I Lol'd (Taken from Jack Thompson's Wiki)

Disbarment proceedings

In February 2007, the Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them.^[127] According to the complaint, Thompson accused Cardenas of "distribution of pornography to children," claimed that the Alabama judge presiding over the Devin Moore case "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him," and sent a letter to Blank Rome's managing partner, saying, "Your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors." Thompson claims that the complaints violate state religious protections because his advocacy is motivated by his Christian faith.^[128]

In May 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused, including making false statements to tribunals, disparaging and humiliating litigants and other lawyers, and improperly practicing law outside of Florida. Thompson filed a motion with the Florida Supreme Court the day after the report was issued to strike Tunis' recommendations as vague for lack of detail. Previously, Thompson had attempted to have Tunis thrown off his case, and filed a complaint against her with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is responsible for investigating judges.

How To Kill a Weekend, The Free Way

So this weekend between bouts with MST3K doing Raides of the Lost Ark, my girlfriend and our friend Ryan fought off cases of the doldrums. Instead of jumping on Direct2Drive and throwing away some money we decided to take a risk and surf the web for a free game. We ended up coming out with a nice little jewel of a game.

Nexiuz is a free FPS that started as a Quake mod. Totally free and completely legal it strives to put the death match back in FPS shenanigans. It does a good job, there were some issues with either lag or something on my computer but aside from that “free” is definitely a fair price. It takes some time to download but not too long.

So if you have a bunch of friends, and are bored I sincerely recommend this game. There is a level with this ring over the board with a sniper rifle on top, you get onto this floating circle (trying very hard to avoid the term “halo” but that’s what it is) by using a jump pad in the center of the level. So it turns into this king of the hill match, except in mid air.

The game also features a grappling hook that your character can use to get to places, and it’s possible to slingshot yourself, so this usually results folks hanging from a wall trying to shoot their friends like some cracked out Spiderman. Ryan would camp in corners and wait for folks to walk by, once we figured out his game though he was easy enough to kill.

Balance seems to be a huge priority in this game, no one weapon seems over powered. The sniper rifle is a little too accurate, in that it works just as well from the hip as it does when you aim. By far my favorite weapon is this fully automatic…rocket launcher…thing… this spinning wheel of exploding death is not nearly as powerful as the actual rocket launcher but it’s still very cool.

Seriously though, I recommend it. Completely free, and it’s a good way to dick around with some friends that don’t want to drop $20 on an FPS. You also don’t have to think as much as that damn CoD4 game.

More of a Personal Post

As someone who owns the collectors set of Indiana Jones, I am a huge fan. They are great stories, I grew up on Westerns when I was a kid. My dad and I used to just watch them together. Shows like “Have Gun Will Travel” where decidedly awesome. Yeah they are hokey but what kids shows aren’t?

Looking back I think I know why those shows were good, the stories were simple. The plot can honestly be summarized with “beginning, confrontation, resolution”. You introduce the main character, oh shit there are bad guys poisoning the water hole, kill/arrest them, end of show. There is a great deal of simple charm to that formula, and when you have a bad guy you don’t like for simple reasons it’s even better.

That’s why Nazis have always worked in Indy flicks. They are the bad guys, why you may ask, because they are Nazis. Things blow up along the way, we may see a few big names, someone’s face melts, and there are some laughs, all around good time, life is good. Kinda like beer and pretzels night with a gaming group. I know the recent OWbN podcast made fun of folks who use this formula for characters in LARP, and I agree, LARP is far too moody and "mature" for that. Nazi killing and evil mustachioed men are at the heart of beer and pretzel gaming though. When I think of beer and pretzel "role playing" I think of those old westerns. Thats the inherent charm in Indi flicks, beer and pretzels, its a beer and pretzels movie trying to capture the charm of beer and pretzel dime novels.

