Links: Politics, Games, and Art Edition

Lot of good stuff from the past few weeks! Political talk and commentary:

• Olbermann rants about 9/11(TM), as the Republicans spin it.
• O'Reilly defends Obama... what? The Daily Show team talks to Republican convention-goers about small-town values.
• John McCain slams Obama for... protecting children from child molesters? Of course, this is good for McCain.
• Obama discusses McCain's lobbyists.
• The Daily Show parody's John McCain's biography film, noting how his policy positions have totally reversed since 2000 (some as late as 2006). They also go over his acceptance speech.
• Joe Biden tears into John McCain, go Joe!
• Samantha Bee of The Daily Show talks to RNC atendees about Bristol Palin's... what's that word again?
• Questions that the media should ask Sarah Palin, as contrasted with what they probably will ask.
• Ron Paul endorses the third-party candidates, ALL OF THEM. Bob Barr asks Paul to be his running mate, with Root agreeing to step aside. I do hope he'll accept, that would be tremendously entertaining.

On games and gaming:

• Here's a paradoic (and hilarious) expose on GameStop's horrible business practices. And here I'd thought they were just garden-variety bad. I plan to avoid them in the future.
• SPORE has awful DRM, and apparently the gameplay is lackluster, too. I was interested in this one back during its development, but now I think I'll take a pass. The game accumulated a ton of negative reviews on Amazon from disgruntled fans (over 2000, most very negative, before Amazon deleted them all (update: they're claiming that was a technical glitch and have restored the reviews)).
• Meanwhile, there is some good news. Good Old Games is selling old classics via download, with no DRM, downloadable extras, and $6-10 price tags. They've just opened for their private beta test. Their EULA is still the usual (when is a sale not a sale?), but it's still progress. If you're looking to get your game fix now, Abandonia has freeware and abandonware games (copyrights fallen into the public domain by virtue of companies gone belly-up, mostly) available for download. I downloaded Ascendancy, since I really liked that game back in the day.

Regarding art:

• Here's a video segment about a painter born without eyes.
• And here's a short photo-essay about a painter (set of painters?) with dissociative identity disorder.

Miscellaneous bonus round:

• One on Shovelglove, an intersting DIY exercise technique.
• For technical-minded folks, here's an article on the history of the User-Agent string (and why Google Chrome is Mozilla, but in fact it's AppleWebKit, which is like Gecko (except not), but really it's just Chrome, which is pretty much Safari).
• Here's an essay on one employee's experience in the Rent-to-Own business.
• United's stock (briefly) tanked recently, after an old story about their bankruptcy was accidentally republished. danah boyd (she of the insufficient capital letters) took the opportunity to share another United Airlines horror story. Considering that my last airline horror story was also United, perhaps this is a good indication that they're another business to avoid.