Month: January 2005

When you join a game of Odd Man In, you agree to abide by the following rules and conditions. Breaking these rules may result in being banned from current and/or future games.

1. Any message sent publicly or privately must not be obscene, offensive, racist, or sexually graphic. Taunting is allowed, but keep it within the boundaries I’ve described. Pretend your mom is playing the game. Mine actually is. Harassing other players by filling up their page with messages is also forbidden.

2. I reluctantly added a curse filter to the game, but right now it only filters out two words. I don’t think I’ll add any more, but don’t try to get around the filter by using alternate spellings.

3. Using multiple accounts is strictly forbidden and will get your accounts deleted and banned from future games.

4. Revealing your identity and talking with another player outside of the game is strictly forbidden and will also get your accounts deleted and banned from future games. You can tell someone you are (or were) in the game and in most cases it’s ok to tell someone if you are dead, but that’s it.

5. Posting gibberish messages is forbidden. Gibberish is defined as a post with no meaning or one with the intention of pushing another message down in the queue.

You or someone you love has probably faced a Snood addiction problem at some point in their life. It’s the weird game where you shoot grimacing monster faces at similar colored monster faces, knocking them all down before the ceiling collapses on you. Personally, I don’t like it all that much but I know a ton of people who do. A North Carolina newspaper sat down with the guy who wrote Snood, Dave Dobson.

Nearly a decade after Dave Dobson designed it, Snood — rhymes with “rude” — is keeping millions of people from what they really ought to be doing.

Dobson designed the game with the goofy little monster faces for his wife in 1996, when he was in grad school at the University of Michigan and she was teaching high school. On a lark, he offered it on the Internet as shareware, and figured if a few people bought it for $10 apiece, he and Christina could go out for a nice dinner.

Today, Dobson is an assistant professor in geology and computer science at Guilford College in Greensboro, but only because he loves teaching. Snood, once estimated to be the most-played computer game behind the games installed in new computers when they come out of the box, has made him a wealthy man.

Industry analysts say that only about 1.5 percent of the people who download shareware ever pay for it. Snood is said to do better than the industry average, though Dobson won’t say how much. His business partner says more than 30 million copies have been installed since it was introduced, or about 10,000 per day.

The emphasis is mine, so think about those numbers.

0.015 x 30,000,000 x $10 = $4,500,000

And the article says Snood does better than 1.5%!

I was leading for about half of this month’s GameShow until my phrase completion skills completely ran out. I thought “rug” would be the most common word to complete _____ burn. Only 7/58 agreed and now I’m in 4th place.

I don’t think I’m a bad speller, but there are certain words I look up every time I use. Are there two r’s? Are there two c’s? Do I keep the e when I add able to the end? These are the top five words I can’t remember how to spell. Don’t be surprised if I misspell one in this post.

5. Caribbean – I want to put another r in there so badly.
3. & 4. Separate and Desperate – For some reason, I always mix up which has the e in the middle and which one has the a. I know they sound different, but in my head they sound the same.
2. Embarrass – The double r followed by an “a or e” dilemma kills me every time.
1. Recommendation – The single c and two m’s has fooled me at least a thousand times. I use the word so frequently on this site that I should have the definition bookmarked.

I’m a big fan of Penny Arcade, but most of their humor doesn’t have wide appeal.

This brilliant comic does. My favorite part is that Jesus says, “Oh shits!”

I’ll admit, I sort of like Tegan and Sara’s Walking with a Ghost, but I have to give it up to Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan (not to be confused with the smart brother on the Hogan Family) for murdering it with such style.

The first single from So Jealous, “Walking With a Ghost”, sounds like one of those dummy mp3s major labels post on KaZaA to fool unsuspecting music lovers, where the first 10 seconds loop for five minutes. Remember when you thought “House of Jealous Lovers” was instrumental? “Walking With a Ghost” repeats three or four mundane phrases– particularly “out of my mind”– dozens of times in two-and-a-half-minutes, all over the same jerky, studio-polished guitar chords. I suppose it’s almost as catchy as the latest McDonalds jingle, but it’s also utterly boring.

Read the full review. Listen to the song in question here.

Some guy recreated a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.

This is your last chance to join One Shot is Not Enough, the next game of Odd Man In. It starts in about 2 hours! The game has begun!

Happy birthday to my wonderful wife, even if it is supposedly the worst day of the year.

As everyone knows this is the Eagles’ 4th NFC Championship game in 4 years. A loss today would be a huge failure.

Good thing the Falcons suck.

Update: Woooooo!

Update #2: This Eagles song is hilarious.