This article is making the rounds, so it deserves a post. It's all about the weird, deadly serious world of "vertical transportation." It also includes a story about a guy who got trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. It effectively ruined his life.

Slate.com (of all places) has a nice article up about Super Smash Bros. Brawl's disaster of an online mode.

No, of course not. Like American Leftism it'll evolve and come back in a new form. Possibly even attached to a new party. But this article is worth checking out.

Is his vision of America too depressing?

Is Obama an Empty Suit with a Messianic Complex?

(My thought: No and Yes.)

Are his economic ideas bad?

Who knows, but Reason sure has funny commenters.

arguing that "socialized healthcare" (Obama's cheaper private health insurance plus increased assistance to the poor, which is a far cry from UK's NHS, slippery slope aside) is even comparable to fucking ten thousand years of war is god damned missing the forest for the trees.

Hell, full blown single-payer/no private insurance health care plan is miles and miles better than McCain's Warhammer 40K fantasies.

A contrarian view of the U.S. economy. Whatever the true state of the economy, methinks the media's stories on it will become noticably positive and upbeat should a Democrat win in November.

I'm beginning to think that Romney and Obama may both win CA and yet still lose their parties' nominations by a razor thin margin (in Romney's case) and backdoor shenanigans (in O's case).

I just got the King of Kong DVD and it's pretty great. The commentary tracks are especially interesting, as there's one with the creators (sadly, no Wiebe or Mitchell) and one with guys from IGN.com and Iam8bit (the latter's more enjoyable than you would think).

Anyway, on the creators' track they make a big deal about how they get along with everyone from the movie and how they're great friends now with Walter Day (Twin Galaxies' Founder/Head Ref).

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if this is accurate. Day's released a series of editorials that are very critical of the movie's sequence of events. Suffice it to say, Wiebe was actually the reigning/recognized DK champ for 4/5's of the movie's runtime.

You know, in watching the commentary, I noticed that the creator's routinely mention how the movie we see is not the movie they set out to make. Originally, they were focusing on the Q*Bert story and the Ms. Pac-Man story, both of which got reduced/cut from the final film, respectively. In fact, they say that at first they weren't sure where Steve Wiebe fit in because he was so "normal."

After reading Walter Day's critiques, I'm beginning to think that it wasn't because Wiebe was normal, but because his drama was largely non-existent and had to be massaged and even manufactured. They themselves say that they didn't know that the story was going to be Steve vs. Billy until April '06. Hm...