The Null Device
2002/9/4
Apparently Mattel's Harry Potter tie-in Nimbus 2000 broomstick, which vibrates when you ride it, is popular with kids of all ages.
When my 12 year old daughter asked for this for her birthday, I kind of wondered if she was too old for it, but she seems to LOVE it. Her friends love it too! They play for hours in her bedroom with this great toy. They really seem to like the special effects it offers (the sound effects and vibrating). My oldest daughter (17) really likes it too! I reccomend this for all children.
Via a lot of places. I wonder whether it's really as risqué as the comments make it out to be.
A Salon article looking into the bizarre parallel universe of Christian apocalypse movies, with B-list actors and plots lifted from Hollywood blockbusters, only infused with an odd mix of fundamentalist separatism, end-times paranoia and smug digs at liberals, atheists, evolutionists, new-agers and others.
it's set in a deserted observatory (erroneously referred to in the movie as a "space station") where everyone's worst sin emerges. Then a weary-looking Judd Nelson realizes what's going on: SETI@Home, the distributed-computing project for analyzing signals from space, is functioning as no less than Satan's own peer-to-peer AudioGalaxy network.
When a signal arrives with a suspicious duration of 6.66 seconds, the usual archetypal characters from rapture movies have their own plans for it. Louis Gossett Jr., as a power-mad general, wants to control it. A crackpot New Age radio host -- the kind of comic-relief character only found in Christian entertainment -- begins raving about how the signal will "evolve" humans to a "higher consciousness" (evolution frequently appears in these movies in conjunction with madness.) The eyebrow-cocking "dot-com billionaire" wants to sell it, exclaiming: "It'll be the biggest webcast in history!" And the lusty TV reporter, naturally, wants to corrupt Judd.
Sounds like it could make for quality bulldada. (via Plastic)
The Greek government just passed a law banning all electronic games, with heavy fines and prison sentences for possession of the forbidden devices. This law applies to everything from mobile phones with integrated games to DVDs with promotional game components, not to mention standard Windows installations, online chess games and so on; its purpose is to protect the virtuous Greek citizenry from the corrupting influence of online gambling, which the government has admitted to being unable to separate from other forms of games. (via Found)