http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/07/27/news_6103575.html
I don’t know if I ranted on here somewhere about my obsessive love of the online, immersive, alternate reality game for “A.I.” a few years ago…but let’s just say it was a dangerous time for me. I spent, no exaggeration, a couple of hundred hours on that game. On the puzzles, of reading blogs and newsgroups and bulletin boards. That game took so much of my time and attention, and it was so worth it! (Check out www.cloudmakers.org for more info on the A.I. game.)

Now comes a new alternate reality Web game in promotion for Halo2. Don’t care much for the video game (since I never played Halo1 and I don’t have an X-box,) but this Web game is likely to have me hooked.

Basically, start with www.ilovebees.com and start trying to solve the mystery. Click the links, read the niece’s journal, try to figure out what’s going on. I’ve barely just begun, but the game’s been running for some weeks now…so there are already a lot of sources out there for people to discuss and share solutions to puzzles.
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=78&sid=68917180ded03e4eb19c8c68e28728a5
http://qube.netninja.com/
Just a couple I’ve found so far.

I found that I want to go it alone, try to solve the puzzles by myself…but unless you have 4 different degrees, 5 different technical certifications, and life experience in many different careers, you HAVE to use the help of others. Plus, working on the game as part of a community really enhances the experience…which I found with Cloudmakers and A.I.

Besides, by the looks of it, the game is more than half over already. =( You need to look at the work of other’s to just catch up.

Wish I could get in on a alternate reality immersive game from the beginning. I got in on A.I. about halfway through.

Have fun =)

Oh, on a side thought, what’s with all this labeling things “hoaxes.” The article above making a deal about the game being a marketing “hoax,” the CNN thing about the M. Night Shaylaman documentary being a hoax…c’mon people. These things are not meant to be taken as reality. Who doesn’t know they’re marketing tools? (A.I. actually was a game. Sure it was based on the movie, but it ran long after the movie did in theaters and took on a life much much bigger than the movie. Argueably, much more entertaining. And certainly many MANY times more hours of activity…and for free!)

There’s a false assumption that if a person is 100% against one person or thing, they must be for the person or thing that is likewise antithecal. When it comes to me and Bush/Michael Moore, nothing can be further from the truth.

I hate Bush with a great passion. I believe he’s the worst President we’ve ever had, more than Grant and Hoover and Nixon combined. And the Republican Party has become a puppet of the Religious Reich and servent of corporate interests. But I despise the ultra-Liberal Left just as much. Their self-serving, elitest, arrogant end-justify-the-means tactics are just as bad as any of the Bush/Ashcroft/Cheney/Rumsfield lying and deception.

In particular: Michael Moore. That yellow journalistic pseudo-documentarian has created as much deceitful propoganda as the Bush administration, and all with one controversial film.

I urge you to take a good read of “56 Deceits of Fahrenheit 911″. After a bunch of backstory, if goes point by point over the movie and details exactly where misinformation, lies, and contrived deception takes place. And ocassionally Moore’s defence on such details, which is often incomprehensible avoidance of the issue.
There’s also Moore Watch (ignore the annoying right-wing advertisements…unless you’re right-wing *g*.)

Like 56′ reminds us, two wrongs don’t make a right. Yes, Bush is a lying incompetant and his administration has deceived us and hurt our freedoms, but to lie and deceive to make the administration even more vilified than it already is is just as wrong and self-defeating. When people find out that “Fahrenheit 911″ is full of lies and misinformation and contrivance, it diminishes the urgency and validity of the real danger of the Bush administration.

Although, it probably won’t matter. True right-wingers wouldn’t watch the movie either way and left-wingers don’t care they’re being lied to if it matches their own opinions.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/04/samesex.marriage.ap/index.html
Missouri voters (of which I am one) voted 71% in favor of amending the state constitution to define “marriage” as between a man and woman.
30 years from now we’re going to look back on this in shame. Like looking back on the efforts to ban interracial marriages.

One of the various shames of this is that voters voted their morality and opinion, not the issue itself. The question isn’t “Do you believe marriage is between a man and woman only,” which most of those 71% interpreted the proposal as. The question is whether the constitution should have to define it that way.
Whatever your moral or religious views, it’s not the place of the government to decide it for you, and everyone! (Granted, better for a state to decide than the FEDERAL government (see US Constitution’s Bill Of Rights amendment number 10.))

