Well… Happy belated May the 4th!!!

Sorry I’ve been out for a while, folks.  Got hit with a majorly bad sinus infection that took me out of the running for like 2 weeks.  Uhg.  Buuut they gave me happy pills and everything is fine now.

Anywho, this was what was going to run about 2 weeks ago.  I did a post a while ago about Disney buying the Lucas Arts franchise, but now I’m starting to have worries.  If the premature ending of one of the BEST animated series, the Clone Wars, wasn’t bad enough, the mouse has been tampering with all of the Lucas holdings.  Namely the closing of all Lucas Arts games.

Don’t worry about your SWTORs just yet, they are still selling off the Intellectual Property licenses, but they just won’t be doing anything inhouse anymore.  I understand the move; game development, especially AAA games, is very expensive for not a whole heck of a lot of return.  Sure, it makes oodles of money, but from an investment standpoint, if it’s not making X% growth or Y% return, then no matter how much it made, it’s toast.  Still, there were some games still in development and I suppose they will get shuffled off to other production facilities, but for the poor development staff left jobless, I hope they get picked up by someone good…

As for SW7… I just don’t know anymore.  I’ve stopped looking for info because the more I hear the less I want to see it.  >

What do you guys think about all this Disney business?

PS…
In case you missed it, I did a review of Diablo 3 a few weeks back!  Guess I should probably do a Torchlight 2 one as well at some point, huh?

Anyways, went to the doc and they got me some happy pills to make it all better.  I don’t think we’ll have comics for next week though, I’ll probably still be drooling on the couch this weekend too.

I did post a new review of Diablo 3 if you guys are interested!  >D

It’s no surprise to anyone that by and large, politicians are selfish and corrupt.  So nobody should really be shocked about the whole furlough thing.  And yet, here we are.

The “fiscal cliff” and “sequester” were supposed to be things soooooo bad that not even the childish differences between the only 2 parties in US politics could possibly allow to come to fruition.  They had an idealistic vision that when presented with absolute worst case scenarios, these two groups that hate eachother would set aside their differences and create something everyone could agree on.

HA, because that would happen!

And yet, they let the two worst case scenarios happen.  They let the things that would be so atrocious and devastating to the people and country, that nobody in their right mind would let it happen, well, happen.

So now we have “furloughs”… basically lots of unpaid days off by government paid employees.  This happened across the board to every corner of every program Americans pay for.  This included things like air traffic controllers and lawyers to name a few.  And it’s not like anybody forgot that it would cause the flow of essential governmental services come to a grinding halt.  That was the whole point.  But now that it’s happened… Why the hell are people getting angry?

Well, not just people getting angry, but why are the idiots in congress reverting it for “essential” agencies and employees?  Oh, I’m sorry, airlines got delayed because your congresspeople screwed up?  You (the people) should be mad!  But we should live with it until they fix things.  That was the point of this entire exercise.  Making concessions for some things that inconvenience us and letting other essential services slip into the void isn’t a solution.  We’re in bad shape here, folks, and you can thank the people in charge.  Don’t like it?  Kick them out!

Now, I’m not saying we should just live with the furloughs, no… this was a stupid idea by stupid people and allowed to happen by even stupider people still.  But I also don’t think it’s ok to allow certain areas to be given a pass while areas that don’t directly inconvenience people into a furor still suffer from paycuts.

Want to know an easy fix?  See, your politicians don’t actually care about us.  No, if they did, they wouldn’t have played chicken with the American economy and people who need to put food on the tables for their families.  If you want politicians to do the “right thing”, you have to speak their language.  That’s why, should we need them to come to a decision that effects thousands or millions of people, then instead of letting the people shoulder the burden like they always do, we should make the politicians carry the load!  That’s right!  No furloughs for or austerity for the people, rather withhold 20% of the congress’s pay for every time they do not come to a meaningful agreement.  Let’s see how they like it!  Then they can try again.  Screw up 5 times and they get no pay until they figure it out.

Or we could just fire the whole bunch and put in people that can pass morality and IQ tests…  That works too.

Sorry for the rant guys, but I’m getting really tired of our government leaders not doing their jobs.

Update:
Hey all, I’ve been pretty sick this last week so it might take me another one to get back up and running again.  Sorry for the lack of comics, but hopefully I’ll get to start them again soon.

