Category: Geek

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. This is a screen shot of the upcoming videogame based on Fight Club. Here’s the description of the game:

Immerse yourself in this gritty, visceral world of bare-knuckle fighting, with action, story elements and environments true to the Fight Club movie. The extreme realism of the game will make you feel every punch and kick by delivering shocking visuals, untraditional moves, and special effects in fully interactive environments.

If you’ve seen the movie or better yet, read the book, you’ll know that in Fight Club — unlike space operas like Star Trek or Star Wars or sword-and-sorcery epics like The Lord of the Rings — the fighting is only an incidental aspect of the story. Hopefully, Vivendi Universal Games will realize this and add equally nonsensical bonus rounds in which players have to beat themselves up, pee in soup, test their tolerance for pain, splice porn scenes into regular movies, park an explosives-laden van in the basement of the TRW building, swap the safety cards on airliners with terrifying homemade ones and best of all, have mad monkey sex with Helena Bonham-Carter.

My own personal feeling is that Chuck Palahniuk novels are better suited to first-person adventure games, and preferably text-based ones. Something in the spirit of the oh-so-terribly-wrong web-based Brad: The Game (text only, but may not be safe for work).

[ Once again, thanks to 0xDECAFBAD for the link! ]

I link to it over on The Farm, the developer blog I write for Tucows: Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto’s very interesting slide show, The Power and Philosophy of Ruby. It’s an interesting presentation on the “why” of the Ruby programming language. Whether you’re a programmer or someone interested in how language influences thought (or get turned on by the phrase “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis”, and hey, who isn’t?), it’s a great read.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m feeling extra-nutty today.

[ Much thanks to 0xDECAFBAD for the link! ]

I have a number of geeky postings on The Farm: The Tucows Developers’ Hangout. If you’re into that sort of thing, you might want to see today’s entries.

I mean, asides from “Open source gets you chicks”…

You’ve probably already heard the very good news: Saddam Hussein, dictator and alleged porn star, has been captured. There’s rejoicing from all corners of the ‘Net, from Salam “Baghdad Blogger” Pax to Little Green Footballs. Sometimes, Christmas presents come early.

The Redhead informed me that the operation to capture him was called “Red Dawn”, to which I replied “WOLVERIIIIIINES!”. A little subsequent Googling found me this report, stating that the targets were named “Wolverine 1” and “Wolverine 2”. It’s nice to see an underrated action flick finally get its due.

Saddam and the geek image problem

Here’s a little something for the geeks to think about.

Below is the photo of a freshly-captured Saddam, who’d been hiding in a cramped and presumably not-climate-controlled “spider hole”. He was described being “disoriented” when he was found, which suggests he’d been holed up there for at least hours, if not days. Needless to say, he probably hasn’t had an opportunity to practice daily hygiene, hence he looks like this:

Now, let’s take a look at Free Software guru Richard M. Stallman, who is not hiding from U.S. Forces in a hole in Tikrit, but hanging out in an office at Harvard, where I hear soap, running water, hair gel and trimmers are cheap and plentiful. And remember, this photo was taken for an article, so they probably took a set of pictures and chose the best one:

Somebody please tell me why they appear to have the exact same level of grooming.

Really, my fellow nerds, a little break from the keyboard for a wash and a trim wouldn’t kill you, would it?