Technically Incorrect

For gamers, Christmas can, indeed, come early.

Because here is every gamer's dream wrapped up in a Christmas paper so beautiful that you might never play Guitar Hero in a living room ever again.

Please hail Ric Turner, who realized the holiday season was upon him and it was time not to keep up with the Joneses, but with the Brian Jones Massacre's. So, according to Make, he created this astonishing Guitar Hero Christmas lights extravaganza, which he calls Christmas Light Hero.

If you are not utterly entranced by the skill and wonderment of this technological exercise, then your fingers are pork sausages and your emotions are boiled semolina.

I know you are going to ask me how he did it. Thankfully, he explained to Make in some detail.

Here is just the first part of his explanation: "Christmas Light Hero is using 7 light controllers from Light-O-Rama built from kits to control 21,268 lights and LEDs. Each controller has 16 outputs and 2-3 TTL level control inputs that are used by the game system to fire different programmed light sequences depending on what happens in the game."

He continued: "It relies on the fact that the game sequence is very consistent. If the game and the lighting sequences start together, they will stay in very good sync through the length of the song."

For the full explanation--it goes on for some paragraphs--please enjoy the Make link.

Turner is so wonderfully talented (Oh, did I mention that he used to be a special effects guy at Disney Imagineering?) that he even thought about not disturbing the neighbors with renditions of Eric Johnson's "Cliffs of Dover".

He said: "When you play, you watch only the Christmas lights, but the audio you hear is from the Wii, so your flubs are broadcast for all to hear (people in cars can tune 99.1 and crank it up as loud as they want.)"

If you happen to be passing Turner's house (a commenter on Daily What says it's somewhere near Disney in Burbank, Calif.), please know that it isn't so easy to get on the high score list.

He said on his YouTube posting: "Optional TV screen is available if you get in trouble, but if you use the screen, you don't get your name in the high score list."

I know some of you will be wondering how many bulbs are being put to such good use here. The Daily What reveals that it is 21,268.

May your neighbors be even one tenth as imaginative this holiday season.

The Disney Company is always so good at accessing one's inner child. The hope, the joy, the glory of absolute love, family goodness, and everything that sails in it.

So I am thrown a little off course when I hear that Disney may have falsely accused an 11-year-old boy of hacking the Pirates of the Caribbean video game and disabled his account.

The account I have read comes from the boy's dad, Brian Guy. Guy is a manager of MySQL's hardy pirates at Sun Microsystems. He also has a blog, which was positively fulminating with frustration Tuesday, as Guy told the story of his son's video game review site.

The site, Carsonreviews.com, seems to this untrained eye to be a rather fine construction, full of wit and wisdom. For example: "While my parents are busy cleaning the house for Thanksgiving, I am busy checking out free online games.= )"

Yet Carson's dad says: "Disney has falsely accused my 11-year-old son of hacking the online game, and Disney temporarily banned his account. They sent him a curt e-mail lecturing him about something he didn't even do."

Does a pirate ever accused another pirate of pirating? Just wondering.

(Credit: CC Joe Shlabotnik/Flickr)

Dad does seem like a fair and remarkably balanced chap as he explained: "I can see how at first glance, they might have misinterpreted his chat logs. Another user had made my son aware of a "glitch" (that's what they called it) that allowed users to rapid fire their cannons."

We are all insecure in this currently crazy world and any opportunity to rapid fire one's cannons at least deserves some attention. However, Carson quickly realized that speeding up his firing might require some file-changing. Which is a bad, bad thing to contemplate.

Dad posted the logs from his son's site to show that Carson was merely asking questions. I post them here for your perusal and edification:

However, he says Disney rapid-fired an e-mail that showed the darker side of its piratical nature.

Dad says Disney espied the logs, reached for its rum, muttered yo-ho-ho, and declared this was proof of "the use of third-party software, shown in the logs." The company also froze his son's account.

Dad entreated Disney by e-mail. Someone called Tony from Disney's Online Member Services apparently replied: "As a family-friendly company, all in-game chat is moderated equally for everyone regardless of age to maintain a friendly and safe online environment for all to enjoy. In regards to your account, the use or distribution of any software or device that allows automated or other manipulation of gameplay is not allowed. Such use may result in the termination of your account."

