• 23Nov 09

  Guinness Gamers

  • Largest fully functional game of Tetris:

  

  Created by dutch students, the massive game took place on 15 floors of the university's electrical engineering department.

  • First use of in-game soundtrack in an election campaign:

  

  The Arizona senator used a composition ( casualties of war ) from Medal of Honor: EuropeanAssaultin one of his presidential campaigns, although he's not known for being a big gamer, but that didn't stop him from dipping his toes into digital waters.

  • Longest prison semtence for playing a video game:

  

  The next time you're asked to turn off a gizmo on a plane, do yourself a favor and just do it. Otherwise, you might up like Faiz Chopdat, who in September of 2002 was jailed for four months for incessantly playing Tetris on his cell phone during a flight to the U.K. Multiple warnings by the flight staff went unheeded, landing the gamer behind bars...and in the record books.

  • Highest Space Invaders score using mind control:

  

  Ready for the future? In 2006, a neurological research team at Washington University in St. Louis developed a system allowing people to play the arcade Space Invaders using sheer brain power. One participant, a 14 year-old boy suffering from epilepsy, managed to reach the third level and tally 5,000 points, earning a truly unique spot in gaming history.

  • Longest-standing video game high-score:

  

  Back in 1982, a 15 year-old gamer sauntered up to an Asteroids arcade machine at a charity event, popped in a quarter, and started playing. Three days later, he stopped. Scott Safran's unbelievable score has thus far proven itself to be unbreakable, outlasting all challengers for a whopping 26 years and counting.

  • Largest gathering of gaming cosplayers:

  

  Geeky conventions might be overflowing with people dressed up as their favorite fantasy figures, but when it comes to dressing up specifically as video game characters, the participants in an event at the Millennium Bridge jointly hold the top spot.

  • Youngest Pro Gamer:

  

  Child labor laws have nothing on Lil' Poison, a gaming prodigy who began playing for keeps at the ripe age of six. One year later, he placed second out of 550 in a pro event. A few years after that, he landed in the records books. What can we say? The kid's got game.

  • Fastest recorded speed for a car in a driving game:

  

  When a gamer by the name of Moretti puts the pedal to the metal, he means it. Using a combination of nitro charged boosts and slick drifting techniques, he managed to bring a Ford GT up to the ludicrous, record-breaking speed. Hope he got a ticket.

  • Posted Nov 23, 2009 8:19 am PT
  • Category: Editorial
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• 14Nov 09

  The OK origins

  A friend of mine was asking for when did the term ok appeared, after he knew he was kinda baffled for what the "O" and "K" stands for. It started at 1839, only survivor of a slang fad in Boston and New York c.1838-9 for abbreviations of common phrases with deliberate, jocular misspellings (cf. K.G. for "no go," as if spelled "know go"); in this case, "oll korrect." Further popularized by use as an election slogan by the O.K. Club, New York boosters of Democratic president Martin Van Buren's 1840 re-election bid, in allusion to his nickname Old Kinderhook, from his birth in the N.Y. village of Kinderhook. Van Buren lost, the word stuck, in part because it filled a need for a quick way to write an approval on a document, bill, etc. The noun is first attested 1841; the verb 1888. Spelled out as okeh, 1919, by Woodrow Wilson, on assumption that it represented Choctaw okeh "it is so" (a theory which lacks historical documentation); this was ousted quickly by okay after the appearance of that form in 1929. Okey-doke is student slang first attested 1932. Greek immigrants to America who returned home early 20c. having picked up U.S. speech mannerisms were known in Greece as okay-boys, among other things.
  
  http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term…
  
  H.L. Mencken once described "O.K." as "the most successful of Americanisms," an estimation verified by U.S. troops during the Second World War, who reported encountering the phrase all over the world. Of all the scores of theories (and sub-theories) as to the origin of "O.K.," the most widely heard traces "O.K." to the "O.K. Club," a political committee supporting Martin Van Buren's unsuccessful bid for the Presidency in 1840. The "O.K.," it is said, was short for "Old Kinderhook," Van Buren's nickname.
  
  It appears that this theory is not so much wrong (the "O.K. Club" certainly existed) as it is incomplete. Chances are good the Van Buren's partisans would never have named their club "O.K." had the phrase not already been widely known as an abbreviation of "oll korrect," a humorous misspelling of "all correct." American speech in the early 1800s was awash in similar abbreviations, two of which, "N.G." ("no good") and "P.D.Q." ("Pretty Damn Quick"), are still heard today.
  
  Ironically, while "O.K." didn't save Van Buren's campaign, the campaign gave "O.K." a new lease on life -- until then, it had never been as popular as a competing phrase, "O.W." (for "oll wright"). (By the way, before we start feeling too superior to the cornball 1800s, is "oll wright" really any worse than the "excuuuse me!" or "not!" fads of a few years ago?).
  
  http://www.word-detective.com/back-q.htm…
  
  OK is without doubt the best-known and widest-travelled Americanism, used and recognised even by people who hardly know another word of English. Running in parallel with its popularity have been many attempts to explain where it came from — amateur etymologists have been obsessed with OK and theories have bred unchecked for the past 150 years.
  
  Suggestions abound of introductions from another language, including the one you mention. Others include: from the Choctaw-Chickasaw okah meaning "it is indeed"; from a mishearing of the Scots och aye! (or perhaps Ulster Scots Ough aye!), "yes, indeed!"; from West African languages like Mandingo (O ke, "certainly") or Wolof (waw kay, "yes indeed"); from Finnish oikea, "correct, exact"; from French au quais, "at the quay" (supposedly stencilled on Puerto Rican rum specially selected for export, or a place of assignation for French sailors in the Caribbean); or from French Aux Cayes (a port in Haiti famous for its superior rum). Such accidentally coincidental forms across languages are surprisingly common and all of these are certainly false. Many African-Americans would be delighted to have it proved that OK is actually from an African language brought to America by slaves, but the evidence is against them, as we shall shortly learn.

  • Posted Nov 14, 2009 4:15 pm PT
  • Category: Other
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• 22Aug 08

  Dr_Lucifer's favorite...Lucifer!

  i wanna know who made the weapon lucifer in devil may cry 4? because the one who made it clearly copied my style!! he even got the skull and the rose and the red colors all together!! i just wanna know who did that so i can sue him..

  • Posted Aug 22, 2008 3:38 am PT
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