For many of the teeming masses who spend their free time editing Wikipedia, contributing to Jimbo's grand storehouse of knowledge isn't just a hobby -- it's a way of life. Nowhere is this more clear than in the confusing and often disturbing culture that's grown up around this once-promising project like some kind of horrible fungus.
Now that we've painted a somewhat less than flattering portrait of Wikipedia's headcheese, let's take a closer look at the unwashed legions who enforce his will: the Wikipedia admins.
Let's make no bones about it: if you use the internet, there's a fairly good chance that you use Wikipedia. Some of you may even use it on a daily basis, because god only knows that it beats even Google in the casual disbursement of information.
Wikipedia's supporters tout it as a revolution in human learning, and the idea is certainly a seductive one: a grand repository of knowledge compiled by the collective minds of humanity, tirelessly updated by volunteers around the globe to continuously remain on the cutting edge of information. The reality, sadly, is far less appealing than the idea; less the sum of man's wisdom, more the canvas for an exceedingly high volume of poop-slinging between cabals of overly bureaucratic shut-ins with delusions of grandeur and people with actual academic credentials confounded by a labyrinth of red tape. Wikipedia the "encyclopedia" has long been outstripped by Wikipedia the apparatus, a nightmare of baroque procedures and committees, of Orwellian gibberish and seemingly contradictory rules enforced by those least qualified to be in a position of authority.
Thanks to his winning performances in blockbuster movies like The Rock, Con Air, Ghost Rider, and National Treasure, Academy Award winner Nicholas Cage has become a household name in America, one of that rare cadre of male actors capable straddling the divide between action schlock and Oscar-winning drama. But even hardcore Cageophiles would find little to love in Deadfall, a 1993 revenge/thriller that managed to waste a cast headlined by James Coburn, Charlie Sheen, and Peter Fonda through sloppy direction and a script that happily criss-crosses the line between outright ludicrous and idiotic.
So it's saying something when Cage's acting overshadows every other rotten thing about Deadfall by a landslide -- Cage doesn't simply overact, but taps on some crazed reservoir of primal ham, some unholy crossbreed between roid rage and alcoholic stupor that simply must be seen to be believed. So, without further ado, here's Nicholas Cage -- just two scant years before winning his Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas -- as Eddie, the "lively" pill-popping crazyman you'll have to drink to forget.
Fair warning: those with squeamish dispositions may want to skip Eddie's close encounter with the deep frier at the end of the second video. Copious swearing also means this exhibit is cheerfully NSFW. Enjoy!
Mark continues to THREATEN ME and now sends me this STUPID EX PARTY CRAP!!! Especially when I was ASKING FOR SOME TIME TO COOL OFF!!!!!!! I had NO INTENTIONS OF BACKING OUT!!!! But it was already a stressful situation. When both you guys threatened me I seriously felled like i’m being bullied since I told Mark I will be OUT FOR A FEW HOURS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If our hero sounds close to total meltdown at this point, it should be no surprise -- in the past month, life in Caseyworld has been far from well.
Shop? Joke? Elaborate hoax gone horribly wrong? Or possibly... an unintended sneak peek at Mr. Serin's much-ballyhooed publishing venture? Judge for yourself. I personally like the 'Volume One' in the upper right corner there -- more chilling words were never written.
"No, I did not leave my wife penny-less and run away to Australia! It’s amazing how some people are trying so hard to sabotage my efforts to make an honest buck through my story/publicity."
Just when you think the Casey Serin saga can't get any weirder...
Our flashing mouthpiece / flashing teeth novelties come in clear, soft plastic. Each deluxe flashing mouth brightly flashes multi-color lights. Flashing mouthpieces / blinking teeth are novelty products only and are not for babies. Light up teeth products are for older kids, teenagers and adults who want to be seen.
"I was staring in the mirror, and I saw God staring back at me."
In which we explore the cautionary tale of Oasis, and discover just how much crap two working-class Mancunians can talk given a million dollars and all the cocaine fame can buy.
With the housing market finally careening towards its long overdue meltdown and property values dropping across the breadth of the United States, it's as good a time as any to pay homage to the greed and idiocy that sent home prices soaring in the first place. Conveniently enough, the story of Casey Serin has both in spades.
...and it's the face of an over-the-hill Canadian chanteuse tackling a piano-driven cover of the hands-down worst song of 2006. Ladies and gentlemen: Alanis Morissette with "My Humps."
