There are almost one million names on the US Government’s terrorist watch list. What use could a list of that size be? The number of false positives must be huge!

In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 - and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.1

At that rate, our list will have a million names on it by July. If there were really that many terrorists running around, we’d all be dead.

Spore keeps looking better and better.

It’s no secret that YouTube has embraced user generated video since its inception. Armed with a video camera and an Internet connection, anyone is able to contribute. We’re seeing more and more videogames starting to incorporate user generated content into the gaming experience — so we often ask ourselves, why not similarly empower gamers to share their experiences with each other?

Enter Spore, the much anticipated game from Electronic Arts and Maxis, which lets players create their own alien creatures, import their creations into the game world, and upload video of their creatures’ moves directly to YouTube from within the game.

Nerdfotainment

What do we know about nerds? Well, we know a lot. They need a project, are systematic thinkers, and they love puzzles and games. This brings me to a whole pile of entertainment that has shown up over the past ten years. All of which, I believe, is specifically designed for the nerd demographic, since all of the content shares a common characteristic: it’s terribly complex and nerds enjoy making it more so.

The Clintons, a horror film that never ends - Andrew Sullivan.

It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . .

Put your own movie analogy in here. Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction – whoosh! she’s back at your throat! – has often occurred to me when covering the Clintons these many years. The Oscars host Jon Stewart compares them to a Terminator: the kind that is splattered into a million tiny droplets of vaporised metal . . . only to pool together spontaneously and charge back at you unfazed.

The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: unkillable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy. You can’t escape; you can’t hide; and you can’t win. And these days, in the kinetic pace of the YouTube campaign, they are like the new 28 Days Later zombies. They come at you really quickly, like bats out of hell. Or Ohio, anyway.

A story about Atari.. Back in the day.

My very first day at work I arrived at my office after orientation and found an Atari 800 computer in a boxes. I spent a little while setting the machine up, got it working, and went to get coffee.

When I returned, a staffer appeared in my door. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “You knew how to set up your computer! I was going to do that.”

“Well, thanks, but…” Didn’t everybody know how? Setting up an Atari computer wasn’t amazingly simple and obvious, but it wasn’t all that hard, either.

It was a portent of things to come. My first officemate didn’t know how to set up his computer. He didn’t know anything, it appeared. He’d been hired to work on Dig Dug, and he was completely at sea. I had to teach him a lot, including how to program in assembly, how the Atari hardware worked, how to download stuff, how to debug. It was pretty bad.

That would be a general theme throughout my tenure at Atari. Newly hired people didn’t necessarily know how to do their jobs, and I spent a lot of time helping them figure stuff out that they should have known in order to land a job in the first place. Atari’s hiring practices were not very careful.

God Hates Obama.

Deus Ex Malcontent: “I’ll Be Back”

Yesterday, Clinton eked out a victory in Texas while also taking Ohio and Rhode Island, essentially deflating the momentum of Barack Obama. In doing so, she has ostensibly brought her flatlining candidacy back from the brink, much to the bemusement of many in the press, who called time-of-death on Clinton 2008 weeks ago. The fact that Clinton won three states last night, though, isn’t as noteworthy as how she won them. True, the public is fickle and likely grew sick of both the aforementioned media death knell and the canonization of Obama, but over the past week-and-a-half Hillary Clinton has played every ugly card up her sleeve, and in doing so has managed to cement her reputation as a soulless political opportunist who will say or do anything to get elected. The Clinton Machine, now under the command of unscrupulous toad Mark Penn, either shouted to the press or demurely whispered in voters’ ears every bullshit controversy and unequivocal non-issue it could come up with — from a hearsay argument that kind of, could’ve, might’ve shown that Obama said something to someone in Canada at some point about NAFTA, to those nagging questions about Barack Hussein Obama’s religion, to the threat of a tantrum-filled scorched earth campaign against her own party, to an almost comically GOP-copyrighted attack ad aimed at convincing America’s impressionable soccer moms that Barack Obama is going to kill their children. Factor in her warm and fuzzy appearance on SNL (Note to Lorne Michaels: When Hillary Clinton is the funniest thing on your show, it might be time to issue some pink slips) and you’ve got all the usual ingredients for a good old-fashioned Clinton Comeback.

And that’s exactly why it shouldn’t be allowed to work.

N’Gai Croal, blogger and columnist for Newsweek takes on the idea that the videogame will never be a respected artistic medium the way the film or the novel is now. Part I looks at the issue of accessibility; part II compares videogames to other more respected media, especially television, pointing out that the highest-grossing examples from any medium are likely to be those with the basest appeal and (perhaps) the least artistic merit.

Popular fiction generally outsells literary fiction. Summer blockbusters generally out-gross arthouse films. Is this any different from, say, Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat out-NPD-ing BioShock last year, or Madden doing the same to Shadow of the Colossus in 2005? Does it truly matter that in aggregate television is more mass a mass medium than videogames, when on an individual level, its practitioners are faced with the same challenges that plague those who work in other media?