Hell, I’d be a fool to pass up an opportunity like this…

Personally I’d rather see Card develop a massive multiplayer online role-playing game set in the Ender saga, but even he would be hard-pressed to persuade people to fork over $15 a month to play-act as prepubescent politicians. That and he’d kill off the entire player-base with old age if the space travel was done like it is in the books. But that he’s doing this one is enough to pique my interest. From Card’s official website…

eGenesis to Develop Alvin’s World as a Multi-player Online Game
Letter to Hatrackers from Orson Scott Card
January 5, 2005

After all these years of taking part together in this online Hatrack River community, I’m happy to announce that today (5 January 2005), I entered into an agreement with eGenesis, the game company that created “A Tale in the Desert.”

Andy Tepper, the lead designer of ATITD, saw in the Tales of Alvin

Really looking forward to this. We caught The Ring on opening weekend and so many people walking out from the show before ours looking drained / disoriented / disgusted that Lisa became real concerned about what she did to make her new husband con her into seeing this with him. Think she wound up liking it though, despite it being way off the map so far as that sweet innocent lil’ mind of hers went.

Of course, anything making the unconscionable amount of money as The Ring did demands a sequel… which when dealing with a horror franchise usually spells “box office bomb”. But so far The Ring Two is hitting the right cylinders: having Hideo Nakata (director of the Japanese original Ringu) helm this one was way smart move and anything that brings Sissy Spacek aboard has got to be classy. Then there’s this: the new trailer for ...

You just know the site admins will be scanning the IP logs for whoever buys a bunch of grow lights (probably the most common item up for sale) from Property Room Police Auctions Online. Run by an outfit called Property Bureau, it’s a pretty clever idea: giving police auctions (a longstanding procedure for disposing of seized property and stolen goods that could not be returned to the rightful owners) a wider “customer base” than their reach normally allows by selling larcened and licentious loot on the Internet (they should have named it “pdBay” :-P). Going by the info posted on the site, it looks like helping police and sheriff departments clean out their property rooms this way plays an adjunct role to Property Bureau’s other purpose: being an online database of the goods with the items’ serial numbers and any other pertinent information, thus letting owners of stolen property ...

A few days ago I posted “Haul Pat Robertson’s butt out of Virginia Beach… AND STONE HIM TO DEATH!!”. It was in response to Robertson’s annual penchant for claiming that God was speaking through him about the coming year. And it elicited some … interesting… feedback.

Some got it and some didn’t. A few were downright horrified. One guy wrote me that initially he thought I was a few cards short of a full deck to have the gall to publish something like that. But after reading the entire thing he said “that’s was an f’ing work of genius!”

If all you saw was the headline – either here or elsewhere on the ‘net where this was referenced – I strongly urge you to read it. ALL of it. And think about the REAL point that I was making with this. I do not want to see Pat Robertson ...

This generation of kids needs a movie like Red Dawn: you know that flick twenty-odd years ago where Patrick Swayze and his high-school chums waged guerilla warfare on the Soviet swine that had taken over their Colorado hometown and the rest of America. It’s so dated now as to be laughable (though for awhile it held the Guinness record for being “most violent movie ever”) but the core idea is the same: young people fighting for real freedom, instead of sitting around in their Birkenstocks signing pointless petitions and otherwise complaining against “evil white men” or whatever. Director John Milius had a clear notion in mind that America was a great land because her children could fast learn their way around an AK-47… and ya know, he’s right. But that ain’t the point of this post.

Lots of places have the news but I found it first on ...

UPDATE 01:27 AM EST 01-07-2004: Worked from 4-something yesterday afternoon ’til a little after midnight. The problem apparently lay in some things that weren’t XHTML 1.0 Strict. Most of the work was just turning upper-cased tags (an old habit) into lower-case for XHTML and cleaning up probably two minor gaffes in the code. However it happened, this blog is now perfectly readable in Microsoft Internet Explorer so ummmm… enjoy! 🙂

Original Post:

If you’re visiting this blog from a Mozilla or Firefox browser, you probably don’t notice anything. If you’re using Internet Explorer, you will be straining your eyes to read some impossibly large fonts right now.

I finally started overhauling the look of this blog and something, somewhere, in the CSS went a little funny in the head. I’m still very much old-school HTMLer (can type it out in Notepad much faster than if I were to use Dreamweaver ...

Somebody please explain to me how it is that a millionaire tycoon can give away $20 million of the people’s hard-earned money to a terrorist front, can raid the public treasury for $200 billion to spend on wars with no defined goals or even strategy, and who is now now appropriating $350 million – also from public funds – toward recovery efforts from the Southeast Asian tsunami can have no qualms about spending other people’s money like a drunken sailor… but only finds enough charity in his own heart to write tsunami victims a check for the paltry sum of $10,000.

What President Bush does with his own money is of no concern to me: if he wanted to write a check for five bucks, he’s got a right to do that. But when it comes to our money and my own “contribution” (read as: pay taxes ...

From the Associated Press via Yahoo!…

25 Killed in Car-Bomb Attacks in Iraq

Wed Jan 5, 4:12 PM ET

By DUSAN STOJANOVIC, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A suicide attacker blew up an explosives-laden car outside a police academy south of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 20 people, and another car bomb left five Iraqi policemen dead. Despite the surge of violence aimed at derailing this month’s elections, Iraq (news – web sites)’s interim leader again insisted the ballot would go ahead as planned.

“We will not allow the terrorists to stop the political process in Iraq,” Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said as the death toll from insurgent attacks topped 90 over four days this week. “The elections process is the basis for the deepening of the national unity in Iraq.”

We should pull out all our troops. Now. We should never have gone into Iraq. Ever.

You cannot ...

Alfred Hitchcock once said that Smokey and the Bandit was his “favorite guilty pleasure” of a movie. And that’s pretty much what David Lynch’s adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel Dune is for me.

The short version (the one that Lynch allowed his name on, and not the “Alan Smithee” extra-long version that has much more cool stuff in) is on AMC right now and I swear they’ve messed with it more… as if it wasn’t messed-up enough already. For one thing at the beginning of this one I noticed that the Guild Navigator’s voice was different, somehow. It didn’t sound as menacing as I remember it. Come to think of it, it was different: it’s definitely not the same voice as is the Navigator’s in the longer version (which was the same voice as the short version). Maybe AMC decided to make it sound clearer to the audience or ...