Violent TV Video Games! News at 11!

Just finished watching CSI: Miami.

Why is it that every Cop/Robber show has to show video game violence in the most extremely worst possible circumstances?

I know of 4 shows on TV that have gone with the whole violent video game angle.

Now I’m all for making sure that violent video games are kept out of the hands of kids. Children have NO need to have that type of violence in their young lives.  It’s stupid, moronic, and completely irresponsible of retailers and parents if they let them get into a child’s hand.

The Columbine tragedy had links to Doom and Doom II (supposedly the two teenagers that were responsible created a mapfile that was a duplicate of the Columbine School), and there are other cases where video games have been linked to violence.  But I think that what a lot of people (including the media and the parents involved) are overlooking, is the fact that these kids have been bullied, rejected, outcast, or they might have had a chemical imbalance that was present BEFORE the introduction of the violent video games into their psyche.  Did the game trigger it?  Possibly.  There’s no proof  that they cause violence, but wouldn’t you think that if your kid was depressed, bullied, beat up, or outcast that those items are MORE prevalent in the kid’s life than the video game?

People are so quick to judge, and want to point finger so quickly that they don’t get all the information they need before making an informed decision.  Look at ESRB ratings.  Find a demo of the game and play it before you get it for you kids, and THEN make the decision whether or not your child is mature enough to play the game/

When programs like CSI and Law and Order portray video games as violent and they CAUSE kids to become violent, I truly believe it does a great disservice to the video game community.  And the community does things other than just make video games.  The US Army uses videogames to train their soldiers to fight, and they use a modified version of the game Full Spectrum Warrior to train their officers to lead those troops. The guys over at Penny Arcade have a Non-Profit organization called Child’s Play.  They collect games (of all types) to give to kids in the hospital that have terminal illnesses.  Microsoft (as a company) does lots of charity work.  I think it would be great to see a cop show go the CRAZY route and show video games in a better light.

And almost ALL of the developers want to make sure that violent videogames are kept out of kids hands.

I love Doom 3. Quake 4 is fantastic, and I think that the Grand Theft Auto series of games are some of the most innovative games to see the light of day.  But I’m not a violent person.  I put the game into context.  They are GAMES.  It’s fantasy. I might run over a pedestrian in Carmageddon, but I know if I do that in REAL LIFE, I’m going to prison for a long time.

So… are some video games violent?  Absolutely.  Do they cause people to become violent? No.  Bottom line – keep them out of kids hands, and wait until they hare mentally capable of knowing the difference between fantasy and reality.

Scrabble again - and other stuff

Well had another Scrabble meeting tonight – and it looks like I’m the only one that’s going to try to get to the Boston Regionals as a Newcomer this year.

I’m hoping to be able to head down at the end of next month on Saturday, and play 6 games in the day and then head back up.  I want to have enough to buy some Protiles and a bag for them.

Also joined the ISC – Internet Scrabble Club, and played a couple games tonight.  

Through them I found a TON of Scrabble websites devoted to wordlists, stems, hooks, and just about every statistic know to Scrabble.

I hope I can do well in the tournament.  I’m still learning my 2’s and my 2 to make 3’s as well.

I need to learn my Bingo prone tiles as well.  I’m pretty good at balancing my rack, but I need to work on my playing speed.

Hopefully I’ll be able to print out some helpers at work next week.

Speaking of work – I finally got my raise – up to $10.20 and hour, and I had an excellent review.  Marlene and Teri are looking into the 7 weeks of retro pay that the bank owes me from my merit promotion.

So thing are going well here in Maine – It’ll be nice when summer hits too (

Scrabble!

Too cool!  Turns out that there is a local chapter of the National Scrabble Association, right here in Auburn!

There was a meeting tonight, although it was just myself and lady who runs the chapter.  It’s snowing like crazy, but since it was over at the Auburn PD, it was easy to get to.

