Wow, I've been getting alot of new readers, lately. I mean, soon enough, I'll mostly have readers that won't know the no-brainers that the original CSC blogosphere knew. I guess I'll just have to be careful about what I assume my readers know... anyway... on to business.

I've been keeping up with the latest geek news over the past few days, and bot have I been under a rock! Now, I like video games. Besides being fun (their main purpose), there's way more to enjoy. Final Fantasy games have stories deeper than most novels . Not to mention the puzzle aspect of Zelda games.

On the other hand, there's violent games. Let me give you some background, to begin. The ESRB rates games alot like movies. "E" (Everyone) is like a G-rated movie. "T" (Teen) is PG-13, and "M" (Mature) is "R." Then there's A-O (Adults only), which corresponds to NC-17. M-rated usually falls into two categories: crude for the sake of crude, and actually pretty good (much like R-rated movies).

Now that the background is out of the way, let's move on to the topic at hand: Jack Thompson. Mr. Thompson is an attourney who is avidly against violence in games. He's also not a big fan of underaged kids having more adult-oriented games. I'm with him on that. I mean, my neighbor back home had at least ten M-rated games, and he was twelve. Of course, that responsibility falls to the parent. He didn't buy the games.

Now, that's all well and good, but he is not only against games, but seems to have it out for gamers as well. Let me try and summarize the events:

Thompson, in one letter to the public, stated that he would donate $10,000 to the charity of Paul Eibeler's choice (Eibeler being the CEO of a video game company), if someone where to make a violent game on the premise of an angry parent (whose son would have been the victim of "video game violence") seeking out revenge on video game designers. All the while, a group of modders (who change the mechanics of pre-existing games) created a similar scenerio, in which Thompson was the main character, instead taking steps to prevent violent video games from being sold. Thompson responded by saying his offer was "satire," much like Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. In response, the authors of the webcomic Penny Arcade donated $10,000 to the ESA foundation (the "for" line being "For Jack Thompson because Jack Thompson won't").

Thompson faxed the Seattle Police about things like an "I hate Jack Thompson" shirt and the posts on Penny Arcade's website. This was accomponied with an e-mail correspondace between them. Through this, Thompson repeatedly disrespects and attacks the gaming community, using name-calling, etc. "Honestly, are all of you gamers on drugs, or what?" aksed Thompson.

So there you go. As you can imagine, he's been getting alot of hate-mail and whatnot. I mean, he has some almost good points, but he's declaring some kinda holy war against video games! Well, there's my rant of the month. I've got updates to the other blogs, too, so make sure and check those out. Man, that Zach.

Oh, and another big update for Eric Online: I found a use for the old Tripod site. Just go to http://eric22222.tripod.com/id37.html to see the new downloads page. Of course, it'll only have one purpose: showcasing the music I compose. I figured out how to export my songs as midis, so now you can enjoy my mad piano skills 24/7. There's only one song up for download now, but I'll another in a few days or so. Then I'll have to do some more composing.