Video game weekend

- If you buy loose cartridges or CDs that don't come with the manual, have a look at this site. They've scanned manuals into free PDFs, some even in color.

- My big complaint about the newer consoles is that they've turned video games into movies. I want to play, not watch. A lot of responses to that post on various discussion forums said that the movie comparison was wrong. Of course it's not -- it's obvious that video games are trying to substitute or compete with movies, since the late '90s anyway. In fact, here's the creator of Sony's PlayStation, Ken Kutaragi, on his vision, from a 2001 Wired interview:

My initial goal with the PlayStation was to expand the game experience by expanding the available entertainment content. With PS2, one of my goals is to take entertainment even further, from games to a fusion of games, music, and movies.

So there you have it -- proof that it was the 3-D era that marked the end of video games as games, especially when the graphics became good enough in the late '90s to substitute for passable CGI effects from movies.

- Assuming that you still prefer playing games to watching bad movies, you should get a Game Boy Player for your GameCube. I've put a link to it in the Amazon box at the top, under the video games section. It goes for about $10, and it allows you to play Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games on your TV.

For people like me who tuned out of the video game world in the mid-late '90s when the direction toward movies began, this is a godsend. There are a lot of great games in the non-movie style that came out then, but they were mostly released on the handheld systems, since they didn't have 3-D graphics and therefore didn't even bother to compete with movies. Even better, they all feel fresh because I've never played them before.

Playing Double Dragon II for the thousandth time is still pretty fun, but I already know everything about that game. However, the average video game player probably didn't get around to the Game Boy games since playing them on a tiny screen isn't nearly as exciting as playing on a TV. There are three incredible Zelda games for the Game Boy, all in color (Link's Awakening DX, Oracle of Ages, and Oracle of Seasons), three Castlevania games for Game Boy and three even better ones for the Game Boy Advance, a great color sequel to Bionic Commando, a stunning enhanced remake of the original Metroid on GBA (Metroid Fusion is a lot more boring, though), a string of great Kirby games -- and the most highly rated Metal Gear game is for the Game Boy Color.

So if you're looking for a fresh gameplay experience in the classic non-movie style, you can't go wrong with a Game Boy Player. Most of the games for it are fairly cheap, and the Player itself is only $10. If you don't have a GameCube, it's cheap too -- you can probably find a used one for $20 or $30 now since it wasn't as popular as the PS2.

And of course, you could always buy the full consoles from the golden age -- circa 1992, not 1982 -- but the games can be a bit more expensive for them, at least the great ones. Some are available for download on the Wii's Virtual Console, but not even a good fraction. I'll probably start reviewing some of the ones worth buying, but I want to wait until my TurboGrafx-16 gets here on Monday. Don't think I'll be getting a Neo Geo, though -- how many different Street Fighter clones could you want?

No one will care about Henry Louis Gates' run-in with the cops

I'm sure you've heard the story by now -- famous black academic breaks into his own house, police question him about it, and he freaks out about their supposedly racist mindset. And like the suburban wigger who finally gets pulled over by the cops, he's so ecstatic about an actual encounter with the police that he plans to make a movie about it (from here):

The charge against him was dropped Tuesday, but Gates said he plans to use the attention and turn his intellectual heft and stature to the issue of racial profiling. He now wants to create a documentary on the criminal justice system, informed by the experience of being arrested not as a famous academic but as an unrecognized black man.

Borrrinnng.

Back here I showed that Google searches for various phrases associated with identity politics show downward trends over the past several years, which I take to show less and less interest in such topics. In particular, the alleged racism surrounding Hurricane Katrina, the Jena Six, and the Duke lacrosse hoax didn't catch anyone's attention. They made the news for a little bit (the lacrosse case for a little longer, just because the trial lasted longer than a hurricane), but once the event itself was done, everyone went back to business as usual. Importantly, there were no massive riots as there were during the social hysteria of the early 1990s when the "not guilty" verdict in the Rodney King case sparked the disastrous L.A. riots of 1991, or the other L.A. riots of the late 1960s. Therefore, no one will care about Gates' run-in with the police in 2009.

