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300 Say They Got Ill From Olive Garden

That few?

No, seriously. This time it’s not trading real money for fake property or fleecing some media company into opening a bureau in the game. Nope, this time it’s honest-to-simulated-God avatar rape. You even get of a Choose Your Own Deviant Sexual Adventure feel as well. There’s Victim, Rapist, or Participant, where you get to help, but not “help” if you know what I mean.

Sure, it’s simulated. Sure, both avatar-owners have to click something to participate. But are we really so far gone that we have to enable people to commit virtual felonies?

It’s not Snow Crash; get over it.
Second Life: Rape for Sale – Gawker

Clay Shirky pegs the issue with the graphically-awful, over-hyped, socially-devoid virtual life that is Second Life.

Finally, the current mania is largely push-driven. Many of the articles concern “The first person/group/organization in Second Life to do X”, where X is something like have a meeting or open a store — it’s the kind of stuff you could read off a press release. Unlike Warcraft, where the story is user adoption, here most of the stories are about provider adoption, as with the Reuters office or the IBM meeting or the resident creative agencies. These are things that can be created unilaterally and top-down, catnip to the press, who are generally in the business of covering the world’s deciders.

Push marketing. You’d think the hipsters and technorati would see through that. Oh, right, it’s marketed by BoingBoing.
Second Life: What are the real numbers?. Many-to-Many:

Image of Jesus appears on the ass of a dog.

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Everyone, note the day that this post is being written: 4 Dec 2006.

Coroner Frank Minyard told the City Council last month that the Michoud area of eastern New Orleans had never been searched for bodies since Katrina and should be investigated as soon as possible.

Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. That was 1 year, 3 months, and 5 days ago. After that long, you’d think it was buried under a ton of debris, something like the bodies being found at the World Trade Center, right?

Wrong.

The body was found Wednesday night in a yard at St. Maurice Avenue and North Robertson Street, chief coroner’s investigator John Gagliano said. (emphasis mine)

In a yard. Decomposed to the point that they have to call in an anthropologist to determine the victim’s gender. Their gender.
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Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer and self-appointed censor of many bad words in others’ products, has been carrying a Nazi-logo’d T-shirt for months, now into Day 22 since they said the shirts would be removed. You can follow the whole saga at The Consumerist (warning, Gawker site; get your Adblock on.)

Can’t have a Sheryl Crow album that refers to Wal-Mart, but hurry and get your neo-nazi iconography while it lasts. No publicity is bad publicity, right Wal-Mart?

Finally.

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What’s that phrase about necessity and invention? Check out this nail (yes, a nail) that has twice the “uplift capacity” of standard nails. That means it can hold something down twice as well as a standard nail in, say, a storm.

Link [via Neatorama]

“I mean, come on—we could have lined up in alphabetical order in the end zone dressed in nothing but helmets and socks and whacked off for 60 minutes, and the BCS would still send us to the Tostitos Championship Game,” Tressel told the assembled reporters. “Hell, you’d all still vote for [Buckeyes quarterback] Troy Smith to win the Heisman. And you know it.”

*snort*

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Galactica moves to Sunday night at 10pm? WTF?

Sci-Fi Storm | Galactica jumps to Sunday night