Merry Christmas Bender!

Yes, nothing says it's Christmas quite like getting wasted off your ass and playing video games all night. I picked up a few more xbox 360 games in the xmas haul this year, and have been doing little else lately. I beat Call of Duty 2 in 2 days, with breaks for turkey and pie. Who says America has lost the true spirit of Christmas?

Xbox 360 Reviewed
Overall, I'd say Microsoft did a damn good job on their 2nd xbox. The DRM crap is as retarded as one would expect, you can only copy music to the hard drive if it's on an audio cd (although burned audio cds work fine, negating any type of copy protection they were attempting). It's just silly to think you can keep people from copying music or anything else. Remember mix tapes? Did you hear of any teenagers getting sued by the RIAA for making mix tapes in the 80's? It's a real shame to see such a craptacular implementation of a 'media center' like the 360 has. It's pathetic. My modified xbox 1 is 10 times anything the 360 could ever be. If you want to be able to play movies, images, music, whatever from your pc, fuck the 360. Buy a modified xbox and play anything you want, xvids, vcds, hell it'll even play .iso image files.

So besides the worthless media crap options, what else does the 360 have? Well, the dashboard is pretty nice - it's always running on its own processor in the background, so you can switch music, check on your friends, send/receive messages within games at any time. The online play really depends a lot on the game developers - Microsoft has provided a nice foundation, but the quality of the implementation varies a lot. PGR3 is pretty good, although I have to believe the matching system sucks. With thousands of people online, I can sit in an empty race for minutes on end, even picking 'random race', which should just put me in a game that's about to start.

The wireless controller/headset combo is perfect. The controller fits very well, and having 4 triggers is better than having 6 right thumb buttons. The quality of the voice over the infobahn varies quite a bit, and apparently the voice disguiser thing just makes everyone sound like Stephen Hawkings, which is its own kind of comedy. I never though I would hear him say, "eat my shit, you ass spelunker!".

I guess any console really comes down to the games you can get for it, and the launch titles are a lot better than I expected (which wasn't much). I expect much better games to come along, hopefully a fun driving game (pgr3 is great for a simulation, but sims aren't that much fun... more like work, and nfsmw just sucks. A crappy port of a stale 'nfsv20') and of course the new spliter cell game looks ass-kick-aholic. Call of Duty 2 is simply awesome in single player - incredibly immersive and chaotic, especially in HD with digital 6.1 audio. The campaign was too short though, I shouldn't have been able to beat it so fast. The multiplayer is pretty weak, with very few options on how to set up a game and you can't even play with just your friends.

Condemned is one scary-ass immersive game - quite fun. I'm disappointed that this seems to be the limit of 'thinking' games nowadays - which is to say there's none involved. You just walk along what you always know is a linear path, do your little thing when it tells you to and watch the cutscenes... I miss games that actually involved thought - I guess that's a relic now.

Portland crippled by 1/2" of snow, xbox 360 owner doesn't notice

Yes, we got our yearly snow/freezing rain visit a bit early this year, paralyzing the city for only about a day before it luckily warmed up. Two years ago we got some snow followed by freezing rain, then 5 days of cold. It shut the city down for 5 full weekdays. It was laughable, they plowed only the biggest roads, leaving 4 foot high hardpacked snowdrifts at every intersection. No one with 2wd had any hope of getting anywhere. It was hilarious.

But not only was the weather nicer, but I wasn't even bothering to look. I finally got a xbox 360 last Friday, the day before I was set to camp out in front of Best Buy for 12-14 hours in the freezing-as-hell weather and 30mph winds for one. Good ol Fred Meyers came through for me. While people are spending 1k for them on ebay and camping out for 15+ hours in the blistering cold, Freds would get them in once in a while and just stack them up behind the electronics counter. I called at 7am and they said they had some in stock, so I sped on down there and jogged across the parking lot, imagining the competition. But no one was there. I got my premium box and picked out some games and other crap, and spent about 15 minutes inside. Wehn I left I hadn't seen a single other person buy one, and I was 20 minutes late.

