News: My sincerest apologies
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Gabe: A few eagle eyed viewers noticed that I accidentally drew a Nebulon-B frigate in today's comic. Gabe mentions the Mon Calamari and the Corellians but the Nebulon-B is actually produced by the Kuat Drive Yards.I deeply regret the mistake and I have since corrected it in the comic by replacing the original drawing with one of the Mon Calamari Cruiser "Liberty", sadly lost in the Battle of Endor . I am in no way trying to diminish the Nebulon-B frigate or the fine craftsmanship of the dedicated workers employed by KDY. Again I apologize for any inconvenience or offence my carelessness may have caused.  -Gabe out
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Co-op mainframe down The Co-operative Bank has apologised to customers unable to get their hands on their cash this morning because of computer problems.â¦
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The most painful kind of generosity are the promises you cannot fulfill. The people who were once so grateful then turn on you, and your self-esteem is sure to take a beating.  Many years ago, in a fit of generosity, Dave Winer offered to host all early-bird adopters of editthispage.com free hosting of their weblogs. This included php.weblogs.com. Well Dave Winer recently announced that he was closing down the weblogs.com and editthispage.com websites. He no longer runs a company that can support these sites and they are a personal and financial strain on him.   I was disappointed, but I had no expectations that Dave would do this in perpetuity.  My momma taught me to keep my expectations low when it comes to free things. After all, Dave and I have never met, and I've only exchanged a couple of emails with him.   I had a feeling that something like this was going to happen because the site has suffering from poor performance this past month. So my contingency plan was to ship the weblog to a commercial hosting service like weblogger if need be. During the weekend, just before the site was cut off, and before any announcement by Dave, I moved my most important open source project to sourceforge, to http://adodb.sourceforge.net/.  Today I got an email from Lawrence, Userland's webmaster:  Subject:   php.weblogs.com  From:      "Lawrence Lee" deleted#userland.com Date:      Wed, June 16, 2004 1:46 am  To:        jlim#natsoft.com Priority:  Normal  Mailer:    Microsoft Office Outlook, Build 11.0.5510   We'll be continuing to host php.weblogs.com, we made special arrangements with Dave to keep it running.  Lawrence   I didn't ask for special treatment, so this is a pleasant surprise. Apparently the people at Userland decided to host this weblog and Dave emailed me, saying he had nothing to do with this decision. Of course I don't expect this offer to be permanent either, and I will deal with that when the time comes. The website's performance is still terrible though, and I have no expectations about this either.  For those who ever wondered what the icon below each post means, it's a graphic emoticon of how i feel. I think the jazz singer Billie Holiday is an appropriate image for this post; her songs are always bitter-sweet. It sure feels like Stormy Weather or Come Rain or Shine.  I would also like to thank those of you who emailed me privately about this issue. RSS seems the best  way to access this web-site at the moment, as it continues to go down at random times.
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It's amazing how easy it is to get lazy and comfortable and accept things as they seem to be instead of trying to see them as they are. That's true, I'm sorry to say, even for someone like me who urges eternal vigilance and makes a living writing about financial fiascos.
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Although the title might suggest that you have wandered into Zbigniew Piekarski's column, I promise you minimal pessimism.
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I messed up in my Nov. 21 column, "Weak Case Against Homework," and failed to include comments from the authors of one of the books I was criticizing. I am way overdue for an appointment with the ophthalmologist, so my failing eyes missed their e-mail, waiting patiently in my inbox between a rant...
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_ The Astros apologized to the Cardinals today, saying they erred by showing a replay of St. Louis reliever Julian Tavarez&#39;s tantrum yesterday on the stadium scoreboard.
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Tycho:  We put Monday's strip up early, so you might have seen it already - but you might not be familiar with the EGM interview it is based on, an excerpt of which appears here.  I sometimes worry about appearing partisan in these communiques, but it is not my job to be fair.  I'm not a journalist, I'm a consumer.  I don't buy one product from each company in the interests of some karmic ideal, and I don't need to purge my posts of wrongthink because I haven't produced something suitable for use as a press release.  Sony is grinding down their goodwill with every smug, psychotic interview, and someone needs to tell them so in clear terms.
