This theme park in Alexandria, Egypt is awesome. Awesome in badness. Badness in a bad way.
This theme park in Alexandria, Egypt is awesome. Awesome in badness. Badness in a bad way.
I’ve been avoiding the political beat for quite a while, because every time I dig in, I end up losing interest in defending my position. Don’t consider this return to politics a desire to stand fast with the opinions presented here - I just read something (especially the comments) on Philly Future this morning that got to me, and something needed to be said. This is the comment I posted, which I hope will see a different audience by re-posting here. Enjoy, and read it before you post a comment so that I don’t have to call you names.
(Thanks to Brian, who helped produce a good bit of this text during a conversation we had over IM quite a while ago.)
Last week while shopping for Brain Age, I pre-purchased The New Super Mario Bros. for my Gameboy DS. At the checkout counter was the official guide for the game. I flipped through a few pages. Indeed, it does ruin the game.
In college, the thing I did fourth-most (in the list right after “ping pong”) when I wasn’t going to class was playing video games. We kept a fair number of consoles around our room. I don’t remember whose the NES was, but we played hours and hours of Tetris and Super Mario.
One of the best parts of playing Super Mario was finding all of the hidden stuff. There are places in the game where you can leap out of the visible play area and run on top of the blocks that border the game board. There are places with invisible blocks that you can hit and cause really weird things to happen in the game. There are these warp whistle/flute things - objects you can pick up in the game only after finding the most hidden of secret treasures.
There was no guide for us for this game. Or maybe if there was, we didn’t have it. We played the game and happened upon these easter eggs. And then we looked for more, trying all sorts of weird things to see if the developers had hidden anything else in the game’s dark corners. 80% of the fun of the game was knowing how to employ these secrets and discovering new ones. It’s a thrill you can’t get from games today.
In case you missed the announcement (I have on the past three occasions, and have taken special measures to ensure that it doesn’t happen again), 9rules is enrolling today. Of the hundreds and thousands and millions of blogs that they will review, only about three will be allowed to join their exclusive blog network. And since one of those blogs is bound to be Asymptomatic, that only leaves two slots open for the rest of you.
Since your chances of being accepted as a true blogger are about as likely as the chances of anyone escaping from the Lost island alive, I thought that I might provide some suggestions as to what you can do to quell your thoughts of suicidal rejection.
Option A: Go on a comment spam fit on all of the newly added blogs and leave hateful messages about how 9rules sucks because they didn’t add your site. Explain how you think their network is bogus self-promotion and that you wouldn’t join their crappy little group if they paid you. Deny that you ever submitted your site for inclusion, and cast aspersions on any such insinuations.