In fact, here's a graph showing the frequency of the term "racial profiling" in the NYT from its first appearance in 1994 up through 2008:


In the late '90s and early 2000s, there was a hysteria about this term, but it was short-lived, and it wasn't large enough to trigger riots. If Gates plans to make a documentary about "racial profiling," he will be dealing with a nauseatingly unfashionable topic -- although you figure he'd market it to Gen X and Boomer dipshits anyway, among whom it's still a favorite buzzword. But don't expect it to catch on -- blacks have shown very little enthusiasm for taking it to the streets lately. There will probably be another massive social hysteria in the middle of the next decade, so if he wants a big audience, he should wait until then to release it.

My new subscription-driven blog and forums

Basic rationale: Starting next week, I'll be posting on the highest-traffic day -- Monday -- only at a companion blog that will be run by a $5 per month subscription. (I'll post here too, but not early in the week when demand is high.) These new posts will be the ones that I put the most effort into -- not where I recount how it went at the teen dance club, but where I present something that no one's found out before, or where I popularize something that few know about.

To give newer readers a feel of the original stuff I've done before, I've given examples in the section below, but I've already decided what the inaugural post is about -- turnover rates in many genres of popular music. Basically, I went through the Billboard charts as far back as they go for the genre, and asked, "For a given week, how many weeks was the #1 song at the top of the charts?" and plotted this over time. Some periods show lots of turnover, while others are marked by stasis. Are there any patterns, and does genre make a difference? Subscribe and find out.

Aside from a weekly top-notch post each Monday, the blog will host forums of sorts throughout the week. The way the blogosphere works now, a comment section largely turns into a discussion board, but the momentum is always halted due to the commenters having to run from one day's comment section to the next's. At the other blog, there will simply be an open thread for the entire week where commenters can go nuts within the same post. There will be one open thread per topic of interest -- race, gender / sex, generational topics, technology, health / nutrition, or whatever else interests the subscribers.

More about the blog posts

First, there will be no ads of any kind, and comments will NOT be moderated. Everyone knows how annoying it is to participate in a comment section with moderated comments -- you can't help but feel insulted by "your message is being held and will appear when the writer approves it," and it slows the discussion down, when all you want is a quick and steady fix. But when access to the site is free, retards and flamers will inevitably show up, as bums flock to crowded malls, so that ownership and control of a comment section is needed to keep it from turning into worthless chaos. Only by restricting access can these rules be loosened up, just as law-abiding children don't need a curfew.

I'm choosing Monday because that is always the highest-traffic day. If you subscribe, you'll get your fix when you want it most, while there will be only a teaser link here to start the week off.

Although blogging doesn't eat up a lot of time, the more data-intensive posts do. This is not something that most bloggers do -- most are linkers or gasbags, with some entertaining and others boring. I actually do a bit of investigation, provide data, and put it into an easy-to-read visual. Not everyone will agree with my interpretation of what I've found, but at least I've done lots of homework that others will benefit from, and that's something you find at very few places on the internet, especially if it's a new finding.

As such, it only makes sense that I get something out of it. For those entries that don't require lots of time, I'll continue to post them here for free. But if they are more original and time-draining, I need better motivation than merely having a gigantic internet following.

However, since the other site will be by subscription, I'll be much more open to reader requests. Right now, I ignore them because if I'm researching and writing something up for free, the only thing that counts is what I'm curious about. But if I'm being remunerated, I'll look into just about anything. If there are topics you're interested in, or parts of posts I've written that you wish I'd looked into more, just say so, and you'll have a bright and resourceful numbers guy on top of it. We all know how pathetic most journalism is -- if what you read isn't covering it, I will, where feasible.

Otherwise, I'll focus on the same issues I do here -- race, generational changes, health and nutrition, sex and gender, technology, video games, pop culture, and so on.

Examples of previous original and data-intensive work I've done:

The death of silly academic theories such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and even postmodernism, using JSTOR archives. This story was picked up by the Toronto Globe and Mail, Arts and Letters Daily, and a few others I'm forgetting. (Here's a follow-up.)

How different social classes react to adolescent sex, using the GSS, and proposing a life history account of these differences.

