Well, it had to happen sooner or later. White Americans no longer have a monopoly on serial killing. It seems African-Americans are making huge strides in the repeat murder business.

Not long ago, a serial killer profile would almost certainly include the words white male. But Derrick Todd Lee and the sniper Johns have made profilers’ jobs a bit tougher. And, I for one, believe this is yet another sign that African-Americans have officially “made it” in this country.

Just when you thought the Christina Aguilera’s of the world were slowly fading away. She goes and has a baby with mad rhyming skillz (notice the z in skillZ, that means I’m street ;).

This past week we saw the glory of E3 come and go. E3 is the grand carnival of digital entertainment, where companies like Infrogrames (now going by the name Atari) and Bungie display their cornucopia of gaming greatness.

While we are caught in the glare of marketing madness, the ooohh’s and aawwww’s as we watch game demo after game demo, and PR people extol why their game will be the next big one, we forget one very important fact.

E3 is awash with an undercurrent of a major battle. While Bungie, Eidos, Atari, and UbiSoft are seen on the front lines, they are just willing participants in a grander game of chess going on in the shadows, like a game-master directing a story in a real life Dungeons and Dragons.

What I am talking about is the video game ground war between Sony and Microsoft.

E3 is nothing more than a pretty face on a brutal war - a corporate mélange of King of the Hill. Personally, I hope neither wins.

It’s a true battle of the titans, too. Sony makes billions in other markets, like movies, music and TV. Microsoft also makes billions in countless other areas as well, cable TV, software, and many others. That leaves them both with the ability to spend, and loose, hundreds of millions on the video game market while they fight for any ounce of my time, and your time, they can get.

And losing money is exactly what they are doing. Microsoft announced that its Home and Entertainment division, which is responsible for the Xbox, lost $190 million compared with a loss of $97 million a year earlier. Sony made no claims of its loss and gains, but I’d bet they are in a similar situation.

So, what’s the pay off? Market share in a $30 billion per year industry. The pay off in the long run is enormous. Sony or Microsoft could double their annual yield based solely on this one industry. That’s quite a high stakes competition.

And in the face of announcing large money losses, Microsoft dropped the price of the Xbox to $179 from $199. Dropping the price of your products in the face of red ink is not standard practice, but that goes to show to what extent they will go to win. Sony, two days later, announced they would also drop the price of the PS2 to $179. Are we far from a $99 Xbox 2, or a PS3?

But herein lies the rub — I hope this battle rages for a long time, with market share hard to gain, and profits hard earned. Why? Because then the gamer will win and win HUGE.

To their credit, Bungie, Eidos, Atari, UbiSoft, Digital Anvil and companies like them are taking advantage of the battle also. They are being encouraged to crank out games at a furious rate. And not just any games, big games that everyone will have to buy. They are all trying to make the next Halo, then next Splinter Cell, the modern day equivalent to Super Mario Brothers.

Notice I have yet to mention Nintendo’s GameCube? Nintendo is a non-player in this market. I predict that by Christmas the GameCube will be remembered with other consoles like Sega’s DreamCast. They will only play a role in the niche market of hand-held gaming like the Gameboy.

While they are not directly on the front lines of this war, Sony and Microsoft are relying on these third-party companies to make the killer apps, the games that will make you want to buy one system over the other. This is odd strategy for Microsoft considering they usually eventually buy the third-party company to make sure they have control. That is what Microsoft did with Bungie when they purchased them in 2000, and Digital Anvil whom they purchased last year.

But the industry is to large for Microsoft to purchase all these third-party companies. They did make some smart strategic buys, like purchasing Bungie and essentially taking Halo off the market for Sony and the Playstation 2. Halo became THE game of the Xbox in 2001.

But with the main front of this battle being out of the hands of Sony and Microsoft and in the hands of third-party companies, the gamer is going to win big.

The hobbyist gamer can look forward to games being pushed to their limits on the console, similar to what we will see with Brute Force when it’s released in late May. Right now gamers demands will be met by Sony and Microsoft because they want our eyes (and our money). But when one of the two companies gets market share, we’ll be less and less important to the overall picture.

Take for example the operating system market. Microsoft has had the market share for a long time and hence most of the changes are cosmetic and not technological. Imagine if there was a raging battle going on in the OS arena. Operating systems would be real tools instead of the how they are now, where everyone is just happy we can now put animated backgrounds on our desktop.

So as long as this battle progresses with slow gains, hard-fought profits and remains at a 50-50 market share, the gamer is king. As the next round of games comes to market, the games we just saw at E3 like Halo 2 and Gran Turismo 4, we will be treated to some of the best gaming experiences to be found. And if that knocks your socks off, imagine what it will be like in 2005 when Xbox 2 and the Playstation 3 hit the market.

Enjoy is while it lasts, gamers. We are in a golden age.

This post was inspired by reading about some software called EVE 2.4. It helps teachers find similar sentence structure and such in articles on the Internet, so they can detect plagiarism in student’s work. I was upset that something like this is needed. Don’t teachers have enough hurdles in the classroom today?

Isn’t the point of going to college the attainment of an education? I never understood cheating on papers. It’s your mother language, least you could do is learn how to write well using it.

Writing a paper should be something that you do to prove to the teacher that you know your shit and that from now on, he/she can go easy on you. Make the first paper of the year the very best thing you can do. That way, every paper after that is graded with the professor thinking, “I don’t have to read too closely, Billy really knows his shit.”

