Caption competition!

So Bill Gates and Steve Jobs publicly appeared together for the first time since probably 1997 at some conference thing. There are photos here. A couple of them are a lot better if you try to imagine what they're saying, so I'm calling a caption competition.

Here's my entry. In this photo:

Jobs: Mine's about this big.
Gates: Oh YEAH? Well, MINE can SQUIRT.

In other news, doesn't it bother that while most people who are nerds in their youth sort of lose the nerdy look as they get older, Bill Gates still looks severely nerdy even in a fancy shirt?

Gig

I'm of the opinion that makers of hardware-intensive games like FPSs should always include a "holy shit mode" of the graphics. By that I mean a setting where the graphics are so ludicrously detailed that no current computer could possibly run that mode without choking. Just pull out all the stops. Don't consider resource limits.

The reason for this is that pretty soon, the resource limits you were working under will be gone. That's just how the industry works. And if a game has a holy shit mode, you can run it on a top-of-the-line machine three years after its release and have it look like it's current.

Quake 4, for example, seems to have a holy shit mode. I can tell it's a holy shit mode because if you turn the texture detail high enough, it automatically lowers the resolution and gives you a warning saying "this mode uses more than 500MB of texture memory, and enabling it is not recommended." Bring it, I said, dismissing the warning and putting the resolution back up to full. That actually caused the frame rate to slow ever so slightly in one place in-game. Disappointingly, though, it didn't seem like the textures were actually that incredibly detailed.

UT2004 doesn't have a holy shit mode. With the graphics turned up to max I still can't get the frame rate to slow even a tiny bit. While I admit this is good for gaming purposes, I want holy shit graphics now that my rig can handle them.

Terrible

Scrubs 607 is a complete travesty. Travesty. Travesty travesty travesty. It's terrible.

The Colts won the Super Bowl. But the media are forgetting that, in fact, all of America won because there were two black head coaches in the Super Bowl. OK, I promise I will stop harping on that. I just had to get one last jab in.

I think it's a strange phenomenon in video games that if one plays two games that are part of the same series, one almost inevitably thinks the first game one played is better, even if it is older and the graphics are suckier. In my case, for example, I like Unreal Tournament the original a lot more than UT2004. Also, I can't stand the graphics of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time because the first Zelda game I played was Twilight Princess, but to those who played OoT before TP, OoT is inevitably "better". The graphics are a travesty (can you tell I love that word?), what with the main character being made of something like six polygons, and the music is MIDI. But how many longtime Zelda players will say TP is better despite its better graphics and music (and control system, if you play the Wii version)? Not many, I'd wager.

I think the UT-Zelda analogy might not be apt, though — because there are a lot of things that make UT palpably better than UT2004, those including music, weapons, game modes, maps, and general atmosphere. UT2004 has a graphics engine that is, I think, two generations ahead of UT's, but the gameplay and maps are pretty much a travesty. I admit that Onslaught mode is bloody amazing, but that's about it. Assault mode is a travesty. And the music is — can you guess? — a travesty. Onslaught mode could be so much more fun if there were decent music.

GAH I SHOULD BE WORKING

SHIT WHATS AN ALGORITHM

I'm not dead

Man, I haven't posted in ages. I guess there have been no wacky hijinks in the news, nor have there been new episodes of Scrubs, or dumb holidays for me to whine about. Well, Valentine's Day is coming up but we're not going there again. You can look at my rant around this time last year (geez, have I really had this stupid blog for THAT long?) if you care.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that if you like both Rush and serious guitarwanking, you should definitely listen to Yngwie Malmsteen's cover of "Anthem" by Rush. Seriously, he can't even get through five repetitions of the opening riff before he starts guitarwanking. Still, it's good guitarwanking, and it's a good song, and whoever he got to sing it is a hell of a lot more pleasant to listen to than Geddy Lee in the 1970s. His drummer is, of course, vastly inferior to Rush's drummer, but that can't be helped.

Super Bowl this Sunday. It's Tony Dungy vs. Lovie Smith. Black head coach vs. black head coach. I don't even know who the teams are. Do those really matter when America is on the cusp of complete racial equality? You know what? I think they should just call the game off and let both teams celebrate the moral victory, so that nobody has to lose. It would be the first time two black head coaches won the Super Bowl in the same year. Wouldn't that be a year to remember?

Holy crap, am I cynical about the USA's attitude towards race or what? Sometimes I even surprise myself.