The only robot I want playing with my balls is portrayed by Summer Glau. But I'll settle for the actual Summer Glau.

Hey, someone has to build the pontoon rafts!

Get some exercise. Run a couple of miles every other day, or bike regularly.

Don't code right up to the point where you go to bed. Do something different to take your mind off code for at least 30 minutes, then go to bed. Read a book. Watch a show. Clean the kitchen. Anything.

You'll find that you're tired on a regular schedule, and your mind will be less code-racy.

Seriously dude, slow down. My wife used to drink about four Starbucks espresso drinks a day, and she noticed she was visibly trembling. Her doctors told her her heartbeat was erratic and racing, so she cut down to one or two coffee drinks a day. She's much more normal now.

The "geek chic" lifestyle, massive amounts of caffiene and Red Bulls, pulling all nighters to punch out code, scarfing down whole pizzas and gaming until all hours, it's not really good for you. Moderate. Get some exercise. Take multivitamins and get a good nights sleep. You can actually be as productive with healthy living and one cup of coffee as you are in stimulant and sugar overload, and you won't be burning the candle at both ends.

Plus, you really won't have to worry about withdrawal when you're stuck on an island with no WiFi, no coffee, but plenty of hot native girls.

Wait, you have a plant that grows coal? Are you selling seed packets?

If I could shift my monthly cable bill to an internet service that let me watch ALL the shows I enjoy whenever I wanted, I would.

Unfortunately, there is no one-stop-shop for every show my wife and I watch now, so I'm stuck with cable.

By linking these pages on Slashdot, aren't we just adding to the cruelty against server-kind?

The real plan is to corner the market on Tomacco.

Somewhere, Gary Larson is weeping.

'We have yet to find one that doesn't work,' says [one of the researchers]."

Oh, but when they do, then once again the vile bacteria will have the upper... psuedopod.

I work in the "Games Industry", so I'll throw in my two cents.

Part of our problem is that the high profile titles are still stuck in what I'll call the Sitcom and Movie Of The Week phase. We have lots of heavily promoted titles that, to an outside observer, are only midly different (my mother would not be able to tell the difference between L4D and Fallout 3, just as I can't tell the difference between Fraiser and The King of Queens), and the production and release of these titles is largely driven by profitibility.

There are smatterings of "art" games, and it is my belief that these games are the ones that will bring legitimacy to the industry, although it's going to be an uphill battle. Let me take this sentence apart, because I want to clarify what I mean and why I'm making this argument.

A game like Emily Short's "Galatea", which is a text based game (ostensibly "Interactive Fiction"), is art, if solely for the beauty of the prose and the exploratory nature of the interaction. There are a vast array of possible conversations that the player can have with the title character, and these are mature, adult conversations, with depth and emotion fitting of any high quality published novel. But barely anyone knows about this game outside of the IF and Academic community.

Another game is Johnathan Blow's "Braid", which I began playing for the third (fourth?) time again last night. Not only is it beautiful, fun, polished, and unique, but the time-manipulation gameplay ties in with the plot in an almost magical fashion. Who, or what, is The Princess, and how exactly does she fit into the timespace continuum? Even after I put down the controller, I find myself thinking about the story far more than the button mashing or the puzzles.

But these two games also reveal part of the challenge, in that a game in the purest sense, as James Earnest (of Cheapass Games) used to attempt to impress upon me often, doesn't care about plot or story or pretty graphics. A game is about rules and play and fun, and that's it. So intertwining the game play aspect with the story aspect is the real challenge for legitimacy, because it's through story and narrative that people develop an emotional connection to the content, but it's via interaction that they experience this narrative.

I think there are a handful of approaches that are starting to tie interaction and dynamic narrative together. Fallout 3 (which I haven't played, admittedly) and Fable 2 are probably good examples, although they're perhaps the modern day "Die Hard" equivalents: yes, romance drives the plot, but it's really about guns and explosions. Cultural legitimacy, when playing a certain video games becomes the mass-populace in-thing to do because there is a positive (or at least thoughtful and broadly appealing) common experience to be had, this is probably at least another decade off. I think we need to see more Braids and Galateas, and better Fables that are less about sword slashing and more about our inner conflicts as human beings, before we get there. I think we need development teams who are more artists and storytellers than algorithmic optomizers, and I think we need to make games that take more risks and fail not simply because the framerate was poor or the textures were blocky, but because they tried to teach us something about what it means to be human and just wound up being weird.

Those are the mistakes we need to make in the industry, so that we can learn from them. Only when we understand how to merge interaction with introspection will video games be legitimate forms of art and entertainment.

Redshift, probably.

When you're looking at things really really far away, the frequencies shift towards the red end of the spectrum due to the doppler effect of the Hubble Expansion. If we only looked in the visible spectrum, we wouldn't see anything, because the light had already shifted out of the proper range. Thus, but looking towards the infrared and longer wavelengths, we can actually detect things that originally light emitted in the visible spectrum but are reaching us in a heavily stretched state.

Yes, and publishers should make books and magazines without margins. Think of the wasted paper!

Those areas are there because we have fingers and hands, and we need to hold these items. Zero bezel monitors sit on a desk or attach to a wall. They're not designed to have an area that can be touched and not obscured by our grubby digits.

And, yes, I'm certain I'm an insensitive clod for ignoring people who don't have hands.

This leads to the series of time machines that provide their own frames of reference, where an object can only travel within the duration for which the machine is "turned on". See the movie "Primer" for an example.

Of course, this makes me wonder, if a person gets into such a machine at 2PM to travel back to 10AM, what would another person see inside if they entered at 1PM to leave at 11AM? Is the device empty? Do they meet the other traveler? What if the other traveler is themselves?

I love the fact that at any time of any day I can find hundreds or thousands of people to play games with. What I strongly dislike, and what keeps me from playing games online that often, is that enough gamers are jerks to ruin the experience for the rest of us. Maybe it's Penny Arcade's GIF Theory, or maybe it's the fact that there are no real-world reprocussions to namecalling, swearing, ragequitting, or otherwise rude and unsportsmanlike behavior. It is, however, those who in real life would receive a smack upside the head followed by a discussion with their mommy and daddy about how they are failures as parents, it is these people who ruin the online gaming experience for me.

On occasion, I get matched with people who are polite, good team players, and who are just there to have fun, learn from each other, or genuinely cooperate to make the whole team better. In the Texas Hold'Em game I wrote, it's tournament style, so the obnoxious guy will often bet out early. But more than half the time, I have people screaming that I and everyone else on the team suck, or clogging up the chatlogs with obscenities, or otherwise behaving in ways that no person would act if they were in physical proximity to the people they were insulting. And in lieu of a good, consistant way to select out those people (Gamer Zones on XBox Live is a good start), I play far less online gaming than I would otherwise.

The great personal irony is that I got into the game development industry as a network programmer.