Purchase of the day.

From the February 16, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

Mario Kart Racing Wheel for Wii (2pcs Bundle) (Bulk Packaging) by Ebest (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.97)

85704 Campus.org Poly Color Jackets - 6 Pack, Assorted Colors by Smead (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.45)

LifeStraw Personal Water Filterby Vestergaard-Frandsen (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.84)

ch ching:

T-fal Actifry Low-Fat Multi-Cooker (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $16.72 )

Microsoft Office Home and Business 2013 (1PC/1User) [Download] (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $17.60)

Hoover Linx Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $11.92 )

... and 28 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers. Or as Barack might say, "Nothing about using the Althouse Amazon portal tonight should increase your family budget deficit by a single dime."

Only I'm not even lying.

So suck it up, load it down, fry it deep, sip it slow. If you like it, you better put a jacket on it. And WEEE!!! Thank you.

100 greatest video games (by decade).

So TIME thinks. Do you agree?

Reader poll here.

"1,583 COMMENTS."

Hey! Thanks for all the comments on last night's election live-blog, from which I absented myself after a post at 8:04, noting the obviousness of Romney's impending loss of Wisconsin. I'd started the live-blog (at 5:12) saying "I'm thinking it will all be about Wisconsin" and "I'm Wisconsincentric." I really was.

I came back at 10:04 to say I was "distancing myself from the political fray, reconnecting to my old aversion to politics." And that's quite true. That's my instinct. When it's over, it's over, and it's been such a long campaign season. Time to stop obsessively looking at all the little numbers, take note of the one big number — 303 (or is it 332?) — and widen one's horizons.

What was I doing during those 2 hours? I had the TV on, and I was sitting back playing solitaire on my iPad (which is something I do when I want to listen without getting distracted into my own thoughts). I was calmly waiting for the inevitable to crystalize. I was adjusting to the new political reality in America.

I knew readers were having it out in the comments. Some were taunting and gloating. Some were telling us what they were drinking. There was an occasional "Where's Ann?"

I'm going to be very curious to hear what Althouse has to say tomorrow about her two-hour AWOL right in the heart of election night. Very odd, to say the least.

She always does this when she "live blogs", starts strong and craps out somewhere in the middle.

That last one was Palladian, who himself was away from the comments for a good long while (and who was drinking Ardbeg Uigeadail).

"Scary, grown-up thoughts have shriveled his video game sack..."

Masculinity tied to video game prowess tied to the consumption of Slim Jims in this ad, discussed here:

Jonathan Byrne, an associate creative director at Venables Bell & Partners in San Francisco, which is creating the campaign, said the ads are intended to balance promoting manliness with hanging on to the joys of boyhood.

“It’s not just about manliness, it’s also bucking responsibility,” Mr. Byrne said of the ads. “Avoiding the growing-up thing is a big part of it.”

Whatever you think of video games and Slim Jims, what do you think of conflating manliness and boyhood?

An animated sequence shows a kidney-shaped organ called a video game sack in a man’s midsection, which collapses as it collides with items like a wedding cake, minivan and baby carriage.

In this trope, actual adult manhood is feminizing. Arguably, this is the point of marriage and the reason why heterosexual marriage is held out to be the building block of society: The overly masculine young man needs to be diluted with femininity in order to do the things that we as a whole want him to do — be economically productive and produce the next generation. In this view, playing video games — and generally camping out in everlasting boyhood — is a preservation of full manhood. A transgressive thought... but that's a big part of advertising, making the consumer feel that they're a big old rebel for purchasing some unremarkable product... this dessicated strip of meat...

What is the most pathetic dessicated strip of meat?
	The 30-year-old guy who sits around playing video games.
	The married man who drives a minivan and pushes a baby carriage.
	A Slim Jim.
pollcode.com free polls

"Earlier today, certain realms were affected by an in-game exploit..."

"... resulting in the deaths of player characters and non-player characters in some of the major cities," reports the BBC. This is news, right?

"But on Tuesday, Mr. Smith’s final message was 'gunfire'..."

"Then he disconnected and never returned."

Survivors include [Sean] Smith’s wife, Heather, and two children.

Today's Google doodle.

Something about Star Trek. Clicking makes lots of stuff happen, but doesn't answer what the occasion for the elaborate doodle is. I'm going to guess the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gene Roddenberry.

Googling for the answer, I see it's just the 46th anniversary of the debut of the show. Nothing especially momentous.

And we'll have to wait until August 19, 2021 for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gene Roddenberry.

"Can You Make It Through This Post Without Crying?"

I was tough, but #13 got to me. And the parrot, now that I think of it.

Ray Bradbury has died.

He was 91.

Instapundit says: "People are mostly talking about The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, but I liked Dandelion Wine."

I think I was assigned "Fahrenheit 451" to read in high school, and I was impressed by it, but for some reason what I most remember of his is "The Veldt." Plot summary:

A family lives in a house with the latest technology. It is called the “Happylife Home” and its installation cost $30,000. The house is filled with machines that do everything for them from cooking meals, to clothing them, to rocking them to sleep. The two children, Peter and Wendy, become fascinated with the "nursery," a virtual reality room that is able to connect with the children telepathically to reproduce any place they imagine.

That was written in 1950, long before video games, etc.

The parents, George and Lydia, soon realize that there is something wrong with their way of life. George and Lydia are also perplexed that the nursery is stuck on an African setting, with lions in the distance, eating the dead carcass of what they assume to be an animal. There they also find recreations of their personal belongings. Wondering why their children are so concerned with this scene of death, they decide to call a psychologist.

The psychologist, David McClean, suggests they turn off the house and leave. The children, completely addicted to the nursery, beg their parents to let them have one last visit. The parents relent, and agree to let them spend a few more minutes there. When they come to the nursery to fetch the children, the children lock them in from the outside. George and Lydia look on as the lions begin to advance towards them. At that point, they realize that what the lions were eating in the distance was not an animal, but their own simulated remains.