I’m going to join the NSA tomorrow, because there is a tournament in April down in Boston, that I’m going to try to attend.  The Scrabble for Literacy is being held at the Hilton in April, and I’m also hoping to get some people from work involved – I’d like to see us have 2 or 3 teams play this year.

I’m just stoked that there is organized play in the area.  The NSA has also added 5 new two letter words to the play list, with 2 in particular that will change the face of the game.

QI and QIS n. the vital force that in Chinese is thought is inherent in all things. – and
ZA and ZAS n. a pizza

These two words alone will make thousands of play possibilities in game.  The only 2 letters that DO NOT have a 2-letter play in them are C and V.  I can’t wait until I can play some more games.  They meet on the 2nd and 4th Sunday of every month, so I’ll have to only play D&D every other week. But that’s OK, I’m going to have a blast playing Scrabble for a while.

Computer... computer.. computer

This is too cool!

I did a MAJOR upgrade to my computer – Bought a 256MB video card, 1GB of ram, and also a S-Video to Composite converter.

I can finally watch movies on my TV!  Looks fantastic too.

And my games run great!  I love my computer now (

The mission - should you be able to log on and do anything...

Talk about an ACTUAL impossible mission.

Mission Impossible 3’s HUNT started at 8:00pm EST.  It’s now 9:35, and it’s STILL not up and running.

The site – hunt.missionimpossible.com is not up – and Chat is wonky at best.

Did the admin’s not do a stress test on the game before launch?  There were only 120 people in the chat room, and I can’t possibly believe that 120 people crashed a server – considering over 30,000 people signed up for the game.

I find this comparable to the stress test I did for Star Wars Galaxies during their closed beta – The admin’s  would tell us in the chat room to all try to log in at once and see how long it took the servers to crash – just so they could figure out the bugs BEFORE the game went live. The only problem is – they are supposed to be live NOW.  This should have been taken care of at least a month or 2 ago – either in house or as a closed beta.

But when you (as a company) promise to have a site up and running – especially when there are actual prizes on the line – I find it inexcusable to have this many problems on day one of a game.  1 Hour and 45 minutes into the game, and no one has even see what the screen looks like yet (as far as I know).

I do hope that the admin’s figure out what’s wrong and then fix it, because I like stuff like this, and it would be a shame to see an opportunity like this to go to down the tubes.

WOW. Not World of Warcraft

Found a TON of cool links for stuff.

I’m into cryptography.  Letter frequencies, word patterns, cryptograms, Scrabble (which I believe is the ultimate combination of math and English), sudoku (number logic puzzles), WWII era cipher machines – you name it, and I’m pretty much into it.  

I had a roundabout way of getting to www.elonka.com. I was doing searches for “The Beast” which was a online murder mystery the ran as an advertisement for “AI Artificial Intelligence”. That in turn led me to the new Mission Impossible 3 game that starts up on Monday.  And from there I decided to go to the Da Vinci Code movie website.  And from there I find out that Dan Brown (the author of “The Da Vinci Code”) put a reference the Kryptos cipher (located at the CIA) into the illustration on the dust cover of the hardcover books.  So I finally get to elonka.com, and I hit a virtual jackpot of cryptographic goodness.

Here are some fun links:

What nerdier than Nintendo? How About Acapella Nintendo
http://www.collegehumor.com/movies/138298/

Cool Optical Illusion
http://blogs.msdn.com/ianm/archive/2005/08/19/453737.aspx

RuneQuest
http://members.aol.com/scirealm/RuneQuest.html

Coolest Rube Goldberg Commercial… ever…
http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/commercials/581/

Tax time!

Woo hoo!  1300 bucks back from taxes (

That’ll get my windshield fixed, my brakes fixed, with LOTS of money left over for setting aside for my next set of insurance payments.

I hope to get some RAM, and a new video card for the computer. I figure if I can bump my RAM to 1 gig, I’ll be fine.