mo madder

2002.08.23
My buddy John "Whiskey" Sawers (get it, his last name is pronounced "sours" and...oh, never mind, it was just a nickname that I failed to get to stick) had his car stolen the other night...right from his driveway! It was a really old Subaru with a massive dent, rusty bits, and 170K miles...I joked that it must've been really dark that night.


Small Gif Cinema of the Moment

mo mad

--from a series of cathartic self-portraits by mo


Observation of the Moment
But the bottom line is that the players and kids stopped showing up. I think this is a weird fact, but every week we looked at earnings around the country, and the day that the Clinton report from the testimony of Monica Lewinsky got published on the Internet, the earnings in the arcades dropped 20%. Unfortunately, [those earnings] never returned! At that moment, I think the Internet became a source of entertainment.
Mark Turmell on the demise of the arcades and the rise of the Internet, from a Game Informer interview.
He's the designer of Smash TV, NBA Jam, and NFL Blitz. NFL Blitz is interesting, a pro-wrestling take on football, but in the interview he says the released version had about 60% of the tackles and moves removed.


News of the Moment
Interesting story about some recent war games by the armed forces...one of the leaders of the "bad guys" of the exercise thinks it was rigged to make the new policies of the DoD look good. Looking to the past, our enemies have been both dumber than we might have expected (Iraq underestimating our ability to come at them through the desert) but also better at jury-rigged solutions, from running explosive-laden motorboats into Navy cruisers to using inexpensive decoy tanks in the former Yugoslavia. That makes it tough to judge the claims General Van Riper (pronounced "Ripper", how cool is that?) that he was unfairly constrained against the counterclaim that he's so experienced as head of the "Red Force" (bad guys) that he has an unfair advantage.