The kids realized that the only way they could stay in their nursery is to get rid of their parents by locking George and Lydia in the nursery with the lions.

Don't take our video games away! Parents! Leave those kids alone!

"What a ridiculously insulting article" in The Atlantic.

Says a commenter on "The Most Dangerous Gamer":

The profile of [Jonathan] Blow is interesting; what isn't is the facile presentation of [video] games as a artless wasteland, with Blow as the only artist and savior of the medium. I really liked Braid and the video description in this article managed to make me hate it a little. Subject does not make something artistic (be it violence or plumbers or an island of puzzles), a contemplative tone does not make something artistic, referencing other artists does not make something artistic, aping the "classy" bits of other mediums (classical music, painterly aesthetics) does not make something artistic.

Art is the skillful application of technique toward personal expression, and there are plenty of games that fall into that category--yes, even a few in the mainstream, like Bioshock, Heavy Rain, and LA Noire. And there's a world of independent artistic games out there that does not begin and end with Blow. To use a film analogy, you've written the equivalent of an article about 1970s Cassavetes while ignoring or denigrating both his contemporaries (Coppola, Roeg, Scorcese [sic], Kubrick) and his predecessors.

It's doubly unfortunate that your simplistic and (although I hate to see the word thrown around) pretentious dismissal of the entire non-Blow video game output to date appears to have been written for people who have never played or heard of a video game before, because you've told those people why they shouldn't ever bother.

There are important discussions to be had about the nature and state of the medium, but boiling them down into "games are guns/sex/juvenile, except for Blow" does nothing but stifle discussion and close minds.

Ha ha. I generally avoid video games, but this (bizarrely long) article really set off my bullshit detector. What is wrong with The Atlantic?!

"MIT hackers have long considered 'Tetris on the Green Building' to be the Holy Grail of hacks..."

"... as the side of the building is a wonderful grid for the game."

"Now videogamers can play the role of Ho Chi Minh's communist forces as they rout French colonists in a blood-spattered shoot'em-up."

"We in Vietnam aren't that familiar with World War II but we still enjoy the 'Call of Duty' games... Anybody can enjoy any game, as long as it's fun and rewarding."

Don't tease the frog!

Intelligent adults, contemplating why they play a mindless video game.

Lori Culwell sees the game "Angry Birds" as her "meditation tool" and thinks she's "picked up some sage wisdom from those self-sacrificing birds and their mortal pig enemies. Call it an Angry Birds satori, perhaps."

[T]he birds put my mind into a deeply Zen-like and hypnotic state, not unlike "flow" as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Maybe the people at Rovio have given us a game that is part meditation, part allegory for life. Maybe Freud would point out that my finding Zen in a game based on pig destruction signals latent anger issues.

("Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly is one of my very favorite books, as I've noted before.)

And here's William Ian Miller in "Losing It"  — a book I first talked about here — talking about solitaire:

Everything distracts me... I interrupted the writing of this paragraph to play a game of solitaire, and then when I lost I allowed myself to play until I won, and then one more in case I won two in a row, and then I kept on until I won two in a row. Says the ancient rabbinical Pirkei Avot: The Ethics of the Fathers, written some eighteen hundred years ago: “If a man is walking by the way and is studying and then interrupts his study and exclaims: ‘How beautiful is this tree? How beautiful is this plowed furrow?’ Scripture considers that it is to be regarded as if he has forfeited his life (or as if he bears guilt for his soul).” If the beauties of nature cannot justify distraction, what of solitaire? My offense is (as if) capital; if only I could remember which circle of hell awaits me. My will—an element of my name, no less—never strong to begin with, has become weaker. The “I am” that remains in Will -iam is thus a ghost of its former self. If William James is right, and I find that he usually is, then I am in trouble: “The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind" (italics in original).

Do you use video games in a way that makes you want to explain it — like Culwell — in terms of meditation and wisdom or — like Miller — to read it as a signpost that you are walking downhill toward the grave?

Turkeys and Jesus.

11 minutes of walking and driving, with Althouse and Meade... and turkeys and Jesus.

Grandpa Aaron reports on the video games his grandson gave him for his birthday.

Very sweet. Via Reddit.

"Long before Cain was running for president and getting attention for his 999 plan..."

"... the residents of SimCity 4... were living under a system where the default tax rate was 9 percent for commercial taxes, 9 percent for industrial taxes and 9 percent for residential taxes."

"Crime and the great recession: Jobs have fled, lawbreaking hasn’t risen..."

"... and criminologists are scratching their heads. I credit Internet porn and videogames. Is there anything they can’t do?"

"Where is the 9,000-foot cow?"/"What do you think about Satan?"/"What did James Madison think about video games?"

Justice Ginsburg lists the strangest questions asked last term at oral argument.

"From the foregoing samples, you may better understand why the court does not plan to permit televising oral arguments any time soon."

Are you kidding? This is why it should be on television?

You know, the fabulous 7th Circuit judge Richard A. Posner wrote a great chapter titled "What Am I? A Potted Plant?"

And I just saw a potted plant on television.

Now, the potted plant was scintillating compared to the live — that is, barely animated — speech by President Obama that preceded it. But the point is: We want the Supreme Court on TV!

Bring on the 9,000 cows! We're dying out here in TV-land!

The U.S. Supreme Court violent video games case + the Wisconsin Supreme Court "chokegate" story...

... melded into a brilliant segment on "The Daily Show":

The Daily Show - Moral Kombat
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The last thing Jon Stewart says here is incredibly cynical about courts. It's also very well set up by what has gone before and deserves both laughs and serious conversation.