So after seeing these movies for the umpteen times and loving it I am excited for the new one. I am going to Kublacon this weekend and will be seeing it with some gamers there in SF hopefully. To get ready for the movie my girlfriend and I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark with the RiffTrax.com commentary of it. It was totally worth the $3.00. I shared the file with some friends who downloaded it on their machines from the Rifftrax site legally. Just like the one for 300, adding this commentary puts a whole new spin on the movie.

Seriously though, it was a pain in our ass. If you ever try these don't use their player. Its kind of a gimmick and it fucked with the dialog. I think we had an option turned on that if we would have turned off would have been fine, honestly though, just do it the old fashioned way. Its kind of confusing with this movie because they often use the fade of the production trademark as the point of reference and this movie really doesn't have that (think of the MGM Lion's roar with the Dark Side of the Rainbow trick). Once we got it work though, it was worth it.

I am looking forward to the new Indi flick. I am one of those people that like to make fun of the movie as we watch it with my friends. I went to go see Speed Racer and every time Racer X talked we implanted lines from Lost…

Also, happy birthday George Lucas…hopefully this year will make you much much much wiser.

Woo!

Are there any Hard Gay fans out there?



If you don't know Hard Gay is a Japanese sketch show character. He is a parody of gay people, overly flamboyant, and just pretty goofy. You can check out a lot of his skits on YouTube (I have one such sketch above).

He is a somewhat controversial figure. Naturally he is so over the top the gay community in Japan feels he is demeaning to homosexuals. No surprise Japan’s homosexual community is very concerned about discrimination. I don’t know how receptive the Japanese culture is to these folks, so I can’t really comment.

I do know he has a big enough fan base that Nintendo thinks he will help sell games. He recently made an appearance in “Tingles Magic Rupeeland” building a bridge. Hard Gay joins the ranks of characters with alternate sexual preferences. Of course many of us know about Birdo, the transgendered dinosaur, and there is of course speculation on Daisy, the tomboyish “friend” to Peach.

Now, Nintendo is not so cavalier as to have these characters appear in the "Girls of Gaming" magazines that frequent the IGN channels, but I think there is a touch of bravado in putting characters like Hard Gay and Birdo (who in a recent game was confirmed as being transgendered) in these games; I think its all about Nintendo's strategy to appeal to everyone, kids and adults.

Check out Hard Gay's wiki

Wheels Keep on Spinning Round...

Two marketing posts in a row, I know, I am sorry. This is at least about GTA IV though, that counts for something right? After playing for three hours I am still having a blast. It dawned on me that I had missed the huge marketing wheel, paid advertisements, contests, ARGs, etc etc, I mean this game has to be as big as Halo 3 right?

Then it dawned on me, I didn’t miss the marketing wheel, it was going on the whole time. The PR team for GTA IV rolled the dice in a lot of ways and it looked like it paid off. Look back a year, when people were still clamoring to “finish the fight” it looked like no matter where you went all you heard about was Halo 3. I mean an open beta, teaser trailers everywhere, its customary ARG, even its own Mountain Dew (which tasted like gross in my opinion).

Rock Star on the other hand did something quite differently. They said nothing about anything. Open beta? Hell no, reviewers had to review the game in a hotel room with guards. Huge paid advertising? Why would you need it; after all Rock Star servers crashed after releasing the 1:03 trailer “Things will be different.” The hype wasn’t needed.

What is something a community loves the most? Speculation. Rumour sites for movies, games, hell even D&D exist and thrive because people love to speculate. Rock Star spoon fed that, carefully controlling the release of information and making sure that whenever information was released it was done for free and built a lot of hype.

This is the kind of marketing Apple employs. Community generation is tough though, and they can do more harm than good if your product is in the least bit inferior. Luckily most of the 10/10 reviews abate that.

Once it was launched they let the reviews do all the advertising and started airing paid advertisements to get those who were in a coma to buy.

I Love Analytics

Thank you ILoveAnalytics.com for these videos....

Below are some funny videos about marketing I found on their site. If you want more commentary on them go ahead and click on over. That blog is all about marketing where we have dorks of a different colour here.