SameOldSchmidt

Happy Halloween! I hope you all have a safe night and score a lot of awesome candy. As for me, well, Tina is taking Genny back to Aurora/Hampton to trick or treat with our families so I’m on my own. In true lazy slob style, I’ll probably just microwave my dinner. I’ve got some Jalepeno Steak & Cheese Hot Pockets that have been calling my name for weeks; hope they’re not freezer-burned…

I don’t have too much in the hopper. I’m gonna go to a couple places to look for some dual-layer blank DVDs. Those boogers are hard to find! I should just order them online but whatever, this’ll give me a little something to do. If you know a place here in Lincoln to get dual-layer blanks, please leave me a comment.

Then I’ll try to put a few more hours into Manhunt 2, which I started playing late last night. I’ve got that infamously leaked Playstation 2 version that’s supposed to be totally uncut. I don’t feel too conflicted about playing the leak because I definitely intended to buy it, and still may pick it up on Wii some day. I support Manhunt and want it to succeed. I bought the original game twice: once on PS2 and once on Xbox. I want to support this new sequel, but I don’t want to pay for a crippled, watered-down version. I’m frickin’ 27, nobody needs to protect me from violent content in a video game.

And of course, I’ll have to pause the Playstation when South Park comes on. I’m really interested to see where they go with this 3-part arc that’s concluding tonight.

Keep an eye out for Splattercast #50, which I hope to have uploaded over at Dead Lantern later tonight. It features a great interview that Mat did with controversial German director Uwe Boll.

Boll has become this infamous figure in moviedom, reviled by many people for making horrible films based on video games. But are the movies really that bad? Or are people just sort of running with the crowd? They’ve heard that Boll’s movies are awful, so they just pile on because everyone else is having fun dissing him? That was what I wanted to explore, so we all watched some of his movies and talked about it.

As you’ll hear on the show, my position after watching a couple of these movies is that yes, these are bad movies but they’re nowhere near as awful as some people say they are. It’s like some folks are actively offended by Boll’s work, and I just didn’t take that away from the movies. I never felt like I was being insulted or that some crime against humanity was being perpetrated.

The discussion on the podcast got a little contentious, with Mat being almost incredulously pro-Boll, me being a little on the “pro” side, and Braden being stridently unimpressed with Mr. Boll’s films. Steve was sort of lukewarm, liking one movie and hating another. And Deejay, of course, was largely incoherent

I’m okay with all of the varying positions, though. I mean, we all feel differently about different things. It’s impossible to go through life and never run into people who disagree with you. Actually, that would be pretty boring! Who wants to sit around with a bunch of clones who think and feel exactly alike?

You read Dead Lantern every day, right? Cool people read Dead Lantern… and you’re cool, right?

Anyway, all of us over there are posting our five favorite horror movies, and I just listed mine, so go check it out - Five Favorites: Jeff Edition.

I picked up Urban Chaos: Riot Response brand new for $4.99 in one of those little video game bargain bins at Best Buy a couple months ago. It came out back in 2006, as the original Xbox platform was winding down and the Xbox 360 was taking the spotlight. I just finished the main campaign mode of UC today and had a lot of fun with it.

The game is a first-person shooter set in a large city in the near future. A hyper-violent gang is running wild and the city has become a war zone. You play as a member of a special anti-gang squad that is authorized to use extraordinary force.

There are a few interesting play mechanics that set UC apart from the plethora of FPS games on the Xbox. Most prominently is the riot shield: a transparent, bullet-proof shield that you can raise by pressing the L shoulder button. Using the shield is crucial to success in UC. With the shield raised you can withstand almost all enemy gunfire without taking damage. As the shield is used, it becomes riddled with bulletholes, cracks, blood spatter, etc so that the more you rely on the shield, the worse your visibility becomes. You can’t fire a gun while the shield is raised, but you can thrust it forward and knock an enemy off-balance, giving you a chance to lower the shield and get some shots off.

