Today's comic book quote comes from the latest Young Justice (motto: "Comics with 'Justice' in the name are associated with the Justice League and sell better! Bandwagon, here we come!").
[Arrowette] (referring to events in the previous issue) "I'm... going to have to become a super-villain." [Wonder Girl and Superboy] "Huh?" [Arrowette] "I tried to kill someone..." (angst angst angst) [Arrowette] "I'm a villain..." [Wonder Girl] "You're *not* a villain." [Arrowette] "I *am*! And it's going to stink. I won't get to *win* any more. And all my friends will hate me... And I'll have to get a skimpy black leather outfit that shows off my cleavage." (pause) "Oh, god... I'll have to *get* cleavage..."
Ah, youth.
Well, there are some interesting things in the news today. (Really, when aren't there.) First up, cheeky monkeys at the British 'net magazine The Register report that the US version of the next Tomb Raider game will have simpler puzzles, because, let's face it, most American kids have the attention spans of moldy cheese, and would rather look at Lara Croft's pert buttocks as she frags enemies than waste their precious time and minimal mental energies having to actually think. Also amusing is that in the Japanese release, Lara is never actually killed by the bad guys, only, er, penalized. OR something. Those wacky Japanese kids.
No wonder many good games (how many Square titles are there out there?) haven't been imported. With each passing year, the patience of the average gamer decreases. It's first-person shooters that are to blame, I tell you...
What can be done? Not a damn thing. Sorry, were you hoping for something cheerful here? Nope, the cold, honest truth is that there are more idiots than ever before, and each of those idiots has more influence than ever before because of the wonders of the information revolution. America's ideals have been rent apart, reduced to the lowest common denominator (who is, in fact, one Bubba "Bubba" Jones, of Lizard Lick, North Carolina, who manages to be his own uncle, son, second cousin and grandmother due to various things too convoluted to describe here), and then balkanized into a thousand fractious special interest groups, most of whom are composed entirely of idiots, and the rest of whom know exactly what they're doing and just don't care what the collateral damage is.
Who, at the height of the Cold War, could have imagined that the Russian 'Empire' would implode so mightily, that we would not merely beat them, but we would humiliate them so utterly that the equipment of their once-proud militaries would be hawked off and worn as status symbols by surly teenagers.
I'm sure that our gaggle of idiots will feel just as baffled when Pepsi hangs a logo on the Washington Monument or our school system stops pretending to be doing anything other than serving as a glorified day care center and reprogramming camp for America's youth or when our politicians stop even trying to be more than their sound bites. Or maybe not. Most likely, they won't even notice.
It's true that the forces of truth and enlightenment and reason will all win in the end. Unfortunately, you don't see very many of them around here, now do you?
Ahem.
In other news, the 'Bubbleboy' virus caused much consternation amongst users of Outlook Express. Remember all that crap about not opening attached files? Well, you'll long for those days. Now people can write viruses that execute in Outlook Express when you view the message. Well, actually, it's probably a hook or something that loads the actual virus from attachment, imbedded into HTML. But whatever. Naturally, this is a vulnerability existing only in Microsoft products, at the moment. All those Windows users... Tch, tch. They'd just better be glad this one was apparently just written to highlight a security hole, otherwise it could have meant very bad things. Thank goodness for ethical hackers. Now, the race is on, between Microsoft getting out Yet Another Security Patch and other, less ethical hackers creating a Bubbleboy variant that annihilates your hard drive.
Imagine how much fun that'll be. You get an odd email. You open it up and look at it. Your hard drive starts grinding away...
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