Duke Followup

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The PR firm working on Duke Nukem Forever tweeted yesterday that some reviewers “went too far” in their reviews, and that they are “reviewing who gets games next time.”

This is the state of game journalism; the blacklist is a clear and everpresent threat. It’s a clear signal to everyone paying attention when a new movie isn’t screened for critics ahead of release, so I suppose the big money in gaming wants to avoid that by bullying reviewers into only and always saying nice things. Nobody trusts online reviews from most of the gaming press, and this is the reason (n.b. that the reviews I linked yesterday were from a general tech news site and a mainstream British news paper, not gamer press publications).

Photos Inside the Mothball Fleet

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The mothball fleet in Suisun Bay, California is a collection of a couple hundred essentially abandoned ships (at one point, the site had over 2200) once awaiting reactivation, and now awaiting the shipbreaker (with at least one exception, asa the USS Iowa is there, too, as it waits its turn to be a museum).

Recently, some intrepid photographers decided to sneak in, explore, and take a few pictures while avoiding patrols. Enjoy.

Posted in Pix

Today in Utterly Decimating Slams

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The biggest joke in gaming has been, for 15 years, the ongoing delays surrounding Duke Nukem Forever. Astonishingly, it dropped this month, finally.

Not so astonishingly: it’s apparently awful, awful, awful. The two reviews I’ve read are clinics in brutal-but-deserved takedowns.

From Ars Technica:

In another scene, a woman sobs and asks for her father. You see, the women in the alien craft are being forcibly impregnated by the aliens, and during your journey, you hear a mixture of screams and sexual noises. After I accidentally blew up a few of these female victims in a firefight, Duke made a joke about abortion.

This is what passes for humor in the game. It’s not racy, it’s not funny, and it makes you feel dirty. Every time I put the controller down, I felt the need to rub my hands on my jeans as if the game were making me physically dirty. It’s like watching your uncle tell racist jokes at Thanksgiving and praying someone has the guts to tell him to cut it out, but this time it’s interactive — and you’re the uncle.

[…]

Multiple developers have worked on this game for over a decade, so I don’t know who to blame for the unplayable, glitchy, ugly, offensive mess it has become. No humor can make up for the game’s rampant hatred of women, and the terrible writing and one-liners can’t even be compensated for by good gameplay. The game’s jokes about other titles are laughable when you see how putrid Duke is upon release.

Sure, it may still sell millions of copies due to the name alone, but it will disappoint buyers and make anyone with half a brain feel uncomfortable. I have no clue how a game so all-encompassingly ugly can suffer from so many framerate issues, but Duke finds a way. From a business and gaming history perspective, the fact that the title exists at all is fascinating; for everyone else asked to spend $60 on it, it’s merely sad.

I’m a fan of humor that’s willing to push the boundaries, but nothing is being sent up, mocked, or lampooned here. There’s just no reason for what you see and hear. This is an ugly game that exists to celebrate ugliness. The people involved should be ashamed.

But the even better slam comes at the end of this review in the Guardian:

If this was 15 years in the making, it makes you wonder what they did for the other 14 years and 10 months.

Not quite “I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul,” but it’s about as close as we’ll get in the real world.

“A martin is a member of the weasel family.”

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From our far-flung correspondents; there is so much to love about this:

HOQUIAM, Wash.(AP) — Police say a man was carrying a dead weasel when he burst into a Hoquiam apartment and assaulted a man.

The victim asked, “Why are you carrying a weasel?” Police said the attacker said, “It’s not a weasel, it’s a martin,” then punched him in the nose and fled.

The attacker was apparently looking for his girlfriend and had gone to her former boyfriend’s apartment Monday night where the victim was a guest.

KXRO reports he left carcass behind.

Police later found the suspect arguing with his girlfriend at another location and arrested the 33-year-old Hoquiam man after a fight.

He said he had found the martin dead near Hoquiam, but police don’t know why he carried it with him.

A martin is a member of the weasel family.

Books

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Seen online:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. — John Rogers

Ok, Holder, Put Up or Shut Up

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David Simon was pleased to hear that Attorney General Eric Holder was a fan of The Wire, and that he wished for another season.