Another prominent mechanic is the use of supporting NPCs. Sort of like a squad-based game, I suppose, but a little different because your squadmates in UC are firemen, paramedics, engineers, etc who you’ll need for various specific tasks throughout the game. There are often a couple other police officers running around with you through the missions as well. Thankfully almost all of these NPCs are smart enough to not get themselves killed and, in the case of the police officers, they actually do a good job of helping out in a firefight.

The graphics in UC are perfectly acceptable, in my opinion, for a last-gen shooter. The urban environments look good, although they do sort of blend together from level to level. The enemies all look very similar; they’re all dudes in hockey masks, except for a few gang leaders who look a little different. I would have liked some more visual variety to the enemies; it would have been cool if each of the 10 or so gang leaders was more of an individualized character.

There’s a lot to do in the game, with multiple goals in each of the 10 or so main levels, as well as 6 timed “emergency” levels that you can unlock by apprehending gang leaders alive. Overall I thought UC was very fun and most definitely worth the bargain price I paid.

Editor’s Note: screenshots ganked from other sites via Google image search, credit goes to whichever sites they were

I posted about Rush Limbaugh putting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s letter on eBay the other day. The auction has ended and the letter went for a whopping 2.1 million dollars! Rush pledged to match the high bid, so that’s 4.2 million bucks going to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation, a charity that gives scholarships to the children of slain Marines and other federal law enforcement officers.

I was going to cut together some highlights from the radio show and provide an mp3, like I did for the last post, but that’s kind of a chore and I’m sure very few of you guys would bother listening anyway

In any case, out of the five or so years that I’ve been listening to his show, this is probably the defining Rush moment. These arrogant senators abused their power and Rush totally threw it back in their faces.

I have Catholic friends, I don’t mean to bag on them… but why are Catholics always seeing stuff like this? Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, Jesus on a turtle’s shell and the Pope… in a bonfire?

I guess maybe John Paul II has come back in a supernatural form, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, so he can impart some advice to the new guy?

That’s Sailor Mercury punching Akuma in the face. Pretty cool, huh? The weird text is debugging info that can be toggled on and off. I’ll act smart and say that I’m actually crunching those numbers for… um… scientific MUGEN purposes.

Tina was giving me some guff for piddling around with this so much lately, but customizing my own MUGEN setup has really captured my imagination. I guess it’s because I like sorting through things, categorizing and organizing them. And when we’re talking about sorting through 1500 fighting game characters and choosing ones that I like, well that’s like the perfect timesink for me. It’s totally sucked me in.

So Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental activism. Good for him. Although ever since they gave a Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat, the award has been sort of a joke. In Gore’s case, the award comes on the heels of a British Judge declaring that An Inconvenient Truth should not be shown in schools without a disclaimer describing several serious problems with the arguments presented in the film.

I respect that lots of people are concerned about the environment in general and global warming specifically. That’s great, we all have our own set of things that we care about. The one thing that bothers me is that any time someone presents opposing arguments or questions their facts, the Gore fans seem to come back with some variation of: “Well, even if our facts are off and our premise is faulty, these policies are just the right thing to do .”

I dunno, I think it’s important to have the basics laid out first. I mean, just look at the Iraq war. We went in there for WMD and didn’t find any. Not even a single nuke strapped to a camel or anything. So how about the Iraq war proponents come out and say “Okay, our premise was wrong, our facts didn’t pan out, but it’s still cool beans because taking out a cruel dictator is just the right thing to do.” Would you buy that?

That’s the way the hardcore environmentalists seem to make their arguments, “It doesn’t matter if our facts are off because our intentions are so good, so we should just roll with it.”

Here’s some respected science dude (that’s not his official title ) who’s concerned about the way global warming is being presented…

ONE of the world’s foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize “ridiculous” and the product of “people who don’t understand how the atmosphere works”.

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.

His comments came on the same day that the Nobel committee honoured Mr Gore for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.

“We’re brainwashing our children,” said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. “They’re going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous.”

