Overnight Open Thread

Thirty Years of the Best First Person Shooters Ever Made

And what a long fun shootout it's been. I believe I've played nearly all of these starting with Battlezone back in the day and going all the way up to CoD 4 and soon CoD: Black Ops. However there was a long dead period during the 80s up to Castle Wolfenstein when PC graphics just weren't quite up to the task so I skipped a couple in there.

Few things give me more pleasure than killing Nazis and killing aliens - and in Return to Castle Wolfenstein I was able to slake both desires at the same time. Overall my faves have probably been the Doom and the Half Life series. Good times, good times.

And in other video games news - Duke Nukem Forever may finally, really, for reals get released this May.

For those of you who don't know DNF is the long awaited sequel to 1996's Duke Nukem 3D that's been in development hell for over 12 (!!) years. It's won the annual Vaporware award so many times that it's now been permanently retired. Starting in 1997 it has morphed over the years from a delayed game to a death march project to practically a cult at the end - you can read the full details here.

But 3D Realms/Broussard finally went bust in 2009 and the new owners swear that it's going to be released in its final form this May and have already released a new trailer. GameStop is actually pre-selling it this time so I figure there's a solid 10-20% chance of it actually showing up sometime this year.

Latest Way to Get Drugs Into The US? Catapults!
Okay technically they're potapults.

How Broke Are Cities These Days?
So broke that they can't even afford to bury the poor. And so the bodies are stacking up at the morgue. As their financial woes get worse expect some cities to start burying unclaimed bodies in mass graves like in medieval times.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich Suing House Cafeteria

Rep. Dennis Kucinich has sued a U.S. House of Representatives cafeteria for selling him a sandwich wrap that caused dental damage when he bit into an olive pit, according to a Jan. 3 lawsuit filed in Superior Court for the District of Columbia.

9 Minutes of Bollywood Awesomeness
If you mixed together The Terminator, The Matrix, and Transformers and then threw in some acrobatics and dance numbers, you'd get this. So how soon will we start outsourcing all our action-adventure movies to India as well?

ObamaCare Waivers Growing
Over 700 employers covering 2.2 million people are now exempt from ObamaCare benefit caps. Which means about 1% of the US is exempt. Expect businesses and unions to go all out to get waivers until Obamacare is finally repealed.

Epic Camping in Karelia
How a Russian man kayaked into the forest, spent 20 days doing manly camping and even built a wood hunting lodge in the process. Karelia is a far North forested region on the borders of Finland and Russia. Note also the quiet but integral role that bacon and vodka played.

Self-Control at Age 3 = Future Life Success

'The international team of researchers looked at 1,037 children in New Zealand born in the early 1970s, observing their levels of self-control at ages 3 and 5.
…
At age 32, they used physical exams, blood tests, records searches and personal interviews of 96% of the original participants to determine how healthy, wealthy and law-abiding the subjects had turned out to be. The results were startling. In the fifth of children with the least self-control, 27% had multiple health problems. Compare that with the fifth of kids with the most self-control — at just 11%. Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth. And 43% of the bottom fifth had been convicted of a crime, far outstripping the top fifth's 13% rate.'"

5 Fashion Styles That Defined Entire Eras - That Were Made Up By Movies
From cowboys to disco to biker gang attire a lot of iconic fashion was essentially made up by Hollywood. Supposedly even mafiosos started emulating The Godfather since that was how the mob was supposed to act and dress.

What The Length of Your Index Finger Says About You

And yet for many decades now, scientists have noticed an extraordinary link between the ratio of two digits on the hand — the ring and index fingers, known in scientists’ jargon as 2D and 4D — and a whole host of seemingly unrelated traits.

Evidence is growing that this ‘digit ratio’, especially when applied to the right hand, is a fundamental indicator of sexuality, aggression and ­diseases suffered by men.

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posted by Maetenloch at 09:49 PM

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