How much different generations enjoy various music genres, using the GSS. This provides pretty clear data that you imprint on the popular music from when you were about 15 and stay that way for the rest of your life.

How the American diet has changed over the 20th C., using pretty fine-grained data such as red meat, fish, poultry, etc., rather than just "meat." There's also data showing that heart disease and obesity has only gotten worse as we've switched to a more carboholic diet since the 1970s.

How the blondness of Playboy Playmates has changed over time, as well as some speculation about why it changes the way it does.

The stagnating pace of revolutionary technological innovation, linking it to the decline in monopolistic bodies like AT&T's Bell Labs or the Defense Department.

And there's plenty more where that came from. Just browse my archives here, or search GNXP.com for "agnostic." Stuff you won't read anywhere else. To reiterate, next week's post will look at the dynamics of pop culture by using Billboard chart-topping data. Soon after that (perhaps the next week, unless there's subscriber demand for something else), I'll present data on whether or not there has been a "decline in formality" over the 20th C, or if that is even possible. You know -- jeans and tennis shoes replacing jackets and ties.

More about the forums

While part of the reason that people read blogs is to see what the writer has to say, an even larger part is to join in or listen to the ensuing discussion. At a given blog, there are a handful of topics that people are most interested in, and comment sections inevitably become discussion boards about these topics. But by being split up over multiple posts, the momentum of the discussion will be killed because there's a new post today and a new comment section to migrate to.

By having a single open thread on some topic (women, race, science, video games, whatever), commenters will be able to go at it to their heart's content and not have to worry about lost momentum. Should things slow down, I'll pop in often enough to stir the pot -- maybe something little like posting a link to a conversation-starting news story. Again, I'll start off with an initial group of threads, but if enough people want an open thread on a new topic, I'll start it up right away. Each Sunday, I'll post a new set of open threads, since this type of yakking has a weekly (not daily) rhythm: the momentum always dies over the weekend anyway.

Another huge benefit from this format is that you can engage in discussions on a variety of topics each day, all day. The way things are now, you talk about sex when there's a post about sex, or affirmative action when there's a post on that. I know that you all want to talk about lots of things every day, so this will allow you to do that. You could follow a bunch of free discussion boards, but by bringing everyone together under a single umbrella site, it will be closer-knit and you'll know that you have much more in common than just one interest. Plus you all sort of know each other already.

It'll be a regular Algonquin Roundtable, and you'll be able to relate ideas from various areas together. It'll be as participatory as a discussion board, but as broadly focused and free-ranging in content as the comment sections of your favorite blogs.

And again, comments will not be moderated, so there will be a much more natural pace to the discussion. Quite simply, if someone acts like a classic flamer, I will remove them without giving a refund, and they won't be allowed to re-join the site. Every meeting place that could attract losers needs a bouncer -- and lord knows that includes an internet comment section. By the same token, nightclubs that cost money to get into are generally better than those that don't charge -- it weeds out those with bad attitudes.

How to join

There is a "Subscribe" button at the top of this blog. You will need a PayPal account, and PayPal automates everything, billing you $5 every month. (You can cancel anytime via PayPal, although I won't refund money that you've already paid.) You will also need a Google account -- they're free, and you just provide them with an email address. When you subscribe, leave me a message via PayPal with the email address associated with your Google account. I need this to invite you to the blog. If you don't say so, I'll assume it's the one attached to your PayPal account. If you forget to mention it, you can always send me a correction through your PayPal account.

Once I invite you, you'll get an email that has a "join this blog" link that you click on. And with that, you're all set. You will need to be signed into your Google account, but you can stay signed in forever. I've already put up some open threads, so you can get going right away.

I expect that most subscribers will not be trolls or flamers -- they want to harass people for free -- but again, if you exhibit classical flamer behavior, you'll be kicked out with no refund. It just takes a couple people like that to ruin the vibe, so I'll be strict about that.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment here or email me at icanfeelmyheartbeat at the hotmail-ish site.

Women still living beyond their means to try to look better

Here are two brief press releases from the marketing research group NPD, which show that the recession hasn't made most women re-prioritize their spending on beauty products, and that the more expensive brands' sales are actually increasing: one and two.

