escape from Lively island

Now this is rich. Google put on a media blitz this week for its new virtual world – Lively. I lasted about 10 minutes in it.

Leaving aside the fact that Lively’s visual aesthetic looks like it was lifted from Escape from Monkey Island, the program manages to do something I thought was impossible: it’s harder to use than Second Life. That hasn’t stopped some SLers from emigrating in hopes of a better virtual life. I doubt they will find it. The graphics suck, and, since Lively runs inside your browser (for some godawful reason), it naturally runs slower than hell.

Actually, that last reason is probably why Lively will survive in one incarnation or another. Google has designed the program so that users can embed Lively rooms into their web pages like YouTube videos. And Google spiders crawl the chat text, matching keywords to text ads and displaying them in the browser. This timesink has two things that Second Life doesn’t – a revenue stream and seamless interaction with the World Wide Web. Now, if they could just program some decent controls…

the Wii has a storage problem

I was down to my last 77MB or so on the Wii’s 512MB internal flash storage unit, so I repurposed an old 128MB SD card to use as backup storage. This was my first experience with transferring virtual console games to an SD card, and I was not fucking pleased.

I waited more than a dozen minutes, not seconds, to offload the dead weight of Emo & Punishment. The game is a little more than 35MB, and it took FOREVER. The problem is probably two-fold: a) the Wii’s processor is little more than a suped up DSP and b) piracy-obsessed Nintendo is trying to make the poor thing do encryption.

After launching its WiiWare memory hogging games, Nintendo tried to stuff its ears and hum through the weeping and gnashing of teeth from gamers who didn’t want to spend their youths staring at a load screen everytime they went to swap out downloaded games. Nintendo disingenuously tried to say that owners could just delete downloaded games and then re-load them. Yeah, that’s convenient.

Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime finally capitulated this week and told MTV that the memory problem has now become “mainstream.” Duh. What this roughly translates to is “microscopic on-board storage is going to put a hard ceiling on how much money we can make off this thing.” He said Nintendo is “working on it.” Don’t get too excited. I’m expecting a new Wii-Lite SKU with a few new gigs of storage, but not a plug-in solution. USB thumb drives for the Wii? A hacker’s dream.

Anyway, I managed to offload 52MB of games onto the SD card, and I now have about 129MB available on the Wii again, more than half the original open capacity. Lord knows how much my first WiiWare game will eat up.

karma is a bitch

As I’m sure Jesus would have said, had he lived to see the Internet: Live by the LOIC; die by the LOIC.

It seems that 4chan, that cesspool of Internet mischief, has finally brought the hammer down on themselves. They attacked Scientology, posted gore and fake news on Ashley Tisdale fan sites and riled the black community with racist attacks on hip-hop web sites. And then the board’s owner did interviews with mainstream publications. It was only a matter of time.

4chan has been largely unavailable this week due to what is rumored to be a protracted Distributed Denail of Service attack on the site. The DDoS beatdown was a favored tactic of 4chan’s /b/tards for shutting down the sites of their rivals, and now it has shut them down. However, the squawk is that this is an internal slapfight between members of the “chan” community, not sweet retribution from on high. Seems they have a stoner anarchist named “pacifico” on the loose with a big bot net. …or he’s just another red herring in this continuing game of Rochambeau.

Nintendo ‘Resorts’ to stupid add-on

Nintendo announced yesterday at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) that it would be releasing a sequel to the wildly popular Wii Sports next spring. So far, so good.

However, the company then implicitly admitted a fact that most Wii owners and developers have admitted from Day 1 – the Wiimote’s motion sensor sucks. To solve this problem, Nintendo has introduced yet another Wiimote add-on…thing, which supposedly makes the Wiimote delicately sensitive enought handle such activities as frisbee tossing, fencing and jet skiing.

Fannie’s cancer

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are teetering on the edge. For many, this has become an opportunity to pontificate about the evils of government-sponsored enterprises. However, I can’t quite get on the bandwagon.

The existence of the F.M. entities allowed The Redhead and I to become homeowners and then become second home owners. No one would have looked at us – crawling up to the doorway of the mortgage lender, clutching barely enough bills to cover closing costs – and decided we were a legit risk if it hadn’t been for Fannie Mae sitting there, ready to buy our mortgage contract and sell it to rich speculators. Banks don’t take those kinds of risks with depositors’ money, but they’d do it with Wall Street’s.

We knew the game was nearly up when we bought our second house two years ago and found the lenders all too willing to finance the astronomic price. They even acted like we were in the driver’s seat, slavishly lopping off fees at our demand. By this time, of course, The Cancer of retail lending began corrupting the commission-hungry underwriters, and Fannie was still buying these monsterous deals without question.

While our case may have been a tight, but good, risk (we’re still paying our mortgage on time, after all), many of the loans Fannie ate weren’t. It’s not surprising to see the The Cancer eating them now, after it chewed through Bear Steans, Countrywide and IndyMac. But, I’m afraid the chemo necessary for this recovering will kill off opportunity for many of my younger friends.

