While we're nitpicking details, you mean proofreader or possibly subeditor, but not editor. The editor of the New York Times does not spend his days checking his writers' use of the neuter third person possessive.

Anyways, my complaint about this article is that it's utterly lacking in any kind of detail at all about what exactly is unprofessional about the event. The writer whines on for paragraphs and paragraphs about how they don't treat him like the sun shines out of his ass (as it so obviously does, according to him), but doesn't actually explain what he didn't like about the running of the event at all.

"potentially paving the way for the kings and queens of game controllers to become as familiar to American households as the faces of Johnny Chan or Annie Duke in televised poker."

So, not very familiar, then? Show of hands who knows what Annie Duke looks like...

HD Radio? Sorry, what? Sub-128K MP3 quality compression doesn't count as HD in my book. It barely counts as SD.

Ron Gilbert wrote an extremely comprehensive debunking of the 'games are bigger than Hollywood' myth on his blog, http://www.grumpygamer.com/ . Will submit this to Blue in the interests of accuracy...

yep - doom1 episode1, best part of any game ever. mind you, it's just too short...i finished it in 5:11. ftp://competn.doom2.net:8002/pub/compet-n/doom/movies/ep1-0511.zip , I think the URL is right, can't check at work, if you feel like reliving the old days and you're short on time :). plays back fine with prboom or original doom.exe.

(time doesn't include e1m8 - historical reasons, when doom running was first done, you couldn't time eXm8 levels, so it's not included under the rules. skip e1m8, it's dull as sticks.)

replying to myself, heh. It's also downright misleading; the law in question doesn't in any way suggest that people should be paid hourly, it simply recognises that there is such a thing as a reasonable working day and requires that if workers are consistently required to work in excess of this, that they be compensated for their time. Does anyone who's been hired by EA want to let us know if EA mentioned at the time they were hired that they'd be consistently working twenty or thirty hours more per week than is expected, usual or medically advised?

Countlove: according to the original ea-spouse livejournal, that exemption does not even apply to EA. Besides, most EA workers aren't paid anywhere near $90k.

"We are looking at reclassifying some jobs to overtime eligible in the new Fiscal Year. We have resisted this in the past, not because we don’t want to pay overtime, but because we believe that the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the kind of work done at technology companies, the kind of employees those companies attract and the kind of compensation packages their employees prefer. We consider our artists to be “creative” people and our engineers to be “skilled” professionals who relish flexibility but others use the outdated wage and hour laws to argue in favor of a workforce that is paid hourly like more traditional industries and conforming to set schedules. But we can’t wait for the legislative process to catch up so we’re forced to look at making some changes to exempt and non-exempt classifications beginning in April."

Rough paraphrase - We think we're so great we don't need to follow employment law. Sadly, the people who enforce the law beg to differ, so we'll grudgingly see if we can do something about not treating our workers illegally next year. Aren't we nice?

I also think the presentation of underpaying workers as some kind of reward for them being 'flexible' and 'creative' deserves some kind of 'most ambitious spin attempt of the year' prize...

In case anyone didn't get the reference...Magrathea was the planet in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy whose inhabitants built custom planets for very rich customers.

Blue, I know this is likely to be kind of controversial, but what's your reasoning behind posting pictures of booth babes? It's soft porn. It's got nothing whatsoever to do with gaming. I think it's cheap and icky idea (what other industry does that?) and with the readership you have, whether you encourage or discourage the practice could have a real impact.

not just drug dealers, but CORRUPT drug dealers? wow, them sure are some bad boys...

well there's always Lister off the UK tv sitcom Red Dwarf, who drinks milkshake for breakfast. Beer milkshake.

I'm sure we talked about gibs in Doom before Quake ever came out. When you hit an enemy with a rocket or a barrel (well, to be technical about it, if certain classes of enemy have lower than -70 health when they die, so plasma can also occasionally do it, and the BFG), they don't just die, they sort of explosively decompress into a lot of nasty red bits...I think that was *always* called gibbing, I don't ever remember calling it anything else. I remember one of the early DHT players used to take pride in gibbing as many enemies as possible in all his demos...

august 1995 sounds good to me, Blue - I remember it being around then. earliest usenet reference I can find is in 1996, though...interesting. did you call it anything before Quake Rag? I can't remember any more...

"The official Secret Weapons Over Normandy Website has been relaunched as a Flash-only affair"

...

web designers are twats.

given I use Galeon on Linux with pop-ups blocked and thus haven't seen *any* of whatever the heck these new ads are, I say the new regime gets an unequivocal thumbs up. Heck, I'm seeing fewer ads than before. Heh :). I'm definitely up for the subscription model, though. There's very few sites I'd subscribe to, but Blue's is one of 'em...

it sounded bad anyway. sam 'n' max 2 sounds like the real good stuff.

*reads that shop's prices*
*splutters*

Allllll together now...

buy it off eBay.

"Now over 25 million Apple Macintosh users everywhere can now experience..."

That's one too many "nows". Shoot the PR writer. Hell, shoot all the PR writers ANYWAY.

dan: well, we have that already, pretty much. www.tsncentral.com - they do shoutcast commentary on several big games, like Wansanity and Eurocup for Quake, and some other games I don't know much about...:)

Cruise Ship Tycoon? Sheesh. I wonder who's going to release Tycoon Tycoon...