Tangentially related to the recent post looking at the relatationship between intelligence, conscientiousness, and credit scores at the state level are discussions over tactics to build (or more accurately, inflate) one's individual credit rating. Not long ago, Razib emphasized a few ways of going about this (the web is, incidentally, brimming with this kind of... Read More

The Inductivist suggests two contrasting images of a Real Man, broadly defined as representing the apotheosis of alphahood. He favors Gary Cooper's character Will Kane in High Noon and assigns Family Guy's Quagmire to Roissy's followers. The use of those two characters as competing Real Man iconic images is not something a PUA is going... Read More

Luigi should have been happy besting Mario in his second eponymous adventure. He could've spent his career scampering around in the forest trying to rescue squirrels from killer robots, after all (the link is to a video for which embedding is disabled by request).Early Sonic games were so much more mind blowing (for votaries of... Read More

... is my favorite character from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. He is not born with supernatural abilities allowing him to live for centuries or walk through a blizzard as if a snowshoe hare, nor does his lineage secure him membership among the company of kings. The keenness of his martial skills clearly have... Read More

Despite four of the last seven US Presidents being left-handed, the daily inconveniences lefties must suffer--the side of the palm covered in graphite after pencil use, the awkwardness in trying to write in a bounded notebook of any kind, the difficulty in playing pickup games of baseball (and no, we don't just want to be... Read More

A couple of years ago, Pew Research released a report on video game playing among teenagers. My curiosity was piqued, but I was underwhelmed by the results. It would be interesting to see data on gamers and non-gamers based on achievement level (GPA, IQ, SAT scores, etc). To that end, only a couple of things... Read More

For those who still can't get enough Canon Rock, take a look at this sweet compilation if you're not one of the nearly 4 million who've already done so: And no, I'm not pointing the video out just because it reveals my, uh, inability to appreciate the vibe and freshness of NAM musical creation. The... Read More

Is 17 years enough time for a story to earn the right to be called a classic? The modern video game industry is only 25 years old, so that's roughly equivalent to Shakespeare in terms of staying power (with the Gutenberg press as a starting point)! Here's a cut scene from Final Fantasy IV, to... Read More

My younger brother wanted my take on the five most influential and important people, ideas, inventions, events, and countries from the beginning of the 18th Century to the present. I'm notoriously bad at comprising such lists, especially off the top of my head. That's why normative rankings I post here are always (uh, except this... Read More

As one who is third-generation on the maternal side and has poor Ozarkan roots on the paternal side, I'm persistently tormented by the thought that I'm not whiter enough, that I haven't suffered through private school, violin lessons since the age of four, or being an only child. Sure, I may play soccer or have... Read More

My initial reaction upon hearing the news was annoyance. With the final installment released, the series had lost its organic ability to shift in the face of critical challenges that an ongoing operation enjoys. JK Rowling had decided, or been advised, to nip in the bud any nascent criticism about the Potter universe's traditional (nevermind... Read More

Germane to this addition is a word on the oft-commented upon contemporary decline in cultural creation. Much of it has gone into video games. This retrospective evinces how the material in FFIV is deserved of serious attention as a cultural object, with complex character relationships, and a larger moral imperative of those with varying grievances... Read More

After reading Al Fin's post on the rising neoteny of Western youth and Agnostic's post on "Category X-ers", I feel a bit ashamed to banter at length about the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, TMNT. But with a limitless number of entertainment and information sources available today, the number of national sensations continues to... Read More

A suggested title for an upcoming Onion story: Comical how in virtually all the media reports on Rove's departure, two contradictory points are emphasized: 1) Rove was not only the architect of political campaigning, but of everything from staffing concerns to foreign poilcy issues, and 2) Nobody knows what took place in conversations between Rove... Read More

Using this neat card editor created by Twan van Laarhoven, I've indulged myself in coming up with a few old RPG-inspired custom card 'sets':Final Fantasy IV (originally II)Final Fantasy VI (originally III)Final Fantasy IXFinal Fantasy XChrono TriggerEarthboundDragon Warrior (Quest) IVDragon Quest VIIIParenthetically, I've had a recurrent pining to get back into Magic: The Gathering, but... Read More

One word to describe this: Fast.The twin electric guitar playing is mind-numbingly quick, and the percussion is hardly a step behind.The guy playing Stepmania appears to a be a savant of celerity as well, but I've a sneaking suspicion that there were more than one set of hands on the keyboard when this went down.This... Read More

For readers roughly between the ages of 19-30 for whom the eight-bit holds a significant place in their hearts, I link to the pseudononymous Angry Video Game Nerd. If you weren't raised on the NES, however, you won't get much from watching him. He tackles several awful games and gets them right across the board--including... Read More

A few days ago I got sucked into a game of Scrabble with my mother and grandmother. The matriarchs are both prolific players, but being so audacious, I expected to win anyway. Instead, my mother and I tied, even after exhausting the rules for tiebreaking. I place blame on the old American Heritage Dictionary we... Read More

The top two Presidential campaign fundraisers for the first quarter of 2007:Hillary Clinton: $26 millionBarack Obama: $25 millionCursed nation, oppressively keeping the doors of opportunity closed to women and minorities. Well, at least the political arena is based exclusively on merit, unlike the entrenched subjectivity, celebrity, and furtive personal and social agendas that go into... Read More