For the rest, I came across CanIVote.org while searching for mine own local early voting info. They have pretty ausum and easy to use resources which can help one to learn about aspects of voting in one’s home state including (but not limited to) finding yr polling place (he-he), what documents and IDs one might need and (come on, duh) procedures for early and absentee voting.
And yeah, my ladyfiend just called me on my bullshit.
I can’t jabber on the subject of voting without at least mentioning vote fraud and the stolen elections of 2000 and 2008 but Greg Palast does it better.
Voting may not make a difference, but subtraction does!
But at least make them go to the trouble of stealing the election.
He hopes that this action will prompt other government officials (e.g. judiciary or state legislature) to step in and alleviate some of the damage caused by the 43,000 foreclosures (in Cook MF’n County alone!) expected by year’s end.
While I feel greatly gladdened by this news, it would not have saved the boyhood home of Jake and Elwood Blues, as the orphanage owes property tax, not mortgage payments.
Too bad the anti-predatory lending laws of all 50 states were sabotaged in yet another glaring example of high crimes and misdemeanors.
It has online co-op, so I guess that means it’s multiplayer and online, but it’s not massively-multiplayer and it’s not online in any sort of way that is defined by the O in MMO. Which basically means, Too Human has all the bad of an MMORPG (designed to waste your time, environments that lack any real substance, brain-dead enemies) with none of the good (meeting new people, playing with a large group of friends, feeling like you’re part of a virtual world).
In short, Too Human is a bad game. So why the hell did I play the whole damned thing? I mean seriously, this game is buggy, the story is nigh incomprehensible, and the game mechanics are completely vapid. Also, the game never explains itself half the time (wtf does “Soothing +44%” actually do for me? I rented the game from gamefly, so maybe that stuff was in the manual that I didn’t have, I guess.)
I played the whole damned thing for two reasons:
A. I really wanted the story to be good. I love Eternal Darkness, and the people at Silicon Knights are always good at story-based games. Towards the end, though, I gave up on it being satisfying and meaningful I kinda just wanted the story to make sense. It never was, and it wasn’t for lack of trying on my end. I was 100% on board for cyber-vikings and techno-norsemen, but they left me hanging. I have absolutely no idea what happened in the events of this story, and not in a pleasant “woah, surrealism is awesome” sort of way. I would have a hard time even summarizing it.
2. Just like an MMORPG, the game is deviously designed to rope you in. Even more than most MMOs, however, Too Human doesn’t ever let up with the endless stream of phat lootz. You just keep pushing the joystick towards badguys, and your brain just keeps on releasing endorphins, because the game just keeps on tricking you into thinking you’re actually accomplishing something. Some people would cite this as a reason to call this game “good,” but it’s only “good” in the same sense as eating a whole box of oreos is “good.” It’s tasty for a time, but ultimately unsatisfying, and leaves you with a tummy ache.
And then you look at that empy box and go “god dammit! I just ate that whole fucking box of oreos! What’s wrong with me??”
This is just about the creepiest thing I’ve read re: the Palin-Biden debate:
A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It’s one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O’Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat. Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it.
Little starbursts? And unicorns and fairies and puffy little clouds, too? Do I need to remind Rich Lowry that people on the TV aren’t talking directly at him? Does he understand how television works?
This is actual commentary from a bastion of conservative thinking, National Review, albeit their online blog, The Corner. I’m no conservative, but to see this sort of shameful writing for a formerly erudite publication is embarrassing. He’s basically saying that she gives him a boner, right? Is the McCain camp gonna call sexism on this one?
I say this because I’ve seen some commentators (and most of the loonies at NRO’s The Corner) suggest that Gov. Palin actually won the thing. Sure, she didn’t fall completely on her backside, but, Dear God, by any measure of debating she was awful. Imagine if you were in a high school (high school!) debate class and you told the moderator that you weren’t going to answer the question in the way that they wanted, that you were just going to talk about something else. You’d be pilloried for it! You’d definitely lose the debate! Your teachers would be embarrassed. I was embarrassed just sitting there watching it. Because Gwen Ifill failed to ask pointed followups like Couric and Gibson did (”Care to respond?” is not a pointed follow-up), Palin just read PR garbage off her cue cards. Like a high-school debater. That’s not substance; it’s called being a parrot. Pathetic.
Fred Kaplan gets it at least: stringing together coherent sentences is not a qualification. We have set the bar that low.
I urge everyone out there, even you Kazan-haters, to go to your nearest video store or reconfigure that Netflix queue and pick up A Face In The Crowd, a terse, creepy movie about a folksy politician, (*cough* Palin *cough* Bush *cough*) played convincingly by Andy Griffith, whose appealing banality eventually gives way to evil. Very prescient stuff, and not to make a Nazi comparison here, but it’s like Hannah Arendt all over again.
until Friday, 24 October 2008.
