I understand Lindsey Lohan's a big deal these days. She got arrested for getting blotto in public again.

Of course, I really don't know exactly who that is, so let's skip to something more substantial, eh?

Like Estonia. For the geographically-challenged, it's a small country south of Finland that was forcibly integrated into the Soviet Union, then liberated in 1991. They're generally unassuming on the world scene, though the Estonians I've met are a nice bunch. Over the last month, their government computer networks have been subjected to a targeted DDoS attack.

"An especially dangerous kind of firearms have come to be used, which are called wheelock, with which a homicide can easily be committed. His Excellency, knowing that these are devilish arms, prohibits their being carried without explicit authorization, under penalty of having a hand publicly cut off."
–City Ordinance, Ferrara, Italy, 1523

This is one of the first gun control laws ever penned. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (yep, they still had those then) passed similar edicts a few years previously, and the first gun-grabbing legislation took hold in Austria and the Netherlands.

Another day, another piece of Mall Ninja Tactical Recon Deployment (M.A.N.T.A.R.D.) gear. Today's exhibit is a bayonet mount, complete with blade, for a CZ 75 SP-01.

A bayonet. For a pistol.

Lest you think that this is something I just overheard when I had the tinfoil cap off, here it is, in all its blurry glory:

I've long considered manned space travel a dead-end. I suppose it comes from the fact that the Challenger disaster had burned itself into my memory as a child. I remember being stunned by the images coming back from the Voyagers at Jupiter and Saturn and getting my mind around the fact that those were whole other worlds. We could go such fascinating places with machines, but getting humans off the planet was obviously a costly, dangerous and futile proposition.

I could bolster that argument with the tragedies of Apollo 13, Skylab and recently, the shuttle Columbia. And for many years, I did.

No, I'm just happy to see you.

Got home from the new job tonight, and after greeting the dogs, I pulled everything off my belt and out of my pockets and flopped it down on the desk. I've never really stopped to look, but man, I carry around alot of stuff.

Left to right: Luna, Dante and Rashid.

Crackdown has gone through an odd life-cycle. It didn't get much of a promotional push, and first impressions didn't help it, either. On the surface, it appears to be a Grand Theft Auto clone with slightly better graphics (of which there are only 46,178 titles available). What's more, Microsoft chose to bundle the Halo 3 beta key with it. That kind of move usually smells of desperation, and it's usually reserved for titles that just can't hack it on their own merits.

Despite all these things, it's turned out to be one of the most enjoyable titles on the 360 at the moment, and it's garnered itself a certain amount of worthy dark-horse status.

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It's been said that there are six kinds of people in this world: those who can read binary, and those who can't.

Stuff like this is why I love Linux. Here's Beryl running on Ubuntu Feisty:

If you're into this sort of thing, a guy named Sérgio Lopes has come up with a way to run Internet Explorer in Linux. I tried it, and it works:

…which is to say, it works as best as IE can be expected to. It's slow, buggy, and of course, it can't render CSS on a 4th-grade level. Still, if you need it, here it is.

It took awhile, but I finally got a set of grips I'd always wanted from Hakan Pek. They're black laminate with a slight concave swell at the thumbrest.

Ah. Killer 7. In gaming circles, this title is highly controversial. It embodies the "game-as-art vs. game-as-entertainment" debate more than any other. Sure, games like the worthy Okami and Ico both qualify as "artistic," while also being engaging, but no other game I can think of wears the look-at-me-I'm-art-with-a-capital-A badge with such brazen pride as Killer 7. You either love it for its loopy, entrancing story and its quirky graphics, or you hate it for its weird control mechanics and obtuse nature.

Of course, it didn't sell very well. You can still find it in the used bins, and I highly recommend at least trying it for the sake of experiencing something unique. That's probably where it would have ended for Killer 7, as a weird cult title with major stylistic ambitions.

That is, until Jack Thompson got ahold of it.