I can’t believe so many people proclaimed so loudly and strongly that this was a good movie. Seriously. It wasn’t even good as a movie divorced from any knowledge of Poe’s original works. Sorry, Vincent Price. They can’t all live up to your legacy. Not when Roger Corman is trying to prove what he can do with a budget.
So there’s apparently a “fourth-dimensional”, “massively single-player” game called The Best Amendment, which throws Wayne LaPierre’s words right back at him, and at you, the player. Remember when he said “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”? This game puts that axiom to the test.
The object of the game is to collect little stars. You need so many per play-through to pass to the next level. Every time you pass to the next level, you are then competing against your past selves. You’re armed with one of five weapons — a hand gun, an automatic rifle, a shotgun, grenades, or a rocket launcher — and you have to kill anyone who’s collected a past star to get the required number of stars. And you have to watch out for your past selves’ shots, because they’ll kill you.
The more pacifist you are, the easier the game is. But without actually murdering any of the past selves, it’s impossible to advance. Funny that good and bad are not a black and white dichotomy in the real world. Since there is no objective morality, what you end up with is a mosh pit of people who think that they’re the good guys, firing guns at one another.
Hat tip to CA7746 for mentioning this, which otherwise would have entirely slipped by my radar. Pay what you want for it, there’s a Windows and Mac client, as well as a Flash version that will work on any platform supporting Flash.
This is a powerful short ad by Moms Demand Action. It asks a question I’ve asked a number of times already, but the only answers I’ve ever gotten involve so much fetishizing of guns and so much misinterpretation of the Second Amendment that if there was a legitimate argument in amongst the dross, I certainly missed it.
I’m going to rip off John Oliver a little bit here, by mentioning the fact that every time there’s a failed terrorism attempt of any sort, the security theatre ratchets up. Someone tries to smuggle in a shoe bomb, we all have to take off our shoes. Someone figures out that you can take a couple of liquids into a plane and mix them there to make a bomb, then you’re not allowed to take any liquids through security. All it takes is one person failing at doing damage to a plane, and you’re willing to forego any and all vestige of personal liberty for some false sense of security.
But one shooting after another — 3300+ since Newtown, in fact — and the media squashes any discussion of guns, blustering and projecting in whatever ways they can, misdirecting people’s rage onto video games and pharmaceuticals and anything but those things that you hold in your hand and point at a person and pull a trigger to put a hole in them at range.
Here’s one of those screw-ups whose impact would be significantly dampened if it wasn’t covered up by the drug corps responsible. Users of Alysena-28, by Canadian drug company Apotex, should check their pills’ batch number.
Apotex says one batch of the Alysena-28 may contain two weeks of placebo sugar pills instead of one, adding the error can reduce the effectiveness of the pills and raises the possibility of unplanned pregnancy.
The company informed wholesalers and retailers Friday, but did not inform women who are taking the pill.
The code on the recalled packages is LF01899A. The bad packages were distributed in all provinces except Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Oh man, SkepTech was a blast this weekend. Maybe a bit TOO jam-packed with epicness, though; such that I ended up missing several panels just getting food or, say, giving blood.
Yesterday I gave blood for the first time ever. It’s something I’ve always meant to do, but every time there was a blood drive right there in my face to remind me, I had been sick recently, or had just gotten a tattoo retouch done, so I couldn’t. But this time, at SkepTech, I had the opportunity I’d been waiting for, so I took it.
But it was also called to my attention that there were many at the convention who could not, nor could ever, under the current regulations.
Okay, that’s not an exact quote, but damned if it’s not close enough to be serviceable. Some survey this anti-gay group produced, has apparently determined that a quarter of gays have had sex with kids or animals. I’d love to see the methodology used. Actually, hell — I’d love to see evidence that the “survey” exists at all.
How many times must we say it? Pedophilia and bestiality are problems because of consent, and the inability to obtain informed consent from the other participants. Lack of informed enthusiastic consent is the core and only factor that makes it acceptable for society as a whole to frown upon any sexual activity, in my view. And the reason that it’s harmful to children to have sex with them, even if they think they’re mature enough to handle the repercussions and think they’re consenting, is that psychologically, most of the time, they’re not.
The only reason these preachers and evangelists and homophobes go to that well is because they know that people (rightly) frown upon bestiality and pedophilia, and they involve sexual acts that are not part of “normal sex education”, and so are taboo. The parallels are drawn along taboo-sex and sex shaming lines, but the parallels fail on the one test that actually matters about those acts.
Over on NewGrounds, there’s a a short autobiographical game by Auntie Pixellante called Dys4ia. It’s a pixelly, Flash-based WarioWare-style game, played only with the arrow keys, chronicling the experiences of a trans woman in rectifying her own dysphoria.
I don’t want to spoil it overly much. It’s short, not difficult (except maybe emotionally), and well worth your time. Go play it.
