I saw this on Kotaku.com the other day, and I thought a few of you guys might be interested in checking it out. It looks really impressive at first glance. I am interested in finding out exactly how varied the innards of the buildings are. The fully destructible environment is great, although I can see how it might start to get repetitive quickly.

Hey guys, if you missed it our article was in Sunday’s Democrat and Chronicle newspaper. We are really excited and have already received several contacts over it. It was on the front page of the business section with a huge picture of us standing there (the one from the last blog post) and nice big text. Really eye-catching.

So anyways, if you are online and want to give it a read you can find the whole article here.

Edit: By the way, there is a Joe DeJoia cameo in the article that is worth reading. I dare you to read his quote in your head and not hear it in his voice.

Vanishing Point from Bonsajo on Vimeo.

Some pretty sweet procedural animation right there

Vampire Weekend has been getting a lot of press over their new album lately. Personally, I think it’s effing fantastic. Rock out to track 2:

Take it away Davey B.  Since I’m not feeling so well tonight, I’ve got two more posts queued up: Part 2 of my Sequential Art series, and a review of a fantastic restaurant in Rochester.

The thing that is so frustrating about talk a paring down the current Senate bill is that the Senate bill is already pared down.  We went through weeks and weeks of rubbing Ben Nelson’s and Joe Lieberman’s feet by getting rid of the public option, taxes on rich people, and any other good policy ideas that twinged an already raw nerve of “looking liberal.”

What we’re left with then is just basic insurance reform, which goes something like this:

1. People are pissed that insurance companies are screwing them by claiming pre-existing condition exclusions.
2. In order to stop (1), we ban this practice
3. In order to accomplish (2) without people abusing insurance companies (i.e. get insurance when they get sick), we impose an individual mandate.
4. In order to accomplish (3) without forcing poor people to go bankrupt buying health insurance they can’t afford, we provide subsidies to buy insurance.
5. In order to pay for (4), we cut waste in Medicare and impose new taxes.

There’s really nothing here to take out, because it’s all related; you take out one, and all the cards fall.

It’s not just me saying this either.  Check with the experts:

“The idea of scaled back reform, and particularly of doing insurance reforms by themselves, is a fantasy,” says Richard Kirsch, director of the reform campaign Health Care for America Now. “The public wants to stop insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. You can’t do that without a mandate; you can’t do a mandate without subsidizing coverage; you can’t subsidize coverage without Medicare savings and new revenues. The public wants to end medical bankruptcies – but to do that you need to provide affordable coverage to people and you need to mandate decent insurance benefits and put a ban on annual and lifetime caps. Doing all that requires setting up exchanges and subsidizing coverage.”

Thankfully, President Obama sees things the same way:

If you ask the American people about health care, one of the things that drives them crazy is insurance companies denying people coverage because of preexisting conditions. Well, it turns out that if you don’t — if you don’t make sure that everybody has health insurance, then you can’t eliminate insurance companies — you can’t stop insurance companies from discriminating against people because of preexisting conditions. Well, if you’re going to give everybody health insurance, you’ve got to make sure it’s affordable. So it turns out that a lot of these things are interconnected.

Now, I could have said, well, we’ll just do what’s safe. We’ll just take on those things that are completely noncontroversial. The problem is the things that are noncontroversial end up being the things that don’t solve the problem. And this is true on every issue.

Where does that leave us?  It leaves us with 256 gutless, crybabies huddled in a corner.  No one but Congressional Democrats are so good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The path is simple.  Pass the bill.

We are going to be featured in the Democrat and Chronicle this Sunday. Here is a “teaser-trailer” for our article. Watch at your own risk. I will be sure to link the article when it comes out on Sunday.

Watch the video here

Phoenix – 1901 – A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque.

My Dad forwarded me two articles from Boston.com which I disagreed with. I wanted to share the email I wrote back to him and maybe clean it up a little bit for Juice, and really only reflect on one of those articles. Here are those thoughts edited for JTB. They are probably the uninformed rants of a foolish, young online-leftist, but since everyone is shouting I may as well take part.

The article, Coakley Downs In Safe Harbor, reflects the talking point surrounding this whole election, which I think is really insulting and embarrassing. The talking point is that Coakley did not do enough campaigning to win the election and that the people were taken for granted.

At a neighborhood New Year’s Eve party, everyone was talking about Republican Scott Brown’s new television ad … The neighborhood consensus: clever and attention-grabbing. Martha Coakley laughed it off. It was a serious mistake; many others followed. They included a barrage of terrible ads and Coakley’s incredible question about what people expected her to do: stand outside in the cold, shake hands and ask for their vote?

Now Democrats have learned their lesson and will not “take anything for granted.” This is not only acknowledging but embracing stupidity. As the article and the polls clearly point out, Brown started airing commercials on New Years Eve and the polls turned around. Brown was outside of Fenway shaking hands in the cold, and Coakley was not. I guess someone forgot to inform me that the job of a senator was to be a master hand shaker. He is a senator, and is going to disappear to Washington and represent his constituents by voting with his party on every issue.

(more…)

Scott Brown, former Cosmo centerfold, is the next Senator of Massachusetts.

There’s a lot of things you can potentially say about this race.  Martha Coakley was clearly a pretty terrible candidate.  On the right, you’re going to hear a lot about this being a referendum on heralth care and Obama in general.  This, I think, is clearly off-base.  This race was never about the issues.  This race was entirely about personality.

(more…)

Real. Bad.

Nate Silver:

The FiveThirtyEight Senate Forecasting Model, which correctly predicted the outcome of all 35 Senate races in 2008, now regards Republican Scott Brown as a 74 percent favorite to win the Senate seat in Massachusetts on the basis of new polling from ARG, Research 2000 and InsiderAdvantage which show worsening numbers for Brown’s opponent, Martha Coakley.

Andrew Sullivan despairs:

Democrats can stop hoping at this point.

I can see no alternative scenario but a huge – staggeringly huge – victory for the FNC/RNC machine tomorrow. They crafted a strategy of total oppositionism to anything Obama proposed a year ago. Remember they gave him zero votes on even the stimulus in his first weeks. They saw health insurance reform as Obama’s Waterloo, and, thanks in part to the dithering Democrats, they beat him on that hill. They have successfully channeled all the rage at the massive debt and recession the president inherited on Obama after just one year. If they can do that already, against the massive evidence against them, they have the power to wield populism to destroy any attempt by government to address any actual problems.

This is a nihilist moment, built from a nihilist strategy in order to regain power … to do nothing but wage war against enemies at home and abroad.

What comes next will be a real test for Obama. I suspect serious health insurance reform is over for yet another generation.

This is bad.  Real bad.

There’s still a chance that Coakley will win, but it will have to be a perfect storm of response bias and a big GOTV push tomorrow, which at this point seems unlikely.

I hope people in Massachusetts know what they’re doing.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Prepare to get your mind blown away. This video was created entirely by one person, music included. Everything you see is completely digital, don’t be fooled.

I highly suggest you click through to vimeo and watch the video in HD – FULLSCREEN -

Classy.