Dad didn't feel this answered the question, so he adorned his blog with his feelings. He would like Disney to apologize and, as of writing, he says he has not received such an apology.

I do not sense Pinocchio's lengthening nose in any part of Guy's story, so I, too, have attempted to contact Disney and will update should I receive a reply. I do hope that everyone can become BFFs again.

Perhaps this is an instance of careless customer service. But when your customer is 11 years old, perhaps you should pause and ask yourself: What would Johnny Depp do?"

As you begin to contemplate your Thanksgiving meal, your family gathered around you, your loved ones embracing you, please be thankful you are not Sal9000.

Sal appears to be a man with very idiosyncratic needs, which he has attempted to satiate by marrying his favorite video game character.

Perhaps you think I have finally lost my last marble. However, please examine this footage. Courtesy of the radical realists at BoingBoing, this video shows that Sal married Nene Anegasaki, a character in the Nintendo DS game, Love Plus.

These unique nuptials were apparently broadcast on the Japanese video sharing site, Nico Nico Douga, a place where many strange things occur for, no doubt, extremely sound psychological reasons.

I don't wish to so much as broach the topic of marital consummation. However, I can tell you that attending the wedding, which was held, naturally, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, were the bride's virtual video game girlfriend, a live audience and, yes, a real religious priest.

I cannot find record of where the happy couple might be honeymooning, but I have an indelible fear that it might be in a very small, dark apartment somewhere in Tokyo. I trust they will have a large and healthy family.

There is a view that removing all 15-year-old boys from this earth would not only help global warming but also our cultural horizon.

Supporters of this view will then be heartened to hear the story reported by the Chicago Tribune of a 15-year-old boy who suffered a serious trauma. His parents took away his Xbox.

The boy, a resident of Buffalo Grove, Ill., which sounds like the sort of place where discipline is imparted along traditional lines, decided to express his feelings and exert his identity. He called 911 in order to ask the police whether his parents were, indeed, within their rights to remove his gaming equipment from his sensitive little fingers.

How could any parent take away such a vital component of a child's life?

(Credit: CC Dave B/Flickr)

However, brave as all 15-year-olds are, he appears to have hung up. So the Buffalo Grove police which, on its website, declares that it is "dedicated to making our community a better place to live and work", wandered along to his house.

Where they may have just laughed until their shirts billowed like the kaftans of the late Luciano Pavarotti.

Commander Steve Husak told the Tribune that the officers not only told the little tyke that parents do, indeed, have the right to take away his gadgetry, but that it might be an idea to listen to what they had to say.

It is not recorded why the parents took away the boy's Xbox. Perhaps it was because he's a vastly intelligent youth who will soon be the governor of Illinois.

Sometimes, one's biases can balance out very nicely. So please let me lay mine out in all their militant glory.

Bias No. 1: I do not play many video games, and Call of Duty does not impact in any way upon my emotional or personal life.

Bias No. 2: Members of my family were arrested by Stalin's miserable cohorts and abused daily in Siberian labor camps, from which only some emerged and even they were permanently scarred.

So I truly do not have a heavily armed platoon in the feral battle currently waging between Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and the fine nation of Russia.

According to the vaunted experts at Hellforge, the designers of this sickeningly successful Call of Duty game decided to push the creative boundaries. The chaps at Infinity Ward incorporated a "No Russian" mission in which people who seem to reek of rather pure vodka massacre lots of folks, leading to--disgust upon depravity--the erection of statues of supposed deceased terrorists in Washington, D.C.

The game, you see, imagines a world in which the Russian Federation is being ruled by extreme nationalists. Positing such a heinous concept clearly took a huge level of imagination and led to Russian gamers expressing their internal pain at such monstrous cultural insensitivity.

Propaganda?

(Credit: CC WillVbcfc/Flickr)

Russian politicians, perhaps the most independent-minded in all the world, huffed and puffed and threatened to the degree that the console version has been banned, according to the Mirror newspaper. The controversial scenes have also reportedly been removed from the PC and Steam editions.

