The Simpsons is dead. Long live The Simpsons!

I'm of the camp that holds that The Simpsons should have called it quits about 10 years ago. At some point, the show stopped working as the smartest sitcom ever and became a loosely connected series of winking pop-culture jokes. Still, I suppose even a tired Simpsons episode is still better than many shows out there.

Nevertheless, I'm dazzled by this website that provides online access to every episode. Relive the good ol' days with seasons one through seven, or so. You can even check out every Futurama episode here. The Scrubs-y pop culture riffing in Futurama doesn't grate on me the same way it does in The Simpsons, maybe because it had a nice run and then packed it in before it began a long, moldering decline.
[Thanks Marc!]

[UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long. Both sites are gone as of 10/2/06, after pressure from some bullying lawyers from Fox, apparently.]

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I H8 Preorders--And I Have Serious Problems With Gamestop, Too

I just spent 14 hours this weekend playing Okami. It was a beautiful little burst of gaming that reminded me of the marathon playing sessions of my youth. I started Friday evening, but I wish I could have started earlier because, from what I hear, I’m only halfway through this gorgeous game. According to Capcom, Okami was released on October 19th, and I was at the local Gamestop, ready to get it then. But Gamestop, really the only option in my area for day-of-release purchases, told me they wouldn’t have it until the 20th. No biggie, I thought. Shipping problems, maybe. So I returned on the 20th, and it was then that I faced the beast of Gamestop idiocy head-on.

“I’d like Okami, please,” I tell the clerk.
“Okay,” he says, and begins bending down to retrieve it from behind the counter.
“Did you preorder?” asks the manager, standing nearby.
“No,” I say.
“Then you can’t have it yet,” the manager says, making no eye contact.
“When can I get it?”
“Two days.”
“So you have it but I can’t get it because I didn’t preorder?”
Silence.
“Can I preorder it now, then?”
“No, we’re not taking any orders, you have to wait until Friday.”

I walk out, surprisingly mad. Then I return on Friday, get the game, and hear a different Gamestop monkey pushing every kind of preorder on customers in line in front of me. Just bought Madden ’07, maybe you’d like to preorder Scarface? Or, how about rumors that Gamestops in Hawaii are asking for $50 in trade-ins (at least a few games) to preorder a PS3? This place is so fantastically committed to locking up customers, taking advantage of their excitement about games and forcing consumers into stupid arrangements. I’d love to purchase games somewhere else, but outside of Gamestop and EB Games, I don’t have many choices.

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Billy Madison Declares This Friday Freenis "Clack-tastic"

Jay Is Games has been running a competition for flash puzzle games and they have just announced a winner. It is a truly engrossing and quite pretty game called Clack, designed by one Sean of Lousiana. I suggest jumping in and experimenting to figure out how it is played. I actually stayed up past my bedtime last night after getting hooked on this game.

Make sure to check out the other entries in the competition, which you can access by mousing over the lower part of the window on this page. There's lots of fun to be had, and it makes me wish I could make games instead of just being a writing parasite.

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Nap Time for Aspy

This week is a busy one. I'm preparing for a two-week vacation to start next week, so work has been nutz. It's time to announce a blog break. I might throw up a bit of freenis tomorrow, but don't expect any real posts until the third week of September. I think I'm going to miss you, Aspy. Sleep well.

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You Don't Know Me

I'm busy this week. (Definitely too busy for long or thoughtful posts.) Busy and stressed. This makes me anxious, and anxiety makes me depressed. I'm glad I can count on the books I read to let me know I'm not alone, or rather, that I am alone and you are too. Together in our aloneness.

From Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm, a writer I admire very much.

The phenomenon of transference—how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud’s most original and radical discovery. The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipal complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities—personal relations—is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form. “Only connect,” E.M. Forster proposed. “Only we can’t,” the psychoanalyst knows.

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New Book For Religious Ignoramuses

Jonathan Wells, a Moonie tool in the religious conservatives’ war on science, has written a new, ridiculous, and quite retarded book about evolution. Wells is a notorious creationist ideologue who used Moonie funding to attend graduate school in biology, earn a PhD, and then use those credentials to bash evolution. (Read that link above, my developmental biologist friends. Just be ready for a spike in blood pressure. And yes, the “Father” he refers to is Sun Myung Moon.)

Wells’s previous book, Icons of Evolution, is a well-refuted collection of misrepresentations and outright lies that is endlessly parroted in creationist/fundie/intelligent design arguments. Panda’s Thumb is organizing a smackdown of the new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. PZ Myers has suggested a google bombing campaign, so here’s Apsy’s volley in the war.

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Friday Flash Freenis: Ikaruga!

If you checked out the last free games post, you probably discovered that many flash games are a little on the dull side. But this week at Kotaku I found a link to a great flash version of the first boss fight from Ikaruga. As a game it's short, but also very impressive for a free flash game. It's all there: lots of bullets and polarity flipping.

I don't think the controls are in English. It should be easy to figure out if you've played Ikaruga before. Z: shoot. X: switch ship polarity. C: Energy release special attack. The arrow keys move your ship. Polarity flipping lets you absorb bullets that are the same color as your ship and charge your energy attack, but being the opposite color of your enemy increases your firepower against it. You may want to reduce the screen quality, even to its lowest setting, to prevent some slow-down and play the game at something like the real speed.

I'd love to see more flash versions of levels from Ikaruga. That game is one of the best Gamecube games and a contender for best space shooter of all time. It is certainly one of the most beautiful games ever. Long live shmups!

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