PODCAST - Election Talk - Parts 3 and 4

As promised (a day late) here's the last two installments of our election talk podcast, which comes in at almost an hour.

Get part 3 here.

Notable quote: "That's a joke that me, Patrick and 2 other people know."
"Both our listeners?"

And get part 4 here.

Notable quote: "Be aware that I can take anything anybody says, cut it, and replay it ad nauseum."
"Okay. I'm sure our one listener will love that."


For reference, here's the links to previous installments:

Part 1

Part 2

PODCAST - Election Talk - Part 2

Here's part 2 of our (soon-to-be) award winning discussion on the recent election. Look for parts 3 and 4 tomorrow.

Here's the audio.

Notable quote: "I'd like to apologize to our black listeners for Patrick's shenanigans."


And for reference, here's Part 1.

The Swayze vs The Chuckster

You know, Chuck Norris has gotten a lot of internet buzz the last few years for being a badass. I'm sure you're all aware of http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/ and all.

But what about Patrick Swayze? The guy can deliver a roundhouse kick like nobody's business AND he dances like an angel. Sure, Norris was in a Bruce Lee movie; then he shaved his back, grew a beard and went on to stardom...but what did he REALLY give us? The same old tired stories, the same old tired character, the Total Gym and God.

Now look at the Swayze's list:

Red Dawn
The Outsiders
Dirty Dancing
North and South
Steel Dawn
Roadhouse
Ghost
Next of Kin
Point Break
Black Dog

I mean, do I really need to go on? The bastard beat cancer, for Pete's sake...while STILL smoking!

He would eat Chuck Norris for breakfast and shit out 2 Chuck Norris' for lunch! You don't FUCK with the Swayze!

Be nice.

SNIPPET - Chinese Crowd Control

Here's a piece of our forever-unaired first WAR Report, where we put the Catholics against the Chinese in our fantasy Race Wars MMO.

Here's the audio.


Notable quote: "I would say the Catholics are a crowd control class, given their large area of effect."

Obama, Guns and You

So, last weekend, I went to the Fort Worth Gun Show. My mom wanted to buy a little gun to have around the house...in case she was burgled by little people. Anywho, we get to the gun show early and there is a HUGE line to get in the place. Behind us, this good ol' boy is talking on his cellphone and says, "Man, you should see how many people are here. Yeah, he's got everybody scared."

Of course, the "he" he was referring to is our President Elect Barack Obama. You see, anytime a Democrat takes office, it automatically means that there's going to be a huge change in gun control. The general feeling is that ammo will be taxed out the wazoo and assault rifles will be banned and it will be much harder to get handguns. Some real hardcore, gun-toting Republicans even believe that they will actually take your guns AWAY. And it all boils down to us not being able to defend ourselves when the shit hits the fan. What shit and what fan, I'm not exactly sure.

Now, I'll give you the reality. No private citizen needs an assault rifle. Anyone that says they do is hunting more than deer. They'll never pass a huge tax on ammo, simply because there's a huge lobby against it. And money still buys votes in D.C., no matter what party is in office. And is it really so unbearable to have to wait 7 days for a handgun? I mean, really? Finally, I don't even want to imagine the carnage that would ensue if the government actually tried to take people's guns away...and neither do they. Don't be ridiculous.

Now, for the other side. I'm a proud gun owner. I own a handgun (sweetass Glock .45) and a longgun (equally sweetass Browning 12-gauge). The only thing tough gun laws prevents is honest people getting guns. Oddly enough, most of your criminals don't buy guns legally. Tough gun laws might prevent some crimes, like the Virginia Tech shooting...but those are incredibly rare. Any murder that is a crime of passion would occur whether the murderer had a gun or not. And don't even bother pointing out how few gun-related murders they have in Great Britain, because they also have a way higher rate of violent crimes than in the U.S.

You see, folks, criminals don't really care HOW they commit their crimes, just so long as they can commit them.

PODCAST - Election Talk - Part 1

Last week we did a podcast about the Presidential election, including the weeks leading up to the election, the election itself, and the reactions to it in the weeks following. It's a long podcast, nearly an hour, so we broke it up into 4 parts for easier listening.

Here's Part 1 of the podcast, where we talk a bit about the lead in to the election itself.


Notable quote: "Kind of like American Idol President."

The Greatest News Ever!

AICN is running an interview with Ron Howard where he says the possibility of an Arrested Development movie is 'closer than ever.'

How's THAT for a morning pick-me-up!

The New XBox Experience

For those of you waiting for the new XBox Live + Netflix service offering, your time has come. Microsoft updated its XBox firmware this morning at 2am Pacific, releasing what it calls the New XBox Experience, which includes a redesign of the menu system (the blades are gone) and incorporating Netflix into the service.

This is something we'll be following closely, and you can probably expect a podcast about it shortly.

Read more about it here.

UPDATE: Here's a really cool AICN article about it that includes screenshots. Take notice of the link/report near the bottom that says some Sony movies are curiously unavailable for streaming...

