Can’t wait for them to get more in stock.

I love that this product explicitly combines two of the things that I think are poised to help revolutionize our culture and our world: the hacker ethos and material science. Now maybe (read: definitely) this is starry-eyed utopianism on my part, but the more people who internalize the idea that they can and should hack their stuff, their world, and themselves, the better. I think that being a hacker speaks to one of the primal elements that makes us human. I think that a far better descriptor for us than “man the wise” (homo sapiens) is “man the hacker” (homo textor? Homo abetor?)

So now combine that hacker spirit with the fact that our fundamental understanding of how materials really work is just starting bear some really cool fruit, and the future begins to look pretty damned awesome. See, we, as a species, moved from the stage of using ambient materials we found around us (flint), to reproducing materials that we first created by serendipity (bronze), to fine-tuning those serendipitous materials (high-carbon steel). But it’s only recently that we’ve gotten to the point where we can actually design materials to achieve the properties we want. Sugru is one such designed material.

So human-designed materials that are explicitly targeted to the hacker soul in each of us. How awesome is that? Rhetorical question. The answer is, of course, “insanely”. Better (non-rhetorical) question: when can I get my hands on some?

Skyonic’s plan to commercialize Skymine, a process that scrubs SOX, NO2, mercury, and other heavy metals from industrial plant exhaust and converts leftover CO2 into sodium bicarbonate, was just a glimmer in the company’s eye as recently as February. But this week Skyonic announced that it is opening a carbon mineralization demonstration facility at San Antonio-based Capitol Aggregates, one of the biggest cement plants in Texas. The plant comes courtesy of a $3 million DOE grant that also requires Skyonic to produce qualifying samples of its baking soda-like CO2 byproducts, which can be turned into animal feed, glass products, and even a growth catalyst for bioalgae.

Carbon capture and storage (the current leading method of reducing industrial CO2 emissions) was never a very good idea. Skyonics’ method, on the other hand, turns CO2 and other waste materials into usable products. It even plans to beat its competitors on efficiency, compete in the market, and turn a profit.

Pollution reduced, value added to the economy, and novel scientific processes refined and better understood. It’s hard to find such win-win-win scenarios in life, and yet science and technology seem to deliver them with stunning regularity.

The last time Neptune was at this time of its year, the Mexican-American War was just warming up and hadn’t even become a shooting conflict yet.  It hadn’t even been discovered by human beings, yet.

A year ago on Mercury was in early January here on Earth.

Second, this segment from the show Newswipe, done by the inimitable Charlie Brooker:

Dead Space certainly fits my definition, which is basically “any horror game in which the object is no loftier than plain survival”.  Sure, the Silent Hill series are Survival Horror games but then again so were System Shock 2 and Bioshock.  By that definition, Dead Space certainly fits the bill.  The game tells the story of a small group sent to determine the fate of the giant mining vessel Ishimura.  Of course by the time they arrive most of the crew have died and comeback as hideous, flesh-eating ghouls.  The ship you arrived on explodes while you’re trying to fix it to get off the Ishimura and it’s game on.

The story that unfolds isn’t really anything new (honestly, the major plot points follow those in System Shock 2 so closely that it raises eyebrows at some points), but it is compelling and well told.  It’s of the classic “oh shit, this be broke go fix it!” plot.  You spend the majority of the game fixing one thing after another.  That being said, all of the “hey fix this” quests make complete sense.  They aren’t forced or random.  Rather they are exactly the kinds of tasks one would be concerned with when trying to survive on a disabled mining ship: getting the engines back online to prevent the ship’s orbit from decaying and smashing into the planet below, getting the anti-asteroid defense systems back online, etc.  You know, important, survival kinds of things.

The gameplay and the story intertwine very well in this respect.  There are a number of zero-gravity and zero-atmosphere scenes.  Sometimes both.  Your character, being an engineer, uses mostly coopted tools to defend himself against monsters.  Even the flamethrower is, according to the game, a modified torch.  This dynamic works very well with one of the rather grizzly motifs of the game: dismemberment.  The whole game is about chopping off limbs.  Now, if it were just a “ooh look what we can do”, body-physics show off thing, it’d probably be kind of annoying.  As it is, though, the dismemberment theme pulls triple duty and a game mechanic (hack an enemy’s limbs off does more damage and forces it to adjust its fighting style accordingly), a mood-setting device (nothing like a room completely strewn with arms and legs to get one in the Horror mindset), and even as a literary device.  Many of the characters, driven crazy by the force that’s infected the ship, ask to be “made whole again” in an entirely metaphorical sense.

But of course no survival horror game would be complete without atmosphere.  After all, as Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw rightly points out:

“Horror as a genre of art exists for the same reason as roller coasters and the terrorist watch list – because for the most part modern society is so stable and orderly and boring that the occasional artificial scare is what we need to make us feel alive.

Evoking fear is, in itself, an art form – and nothing in the entire history of storytelling has explored it better than video games.”

If a horror game doesn’t scare the player, it has failed.  Dead Space does an amazing job of bringing the player so close to the edge of their seat that they’re only a knocking air vent away from startling themselves out of it.  And while it never gave me nightmares (unlike Silent Hill 2), it did scare the holy hell out of me on several occasions.  More than just sudden startles, however, the whole game is just downright eerie.  You’re one a dead ship, where everything is falling apart, plus you’re alone save for a bunch of aliens who just want to eat your face.  The few people you see in person after the intro are either insane, in the process of perishing (sometimes even by their own hand), or both.

One final note on the game: I was gratified that there was no cliffhanger.  When it was over, it ended (and in classic horror style, too) and it felt like the designers were saying “thanks for playing, here’s your ending!”  Not, “okay, well done, now get to wait for the privelege of buying the sequel!”

All in all, brilliant game.  If horror’s your thing, you need this game.  It’s available on XBox 360 and PS3 and it’s WELL worth the $60.

2.) If any rich admirers out there are wondering what to get me for Christmas, I’d like one of these in .300 Win Mag or this ludicrously nice amp or a copy of the Secret Museum of Mankind if you can find one.

3.) Well, my Washington State ballot arrived a couple of days ago.  (WA ballots are all mail-in.)  Which means I finally have to figure out who I’m voting for for President.  I still haven’t ruled out writing in one of the Roosevelts.

It turned up foobar2000.  If you’re in need of such a program, I highly recommend it.  Small, free (as in beer), extensible, and in its basic configuration uses up next to know resources.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to cut code, consult firefox, AND listen to CDs, all at the same time…