Jobber of the Week

UbiSoft has just released a game called The Political Machine. For those who don't know, this is basically like SimPolitics. As you can take many established politicians, the current breed of politicians, or make your own politician and try to act as their campaign manager in various races. They've tried to copy the feel of everything from the candidates themselves to the media as far as they can without being sued for copyright infringement or slander. Here's some screenshots to get you interested: Someone's Democrat running against GWB: Special Interest money, anyone? Ad creation John Kerry appears on the Bill O'Malley show Bill Clinton sets up an HQ: And with troublemaker characters such as protestors and activist people and just plain loons. This guy seems kind of familiar: He certainly is rather fat on the game screen: Granted, in 10 years the issues will be entirely different and nobody will be arguing over stuff like the Affirmative Action and the War On Terror (I hope), but I still think some of you guys might be interested in this. It also has online play. Anyone up for a game?

Amazing that Mike "they were all Al-Qaeda who were being merely humilaited" SC posted what he did right after Zsasz posted what he did.

Well, let's see. Teke was saying a bunch of rich guys are the ones who want to tax the rich and how suspicious that is. Taking out the irrelevant names. Make more sense?

Shit, now they're onto me already! I thought, being an economist and everything, you worked for the Treasury or something like that.

Is that the excuse we're going to hear if they don't win the gold? It's pretty much the truth. This is a far cry from the Dream Team. I suspect a bunch of multimillionaire basketball players decided against representing their country because Gold Medals don't buy a new Caddy Escalade and a bling bling necklace.

That's the woman who sounds like Rocket J. Squirrel. I keep waiting for "And now, Mister Know-It-All..."

Oh no, not here. NBC is a huge network, but with no deals with our basketball, baseball, football (our football, not yours), or hockey leagues, all they have is the Olympics and they're going to hold onto that for as long as they possibly can. Which sucks, because they never do it justice. The one time they did was Barcelona "Olympic Triplecast", where they had three channels running 24 hours with no commercials looking at various events. Unfortunately, it cost something like $70 per household for this service, so it was a minor joke.

To their credit, the announcers on the HD channel gave more information about the history of most the nations ("Madagascar is the fifth largest island in the world" "Hey, here comes one of the world's last Communist nations" "Here's Vietnam, we were at war with them for a long time"), although very little information about where each country was located, which would be helpful for a 3D globe or something to appear for these "WTF? I've never heard of them" nations. The only problem is the woman they have with him sounds like Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

From fortune magazine, here's what a bunch of recent politicians would keep if they had a divorce:

Just because it's an issue that appears in an election year doesn't mean it becomes an election issue. I doubt Kerry will say anything at all. <Mike>Mere humiliation. Ho-hum</Mike>

I haven't seen a single match of his, but I know who he is and what he did. And I'm not exactly Mr. Know-It-All either.

8/14 NEVER FORGET. I suggest we build a Tomb Of The Unknown Gimmick Poster.

I'm suprised. Not that the USA team isn't qualified, but that it doesn't have something to do with steroids and the fact that Selig is as blind as Vince McMahon when it comes to them.

The weird thing is I hear so many Canadians complain about CBC and how they're completely focused on the Canadian athletes. BBC has live streaming of everything, but non-UK addresses are blocked out. Damnit.

FUCK! No more Yambo?

Blockbuster here does it, too. The problem is they don't stock more than a few copies of whatever, especially games. If you're going to compete with Netflix, you can't just stock 2 copies of a new release and shrug at everyone else who wants one. People who go with the Blockbuster route are going to be spending more time watching movies they don't want to see because other people with the same deal has emptied the store. That's even worse than waiting around feeling the money slip away as you wait for movies to come in the mail.

I don't know because the whole schedule is rather overwhelming. I plan to watch some NBC and some Bravo today. I would LIKE to watch HD, but I already detailed that. Last time I watched quite a bit of MSNBC. I tuned into Curling since everyone in their Brother makes fun of it and calls it boring, and I got hooked.