When I named Pete "Baby Shambles" Doherty Atrocity Exhibition's Man of the Year for 2006, the life of Britain's favorite fish-faced trainwreck had already entered something of a sad lull. No longer was our hero headbutting former bandmates or gracing tabloids with candid shots of his crack-smoking exploits. Months had passed since his last arrest. Rumors of a hush-hush Thailand wedding to sweetheart Kate Moss -- herself no stranger to the career-boosting benefits of unchecked substance abuse -- only seemed to confirm our worst fears: Pete had gone soft on us.
Not so. During a recent interview with Vogue Homme, Doherty not only impressed his Gallic hosts with a DIY crack pipe made from a Cognac bottle, but also admitted he continued to indulge his number one vice on a daily basis. The real bombshell, however, when our boy revealed he had whored himself out to men for drug money -- at just forty bucks a trick. "There was no shame, because I kind of knew they were just lonely pissed-up old queens. And 20 quid was a lot of money!"
Marketing analysts have a tricky job -- doubly so in an unpredictable, competitive industry like gaming, where consumers cut across all age groups and demographics. What's more, the amount of data to sift through is overwhelming -- these days, success for a console hinges on being able to conquer three significantly different markets at once, while the number of games released in a given month can stretch into the hundreds. How can you reliably analyse an industry of this magnitude?
Well, if you're Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter, the answer is simple:
Wildly overestimate. Claim that Nintendo has sold 1.2 million Wiis in December '06 when the actual number barely topped 600,000.
Make ludicrous predictions about the future. Announce that World of Warcraft is "going to roll back to a million. I'm not predicting it's going to happen in three weeks; I'd guess it has a half-life of 6 months to a year."
Don't let your total ignorance of the sectors you're addressing stop you from going out on a limb about them. Boldly proclaim, "I don't think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month."
Offer a heartfelt mea culpa after all of your predictions fall flat, in this case regarding Rockstar's Bully: "I have been consistently wrong about this title. I thought it would be stupid, and it was fun; I thought it would get poor reviews, and it got solid 90s; and I thought it would bomb, while it now appears to be a million unit seller."
Try not to play games yourself, so you can say that "we don't play games for social interaction" with a straight face while you're calling Microsoft's Xbox Live service "absolutely flawed" as a strategy.
Use your contempt of Xbox Live's Arcade service and complete cluelessness in regards to development costs to justify opinions like "the relatively high costs of developing console games could keep a steady supply of PC games coming as a low-cost alternative."
And whatever you do, don't actually get the names of the games you're referencing right. How else can you make predictions like this? "I think Gran Turismo 4 will move a lot of PS3s, but don't really see a lot of other games that will move the needle this year for hardware sales."
Congratulations! You are now a gaming analyst. You are now also the laughingstock of the very market you're trying to analyse, but hey, that's why they pay you the big bucks.
It's a little-known fact that honest-to-goodness journalism uses a practice known as 'fact checking' in proofing its copy. Fact checking is a fairly simple concept: whenever a factual assertion is made in a story or article, it's generally expected that somebody -- either the writer or an independent fact checker -- will ensure that said assertion is correct. This way, you don't end up in situations where a published article credits Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi for Tetsuya Takahashi's Xenogears or Tetsuya Nomura's Kingdom Hearts franchise. When the Toronto Star claims that Hideo Kojima co-founded Nintendo, it's easy to be at least a little forgiving; after all, gaming is a big and bewildering field for rookie journalists on a deadline. When somebody who's making their livelihood writing about games can't even do basic research on the people they're namedropping, it's another story entirely. And while we're passing out the brickbats to GameSpy Industries:
pop·u·lous [pop-yuh-luhs] 1. full of residents or inhabitants, as a region; heavily populated. 2. jammed or crowded with people: There's no more populous place than Times Square on New Year's Eve. 3. forming or comprising a large number or quantity: Because of epidemics the tribes are not nearly so populous as they once were. 4. ancient Peter Molyneux god sim: Remember Populous? Back before Peter Molyneux totally went off the rails? Good days.
Longtime readers will remember our special tribute to the works of Anthony J. Suson, creator of Rugsex, Penny-Dick Volcano, and more plagiarised characters than you can shake a vaguely phallic stick at. Fortunately -- or unfortunately -- for the rest of us, he's still at it, and back like cooked crack with a fresh campaign setting guaranteed to set freeware RPGs back a few years, or at least to early puberty.
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