I have to say I think Microsoft really did a good job - the online stuff is pretty fun and adds a lot of replay value for a lot of games. It doesn't do much for the single player games, but it's a nice low-cost add-on. The games I got are project gotham racing 3, king kong and condemned. Each are excellent and beautiful, nearly photo-realistic in graphics quality. And it has optical sound output so I could plug it into my dts 6.1 receiver and blast some surround sound. Excellent 1080i HD visuals as well, it really makes for a quantum leap in quality.

Maybe I'll post more detailed reviews later, for now I must continue to uh...evaluate the games in detail!

I'm as white as they come, and DNA proves it!

If you haven't heard about this, it's really cool. The National Geographic has a massive project to collect DNA from as many people as they can all over the world and map the genetic markers to their ancient ancestors. One of the sexiest things about humans and other aerobic respiration types (pretty much every animal) is that they all have mitochondria in their cells. And the best thinking today suggests that mitochondria was actually another species altogether that merged with the first living things to form a symbiotic organism - a combination of the two that can't ever be split apart and survive. How cool is that?

Well one of the interesting things about this is that mitochondrial DNA is always passed down through the mother - it doesn't randomly combine the way our normal DNA does. Since entire bloodlines now share an identical property, this makes it possible to backtrack to very long ago. The males also have a set of markers that can be traced paternally - The Y chromosome that makes you a man is always given my the father (women have no influence over the sex of the child) and apparently is also identical. So Robin bought me a kit and I sent in my swab, and here's what I got back:

As you can see, after my ancient ancestors left Africa, they wandered around the seat of civilization and wound up in western europe and britain. Here are some excerpts from the write-up of my haplogroup:

The marker M45 first appeared about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago in a man who became the common ancestor of most Europeans and nearly all Native Americans. This unique individual was part of the M9 lineage, which was moving to the north of the mountainous Hindu Kush and onto the game-rich steppes of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and southern Siberia.
Today, for example, the marker's frequency remains very high in northern France and the British Isles—where it was carried by M173 descendents who had weathered the Ice Age in Spain.

The intelligence that allowed this lineage to adapt and thrive in harsh conditions was critical to human survival in a region where no other hominids are known to have survived.

Members of haplogroup R are descendents of Europe's first large-scale human settlers. The lineage is defined by Y chromosome marker M173, which shows a westward journey of M45-carrying Central Asian steppe hunters.

The descendents of M173 arrived in Europe around 35,000 years ago and immediately began to make their own dramatic mark on the continent. Famous cave paintings, like those of Lascaux and Chauvet, signal the sudden arrival of humans with artistic skill. There are no artistic precedents or precursors to their appearance.

Soon after this lineage's arrival in Europe, the era of the Neandertals came to a close. Genetic evidence proves that these hominids were not human ancestors but an evolutionary dead end. Smarter, more resourceful human descendents of M173 likely outcompeted Neandertals for scarce Ice Age resources and thus heralded their demise.

Members of haplogroup R1b, defined by M343 are the direct descendents of Europe's first modern humans—known as the Cro-Magnon people.

Cro-Magnons arrived in Europe some 35,000 years ago, during a time when Neandertals still lived in the region. M343-carrying peoples made woven clothing and constructed huts to withstand the frigid climes of the Upper Paleolithic era. They used relatively advanced tools of stone, bone, and ivory. Jewelry, carvings, and intricate, colorful cave paintings bear witness to the Cro Magnons' surprisingly advanced culture during the last glacial age.

When the ice retreated genetically homogenous groups recolonized the north, where they are still found in high frequencies. Some 70 percent of men in southern England are R1b. In parts of Spain and Ireland that number exceeds 90 percent.

Pretty cool, huh? I was disappointed that they didn't do my mitochondrial DNA too, but I guess I'll have to have a female family member do it too so I can see where that comes from... Who wants to bet it'll be just as white as mine?