[High Praise! to After Math]
Archive of entries posted on 14th February 2013
Walter Cronkite: Simultaneously Dead Wrong and Perfectly Accurate
[YouTube direct link] (Viewer #234,449)
I actually have a home office and I telecommute. My office equipment does everything Walter describes (except that I choose not to use Skype’s video options – although I certainly could).
An Illegal Rose by Any Other Name
At an immigration hearing, Democrat Congressman John Conyers warned people against “using the term illegal immigrants”.
Fine. Let’s go with “criminal trespassers”.
Barack Obama’s Mirror
Link of the Day: Satire – Method Actor Prepared For Bin Laden Role By Founding Al Qaeda Cell, Blowing Up Bus Station
[High Praise! to The Duffel Blog]
[NOTE: Mild adult language]
Method Actor Prepared For Bin Laden Role By Founding Al Qaeda Cell, Blowing Up Bus Station
[Think you have a link that’s IMAO-worthy? Send it to harvolson@gmail.com. If I use your link, you will receive High Praise! (assuming you remember to put your name in the email)]
Wisdom of the Day: Water Response Trees Think Car
Rubio: drinking water. Obama: treading water. MSM: carrying water. Americans: underwater. #SOTU
— Razor (@hale_razor) February 13, 2013
Republicans, next year I’ll do the response to Obama’s SOTUA _during_ his speech, entirely through spit-takes.
— jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) February 13, 2013
Friends are like trees. They fall down if you hit them with an axe multiple times.
— Anti Joke Book™ (@AntiJokeBook) February 13, 2013
The media: water water everywhere, and not a thought to think. #H2RubiO
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 13, 2013
In the old days you could buy a car for a handful of water
— FREE FACTS™ ! (@FREE_FACTS) February 14, 2013
Global Warming – CURED!
A new report from a liberal think tank says that the solution to global warming is for people to work less.
So… that last blizzard in New York… Occupy Wall Street’s fault.
Video Games: Finished GTA4
So I finished Grand Theft Auto IV, and my impressions only improved a little from when I first played it. It eventually grew on me, but it took a while. I still don’t get how IGN gave it a perfect 10, though.
First, the good stuff. The game came out like five years ago, but graphically it still puts to shame pretty much any new game out there. I mean, the character models (which they went for a slightly cartoony art style with) are nothing to call home about, but the city and the vehicles are just unbelievably detailed. And the writing and voice acting is top notch. Pretty much all the characters in the game are scumbags, but they really grow on you (including the Jamaican guy I couldn’t understand at all). And the missions are generally varied enough to keep things interesting.
Now the bad.
The tedium. This had to have been in all the previous GTA games, but maybe I just noticed it more since my game playing habits have changed. I used to be able to be able to play a game during the weekend for several hours at a time, but now I’m lucky if I can find one continuous hour to play. And for GTA, most of that hour will be spent driving from point A to point B. And since the driving was made very realistic in this game (i.e., it’s easy to lose control), you can’t just race recklessly to your destination. In fact, an analog button for gas is a necessity in this game because pressing the gas all the way is an easy recipe to spin out. Eventually, I made the game more fun by pretty much getting everywhere via taxi — the closest thing to fast travel in the game — though sometimes it would take minutes to find a cab.
Also, you have friends in this game and they will get angry at you if you don’t call them up and play pool or go drinking with them — which just means more tedious driving from point A to point B if you don’t want them to hate you.
Oh, and no checkpoints in missions. You could spend twenty minutes playing a mission and mess up near the end, and then you have to repeat the entire thing over again. So I sometimes used up my hour of gameplay time and never got anywhere.
The combat. You do a lot of combat, and it’s not that great. They have a cover system, but it was a little wonky to me and I often ended up on the wrong cover. And you have to remember to hold the run button when moving between cover or Niko will just meander to the next one. And you’ll often enter rooms or go up stairs and get shot at from all direction but you have no easy way of telling from exactly where. And people will rush you and you’ll lose your lock on the enemy and get punched in the face with nothing you can do about it while holding an SMG. At times the combat felt so clunky I had flashbacks to playing early Resident Evil games. Also, there are very few different weapons and no upgrading any of them.
Can’t hold on to cars. This is actually a problem in every GTA game. You have parking spots to keep good cars in, but then you never want to actually use them because you never know when the mission will force you to abandon your car and you’ll lose it forever. Previous GTA games had ways to instantly get cars you wanted, but this one lacked that.
Big city with nothing to do. You earn money in the game and it plays it up likes its important, but there is little to do with the money. You can buy some new clothes (because grown men love playing dress up) and restock your weapons and that’s about it. You quickly in the game have more money than you ever need. And while the city is beautiful, there is nothing to find exploring it. There are no hidden items or hidden mission or bonuses to unlock or anything (there are 200 pigeons which you get some prize if you kill them all, but that’s it). This feels like a big step backwards from previous GTA games.
In fact, while GTAIII basically created the open sandbox game, I get the impression Rockstar doesn’t want to do a sandbox game anymore. They really want an intensely scripted linear game, and they seem to be removing the incentives to run around the city and cause chaos (which in this game, seems really out of character for Niko). For the next one, it sounds like it will be even more scripted (there will be three different main characters you follow who have friends and family to worry about). So while GTA invented the open sandbox game, it seems to me more like Saints Row is the one actually running with it now.
