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Polybius (game):

Polybius is a supposed arcade game featured in an Internet urban legend. According to the story, the Tempest-style game was released to the public in 1981, and caused its players to go insane, causing them to suffer from intense stress and horrific nightmares. A short time after its release, it supposedly disappeared without a trace. No evidence for the existence of such a game has ever been discovered.

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According to the story, an unheard-of new arcade game appeared in several suburbs of Portland, Oregon in 1981, something of a rarity at the time. The game, Polybius, proved to be incredibly popular, to the point of addiction, and lines formed around the machines, quickly followed by clusters of visits from men in black. Rather than the usual marketing data collected by company visitors to arcade machines, they collected some unknown data, allegedly testing responses to the psychoactive machines. The players themselves suffered from a series of unpleasant side-effects, including amnesia, insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, and even suicide in some versions of the legend. Some players stopped playing video games, while it is reported that one became an anti-gaming activist. The supposed creator of Polybius is Ed Rottberg, and the company named in the urban legend is Sinneslöschen (German for sense-delete), often named as either a secret government organization or a codename for Atari. The gameplay is said to be similar to Tempest, a shoot ‘em up game utilizing vector graphics.

Read on.

Sue Jones-Davies, the actress who played Judith Iscariot in Monty Python’s Life of Bryan, is now mayor of the Welsh town of Aberystwyth* and is trying to lift the town’s ban on… The Life of Brian!

Some religious groups picketed cinemas which screened the film, and it was banned from being shown in some towns and cities, including Aberystwyth.

Nearly 30 years on, Mr Bell, vicar of the town’s St Michael’s Church, said the restriction should remain in place.

“There’s been no change in attitude or response to the film amongst the Christians who have spoken to me in Aberystwyth,” he explained.

“The film at its root is poking fun at Christ and we don’t want that to happen. I don’t think that the film should be shown. Why should the ban be removed?”

Asked if he had ever seen the film, Mr Bell said he had “seen a small clip, that’s all”.

Surprise, surprise. Read the whole thing.

*Gesundheit!

If I were to tell you that a theatrical version of William Gibson’s famous novel Neuromancer was going to be performed in a rural Missouri town, starring a radical leftist activist and members of an amateur theater troupe from a local Baptist church, what would you say? It probably wouldn’t be: “Yeah, and wouldn’t it be great if all the cyberspace scenes were done with cardboard cutouts that people move around on stage, accompanied by Indonesian Gamelan music?” And yet that’s exactly what Brody Condon is going to do, next summer, with grant money from the Rhizome Foundation. I know it sounds insane, and that’s precisely the point.

Oh my god. This sounds amazing. Read on.

The name of the mission is Solar Probe+ (pronounced “Solar Probe plus”). It’s a heat-resistant spacecraft designed to plunge deep into the sun’s atmosphere where it can sample solar wind and magnetism first hand. Launch could happen as early as 2015. By the time the mission ends 7 years later, planners believe Solar Probe+ will solve two great mysteries of astrophysics and make many new discoveries along the way.

One of those mysteries blows me away. I had no idea about this:

If you stuck a thermometer in the surface of the sun, it would read about 6000o C. Intuition says the temperature should drop as you back away; instead, it rises. The sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, registers more than a million degrees Celsius, hundreds of times hotter than the star below. This high temperature remains a mystery more than 60 years after it was first measured.

We live in a wonderfully bizarre universe. Read the whole thing.

The Raw Story:

Rep. Broun has introduced H.R. 5821, also known as the Military Honor and Decency Act, which would close what he calls a loophole that allows the continued distribution of pornography to soldiers, to their moral detriment, with the help of taxpayer funds.

“As a Marine, I am deeply concerned for the welfare of our troops and their mission,” Broun said on April 17. “Allowing the sale of pornography on military bases has harmed military men and women by: escalating the number of violent, sexual crimes; feeding a base addiction; eroding the family as the primary building block of society; and denigrating the moral standing of our troops both here and abroad. Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit. The ‘Military Honor and Decency Act’ will right a bureaucratic–and moral–wrong.”

Let me get this straight: you can die for your country, but you can’t squeeze out a few rounds for your own benefit? Dick. Link! [via Don't Taze Me Bro]

Wired:

The two remaining Democratic presidential candidates recently agreed to participate in the Compassion Forum, scheduled for April 13 at Messiah College in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Billed as a conversation on faith and values, the event will be broadcast by the Church Communication Network. It also comes five days before a proposed science debate that was canceled after the candidates refused to participate.

Emphasis mine. Why would they want to talk about, you know, issues that actually affect the future of life on this planet, when they could be yammering away about the same ancient lies that have been killing people for millennia.

Fuck. And this is the comparatively rational party. It’s enough to make you want to take the Lord’s name in vain. Read on.

UPDATE: Just came across this. Seemed appropriate.

Exactly what it sounds like. My personal favorite: Tyler Perry’s They Live. Well, Perry’s made nothing but horror movies so far.

I’m starting work on a script that involves the chimps that NASA shot into space in the early 1960’s (don’t ask) and I just started doing research. One Google search took me to this:

The first ‘chimponaut’, three-year-old Ham, rocketed into space on January 31, 1961. According to NASA’s archives, “Ham’s survival, despite a host of harrowing mischances…, raised the confidence of the astronauts and the capsule engineers alike.”

Three months later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space. NASA’s next mission was getting a capsule into orbit, and on November 29, 1961, five-year-old Enos was launched into space. Due to a malfunction inside the capsule, Enos was given an electric shock for every correct maneuver he made, a reward-punishment system that contradicted over a year of training.

Rather than alter his behavior, Enos endured the shocks and performed the flight tasks he knew were right. The flight took Enos on a two-orbit ride and landed him alive. This qualified the system for manned flight, and the following year John Glenn orbited the earth three times.

Holy cow! That’s one tough chimp. But then…

America took its astronaut heroes to heart with an enthusiasm that surprised the nation. In March 1962 four million people in New York City showered confetti on John Glenn and fellow astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom.

The Air Force chimpanzees were not so lucky. After showing the “right stuff,” the chimpanzees were reassigned to “hazardous mission environments.” In one such “environment,” the development of the seat belt, the chimpanzees were subjected to perilous levels of force while in restraints in deceleration sleds. By the 1970s the Air Force stopped using the chimpanzees and began leasing them out for biomedical research purposes.

Makes you feel ashamed to be human, doesn’t it? Read on.

…they advocate cannibalism. Ok, ok. So it’s only a Fox affiliate, but I can’t help but kick them when they’re down. Well, not down precisely, but they do need to scramble.