Schadenfreude

According to this link, the Wii Fit is calling kids fat. here is my take on it.

If I'm reading the height/weight chart at http://pediatrics.about.com/library/growth_charts/ngirlstwo.htm correctly (and I'm confused by it, so I may not be) an "average" (whatever that is) girl of 10 years weighs about 75 lbs with 84 lbs (6 stone) well within the range of "normal". The medical definition of overweight is a BMI of more than about 25 or 27.3 depending on who you ask. The funny part is that a 4 foot 9 inch, 10 year old, 84 lb girl only has a BMI of 18.2 which is considered to be healthy (and nicer than my own BMI of 21.8), so I don't know how the Wii would have put her into the overweight category anyway.

If the Wii goes strictly by BMI, which is not a good thing as it doesn't take body type or muscle/fat ratio into consideration, (in many cases waist circumference is a better indication of unhealthy weight in people in the normal to overweight range - it has little predictive power beyond a BMI of 35 or more) then the girl should be well into the ideal (if not a teensy bit underweight) range. My guess is that she's not 6 stone anymore and daddy can't see his precious little porcine pygmy for what she is...

I suspect that lots of chubby little kids who've been told their whole lives that they're just "big boned" are going to have a rude awakening when they get a Wii Fit.

Apparently CEOs are still worthless and overpaid. I suppose this is news to some people – in this case Forbes and ABC News.

I said basically the same thing here over a year ago.

Many CEOs are still corporate parasites and not worth anywhere close to what they are often paid. It gets worse when you consider that Gary Forsee’s pension for life of $84,000 (after getting fired for poor performance) per month could give 12 employees an $84,000 per year job. I’d really rather see that money go to someone who actually does some work instead of a useless, ex-CEO.

May Day started as number of pre-Christian celebrations including Beltane, the Walpurgis Night that were eventually Christianized along with most of Europe.

Today, however, it’s usually recognized as an International Workers day – a sort of Labor Day commemorating the fight for the eight hour work day. In many countries (notably, not the US or Canada) May Day is an official holiday.

This is somewhat ironic, since the day in question, May 1, was chosen in honor of the Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886. But since US foreign policy in the 1950s (through the late 80s) was just to do the exact opposite of what the Soviet Union did, congress designated May 1 as the creepy, Orwellian, “Loyalty Day” in 1958 since May Day was observed by the Soviets.

So if you like your 8 hour work day, be sure to thank the people in the labor movement for the social and economic achievements that they fought so hard to give you.

And remember, if it wasn’t easy, it wouldn’t make you a douchebag.

Ladies, while douchebaggery is still very much a man’s world, women are making huge inroads into it as well. So don’t be afraid to follow the steps and the simple examples below.

Step 1: Believe your own bullshit.

Step 2: Believe everyone else’s bullshit.

While these are very simple steps, allow me to elaborate and provide some specific examples actually witnessed from the professional douchebags with whom I live and work. Now everyone exhibits a few of these douchebag traits, but to be a truly devoted douchbag, you have to commit to undertaking a lot of them.

Before we begin, you’ll need to pass a small test. Reconcile the following statements: “Douchebagging isn’t for sissies; you have to go all the way!” And, “The easy way out is the best way out, especially if you can fool someone else into believing that you’ve undertaken something truly monumental”. Step 1 will help here. Once you’ve passed this test, your mind will be primed and ready to follow in the footsteps of the greatest douchebags of all time.

In no particular order:

