PAX Omegathon Ending

I only sort of followed the blog reports from Penny Arcade Expo, but when one of them (Joystiq? Game|Life?) mentioned the pure adrenalin of the Omegathon final round, I had to watch the video.

The Omegathon is a competition among a small group of PAX attendees to see who is the ultimate gamer. Each round is a tournament on a well-known game.

For the final round, Tycho and Gabe (Jerry and Mike) have always picked an old game: Pong and Tetris have both shown up.

Not this year. The two of them did the intro perfectly, having the lights go out just as they claimed all technical difficulties had been worked out. At that point, the screens started flickering, and a band (The Minibosses) started to play the theme song to Halo 3. It's not out yet, but Bungie arranged to make the final Omegathon round a brand new level of Halo 3.

As the crowd begins to realize what's going on, they go ballistic. I don't have an Xbox so I've never played Halo, but it's hard to resist the sheer energy of the crowd.

Part 2 (slightly overlapped) is here

Diegogarcity

You know how when you learn about something for the first time, and suddenly it shows up everywhere? It's always been there, presumably, but you've never noticed it before?

Turns out there's a term for this phenomenon: Diegogarcity. The last graf of this post at wordorigins.org gives the origin.

Actions And Words

Can we just take it as a given from now on that if someone is rabidly anti-anything-off-the-supposed-sexual-mainstream, they're obviously a closet case? It would save a lot of posturing by politicians. 

Awesome Cast Puzzle Ad

If only the U.S. had ads like this one, an ad for Cast Puzzles, perhaps the highest-quality commercial puzzles around. (The puzzle in the ad, by the way, is a metal remake of The Wanderer by Oskar van Deventer. It's a puzzle everyone should own.)