Cranky T-Rex's Blog

Ah, those were the days. Last week Epic Games announced they are making another Unreal Tournament (UT) game. Unreal Tournament is a first-person shooter franchise that helped define my college experience, with the first game providing comfort on many a lonely eve my freshman year and its successor Unreal Tournament 2004 being a go-to game for the cadre of friends I amassed over my tenure there. Years later I’d buy a brand new PC just to play Unreal Tournament 3, and though UT3 turned out to be a disappointing entry in the franchise, the idea of a new UT game is still pretty exciting. What’s especially interesting about this one is the business model Epic has put forward: Mark Rein, the Gears of War and Unreal Tournament studio's VP, teased a new game last week. This Unreal Tournament will be a free game -- "not free to play, just free." Fans with an Unreal Engine 4 subscription can participate in the crowdsourced development the next Unreal Tournament, with...

There's a classic episode of Star Trek: The Next Generati on in which Captain Picard is captured by the Cardassians in an attempt to glean information about Federation defense plans. Picard is given over to Gul Madred, played by David Warner, who proceeds to torture the good captain in every way imaginable (waterboarding is curiously left out) including inserting a device into Picard that can instantly cause pain and continue to do so for prolonged periods of time. The hallmark of the repeated tortures is the test Gul Madred uses to determine if Picard has finally submitted. Madred has placed above and behind him, four spotlights. He turns them on, and then he asks Picard the simple question of "how many lights do you see?" Picard naturally counts four, only to be rebuked by Gul Madred that there are, in fact, five lights. This exchange is repeated a number of times over several days, and when Picard disagrees, Madred inflicts pain on Picard, even leaving the pain device ...

For those who have not heard, during President Obama's address to Congress this week, at one point Republican Joe Wilson shouted out "You lie!" in response to the President's assertion that illegal immigrants would not be covered under his health care plan. He quickly apologized after the address, and the President accepted that apology. In response, the pundits and the progressive bloggers have demonstrated all kinds of outrage at the breach of decorum. Not only that, they claim the outburst was motivated by some kind of latent racism in Wilson. On CNN, I watched as a host and his guest bantered back and forth the idea that if Obama had looked more like his mother, Wilson would never have had the temerity to speak out like that. Thanks to a conversation with a friend of mine, I have come to the conclusion that these people simply do not know what a racist breaking decorum looks like. I, fortunately, have an image for them. It looks like this: ... That is a depiction ...

The incomplete House version of the health care bill is already over 1000 pages. It's not done, the amendments haven't all been tacked on yet, and it's already over 1000 pages. If it were a work of fiction (no jokes please), it would rank up there with War and Peace as one of the longest novels ever written. It is also written in legalese, so to read it, a person needs to speak that language. Translating it into English would probably triple the page count. It is also not the first bill to fit this criterion. The Stimulus bill passed several months ago was also this way. The same was true of Cap 'n Trade. This means that the average citizen has no hope of reading, understanding, and having productive dialogue about the legislation. Since this administration complains constantly about its opponents not putting forth solutions, here is a solution to this problem: The Term Paper Act of 2009. The TPA is inspired by requirements for term papers and other major written projec...

President Obama said: Our reform will prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage because of your medical history. Nor will they be allowed to drop your coverage if you get sick. They will not be able to water down your coverage when you need it most. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime. And we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses. No one in America should go broke because they get sick. It seems that the President does not understand what insurance is. Insurance is, at its core, essentially gambling. The insured gamble that they will need more money at some point than they will have given the insurance company. The insurers gamble that the insured will never need the money back. It is no different than going to a casino in Vegas and playing every month, hoping to eventually hit the jackpot. The casinos naturally attempt to minimize their losses ...

The Godzilla Award was founded in honor of my cousin from Japan, who unfortunately took his own life in 1998 after he was tricked into starring alongside Matthew Broderick in one of the worst American films ever made. One of Godzilla's most famous traits was his ability to do massive damage with just the power of his breath, and so we dinosaurs have created an award that recognizes the biggest blowhards we can find. This week's winner is... Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA)! Senator Specter wins for complaining about having to use his precious time to answer to his constituents, especially since they've been foaming at the mouth as a result of the health care debate. Senator Specter said: "I’m encouraging constitutional rights. I’m encouraging constitutional rights by coming to Lebanon to talk to my constituents. I could be somewhere else. I don’t get any extra pay — I don’t have any requirement to be here. But for somebody –" Naturally, Senator Specter is cut off by ...

Medical treatment has had a long history of evolution, and for quite a bit of it, going to a doctor was often worse than simply dying. With little to no understanding of how the body worked or the microscopic organisms that could poison it, doctors often relied on religion and superstition to discern treatment. Consider the Dark Ages, wherein disease was considered caused by evil spirits. The Cure? Prayer. Blood-letting. Drilling holes in the skull to let the demon out. That kind of thought persisted well into the 19th century. Even by the American Civil War, doctors were still often little more than butchers and charlatans. A soldier who took a bullet in a limb could reasonably expect to have his limb hacked off with a dull blade that just came out of the leg of someone with gangrene and no anesthesia to speak of. The lucky ones got a sip of tequila or some other hard liquor. Many so-called doctors even traveled the country prescribing a variety of chemicals for ailments that ranged ...

The Godzilla Award was founded in honor of my cousin from Japan, who unfortunately took his own life in 1998 after he was tricked into starring alongside Matthew Broderick in one of the worst American films ever made. One of Godzilla's most famous traits was his ability to do massive damage with just the power of his breath, and so we dinosaurs have created an award that recognizes the biggest blowhards we can find. With all of the Congress critters running around calling protestors angry mobs and nazis, it was a tough pick this week and a very close vote. But, in the end, one nomination stood above the rest. This week's winner is... Linda Douglass! Ms. Douglass wins for telling everyone not to believe their lying eyes. “Hi. I’m Linda Douglass. I’m the communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform, and one of my jobs is to keep track of all the disinformation that’s out there about health-insurance reform. And there are a lot of very deceiving headlines o...

Hope and change: two words that came to embody the campaign of Barack Obama. It was believed that Mr. Obama would bring hope to the needy and the downtrodden, and change to the marginalized, the poor, and the pained. Of course, at the time many of us wondered if the promise of these things was quite simply: too good to be true. Though we are only six months into his administration, it seems that our apprehensions were entirely too correct. Instead it appears that all of the talk about Obama being some sort of post-racial Messiah sent to save us from our own short-sightedness is merely an awful lot of hype. And the change promised by Obama? It weighs down the future of every man, woman, child, or business that ever believed they could become something more like a ball and chain clamped to their ankle. The Obama Administration speaks of restoring relations with the world, and yet they continue to bungle diplomatic events with wrongly-encoded DVDs and mistranslated buttons. Obama...