IRL troll…due to the AIDS

The endlessly entertaining and culturally moronic Fox News Team has struck again, this time in New Braunfels, TX, where it appears some /b/tard has loosed 4chan’s “pool’s closed” meme into the real world. The meme, in case you are too lazy to click, sprang from a stunt which /b/tards now refer to as “/b/lackup,” in which they log into the kiddie-themed virtual world of Habbo Hotel, choose black avatars in suits and afros and block access to the public pool, shouting “Pool’s closed, due to The AIDS.”

What was once a mildly funny inside joke has now become a cause for racist concern as disturbed boomers mistake this prank as something more than the caffeine-fueled idiocy of a bunch of teenagers cloaked in digital anonymity.

/b/’s days are numbered…

in b4 newsfail

So, I wondered in type a while back why the news outlets haven’t figured out that 4chan is behind the recent denial of service and graffiti attacks on Ashley Tisdale and prominent hip-hop sites like SOHH.com. It appears that the network hive mind is now vaguely aware of the “the 4chan,” and have sent agents in to do preliminary profiles.

Both Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal dropped a pair of feelgood stories about the site Wednesday. The Time article, while lacking the WSJ’s thorough explanation of memes, is far better written and takes an adequately skeptical tone about some of the site’s less savory attributes (gore, racism, sexism, asshattery, etc). The Time reporter was also not taken in by the site owner, “moot,” and moot’s suggestion that his real name is “Christopher Poole.” The initials of that name, “CP,” are also 4chan’s shorthand for “child porn,” the one type of image that 4chan prohibits and its rowdy members always try to sneak into the site while moot isn’t looking.

Predictably, 4chan’s longtime lurkers (“oldfags,” in the board’s parleyance) are not too happy about the number of siteseers (“newfags”) the articles have attracted to their mental junkfood buffet. Like a gaggle of xenophobic monkeys, the “oldfags” have greeted visitors who announce themselves with a barrage of gore and scat pictures. Nice.

There is already the perception among the “oldfags” that a “cancer” of teenage twits is already ruining the anarchic cleverness of 4chan’s random /b/ channel. And now the mass media have discovered 4chan. You know what that means – the FBI ain’t far behind…

Jenga…with bombs

I got a bit of windfall this week, so The Redhead and I decided to treat ourselves to a couple video games. The Redhead got My Spanish Coachfor the DS, and I got Boom Bloxfor the Wii. I got Boom Blox for two reasons: a) I figured I would like it better than Mario Kart Wii and b) I couldn’t find Mario Kart Wii.

I’m sure I’m committing a bit of heresy here when I say that an EA game ranks higher on my priority list than a key Nintendo franchise, but, when I played a few minutes of Kart in the store a few weeks back, I felt underwhelmed. It looked like a slightly more polished Double Dash, and it played like the superb DS version I already own. The motion controls irked me a bit. And, after firing up a three-way match on the DS with my brother and his fiancee, I realized that I would far rather play Kart that way than on a shared screen. I realize that the Wii version has Internet play, but so does my DS. I get my ass kicked on it. It’s no fun.

So, Boom Blox. Awesome. It’s often compared to Jenga, but it’s so much more than that. It’s essentially a physics engine, one that comes with the tools to craft your own Rube Goldberg machines and moving body nightmares. There are tons of Jenga-like topple tower puzzles, but that’s just scratching the surface. It’s a great party game as well, ripe for trash talking. My only complaint is that the developers seemed obliged to put shooting galleries and escort missions into the game. The former severely taxes the Wii’s processor with too many rendered objects and their accompanying physics calculations grinding the CPU to halting slowdown. The latter is just dumb. I HATE escort missions in any format.

DS Haiku – You know, for kids!

The Nintendo Channel has updated! You know the drill:

Carnival Games- Carnie rip-off games/Now in the palm of your hand/Love the dunking booth

Pictoimage- Artwork of the youth/What the hell is this bird scratch?/Refrigerator

little robots, clogging up your arteries

A meme is born.

I’ve been watching with minor interest the latest dustup between the /b/tards of 4chan.org and various hip-hop sites. It was the usual /b/ drama until their Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and graffiti attacks on two popular hip-hop sites made national news on both NPR and BET.

The NPR report is an interview with Felicia Palmer, owner of SOHH.com. Her analogy of a DDoS attack is priceless, and /b/ had a good old time making fun of it. So, if you should begin seeing references to “little robots inside my computer, clogging up the arteries,” remember that you heard it here first.

It seems that /b/, 4chan’s random image channel, has taken a real racist turn in recent weeks. The forum has never been very politically correct, but it has really attracted a lot of outright haters. It continually amazes me that the media has not put a real hammer on the place yet. The 4chan name never comes up in these reports. Shameful. Oh well, I’m sure the Feds know all about these punks, given that the raiders keep talking about it. The first rule of Fight Club…