Again, I didn't hear this because the HD feed had other announcers. They were pretty dull and going way overboard about the symbolism of everything, but some people who saw both feeds said they were infinitely better than Costas. Having been annoyed with Costas after SLC, I can figure where they're coming from. Here they kept running either the same Sony ad I mentioned or 3 minute flyovers of Athens. You know, those giant helicopter shots of waterfalls and crap that says "Oooh, High-Definition wildlife... Puuurrrdy...." Except they only recorded 3 minutes of it and played it on repeat for 5 minutes. They actually went off to one of these stupid breaks while somebody was speaking, although I don't know if that was NBC's fault or just something NHK did. http://www.nbcolympics.com/tvlistings/index.html for coverage and listings. Check out how laughable the HD channel is compared to the others. But hey, Bravo is airing table tennis!

Give me an NBC executive **NOW** so I may inflict pain upon them! Let me count the ways I hate Hate HATE NBC this morning: * The same reason I usually hate the US coverage: Delayed to all hell. Newspapers, Internet, and radio are covering results that I won't even see for hours. * What's playing on the HD channel isn't what's playing on the "regular" channel. Different announcers AND camerawork, since NBC is appearantly apeing off NHK Japan for the HD feed. This means a different set of announcers than Bob Costas and the others on the main NBC, because viewers on the HD channel are seeing different shots and camerawork than the NBC people are. ...But I expected that. Here's the reasons I didn't count on: * High-Definition feed of Opening Ceremonies begin an hour after the "regular" NBC channel begins. * High-Definition feed of Opening Ceremonies glitches up. Saudi Arabia enters the stadium twice as the tape men rewind to cover an announcer screwup. That's the kind of thing someone would get fired for if NBC didn't treat HD as a joke. * No HD coverage today. Just 24 hours of Opening Ceremony replays. * Some of today's (Saturday) events will finally air tomorrow (Sunday.) They will be repeated 24 hours on end. * They've cut the commercials out, which isn't a BAD idea, but every commercial break is the SAME COMMERCIAL for the Sony Wega HD Theater where a guy in an apartment is confronted by a mob of people in the streets below shouting at his window in unison: "HEY BOB!" Yeah? WHATCHA DOIN? Watching the game. IN HIGH DEF? Yeah. CAN WE WATCH WITH YOU? I... i dunno. WE BROUGHT CHIPS! (one guy) And Salsa! Uh.... Okay. After you've seen this commercial for the 20th time, it's no longer cute. So, by now you're saying "Gee, I wonder why NBC fucked it up so hard?" Appearantly, Neilsen doesn't rate HD channels, and if you're watching the HD broadcast of a show, whether it's CSI or a movie on ABC or even the Olympics, Neilsen doesn't count your viewership in their ad revenue numbers, even when you're seeing ads (which you usually are during regular schedule.) NBC is intentionally gimping their HD Olympics coverage so you'll go watch the standard channel and help them pay their bills. So, as a result, I have a fuzzy analog cable channel blown up and stretched out on my widescreen set. Boy this is really how I was planning to watch the Olympics after all those ads touting HD this year. NBC can fuck off.

Yes, that's the generic Republican response to a non-partisan inquiry. I'm sure we'll hear it in the echo chamber (Fox, talk radio, etc) soon enough.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2004Aug12.html So there we go. Even the CBO says that Bush's tax cuts have shifted the load of taxes to the middle class. Are some of you dweebs (you know who you are) still going to argue that the rich are paying too much in taxes?

It's been growing along fine on it's own, I doubt the switchover crap anymore until it has a majority marketshare of it's own accord, which won't be for a LONG time. I read about a total switchover to HDTV coming "soon" during the 80s.

I had a crazy idea before I went to bed last night. Pull out a sheet of tinfoil and form a hat, folks. What if this is all a stunt to get rid of him? I mean, it sounds like the Governor wasn't really popular, and we saw what happened in California when the Governor isn't really popular.I can see it now: "Perhaps what we need is a way to get him out while allowing someone from the same party to step up and replace him and, I know! Rumors are about that he's gay, right?" ... You can see where it goes from here.

Hurry up, let's get this guy's career over with. Have JBL squash him and let's continue on.

Who the hell are you?