BBC Africa Have Your Say invites readers to debate whether or not Rwandan Tutsis should be put to death.

Just kidding! Substitute "Rwandan" for "Ugandan" and "Tutsis" for "gays." Although Rwanda is also debating the execution of gays.

So... why is it just our right to live that's not a sine qua non internationally? I want to share the joy of this feeling with everyone.

This started to turn me a little straight, but then I lolled.

These commercials that try to put longterm consumption "in perspective" by showing the same amount consumed in one sitting make me want to produce a commercial using that bullshit urban legend statistic about the number of spiders people supposedly swallow while sleeping.

"Over the course of a lifetime, the average person swallows the equivalent of NINETY-EIGHT POUNDS OF SPIDERS."

[A giant spider pushes its way out of the elasticized head of a sleeping figure.]

"NEVER GO TO SLEEP AGAIN."

I put this in a mix long ago. This song continues to amaze me. It feels like some kind of alternate-universe genre of Tejano that reflects the heat and grime of the border crossing, radios in cars with no AC, the air shimmering over the 18 wheelers lined up halfway through town on I-35.

I suspect the recently released Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for the Wii is going to be the hot new thing for game criticism blogs to mull over.

With a heavy focus on exploration, the inclusion of psych-test mini games, and the replacement of regular combat with OHGODGETITOFFME flailing, the game feels a lot like an independent horror movie in the best way possible.

The biggest question it raises is: Why didn't indie devs get here first? Maybe they did; I might have missed an obvious predecessor, but my point is that the game's scope (small) and mechanics (experimental) are in line with the interests and abilities of a talented indie developer. The closest relatives of Shattered Memories that I can finger are Tale of Tales' The Path and the Adam Cadre interactive fiction game Photopia. The Path is all about exploration and atmosphere, while Photopia shares with Shattered Memories some themes and its interleaved passages of fantasy and reality.

Anyway, go out and get it, or everyone else is going to be pretentious without you! In a just world, it will be highly influential.

Also, Photopia is playable inside your browser here. It's short, linear, powerfully written and extremely memorable. You have no excuse not to open a browser tab and run through it if you're reading LJ. The alternate universe versions of yourself that have already played it are screaming at you to do so now. Caveat: the in-browser player doesn't seem to handle non-default background colors well. If you get a solid box with seemingly no text in it, highlight it to see the text it contains. These boxes only occur between scenes, so it shouldn't affect your experience too much.

You know what's great?

( Georgian wrestler Ramaz Nozadze )

Gay marriage bill passes committee vote in DC. Full council vote to come in a couple of weeks. The Catholic Church promises to stab homeless people with sharpened crucifixes until the council changes its mind.

Railworks Train Simulator: Challenger Edition is 50% off on Steam right now. However, after the discount, it's still $35. It's normally $70! That's like a third of Amtrak's annual maintenance budget. For that kind of money, the full price game had better come with an actual elementary school teacher that actually explodes when your train goes fast enough to achieve lift-off.

CBS Morning News demonstrates the intersection of sexism and homophobia by censoring a M/M kiss but letting a F/F kiss play. The objection is not to homosexuality per se, but to something that does not cater to the straight male gaze.

Thanks to Joe My God.

From the wikipedia article Zap (Action):

GAA member Marty Robinson is credited with developing the zap following a March 7, 1970 police raid on a gay bar called the Snake Pit. Police arrested 167 patrons. One, an Argentine national named Diego Vinales, so feared the possibility of deportation that he leapt from a second-story window of the police station, impaling himself on the spikes of an iron fence.^[11] Gay journalist and activist Arthur Evans later recalled how the raid and Vinales' critical injuries inspired the technique:

The Snake Pit incident truly outraged us, and we put out a leaflet saying that, in effect, regardless of how you looked at it, Diego Vinales was pushed out the window and we were determined to stop it....There was no division for us between the political and personal. We were never given the option to make that division. We lived it. So we decided that people on the other side of the power structure were going to have the same thing happen to them. The wall that they had built protecting themselves from the personal consequences of their political decisions was going to be torn down and politics was going to become personal for them.^[12]