So he’s made an offer:

“The attorney general’s kind remarks are noted and appreciated,” Simon said in an email to the Times of London. “I’ve spoken to Ed Burns, and we are prepared to go to work on season six of ‘The Wire’ if the Department of Justice is equally ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanizing drug prohibition.”

Your move, Eric.

Wow. Just Wow.

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It’s pretty easy to see why Palin would consider running for President, or at least consider looking like she might: her leap from backwater civil servant to millionaire was accomplished exclusively through her sudden national exposure via the McCain campaign. More of the same will doubtless line her pockets well even if she bows out early.

What’s less clear to me is why Rick Santorum thinks he’s got a shot at all. His most recent electoral experience was getting voted out of his Senate seat, so he’s got the taint of LOSER on him already. He’s a strident right-winger unlikely to garner much centrist support. I suppose he could be banking on the exposure helping him in a future race, but he’s not telegenic enough to cash in like Palin. The alternative is that he’s self-deluded enough to think he could challenge even Palin or Romney or Pawlenty for the nomination, and that he has a chance vs. an incumbent Obama in the general.

Who really thinks that?

The Marshal rides off into the sunset

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The second guy to play Gunsmoke‘s Matt Dillon — and the first on TV — was James Arness, also of note for his role in the original Thing, and for being sadly-also-dead Peter Graves‘ brother.

Arness died today, at 88.

(What I didn’t know: the first guy to play Dillon, who worked only on the radio version, was William Conrad, who later appeared in the 70s cop drama Cannon as well as the TV version of Nero Wolfe and as the latter character in Jake and the Fat Man.)

You may ask your self “how much more heavy could this be?”

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And the answer is, unequivocally, no NONE. NONE MORE HEAVY:

From this MeFi post with several other worthwhile links.

Observations gleaned from various comment threads on this:

First, amazingly, “War Pigs” is only eleven years after Buddy Holly.

Second, N.B. what a tiny drum kit Bill Ward plays compared to modern metal drummers. It does not seem to slow him down.

Finally, how the hell did Mrs Heathen and I not know this was happening at the 9:30 club that night?

Dept. of Theaters That Don’t Suck

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It’s nice to see that some theater owners do understand how to compete with better home theater: give the customer a solid experience, including not just a fantastically curated film selection, but also great food, solid fundamentals, and vigilant protection of the whole experience.

It’s even cooler that the guy TechDirt is using as an example is someone we Heathen actually know, at least tangentially. All Hail Alamo and Tim League!

Well, that’s no surprise

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The Onion, of course:

High School Fuckup Now In Charge Of Checking Airport Luggage For Explosives

BIRMINGHAM, AL–Former D-plus student and complete fuckup Malcolm Tibbets, 28, was recently entrusted by the Transportation Security Administration with the task of searching all bags for explosive devices or other weapons that could kill passengers or cause irreparable damage at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. “What I do is real important,” said the semiliterate, five-year Birmingham Central student, shaking a peanut brittle package next to his ear several times before replacing it in a passenger’s bag. “Got to make sure no bombs get on the planes.” According to airport sources, Tibbets, who once tried to punch his 11th-grade English teacher, was given the bag-searching job in December after TSA personnel deemed him the sharpest man on the metal detector team.

Yet another geeky reason to love XKCD

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In the current comic‘s alt text, the author insists that if you pick any random article in Wikipedia, and then choose the first link in the article text not in parenthesis or italicized, and repeat, you will eventually find yourself at the entry for “Philosophy.”

So I tried. I started at Horse fly -> Diptera (which redirect to Fly)-> Order (Biology) -> Scientific Classification -> biologists -> scientist -> Systematic -> Elements (mathematics) -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property (philosophy) –> Modern philosophy –> Philosophy.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

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I’m researching an IE problem, but I’m using Chrome on my Mac to do it. What do I see in MSFT’s support articles? This gem of a warning:

System Tip

This article applies to a different operating system than the one you are using. Article content that may not be relevant to you is disabled.

Clearly, nobody in Redmond every researched a client problem on a different brand of computer than the client used. Who makes choices like this? Seriously?