James Lileks informs us that The Gobbler was once the grooviest motel in Wisconsin.

Consider, for example, The Romantic, Purple Luxury Room with King-Sized Bed:

If you found yourself so drunk you did not know which way was up, this room had a helpful tactile hint: short carpet, wall. Thick carpet, floor. Barf accordingly.

You really have to see the photographs to fully grasp the awesomeness of the decor.

[Via MetaFilter]

Tom Armitage ponders what might happen If Gamers Ran The World:

Barack Obama is 47. By contrast, David Cameron – who leaps to mind as another potential national leader in the coming years, whatever you may think of that fact – is 42. I got to thinking about what a national leader might look like in ten years time, 2018. Let's suggest, based on Obama and Cameron, that they're 45.

[...]

They would have been a gamer all their lives. Not someone who once played videogames, trotting out the same anecdote about "playing Asteroids once" in interviews; someone for whom games were another part of their lives, a primary, important medium. Someone who understood games.

[...]

To explore what a gamer might bring to the world, I'm going to break the talk up into a number of sections; in them, I'll examine some fairly large "issues", and look at the kind of games that might teach us something about them.

Scarcity
The next 50-100 years are likely to be characterised by scarcity: the increasing scarcity of natural resources like oil, and the realisation that cheapness is often just an illusion. Cheap oil is an illusion. Cheap food is an illusion – you might notice in the shops that whilst the price of cheap bread is rising rapidly, expensive bread is rising in price much more slowly. We're slowly being reminded of the real cost of things. How does your behaviour behave when things become expensive? And how do you behave if you've grown up never knowing that some things used to be cheap?

A gamer looks at scarcity and says "oh, this is just survival horror". Survival horror is, fundamentally, about surviving terrifying situations in the face of scarcity of resources – usually ammunition and health. You can't play Resident Evil as if it was Quake; that leads to death very quickly. Instead, the player has to make judgment calls about every action. Save points, in early survival horror, are rationed just like ammunition; saving now means potentially not being able to save later. Using this magnum round now means not having it later. Taking the SMG as Claire means that it won't be there for Leon.

[...]

The shift to survival horror is a big shift for an economy based on wholesale, overpowering victory. There's no longer any bonus to highscores and killing everything; the only victory is survival. And when reduced to those raw elements, survival is, by its very nature, horrific. Thinking about bare minimums is frightening. And gamers – or, at least, fans of one particular genre – are already well-versed in what survival looks like. [...]

[Via Qwghlm]

Ben Goldacre bangs his head against the brick wall one more time:

As usual, it’s not Watergate, it’s just slightly irritating. “Down’s births increase in a caring Britain”, said the Times: “More babies are being born with Down’s syndrome as parents feel increasingly that society is a more welcoming place for children with the condition.” [List of further feel-good newspaper headlines follows...]

Their quoted source was no less impeccable than a BBC Radio 4 documentary presented by Felicity Finch (her what plays Ruth Archer), broadcast on Monday. “The number of babies with down syndrome has steadly fallen, that is until today, when for the first time ever that number is higher than before, when testing was introduced.” I see. “I’m keen to find out why more parents are making this decision.” They’re not. “I was so intrigued by these figures that I’ve been following some parents to find out what lies behind their choice.” Felicity. Wait a second. The entire founding premise of your entire 27 minute documentary is wrong. [...]

The sad thing is, the core point being made in the documentary – that there's more widespread knowledge about the sort of support required by children born with Down's syndrome nowadays – is quite possibly correct; it's just that the statistics quoted by the press don't address that point.

The BBC are bringing back The Triffids:

The year is 2011 and man has finally depleted the world's fossil fuel supply. In the hunt for alternative sources they uncover the ominous Triffid, a crop now cultivated for its fuel that seems to have a life of its own. [...]

It seems to me that this is a remake worth doing. From what little I remember of the 1981 version, John Duttine was fine in the lead role but the limitations in the special effects technology of the day meant that the triffids didn't actually move all that much or even get a great deal of screen time. Admittedly there's a danger that we'll end up knee-deep in unconvincing CGI triffids by the hundred, but it's also quite possible that the roaming plant life will seem properly scary this time round. I'd say it's a risk worth taking.

