Dead Space look good...play bad

Let me clarify that statement.

I was able to procure the new EA developed/produced title Dead Space for my PC through a friend whose S.O. works there. I was warned that the controls were funky on the PC, and that I should use an Xbox360 controller to avoid the standard keyboard/mouse configuration.

I was initially thinking, 'how bad could it be', then I installed and played it.

Yikes. Mouse controls are soft and loose, not crisp and defined like most 1st or 3rd person shooters. Mouse sensitivity options are useless.

At first I was thinking, well maybe they designed this because it makes the gameplay more visceral in that you're more vulnerable to attacks. Then, after a few rounds with some gnarly looking necromorphs, it was clear that the control schema was simply ported over from console design to the PC without any kind of discrete mapping or optimization. LAME!

Why does a development house like EA spend all this time making a great game, then hobble it for one platform? Oh wait...we're talking about EA developing PC games. Ahhh....ok...making sense now.

Stuff on the internets indicates that the issue was raised to EA, and the response was:

"Dead Space for PC is an equivalent experience to that on consoles. The controls are different and customizable, but we feel it's in the best ability for the players to match what the console experience is like."

The PC review from IGN, a site I usually rely on for reviews and details on new and upcoming media, was positive, and a closer read indicates that a device other than keyboard/mouse was used for the evaluation. It would have been interesting to see what the score would've been had they used the standard PC controls. It is noteworthy that the review doesn't draw attention to why they employed an Xbox360 controller (or similar device). I wonder if they had any prompting from EA. If so, that's downright dastardly of IGN

Here's hoping they get a patch out that fixes this, otherwise, I'm going to have to invest in a nice, used, wired controller. How ironic. Folks like to play these kinds of games because of the better sense of accuracy, and now the PC is being relegated to mimic console controls. I weep for the future.

Solid Gold...in your coffee?

While preparing my beverage the other morning, the brand name of the creamer took me back to the 80s. I never realized that Diddy was dancing back then...wow! He's so talented. A Solid Gold dancer.

Will the sequel be Hannukah on Venus?

I love The Flaming Lips. Bonus to you and me, they're in a film called 'Christmas on Mars'.

Weird? You haven't heard their Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots then. Apparently, their Fight Test EP had a trailer of the movie. I'm so late to the game.

While the movie's in release in *select* theaters, a CD-DVD set including the movie and soundtrack is coming out in November.

These guys are by far one of the best things to ever come out of Ohio. Family and friends reading this, you know it's true.

Palin for President

My new favorite site.

Looks like it's getting updated each day.

Can't wait to see what happens with the diplomas.

WTF? New Bioshock 2 trailer

Bioshock was one of the COOLEST games ever. It redefined 1st-person shooters. I'm still tripping out on the gameplay, graphics, storyline, and replay value. Here's hoping that Irrational Games continues developing quality games for this IP.

This just in: Democratic administrations better for your investment

According to a NYTimes piece (sourced from Bloomberg Financial Markets), $10,000 invested in the S.& P. stock market would be worth $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents and $300,671 for Democratic presidents, assuming a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years (the period of time during which either a Republican or Democratic president was in office).

They also indicate what the return would've been had Hoover's administration been considered.

Note that the period where the investment has the greatest return is during Clinton's administration.

Hmmm.

Current president: can't think for himself, has difficulty speaking in clear, articulate sentences, dragged America down a couple rungs in the eyes of the world, ran country using fear tactics; the economy suffers.
Note: couldn't get impeached no matter how many child molesters or CIA agent outers he protected.

Clinton: charismatic, intelligent, could articulately speak to any audience, worked with Dems and GOP congresspeople to get a balanced budget (a first in over 30 years, at the time), had crazy dope foreign policy skills (restoration of Haitian president, Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, peace negotiations with Protestants/Catholics in Ireland, etc), 4% unemployment + more; the economy boomed.
Note: Newt Gingrich and Kenneth Starr led the way to waste taxpayer dollars to impeach him for a blowjob.

Teabag

Usually in the mornings I have English Breakfast or Plantation Mint tea, but today all that changed.