I still have the Episodes from Liberty city to play which also got great reviews and sounds like it will be more missions without the extra stuff like keeping up with friends I found tedious. Maybe I’ll give that a try when GTA5 comes out and everyone is talking about that, but I’m pretty much Grand Theft Autoed out for a while.
Starring Al Pacino as Barack Obama
Winning Jeopardy Like a Boss
In case you haven’t seen it yet, let the coolest teenager ever show you how winning Jeopardy is done. It’s not cocky if you can back it up.
Straight Line of the Day: In Response to North Korea’s Latest Nuclear Test, Obama…
Let’s Stop Pretending the Minimum Wage Isn’t Idiotic
Well, Obama is talking about the minimum wage again. This is the dumbest left-wing trick that we really need to crack down on. You have a bunch of morons in D.C. who know nothing about business pick some arbitrary number (they never even pretend there’s any actual science to it) that they say wages must be, and how in the world is this not supposed to do damage to the economy?
And they make these absolutely idiotic claims like, “Raising the minimum wage won’t cause jobs to be lost!” Okay then, let’s make the minimum wage $50 an hour then. Yes, at some point people will admit it could damage business, but they pretend it’s way past whatever made up sum they just pulled out of their posterior.
I’ve said this many times and I’ll keep saying it: The minimum wage is and always will be zero dollars an hour. And that’s a wage more and more people will get the more you let the absolute idiots in D.C. have influence over the economy. In fact, for the people who actually take the risks and make businesses, the minimum wage can be less than zero dollars an hour because they often have to spend their money to get a company going. That’s who we should be supporting… or at least getting out of the way of by not putting more costly burdens on them.
It needs to be ingrained in every American that when a politician tries to interfere with the economy, we strike him very hard on the nose and yell, “No!” Think of businesses as someone carefully putting together a house of cards, and the politician is some dumb toddler coming to “help”, a big, stupid, uncomprehending grin on his face as he knocks the whole structure down. “Me make jobs!”
We have a way to determine how much money people should make: It’s called the marketplace. It’s a much better system than dumb toddlers breaking things as they try to help.
Cartoon of the Day – Caduceus
[Source: Michael Ramirez – GoComics]
Of course, what else could be expected to arise from the snake oil salesman that currently infests the Oval Office?
Random Thoughts: Love, Water, and Candy Hearts
Have they confirmed Dorner dead? Has any more information come out about the water Rubio drank?
The minimum wage is and always will be zero dollars an hour. Moron politicians will continue to make sure lots of people stay at minimum.
Know what would help the economy: Idiots in D.C. with no business experience coming up with arbitrary numbers they think wages should be.
Minimum wage for a business creator can actually be less than zero dollars per hour.
So we’re all basically in agreement that the water thing demonstrates a serious, disqualifying character flaw for Rubio, right?
Now when Rubio talks about the dangers of government spending, everyone is just going to roll their eyes and say, “Whatever, water-drinker.”
My favorite part of the State of the Union address was when Christopher Dorner burned to death.
So will the water drinking thing will have more or less an effect on Rubio’s career than Ted Kennedy drowning a woman and fleeing the scene?
I’m predicting in the future leftwingers will wave water bottles at Rubio and think they’re making a point.
Candy hearts are basically just chalk and sugar, right?
I hope drinking coffee isn’t a career-ender or I do nothing but end careers all day.
My wife tells me I’m supposed to drink six ended careers a day, but that just seems like a lot of careers to end.
HOLD ME LIKE YOU DID BY THE LAKE ON NABOO #CandyHeartsRejects
YOU DID’T BUILD THAT #CandyHeartRejects
TAKE WITH ALCOHOL #CandyHeartRejects
I DIDN’T KILL MY WIFE #CandyHeartRejects
I AM RESIGNING AS POPE #CandyHeartRejects
NOT EDIBLE #CandyHeartRejects
MATH CLASS IS TOUGH #CandyHeartRejects
THIS IS MY ONLY WAY TO COMMUNICATE THE HORRORS OF CHINESE SLAVE LABOR #CandyHeartRejects
DICK MORRIS PREDICTS OUR LOVE WILL LAST #CandyHeartRejects
“To break up the gameplay a bit, why don’t you add an escort mission.” -Satan
The importance of being Earnest. And Pam.
A group of six Georgia legislators have proposed a bill in the State House that would make certain fake images illegal. Like when you take the head of one person and put it on, say, a porn star? That would be a crime under the bill.
The actual wording of House Bill 39 says:
… a person commits defamation when he or she causes an unknowing person wrongfully to be identified as the person in an obscene depiction …
The bill goes on to describe what “nudity,” “obscene depiction,” and “sexual conduct” means, in case you didn’t know. It also describes all the fun/naughty parts that make nudity, obscene, and sexual actually nudity, obscene, and sexual.
The six Democrats — you knew the sponsors were all Democrats, right? — really don’t like that kind of humor. Two of them were victims of such prankery, Pam Dickerson* (who introduced a similar bill last year) and Earnest Smith*. The blog Georgia Politics Unfiltered is one of the culprits that prompted such actions. You can search that site for more images, if you want. You don’t want. Trust me.
Still, I understand that those that are victims of such actions might not like it. But, a crime? Such thin skin.
Maybe I’d feel differently if I was the victim of such actions. And, no, this is NOT a call to photoshop some image of my head on a porn star’s body.
Unless it was Jenna Jameson. I’ve always wanted to be Jenna Jameson.