Unfortunately, women are junking higher-end skincare products in favor of higher-end make-up, eye make-up, and fragrances. At least skincare adds moisture to the skin, and the higher-end products tend to have vitamin A (retinol) or other things that ameliorate the effects of aging.

I cannot believe that there's an eye make-up that costs $38 and is named after Hello Kitty.

Video game weekend: a brief history of video games

Since Fridays and Saturdays are low-traffic days, I'm devoting them to lighter material that I know lots of the readers here are interested in -- video games. (Hopefully this will recapture the feeling of being done with school and renting a video game for the weekend.)

They're a huge player in the entertainment industry, yet they haven't been studied very much. At some point, movies became a serious thing to talk about, so why not video games too? And just as the evolution of Hollywood businesses tells us a lot about the cultural products they made, we can learn a lot about the quality of video games by examining the history of this industry's businesses.

I'm in the middle of reading two histories of video games from academic sources, and I'll probably post on that later. But for now, I'll simply re-direct you to a four-part YouTube series by The Gaming Goose:

Part one, part two, part three, and part four.

Most of the info can be found on Wikipedia and a few other sites, but it's a pretty good synthesis, and there's a lot of personal insight from someone who grew up experiencing the birth of video games. Plus, unlike virtually every video game reviewer on YouTube (or elsewhere), he comes across as a normal person, not an autist.

One thing he mentions is that it's nonsense that the improving quality of home console games was what killed off the arcade games -- i.e., that people could now fairly well substitute home for arcade games. That's a point that I've made before by just noting the timing of the rise and fall of arcade game sales, in relation to home console sales. Arcade games started disappearing already in the very late 1980s, years before arcade-quality graphics were available and affordable at home.

He also emphasizes that going to video arcades was a social experience that you can't duplicate by playing people online today. That's true: you're out of your house, probably at a mall or movie theater surrounded by tons of people, and you're interacting face-to-face. There's all sorts of non-verbal stuff that's missed by playing online, such as that look of excited relief that you give each other after you beat what seemed an unbeatable boss. It's a superficial bond that only lasts as long as you're blasting away a common enemy, but that's still closer than the interaction between two random mall-goers.

Also, especially for younger boys, there was the thrill of getting to hang out with the cool older kids -- one of the few places where they would tolerate your presence. Unlike sports, a younger kid can actually fare pretty well against a teenager in video games, so that you could easily prove yourself to them and earn their respect. "Damn, look at that little dude go -- he just smoked your ass!" I don't know that there are many places left now that allow this partial breaking down of the age barrier.

And just for the record, Golden Axe is the best arcade game, just ahead of Ninja Turtles and the Simpsons.

New layout

I read too many books to write about (and most of them are pretty good and worth reviewing), so rather than put yet another post on the back-burner for each book, I've opted for what you see at the top of the page. They're all really neat and worth reading; click through as normal to see their Amazon entry. If you do buy an item after entering Amazon via my link, I get a small commission that will help defray the costs of the moon-sized death ray pointed at Earth that I'm working on.

I get questions a lot about which health and nutrition books to get -- well, there they are. All you need is those two, and you're basically set.

I'll probably begin devoting Fridays, which tend to be lower-traffic days, to video game reviews -- mostly of older ones. You can play the games yourself by getting the NES / SNES combination console in the link, and Amazon marketplace now has used video game sellers too for the cartridges. If you want something newer, the Nintendo DS Lite is pretty good. I got one in order to play newer games (on the DS) as well as the good ones from Game Boy Advance (which includes some from the NES and SNES). Plus the DS Lite is a lot cheaper than the new DSi -- and the DSi doesn't play GBA games either.

If you have a GameCube, you can pick up the Game Boy Player from the link, and that'll play GBA, Game Boy, and Game Boy Color games. I just got one so that I can make up for the time I lost in the late '90s -- I didn't know they made a fair amount of good games for the GBC. I assumed they were like Game Boy but just in color. The games are cheap too -- I found Metal Gear Solid, the top-rated game for the system, for $6 at a used record store nearby.

The movies in that list are mostly ones I've reviewed here And the music list is an introduction to really good stuff, in case you haven't already heard it. And now back to the death ray.

