I re-activated my Mobygames account a couple of weeks ago and decided to add a list of my favourite games to my profile page there. It’s hard choosing only a couple of them, but here’s a list and my reasons why I included them, in no particular order. Maybe you’ll discover something new or have some good memories of some of the games.
Two days ago, the United States Supreme Court toppled the gun ban in Washington DC. I am probably a bit naive, but I was shocked at how the mostly US-residents at a games forum I frequent reacted to this. They had pretty much nothing but applause for the result, even those who didn’t care much for guns stated that the freedom to bear arms is important to them. I simply can’t understand how having firearms in your home reduces the crime rate. Criminals knowing that every household has a gun in a drawer somewhere won’t turn into saints looking for legal work all of a sudden. They commit crimes for a reason, and I doubt they don’t know the risks that come with their “job.” And even if they avoid robbing homes and choose “easier” targets, as suggested in the forum thread, that doesn’t reduce the crime rate at all. It just shifts a little into other areas. And I guess it’s safe to say that the probability of firearm accidents is 100% higher if you have a gun at home than if you don’t. And of course, lifting the restrictions on gun possession will make it a lot easier for criminals to get hold of weapons themselves. It’s like an arms race between two nations. If you know your target owns a gun, you’d better be equipped with an adequate counterpart yourself. I mean, a gun is a device made to kill a living being. How can that be any good for anyone? I’ve even seen a video once of children sitting on machine guns at a firing range, with their daddies standing there right next to them smiling. WTF is wrong with this society? I think it’s time to realize that maybe, 200 years ago, things were a little different than they are now. At least other high-income countries with stricter regulations seem to have less problems with homicide as well. But I guess the constitution is just too much of a religion for the US, an infallible, untouchable holy grail of democracy.
De La Soul - Stakes is High
I’m checking NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander website daily to get updates on the mission and new photos to look at. I find it really fascinating and quite a technological feat to shoot a complicated machine into space, have it travel millions of kilometers over periods of months or years and then land it on another planet. And it still works after everything it went through (well, sort of, there are already some minor problems.) Anyway, I was getting some of the latest photos from the site. The stereoscopic camera on Phoenix only shoots black and white photos, but there is an array of red, green and blue LEDs near the camera. This allows to shoot the scene three times, with different lighting and thus later on compose a colour picture. I tried this myself today with one of the pictures, but it’s of course only a very rough approximation, and nowhere a scientific process. It’s especially difficult since the photos aren’t labeled, so you don’t know with what colour light they were illuminated. I tried some reasoning, since the primary colour on Mars is red, the brightest photo of the series should be the red channel from my naive understanding and so on. The result is what you can see above.
This got me thinking about my favourite space pictures, so here’s a little rundown of some of them, in no particular order. Click on the images to view high-resolution versions.