Usually I ignore crazy people. But when someone uses a tragedy like Virginia Tech to stand on their soapbox and start accusing video games of being the cause of violence in this country, it makes me sick. In the past, he claimed that a shooter in a previous instance trained on Grand Theft Auto before committing a school massacre. Does this man ever even look at video games? When he went on his tirade about the game Bully on G4, he admitted to never having even SEEN the game! Is there any rational thought to these blanket statements that he makes, every single time a something like this happens? I’m sorry, I must have missed the “school shooting simulation,” first-person perspective level in GTA3.

You know what? My last sentence was even too vague. I don’t care if there was an Army-approved, super-realistic shooting simulation available. Unless someone is PREDISPOSED to violence of this level, absolutely no amount of video game playing is going to make them kill someone. None. I don’t care how many scientific studies this man thinks there are to back his claims. A normal human being will not turn into a maladjusted killer because they played too much Counterstrike. He also says that the “common denominator” in these school shootings is that the killers “trained” on “mass-murder games.” Oh, teenagers were playing video games? That is shocking, absolutely shocking.

And as a matter of fact, there is no record that Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech even played video games. I’m in no way making light of these recent events at all, I’m just so thoroughly disgusted that this man continues to be invited by the media to spout his ignorant, misleading, and incorrect statements to the world. Mr. Thompson, please take some time to re-evaluate what it is you’re doing, and come up with a better, more productive way to help the American family.

Click To Play

Last Saturday night was Wii Fight Club, and there are four rules:
1. Don’t blog about Wii fight
2. Do NOT blog about Wii fight
3. No Twitter
4. No Dodgeball

Well, I broke three out of four… kind of. In any event, I kicked Ryan’s butt, so it was all worth it! See my victory interview on Geek Entertainment TV’s video of the event, seen above. Hopefully they’ll invite me back after this blog post.

More photos by Scott Beale from Laughing Squid, seen here on Flickr.

There are a lot of really intelligent and influential people in the world that love Second Life. It’s important enough that News.com writes about it all the time, and magazines write cover stories on people making their fortunes inside of it.

I think it’s boring.

The idea is really great. The implementation? Not so much. As someone who spends a considerable amount of time in a virtual world, I don’t understand how anyone could use an interface that is so poorly constructed. Is it much worse for me because I’m on a Mac? Is it really supposed to look like someone’s idea of what virtual reality should look like, if they lived in the 1980’s? And is there anything else to do other than program sexy actions and create “nude” skins for avatars?

I issue a challenge to you, SL fan - show me a good time. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places (I’m still bitter that they didn’t make my cubicle in the CNET offices…) and so I’m missing all the fun stuff. Drop a line in the comments and tell me what your favorite (non-sexy, please) activity in Second Life is, and we’ll go on a little trip. I want to be proven wrong!

Yesterday I started a Blood Elf on the Earthern Ring (RP) server. I did it so I could play with Andrew and Scott from The Instance. If you want to come say hi, her name is Imriela. It’s fun going back to the Horde, I have to say… although I was very opposed to the Blood Elves for some reason. Maybe she’ll win me over after all.