I experienced all that is I Love Lemon. Madness I tell you...madness!

Note the crappy photo quality (or is it user error?) from my iPhone.

I'm fortunate that I didn't have this experience while savoring its goodness.

This just in: cool people admit they would have Tina Fey's baby

See the SNL VP Debate?

Nitro pump for Boddington's

Went to Ben 'n Nick's on College Ave last night with some old co-workers.

As luck would have it, they had Boddington's on tap, AND poured from the nitro tap, which means the head was extra creamy, so of course, I got a stein.

And to add to the Citysearch comments, they do have free wifi, but the signal was weak, so disconnected the iPhone from the network and ran it on 3G instead. All better.

Plan C (If McCain/Palin are elected, and I haven't the will)

Just came across this great piece over at InfoWorld about Americans being able to offshore themselves if IT jobs continue the exodus.

Costa Rica sounds sweet, but I've always wanted to go to Israel and get my kosher on. Regardless, it's an awesome thing to see a more integration of a markets, needs, and talent. Feels like a Schoolhouse Rock spot.

I hear there's mashies on the youteletubbies

Check out the "W." film channel on youtube. Visitors can make video mashups with the content provided. Oliver Stone has a welcome spot, in which he indicates that he's picking a winner, and the prize is well over a million dollars...not really.

Even if you don't make a mashup, there are some great clips of Dubya in inaction during his great prisonmate ass-raping of the world during the past 8 years.

Donkeys are usually heavier than elephants

The Economist has a Global Electoral College tool on its site. It allows people from across the world to select their country and vote for a U.S. Presidential nominee

What's that mean? You say? Economist? Isn't that a elite media institution that uses multi-syllabic words designed to befuddle Joe Six Pack on Main Street? I'm sure that's the argument that sweet little barb-toothed  Palin would project given the results: the world is choosing Obama.

During debate last night, I was expecting to see 'the gloves come off' from McCain, as Palin indicated they would. The gloves must've been from McCain's proctologist employed in a quick pre-debate probing. Everything seemed to be relatively smooth, and I didn't see much sting from McCain, given that the policy of fear first raised from the dead by Dubya and Cheney is still being carted around by the current GOP nominees. Looks like the U.S. wants Obama as well.

One of my personal highlights

M: ...in his short career, he does not understand our national security challenges. ... We don't have the time for on-the-job training.
O: It's true. There are some things I don't understand," Obama said. "I don't understand how we ended up invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11" while failing to capture Osama bin Laden.

 A Forbes poll also reveals much of the same:

 

 

A-game for the AP

I'm loving the comedic coverage from the AP regarding the U.S. 2008 Presidential race.

Highlights here:

Of course, the stock market's plunge was a popular topic among the comics, with Letterman devoting his Top Ten list to "Ways to Make the Financial Crisis More Fun." Ranked in second place: "Enjoy the blank stare when Katie Couric asks Sarah Palin what the FDIC stands for."

He also poked fun at Palin's gaffe when, addressing a group Sunday, she referred to Afghanistan as "our neighboring country."

"Apparently," cracked Letterman, "she can see bin Laden's cave from her house."

On Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," host Stephen Colbert took an approving look back at Thursday's vice presidential debate.

"Both candidates surpassed expectations," he said. "Sarah Palin proved she could speak. And Joe Biden proved he could STOP speaking."

And NBC "Tonight" show host Jay Leno called attention to a candidate for governor of Bangkok who assaulted a TV reporter for asking him tough questions on the air.

"Today Sarah Palin said, 'You can do THAT? Where's Katie Couric?'"

And here:

"John McCain's campaign has closed their offices in Michigan and they say they won't try to compete for votes there," noted NBC "Late Night" host Conan O'Brien on Monday. "Apparently this is part of McCain's strategy to try to win votes only in the original 13 colonies."

"John McCain blew off Michigan! Well, I know how they feel," said CBS "Late Show" host David Letterman. McCain canceled an appearance on Letterman's show two weeks ago."

7 1/2 Floor...700 Billion...Coincidence? I think not.

