Here's an interesting videogame thread from NeoGaf about how box art back in the day was laid out by hand. Some of the ones they link to are indeed beauties of color, font, and original artwork. (Man, Konami really knew how to make Castlevania look cool... before they made it all anime-gay in recent years.)

Interesting observation from Instapundit and opinion dude Howard Kurtz.

HOWARD KURTZ:

The press seems downright excited at the prospect of the first female president.

The idea of the first black president has journalists all but giddy.

But the first Mormon president? Whoa! That's a different matter.

The skeptical tone toward Mitt Romney's announcement has been impossible to miss. And the major reason is his religion.

Hmm. Is this because most members of the press don't hang around with Mormons much? Maybe it's a diversity problem.

I think that Right or Left, Northerner or Southerner, Americans east of the Rockies as a whole don't have much experience with Mormonism and regard it with thinly veiled skepticism/hostility. In short, I don't think it's a "press" thing, but more regionalism.

This past BSG was probably my least favorite ever. "Let's do a whole episode about the bitchiest, most annoying character on the show!" Ugh. It was ROUGH, folks.

I made this glorious animation. It nearly killed me, is still killing me, but now it is done and I am happy.

You can watch this good version at the Psychic Bunny site, or just watch this You Tube version:

First, not awesome: Apparently yesterday was the anniversary of one of the first huge terrorist attacks in Baghdad. I was listening to a clip of the speech that PM Al-Maliki was giving about the need for peace, and in the background you could hear the series of bombs going off that ultimately killed more than 60 people. It was about the most disheartening thing you can imagine. I can't fathom how it must have felt to be there, seeing this speech delivered and immediately shown to be hollow words.

And yet, AWESOME: Listening to NPR today, I learn that US ships in Washington state are vulnerable to terrorist attack from the water, and so the Navy wants to train dolphins and sea lions to defend the ships. How awesome is that? The sea lions will attach a cuff to the terrorist divers and then drag them onto shore as prisoners. They didn't talk about it, but presumably the dolphins will just beat people to death.

The two big headlines on the NY Times this morning (other than Obama's suurprise announcement! yawn) are Putin Says U.S. Is Undermining Global Stability and, as if the paper wishes to make Putin's case for him, Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says.

Now it doesn't appear that the "US" is actually saying this. The recent NIE said Iran was providing "lethal support" to Shiite militias, and now a bunch of completely nameless people and/or angencies have said Iran is providing the "Explosively Formed Penetrator," a weapon which henceforth makes it impossible to deny that weapons are a smidge phallic in nature.

But we've all heard this song before, right? Vague sources in the government say Ira* is a threat! The sources don't get less vague so much as the certainty of their conclusions. And then Colin Powell goes and sacrifices his reputation on the altar of war with Ira*, thus becoming a national joke instead of a national hero. I wonder if they can get him back for the sequel.

But this brings up a good question to which I have no good answer. Iran, unlike Iraq of the time, may actually be posing a danger to American troops. It seems like that can't go unanswered. Yet to declare war on Iran is so collosally stupid that I think it must. War with Iran dooms the Iraq project to an even more spectacular failure than we've currently got, it puts a much wider Middle East war, and the possible destruction of Israel, on the table, and it solidifies the anti-American sentiment of the current regime - likely crushing any hope of burgeoning liberalism in the country even if we win.

So, how do you turn the other cheek in this situation? Is there a tacit understanding that as long as Iran isn't directly attacking us we won't attack them? This is why I am not a SecDef or SecState. These things always seem intractable to me.

Also, how bout that Putin? Kind of a Dictator, huh?

An otherwise "who cares?" race down in the OC has ended in a photo finish between two Vietnamese Republicans who are separated by a mere *7* votes. The article as a whole is somewhat interesting, as OC's Vietnamese community is emerging as a minor Republican force/farm team in state GOP politics. CA's Vietnamese Republicans are the new Mexican Democrats!

(Other note: The seat they are fighting for was previously held by Democrat Lou Correa who himself won an astoundingly close State Senate race in November by less than a hundred votes. Fast times in Orange County, indeed.)

Last month LA Weekly posted a fascinating look at the black-on-white Halloween 06 violence in Long Beach. LA Weekly wonders why SoCal's MSM was so slow in covering it, and why they covered it so shoddily. Here's their 1/31 story on the anticlimactic verdict.

I've been seeing a lot of posters up for Celebrity Deathmatch on M2. I think they've also gotten CrankYankers from Comedy Central. So it turns out that when they launched M2 they didn't really want a network for music videos again, they just wanted to make us relive the pain of seeing our music video channel slowly taken over by other shows that have nothing to do with music. Mission accomplished!

I've been totally out of the loop until the whole Boston thing went down, but I must say, the trailer for the ATHF movie is surprisingly funny.

(I checked out of the show after the second season).

Well, that's not entirely true. 60+ years ain't all that bad, and we have a glorious stock of columns to enjoy for the forseeable future.

My Mom met Molly Ivins once, at a big dinner at Penn State Altoona. Thanks to her I have a signed copy of "Shrub." Well done with that nickname, Molly. I hear he fancies himself a Nicknamer, in additon to being the Decider, and turnabout is only fair play.

And yes, read the columns