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A sobering list of recent accidental shootings from Cynical-C.

Web-savvy users have long known that YouTube has some of the dumbest comments on the internet, but the idiocy is really thrown into sharp relief when you put them side by side with MetaFilter comments. I credit the $5 signup fee.

Ammon Shea, in the Oxford University Press blog, writes about some of the weird stuff he found while reading the Oxford English Dictionary:

I’ll confess that on several occasions I thought that the editors of the OED were having a joke at the reader’s expense. The entry for unpoetic gives no definition, but there is a note that tells the reader to ‘cf. next.’ The reader dutifully looks ahead to the next entry which is unpoetical, the definition of which reads ‘cf. prev.’

Sure has been quiet around these parts, huh? Well, get ready for it to be a whole lot quieter!

Inspired by sites like The Brainy Gamer which explore video games from a more critical, intelligent angle, I’ve started a new blog about video games called Cruise Elroy. So far there’s only one real post, but I think it’s about as long as everything I’ve written here for the past two months put together. Take a look, won’t you?

Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, passed away this morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He was 69.

I was never a D&D player, but I have indirectly felt his influence through video games for years. Alec Meer at Rock, Paper, Shotgun writes:

Would we ever have had PC RPGs without Gygax’s laying down of roleplaying foundations back in 1974? Oh, probably – in some form, anyway. But would we have had Ultima, Fallout, Diablo, World of Warcraft, even Deus Ex? Probably not. Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Planescape Torment? Definitely not.

In short, he was an enormously influential figure in interactive entertainment, and will be missed.

For further reading, the MetaFilter thread eulogizing Gygax has some great stories.