The Junkyard - I

Visited Something Awful after a long time today. Here are some random pieces that I found rather interesting (each link followed by the authors' 'preface').

Your Genre Sucks

As you all know, I’m a man of science. As such, I constantly seek to refine my understanding of bad music and share my findings with you. Lately I’ve spent many delirious nights half-awake, feverishly pondering the deep structures of badness in music. In all this nightmarish meditation, I’ve hit upon a bold new formulation which will surely revolutionize the way the world thinks of crappy music. Of course, I’m not going to share it with you, because you’d steal it and sell it to the legitimate press. I’ll just pitch you one of my lesser ideas instead, in order to keep the satisfied glaze over your dull eyes for another two weeks.

How To Survive In Any RPG

To say we enjoy games would be like saying Canada's got some syrup, or that we employ clumsy metaphors once in a while. We live them, breathe them, and sometimes breathe them too deeply, in which case we need someone to strike our collective backs repeatedly until we cough them up along with the set of Duplo Blocks we dined on the previous night. Our love of video games began back in the eighties when we were smaller, smarter people, and has kept us both in peak physical condition to this very day. Since no one can dispute our claims in this article, we officially anounce that we are the undisputed greatest gamers ever, and therefore you'd be a fool not to read this definitive guide to RPGs. It's guaranteed to raise your INT by 3, although possibly lowering your CHR by 7 in the process. Please kill us!

On a different note, Slashdot reports that researchers in UK have developed a program that can learn the game rock, paper & scissors through observation. Wonder if it can play this version of the game - Rock, Paper, Saddam!!