1. Maintain an unwavering belief in your own importance. Remember your Family / Business / Friends / Church / Favorite Team / Nation / Industry / Favorite Activity / The Internet / etc. would simply shrivel up and die without your constant attention and input.
2. Link your personal self worth to things that have absolutely nothing to do with your substance as a person. Examples include your career, your possessions, where you went to school, and your affiliations. Being a person of substance is hard, but buying status is easy.
3. Be immensely proud of things over which you have no control. Examples include your nationality, race, gender, physical attributes, ethnicity, or ancestry.
4. Tale credit for accomplishments that you didn’t have anything to do with. These include the accomplishments of your parents, children, countrymen, and subordinates at work. “My great great great great great great grandparents came over on the Mayflower!” “My son is an honor student at DB Middle School!” “My team was responsible for implementing the new collaborative workgroup environment.”
5. Believe that “perception is reality”. It doesn’t matter what is actually true or not, just what you can get dumb people to believe. Sure you’ve spent your whole life taking the easy way out, but as long as you can fool others into thinking that you’ve achieved something, you can pretend to have some worth. After all, that is the only thing that matters.
6. When making a purchase and being unsure of an item’s quality or value, get the most expensive one available even if you can’t afford it. Expensive items will impress other douchebags and reaffirm your status in the douchebag hierarchy. Researching purchases is for people with free time and no money. You are far too important and busy to bother with that. Ignore those who laugh at you for paying more for items with fewer features and lower quality than competing items. They are simply jealous of your ability to get “The Best!” Yes, a $30 Casio watch will keep better time than the $6500 Omega on your wrist, but who would be impressed with what you spent on it?
7. When engaging in or planning an activity, be sure to buy only the equipment that is considered “Professional Grade”. This includes tools, cameras, cars, boats, hiking boots, bicycles, home theater equipment, etc. Remember, high price and professional stickers are an indication of the suitability to a given task – any task. You really need that $5500 computer to do your taxes every April and occasionally play Solitaire. Also an $8500 digital SLR camera and $30,000 worth of lenses *will* make you take higher quality photographs. You get bonus points if your camera or lens is from a German brand, even if it’s assembled in Japan or China. Teutonic brand superiority seeps through regardless.
8. Get a tattoo. If you’re unsure what to get, pick something at random out of one of the many books of samples at the tattoo place. For extra douchebag points, get something that makes you look deep and spiritual like a Yin-Yang or an Asian-style character in a language that you aren’t familiar with. Believe the tattoo artist when he tells you that it means “Strength” or “Eagle’s Claw”. It probably doesn’t mean “asshole” or “retard”, so don’t bother to check. If you work out (and you do, right?) acceptable tattoos include barbed wire, bullet belts or “Tribal” designs around your biceps or thighs. Just make sure that people can see them while you have a shirt on.
9. When unsure of the quality of one of your possessions or activities when comparing it to those of other douchebags, be sure to drop the price into a conversation as much as possible. If the other douchebag is impressed with what you paid, then you can rest assured that yours is better than his.
10. Get a personalized vanity license plate for your car that has your name on it, some reference to how great your car is, or how much it cost you. Examples include: “U NV THIS”, “HER TOY”, “DDYS GRL”, “POLLERA”, “MY 911”, or “2 MCH 4U”. Other douchebags will definitely take notice!
11. Play golf. Pretend that it’s a sport. Rationalize your activity, err, sport by saying that “Lots of business happens on the golf course”. When you get lucky and get a hole-in-one, assume that is was entirely based on your own golfing prowess and ability to perfectly calculate wind resistance and compensate for the Earth’s rotation and small uneven patches on the green.
12. Be resolute that things that are of trivial importance to others are really of earth shattering importance. The fact that you are in the top 10 in the Halo 3 leaderboards is vital to the survival of freedom as we know it. You’ll show them all one day when you use your Halo 3 skills to cure cancer! It’s also important to be the CEO of a company even if the only employees are you and your wife. Be sure to put it on your business card and always mention it when introducing yourself to others.
13. Flaunt all of your accomplishments, no matter how small. If you acted as an extra way in the back of a scene in “Madea's Family Reunion”, refer to yourself as having acted in a “major Hollywood motion picture”.
14. Get a tan. But remember, you are far too busy and successful to waste time laying out in the hot, dangerous sun, so use tanning lotion to turn your skin a nice shade of Umpa Loompa orange. The darker, the better.
15. Find out about the latest trends. Follow them without question, reason, or taste. If it doesn’t succeed at first, stand your ground and soon other douchebags will respond by copying you. If that doesn’t work, refer to yourself as a trend setter and remind others that they are behind the times.
16. When deciding on a car, remember that image is important here. You can pick from an exotic sports car, way-oversized SUV or luxury car depending on which flavor of douchebag you are trying to impress. If you can’t afford a truly exotic sports car and the jealous car dealer won’t let you finance 120 months at 2/3rds your net monthly income, then just get cheaper or mundane car and “tune” it. Sure it will end up costing almost as much, will have no resale value and be an ugly, unreliable eyesore, but it will surely turn the heads of other duchebags. For sports cars (either real or tuner wannabes) be sure to apply many “sponsorship” stickers, non functioning air ducts, and spoilers all over you car. Fake carbon fiber parts and lowered suspensions are for bonus points. Justify this by being a “real” racer and take your car down to the track, once. It’s far too dangerous and you are far too important to risk getting hurt. For SUVs, bigger is always better. Bullet hole stickers show how tough you are and shiny 20” rims with spinners demonstrate that you have money to burn and are willing to sacrifice ride comfort and off road ability for Bling. If you end up with a luxury car, don’t let anyone tell you that your fancy new Lexus is just a Toyota with a different badge or that your Audi is actually made alongside lesser Volkswagens.
17. Go overboard at every opportunity. Party hard, drink hard, drive fast, and spend money on crap you don’t need or even want. Be sure to tell everyone, even complete strangers, about your exploits.
18. Your time is extremely important to you and everyone else. When at the grocery, it is perfectly acceptable to take your cart of 37 items into the 15 items or less lane. That silly restriction is there so that other people’s purchases don’t make you wait in line longer than absolutely necessary. That line’s only reason for existing is to make sure that you get in and out of the grocery as quickly as possible. Other people know that your time is far more important than theirs and will be more than happy to wait while you delay the whole line. That muttering you hear in the line behind you is just them talking about how they wish that they were you.
19. You are in a position of absolute authority. It doesn’t matter if you are the Assistant Night Manager at Taco Bell, the head of a cult, or if your daddy’s oil buddies made you CEO of a few companies that all failed under your leadership – you are not a person to be trifled with. Flaunt your power and destroy anyone who dares to question you. Blame any problems or failures on those who disobeyed you, are weak links in your team, or who are trying to undermine your authority.
20. You are a self made man (or woman) and got to where you are in life by pulling yourself up by your boot straps. Deny that you benefited from public education, social services, inheritance, social class, helpful mentors, ancestry, and employers who gave you a shot when you really didn’t deserve it. Work doggedly to deny those same benefits to others in order to give them character.
21. Be sure to talk about how you just can’t start the day without your fancy, overpriced coffee. Pretend that you can tell the difference between your coffee of choice and lesser coffees. This also works for wine, beer or just about any beverage.
22. Brag to anyone who will listen about how many hours you work every week. After all, hours physically spent in the office correlate directly to productivity, even if you spent 60% of your time chatting with people at the water cooler, shopping online, or in the parking lot smoking.