Really REALLY sorry…

XD

It’s interesting… the careers we picked as kids are the same that are being shut down by “tough economic times”.  Unfortunately, they are also the jobs we really need.  But whatever… who needs science?  Who needs space exploration?  Who needs public servants like firefighters, medics, police officers, etc…

Who needs them when we can outsource, downsize, or streamline?

Besides good news, our unemployment rate is now only 7%!  That means one out of 14ish people are unemployed.  Chances are, you know someone who’s out of work right now or someone who has been struggling.  Granted, it’s better than the 14% and up we had before, still… the problem with these stats is that they don’t take into account people who have had to go into work outside their field “just to have a job” or just given up on searching.  Also, you’d think these stats came from the unemployment office… but alas, it’s just a general random calling campaign asking people.  Excellent source of quality stats!  Uhg… (meaning, actual figures are probably much higher)

So this is one of those really weird side effects of growing technology.  Once upon a time, you had to buy all your media on tape or cd (or record).  These you could freely resell without any restrictions.  You buy it, you own it, you can do what you want with it except copy it.  Simple as that.

But at some point we stopped wearing bright neon and gallons of hair spray and they digital age was upon us.  With it, came great accomplishments like digital media and electronic networking.  But at what cost?  Ownership laws became muddy and ambiguous.  Various file sharing companies rose and fell.  And we are left with a disconnect between the physical and digital worlds.

So you like Steam / Digital Download games?  You like MP3s from iTunes or Amazon?  You like to buy movies to download online?  That’s great!  But you don’t own them… not really…

In the light of the most recent events, further cementing the anti-digital rights movement, we have precedent and law that makes it illegal to sell any digital media. Basically, the outcome said that you would have to sell the physical object in which you downloaded it onto… meaning your harddrive.  It was meant to be an obnoxious way to snub digital rights proponents.

Never mind Europe now allows the resale of some digital goods… this just really makes it harder for our future generations to overcome these kinds of restrictions.

The cute way around this is to download your movies, mp3s, ebooks, and games to a cd or external thumbdrive first, then copy them to your harddrive or whatever.  That way, you can say you never had them on the harddrive first and be able to sell the media!  Take that legal system!

But we shouldn’t have to circumvent the law.  We purchase a good or service, an mp3 or game isn’t a digital service as they would like to believe, it’s a digital good, thus, we should be allowed to do with it as we please.

ALSO:
Wow Insider just wrote up a nice article about What’s Shakin!!  Take a look!  I’m a big fan of their articles and they helped both my sites get their start, so check em out!!

http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/04/14/sunday-morning-funnies-whats-shakin/

Seriously folks… Hunter traps hurt!  Worse than a teething gnome on caffeine!

Haven’t played it yet… going to wait for the steam summer sale, but from what I saw watching my buddy play it… Lara gets the tar knocked out of her.  Now, I’ll admit, she’s a tough old bird, still, I don’t think many humans can survive the amount of falling and getting shot at that she does.  And from the looks of it, she just gets more and more beat up.

Still, as a big Tomb Raider fan, I’m looking forward to this reboot!  The series has long needed a good injection of adequate talent to make it back into the top games position.

That being said, from what I hear, it still highly linear.  Now, maybe I’m spoiled with open world games like Skyrim, Just Cause 2, Fallout3, and the likes, but I think if any series could do very well with large world exploration, it’s the Tomb Raider series.  Yeah, I see it has some, but that last Final Fantasy had “open world” too… still felt like a rail shooter in an arcade.  Also… multiplayer?  What the hell?  Granted… haven’t tried it out… but not all games need a multiplayer gimmick.  Seriously… seems like anything with a gun in it has to have a multiplayer version.  I wouldn’t be so opposed if it was decent and doesn’t interfere with the core gameplay… but TR isn’t a coop/multiplayer game (well, maybe coop with Lara’s twin sister Dora…) so it feels like it was just an afterthought added to bolster sales… all the while depleting resources and development time that could be better spent on making the core game longer or having mod support.

Anywho, I’ll give a full proper report when I sit down with it this summer.  Maybe my surly preconceived notions will warm up… or maybe I’ll set my computer on fire because they battered the franchise as much as they did Lara… We shall see.  >)

(in either case, I’m glad to see someone’s moving forward with the series… it’s been a good long while since we’ve seen it in the headlines)