On Gay Marriage

So earlier this week in this lovely land of the United States of America where I am living for another month or two, a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was defeated. I thought you all might like to see some of the opinions stated by the representatives before the vote.

Is it just mean, or is this just fucking nuts? You would never, never get away with saying things like that in a Canadian Parliment. It isn't done, and it's not done because religion and politics are not supposed to, ever, mix.

I guess the States forgot about that somewhere along the line.

The typical argument that's presented in Canadian Politics against Gay Marriage is usually along the lines of "Gay marriage discriminates against faith X because they would before forced to marry people, blah blah blah".

Clearly this is untrue, and the law is always presented in a way to prevent any church (Mosque, Temple, etc.) that does not want to perform these cerimonies from being forced to do so.

Moreover, It seems to me that protecting the rights of a majority to discriminate against a minority is kind of insane. Now we just need to get these fools to figure out that a little spec of 150 cells is not the same as a human being, and doesn't deserve protection and rights under law (This seems inherrantly obvious to me, but clearly I am not among a large majority in this matter).

The car I want

Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley start-up has just unveiled their first vehicle, a roadster which is being produced by Lotus, and has a very similar design to the Lotus Elise.

The difference is that this one is all electric.

The Tesla Roadster can go 250 Miles on a single charge, with a maximum speed of 130 mph and will go 0 to 60 in 4 seconds. It's also completely silent, the only noise you hear is the wind rushing by.

That's good enough for me baby. The roadster also comes with all the goodies you expect with a luxury sports car: Satellite Radio, Navigation System, AC, etc.

Did I mention it's a convertible?

The price tag is supposedly between $80,000 and $120,000. High, but not for a luxury sports car (and most electric cars i've seen that look like that price up around half a million). See video below from Auto Blog Green.

This is a gamer-only post

Valve, makers of Half-Life 2, just released a demo trailer for a new game they're making called "Portal". It looks like what they've done is taken the physics engine, and the gravity gun from HL2, and twisted the rules of nature around. And the result looks... really awesome. And really hard. The trailer is entertaining (see below), and I recommend watching it.



This is going on the list with Spore, Assassin's Creed, and the new Splinter Cell. God damn I need a new computer.

Oh, and can someone tell Ragnar Tornquist to get it in gear and finish The Longest Journey Trilogy? And make the last one better than Dreamfall.

I've heard rumors that Peter Molyneux is up to something again too. Tis' an exciting time to be a gamer.

In other news, I aquired a couple of weeks ago a Nintendo DS Lite. I rather like the DS Lite, however I am irritated at the lack of titles again. Largely this is because most people are still developing games for the GBA, which is fine, but I think given that this device has the ability to connect to the internet, there's a lot you can do with that, and I don't really think many people have taken advantage of it.

I've been secretly buying DS games, and i'm not really entirely impressed. New Super Mario is pretty decent, for a Mario game. It's basically a mix of Mario 3 and Super Mario World; and while that's great and all, it doesn't exactly inspire rapture.

I also bought Metroid: Hunters. My main complaint about this game is that it has a lot of jumping puzzles, and if you're going to take the metroid franchise and turn it into a FPS, don't carry the jumping puzzles over. Using the stylus to look around is, interesting, but at the same time, annoying.

Next on the list, the internet tricked me into buying Animal Crossing.
I am displeased. Do not buy this game if you are over the age of 8. I thought it would be something akin to Harvest Moon, which I enjoy. But it's not, it's just a weird kiddie version of the sims, with all the interesting things taken out.

Lastly I just bought a game called Lost Magic. Lost Magic features an interesting gimmick, in that you're a mage, but instead of selecting spells to cast, you have to draw a series of runes using the stylus. If you don't draw them properly, the spell doesn't cast. I like this idea in a game, and the runes are plentiful and in sufficient combination that there are over 400 spells in the game, but are structured in such a way that you can figure out the combination you need to draw to get the effect you want. This game is HARD. I mean really hard. Like, Ninja Gaiden hard, only without the cool sword moves. Still, probably the best of the ones i've aquired so far.

Jon tells me that Meteos is an addictive game, but I suspect I will probably just borrow it from him when I get back (and perhaps lend him something else). If anyone else in the world happens to have a DS other than Jon and I, please let me know of anything I haven't been able to find that's crazy addictive (and doesn't involve Sudoku).

Anyhoo, that's my rant for now. Lookforward to burn stories tonight.

This is Entirely my fault

4th of July

If anyone cares, Adam decided he'd film the end of the firework show from last night...

Fireworks