The “sanctity” of marriage is a religious and moral issue, not a legal one. The government has the responsibility to provides the means for people to seek life, liberty, and pursue happiness within their own lives. With liberty and independence! When the government defines for the people who they can and cannot devote their lifetime commitment of love, that’s the worst example of fascism. If you don’t like same-sex marriages, fine. Don’t get married to someone of the same sex. Protest, preach, exercise your right to free speech and orderly protest.

But in my opinion, this whole “sanctity” and protecting the history of marriage is bu11sh17. Period. 99% of the history of marriage, including Western Europe and America, has been based on property ownership and political/financial mergers. Not about love or devotion. Love in a marriage has historically been quite rare. Ever actually research the meaning and history of “Courtly Love”? It’s not between a wife and husband, that’s for sure. It was always about extramarital love affairs and devotions from afar. Marriage has always been about business arrangements. Gaining land and property. Influence. Selling your daughters off. Treating one’s wife as property.

The religious basis of marriage in the Judeo-Christian line has included polygamy and owning one’s wife. Women were cattle and baby making machines. Punishments for women for adultery were death and for men financial. Adultery laws were based on theft, not about defiling sanctity. This attitude about marriage existed right up until 100 years ago. Marriages even in America were historically arranged affairs between parents, or out of convenience. The history of marriage has been about ownership, not love.

Even today, what’s so sanctified about marriage in the heterosexual community? 50% of these sanctified unions end. Husbands and wives still beat each other, abuse and neglect kids, get married on spur of the moment, to get GreenCards, by Elvis impersonators. There’s nothing inherently sanctified about male/female marriage.

By contrast, most gay/lesbian lifetime unions ARE about devoted love and commitment in much greater ratio. And children? In addition to artificial insemination, gay and lesbian couples adopt children. And what children do they adopt? The castaways from “sanctified” heterosexual unions. There is by far an absurdly higher rate of child abuse and neglect and molestation and infanticide in heterosexual marriages than in same-sex unions.

And banning same-sex marriage is in no way whatsoever going to have any effect good or ill on the rate of heterosexual abuse, divorce, adultery. In fact, the fact that most same-sex marriages in ratio are completely about love and devotion should raise the level of so-called “sanctity” of marriage in general.

The religious laws and guidelines of marriage in the Christian Bible are all about ownership and procreation rights. When it comes to love, even the Bible makes no gender basis. Look at the stories of David and Jonathan (Samuel 16-ish to 20-ish, and 2nd Samuel around 24-26,) Ruth and Naomi (Ruth chapters 1 and 4,) and…drat, there’s another big relationship but I can’t remember it at the moment.)

Ruth is mentioned as having her husband’s children, which is what was important in marriages, but it never ever mentions any love between them. In contrast, some of the most beautiful words of love and devotion are between Ruth and Naomi. David and Jonathan both had marriages to women and had children as were expected of them, for that was the purpose of marriage was so that more people would be created, but they were utterly devoted with passion to each other.

I’m also curious as to why the Bible makes special mention about John being the disciple in particular as the one “loved by” Jesus.

Anyway, the Bible never actually condemns homosexuality. No, what it condemns is “sodomy” which is a mistranslation of Hebrew. Where “sodomy” is used, the context is raping of a man, or the practice of male sex in temples as a religious rite/service. The one and only place where the Bible specifically mentions consensual male/male sexual contact outside of a temple is that famous line from the OT which is almost always said in the King James translation even by people who 99% of the rest of the time will quote NIB translation. Because King James had a very anti-homosexual agenda and promoted to the people he was paying to translate the Bible to change references to male rape and male temple sex to sodomy in general.

But as for that one verse about “Whoever shall lay with a man as with a woman are an abomination and it is detestable to God…” yaddayadda…the proper translation from Hebrew is “Whoever shall have sex with a man in the bed of a woman are ritually unclean.” The focus of this admonishment is not the act of male/male sex, but doing so in a woman’s bed. And the Hebrew word used for this type of “unclean” is the same level of unclean as eating shellfish or touching a woman during her time of the month.

When you consider that Biblical marriage laws and purposes are all based on property and making as many children as possible, and that there are very significant passages of same-sex love, it’s hard to make a case against same-sex marriage without it being all about one’s own biases and the continued insistance that marriage is a baby-making institution.