I should have added a music category to the site, but this will probably be the last genuine news post I make so it doesn't really matter. Anyway, it's a sad day for classy people as one third/third-and-a-half of hip hop group the Beastie Boys died of cancer today. MCA was the raspy, badass mother-shut-yo-mouth of the trio and will be sorely missed. He is survived by Mike D and the King Ad-Rock.

Let us all enjoy the continuingly ill adventures of the Beastie Boys.

Okay, everyone. As you should know, I've been running a contest for a free game from GOG.com if we can hit 50 registered members here on the site. I started the contest in June of 2011 and we still haven't hit that number, and most of those who registered haven't been active enough to qualify for the prize anyway. So I'm hereby putting a time limit on this thing.

I'm working on one final redesign of the site, and if we haven't reached 50 members by the time it's finished, I'm cancelling the contest. The whole point of the contest was to get people to tell their friends about the site so that they would join and be active, and that hasn't happened. I can't be expected to keep this offer running indefinitely, so I won't.

I don't know when the redesign will be done, so I'm not setting a firm date for the contest's cancellation. If you care at all about the prize, get active in the forum/comments and tell your friends to join. Otherwise, I apologize to those who did join and were active in hopes of netting a free game.

I'm not posting this as a threat or an enticement. I don't really care about the contest. I just figured I should let people know what my plans are so that I can avoid being sued.

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island is a sequel to 2008's Journey to the Center of the Earth and, presumably, a prequel to Journey 3: The Search for More Money. I didn't even realize what Journey 2 was sequelizing until I was in the theatre and saw Josh Hutcherson's terrible underbite, which immediately reminded me of the first film. But even then I wasn't certain because, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't see an aging Brendan Fraser anywhere. Instead I was greeted by the rippling muscles, shaved head and perfect white teeth of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Suddenly I knew that this is what my whole life had been leading to, and this is where I was meant to be.

Journey 2 was going to be the greatest film I had ever seen.

Continue Reading . . .

So, there's this game developer named Christina Norman. She used to work for Bioware on Mass Effect, and now she's—I don't know—licking ball sacks for money behind the 7-11 or something (she's very popular with the local soccer coaches since those sacks are very difficult to clean after a game). The point is, she recently said this:

There's no point in releasing DLC a year after your game has come out when most people have already sold your game back to GameStop three times. That means getting it out early; that means even day-one DLC. That is a terrible thing to some players. Players rant--they know nothing about this DLC that's coming out except its name. But then it's 'oh this game must be incomplete, the game must be ruined.' Game developers are not evil. (Some are evil.) But most are not evil. (Shacknews)

I understand what she's saying, but the problem is that what she's saying is stupid. It's not the fact that Mass Effect 3's ten-dollar downloadable content "From Ashes" was released at the same time as the game itself that has people pissed off. That fact is only a signifier of greater things, namely that the content was done at the same time as the base game, but was withheld from the final release for the explicit purpose of making ten extra dollars off of as many sixty-dollar sales as EA could. EA can claim that it was a different team with different resources that handled the DLC, but by that same logic, isn't it also a separate team with its own resources that programs the artificial intelligence? Should that be released as its own thing on top of the cost of the full game?

Basically, what I'm saying is that EA's reasoning here is bullshit. The only reason that "From Ashes" could possibly have not been included on the disk (which itself isn't even a statement toward it's inclusion in the game proper anymore, what with on-disk "downloadable" content being a thing for a while now) is so that EA could make that extra ten dollars.

That's why people are mad. Not because they have to buy extra content or even that they have to buy it on the first day, but because content is being specifically withheld, and in many cases from games that aren't worth the initial cost to begin with, like Dead Space 2. And then publishers like EA lie about it like we're stupid—as though we were a race entirely of Christina Normans or something.

It's nearly Valentine's Day and you know what that means! No, it's not time to hang the rope from the ceiling fan again. We covered this last year: you're way too fat for it to support your weight. If you really want to kill yourself anyway you can just keep eating, and then you may at least break a world record while you're at it.

I'm talking about the annual Valentine's Day Horror Movie Marathon! The one reliable feature that I contribute to this site because I literally have an entire year to prepare it in advance. So if anything happens between April 25, 2011 and February 14, 2012, you can bet that this article will totally ignore it! That's just my commitment to you, the reader.

This year, in honour of the recent DVD release of the prequel to The Thing and breaking the commitment I made just two sentences ago, it's going to be an all Who Goes There?-themed marathon! I won't expect that you've read the original novella that these three films are based on, however, because I know that you're illiterate.

Continue Reading . . .

You can also watch the original YTMND here: http://ohmylove.ytmnd.com

The official story is that this is a video of an "animatronic baby mechanism for [an] anonymous TV series." The truth that they don't want you to hear? Sex robot for Newt Gingrich.

Via Geekologie