[Via Kevan Davis]

Ewwww!

Marina Hyde reveals that no matter how bizarre British reality TV can seem, there are always depths yet to be plumbed:

The highways of Muncie, Indiana, are patrolled by erstwhile ChiPs actor Erik Estrada, who so enjoyed his role in another US reality show last year that he recently stated: "I am a law enforcement officer first now. Before I was an actor playing a cop and now I am a cop who will act once in a while."

The show in question was Armed & Famous, whose premise was basically to give sublebrities loaded guns and order them to police a real town. Plucked from unscripted programming's unofficial repertory company, the cops included Estrada, reality Zelig Jack Osbourne, LaToya Jackson, and a dwarf. There's always a dwarf.

As for how the show went … Estrada unleashed an obscenity-laden tantrum at an ambulance patient who accidentally referred to him as Emilio Estevez. But the standout triumph – and possibly the reason Armed & Famous was pulled off air after three episodes – featured our rookies storming the house of a woman who was watching TV alone in her nightgown. It transpired in the resultant lawsuit that the celeb-cops had the wrong house but they declined to accept that at the time, choosing instead to handcuff the woman and subject her to a lengthy interrogation. According to court papers, she was left so shaken that she could only explain her ordeal to actual cops with the words. "LaToya Jackson and Jack Osbourne were involved."

Christopher Dickey's article in Newsweek is worthy of a resounding cry of WTF!?!

Revolution 2.0
The Obama campaign developed powerful Web tools that might shape government but are more likely to build opposition movements, revolutions and possibly terrorist cells.

[...]

The Internet has always been just as open to purveyors of hate as it is to those who promise hope. It is not an ideology or ethos. It's a collection of tools for communication – and for organization and mobilization – that anyone can use. Al Qaeda discovered that a long time ago. [...]

What concerns me here is that the Obama campaign has now shown the world, bad guys as well as good guys, the state of the art. This isn't criticism and certainly wasn't the intent, but it's unavoidable. And while the president-elect's supporters talk about using the Web to build his democratic government, what experience has shown us so far is that the model is most effective when it is used by the forces of opposition, by outsiders. [...]

Dickey's article is primarily about the proposition that the Obama transition team is changing the focus of their web-based activity now that they're a government-in-waiting. Why he feels the need to link this story to the dubious proposition that terrorists are picking up organisational tips from the Obama web site is beyond me. Presumably by his logic the US forces occupying Iraq should adopt the most counterproductive tactics possible, lest they reveal to the terrorists how to forge mutually beneficial relationships with the locals and leave the country in a better state than it was when they found it.¹

[Via delicious/foreignpolicy]

1. Hey! Wait a minute… ↩

I do hope the history books fifty years hence won't record that the trigger for the Third World War was infringement of intellectual property rights:

HELSINKI, Finland, Nov. 21 (UPI) — In an odd post-battle inquiry, Finland wants to know whether Russia, in its August conflict with Georgia, used Finnish camouflage, military officials say.

Studying pictures taken in Georgia, Finnish authorities are trying to determine whether Russian armed forces were wearing M/05, a pattern that is based on digital photographs of Finnish forests and legally protected in the European Union.

[Via Certain Ideas of Europe]

Natural Harvest: A collection of semen-based recipies

Semen is not only nutritious, but it also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties. Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants. Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food. This book hopes to change that. [...]

[Via Judge a Book by its Cover]

Graham Linehan, on the way to the Emmys:

We're in a taxi, on the way to the Emmys, and the driver asks us where we're going. We tell him about the nomination and he says "Oh, my wife, she's crazy about British television, she loves that show … oh, what is it … set in the Fifties or the Sixties…" [...]

See if you can guess which BBC export he was talking about before you get to the end of the story…

It turns out that the best way to build a really big suspension bridge is to use rockets:

So you've erected the enormous towers on each side of the deep valley, deeper than any valley previously bridged. How do you get a pilot cable from one tower to the next? Previous solutions have included: attaching the cable to a kite and flying it over (e.g. Niagara Falls suspension bridge), carrying one end by helicopter (e.g. Akashi Kaikyo bridge) and floating one end on a boat (e.g. Brooklyn Bridge). The brains behind the Siduhe bridge decided to ignore all those options and break another record instead. They attached the 3,200ft cables to rockets and accurately fired them over the valley [...]