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I haven&#8217;t talked about the PvP comic book for a while and there&#8217;s a reason for that: I&#8217;ve been avoiding the subject. I made a lot of extra work for myself last year what with the animated series, moving into a new office, bringing my store in house, etc. Because of that, I got behind on [...]
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Yesterday's piece, lightly edited, on the Huffington Post. http://x98.us/jz  I think it looks pretty good over there!
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I should have known... The idiots want to rule the Reddit I started for Scripting News readers. I couldn't figure out how to delete it, and while trying, I deleted my account, so forget the experiment, and if anyone at Reddit is listening, could you please delete it for me. (I sent an email but there was no response.) Still diggin!
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Tycho:  It wasn't until the strip was completed that I realized we had written two comic strips at the same time.  Gabriel thought this comic was literal, and I thought it was about miscommunication. At least, I hoped it was. This is a fantasy to which I still cling.
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Gabe: I sort of have a reputation for being the hot headed one here at the Arcade. I think that"s probably fair to say. I have a habit of saying very mean things to people I don"t agree with. As much as I might try not to be that guy it"s just sort of become my role.
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If Mattel apologizes to China, then I guess I have to apologize to Mattel.
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Tycho:  There was so much news, we had to poke it with a schtick.  I'm allowed one or two puns like that a year.  At least, I hope.    The value of each leisure minute has increased exponentially since the holiday deluge began, that's not precisely news, but the games that are losing out over here are of such a high caliber that it's a little scary.  I downloaded the demo for PGR4 and loved it, in fact I still play it - I'm playing it right now, and you would be horrified if you knew how.  This said, I have no idea where I would fit this game into my life.  This is patently ridiculous - a game of this obvious polish and pedigree would command that tray for weeks at any other time of the year.  We're both in love with Zelda, but can so rarely consummate this love as bright baubles are constantly rolling in.  Gabriel doesn't even make time for nightly Halo - his evening is entirely routed to The Lion War.  When Call of Duty 4 hits on the fifth of November, I have plans to betray our collective in a similar fashion.    The time I did have yesterday wasn't even invested in the long-form retail games that I see as the core of my responsibility to you.  Every moment not devoted to Halo was soaked up by Every Extend Extra Extreme, an XBLA game I had already played on the Playstation Portable and the PC, only to find that its true calling was on the console.  Another game with a strong audio focus from the creators of Lumines and Meteos, the entire objective is to blow yourself up in such a way as to create the most casualties - I can't wait until Jack gets ahold of this one.  It has other modes, but that's the basic idea, and of course it's all very abstract.  Like other games from Q Entertainment, how much you derive from it is often a function of how open you are to its audiovisual synergies.  It's fun, but that fun is not a result of complex systems.      I also picked up Everyday Shooter for the PS3, in further dereliction of my duties, having a series of profound experiences with it that might be too strange to describe.  The game's author expresses a debt of gratitude toward Q's Mizuguchi and others, but he's accomplished something wholly his own here.  Superficially it's one of these dual analog, robotronian shooters every platform is weighed down with now.  Don't be fooled by that trope, and certainly don't think you can come to any conclusions based on screenshots.  Where Lumines or Every Extend Extra draws from electronica, a great match for their style of presentation, Everyday Shooter disarms the player with a suite of earnest, analog songs played on guitar.  At times, during the course of ordinary play, I felt as though I were interrupting him.     In gameplay terms, each level apparently plays around with the idea of chains and combinations, and I say "apparently" because I've only played two levels in - every time I die, I get sucked in by his menu.  It's just a bunch of text, but moving down or right produces a single note, and pressing left or up produces a two note chain.  Pressing a face button produces a string of four notes, and with these rude tools one can actually augment the title music quite well.  I didn't realize I was doing it at first.  When Gabriel came in perhaps fifteen minutes later, I felt as though I had been woken from a dream.
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Tycho:  I don't know why I get my hopes up reading shit about "broken street dates" online, I'm perpetually disappointed by the results.  I got a game on the actual ship date five years ago, and it's made me into some kind of Goddamned optimist.  There are scattered reports that people have picked them up, and you may invest your time in this way if you are desperate, but I apologize for wasting your time.  (CW)TB
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An open letter to Daisuke Matsuzaka: Dear, Dice-K (OK if we call you Dice-K? Or would you rather D-Mat or Dice Man?),