Kickstarter.com just seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. Now, the Two Guys From Andromeda (Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe), are back together after twenty years and have started a Kickstarter project to help fund a new Space Quest game! The two guys also have some top notch voice talent lined up for the game, including the great Gary Owens! Roger Wilco may soon be cleaning up the spaceways once more.
Why, why, why did Lego have to release Lord of the Rings themed sets at the same time that I get an eighteen hundred dollar rebate from the city for a sump pit I put in my house last year? Why?!?
This afternoon I went over to Walmart to pick up some plastic tubs and I walk by the toy section just to see what’s there and I notice a bunch of LoTR Lego sets. I left the store with a few plastic tubs…and four boxes of Lego!
“Attention all competitors: This is your one minute warning. I repeat, one minute until race commencement. Members of the public: You now have one minute to reach minimum safe distance!”
Stainless Games is looking for backers for their remake of the original Carmageddon game called Carmageddon: Reincarnation! Pledging $15 will get you a digital copy of the game when it comes out in about a year.
If you loved the original games, show your support now!
This game does not sound like very much fun at all:
I’m sorry, I don’t care how “mega” those lollipops are, there’s no way I’m paying twenty-five dollars for one!
(And, yes, that was the actual price and not the price tag for something else. The photo is a bit blurry, but it does say “Chupa Mega”)
Stephen, take a good look at the shitty mask you made for the Cobra Commander in G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra:
What the hell were you thinking? This looks like someone melted a plastic tray on Cobra Commander’s face! There’s no clear style; It’s just an amorphous blob. And to make matters worse, the whole thing is reflective, making it impossible to distinguish what little visual coherence the mask had any way. Well, if you wanted to show the world what the love child of Darth Vader and the T-1000 would look like, then mission accomplished.
Yes, I know that movie came out in 2009, but it still bugs me that you made such a stupid mistake. All you had to do was throw a bag over Cobra Commander’s head and it would have been perfect:
See? But nooooo, you had to get some art school flunky to come up with a mask that a) bore no resemblance to anything the Cobra Commander ever wore in any cartoon, comic, or toy, and b) looked like a lacquered elephant turd. But, I suppose a decent costume would have been too much to ask from the man who gave the world all those mind numbing Mummy/Scorpion King movies and the abominable Van Helsing film (I still liked Deep Rising, though).
Now look at what Jon Chu — whose entire filmography is made up of stupid dance movies, for goodness’ sake — managed to give us in the upcoming sequel, G.I. Joe: Retaliation (background added by yours truly):
Now that’s Cobra Commander!
See? That wasn’t so hard now was it, Stephen?
I’ve [relatively] recently come across some very interesting pieces of information regarding morality and the brain:
Philosphy Bites Podcast: Morality and the Brain (mp3)
TED Talk: Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions
Pedophilic urges caused by brain tumor (scientific paper referred to on this link)
The more we study the brain, the more we understand how and why people make the decisions they do. As incredible as it may seem, it’s beginning to look like mankind could conceivably achieve moral perfection through technology. It might be possible to cure things like pedophilia via brain surgery, or maybe genetically engineer people to be less apt to behave in certain ways that are harmful to society. One day we might be able to simply engineer evil out of human nature.
As mentioned in Sam Harris’ TED Talk above, I think such a step would have to be predicated on a global mutual agreement on what is right and what is wrong. While that may seem an insurmountable task, it’s possible that such an agreement could eventually come about as a natural consequence of technology. By this I mean the connecting of people throughout the world via whatever the internet ends up evolving into.
Instantaneous, long-distance communication — most notably its current apex epitomized by the internet — has connected humanity in a way that was likely never even conceived of before the invention of the earliest telegraphy devices. But what if further advances in technology start to connect us all to a more intimate degree. Instead of just communicating through text, pictures, voice, and video, what if our understanding of neurobiology eventually leads us to learn how to build devices which enable us communicate to each other via thought? How cavalier would we be about starting wars when, instead of some poor faceless statistic in some foreign nation arbitrarily labelled as an “axis of evil”, our enemy’s thoughts and reasons for his behavior and beliefs could be understood on a level more personal than speech?
And perhaps the whole world would not need to come to an agreement on what constitutes right and wrong. What if it only takes “enough” people to make such an agreement and engineer morally perfect progeny? Likely a society of people so perfectly able to work as a group (and what is immorality but the antithesis of a functioning group dynamic?) would simply out-compete other cultures, in an evolutionary sense, and eventually dominate the planet.
And what would the future hold for a humanity engineered to be perfectly moral and able to do the right thing whenever realistically possible; a humanity perfectly able to work together in harmony? What would be beyond its grasp?
One more video on the science of morality: The second annual God Debate features atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris and Evangelical Christian apologist William Lane Craig as they debate the topic: “Is Good From God?”
Julia Sweeney’s one-woman show about her life growing up Catholic, her eventual rejection of Catholicism, and her subsequent search for God:
Julia Sweeney – Letting Go of God (link goes to a list of all thirteen parts)
Or just start watching right here:
The Amazing World of Don Dueck 