The copyrighted image is actually the "woodgrain background", quoting Technically Legal. Is this a joke? The whole story is about a background texture being stolen? Some actual artists out there who've been ripped off must be feel pretty distressed right now.

This is because they mistake Lordi for some kind of Klingon emperor (yes, I know he doesn't live in Hki).

The guy who pushes the lawn mower farts too. I'm not sure what kind of gas comes out -- and I don't want to know -- but it sure is bad for my personal atmosphere.

the studio hopes to turn it into an LotR-style fantasy blockbuster

As if! At best it will look like Eragon or Dungeons & Dragons, they just need to be sure to hire poor Jeremy Irons to play one of the characters.

I was only interested in the Twilight Zone episodes personally but it's not working. I'm pretty sure they forbid access if you don't live in the US, it must be that IP detection they use on the South Park site and with some YouTube videos also. That's really a dumb thing to do but was expected.

This record is hard to believe. They give the monetary value of the sales like in the film industry whereas in the game industry companies are more inclined to provide the number of units sold, making it difficult to figure their actual revenue per title. Oblivious of the exact numbers of the competition, it's easy then to claim they broke a record.

According to Wikipedia, which links to a Reuters article, the worldwide number of sales would be of above 8 million. Some games have sold much more than this (Pokemon Red/Blue, Super Mario Bros, The Sims...). Even if Guitar Hero III is more expensive, it is highly unlikely to be the first video game to pass the billion mark.

GH3 has also the advantage of being a multi-platform game.

The new favicon looks like some painting by Miro, except better. He should have made all of his awful art on a 16 px-wide square instead of canvas, it's less hideous to the eye.

A new Punch-Out is coming for the Wii, it doesn't look an awful lot different from the original.

I wouldn't call these obscure. A Boy and his Blob, Little Nemo and especially Shadowgate are pretty famous NES titles. There's also Uninvited in the Kemco trilogy from the MacVenture series. As for Guardic/The Guardian Legend, it's not about remaking, you should just wish Compile is still alive. Some of their staff ended up in Milestone, making the game classic shmups that don't get a whole lot of attention in mainstream media (Chaos Field Expanded on GC, who remembers?).

Rygar on NES was pretty popular too as an action/adventure game; there's also a Sega Mark III/Master System version with better graphics but Japan only I belive (like Solomon's Key).

It's been done in Japan at least, Dragon Quest I&II for Super Famicom.

Screw Penny Arcade! Everybody knows Penny Arcade and xkcd.com, if you don't, consider yourself lucky, they're not even funny. At the very least they don't need some more linking to their site, they don't deserve all that attention. If you want to link to a web comic, link to Dueling Analogs, maybe he doesn't update very often but at least he bothers to change the scenery and characters quite a bit, and astonishingly, he does manage to write very funny trips.

One, two, three... poo!

It certainly is not like MySpace, only one block on the right is fully customizable by the user and the ads are smaller and not so intrusive. I think the layout is pretty clear: your music stats in the middle with a shoutbox at the bottom, radio and site stats on the right. Actually, I love last.fm as a website, it's easy to navigate and interact with, everything feels very intuitive, it's a really well-made site; I often wish they had made Facebook...

What I'm more critical about is the way they handle data. I fail to see the prowess. "Playing with that data is one of the most fun things about working at the company.", it says in the summary. Well, perhaps they should play less and work more with it. It's quite common to see different pages referring to the same track only because of slight alterations in the track's title when it was scrobbled. Last.fm is pretty much incapable of recognizing identical tracks if they don't have exactly the same name. Same goes with the artists, if the name is written a bit differently, say with the alphabet from the Japanese set of characters, it might create a different page (example: this = that).

You wind up seeing all sorts of oddities in the artists charts, check Beethoven's for instance: Fur Elise appears in a countless number of forms along work which is wrongly credited (Flight of the Bumble Bee). Discernment isn't last.fm's greatest strength. Yet, I still think it's one of the best sites out there, because of the wealth of existing data, because of the little-advertised group radios (which let you listen to pretty much any kind of full tracks if you search right), it is to music what imdb is to films, with their own flaws. Interestingly it's sometimes described as a social networking website, but the fun part is about the statistics and data archiving. While it may sound very nerdy, I think that is what primarily appeals to people.

Not everything can go "to the cloud". The time when people will have nothing else but a large screen and a collection of virtual data sets instead of books, movies, games won't come. People like to own things, there's a materialist in every one of us more or less eagerly amassing personal treasures.