Miscellania

2006-02-05T05:39:50Z

Here are some other things going on on the Internets:

-Jeff Wells asks just what being sane is about:

I don't mind so much being dismissed as mad, so long as I'm not locked up in a psychiatric hospital for the politically insane. Though since that day came for Soviet dissidents, and the Western calender is running just a little behind, we shouldn't be surprised if our questions will eventually be addressed with a pharmacological magic bullet. Rather, what I find most disagreeable about this popular refutation of "conspiracy theory" is that such thinking is somehow comforting.

Tell me what I say is crazy, without bothering to hear what I'm saying. I'm fine with that. Hell, I listen to what I'm saying and sometimes I wonder myself. As a fellow "conspiracy theorist" recently told me, "I feel like the guy in A Beautiful Mind, minus the genius part." Adding things up which are not to be added can do that to you. It's a crazy-making world out there, once you start paying attention to it. Just don't presume to tell me how I feel about it.

I won't presume to tell you how you should feel about what Jeff (or, certainly, the comment-thread on his post[s]) is saying. But it's important to think about these things - just what is crazy, anyways?

-Speaking of what's crazy or no, BoingBoing points us to the indispensible talking points on the GTA:SA kerfuffle, from a guy who knows:

The Founding Fathers of the United States roll over in their graves today as the media, politicians, and lawyers line up to launch a new witch-hunt against the First Amendment. In their sights, as anyone who has seen any type of news lately may have noticed, is none other than Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA:SA), its publishers and developers, and the gaming industry as a whole. And the impetus for this attack on game developers' right to free speech, strangely enough, boils down to a third-party modification (mod) to the PC version of GTA:SA entitled "Hot Coffee". A mod which was made and published by end-users, with neither the consent or help from Rockstar Games or its parent company, Take2 Interactive. Nor were the aforementioned companies even aware of the mod's development until well after its release.

At the root of this rather knee-jerk reaction lies the argument that Rockstar Games somehow "hid" pornographic content from the ESRB with the intentions of it being "unlocked" later after avoiding an Adults Only rating. While it may be true that portions of the Hot Coffee mod were created from assets found in the retail version of the game, to say that Rockstar knowingly hid and sold pornography is absurd. For starters, most (if not all) of the allegedly "obscene" animation assets found in the mod can be seen elsewhere in the course of regular game play during less "graphic" sequences. Secondly, the audio assets used in the mod exist in the retail game during the default censored "Coffee" scenes. As such, it would stand to reason that these parts of the game were already seen by the ESRB, and the game was labeled as having "strong sexual content" accordingly.

The primary difference between the retail version of the game and that of the modded version is that the above content has simply been rearranged and intensified by the consumers. By using the logic that this content was illegally "hidden", one could just as easily claim that any R rated movie has covertly crossed the limits of decency because the end-user could very well pause their DVD player on a scene containing nudity, thus exceeding the length of such scenes by which the MPAA decides whether a film is to be classified as R or NC-17. The same could be said of even a PG-13 rated movie which contains brief nudity.

Perhaps what is most absurd about the accusations against both Rockstar Games and the gaming industry, is that those making the allegations seem to have no idea how the technology they're condemning works. Had they done even a moment's worth of research, they would discover that the online mod community for GTA:SA (and many other PC games) is not only capable of recycling various fragments of game code and art to create new scenes for the game, but we do it all the time. If Senator Hillary Clinton, Leeland Yee, Dr. David Walsh, et al, were to give even a cursory glance at the websites which published the Hot Coffee mod, they would see that it is but one of thousands of modifications made by users which create new game play scenarios using the existing assets. Given the very nature of the interactive digital medium, an industrious "modder" could within minutes create things far "worse" than Hot Coffee if they so desired simply by swapping a few items and lines of code about. Then, on top of just shifting around pre-existing assets, it is also quite easy and common for players to create entirely new content from scratch.

-And, of course, there's this:

LONDON (AFP) - Giant carnivorous mice on the British-ruled island of Gough in the south Atlantic are eating seabird chicks alive in mass feeding frenzies, threatening several species' survival, a wildlife charity warned.

...

"The albatross chicks weigh up to ten kilograms (22 pounds), and ironically albatrosses evolved to nest on Gough because it had no mammal predators -- that is why they are so vulnerable," he said.

"The mice weigh just 35 grams (1.235 ounces). It is like a tabby cat attacking a hippopotamus."

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Miscellania