This isn't a videogame review of the new Playstation 3 game The Last of Us. It's more a reflection what a game is...and what it isn't.

Naughty Dog (the game developer) has been making "movie games" for most of the PS3 generation (with the Drake's Fortune series and now this one). Which is to say, they are building scripted, dramatic stories with segments of player control but no real decision-making ability on the part of the player. The game only moves in one direction, and you are essentially on rails for the entire experience. Thus, to me, it isn't a game -- it's an interactive movie.

And this is a problem, both in terms of design and in terms of art.
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Posted by: Monty at 07:42 AM | Comments (205)
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Sexier than Bob Filner. Longer than Anthony Weiner.

Posted by: andy at 03:33 AM | Comments (461)
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Now that I've made it seem cool in the headline, I can reveal to you it actually wasn't very cool. The car was stationary; the assassin intended to activate the guns as the target walked by (as part of his morning routine) via remote control.

So it wasn't a DB-5 machine-gunning the scenery at 130 mph.

The guns did fire but failed to hit the target. In fact, they failed to even upset the target.

As Uproxx notes, the intended target's blase attitude about this -- "All my life is like James Bond stuff" (no really he says that) -- is cooler than the Kill-Car.
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Posted by: Ace at 12:17 PM | Comments (141)
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MSNBC's got a fevah, and the only cure is continuing the riotous claim that Detroit went bankrupt due to its excessive libertarianism and fiscal restraint.

The Daily Mail is now treating Sydney Leathers as a celebrity, which isn't that surprising, as they treat British reality tv people no one ever heard of as celebrities too.

Worth repeating: Despite the media's determination to shield Democrats from a single Democrats' scandals, in fact the Democratic Party covered up for Bob Filner, and in fact even pressured a woman who knew about his groping to support him for mayor anyway. Even after she'd warned the party about him.

Saldaña said she contacted former party Chairman Jess Durfee with the allegations and Durfee was among a group of Democratic leaders who met with Filner to discuss them that summer. She said nothing happened.

“As disgraceful as Bob’s behavior has been, it’s been tolerated by our Democratic Party leadership,” she said.

Saldaña said Filner never personally harassed her and declined to say who alleged to have had run-ins with the mayor. She said former City Councilwoman Donna Frye, who is calling for Filner’s resignation over unspecified sexual harassment allegations, inspired her to talk.

Saldaña has a long history of conflict with Filner, most prominently over a failed border sewage treatment project about a decade ago. She also wound up endorsing him for mayor.

Party leaders, she said, made it clear that if people didnÂ’t support Filner they wouldnÂ’t receive their support again.

Obama has gone from saying that no one is more outraged by the IRS targeting scandal than he to calling it a "phony scandal." No one from the press asks how he "evolved" on this issue, just like they didn't ask him how he "evolved" on gay marriage. Those affected by these "phony scandals" speak up, including Patricia Smith (mother of Benghazi victim Chris Smith) and and targeted Tea Partier Becky Gerittson.

The media might not ask Obama how these "outrageous scandals" became "phony scandals," but I think they actually know the reason:

Meanwhile, heavyset and charmless MSNBC staffer Chuck Todd is also now talking up a "phony scandal," that of the habit of the media to identify Republican scandal-makers as (R) but so often forgetting to do so with their Democrat chums. He says it's a "phony whine."

Update [JohnE.]: And the middle class. more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:08 PM | Comments (610)
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Everything you're about to read is 100% true.

Well, 100% true, except for a few things.

That woman has Filner's hand locked up for dear life...
...and look at that intent-but-glazed look in the eye

Posted by: Ace at 02:11 PM | Comments (206)
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Via Twitchy.

As I said in the podcast, it's not true that the media-Democratic complex never goes after a Democrat.

It works like this:

For as long as possible, the Media-Democratic Complex attempts to save a Democrat by either not reporting the story at all, and refusing comment on it, or, if forced to comment, by offering vague condemnations (to pretend they're betrayed) with shows of support for the beleagured leftist (to maintain solidarity within The Collective).

However, at some point, sometimes, this NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT strategy becomes untenable. At this point, The Collective turns viciously on the one they had been protecting, for two reasons:

1, out of genuine emotional anger at having been forced to protect him so long, and

2, in order to make a Conspicuous Show of their fidelity to the principles they pretend to believe.

They sort of ignore the part where they're actually the last ones to the party and in fact had be pressured/shamed into coming at all.

But to make up for their tardiness, they slather on vehemence.

They will protect you inside the soft, warm, wet Collective, but at some point, if you become a threat to The Collective, they will vomit you out and spit poison at you.

This is the pantomime of the Distancing/Purifying phase.

Objection: Ace, You're Just Describing the Basic Dynamics of a Firing or a Break-Up. Yes yes yes, you're right. Yes, a firing goes this way -- letting the unsuitable worker hang on for far too long, often followed by a decisive, and sometimes hard-hearted, termination.

And so too break-ups, where long-suppressed disenchantments suddenly rise to the surface, resulting in a clear, binary, you-are-out-of-my-life declaration.

But this is the sort of behavior one expects within an organization or within an affiliative relationship.

Yes, it may be normal for the Democrat Party to behave this way when they ultimately fire a troublesome employee.

What's the media excuse for doing the exact same thing, at the exact same time their political wing, the Democrat Party, does it?

Was the media in the same organization as Weiner? Was the media in an affiliative, affectionate relationship with him, which has now been irreparably damaged and must be called off with the finality of a Break-Up Letter?