Nintendo DSi information

Well, by now the DSi has been released in Japan, but no word on the exact U.S. release date yet. For those of you who need some hardcore DSi info, check out the list of links below:

Here's some DSi sales information courtesy of PC World.

A little preview info, also from PCWorld.

More preview info, from Wired.com.

A Wired.Com review of the DSi.

Here's an article about the patents Nintendo owns that relate to the DSi. Speculate away!

And, last but not least, the Nintendo DSi Wikipedia entry.

USB 3.0 Spec released

Yesterday, the USB 3.0 Promoters Group announced that the USB 3.0 specification was complete. What does that mean to the rest of us? Faster and more-powerful USB, that's what. This article lists some benefits of the new spec, which allows nearly 5.0 Gbps data transfer.

Top 5 selling games of 2008

According to this article on Gamasutra.com, the Wii seems to have made quite the mark on the top-selling games list, especially Wii Play. There's some interesting talking points here, notably the popularity of the Wii (which we already know), the explosion of casual gamers (or family gamers), and the fact that GTA 4 is the only non-Wii game on the list.

Weird.

Virtual Cheating

This article on USA Today talks about a couple who are getting divorced after the guy was discovered cheating in Second Life.

See if you can spot the two words in the article that REALLY stood out to me...

Wrath of the Lich King

So I guess this comes out today/last night for World of Warcraft. I'm sure people care, I'm just not one of them. I did find this PCMag.com article about the launch last night interesting, specifically the following quote:

"Though retailers like 7-Eleven have been selling copies of World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King for several days..."

7-Eleven? Since when do they sell games?

WAR Report - 11/12 T4 action (Lag anyone?)

I guess since one of our goals here is to cover our activities on the Iron Rock server while playing Warhammer Online, I would be remiss if I didn't mention anything about the T4 action in Greenskin lands last night (11/12). We'll cover this in more detail in our next WAR Report podcast, but I'll give a brief rundown of the action for those of you who missed it. At least for as long as I was logged in.

I hopped on around 9pm (central) and got word that Thunder Mountain had been taken by Order and that Black Crag seemed to be next. I joined an alliance warband, lead by Percane, and we proceeded to get stomped continuously by the horde of Order warbands roaming throughout the zone.

Sometime around 10pm, Black Crag flipped and the fight was on. Butcher's Pass, the Greenskin fortress zone, was now open, and the 60 min timer to take the fortress had started!

The battle began slowly, though. Order didn't even show up until 15 minutes had already counted down, which was fine for Destruction, since a good number of us weren't even sure how to get to Butcher's Pass. But we all found our way as Order arrived and proceeded to work their way through the north gate of the outer wall. With somewhere around 25 minutes to go, they breached the north gate and everyone retreated to the inner keep.

Unfortunately, this is where the major problem of the night set in... LAG.

That's right. The battle was ruled by some pretty severe lag. I didn't crash, but I noticed many others dropping out throughout the course of the battle. Destro managed to hold off the attackers at the inner keep, and finally port out and wipe them, but the intense lag made the whole battle a 'mash-your-buttons-and-pray' type of affair.

It was indeed an Epic Battle. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by Epic Lag.

Here's some discussions about the night's events:

VN Boards
Warhammer Alliance

Obama and American Soft Power

Here's an interesting article on the International Herald Tribune, a news site that I don't frequent as much as I used to - primarily because the ads on the site seem to peg 100% of my PC resources when viewing it in Firefox.

Regardless, it's a good article about Obama's chance to help the U.S. reclaim it's 'soft power'.

A good read.


And as an added bonus, here's another article about bananas in Europe.... fascinating stuff.

Bill Simmons - The Sports Guy

Simmons is one of my favorite sports writers around, mostly because he's hilariously funny. He writes for ESPN.com's Page 2, and I try to catch his new stuff as often as I can.

So I submit this link to his latest story, a ranking of all NFL teams, less as a pertinent sports story and more so you just have a link to his article. So, here you go.

Here's a preview, regarding the Cleveland Browns...

"I remember this past Sunday when Fox's Rich Gannon said, "You can't second-guess Romeo Crennel here." I won't even tell you the context. Just know that, yes, at all times we are allowed to second-guess Romeo Crennel. Even if he's single-handedly disarming three gunmen during a bank robbery as I'm lying on the floor with my hands behind my head."

And one more...

"At least one network needs to stick laptops in front of its guys. My preference would be CBS, if only for six straight weeks of Shannon Sharpe joking he has never seen a computer before and doesn't even know whether it's turned on properly as everyone overlaughs except for Bill Cowher, who will be glancing at his e-mails to see whether Jerry Jones e-mailed him yet with the subject heading, "What about $35 million for five years?"

Beware of job interviews

Here's a story I hadn't heard before, about a guy who hacked into Valve's network and posted the source code for Half Life 2 on the web. Apparently, he was German, and Valve coordinated with the FBI to set up a fake job interview to get him into the US, where he could be arrested.

Here's the story...

Batman suing Batman

In entertainment news..

Apparently there's a city in Turkey named Batman. Who knew?

View the article

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