Sports video games sucked then and suck now -- why?

I never liked sports video games, aside from the occasional game of Baseball Simulator 1.000 for Nintendo (made by Culture Brain, a great little company). If I wanted do something sports-related, I'd throw the football around with my friend or bike down to an abandoned tennis court to join a game of roller hockey. But maybe I just didn't play the good sports games, or perhaps sports games have gotten better -- that is, increased at a faster rate in quality than games overall.

Nope. To check whether my assessment of sports games from awhile ago is correct, I went to eStarland and looked up used Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games, sorting them from low to high price. Almost without exception, the first 100 or so of roughly 500 games are sports games. Think of all the other genres that could have been mixed in there too -- yet the bottom fifth (and maybe more) are almost entirely sports games.

Then to check on more recent consoles, I looked up used PlayStation 2 games from low to high price. Again, virtually all of the really low-priced games -- i.e., those that no one wants -- are sports games. The graphics may be better, and you may be able to customize your team more than before, but compared to other genres, sports games are still garbage.

So, what is it about sports games that makes them so unpopular? It can't be "I could do that in real life," since The Sims is incredibly popular (among girls anyway). I don't think it's that we expect sports to be physical, so that a test of our button-pressing doesn't live up to a test of coordinating our whole body. After all, the beat 'em up games are supposed to be physical, and they don't live up to the feel of actually killing 500 guys with your bare hands. Thoughts?

The real benefits of good looks

Everyone knows from their own lives that looking good will make it easier to get your foot in the door with the opposite sex. And if you've followed the media's fascination with the psychology of the past 15 to 20 years -- mostly the evolutionary kind -- you've probably heard about how they are given more attention even by newborns, and that they tend to earn more than their plain-looking counterparts.

But there are two even more important perks that hardly anyone mentions:

1) Should the need arise, you can fart in public without worrying -- no one around will think that the good-looking person did it. It must have been that fat ugly guy over there. (Most girls under 30 benefit from this too -- everyone assumes they never do it.)

2) You can go longer without doing laundry since your sweat not only doesn't stink, but actually smells good to the opposite sex. (See the cottage industry of "sweaty t-shirt studies.") That's a real plus during the summer. I think you have to still have a clean overall appearance, though.

The only downside to children preferring to be around good-looking adults is that they want to play with you way too much. I didn't mind that as a tutor because it meant that they'd actually behave themselves pretty well around me and not act like monsters, lest they lose my favor. But, for example, yesterday I was trying to get some reading done at Starbucks when someone's group of little kids kept hovering near me to make their stuffed animal crawl up my leg. It was cute at first, but it's hard to shoo the little boogers away when you need to get work done.

The reasons that females police promiscuity are self-interested, not patriarchal

I want to return to a previous post where I linked to and commented on a YouTube video of an 8th grader mercilessly documenting her best friend's libidinous ways, all while the friend begs her to stop and chases after her when that doesn't work. This is the familiar pattern of girls sabotaging their so-called sisters to get ahead.

Yet several commenters argued that the teaser was only acting under the influence of the patriarchal norms that she'd internalized -- if they were reared under a matriarchy, teenage girls would not act so savagely toward one another.

But let's get real.

This girl just so happens to police the sexuality of other females exactly at the time when she herself has a selfish motive to do so -- to keep them from competing with her for boys, from dragging down standards, and so on.

Think it through: if females policed others due to social brainwashing, it would show up in their behavior early on. Even by the end of elementary school, kids have absorbed most parts of culture that are not innate -- the ambient language, looking both ways before crossing the street, saying please and thank you, etc.

And yet elementary school girls don't harangue females of any age about their sexuality -- at all. They only start doing this after puberty.

Under the "social brainwashing" hypothesis, the perfect coincidence between policing and puberty is completely unaccounted for. Under the "advancing her own interests" hypothesis, it makes perfect sense. We conclude that girls tearing into other girls for acting slutty, once puberty begins, is as genetically pre-programmed as boys acting violently toward each other to attain top dog status.

File another Women's Studies theory under "so wrong a high schooler could figure it out."