>*

At the time, these guys were naïve enough (and good-looking enough) to firmly believe they were the best band in the world; and for a moment, it actually came true.

[via]

Trying out this newfangled Scribefire thing...

Obligatory sea otter image, thanks to the new images.google.com.

This is utterly fascinating - Scene nuke rules.

From wikipedia:

In the warez scene, nuke refers to labeling content as "bad", for reasons which might include unusable software, bad video/audio quality, virus-infected content, deceptively labeled (fake) content or not following the rules. Also duplicates and stolen releases from other pirates will be nuked.

So that's all well and good, but the extent to which these rules are organized and spelled out is pretty impressive. For example, take a look at the MP3 release rules which are signed by a large number of groups, or the general nuke council rules (yes, that's a real thing).

Reading this post on the difference between Starcraft and Starcraft 2 game mechanics (in particular, pathing) reminded me of strafe-jumping, which started a bug in the Quake physics engine, but eventually became so prevalent that they purposefully included it in every Quake engine (and therefore games based on the Quake engine like Counter-strike Call of Duty) since.

Which begs the question, when does a buggy game mechanic become part of the game itself, and should we go out of our way to try and fix them all? It smacks vaguely of the Star Wars "special editions" saga, but then, this is Starcraft Two, not Starcraft: Special Edition we're talking about. 

Edit: whoops, silly me - Counter-strike isn't based on the Quake engine.

But in case you're thinking of staking your life savings on Paul's mystic abilities, be warned: the octopus only managed an 80 percent success rate in predicting Germany's results at the 2008 European Championships.

Ah yes, a mere 80% success rate. Nowhere near high enough to make buckets of cash if you had that kind of accuracy. Also, did we mention it's an octopus? It is. [source]

(h/t Brad)