Ambushed by Donahue

alternateorg on August 21, 2002


White kept harping on the fact that GTA3 was the top-selling game in the country, as if it were representative of the industry as a whole. If we went only a few more notches down the charts, we would have found games like Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Sims, Civilization 3, Spiderman, and Rollercoaster Tycoon. M-rated games make only about 9 percent of the gross revenue from the American games industry. The game industry is more diverse than it was a decade ago, the technology and storytelling more sophisticated, the market more far-reaching, but the reformers keep beating the same dead horses. White and her allies describe games as commodities no more valuable and every bit as dangerous as cigarettes. I call games an art, and challenge game designers to live up to their responsibilities as artists and storytellers.

I hope all CNN/MSNBC/HeadlineNews viewers would read this article and understand how set-up and fake those ‘crossfire-style’ shows are. News today is entertainment, not news. I feel really bad for this guy not only because he’s got good intentions and is going about them in a civilized way, but also because his points never even had a chance of getting themselves made, and that’s why he was invited on the show.

No one's ever sorry

alternateorg on August 19, 2002

I’m really getting fed up with this whole “it wasn’t my fault, so fuck you” mentality I’ve been receiving lately. Case in point: I’m a member of NetFlix, where I get DVDs delivered to me relatively frequently, in little red pouches just barely bigger than the DVD disc itself. This means that despite their small size, they cannot fit into my tallish,skinnyish mailbox I have downstairs in my building. So quite often (along with other large mail delivered by the post office), my DVDs get delivered to the open box next to the mailboxes, seemingly reserved for large mail and junk mail.

Can you see where this is going?

My building is cleaned every few weeks by the maintenence crew, and often this includes the emptying of the open bin. This is fine as mostly, people get the mail out of there they need and leave the junk mail for the trash. However, this past week, maintenence came AFTER the mail was deliverd, and BEFORE I got home. Meaning that any and all items delivered to me and put into the large bin were basically thrown into the trash. And this day just happened to be the day that I had two DVDs delivered to me by Netflix: Lord of the Rings and Heathers.

To me, the fault here is obvious: the maintenence crew/apt complex manager for throwing away what is all for all intents and purposes, my private mail. Whether the mailman is supposed to deliver items to that bin is not of my concern. All I know is that a. I (along with all other residents) have very often had items delivered there and b. that I had 2 DVDs delivered on that day that were never received by me. Now, the apartment staff is claiming that the fault is the Post Office for delivering mail to the bin when any oversized mail should be delivered to the office instead and to take it up with them. Which smells like bull-fucking-shit to me. Fuck the world and everyone in it. That’s what I say.