loonyblog.

From GameSpot’s preview of NARC:

In a somewhat shocking twist, you’ll actually be able to use the illegal drugs you confiscate throughout the game. In fact, they’ll actually give you short-term benefits. Smoking marijuana causes the player to go into what the developers call “weed time,” which is functionally identical to Max Payne’s bullet time in that everything slows down, giving you more time to react to a crowd of enemies. Speed, as you might expect, makes you move quickly. Dropping acid fills the screen with crazy colors, but it also gives innocent citizens large jester heads while giving criminals large devil heads, for easy identification. Smoking crack causes the controller to vibrate as though you have a heavy, pounding heartbeat and pumps up the damage you can do. Finally, taking liquid soul turns everyone on-screen into an enemy, but it also lets you kill everyone with one hit.

Far out, man. Finally, someone’s making a game where I can smoke crack!

Although they left out the heroin. I guess they have to leave something for the sequel.

My article with my complete Oscar picks is now online over at Shacknews.

This morning I woke up with less confidence in my choice of Capturing the Friedmans over The Fog of War (especially now that I see my father chose the latter), but otherwise I remain as confident as I’m going to get.

Here’s the rundown of the major categories:

• Best Picture: LOTR: Return of the King
• Best Director: Peter Jackson
• Best Actor: Sean Penn
• Best Actress: Charlize Theron
• Best Supporting Actor: Tim Robbins
• Best Supporting Actress: Shohreh Aghdashloo
• Best Original Screenplay: Lost in Translation
• Best Adapted Screenplay: Mystic River

Science-fiction author Orson Scott Card has published a relentlessly bigoted article at The Ornery American (originally from The Rhinoceros Times) in which he does everything but call for a holy war against the gay community.

Among the tenets of this piece are such gems as “marriage is already open for everyone” (provided gay people marry people of the opposite sex, that is) and that a “family” by definition requires a mother, a father and children (I think there are many, many, many families with single parents that would seriously take offense at that).

You expect to read something like this from radically right wing ultraconservative wackos, but even though Orson Scott Card’s politics have always been known to be right-wing, this is beyond the pale. I’ve only read one book by him (Ender’s Game) and found it to be extremely overrated. I won’t be reading another.

From Dark Horizons:

Dragonball Z: “Smallville” spunk Tom Welling is being rumoured for Goku.

Well, I guess there is something there…although I think some serious prosthetic hair is going to be necessary in order to complete the illusion:

I’m seeing double! The resemblance is truly uncanny.

Over the last 24 hours I’ve received three calls from someplace that showed up as “Unknown” on my phone. I now know where they were coming from: I just received fax spam on my cell phone.

If you’re wondering how this is possible, it’s because T-Mobile by default, apparently will receive faxes on your voice mail, and you can then forward that to a real fax number from your voice mail system. That’s actually pretty cool, except of course when something like this happens.

I’ve turned off this feature, but now that I’ve received one, I’m sure more will follow. Even if my voice mail doesn’t pick them up, I’m going to get nagged by fax calls to my cell phone.

How on earth can companies still do this? It’s not legal, no fax spam is. They use auto-dialers to find fax machines. I know this from experience…we get fax spam at home. But scanning mobile area codes is just sleazy. I have no intention of simply taking this and living with it. I’ve read through the comments on this blog and Junkfax.org, and I intend to do everything in my power to fight back.

It’s not as bad as the IGNMcSpy thing (I’ll never let them live that down), but here’s an unedited screen capture from Xbox.IGN.com that shows that yes, their staff is predominantly male:

As I’ve said practically every time I get a chance, many of my favorite games of all-time, and really the games that truly instilled my lifelong love of this medium, are those great old Infocom text adventures.

Of these, I have many favorites…the first three Zork games have a special place in my heart, as does The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Lurking Horror, the absolutely-brilliant (if exceedingly difficult) Suspended, heck, even Seastalker brings back great memories (that one was a birthday present from my Uncle, if I remember correctly).

I have played these games repeatedly on a pretty impressive list of platforms over the years. I discovered pretty early on that all you needed was the original data files to keep running them on different platforms, so from my Apple //C I copied them to my first-generation PowerBook (using a friend’s Mac that had a 5.25″ drive), from there they went to my 286, then 486, then P100, then P2 450…and so on, with occaisional side trips to my Palm Pilots over the years.

Anyway, because of all of this, and because I’m just this much of a dork, I’m proud to present Zork I: The Great Underground Empire. Complete, and playable, using Zplet, the Java-based Z-machine interpreter. Enjoy!

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Quite frequently, campaigns to save canceled TV shows do little, if any good, and serve only to make fans feel that while it was unsuccessful, at least they tried to save their favorite show. But then there was the Save Farscape campaign, which was successful enough that the SciFi Channel has commissioned a mini-series to presumably wrap up any lingering storylines (although having never watched the show, I have no idea if that’s the case).

Which brings me to the latest such campaign, the one to save Angel, the Buffy spinoff that has proven itself to be a fine and entertaining show in its own right (and last year was a hell of a lot better than Buffy’s final season). The show’s been canceled, and the general consensus is that it’s a really big long shot that any campaign, no matter how big, will manage to convince The WB to bring it back for another year, or UPN or any other channel to pick up the show. But I admire the concept.

So far they’ve raised over $9,000, and will be placing full page ads in both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. Their next goal is to raise another $8,000 for a “Guerilla Billboards campaign” (I’m not sure what that means exactly). Whether it’s successful or not, these campaigns have gotten much more organized, and like I said, I admire the effort.

And hey, if it works, all the better. I like Angel. I’d like to see it continue for another year or three.

Yes, it’s getting very close, and the pressure’s starting to build…

As I do every year, my picks will be placed online. A full article will run on Shacknews on Friday containing my complete list of picks, plus the reasoning behind them. I’ll post the straight list here as well.

And of course, for anyone that’s interested, you’ll be able to check the results after the show at this address, which will show my picks, my father’s picks, and the final tally.

At long last, the president made his position clear today: he will support an amendment to the constitution declaring marriage to be exclusively a union between a man and a woman. This is a historic moment for this country, and Bush has clearly drawn a line. It’s going to get really ugly from now on, and I can’t say how things will turn out…but this is it: the issue is now front and center.

For interesting commentary on this subject, read through Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Sullivan is a conservative writer, but he’s also gay, and his recent Time Magazine editorial is as clear and straightforward an argument for gay marriage as you’ll read anywhere.

Hopefully this will be one of many issues that swings moderate voters away from the Conservative Christian Republican party.