Mssv

The German Family Affairs Ministry has blacklisted EA’s new game Command & Conquer: Generals because it “portrays war as the only way to resolve conflicts,” and that “it gives military force an aesthetic appeal.”
When I first heard about C&C: Generals, I have to admit that I was a bit surprised at its premise of having [...]

International Space Centre for Merseyside – bit of a bizarre idea, putting it in Wallasey, and I’m not sure how many visitors it’ll get, but on the whole I think that more space centres are always a good thing.

Scene: A moderately untidy lab in a university with stacks of papers on tables and computers humming away to themselves. One person, G, is building a couple of computers and taking apart two others. S watches by. Another, R, is working on a paper.
G holds up a dusty-looking computer card.
G: R, what should I do [...]

The BBC Digital are airing a new eight-part series this Saturday called The Murder Game. In it, ten contestants try to solve a murder investigation in the fictional village of Blackwater. It seems that the level of interactivity with the public (mostly online) will be pretty low, considering that we aren’t eligible for the £25,000 [...]

Matt Groening sounds off – he isn’t very happy at all about Fox’s treatment of Futurama, which was cancelled a while back.
“We won the Emmy for best animated show a few months ago and I didn’t even get a begrudging phone call from anyone at Fox. That’s a dark company that they can’t even make [...]

Guerrilla advertising – Meg has cleared up a mystery for me! When I was in London last week, I saw a lot of anti-Esso Poems on the Underground which surprised me no end since I couldn’t see how the London Underground could get away with it. It turns out that someone has been printing and [...]

So it was a gorgeous day yesterday in Cambridge, sun shining, birds singing, etc etc, and after a game of badminton in the morning I went to do some reading on the Trinity College backs. I originally intended to take along An Instance of the Fingerpost which had been sitting around in my room looking [...]

Spirited Away Captures Oscar – perhaps now this means that it will enjoy a proper release in the US and UK instead of the crippled (and non-existant, in the case of the latter) release given to it by Disney. It continues to baffle Miyazaki fans how Disney, after buying up the distribution rights to all [...]

London photos – from my sightseeing trip last week which included the Tate Modern, British Museum, London Eye, Trafalgar Square, Millennium Bridge and lots of good weather.

The Third Wave – in 1968, a schoolteacher conducted an experiment to find out how easily ‘normal American students’ could fall into patterns of behaviour as seen in Nazi Germany. The results were quite astonishing and unexpected, and well worth reading (via Metafilter).