A little while ago I was at World Savings (part of Golden West Financial) in, which later got bought by Wachovia, which then severed a multitude of jobs, and is about to get put in Wells Fargo's grocery bag.

SFGate ran a piece about the Sandlers, a husband and wife team who started World Savings and had their headquarters located in Oakland, and who got out of the mortgage business about the time when I left. Very shrewd couple...or evil diabolical architects of fiduciary vampiricism?

Regardless, it appears that their Wachovia stock is going to get a whole lot more valuable. Although I must say, we had a very Being John Malkovich orientation process at World.

The orientation consisted of getting to know how many branches they opened up, what was the first branch, how Herb and Marion Sandler met, etc. It was almost like...7 1/2 Floors.

Unfortunately, there seems to be little peace for taxpayers and the lot of their accursed kind. We get to bail out everyone. It's amazing how 'FREE MARKET WILL PROVIDE' the politicians are, but when the shit hits the fan, we get a Karl Marx solution.

Answers at Ask.com

This is a shameless plug made in favor of the shareholders (i.e. me) and internet denizens like yourselves.

We launched a completely revamped site today. Most noticeable, is the removal of the left hand navigation frame that contained the "Narrow Your Search and " Related Search" features. Frame design as a whole was streamlined to provide less clutter on the screen and more information relating to a query. In short, we redesigned to focus on providing answers, so people can avoid the constant clicking of a link, then clicking back to return to an initial search result page.

The site now presents "blended results", which mean that each blue link resulting from a search can contain content matches from various sources.

Various agencies reporting on the release liken it to a harkening waaaaay back in the 90s, when it was askjeeves.com and people actually provided answers/results for queries. I suppose it is in a way, but now the responses are fed by various external data sources and our own proprietary search algorithms.

Are we now considered a "core" search engine? That will be left up to the users. We're certainly taking actions on the traffic data, to understand what people are looking for, and how they look for it.

We've also acquired Lexico, the parent of dictionary.com, thesarus.com. and reference.com, so expect to see more integration in the future. These services fall directly in line with the new direction of Ask.com: quickly providing answers to users asking questions.

 

Check the new site out. Send feedback, although I can't guarantee you'll get a response you will feel better after getting it off your chest.

Well, she didn't wear an ear bud

On the whole, I found the VP debate to be pretty anticlimactic, but interesting.

I found Biden to be better than expected. He was pretty much to the point, and smartly remained focused on highlighting the differences between McCain and Obama, and portraying Obama in a more positive light, thereby emphasizing the skills he'd use when supporting the President.

Palin did better than I expected, which isn't saying much given that the bar was set so low, all she had to do was show up, smile, talk about Joe Six Pack, and talk about how silly all that crazy political talk sounded since she's such a Washington outsider. Palin seemed to take more jabs at Biden, and didn't always address the moderator's questions. I found her folksy 'small-town' colloquialisms to be insulting, as it's reminiscent of Dubya, another self-coined 'Washington outsider'. She reminded me of Charles Montgomery Burns when he ran for governor.

I heard that Palin's debate talent rests on the fact that she leverages the theatrical element, rather than relying on facts, numbers, and y'know...anything that would establish political data points used to construct a trend, which could be used as a predictor for future behavior. She pretty much smiled, acted cutesy, delivered barbs, and dropped a few numbers here and there, which were her clumsiest moments. Facts-schmacts.

I found the reactions to global warming hilarious. Palin basically said she didn't want to point fingers at causes, while Biden indicated that you probably won't be able to come up with a solution to a problem if you don't identify a cause. Her constant comments about Alaska being an energy-producing state were vomit-inducing. Alaska's untapped fields aren't going to provide a long-term solution to the world's addiction to fossil fuels...not while the U.S consumes 25% of it.