The answer to these questions is "Yes." The Media Party is the real enemy, and the Democrat Party is just the group of lowlifes whose various drug problems and infidelities are not so notorious as to blockade them from seeking actual elective office.

Posted by: Ace at 01:26 PM | Comments (215)
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Well, at least the first two. The third is implied.

On Fox, he's giving a press conference, or trying to, because the audio isn't working. He says he'll take two weeks off to undergo "intensive" behavioral therapy.

Then he'll be all better.

You can trust him. Would this face lie to you?

I will molest you in your dreams tonight

pic from @sdwinkler.

More: He claims the following: He will be at this "intensive counseling" full time, 24 hours per day, and yet he will also be running the city during this period.

Which doesn't sound full-time to me. I'm pretty sure I know the meaning of "full-time" and that's not it.

Video of the Press Conference Below.

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Posted by: Ace at 11:14 AM | Comments (289)
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On today's episode, National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke joins us to discuss guns, Anthony Weiner, Bob Filner and Obama's speechifying.

we got @charlescwcooke to read Obama's "Skies of Tomorrow" speech in his plummy British voice.

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Posted by: andy at 11:37 AM | Comments (327)
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I could add this as a post-script to the last post, but it's sort of substantial and I don't want people to overlook it.

What we have on our hands is clear, inarguable evidence of partisan-driven bad faith on the part of The New Republic's writers and editors, and probably its super-liberal ideologue owner, too.

The New Republic demonstrated its commitment to dishonesty in its first stealth edit.

Here was their first claim about the 311 call about an unattended 7 year old boy wading out into traffic :

. . . Zimmerman was an edgy basket case with a gun who had called 911 46 times in 15 months, once to report the suspicious activities of a seven year old black boy.

Emphasis in original. Now, the facts came out, and they were not pretty for TNR:

[M]ost egregiously, Zimmerman’s call (to the non-emergency police number) regarding a seven-to-nine-year-old black boy was placed because Zimmerman was “concerned for [the] well being” of that child, who was walking unaccompanied on a busy street (see page 37).

At this point TNR knows it has the story wrong -- way wrong -- and we know that because they now endeavor to clean up their article with a stealth edit.

So this:

. . . Zimmerman was an edgy basket case with a gun who had called 911 46 times in 15 months, once to report the suspicious activities of a seven year old black boy.

Becomes this:

. . Zimmerman was an edgy basket case with a gun who had called the polics 46 times in 15 months, once to report on a seven year old black boy.

Emphases in original, except for that usefully-vague prepositional phrase "report on," which I highlighted myself to point out their game: Whereas before they had been rather specific (and false) about the call, now they seek to cover up the error by employing the very broad phrase "report on," which could mean a whole range of things, including, by design, their original false claim of reporting the suspicious activities of a seven year old.

Note well they do not change the sentence from a false one to a true one; instead, they merely edit it so they cannot be charged with explicitly saying that Zimmerman feared the criminal capacity of a seven year old black boy.

But they edit it in such a way that a reader is invited to draw that conclusion anyway -- a conclusion TNR now knows is false. They scrub the part where TNR makes a false statement in support of a false conclusion, but then are careful to leave the false conclusion alive in the minds of their dwindling readership.

Or, as the Faculty Lounge says:

TNR replaced "report the suspicious activities of a seven year old black boy" with "report on a seven year old black boy." The charitable characterization of this edit is that it is very, very lawyerly. Yes, the TNR piece no longer explicitly falsely claims that GZ called the police about a black boy because GZ found the child suspicious. But in the context of a paragraph meant to demonstrate that "[v]igilante justice . . . is especially menacing to minority racial groups who are often sterotyped as criminals," and in the absence of disclosing the benign (indeed, laudatory) reason why GZ did call police, the reporting of GZ's call about "a seven year old black boy" — complete with incredulity italics — strongly implies what the article only technically no longer says: that Zimmerman "reported on" a young black child because Zimmerman stereotyped that child as a criminal.

Now, there's one more wrinkle here: Now having stealth-corrected and deliberately attempted to keep a false conclusion alive and having been called on it, the New Republic simply deleted the reference entirely, again, in another stealth-edit. As The Faculty Lounge says:

Still, the most egregious error has been corrected: all traces of the seven-year-old boy are at last gone from the online pages of TNR (if not from the memories of however many people read the piece in the first 10 days of its existence).

Except that's not really a correction; that's simply a case of Destroying the Evidence.

Of course they persisted in not acknowledging the gross mischaracterization in the original piece. They wanted to ensure that anyone who had read and believed their original claims still believed those claims; they didn't want to correct the false impression they had given their readers.

All they wanted to do is to get people to stop noting that they were printing deliberate lies-- not dispel the lies with actual truth and confession of error.

Only now, after they have been repeatedly embarrassed by their deliberate fabrications, do they do what they should have done from the start:

State the actual facts truthfully, and confess their previous false reporting.

This is not the behavior of a magazine seeking to print the Truth. This is the behavior a magazine which has decided Stephen Glass was just a man ahead of his time.

The Faculty Lounge has further thoughts on the need for Truth in reporting, and in science, too, which you'd think would be rather obvious, but apparently the Magazine of Stephen Glass hasn't yet heard.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (176)
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A correction this time, rather than the stealth edit of two items (while leaving one of them misleading as hell) and the utter refusal to correct a completely-wrong third.

Is the Truth so difficult for our Priesthood of Truth-Tellers?

Posted by: Ace at 10:15 AM | Comments (192)
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