Revival

The smartphone is my portal to online presence.  I would not be seen here, or on Facebook or any other social site if I could not access it conveniently from my smartphone.  Any social media company worth its bits will develop and maintain its core business model around mobile devices.  Laptops are like an NFL player in a smart twofour when it comes to fitting in with today's mobile arena. The desktop PC is being increasingly niched into smaller arenas of actual needs.  Tablets are good if you want to do the stuff you used to want to do on a laptop.  Smartphones are king when it comes to eye-share and the key to success for nearly all future personal computing business.  At least until something more fundamentally ergonomic and convenient replaces them.

The Return of The Side Scroller

The post title might make you think of Star Wars. Well it should. It's been decades since a serious attempt at main stream side scrolling gameplay has been handed to the masses of patiently waiting gamers who can remember the simplicity of two dimensional games and just how much fun can be had in that fantastically flat environment. Certain games have been let loose that have side scroller parts, but nothing like the games of old where the entire content was a maze of two dimensional goodness... Until recently. I knew this would happen. You can only suppress the genre of Mario Brothers and Metroid for so long. And now we do have another Mario Brothers game that is said to be everything it's ancient predecessors once were, and finally we get simultaneous multiplayer. I can't wait until Christmas. There's a remake of a Boy and His Blob now which I have little experience with, but that was a very popular game in its day and I have heard that the gameplay is just as good now as it was before. We are still waiting for Metroid: Other M to be released, and I have heard good things about it as well. There's a reason why these games are all successful. The side scroller genre has something that cannot be duplicated, simlutated, emulated, or otherwise recreated in a 3D environment. It's like the porridge that's just right. You can add a 3rd dimention to Mario's adventures, but does it actually make the game more fun? Not necessarily! I have played some of the 3D renditions of that famous family of games, and I can confidently say that the 3D aspect detracted from the fun, and there was no number of shaders, polygons or crazy 3D puzzles that were going to make up for it. Get ready for a wave of big name side scrollers and top down scrollers. The 2nd dimension has come back for its throne.

It's not dead!

Serious!

Just sleeping like a one million year daemon resting to gather strength...

Smells Moldy In Here

I had to dust off the login prompt before I could even try to log in. Had to make sure my blog was still here. It is. Certain factors crushed my will to maintain the blog. Maybe I'll return sometime...

Littering is a crime

This is a picture of the jerk that decided that it was a good idea to toss a pop can out his window while travelling at 70MPH down the highway. Well, the can hit my car and left a nice dent in the front bumper. Not only is littering illegal, he damaged my car in the process. Double no-no. I hope his mom reads this.

Oh it was a Coca-Cola can BTW. Unless of course anyone knows of another all red can out there. Beer maybe? It is St. Patricks day after all.

Question

So if it's $7,500 if you injure/kill a road worker, and traffic fines are doubled in work zones, does that mean you automatically pay $15,000 for such an offense? Please comment on this, as I am curious.

News Lately Seems Incredibly Relevant

Let's check a quick list of news items that are definitely a step above the usual drivel that the news media likes to affix itself to:

• Olympics
• Iran Vs. The World
• China Vs. Freedom
• Canada Vs. China
• RIAA Vs. Freedom

To make it short because that is a large list for one post, I'll try to exercise extreme brevity.

Olympics - Eternally the measure of human physical ability combined with the most cutting edge technology. Why do you think developed countries take home the most gold? Anyone who wants to get a quick assessment of the true world structure should watch the winners and the trends in the Olympics. What's sad is that American Idol gets better ratings than the Olympics.

Iran Vs. The World - Of course any time an insane ruler backed by an insane religious figure-head get the idea that they want to test the resolve of the World, we should all get worried. Nuclear power or not, Iran is a threat to everyone in one way or another. We need to give them non-negotiable rules for behavior and follow through with strict punishment when they try to push the line. Such is the only way to deal with animals, juvenile delinquents and lunatics.

China Vs. Freedom - They like to control their people in many ways, and one very important keystone to that control is censorship. China knows that the free-flow of information on the internet is the greatest threat to their communist dictatorship.

Canada Vs. China - I love it. A Canadian company is developing a little app that will allow anyone in an information controlled state (specifically China) to bypass the government firewall anonymously. I'll have to test it out myself. Hey, you never know...

RIAA Vs. Freedom - Now the RIAA is saying that copying the music off the CD that you bought for either backup or media-shifting purposes is NOT fair use. Media shifting meaning taking the music from the CD and converting it for use on another device such as an iPod or computer. If this idea gets any traction, I might start to get mad at all the people that still buy music. If you are willing to give up your rights that much you need to get your head examined. RIAA definitely needs their collective brain-cell examined because even an amoeba knows that you can only leech so much from your host before you kill it.