[Via kottke.org]

Exquisite paper sculptures by Elsa Mora.

I adore this one.

[Via fourth edition]

The 10 Doctors may be fanfic, but it's very good fanfic. A recent instalment contained possibly my favourite passage of dialogue in the series to date:

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart: They tell me The Doctor will arrive here shortly, so be prepared to feel completely useless.

Sage advice…

Best. Meteor. Strike. Ever!

[Via MetaFilter]

No matter how it's shelved, You Will See Flesh…

Kinky.

Half a year of Sun.

[Via Kevan Davis]

Bender's Anti-Piracy Warning.

[Via Comics Worth Reading]

From Ansible 256:

Peter David is delighted that his comic Fallen Angel has been banned by a US prison as 'detrimental to the security and good order of the institution and the rehabilitation of inmates.' He wrote: 'We are SO using this as a pull quote on the next trade paperback.'

xkcd: Faust 2.0.

Stu of Feeling Listless is thoroughly unimpressed by Heroes showrunner Tim Kring's account of his plans for the show:

Kring said no final ending for 'Heroes' has been conceived, noting, "We didn't have an island to get off of." On top of that, Kring noted that "My original idea was more of an anthological vibe to it, where you regenerate the characters."

Veiled Lost reference there. Actually, you did have a goal, a very good one, but you pissed it away at the close of season one. A surprising number of shows don't, but with a piece like Heroes you'd at least need to have a notion, simply because of all the characters involved. Audiences can smell when you don't know what your end game is. Look at The X-Files which began to look stale by the sixth season because we'd all worked out that Chris Carter had less of an idea of what his mythology meant than we did.

I don't see the X Files parallel, mostly because I don't think Heroes did set itself up from the start as setting out to solve a big central mystery. We now know that there have been people with powers, possibly triggered in part by a solar eclipse, for centuries. The task of working out why this happens could be used as the big goal in the show's final season, but it certainly isn't inherent in the setup of the show that everyone is trying to figure out how and why they got their powers.¹ In The X Files, by contrast, it was central to the motivation of one of the two main characters that he wanted to solve the mystery of UFOs/government cover-ups/what happened to his sister.

I don't have as negative a view of Heroes as many online commenters. Season 1 was excellent, season 2 was wrecked by the impact of the writers' strike, and season 3 has introduced a major new bad guy who could well be around for years and is doing OK: I think we should judge it when we get to the end of the season.

Where I think the show's producers have a serious problem is that the economics and practicalities of running a TV series don't lend themselves to the "anthological" approach Tim Kring set out to use. In comics about a superhero team, the writers can easily push a character into the background for a while to let others take the spotlight: Marvel's writers haven't given, say, Nightcrawler a lead role in any of the main titles in years; he's been present in various teams, but usually in a background role at best.

If Marvel decided tomorrow that Nightcrawler was going to be the lead character in Matt Fraction's next big Uncanny X-Men story arc then they could make it so without much bother. By contrast, if the producers of Heroes were to drop the character of Claire Bennet after season 3 and then decided to ask Hayden Panettiere to return to the role in season 7 because they had a storyline where her character would have a key role² then they'd have to deal with the possibility that the actress might not be available, or might be a lot more expensive to hire if her stock had risen in the meantime.³ They either need to have a lot more Heroes, so that no one character is essential to the show or has a unique powerset, or they need fewer Heroes so they can commit to following the fortunes of those characters.

1. Mohinder Suresh clearly is, and of course The Company and Pinehearst are carrying out powers-related research, but those efforts are more about controlling who has powers than why these people were granted powers. Most of the characters are working through the consequences of using, or not using, their powers, rather than searching for answers to the big question. ↩
2. The Trial of HRG? ↩
3. They could always recast the role, but if the character's popularity turned out to be partly down to the audience's reaction to the actress then that choice could backfire spectacularly. ↩