Month: December 2010

I may have to give up on Assassin’s Creed 2.

I’m facing the endpoint of one of the tombs.  I know the answer (lots of jumpy-flippy stuff); but I just don’t have the reflexes to execute the answer within the freaking time limit.  There’s no way to adjust the difficulty level, there’s no way to abort the mission, there’s no way to revert to a previous save and simply go do something else, and there’s no freaking cheat code to let me stop having to do a part of a game that I don’t, you know, enjoy.  After a couple of days I just gave up and fired up Mass Effect.  I’ve only finished that game once; I can still get enjoyment out of it.

I think that Assassin’s Creed 2 is the first Ubisoft game that I’ve ever played – and if they’re all like this in terms of customizing game play then it’s probably going to be the last one, too.

QotD, George Lucas edition.

Nodwick makes one prediction of many:

9. George Lucas will announce his next movie, “Indiana Jones and the Saber of Light.” Nerds will eschew rioting and complaining, as they begin to look upon George as a demented relative who “just does that kind of thing, it’s sad, really.”

Given that prior to seeing this I spent five minutes explaining to my wife* how I would have redone a completely hypothetical prequel trilogy to the ONLY EXISTING STAR WARS TRILOGY… yeah.

Moe Lane

*I’d regale you with the details of said redoing, except that all of you could have written a better prequel trilogy in your sleep, too.

My time-traveling vacation destination.

(H/T: Instapundit) Claire Berlinski over at Ricochet is soliciting suggestions of where you would go on vacation if you could travel in time and spend a year there.

1980, of course.  I’m sure that Bill Gates would be happy to get a little venture capital, in exchange for stock options.  So would Nintendo.  And so would Sam Walton, and Steve Wozniak, and the McDonald’s Corporation…

What?  Dude: I exist in 1980.  Social Security card and all: I’ll just go on the grid, pay my taxes like I’m supposed to, and be long gone before anybody can get around to noticing that I’m not ten years old*.  And my parents weren’t idiots: I have even had the “How would a time traveling version of myself convince you two that I was for real?” conversation (this is what happens when you have a geek for a son).  We’d be able to put a suitable cover story together, particularly since I’d be establishing my bona fides early with some truly huge sports betting**.  And screw the timeline: in 1980 I’m alive, my sisters are all alive, my wife’s alive, everybody else can go whistle.

Also, I need to convince my father to quit smoking.  Which would be the larger reason for going, really.

Moe Lane Continue reading My time-traveling vacation destination.

The *true* John Conyers scandal.

Background: back over Thanksgiving weekend John Conyers III (the son of Rep. John Conyers) reported a theft of computers and concert tickets from the car that he was using.  The problem?  John Conyers III was using the car unlawfully: it was leased to his father’s Congressional office as an official vehicle, and Conyers was not using it in an official capacity.  And it wasn’t anything like an one-time event, either: John Conyers III also got a speeding ticket on the car back in September.  The behavior was so egregious that Rep. Conyers isn’t even trying to fight it: he’s just swiftly reimbursing the government as comprehensively as possible before the 112th Congress gets sworn in.

None of this is the true scandal.  The true scandal is that we’re only hearing about this now.  Rep. Conyers – who is, by the way, still the JUDICIARY CHAIR – has a history of abusing official resources.  His wife is in jail for bribery.  There is thus zero excuse for the media not to jump on this with both feet… and if the man had an R after his name, they would have.  Then again, if Rep. Conyers had had an R after his name the media would have destroyed him years ago.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: I think that the new Ethics Committee leadership should look into this – and that they should not give this the same wrist slap in 2011 that their Democratic counterparts did in 2007.  I am tired of Democratic politicians thinking that they can get a pass on not even having to care about propriety; I am even more tired of them having any practical justification for thinking that way.

#rsrh QotD, Self-Evident Truth About Congress edition.

The DC Examiner, on ‘productive Congresses,’ and why that phrase should make you shiver a little inside:

Our Founding Fathers were always wary of those who wanted government to do lots of big things. That’s why they created a system that separated powers among three more or less equal branches and provided each of them with powerful checks and balances. When professional politicians become frustrated with Congress, it is a sign that our system is working as intended.

Our system is not working as intended.

Read Biden’s Lips: new taxes in 2013!

Vice President Joe Biden, bless his heart, is promising that there’s going to be a tax hike (including one on small businesses) in 2013.  This, despite the fact that that the Republicans used their 58/42 minority in the Senate and 256/179 minority in the House to somehow prevent the current ruling party from moving ahead on the promised tax hikes: no doubt the President will make a speech and shine the light of his countenance upon the 112th Congress, thus causing them to tremble and flee the righteous Hope-and-Change of the Lightworker.  Or the President will pout, which will probably have roughly the same effect.

VP Biden also promised that the administration would be hiking the death tax, speculated that the next post-DADT repeal step for the White House would be addressing the ‘so-called’ DOMA (although Biden apparently neglected to mention why he voted for it in the first place, just like a majority of his party’s Senate caucus), and walked back the White House’s walkback on Biden’s recent unilateral declaration that we’d be out of Afghanistan by 2014.  Biden then ritually slew a baby harp seal wrapped in the American flag on national television; the Vice President managed to gouge out the heart with his bare hands and offer it up to President Obama before somebody managed to switch to commercial.

Seriously: why do they let this man out without a keeper?

Moe Lane (crosspost)