If you missed it, you can grab a demo of the Creature Creator for the upcoming game (comes out early September). I spent 5 minutes and whipped together this guy. It’s very easy to use and extremely customizable.
It actually has a long tail but it’s obscured by its super sexy chest.
Also, the last few days have been Christmas-in-the-summer for fans of Blizzard games. They finally unveiled Diablo 3. Back in the day I spent hours playing the first two. Looks great (hold your breath until next holiday season).
You don’t have to worry about standing in line to see some people get punched in the crotch by Steven Seagal. Somehow the writers at The Onion managed to convince a studio to put together a straight-to-DVD movie filled with their antics.
The funny part for me is that someone named Caroon Gharakhanian actually emailed me saying that he saw various posts of The Onion on my site and thought I’d be interested in the movie. Pretty smart viral marketing (using a bot to find out the millions of sites that link to even one article and then filtering for the correct email… innovative operation).
That reminds me of when Tyler Cowen released his new book. He emailed everyone that had ever posted a comment on Marginal Revolution to tell us about it.
And speaking of books, War Nerd, one of my favorite writers has a new book coming out on July 1 (apparently you can get an advanced copy at Amazon).
Note: no I wasn’t paid by anyone to post this. Yes, I would like to have been paid. Send yen, loonies or euros to me Seoul. No dollars.
This is a huge survey from the makers of the Half-Life series.
Things that stand out to me:
- Nearly 60% of users still only have a single core system
- More than 40% of users are ultra low-ping bastards (LPBs) with 2 mb/s bandwidth
- Roughly 15% of the users have migrated to Vista which is still significantly higher than adoption rates by enterprises
- About 100,000 users install and play the games with the Russian language pack
- The number 308,754. That is the amount of users with HyperThreading enabled in their processors. It is a cool parallelization technology that has not been included on any Intel chip for more than 2 years and was solely relegated to the upper echelon’s of P4 cores. Fortunately for the consumer, it’ll be back out with Nehalem later this year.
It would be nice to see ascending versus descending annotations. For instance, I’m sure that as the months go by, the user base continues to move towards multi-core systems and multi-megabit connections.
If you look under Video Card Descriptions nearly 20% is listed as Other. I would wager that the long tail prevented the reporting of the largest segment, ATI-based cards in the 2×00 and 3×00 series.
I personally find it amazing that anyone would want to try and play the games produced by Valve on something like a GeForce MX or VIA-based IGP. These users are the same people who probably enjoy trying to finish the Friday edition of the NYT crossword puzzle by themselves.
And the weirdest series of spikes are at the very bottom with hard drive size. Were 96 GB drives that popular? I wonder how many of these people try to play on laptops.
Oh, and this really puts the magical 384 number I learned in stat class to shame (to wit, to generalize the purchasing habits of 1,000,000 people you only need to randomly select and survey 384 people).
I don’t play computer games primarily because it’s kind of difficult for gringos like me to talk to online players in Korean or Chinese.
A year or so ago I fooled around with SecondLife and didn’t find it worth the 45 minutes I spent wandering around the first island. To be fair, SL isn’t a game but rather a glorified chat room… and it still was uninteresting compared to walking outside, with my own legs.
And while I have no idea if this game will be any good, Conan: Hyborian Adventures has a really cool feature that - if I was a gamer - would probably enjoy. One of their innovations in this new MMOG is player-created cities. If you watch this video you might be impressed with the breadth and customization these organic social nodes potentially have.
Again, maybe the game will suck, but it’s a cool feature that I’m sure anyone involved in a guild on WoW would enjoy.
Aside from sounding like some kind of plan hatched by MacGyver, what do those items have in common?
I’ll give you a hint: UFOs.
It turns out that those “mysterious” unexplainable lights in Phoenix are, like every other sighting: very explainable.
I actually kind of find it funny because it was just some guy playing a fun prank:
[...] he used fishing line to attach road flares to helium-filled balloons, then lit the flares and launched them a minute apart from his back yard. He said he believed turbulence created by a passing jet caused the balloons to move around.
If anything it shows just how unskeptical some people still are — jumping to conclusions in an effort to prove their beliefs in ET.
Kind of like deists sometimes do, right?
And it’s not that I knew the correct explanation, but a spoonful of Occam’s razor keeps the boogie man at bay. And cures cancer.
I promise this link - “What the Frak?” - actually goes to a funny overview of the last 3 seasons of Battlestar Galactica.
I have never watched the series, in part because I’m too cool for anything on the SciFi channel. That and the two or three previews I have seen make it look like Lost, another show that I’m too cool to watch.
On another note, what was Rick Astley thinking when he put together that iconic music video 20 years ago? Dancing at night in a deserted street with a trench coat… chicks dig that kind of thing — very romantic.
Back in the late ’90s and even up through parts of the ’00s there were people that got tattoos of Asian hieroglyphic characters, just because they looked cool.
The user had no idea what they meant and in the few weeks that I have been here, I have noticed a similar trend in xenophilia.
While I haven’t seen a whole lot of Romanic characters stenciled on the locals, many young people wear shirts even if they don’t know what it may say.
Exhibit A:
I snapped this photo during a scavenger hunt through one of the many jam-packed markets on Korea’s Constitution Day.
There are a million more where this one comes from, most of which are not family friendly…
- The original Movementarian.com had a motto of “We Plagiarize From the Best,” it appears that the creators of The Office did something of the same thing: Always Steal From The Best
I have to come clean, I sold Barry Bonds steroids.
Some goofy and sometimes comical videos: