Finding the right apartment is hard work. First, you have to narrow down a price range that won't leave you eating cat food; from there, you have to find one that actually looks like it sounds in the advertisement description and isn't situated at the corner of Freeway Meridian and Meth Lab, and not only that, but it has to be somewhere convenient to your needs. Variables like smoking or non-smoking can be a factor, and then if you want pets, you have to find somewhere they won't get thrown out on their ears.

And as if that weren't enough, be prepared for a world of pain if you're unfortunate enough to be belabored with the task of being a video game rock star.

You see, I'm somewhat of a Legendary God of Guitar Hero myself, and having spent a good block of Thanksgiving weekend demolishing friends and acquaintances in face-off mode, I can attest to the fact that it is really best played loud and at two-o-clock in the morning (sliding across the floor on one's knees at integral parts of the Dragonforce bonus.) That said, the little time spent not ruling on the five-button was spent fantasizing about, of course, the modern marvel that is Rock Band, guaranteed to be a worthy challenge and at least five times as loud -- while you can turn the volume down on fake guitars, how do you really regulate the volume of your voice when you're trying to hit the upper-stratosphere pitch of Claudio Sanchez? And how do you not drink until you throw the drum kit into the kitchen sink like a crazed reincarnation of Keith Moon? Obviously, it is unavoidable.

It is beneficial, therefore, to have friends with few neighbors and lax landlords. Thus, when someone you know finally gets a compatible console, you'll be ready. Sadly, a group of more pioneering fellows on the Rock Band forums did not have such foresight, and suffered a wrathful blow heard 'round the internet -- eviction by rock.

Okay, sort of evicted. Not that a compulsory evacuation notice is much better, but at least it won't destroy their credit for time eternal. The tragic band posted their notice on the game's forums, blurred by either tears or the earth-shaking metal they're still shredding through in these last darkest days.



I did notice, however, a little something in a close-up of their compliance notice that makes me feel a smidge less sorry for the guys.



Here, I strain my eyes so that you don't have to:

Did these guys read their lease contract before moving into this apartment? It all comes back to finding an apartment that fits your needs. I mean, seriously: don't run your dishwasher after 10PM?! What, are their dishwashers powered by nuclear generators? Faced with that sort of reserve of silence, it was their duty to understand immediately that this apartment complex is for boring grandmas and cat ladies, and should have run screaming on the double. Such a place could never have been tolerant of fake band wizardry, and it was all only a matter of time before they were ousted like Ozzy at the Alamo.

It's a tragic story, and I feel deeply for my brothers in rock, but I hope they can take what they have learned and move on, a little bit older and a little bit wiser, and know that when they finally find a people-friendly apartment to welcome them, at least they will have lived to rock another day.


_DictionaryGirl_ doesn't have Rock Band yet, but she challenges all of you to Guitar Hero.

Um, so here's something...

That's the headline of the story I just read... The headline. Am I the only one who finds it a bit, oh... super fucking creepy? I mean, funny, sure... But, mainly creepy.

Surprisingly, "soft hands" is not on my list of robot attributes.

Pearly white? And there they go mentioning the hands again.

And again! Ugh...

Now, granted, it is an article about a NEW ROBOT WITH SOFT HANDS, I get that, I really do. Just, "go easy," okay? I don't even know what I'm proposing. I don't. I'm not sure how you talk about, or tell the world about, or celebrate- a robot with velvety-soft hands without mentioning the creepy, supple, gentle caress of said 'bot's hands... I do know that when you mention it, I feel weird inside.

"Supple"! "Movements that respond to human touch"? Ugh, now you're just trying to weird me out.

Yeah, well, I defy you to try to eat toast in front of this milky bastard. Oh, and forget the "lifting out of bed," part, he will never find, or know where my bedroom is. In fact, who says it's even a "room"? Let's just say my "sleeping space."

Maybe a little TOO much system integration? Hmmmmm?

Hahahaha, face like a "giant squashed bean." That's legit funny! I feel better...

Annnnd right back to creepy. Flexible?? No. Where's that coal-powered body built from titanium and boulders when you need it? I bet this thing has an actual "creepy" setting. Where's that adjusted, I wonder? On his back? A "soft, mushy, moist, sweat-excreting, life-like" switch permanently stuck in the "creepy" position. No, I know, it's probably between his "doughy, powdered donut-like, pillow-esque, wish-granting thighs."

Haven't the elderly suffered enough? Their senses may be failing them but I'm betting they can still muster revulsion at the idea of Twendy-One running its silicon digits through their thinned out, silver-gray manes while whispering "Shhhh... sleep," into their giant 'lobes. Let's just hope their ancient tears are enough to gum up the robot's works long enough for them to get help.

Oh you don't say? Overheat? What more do we even need to hear!? Kill these squirmy ivory-automatons before they spawn soft-handed offspring! Please, I don't want to fear the next gentle caress I receive. I don't want to clap a palm onto what I thought was my girlfriend's hand on my shoulder only to turn and gaze into this marshmallowed monstrosity...


TheCoolerKing doesn't trust "friendly robots." Ever.

Each week, Ariel Waldman serves a tasting of the latest in sex and tech.

Square Dildo Senses Your Arousal

A new project in porn aims to reverse your reaction. Using an awkwardly-shaed square dildo that is (thankfully) meant to be held in your hand, a connected box reads your arousal levels and tweaks the TV accordingly. The device uses a big black box with metal sensors attached to the less-than-rounded rubber. The more aroused you become, the more pixelated the porn becomes.

Phoenix Dildo Heats Up And Hardens

The holidays can often be quite cold. Between the weather and/or being single, something to keep you warm often becomes a necessity. The Phoenix wants to help combat the cold weather with keeping you warm beyond just between the sheets. Heating up to 38 degrees Celsius (about 100 degrees ), the translucent toy additionally hardens the longer you keep it on. More pleasure is optionally provided by inserting a vibrating core. Heating up the holidays is no longer only reserved for hot cocoa.

Woman Caught Cheating From Nintendo Wii

A soldier stationed in Iraq came home to a suspicious house. Friends had rumored of his wife cheating while he was away. Apparently, he went looking for hard evidence of infidelity and found it through the Wii.

Best to sanitize the Wiimote before any further bowling.

Hey guys, I have a very important message: stop looking at the universe. No seriously, stop it. Don't engage it in a staring contest, don't glance at it sideways. Don't even watch documentaries about it on cable TV. Hell, you know what? Don't even think about the universe. You're doing it wrong, and you'll break it, and then we'll all be sorry.

My important message comes via a couple of leading theoretical cosmologists studying the effects of the quantum theory, who are currently putting forth the idea that simply by observing the reaches of distant galaxies as we have, we are willing them into existence, and by proxy their imminent destruction.

This theory essentially takes Erwin Schrodinger's famous theoretical cat experiment -- the outcome of which being that, though when a cat is encased in a soundproof box he may be either dead, alive, or reciting internet memes with poor grammar, once someone decides to observe the cat, a choice of which state of being to take is forced upon the subject -- and follows it to its seemingly logical conclusion: if it works for a cat, why not for the universe?

Likewise, it is supposed now that the universe was supposed to decay at a certain rate, but by not being observed it was able to languish in uncertainty, but now that we are able to chart it and make note of its progress, it may have "reset" to its original rate of decay. Bummer.

Superb. So what does this theoretical knowledge mean? What should we theoretically do? We could stop looking at the universe, dismantling our telescopes and calling the Space Station home, in the hopes that the universe will settle back into its pattern of uncertainty in the unknown. On the other hand, however -- having already found the dark energy and supermassive black holes, hasn't the theoretical damage already been done? Perhaps we should just keep looking. Maybe whatever we find next will be a cure for all that darkness and decay --as long as the next thing we force to choose existence isn't a space kraken, we theoretically couldn't do much worse.



For a while in college, _DictionaryGirl_ held this theory that, as long as she never looked at handed-back essays and final posted grades, there was as good a probability as any that she had straight As -- it was only upon observation that her GPA was forced into actualization.

"Why the Hell Was My Whole Holiday Shopping List Published in My Facebook News Feed?" That's what some Facebook users have been wondering ever since the site's new "social advertising strategy" started publishing information about members' activity on third-party partner sites to their friends' "News Feeds." In other words, Facebook users who make online purchases are finding that many of those transactions are showing up for everyone to see. Kind of sucks for people making "personal" purchases, or trying to surprise friends and family with holiday gifts.

Why does MoveOn.org care? They say that the program -- called "Beacon" -- is a major violation of privacy.

Beacon is not mandatory, and Facebook users can opt out, but that choice is well-hidden and only temporarily visible. MoveOn.org insists that Facebook needs to do a better job of informing and protecting their users. Facebook, of course, claims that MoveOn.org is misrepresenting the site feature. In response to MoveOn's attack, Facebook offered a statement saying that they had it all wrong.

You think the MoveOn gang bought that weak excuse? Everyone knows that many of the "friends" listed on social networking site profiles aren't the real deal. Not only that, but who even wants their true friends to have access to all of their purchases? I don't need my good friends or classmates to know that I got myself a copy of Sexually Transmitted Diseases: A Physician Tells You What You Need to Know. This should be the sort of thing that users choose to turn "on" instead of "off," and Facebook has a responsibility to make their users aware of new features like this before they go into effect.

You know who's kind of a tease? Science. Yeah, that's right. Constantly dangling the next generation of technology before our eyes, but rarely following through with the delivery...

Robots, human clones, invisible tanks -- all announced and in various stages of development. But we still haven't seen them. Debates are started, tests are done, unseen progress is supposedly made, but, we don't get to see anything. I would've put super-powered exoskeleton into the same category.

Then I saw one.

I'm totally fucking sorry, science. You did it. I'm a jerk and I'm ashamed for ever doubting you.

Did I just see that thing give that guy crazy robot strength? Um, and now it's playing ball? Well, that's cool but I bet it can't. Nope, wrong again, that robot suit is totally hitting the speedbag. Like fucking Rocky. Only Rocky can't crush yer head like a ripe melon. (Sorry, the Rock, it's true.) Rambo can't even do that.

My first, second and third reactions to that video were amazement. The fourth was fear. Fear of the fact that it appears we're about a year away from an actual living, breathing, super-villain.

I can already see it now. Mild-mannered army private whose body happened to fit the skeleton receives the awful news that the gov't wants to do some typical gov't fucked up shit to him and he's got no choice in the matter. No choice but to break into the facility late at night, hop into the machine (sorta like in Stripes only with less wisecracks and much more decapitation) and go on a bloody, sergeant-slaughtering rampage.

Or maybe the scientist who designed it refuses to turn it over to the gov't once he discovers its true purpose (he was told its job was to pick fruit... coconuts or something.) He hides the suit and is tortured for hours, eventually turned into a twisted, evil psycho who breaks loose and dons the suit, before going on, yup, a bloody rampage.

So many ways to go wrong with this thing.

I guess our only hope is that some brash young soldier steals the suit after the army refuses to authorize a suicide mission to rescue his kidnapped sister, during the course of which he decides to keep the suit, paint it red and yellow, and fight crime. Yeah, not likely.

I don't know about you, but I'm spending the next few years developing a fighting technique to beat this exoskeleton. So far I've got a nice start. Yes, it involves magnets... and an outlawed jiu-jitsu technique developed for rhinos. Admittedly, at this point, the plan relies almost entirely on the close proximity of a lake filled with acid... So, you know, I've got some work to do.


Special thanks to the awesome Drake for alerting me to the story... Well, "alert" sounds a bit much, there were no sirens or blinking red lights involved. She just sent it to me.


TheCoolerKing blah blah something about Thanksgiving.

My new book was reviewed on Slashdot yesterday, and while I was writing and reading comments, I noticed that the current Slashdot poll question is, simply put, “Best Star Trek?”

I was actually surprised that in all the years Slashdot has been bringing us news for nerds this is the first time this question has been asked, and when I went to vote for TNG, I remembered a story I liked to tell at conventions, back in the day.

In my first book, Dancing Barefoot, I wrote a story called The Saga of SpongeBob VegasPants (which, if nothing else, is a lesson to all you aspiring writers out there, and a reminder to the rest of us: put some fucking thought into your titles, guys, because if you don’t, you’ll be talking about The Saga of SpongeBob VegasPants for the rest of your life.) The story is about my experiences at a convention celebrating the 35th anniversary of the original Star Trek series. I’ve excerpted it for the GiR before, but I’ve never shared the particular story that the Slashdot poll brought to mind until today.

I’ll pick this story up while I’m on stage, giving my talk at the convention. Up until this point, thanks to a perfect storm of nerves, exhaustion, and being the last speaker of the day, I have absolutely sucked out loud. The audience has hated me, and some of them have walked out. I’m seriously thinking about doing us all a favor and just walking off the stage . . .

An experienced performer has a few jokes or stories that always get a good response. We call them “back pocket” material, and they are held in our minds for occasions like this. I decide to bring one of them out . . . but my mind draws a complete blank.

I have nothing, so I say, “Uh. Does anyone have any questions?”

I honestly expect someone to shout out, “How come you suck?” But nobody says anything.

I look at the crowd for a second, and I say with a smile, “Well then, I guess we're done here! Thanks a lot for coming, and have a great rest of the weekend!” I start to walk off stage, with every intention of continuing down the hall, and into the bar.

After a couple of steps, though, they all laugh. Hard.

What? That was funny? Okay, I'll take what I can get at this point. I relax a bit and begin to share my Star Trek memories. The crowd, which just moments ago was wishing their phasers were functional, warms up to me a little bit.

A woman dressed as Doctor Crusher stands up and says, “Say hello to your mother!”

“Okay . . .” I say, and turn to my real mom, Debbie, who is sitting on the opposite side of the theater. “Hey mom! Thanks for coming! Do I still suck?”

The whole room turns to find her.

“No. You're doing great, honey,” she says.

“Thanks, mom,” I say.

I call on a cute girl who wears a babydoll “Social Distortion” shirt.

“What was it like to kiss Ashley Judd?” she asks.

I smile broadly. “Come on up here, and I'll show you!”

Huge laugh. She stands up!

“Oh! No! I'm just kidding!” I hold up my hand, and point into my palm, “my ifeway isay inay the eaterthay!”

I glance at my wife. She's laughing and shaking her head, and she winks at me.

I feel good. They're laughing with me, and having a good time.

I call on an older man, who sits near the front, several bags of collectibles at his feet.

“Do you have a favorite episode of Voyager?” he asks.

“Well, The truth is, I've only watched Voyager a couple of times, and I really don't like it.”

There is a little bit of a gasp. Did Wesley just say he doesn't like Voyager?

I try to explain. “The episode was called Scorpion, and I watched it because my friend designed the monster that terrorized the crew for the entire episode.”

I hear angry sighs. People turn to talk to each other. Some of them leave.

What happened? All I said was that I don't like Voyager! What's the big deal? Lots of Trekkies don't like Voyager. Maybe I should have called it “V'ger.”

A guy waves his hand rather urgently, fingers spread in the Vulcan “Live long and prosper” salute. I point to him.

“What was your favorite episode of Deep Space Nine?”

“Well, the truth is, DS9 and Voyager just never appealed to me. The stories didn't interest me as much as the stories on Next Generation, or Classic Trek,” I say.

Big mistake. This is not what the fans want to hear. They want to hear how I love and care about these shows as much as they do, because that's exactly what they hear from the other actors. They get up on stage, and they give the fans exactly what they want.

Well, I don't do that. I tell them what it's truly like for me, warts and all. The truth is, sometimes being on Star Trek was the greatest thing in the world. Other times, it completely sucked. And, as blasphemous as this sounds, at the end of the day it was just a job.

But when all is said and done, I am still a fan at heart. I loved the original series. I am proud of the work I did on Next Generation. I cried when Spock died, and saw Star Trek IV in theaters six times.

I failed to mention all that, however. Without that information, it can piss people off that I don't have the same unconditional love for Star Trek that they do.

I look at my watch, and I have ten minutes left to fill. I have nothing to lose, so I reach into my back pocket . . . and find it filled with material.

“I have the limited edition Star Trek Monopoly game.” I say.

“Of course, it's a limited edition of 65 million. But it's extremely valuable, because I got a number under 21 million.”

They laugh. It's funny, because it's true.

I go one better. “Plus, it's got a certificate of authenticity signed by Captain Picard!

“Yes, that's right, my Star Trek Monopoly game, which I've rendered worthless by opening, comes with a certificate of authenticity signed in ink by a fictional character.”

I see a guy in the front row say something to his buddy, and they both nod their heads and laugh.

“Cool thing about the game, though, is that there is a Wesley Crusher game piece in it, and the first time we sat down to play it as a family, Ryan grabbed Wesley and proclaimed, as only an 11-year-old can, 'I'm Wil!! I'm Wil!! Nolan!! I'm all-time Wil!! I call it!!'”

I see some people smile. I start to pace the stage. I'm hitting my stride, and the stories flow out of me.

“One time, when we were renegotiating our contracts, we all asked for raises.

“We all felt a salary increase was appropriate, because The Next Generation was a hit. It was making gobs of money for Paramount, and we felt that we should share in that bounty.

“Of course, Paramount felt otherwise, so a long and annoying negotiation process began.

“During that process, the producers’ first counteroffer was that, in lieu of a raise, they would give my character a promotion, to lieutenant.”

I pause, and look around. I wrinkle my brow, and gaze upward.

“What? Were they serious?”

A fan hollers, “Yeah! Lieutenant Crusher! Woo!”

I smile back at him.

“My agent asked me what I wanted to do. I told him to call them back and remind them that Star Trek is just a television show.”

Okay, that was risky to say. It's pretty much the opposite of just a television show to a lot of these people, but I've gotten the audience back on my side, and they giggle.

“I imagined this phone call to the bank,” I mime a phone, and hold it to my ear. “Hi . . . Uh, I'm not going to be able to make my house payment this month, but don't worry! I am a lieutenant now.” I pause, listening to the voice on the other end.

“Where? Oh, on the Starship Enterprise.”

I pause.

“Enterprise D, yeah, the new one. Feel free to drop by Ten Forward for lunch someday. We'll put it on my officer's tab!”

Laughter, and applause. My time is up, and the promoter stands at the foot of the stage, politely letting me know that it's time for me to go.

The fans see this, and I pretend to not notice him.

“In 2001, startrek.com set up a poll to find out what fans thought the best Star Trek episode of all time was. The competition encompassed all the series. The nominated episode from Classic Trek was City On The Edge Of Forever. The entry for The Next Generation was Best of Both Worlds Part II. DS9 offered Trials and Tribble-ations, and Voyager weighed in with Scorpion II.”

As I name each show, various groups of people applaud and whistle, erasing any doubt as to what their favorite show is.

“Now, look. I know that Star Trek is just a TV show. Matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I just said that five minutes ago, but there was no way I was going to let my show lose. It just wasn't going to happen. Especially not to Voyager – er, V'ger, I mean.”

“So I went into my office, sat at my computer for 72 straight hours, and voted for TNG over and over again.”

The audience giggles.

“I didn't eat, and I didn't sleep. I just sat there, stinky in my own filth, clicking and hitting F5, a Howard Hughes for The Next Generation.

“Some time around the 71st hour, my wife realized that she hadn't seen me in awhile and started knocking on the door to see what I was doing.

“'Nothing! I'm, uh, working!' I shouted through the door. Click, Click, Click . . .

'I don't believe you! Tell me what you've been doing at the computer for so long!'

“I didn't want her to know what I was doing – I mean, it was terribly embarrassing . . . I had been sitting there, in crusty pajamas, voting in the Star Trek poll for three days.”

Some people make gagging noises, some people “eeww!” But it's all in good fun. They are really along for the ride, now. This is cool.

“She jiggled the handle, kicked at the bottom of the door, and it popped open!”

The audience gasps.

“I hurriedly shut down Mozilla, and spun around in my chair.

“'What have you been doing on this computer for three days, Wil?' she said.”

I look out across the audience, and pause dramatically. I lower my voice and confidentially say, “I was not about to admit the embarrassing truth, so I quickly said, 'I've been downloading porn, honey! Gigabytes of filthy, filthy, tentacled bukkake porn!'”

I have to stop, because the ballroom rocks with laughter. It's a genuine applause break!

“She was not amused. 'Tell me the truth,' she said.

“I sighed, and told her that I'd been stuffing the ballot box in an online Star Trek poll.

“'You are such a dork. I'd have been happier with the porn.'

“I brightened. 'Really?'

“'No,' she said. She set a plate of cold food on the desk and walked out, muttering something about nerds.

“I stayed in that office for another ten hours, just to be sure. When my eyes began to bleed, I finally walked away. It took several weeks of physical therapy before I could walk correctly again, but it was all worth it. Best of Both Worlds Part II won by a landslide.”

I pause dramatically, and the theater is silent.

“And it had nothing to do with my stuffing the box. It's because Next Generation FUCKING RULES!”

I throw my hand into the air, making the “devil horns” salute that adorns my satanic T-shirt, and the audience leaps to their feet, roaring with applause and laughter.

I can't believe it. I got them back. I say thank you, give the microphone to the promoter, who is now sitting on the stage pointedly checking his watch, and exit, stage left.

. . . for the record, I only voted once in this week’s Slashdot poll, and Next Generation is crushe(r)ing everyone else with 28788 votes. The closest is TOS, with 9107. As I said in 2001, it has nothing to do with my stuffing the box. It’s because Next Generation FUCKING RULES!

Wil Wheaton taught Karl Rove everything he knows about stuffing ballot boxes. Just kidding. Wil Wheaton hopes Karl Rove dies in a fire.

Each week, Ariel Waldman serves a tasting of the latest in sex and tech.

Adult FriendFinder Gets Acquired

TechCrunch carries in the rumors about the recent unconfirmed acquisition of Adult FriendFinder. The sometimes frightening ads we see pasted across splogs are in demand and apparently for a lot of dough. With estimates ranging from $500 million to a laughable $1 billion, Penthouse Media Group seems to have made the quasi-porn purchase. CNN asks, "You know how you'll be trying to do work, and the Internet will inexorably drag you into porn?" Yes, but we can only ask CNN, "You know how you'll be trying to look for porn, and the Internet will inexorably drag you into trashy ads?"

Atari Provided Pixelated Porn

Adult game development used to get some action from Atari. At the time, the adult games couldn't be sold as games, so they remained on sale only in adult specialty shops. "Adult entertainment" like Custer's Revenge consisted of naked cowboys raping tied-up Indians. Others such as Bachelor Party were far more innocent in their rough-edged animations, only providing a Pong-like strategy of gaining women like points. Kotaku has more cartridge case studies from the '80s.

Drew Carey Likes Phones And Sex, Not Phone Sex

Drew Carey made the collage of a cover for last Sunday's issue of Parade. The issue covered the latest in technology, which undoubtedly means they were late to the iPhone coverage game and are milking it for what it's worth a few months later. Regardless, Carey talked about his tech-fetish:

He also mentioned going on virtual dates with his IRL fiancée in Second Life. Virtual candle-light dinners are not necessarily recommended unless you're comfortable with the occasional Furrie crashing it.

When I heard people talk about “The Greatest Generation”, I tend to assume they’re talking about human beings, like the soldiers that landed on Omaha Beach or fought at Anzio.

However it seems that nostalgia for the World War II era extends past mere mortals and encompasses machines as well.

For example, a group of British computer enthusiasts spent over a decade rebuilding a massive 1944-vintage Colossus Mk2 computer. The Colossus, one of the first “supercomputers”, was originally used by the British government to decode encrypted German teletype communiqués during World War II. In case you think the name “Colossus” is a result of wartime morale-boosting hyperbole, it’s actually more of an example of British understatement, since each Colossus machine used 1,500 vacuum tubes and took up over 80 square feet of floor space.

The Colossus Mk2 was designed to break the codes created by German encryption machines known as the Lorenz SZ40 and SZ42. The comparatively svelte and low-tech Lorenz machines used five spinning metal wheels to mix seemingly random digits in with the standard code to transmit messages via teletype, making it impossible for average teletype machines to decode the transmission. British codebreakers figured out how to reverse engineer the Lorenz encryption in 1941 after some hapless German teletype operators re-transmitted the same encrypted message twice in a row with slight variations. Comparing the two transmissions along with the other unencrypted German messages allowed British cryptographers to figure out the pattern the Lorenz machines used to add extraneous digits.

However, it took another two years for the British to create a machine that could decode the encrypted German messages quickly and reliably enough for that information to be useful. Going through the messages by hand took weeks. The first attempt at a Lorenz codebreaking machine compared a printout of the encrypted German message to another printout of various possible Lorenz encoding patterns. While this machine, known as the “Heath Robinson”, allowed codebreakers to ideally decode up to 1,000 characters a second, it depended on keeping the two paper printouts in sync with each other. The Colossus sidestepped this problem by replacing the decoding printout with what was basically a computerized Lorenz emulator that would electronically generate Lorenz encoding patterns and compare them to the encoded message. The Colossus Mk2 could easily decode 5,000 characters per second, meaning that paper printouts of encrypted German messages could be fed into the Colossus at a rate of 30 miles of paper per hour. The Colossus was even tested at a speed of over 9,000 characters per second, but paper printouts going at 60 miles per hour tended to disintegrate.

And no, for the handful of ‘70s sci-fi geeks reading this, none of the scientists involved was named “Forbin”.

The Colossus was so fast and efficient at doing its decoding job that during the rebuilding process the scientists involved claimed that a modern-day desktop PC wouldn’t be able to do a much faster job of decoding the same messages.

This is what we in the writing biz call “foreshadowing”.

The reason it took a good deal longer to rebuilt the Colossus than it’d take to solder together a Pong arcade machine is that due to the top-secret nature of the Colossus, eight of the ten Colossus machines were destroyed after WW2 (Winston Churchill supposedly decreed that they be demolished into “pieces no larger than a man’s fist”). The remaining two Colossi were destroyed and the diagrams for their construction were burned in 1960. The volunteers looking to rebuilt Colossus had to rely at first on only a handful of photographs and a few partial circuit diagrams that some of the engineers involved had secretly and illegally held on to.

Of course, once the rebuilt Colossus Mk2 was back in action, the scientists that rebuilt it wanted to show off how awesomely fast it was, so they devised a challenge. German radio enthusiasts would encrypt a message using a vintage Lorenz machine and then transmit it by radio, while scientists manning both the rebuilt Colossus and a “virtual Colossus” program being run on a laptop would wait to intercept the message and start a race to see how quickly they could decode the message. Amateur codebreakers were challenged to tune in for the encrypted message and try and beat the Colossus to the decoding punch. The suspense was, if not gripping, at least slathered in a layer of retro technogeekery thicker than London fog.

Would the WW2-era Colossus be able to beat those pesky newfangled PC whippersnappers and show them how to decrypt it old school?

No.

In what scientific terms is called an “anti-climax”, a German amateur codebreaker who had “written a suite of software specifically for the challenge” managed to decrypt the transmitted message before the British team even got a chance to start feeding it into their rebuilt Colossus.

To make things worse, the laptop virtual Colossus managed to decode the message several hours before the real deal did, although to be fair, most laptops don’t have to deal with exploding vacuum tubes.

Despite its Michael Jordan-esque comeback (Wizards, not Bulls), the rebuilt Colossus is at least going out in style, as it’s now the centerpiece of the British National Museum Of Computing.

No word yet if anyone’s been able to program it to play Tetris.

Even though I was only six years old when it came out, I still remember Ghostbusters with fond giggles. That movie was hysterical, man. Ghostbusters 2 sucked butt, what with its crappy-ass "can't we all just get along" public-service-announcement-esque message, but the first one was classic. You know what I loved about that movie, most of all? The fact that it was AWESOME. I played with my share of slime in the 80s, and while I was a big fan of slime, a video game would have be cooler.

Well whoop-di-doo! My prayers have been answered! A Ghostbusters video game is set to slime you in 2008. Dan Akroyd wrote it, and Harold Ramis and Bill Murray are joining him to record the voice-overs.

Radicool. That stupid article doesn't mention Ernie Hudson, but he has apparently signed on as well, according to Kotaku.

Yippee. Kotaku also pointed me to G4, where there's some exclusive gameplay footage for your viewing pleasure. My only complaint is that I won't be able to play the game on my Atari 2600, but all of you Xbox/PlayStation/Wii types will be set.

Don't cross the streams, beotches!

The October Surprise in the 2004 Presidential Election was a video released by Bin Laden where he took responsibility for 9/11. (Aw!) This tape bolstered the popularity of Bush to a six point lead over Kerry.

I'm here to predict that the October Surprise for 2008 will be aliens. I'm serious.

Scenario Number One:
Should Bush want to stay in office beyond his term limits he will declare Martial Law (military rule) on account of the fact that aliens are determined to strike America, or that they're already here. He will be President for life or King or dictator because it's going to take an unknowable amount of time to deal with the aliens.

Scenario Number Two: (through Ten)
All of the years of public fascination with UFOs and alien abduction will be taken seriously by officials. There will be great intimation that aliens do exist. Are aliens planning to come here? We do not know the intentions of aliens. Are aliens on the side of Al-Qaeda? What if aliens are even scarier than Al-Qaeda? What if aliens hate Jesus and our freedom? Who can protect us? Why, only the Republicans can protect us! You don’t want a woman President if aliens attack America, do you? She'll just cry or worse try to dress the alien up in cute outfits! You don’t want a black guy President when aliens America, do you? He'll just scream and run in the other direction.

It's already happening. Remember when Kucinich said in a recent Democratic debate that he'd seen a UFO? He was ribbed for that. What a wacko! But look closely. This is going to be spun in even another direction. Kucinich and the Democrats are giggly elves when it comes to UFO's compared to Giuliani the tough guy who reassured a child at a recent Republican debate.

Former Arizona Governor Fife Symington moderated an event on November 12th, 2007 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Credible experts from all over the world met to discuss what once were classified documents on well-documented cases of UFO sightings. Symington is very outspoken about his UFO sighting, the famous Phoenix Lights. He believes the military has consistently given flimsy explanations for sightings.

Anderson Cooper briefly covered this event on 360 the other night. Former Air France captain Jean-Charles Duboc saw a UFO over a thousand feet long. Retired Iranian Air Force pilot General Parviz Jafari believes that alien life caused his plane's missile system to become inoperative.



Even though it makes great television and gets our imaginations going, this new wave of UFO mania doesn’t seem to be catching on at the government level.

The FAA isn't investigating new reports of UFOs.

However Reuters reported that the international panel is trying to urge the U.S. government to re-open it's UFO investigation through the Air Force or NASA in the name of national security.

What was that? Did somebody say the attacks of 9/11? Now, they're talking. (Admittedly, in an age of terrorism, I think it's a smart idea to investigate anything unusual in the sky.) I predict that the government will reopen its investigation of UFO's. I predict that the investigation will be half-assed and slightly falsified but a good excuse to keep invoking 9/11 and introduce a new intergalactic fear.

Republicans will use the public's renewed interest in UFOs and the subsequent investigation to their advantage. Fox News will begin reporting things like, "Aliens. Are they all cute like E.T. or could this be the beginning of a War of the Worlds?" The Democrats will try to appear as likeable and sane as possible as they try to explain away what they saw in the sky.

The Republicans will accuse the Democrats of wanting to offer therapy to the aliens in order to deal with them. Al Gore will have his Nobel Prize taken away after he tries to talk to the aliens about their sustainability technology. Somehow France will be made fun of. Every captured UFO at Roswell will be re-named an "Unidentified Freedom Object." We'll scare the aliens away with our childish behavior and they'll fly off vowing never to visit Earth again. Oh, and Bush will be President for life because of all of this mass distraction. Mark my words.

SleepyLady wants you to mark her words.

The electric guitar has only been around for three quarters of a century; the classical piano as we know it was born just a couple hundred years before that. What did we subsist on before? Mostly tribal drums, I suppose. Some lyres, maybe some pan-flutes for variety. What with music having been around since at least the dawn of time, it's hard enough to grasp the brief existence of accompaniments as we know it--it's harder still, however, to conceive of what music will be made of in the future. While theremins and moogs certainly have the capability of sounding spacey and futuristic, they place "the future" at approximately 1966.

This week, I have seen two novel attempts at creating music from fairly unexpected sources. Of course, wherever there is music, there must be a music critique, and luckily for you I'm here to do the job. Let's take a look.

1. Stretches of Highway

When I first heard that Japan is really into the slow, cacophonous meandering of pavement right now, I was like, "Well, who isn't? Stephen Malkmus is God." But that's not what they were talking about, and the truth of the matter is much more strange.

Oh, Japan. We should have known. So, how exactly does it work? I figured it might be like a record, but it seems more along the lines of one of those self-playing pianos, notch-filled reams of music ever-scrolling.

This is the point where I have to wonder how one even comes up with such an idea, so I'm glad that the article provides the information, crediting the discovery to a Shizuo Shinoda, who is said to have accidentally cut the preliminary tone-producing grooves in the road with his bulldozer.

I wanted to give this the benefit of the doubt. Sure, it's making music by grinding your car over highways, but I always suppose the worst and something nagged at me that it might be a lot more sophisticated and beautiful than I'd imagined. Thankfully, we have the internet to check up on it--and so can you! It's worth it, if you care to brave the lack of English.



I.... I think I heard a song, or at least I heard the pitch of the car's whine on the road shift up and down. The panelists seems unimpressed, and I share their malaise. Not exactly gold soundz there; more like a low-pitched version of running your finger around the rim of a glass. Can you imagine hearing that nonsense impeding on your sound system while trying to make a simple drive through Hokkaido? Not that I'm saying I wouldn't want to visit the road just once, but once the novelty wore off it must get tedious. Adding to it, a few complaints of those who frequent the roads:

28mph! Where are these roads, in a school zone? Can we not make these roads run at least on 45RPM? All in all, it's great in theory, but in execution the whole thing isn't much more than a fun amusement. That's all it's surely meant for, I would think, but maybe it can be refined a bit more before we start actually calling it "music."

VERDICT: How great would it be if they paved a road that played Pavement? But seriously, folks--aside from the novelty of it all, it sounds pretty terrible. Wake me when we're rolling in high fidelity. Pass.

2. Tesla Coils

When Nikola Tesla first constructed his famous coils, he may have had many things on his mind. The harnessing of electricity, perhaps, and the future of technology. Did he know, then, that in said future one might be able to manipulate the frequencies of the currents coursing through the coils in such a way as to make them sing? Whether it ever crossed his mind or not is a moot point by now, because, a century later, a creative team of tech geeks has made it so. (Invoking, as they did, what surely must be one of the core unwritten rules of the modern internet: if there is a musical instrument, someone will play a NES song on it. No exceptions.)

Upon reading this, I wasn't expecting much more from it than what we heard from the Melody Roads. Thankfully, once again, we have video footage, and while the Mario Brothers song is great and all, I submit instead a small movement that Tesla himself might have recognized from his era. You, too, may recognize it from Tetris. Roll it.



I think I've seen all I need. It is beautiful.

VERDICT: OMD would have appreciated this, and I could totally see Radiohead using it on their next record. It's not exactly a new invention, but it's pretty damned impressive nonetheless. The future sounds a lot like a staticky fried Casio, and that's all right with me. I'll take it.

Imagine yourself in Siberia almost one hundred years ago. On a summer morning at 7:15 AM, you see a blue light screaming across the sky. Ten minutes later, there's a bright flash, and the ground thuds like artillery fire. Shockwaves shake the earth for hundreds of miles. For 830 square miles, the Siberian forest is a landscape of fallen trees. Seismographs across Eurasia record the strange occurence, and for weeks, the skies are still illuminated.

This weird and wonderful bit of history has come to be known as the Tunguska event. The explosion of June 30, 1908 has been estimated to be 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

It wasn't until 1927 that remote Tunguska, Siberia was visited by scientists wishing to study the incident.

Though the dominant theory since the event has been that it was the result of a meteoroid or a comet exploding a few miles away from earth (due to both the shocks and the extraterrestrial debris found in later investigations), the lack of an impact crater has led to a lot of speculation through the years. Some of my favorite theories: that it was the result of a small black hole passing through the earth (yowch!), that it was the result of a chunk of antimatter falling to earth (double yowch!), or the very best of all, that a nuclear-powered UFO crashed/exploded there (you can always count on Pravda for the best articles) and/or extraterrestrials fired some sort of weapon (Siberia is a huge threat to Zeta Reticuli, you know). There was a pretty good X-Files episode about it. And even Pynchon has weighed in.

As such, I have some depressing news from that great cosmic cockblocker known as Science.

A team of scientists say that they have finally found the primary impact crater.

Of course, this only accounts for a single large fragment of whatever the space object was that exploded over the Siberian taiga back in 1908. If indeed an asteroid fell to earth, there would be smaller craters also to be found in the surrounding area. The lack thereof leads credence to the hypothesis that the object was a comet (the dominant idea in Russia), whose icy composition lends itself to annihilation rather than scattered debris. Also, the team still has a lot of testing to do, as every other investigation of Lake Cheko has found it older than the century it would have to be to have been the result of the Tunguska impact. So the book is not yet closed on Tunguska.

It's compelling evidence, for sure, though I still like the nuclear UFO explanation (I apply the principle of Fluxy's Razor (also known as Occam's Curling Iron) to all situations: the most interesting/weird/funny explanation is the best).

Regardless of whether or not its mystery is ever conclusively solved, Tunguska is sure to haunt and enthrall us for another century, a sobering warning of how precariously Earth is hung within the cosmos.

Imagine this over Moscow, or Tokyo, or New York.

Flux is become Death, destroyer of worlds.

Each week, Ariel Waldman serves a tasting of the latest in sex and tech.

Mac Creates Best Platform For Porn

Despite the disparities over the new OSX version, many seem to agree that it's the best UI for viewing porn. A new comic from the Joy of Tech outlines the ins and outs of getting the most out of your Mac. From using Quick Look to glance at desktop cuties or Time Machine to find those deleted photos of an ex-girlfriend, the new interface enhances your intimate photos. OSXXX may soon be a reality at the current pace of porn and technology, but would a Porn Genius Bar really look like something straight out of the '70s?

Progressive Dating Sites Encourage STD Education And Support

STDs are an unfortunate reality to dating and social networking today. A couple of sites are dedicated to shed light on the subject while protecting and respecting online privacy (unlike Facebook's recent fumbles). Two recent examples:

PositiveFriends is a network more geared to those living with STDs and the education thereof. By setting up various privacy settings depending on comfort level as well as the ability to blur profile photos so as to remain anonymous, the site lets users cozy up to the service on their own time.

Woman Strips For Weather Station

Okay, okay, she's just digital, but it's always fun to play with pocket-sized gadgets. The Stripping Weather Girl Station isn't exactly turning on any of the gadget blogs (which says a mouthful), but it might be a cute PG-rated gift to put in the stockings this year. It's fairly simple: it gets warm, she strips, it gets hot, she strip, it gets cold, she still wears a mini dress and heels. There were so many clever routes this could have taken. A gadget that could get heterosexual guys hard while advising women what to wear based on the weather would definitely have some kind of a demand.

I need to get to Japan, and pronto. Not just for the natural beauty, Buddhist temples, and Shinto shrines. Not just to climb Mt. Fuji or shop Akihabara. But to experience the utterly fantastic weirdness of stuff like this. It's the equivalent of a maid cafe, but created to play to the fetishes of female otaku, rather than male.

These cafes staff pretty young men who dress as English schoolboys and play the role of a privileged boarding school students. In addition to the fantasy, food, and drink, one new "boarding school cafe" called Edelstein also "rewards" its regular customers by offering photo opportunities with "pupils."

Weird? Yes. Wonderful? That, too.

I'm sorry about the pun. I tried to stop myself.

Anyway, I can't believe this wasn’t bigger news. Did you know that King Tut's face, without his burial mask, was finally revealed to the public for the first time this week?

As it turns out, King Tut has bucked teeth.



I'm sort of bummed. I always had a crush on King Tut in his death mask. He was hot in a sort of David Bowie Ziggy Stardust way. Now, he just looks like what he is: a teenager with bucked teeth. I may be a necrophiliac but I'm most certainly not a pedophile.



And did you know his penis was considered missing for the last few decades? Nobody could locate King Tut's member ever since British scientist Ronald Harrison took some X-rays in 1968. Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities found the missing dick in 2006.

I love that even the Discovery Channel website has to address the issue of a mummy's penis. So, did this nineteen-year-old King have a big dick or what? Mummy expert Eduard Egarter Vigl says that King Tut's penis was just normal sized and that's allowing for some normal shrinkage due to mummification. Egarter-Vigl is the caretaker of Otzi the Iceman, the world's best-preserved mummy.

What a shit starter!

Also, I have a stupid question that I can't find an answer to. Does the penis fall off after thousands of years or was it removed for burial? Why is King Tut's dick detached?

I love mummies. For some reason I just love to stare at finely wrapped, decaying bodies from anytime B.C. I don't watch Law and Order because I get creeped out by the dead bodies that they're always discovering. I realize I'm only looking at actors wearing make-up but still, it's really realistic. I guess I just don’t like freshly dead things that look like they could still wake up. That's why mummies are great. We get to face death but it's so ancient looking we get to still pretend in the back of our minds that it's not going to happen to us. But it's inevitable, whether we are royalty or not, our dicks will fall off someday only to be scrutinized by later generations.

It's official, folks: the future is now. Sure, we still don't have hovercraft cars -- yet -- but between the government building imperial walkers and American Apparel hawking all the metallic spandex a girl can carry, yesterday's science fiction is looking pretty tangible and bright. What's more, like any good piece of science fiction, the future promises to be filled to the brim with robots.

The latest offering to be brought to the robot table comes out of Fudan University in Shanghai. He has no given name yet, but what the cute little Rosie the Robot-type roller does have is voice recognition and some seriously sophisticated AI, notably the ability to continuously learn and memorize new commands.

It all sounds like trivial tasks, but it's just baby steps. Speech recognition has been around for a couple of years now, but is mostly confined to very specific rote branches of information. Learning how to respond, comprehend, and compile new memories based on any new given command is one stop closer on the express railway to building complex conversation programs for Wife 2.0.

Meanwhile, apparently my home country is setting me up for grand disappointment -- Lance Ulanoff over at PC Magazine just published an editorial on why the United States might be behind the times when it comes to welcoming our new robot overlords. It is definitely a relevant parallel, considering our newest aforementioned friend hails from Shanghai, and his piece brings up some interesting points, starting with how depictions and emotions toward mechanical friends differs back around on the other side of the Pacific.

Here, I thought of the robot in Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky -- though huge and lumbering in appearance, he nevertheless proved friendly, as the devoted infinite guardian of the castle gardens and all who lived therein. Which is nice, right?

So what's our problem then, doc? Why do more realistic robot toys sell so poorly over here? Why are American grandmas getting their knickers all in a bunch over a damned Roomba when the future of AI is on the line? Ulanoff, examining our Western culture, seems to find the answer in 19th-century psychology.

Actually, Lance, the word you're searching for isn't so much "grotesque," but rather one of Sigmund Freud's favorite buzzwords this side of cigars, "uncanny."

Which is all a very long-winded way of saying that what the average person finds most threatening and creepy are things that are perfectly commonplace, and yet, at the same time, wholly alien. It's why The Twilight Zone was so popular, and it's how Stephen King makes millions of dollars on horror stories like Cujo (an ordinary dog... of EVIL!) and Christine (an ordinary car... OF EVIL!!!). More relevantly, it's why Optimus Prime at his most photogenic still looks like a mack truck, while the smartest thing the CGI artists working on that Will Smith I, Robot debacle ever did was capping the robots' spindly wire bodies with soft, thoughtful, and ultimately cruel human faces.

Ulanoff also offers another possible explanation for the Western world's unwillingness to embrace the bots: we just care too damn much. It's a lot to swallow, but given what a tear-jerker that Haley Joel Osment robot movie was, it's not out of the question.

Though I want to stop and dwell for a bit on the embarrassing ludicrousness of people dressing up their Roombas, the real point of the quote is a study in contradictions. On the one hand, as an intelligent nation, replicants creep us the fuck out. On the other hand, the idea of being duped by a hot Jude Law-Bot who may never truly love us back... well, it creeps us out. To a point, I can buy it. It's every wildest fear -- eradication vs. abandonment -- all rolled into one. Who would have thought robots would make people so emotional?

Ulanoff does stress that the robot revolution will come, subtly or otherwise, whether the United States accepts it or not. I, for one, prefer to think of the robot revolution as a kindlier Studio Ghibli sky-garden sort, that might just be a childhood spent in Japan talking. Çe la vie.

Thank you, Slashdot.

The good folks at LiveScience have compiled for us a Top 10 list that beats the hell out of Letterman. I am a big fan of rationalizing my vices (my beloved Bloody Mary is really just a salad with a little vodka in, for example), so this story about how 10 glorious, delicious things that Puritans and/or health freaks tell us to shy away from aren't all bad. Here goes:

10. Beer

So you're telling me that the Nectar of the Gods I am enjoying right now is good for my heart? It's been suspected that beer was the fuel for the laborers on the ancient Egyptian pyramids. The stuff's a superfood if you ask me; calories, carbohydrates, some crap that keeps your cardiovascular system perky, hops, and sweet, sweet ethanol. So, you know, awesome.

9. Anger

It looks like the Current Events board has it right. All those armchair politicians calling each other fascists and pigfuckers are only just acting out in a form of stress release. "It's just the Internet," my ass! DO YOU WANT A PIECE OF THIS, FearTheReaper?! I'LL KILL YOU!

8. Coffee

Coffee: a cure for alcoholism and Wilford Brimley.

7. LSD

I think it's pretty neat that acid can help with the recovery process (if you think that's something, you should read about ibogaine) and I hope that our War on Drugs government will eventually relax and allow substances like LSD to be used for possible curative purposes, but, come on, "36 volunteers...reporting mystical experiences"? Scientists, you can do better than that. What's the next study? Volunteers using cocaine acted like douchebags, went to discos?

6. Sunlight

...And it helps us to produce vitamin D! So, you know, as long as you avoid that whole "malignant melanoma" thing and maybe the "premature photo-aging," I feel like anything that results in this can't be all bad, amirite?

5. Maggots

Okay, so maggots aren't really what I would call a vice. (If maggots are your vice, please don't send me fan mail, as I am concerned that our friendship will center around your desire to wear me all Xipe Totec style.) But they eat dead flesh. That's pretty metal. Moving on...

4. Marijuana

The universe has such a grand sense of irony; reefer makes your roommate forget that rent is due but can keep the elderly together for a few more years. If only I could go back a few years and give my beloved grandmama a few Widespread Panic albums and a bag of ganja. Plus, how cute would it be to see Charlton Heston in one of those Rastafarian tams?

3. Red Wine

Everybody knows that red wine is good for you, ever since Jesus gave it the thumbs-up over water back in the good old days. H20? Get thee behind me, Satan!

2. Chocolate

Of course, this doesn't apply so much to the mass-produced "chocolate" we find in the checkout aisle but, rather, to the high-cocoa, low-sugar stuff that's a little higher end. In other news, I have cancer, clogged arteries, and am going senile. Please send Vosges.

1. Sex

Lazarus Long said it best, "It is better to copulate than never."

Flux hopes and prays that all your sins are good, fun, and happy ones.

Geeks find many way to set aside the mundanity of the real world these days. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies compete for our time and our money, and we can find ourselves with more escape pods than ever before, an embarrassment of riches that can be overwhelming, with dire consequences if we choose . . . poorly.

My limited time is the most valuable commodity I have. I can always earn more money; I can always eat more food; I can stay up late if I didn’t finish that load of laundry in the afternoon. (Curse you, Guitar Hero III: Thief of Daylight!) But I can’t get back time that’s already spent – in some cases, wasted (the time, not me) – on hollow pursuits, so I think very carefully about how I invest my limited free time, and my even more limited “me” time. Here's a look at a typical afternoon spent in a twisty maze of options, all enticing . . .

Oh . . . this should be interesting.

Well, that door wasn’t much fun, was it?

Does anyone (who does not live in easy driving distance of an Alamo Drafthouse [My editor, Andrew, who lives in Austin and goes to the Drafthouse all the time, made me include this. Bastard.]) really enjoy going to the movies any more? I don’t know anyone who says, “Man, I can not wait to go spend a crapload of money so I can watch a crapload of commercials, surrounded by idiots who just won’t Shut. The Fuck. Up.” What is the consistently compelling reason to go out to the movies? I’m trying to escape the frustrations of modern life and the idiots in it who just keep on making more idiots. Why not just stay home and watch something on DVD or cable? Thanks to Netflix and Blockbuster Online (okay, and bittorrent) just about any movie you’d ever want to see is rarely more than one day’s wait away. While there are certainly some films that deserve to be watched on a big screen, like Lord of the Rings, or work better with an audience, like Grindhouse, they are exceptions to the rule. I just don't understand why anyone with ANY sense of dignity at all would . . .

Right. Moving on to door number two . . .

That door made me--

--stabby.

So this problem with commercial loudness will eventually be solved by Dolby Volume, but until that day arrives (and we all upgrade our equipment) does any self-respecting geek watch a show when it airs anymore? Since I got my DVR, I don’t watch anything when it starts. Instead, I wait ten or fifteen minutes and then watch it delayed on my DVR so I can skip the commercials. It’s not that I hate commercials as a class (although, seriously, American beer guys? Beautiful, sophisticated women do not drink cheap, nasty American beer. Give it up already), it’s that I hate commercials that are so loud they wake up my neighbors. I find that I prefer watching movies on my home theater or television shows on my DVR because I control the environment and the experience when I watch. That takes care of the commercials, but what about those annoying animated advertisements that litter the screen and get in the way of me enjoying the show that’s on? Until someone develops AdBlock for television, our only choices, really, are to wait for the show to come out on DVD or just suck it up. I will admit to sucking it up a few times a week, for shows like Heroes and How I Met Your Mother.

Until things change dramatically though, non-DVR broadcast television isn’t earning my time at all. It can’t compete with washing the dishes, much less catching up on my blog feeds or what lies beyond the remaining two doors.

Speaking of . . . let’s see what’s behind Door Number Three . . .

If the biggest problem we have with books is that we just don’t know what to pluck from our two towers of “really want to read” and “really want to read again,” what is there to complain about? Books are great for getting away, whether you’re a geek or not. A book is relatively inexpensive (free at your local public library) and portable, and if you break down your investment by the hour, you get a lot more for your money in a book than you do in a movie. There are no commercials, no annoying idiots shoving fistfuls of popcorn into their mouths in the seat next to you (or, if there are, you can move), and – best of all – you have complete control over when and where you do it. You can read during breaks at work, between classes, when you’re avoiding writing your column, or, uh . . .

. . . when you should be doing other productive tasks.

It should be no surprise that, as an author, I love books and can’t find an awful lot to dislike about them. I freely concede that there are bad books out there (I'm looking at you, Dan Brown), but you can always set a bad book down and pick up five books that are more to your taste. There are more books published each year than anyone could ever read in a lifetime spent doing nothing but reading. We live in a rich, rich time -- reading is available for everyone who cares to make the effort, and you can read about any topic you want.

I imagine that if I were a filmmaker, or television producer, I’d feel differently about the first two doors than I do, but I just don't see the same variety, the same creativity in the visual media that I do in print. There is good work out there, but you have to really dig for it. In the bookstore, it's right there for the taking.

Finally. Let’s open door number four . . .

In real life, it’s a lot harder to settle down and choose just one game, especially when I’m faced with such limited free time. I read an article in Wired earlier this week by a guy who said he’d become a suicide bomber in Halo 3, because asymmetrical warfare worked to his advantage when playing multiplayer online games. He was time-poor, so he couldn’t develop the same skills as the hundreds of thousands of students and unemployed writers who have time to spend practicing non-scoped sniper headshots day after day.

Just like the huge stack of books, the best and worst thing about video games is the time involved. I can spend $40 to take my wife to a movie, and we’ll have a nice three or four hours together. I spent $50 on Halo 3, and without even finishing the campaign, I’ve already spent 30 or more hours with my friends in online matches. It’s the same way with Guitar Hero, and I assume you WoW players would have a similar experience to report -- if you just stopped killing boars in the forest long enough to talk to us, of course. (I keed. I keed.)

I think of my time as a valuable currency that must be earned by anyone who wants me to exchange it for whatever they’re selling. When we geeks talk about investing our money and our time into entertainment and escape, movies and television just can’t compete with video games, comics, novels, or going through a few hundred RSS subscriptions that you save for the times when you have a column due and need a geeky way to kill time under the auspices of--

Pushy, pushy. I'm just trying to figure out what I'm leaving out. I keep feeling like there's something missing . . .

I hate cliffhangers.

Wil Wheaton still remembers how to get the Babel Fish.

Each week, Ariel Waldman serves a tasting of the latest in sex and tech.

Video Game Vixens Get Centerfold

Playboy gives the fantasy female heroines from the previous installment of Girls In Gaming a closer inspection. Leaving imagination behind, the "Playing Rough" series shows all by stripping the lady characters down to nothing but their deadly weapons. Featured in the series is “Keaira” from Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, “Church & Black” from Clive Barker’s Jericho, “Morenn” from The Witcher, “Yoko Retomoto” from Kane & Lynch, “A’Kanna” from Conan, and “Sarah Morrison” from Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa. We have yet to pick ourselves up a copy of the December issue of Playboy, so we can't confirm if the fantasy game babes in fact made centerfold, but sexing up our screens definitely deserves a spread.

Women Keep It Casual

Times Online asks if women gamers are less faithful. The question comes from statistics that point to 74% of casual gamers being women, and thus enjoying less-commitment. If the ratio sees off kilter, it may be due to the fact that most men won't admit to merely being casual gamers.

Soft-core "shiny gems" are at least less likely to lose sleep over, unlike an all-nighter with "hard-core" Halo 3.

Girl On Girl On Game

Girls and gaming are no longer isolated instances across the industry. From the Frag Dolls to the PMS Clan, chicks with joysticks are everywhere. As such, a new website with the tagline of "Because sometimes we use our hands for other things," aims at an alternative non-male market. According to LesbianGamers.com, "If you're a girl who likes girls who likes games, you've found your place on the internet". Having launched just recently, the founding ladies hope to build a lively community for lesbian gaming.

Previously: Girls In Gaming