Wallpaper Wednesday – January 2011 Edition
Posted in Personal by lunarskye | Tags: Minecraft, Personal, Wallpaper
Oh yes. We’ve been playing in (and obsessing over) our micro-minecosm a lot lately. We’ve got a lot built up so far, and we will be sharing our progress here on Pancake soon. But for now, what better way to show our Minecraft love than to dedicate this month’s Wallpaper Wednesday to our newest gaming addiction?!
The End of Countdown: Keith Olbermann Gone From MSNBC
Posted in News/Opinion by Lithobolos | Tags: Keith Olbermann, News/Opinion
Horrible and surprising news: Keith Olbermann’s show is OVER as of tonight! There was no warning of this, and we here at Pancake are confused. That said, we hope for the best and will miss Keith. He had a sentimental sign-off thanking his viewers for their support over the years and thanking some people at NBC for supporting him. There seems to be an indication that the approaching Comcast takeover of NBC had much to do with this.
While no one is perfect, Countdown has generally been a rational and entertaining show. Often comparisons between his show and shows on Fox News Channel (Beck, Hannity) were made, but these comparisons have been unfair. While clearly a liberal or progressive show, it was rarely as vicious and dishonest.
This is a clear loss for the left and also for the country as a whole. Hopefully Keith will find a new platform to help inform the electorate in the future.
More from
Huffington Post
Team Fight Chix and the Struggles of Women’s MMA in Japan
Posted in MMA by Lithobolos | Tags: MMA, Women's MMA
Female athletes in all sports have a harder time compared to their male counterparts when it comes to getting respect and recognition for their work. In the MMA world, this fact hits even harder due to the already low salaries and lack of mainstream respect and understanding that all fighters face. That said, there have been positive changes in recent years. Both Bellator and Strikeforce had women’s tournaments, and Strikeforce is home to stars like “Cyborg” Santos, Marloes Coenen, Miesha Tate, etc, but this is still not enough.
The rise of Women’s MMA in the United States has been in tandem with the rise of the sport in general. The same relation is true in Japan except in the opposite direction. As MMA and K-1 lose their luster and struggle to get TV deals, many mid-level fighters find themselves working a day job and training at night in often undersized gyms. Furthermore, Japan is, put simply, a patriarchal and sexist society where women in all parts of society are oppressed or discriminated against, and the culture is strict on placing gender role expectations on them. Read more »
Suspected Arizona Shooter’s Motives in Question, but Should Not Be Politicized
Posted in News/Opinion by The Pancake | Tags: News/Opinion
The recent and horrific incident in Arizona has grabbed the complete attention of the media and has forced the nation to ask why. As of right now, the facts seem to be this: a young man opened fire outside a grocery store that was hosting a small meet and greet event by the local U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. In total, six people were killed, including a nine-year-old child and a federal judge, twelve were wounded. At present, it appears Representative Giffords is alive despite a point blank gunshot to the head that passed through her brain.
The motives of the person taken into custody by authorities for this shooting, Jared Lee Loughner, are now and will soon be of even more interest to the nation given the current political atmosphere in the country, especially in Arizona. The two most important things people who are not directly involved in this matter can do now and in the future are to hope for the well-being of the victims and not spin or try to gain politically from this act.
The following information will be an assessment and critique of the possible motives and beliefs of Jared Lee Loughner, and it will be updated and changed dependent on new information or consensuses. Read more »
Elements of Game Design
Posted in Gaming by BookReader | Tags: Game Design, Gaming
We have long passed making children’s toys and now can concentrate on serious business.
It was once said that video games by their nature cannot be art. Now that Flower has done away with that prejudice and the Citizen Kane of video games, Portal, is extant, we can collectively look at the art form critically.
To view video games critically is a new approach, but only because video games themselves are so very new. From the beginning the the critical frame work was setup in the form of reviews in many gaming magazines (most now represented by online counterparts) and now they are judged in the same way movies and books are.
The primary benefit of video games to other forms of art is that they let the player be other people. To finally take the second person “you” and incorporate it into a story. Literature has long struggled with this, there are a few stories written in the second person, but they’re gimmicky and often come across as an insecure first person narration. Video games, however, have many more second person narratives than first. In video games, first and third (I and him) are really just you and you alone. All video games except for RTS and god games are you games (and a strong case can be made for RTS and god-view games being second person as well). This ability to place a person in a foreign personal space is very great. The novel perhaps surpasses the video game in empathizing with characters, but the level of removal from the subject is unavoidable because the reader is never in direct control of the protagonist. I do not wish to say that video games are better than novels, or paintings, or any other art form, only that they like all art have their own unique strengths and weaknesses.
Like all art, video games have both good and bad examples. The below is inspired by two things. One is a particularly bad game that I played recently, itself violating rules 7, 24, and 25. The other is The Elements of Style, a work whose influence is plain in the following.
The following are either rules governing playability, player irritation, or bad form and are in their respective sections. Read more »
