Smug, arch, deliriously self-absorbed, and given to carrying around precious little pet dogs like he was some kind of eccentric Bond Villain. That he would pay Slashdot to interview him -- and that he would be so out of touch as to think there were any genuine tech decision makers left on Slashdot -- comes as no surprise at all.

Just look at the outrage that these tweets have caused. It looks to me like gamers do care.

People who tweet about games care. Which is but a tiny fraction of the people who buy games (as tweeters are but a tiny fraction of the population in general, despite Big Media's attempts to have you believe otherwise, but I digress...).

This is Electronic Gaming's "AOL Moment." Back In The Day, we were all on Usenet. Which is to say, a rather insular community of us self-important early-adopter geeks that nobody could really make a dime from were all on Usenet. When AOL provided access to Usenet for all its users (or "AOLusers" as we called them -- weren't we so clever??), we bitched and moaned and derided and threatened and wrung our hands but there was nothing we could do because the great community of "Casual Users" was vastly larger than we hardcore hackers -- once they were shown what to do -- AND they spent money, AND they lined up in nice neat rows for the Marketers to measure and count and shepherd. The landscape was moved to catch where the dollars were dropping -- not to make Internet communities and communication better (well, at least as far as we self-important geeks judged "better").

And what is this based on?
My personal experience. I've played this course before...

Don't want a gaming console that requires a persistent internet connection? Don't get one!

Exactly right.

And the market will show that the vast majority of gamers could not care less whether an Internet connection is required or not, so long as the game is fun. And since game development is all shifting towards multi-player anyway, with only token efforts being made for the lonely solo console players, this whole issue borders upon moot.

Five years from now, just two categories of game will be made: Multi-player for consoles, solo (with multi-player functionality) for mobile devices.

actual meatspace storefront .... Please.

actually using the word "meatspace" and you're *not* a character in a bad 90's era cyberpunk novel? ...Please.

If you don't believe in abortion, don't have one.

Substitute "a slave" for "abortion" and you have some insight into how Pro-Life voters feel.

The idea that a black African was a "person" with rights equal to his white owner was as crazy to half the country a few hundred years ago as the notion that an unborn child has rights equal to her mother is to half the country today.

Who knows? Maybe in a few hundred years someone who survived a third-trimester abortion will grow up to be President and vindicate the millions who were killed in utero, the way Obama vindicated his slave ancestors? Wouldn't that be lovely?

D00d, you wrote a 2000+ word essay -- on a Slashdot Blog! -- complaining about how the practical applications of Transporter Beams weren't effectively realized on Star Trek (Which is fictional, by the way. FYI)

You're, like, The Uber-Geek. The ur-Nerd.

I got the same weird mixed feelings of respect and mockery reading that essay that is usually reserved for when I see pictures of some Steampunk Cosplay Guy who's built a working jetpack. Over nights and weekends for the past three years.

Well done, Sir! I think...

The Black Geary Books, as fans often refer to them, are "officially" known as the "Lost Fleet" books by Jack Campbell.

The first one is "The Lost Fleet: Dauntless." I believe there is a total of six in the series. He followed that series up with further Black Jack adventures in the now-ongoing series "The Lost Fleet: Beyond The Frontier."

The Amazon Link: http://amzn.to/R2vhfI

The neatest thing I found about the series (other than all the geometry), is that Black Jack -- a war hero revived after 100 years in stasis -- is the reverse-type to the trope of Ancient Badass Warrior Travels to Future and Kicks Soft Pasty-White Butts Living in Luxury Too Long. In Geary's "relative future," he is the Enlightened Man, using sophisticated naval tactics no longer taught at Academy because the peeps of that relative future are so angry and beaten down by a century of war that all they want to do is just ram their ships into the enemy and rip out their opponents' lungs with their teeth.

But I also enjoy reading pure Mathematics texts.

The Black Jack books are the first ones I've ever read since the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series where I felt the need to keep a pen and paper nearby. Half the time it seems that Black Jack wins his engagements because he knows how to use a protractor and his opponents don't...

I can consistently pick out the Hugh Pickens submissions just by looking at the titles in the RSS feed.

And Hugh, please don't construe that as a *good* thing...

...when you say "cult," are you referring to Mormonism or Linux?

Yes, yes, it's easy to mock online petitions and their traditional worthlessness, but THIS petition has been written by a member of the "technorati," so maybe it has a chance.

God Speed, Brave Technoratus! Make Us Proud!!

I am absolutely floored by the notion that there are still journalists and media who believe that Google is not already in the pocket of the government and is not thriving merely because of that relationship.

There is a group of guys at my workplace who do it every day on their lunch hour.
And not a one of them would understand this story

Or how to make a baby.

Wikipedia embraces "experts in the community," inflates them far beyond their objective worth when it comes to defending its credibility among legitimate encyclopedias, then goes all "Vonnegut in Back to School" when faced with legitimate experts who normally have little use for their sandbox.

Like I've always said: Want a wonderfully comprehensive summary of the 5th Season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or exegesis on some nearly forgotten Geek meme? Wikipedia's the place to go. Anything else? Not if your serious about it.

...is that, um, like a coder or a developer?

Or do you really build houses from floppy disks?