At his first appearance since the award was announced in Oslo, Mr Gore said: “We have to quickly find a way to change the world’s consciousness about exactly what we’re facing.”

Mr Gore shared the Nobel prize with the United Nations climate panel for their work in helping to galvanise international action against global warming.

But Dr Gray, whose annual forecasts of the number of tropical storms and hurricanes are widely publicised, said a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures - related to the amount of salt in ocean water - was responsible for the global warming that he acknowledges has taken place.

However, he said, that same cycle meant a period of cooling would begin soon and last for several years.

“We’ll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was,” Dr Gray said.

During his speech to a crowd of about 300 that included meteorology students and a host of professional meteorologists, Dr Gray also said those who had linked global warming to the increased number of hurricanes in recent years were in error.

He cited statistics showing there were 101 hurricanes from 1900 to 1949, in a period of cooler global temperatures, compared to 83 from 1957 to 2006 when the earth warmed.

“The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures,” Dr Gray said.

He said his beliefs had made him an outsider in popular science.

“It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong,” he said. “But they also know that they’d never get any grants if they spoke out. I don’t care about grants.”

Now, again, I totally respect that some people care a lot about the environment. I have several friends who are very green-minded and I think it’s great for them to pursue something that interests them. I definitely don’t mean to belittle the things in which they believe, just like I don’t appreciate when people belittle the things that I believe, whether it’s something central to me, like religion, or something trivial like which movies I enjoy or what bands I’m into. Nobody likes being told they’re foolish, so I definitely aim for respectful discourse.

All of us at Dead Lantern were pretty excited and flattered to be mentioned in the current issue of Rue Morgue magazine. We get a nice little blurb in an article about horror podcasts.

Here’s the blurb: Weekly podcast hosted by the acerbic creators of comprehensive horror website Deadlantern.com Topics include the latest theatrical and DVD releases, convention reports and a frequently hilarious segment called “Splatterpiece Theatre”, wherein the hosts perform dramatic interpretations of their favourite scenes from gore flicks.

I know it’s not some huge deal or anything, but it’s pretty darn neat for us. I don’t know if I’ve ever been described as “acerbic” before; I’ll take it as a compliment!

This is pretty badass, Rush Limbaugh is selling the infamous letter that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent to his corporate partners, donating the proceeds to charity. If you haven’t followed the story at all, you probably won’t find the auction all that interesting but for fans of talk radio it’s pretty fun. Here’s an mp3 file of the audio from the show: rushebay.mp3 (about 3 minutes) and here’s a link to the eBay auction.

When “Dingy Harry” Reid and the U.S. Senate turned away from the business of the nation to instead smear a private citizen, forty-one of them sent a letter demanding the “repudiation” of their inaccurate interpretation of Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Jesse Al-Zaid (a.k.a. Jesse MacBeth) and other “phony soldiers” who falsify their service. This letter was delivered to Mark Mays of Clear Channel Communications, Rush Limbaugh’s syndication partner, and widely quoted in the Drive-By Media.

Up for auction is the original letter signed by 41 Democrat senators. This historic document may well represent the first time in the history of America that this large a group of U.S. senators attempted to demonize a private citizen by lying about his views. As such, it is a priceless memento of the folly of Harry Reid and his 40 senatorial co-signers.

The entire proceeds of this auction.. the entire high bid… will be donated to The Marine Corps - Law Enforcement Foundation, a registered charity which provides financial assistance to the children of fallen Marines and federal law enforcement officers. Rush Limbaugh serves on the Board of this organization and has been active on its behalf. All costs of this auction will be paid by the seller… every dollar of your winning bid will go to this charity, which has to date distributed over $29 million.

Rush first publicly displayed this letter on the night of October 11th during a speech in Philadelphia, having a security operative carry it on stage, with the letter itself safely encased in a Halliburton Attache case handcuffed to the agent’s right wrist. Included in this auction is that same Halliburton briefcase, as well as a personal letter from Rush Limbaugh, thanking the winning bidder for his donation.