Burrowowl

Two weeks ago, Logtar posted his take on how to find a Wii, which reflected the experience of many people seeking this elusive console. Nintendo has apparently found that sweet-spot where they’ve hit an optimal efficiency of scale balanced against a voracious public appetite for the device. Unlike Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s Playstation 3, which have focused on pushing the envelope of high definition output, Nintendo has taken what I consider to be a higher road: they focused on play experience. The result has been a technically-inferior but greatly-loved platform that has earned praise from professional and amateur reviewers alike. They broke away from the sitting-around-mashing-buttons model that came in with the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System in the 80′s. This was a bold move, and looks to have paid off for them.

This brings me back to how one actually gets a hold of the mythical device. Various retailers in my area, including big-box electronics stores, major toy stores, and boutique electronic gaming stores all seem to get small shipments of Wii consoles every week or two, and almost immediately sell out. Alas, Logtar’s advice (which amounts to “happen to be at the store right after the consoles show up) isn’t as helpful as I would have liked when I gave it a try. Every store I went to over the course of three days didn’t have one in, and the clerks were unable to guarantee when a new one would show up. I briefly contemplated paying an inflated price online and eat a shipping charge to get one in time for my wife’s birthday.

Turns out that’s unnecessary. Here’s how you get a Wii Console:

1. Go to the Funcoland in Coddingtown.
2. Bring a kid.
3. Talk to the over-enthusiastic long-haired sales guy. Mention that it’s a gift.
4. Play along with his attempt to get you to put down a deposit on a game you wanted to buy anyway. Sales guy now has the kid’s cuteness, your impressive generosity, and additional profit motive all working to fuel his all-consuming need to get your money.
5. Give him your cellphone number.
6. Wait for him to drive an hour away to the secret lair where somebody actually has a console in stock.
7. Pay for it.

If you don’t happen to live near Santa Rosa, you’re on your own. Sorry, folks.

Looks like Wizards of the Coast have a hankering to squeeze out another set of core rulebooks. Sigh.

Back in late September of last year, I thought that Higurashi no Naku Koro ni was all wrapped up. The main characters had all died. Some repeatedly and graphically. Some repeatedly by inference. Imagine my joy when I found out a second season was coming in July! Well, actually I waited until this week to actually pick it up, my interest having waned in the intervening months.

I shouldn’t have strayed, Oyashiro-sama! Please forgive me! “Reunion” is a single-episode segue between the two seasons rather than a new plot arc, and features our buddy Ooishi meeting up with Akasaka and a third man in 2005, twenty-three years after the Great Hinamizawa Disaster. They discuss the popular theories of the day regarding the nature of the incident, including some of the ramblings of Takano Miyo, the nurse that keeps disappearing on the night of the festival. From the TIPS, it’s fairly clear that Miyo has a variety of nutty theories about the Curse of Oyashiro-sama, so seeing these men fixated on an alien-landing-strip theory was quite amusing for me. Best twist for this episode: they put Rena as the sole survivor of the disaster. Previously that role, when mentioned at all, was exclusively the domain of Keiichi. She reports that Rika had tried to inject her with something. Very interesting, in light of how Mion and Rena tried to take a syringe to Keiichi in the “Demoned Away” chapter (the very first plot arc). Were they really trying to help him after all?

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In the aftermath of a rather laughable Fox 11 News piece exposing a secretive hacker gang calling themselves “anonymous” last week, a few things have been grating on me a bit. The report itself was horribly flawed, but I’ll focus for the moment on public reaction to it.

A couple of points:

1. The Internet is not Fight Club. You are neither Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, nor V.
2. The Internet is not Fight Club. There are no rules 1 or 2. Rule 34 was a stupid, though funny, joke, and the rest of that stuff is backfill.
3. Nobody speaks for anonymous. Going on Youtube with a silly voice filter to spit out some manifesto is ridiculous.
4. Most of what I’ve actually seen anonymous do could only be described as “hacking” by the most ignorant of mass media talking heads. Shutting down a poorly-administered web forum with Gigaloader is not hacking. Neither is setting up a wget script through a TOR node. Ordering somebody a pizza online isn’t hacking. It’s pestering.
5. Anonymous is not invincible. Look at what happened when anonymous went up against a bunch of white nationalists in December and January. Those bigoted fools are still operating just fine. The blowback attacks didn’t cause any real problems either, but that’s the nature of an Internet Fight. Nobody’s going to become An Hero over such shenanigans.
6. You aren’t really anonymous. It may be difficult to track you down, but TCP leaves a trail. The rest of the world tolerates things like 4chan, 420chan, and such because they are essentially harmless. By this I mean that they are incapable of causing harm at a scale that is worth bothering with. Note that a couple of idiot FBI guys managed to nab that “NFL plot” guy, and that was the result of federal agents that were so incompetent as to think the threat was credible.

All of that being said, the drama that erupted over this report has been hilarious. The “victims” of anonymous in this may be some of the stupidest people I’ve been exposed to lately, and that’s saying a lot. If you want the Internet Bullies to stop, don’t show that it has affected you. Just curl up in a ball and wait for the bad men to stop kicking you. Going on television and making a fuss just makes you entertaining again.