My favorite moment related to taxes. There are mountains of spam moving around about how broke we'll be if Obama comes into office because of his record of voting to raise taxes (94 times). Palin called this out, and Biden clarified it as being an inaccurate statement, while leveraging the same rationale to McCain's record and indicating by the same logic McCain voted to raise them 477 times.

courtesy SFGate

I walked away from it feeling better about Biden. Palin delivered barbs and did her best to try to make herself and McCain seem like a voice of change, which was downright laughable. The Obama movement was launched with the theme of change, and gathered so much momentum the only way the GOP could counter was to get someone REALLY inexperienced, and make Palin seem like a moose-eyed newbie, even when Obama's only 3 years older than her. It appears that the less experienced she is, the better, since it's closer to Joe Six Pack, and that is who she's talking to in her fireside chats.

There was a new word mentioned, exceptionalism, thanks to Sarah Palin, the spiritual torch-carrier for imaginistic langualogy in the same breath as Dubbya. Voice of change indeed.

She did much better than her recent Couric interview:

Couric: You have a 72-year-old running mate - is that kind of a risky thing to say, insinuating that Joe Biden's been around a while?

Palin: Oh no, it's nothing negative at all. He's got a lot of experience and just stating the fact there, that we've been hearing his speeches for all these years. So he's got a tremendous amount of experience and, you know, I'm the new energy, the new face, the new ideas and he's got the experience.

Couric: And when it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?

Palin: I've read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.

Couric: What, specifically?

Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.

Couric: Can you name a few?

Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, "Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?" Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

 I think I can see Alaska from here...must make me a geographer!

VP Debate pre-show details

The VP debate's on tonight! See what channels offer it where you live.

Seen the AP piece on the recent bout of network hosts blasting the VP candidates? It's fairly one-sided because, well, we haven't seen this much of a sub-par GOP VP nominee since Quayle ran with GHW Bush. She's an unstoppable force of fodder. The bar's been lowered so far, that she'll be seen as a competent candidate as long as she remains standing, maintains that spooky smile, and utters a few incomprehensible words.

And be warned...if her hair isn't in a bob, then she's wearing an earpiece, so her handlers can bail her out.

In the event you don't like additional mouse-clicks, here's the highlights from the article:

"Last night during an interview on CBS, Sarah Palin said, 'One of my best friends is a lesbian and I love her dearly.' After hearing this, Bill Clinton said, 'Prove it.'"
_O'Brien, NBC's "Late Night."
___
"I love this show! It's like the first season of 'Lost' only it makes less sense."
_Stewart, Comedy Central's "The Daily Show".
___
"It's been reported that John McCain is taking an herbal supplement to improve his memory. Apparently McCain is having trouble remembering why he picked Sarah Palin."
_O'Brien, NBC's "Late Night."
___
"Great day for Sarah Palin. She has been practicing for the big debate tomorrow night. Palin's staff has tried to find a stand-in to pretend to be Joe Biden. But so far all they've come up with is a tree stump. Which actually sounds about right."
_Craig Ferguson, CBS'"Late Late Show."
___
"This is for all the marbles, this debate tomorrow night. And Sarah Palin is nothing if not diligent. She's working hard on preparing for the debate with Joe Biden. Earlier today in Arizona, we just heard, she shot a donkey."
_Letterman, CBS'"Late Show."
___
"Now we all know Gov. Palin has a lot of foreign policy experience because from Alaska, she can see Russia. More to the point, Russia is on the other side of the international dateline from Alaska. It's tomorrow there. So when Palin looks at it, she's actually seeing the future."
_Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."
___
"The vice presidential debate is tomorrow night. Joe Biden, already gearing up. I understand he went to the hair salon, told the guy to put a little more on top ... And Sarah Palin she's getting ready for tomorrow's debate, too. I understand she now knows all three branches of government."
_Jay Leno, NBC's "Tonight" show
___
"Teams of technicians have been working around the clock trying to figure out how to run an Internet cable directly into the back of (Palin's) skull."
_Jimmy Kimmel, ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live."

Notorious

Might be a DVD rental, but I think my money's going to be on Stone's 'W.' biopic.
[GHWB: Who do you think you are? A Kennedy? You're a Bush! Starting acting like one.]

I'm a fan of Biggie fo sho, and he was undoubtedly one of the best MCs to grab the mic, but right now I want to see Dubya's legacy skewered and roasted over a hot pit of voter vengeance.