I was excited about Army of Two for the XBox 360 ever since I first heard that it was under development. What’s not to like? It has a single player campaign that’s built from the ground up with co-op play in mind, lots of weapon choices and a reasonable selection of locations.

The reality of the game is somewhat different. I’ve recently finished the game on the medium difficulty (mostly, but more on that later) and I have to admit that it wasn’t very much fun to play. First off, the characters are unlikeable sociopaths who are completely OK with the fact that they kill masses of people for profit. They don’t even have any hitman-like nobility or the moral excuses of a soldier in a position that he surely doesn’t want to be in. These guys purposely put themselves in a position where they are paid to kill people – lots of people. Yes, I know it’s only a game, but the regular fistpumping at the swath of destruction that these two cut gets old really, really fast. I don’t enjoy playing games where the protagonists are reprehensible people unless that's the whole point (Overlord and, if you play your cards right, Fable). But those games are cartoony and fun, this just made me uncomfortable.

While the characters’ personalities are unpleasant, I could have lived with that (it is just a game, after all). The game’s main flaw is that it just isn’t very much fun to play after the first couple of missions. The tactics are the same every time, no matter the mission. You see enemies, you find cover, you shoot. The enemies find cover and you wait for them to stick their heads up and you shoot them. Sometimes they will try to flank you and you shoot them. Sometime you will try to flank them, and you shoot them. Occasionally, an armored enemy comes along and you make your buddy get his attention so that you can sneak up behind him and shoot him where he isn’t armored. You repeat this process until no more enemies come out of the woodwork. Then you advance a bit till you find more enemies and the whole song and dance starts over again.

Sure the environments are different, but it’s really the same slow, tedious crap each time. By the last half of the last mission, I switched the difficulty to easy so that I could just get it over with sooner. You get the same achievements regardless of the difficulty (unless you play on the hardest setting, which you first have to unlock by beating the game on easy or medium). I just wanted to finish the game so that the pain would stop.

What’s with the bling? As you fight, you generate “aggro” which determines who the enemies pay attention to. If your partner is using a big, loud machine gun then the enemies are more likely to be shooting at him instead of you as you sneak around with your silenced pistol. OK, that makes sense and is pretty reasonable, I suppose. Different guns generate different amounts of aggro during use and different modifications that you make to the guns adjust that further. That’s fine too. The dumb part is that you can alter the appearance of your gun to generate additional aggro too. The only choice that the game gives you is a shiny, gold and silver version of the gun (sometimes that’s the only modification available for a particular weapon). I never bought those “upgrades” because I couldn’t get past how dumb it would be to have my character running around with a sparkly, Paris Hilton version of an AK-47. I don’t even mind the idea of altering aggro with the appearance of the gun, just give us some choices.

Finally, the ending sucks. Without giving too much away, by the end of the game you have two main guys to kill. After slogging through countless soldiers, you finally reach the first of these people. As you approach him, the game switches to a cutscene where your characters proceed, very anticlimactically, to kill him. OK, I thought, but at least we get to kill his boss. Nope. The cutscene continues and your characters kill him too. So after forcing you to play as a bunch of cold blooded sociopaths through this repetitive and largely uninspired game, the designers don’t even give you the satisfaction of killing the final enemies yourself.

Seriously, though, I haven’t seen an ending that irritating since I played Bugs Bunny’s Crazy Castle on the original GameBoy way back when I was a kid. After going through eighty (that’s 80, folks) levels of the most boring, tedious, repetitive crap, you simply got the words “You are good player” with an animated picture of Bugs jumpy around like a complete ass.

Having said all that, there are some good points to the game too. The sociopathic protagonists seem to be genuinely worried about each other’s safety. The weapons are varied and I really liked most of the customization options. The locations are nice visually, though some get pretty repetitive. Finally the story is OK, but you’ll figure out the plot much sooner than the characters do.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that I’m going to sell the game. I’ve gotten as many achievements out of it as I’m going to get. I really don’t seem myself playing it any more.