Pat Robertson: "Virtual Sin" is as bad as real sin

I must be a genocidal maniac for having murdered so many video game characters. I must also be a racecar expert, and a canny businessman, and an expert marksman, a seasoned space traveller and terrestrial archaeologist, and an athelete extraordinaire, with superpowers of all stripes, and an endless series of chances at getting things just exactly right in my life.

I will say this for Pat: he’s right that playing video games cut me off from God. I have previously told you that my childhood was steeped in video games, and that one of the major video games was Final Fantasy, which included a number of mythological figures treated in the same category as mythological figures from the Bible. That was formative for me. I realized that they were in fact the same category, and it helped me free myself from the shackles of belief in a non-existent supernatural entity.

If video games helped loose me from those bonds, I feel as though it is my duty on this planet to create video games and loose others from those bonds. Though, I am keenly aware that my experience is unlikely to be anything like universal, I do have to admit that I do have a pull toward creating games. I don’t have anything like the time it would take, or financial freedom to quit my day job, though.

What would you folks like to see in a video game that could theoretically help kids deconvert?

Pat Robertson: "Virtual Sin" is as bad as real sin
{advertisement}

Mock The Movie: Sol transcript

We watched Sol for Mock The Movie last night. I can’t remember what happened in the movie. I have a vague recollection of poor acting, tents and sand. I think I blocked the rest as a defense mechanism. There were more than a few times I simply got distracted from the movie — I’m not used to having commercials in my movies any more, so the Hulu experience was jarring, and I was determined to find out whether or not the music on the Absolut Vodka was done by Woodkid, the same guy who did a song called Iron which was used in the Assassin’s Creed: Revelations trailer.

Participation was thin, so I’m including as an extra bonus Blake Stacey’s solo watching of Prometheus, which was an unscheduled event but certainly better worth your time.
Continue reading “Mock The Movie: Sol transcript”

Mock The Movie: Sol transcript

You are free to choose how to use the internet

I’d like remind everyone that you are free to curate your internet experience however you please. When your internet experience starts to suck because people are trying to make your life miserable, you are free to deal with that as you see fit.

You are free to withdraw from a space. You are free to ban and block. You are free to call on friends for help. You are free to dig in and argue with every entitled douchebag who comes along trying to win a war of attrition in order to force you out of that space. You are free to be pseudonymous; you are free to use your real name. You are free to publicly disagree with them, even via a blog post if you so choose; or you can privately disagree with them amongst a small tight-knit circle of friends and allies. You can use any number of block-list services like Akismet, RBL, the A+ Block Bot, or even a whitelist-only setup like making your Twitter account Private. You can engage with everyone who thinks the internet is a debate club, or you can ignore those people, or you can block them.

And be damned anyone who says that this is “fascist”.
Continue reading “You are free to choose how to use the internet”

You are free to choose how to use the internet

Getty Critics dub lame stock footage and make it awesome

Getty Images does stock photography. They also do cheap stock footage. This footage doesn’t have sound. It turns out, that is a bit of a travesty.

The computer guy is me. Totally.

Hat tip to Getty Critics and Copyranter.

Ain’t got much in the way of resources at the moment. Pretty sure I’m coming down with something nasty, and this just has to happen while my cat may have kidney stones and needs an x-ray, and I have to come up with nine grand in order to sell our house on the 26th. I can do this last part, with help from my job and friends and creative shuffling of finances, but it’ll be a lot of scrounging. If you have even the remotest pang of empathy for me, donate instead to Light The Night.

Getty Critics dub lame stock footage and make it awesome

Fischer talks about "love for gays"

If you know anything about Bryan Fischer, you probably have a good guess exactly what he’s going to say before he even opens his gob.

Pro tip: this ain’t love. It’s barely-contained seething hatred with a thin veneer of Christian brotherly love spray-painted on it. And since we already know that brand of love is anything but love, but rather a demand for conformity to rules written by goat-herds thousands of years ago, it doesn’t even register on the “worthy discourse” scale. I only add it to my blog in the interest of reminding everyone just how hateful a human being this man is.

Fischer talks about "love for gays"

Fez

Pixellated white character wearing a fez, leaping ecstatically at a 3-D golden cube

Late last week, I got the latest Humble Bundle (this one was another Indie-games Bundle, so of course I had to get on board). Humble Bundles are a pack of cross-platform games where you get to choose how much to pay. By default, most goes to the devs, some goes to Humble, and some goes to charity — but you also get to choose how to split the proceeds, so you could give it all to the devs, all to Humble, or all to charity. And if you give more than the average, you get extra games. One of those extra games was something I was particularly interested in — a little indie game called Fez.

This post will be EXTREMELY spoiler-heavy, so if you are looking to enjoy puzzle games with clever twists, go get it now and close this browser window. I’m serious. Then come back when you think you’re done, once you’ve collected your measley 32 cubes and “finished” the game, because you’re just getting started.
Continue reading “Fez”

Fez

The Perfect Victim

Trigger warning: rape, rape culture, rape apologetics and victim-blaming

One of the major themes hit upon by Richard Dawkins’ most recent attempt at creating an objective scale of relative harm, much to the detriment of everyone who’s been harmed by things he’s decreed as zero bad, is that he did not find his own sexual assault particularly bad insofar as he had a support network of other people who were assaulted the same way.

His own encounter was brief, and he did not find it to be particularly off-putting except for an explicit description of the “cremasteric reflex” which makes me cringe just to hear it. He does not recall whether or not he knew of any of his compatriots having been mistreated more than the once. He did not report it to the authorities, but he did report it to his friends, who supported him because they experienced it themselves.

Continue reading “The Perfect Victim”

The Perfect Victim

Mock The Movie: Deep Blue Sea transcript

While updating the Mock The Movie page. I realized that I’d neglected to post the transcript for Deep Blue Sea. It’s a movie about sharks genetically engineered to be super-intelligent.

Get it? Like Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer?

Sigh. Too hip for the shark crowd, I guess.
Continue reading “Mock The Movie: Deep Blue Sea transcript”

Mock The Movie: Deep Blue Sea transcript

Mock The Movie: House of Evil transcript

This movie was obviously a labour of love — an attempt at true art, with lavish setpieces and expensive props at every turn. Or at least so I imagine, behind all the murky darkness we movie-watchers got to experience. Truly though, the experience of watching a mostly-black screen for an hour and a half was all worth it because of the brief glimpses we got of some absolutely epic muttonchops.

Visit the Mock The Movie page for transcripts shortly.
Continue reading “Mock The Movie: House of Evil transcript”

Mock The Movie: House of Evil transcript