You know, if it takes cheating for someone to make it through college, maybe they should get out of college. Not everyone needs a degree. We need car mechanics and forklift drivers and people are skilled at working with their hands. Maybe that might suit some of these kids struggling in college so much. This idea in America that every kid can be President and needs to go to college is a big load of bullshit foisted on us by some liberal desire to equate educational success with self-esteem.

The truth is if a car mechanic is good at what he does and takes pride in work, even though he may not have graduated high school, he can make over 100K a year and have a nice life. We should adopt a system that weeds out the wheat from the chaff and sends people to schools that are geared toward skills and educations for which they have a proclivity.

For every kid from the hood who goes to college and becomes a success, there’s 10 kids from the suburbs whose parents force them into college, where they fail out, get addicted to drugs, kill themselves, or generally fuck up. So, what’s the greater good for the greater number of people?

I have now watched the 8-minute trailer from E3 about 45 times. As a hobbyist gamer, it’s a wet dream. While it goes a long way to show us what we have to look forward to, it still leaves many questions unanswered.

Graphical Porn
The graphics, even though the video trailer is not a direct feed, are stunning. They will probably be the best graphics we’ve seen on the Xbox. I hope load times do not suffer in-between levels because of it. It also looks like Bungie has taken the time to make the environments rich with detail.

The explosions are rich. I recently spied some Planetside beta action and the explosions were weak. There are two things that can make or break a game: great explosion detail and environmental sounds. The explosions need to look good, not like the light bulb popping in Planetside, and the gun sounds have to have texture and depth. Skimping on either can weight a game down lead shoes on Jimmy Hoffa.

I Could Use a Buddy, Sometimes
One thing that made Halo a tad too much like all the other FPSs was how often you had to clear a whole level alone. While I don’t want to mess with friendly AI that often turns out to be not so friendly, those times when you were with some squad mates made the game fun. We’ve seen in games like Ghost Recon where your teammates suffer from sometimes bad AI scripting and they end up being more a burden than help.

I”m not suggesting Bungie lasso a squad of mates to follow you around, but I hope they stay away from the “I saved the whole planet alone” motif.

Storyline
I hope the story line is more complex than just “save Earth.” In the first Halo the storyline was more complex. While on many levels it was just a FPS, there was an underlying story if you chose to play attention to it. I’m hoping Bungie has some surprises in store for us here.

A Babe of Sorts
From the trailer it seems as though Cortana is your companion again. Why, and for how long is unclear. The simple reason is that she keeps the player on task and moving toward the next objective. From a storyline though, I”ll be interested to see how they keep her in the game.

A Step Above
What I’ll want to know over the coming months is how the game play is going to be handled. How will system link work with the game? Will they steal, er um, borrow the ideas from Brute Force the way Brute Force borrowed Halo’s controller configuration? Brute Force is taking a step away from the split screen by allowing you to play on multiple TVs with the System Link cable. Halo forces a split screen even on multiple TVs.

Brute Force will also allow you to switch from one-player to two-player on the fly. So you don’t have to start a new game if your buddy wants in on the action. Hopefully Halo 2 takes a lesson from that.

With Halo 2 still possibly a year away, we have plenty of time to speculate. But in the meantime, you can already pre-order the game.

In what must be one of the most confusing and asinine attempts at “Homeland Security,” the Bushinator has made it illegal to own and build certain types of model rockets. What he has really done is make engines of a certain size illegal because terrorists may use them for bombs.

So, get this straight, an industry, which is dominated by Estes Rockets is going to crushed under the weight of bureaucracy so some asshat with too much time and hate on his hands has to go buy fertilizer instead of cutting open and combining 4,000 model rocket engines. My point is that there are lots of other ways to make bombs instead of model rockets.

Of course, if there intent was to stop terrorists from using the rockets as payload delivery mechanisms, then I guess that’s even a sillier story. I have built several of these rockets over the years. There ability to carry a payload ranges somewhere in the range of what an ant can carry to a very small camera. To fear attack by model rockets is absolutely ridiculous. It’s like thinking that someone would unleash a ton of rats to disable the Capitol Building. Sure, it might happen, but who has the time or money to prepare a defense against it.

This is just another example of the ATF and Bushy’s Battalion of Homeland Defenders wanting to pry into the lives of everyday citizens. Heaven forbid that a child or an adult might have some healthy hobby that requires creativity, patience and attention to detail. Instead, let’s encourage everyone to hide out in their homes and play video games until they become some modern-day Gollums.

I say that we start a campaign. Let’s send as many model rocket engines to the White House as we can possibly get. Then let’s get Bushy to try and build a model rocket without help from one of his handlers. Odds are, he gets the coke shakes before the fins dry.

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Well, I am working on cutting up the new design as we speak. Once I get the code ready, then we can load in the MovableType templates, and voila! I also got the forums back to the way they looked before. Frankly, it matches well with our new design, so my planned skin may not come about.

Jetteva did most of the work on this design cribbing a few things from another template he had. We will attempt to be 100% XHTML compatible and 100% CSS, but I can’t promise anything right now. The new design is a great deal more detailed and graphic heavy, so I may cheat and use a few tables here and there.

Speaking of CSS and tables, SitePoint has announced their new book: HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS. I downloaded the sample chapters and it looks pretty interesting. I was thinking last night about how CSS and XML/XHTML have really changed the landscape of web design. I sat wondering what the next big watershed change will be. Hopefully, I will think of it and can be paid millions to write books and give seminars. It’ll be like winning some lottery, only greatly legitimized.

Stay tuned for the new design!