I am not sure either side comes out of this looking, well, brave.

Somehow, I have a sense that the game designers at Infinity Ward might have known that a little controversy would be caused by scenes so clearly offensive to a nation of peace.

However, I am also concerned that the Russians might be overreacting. If Salman Rushdie had written such an imagined scenario in one of his books of so many words, would the Russian government have banned the book? Would it have sent some operative to stab him with an umbrella or poison his sushi? I think not.

So why get so worked up about something that will largely be played and pirated by youths of an already doleful spirit?

It is hard enough these days to select a country for villainy in works of art. I notice that in Bond movies, where once evil had its origins in Eastern Europe, now it emerges from some indeterminate or impotent nation in order to keep feathers muffled rather than ruffled.

By getting upset about a video game with an obviously false and fictional characterization, Russian politicians are surely giving it far more credence than its creation merits.

I mean, it's not as if Infinity Ward had shown scenes of Polish officers being murdered by Russian soldiers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, is it?

Perhaps you are one of those who saves your credit card information on your Xbox remote so you can buy points at the very time your mood demands them. Perhaps you also have a dog. Then this story from Fox News will be important to you.

Greg Strope and Christine Payne of Richmond, Va., were lying in bed one night, when Greg got an e-mail from Microsoft. No, Redmond wasn't wondering if they'd like to buy a slightly used copy of Windows 7. Nor was this a late-night Bing jingle phone karaoke invitation.

Did I mention Greg was in bed? And that Christine was with him and his Xbox wasn't? Oh, and that he didn't check his phone that night? This is relevant information. Because the next morning Greg went downstairs and checked his phone to discover that the e-mail was a thank you from Microsoft for purchasing 5,000 Xbox points. Greg was somewhat flummoxed, as the time of purchase seemed to coincide with the time he was in bed.

Then he espied his Xbox remote. He detected a little spittle. The spittle was not his own, nor that of his beloved, nor even that of his roommate, who had also been in bed at the time. The spittle belonged to Oscar, his dog.

Perhaps Oscar had sudden urges to buy some new game content. Because there was no other explanation as to who had made the Xbox purchase. "The only living creature that could have done it was the dog," he said.

Greg surmised that Oscar had pawed at the remote with such beginner's good fortune that he had successfully spent $62.50.

Greg didn't even attempt to persuade Microsoft there had been a mistake. However, he did tell Fox News: "I just wish they'd make it a little harder to purchase points."

Oh, Greg. Retail doesn't work that way. It's there to make purchasing easier. Try sending Oscar to your local 7/11 and see what he comes back with.

I have always wanted to propose marriage to someone.

It's just that somehow the moment's never seemed right. Or, well, the lover in question leaves before the question can be popped.

So perhaps I might learn from this dashing, daring, and technically very correct man who found one of the more romantic ways to tell his girlfriend of five years he would like to spend at least the next five years with her.

He seems to be something of a geeky sort, so he reached for an editing program called Lunar Magic and inserted the deeply felt words "Lisa Will You Marry Me?" into a Super Mario World level.

Touchingly, the words were spelled out in gold coins.

The Super Mario suitor didn't reveal his name on YouTube, but the poster's identity is BradSmith182. So I know some of you might conclude his name is Brad Smith and he is a large aficionado of Blink 182.

The video does not start in a promising or loving way. Lisa somewhat rattily declares: "Why are we playing this?" as if, perhaps, there was some more cerebral game she had in mind.

But once she sees the magic words and BradSmith182 brings out the ring, she agrees somewhat shyly to be with him for better, for worse, and for Mario.

In the place where they struck oil, they might, on hearing this news, be struck dumb.

You see, as I wandered through the pages of eBay in search of some fine and modern cooking utensils, I came across something that forced my digestive system to ask questions of my cerebellum.

(Credit: eBay)

For there (here, indeed) was what seemed to be a brand new Xbox 360 for sale at the most reasonable sum of $1.1 million.

This, as your own cerebellum might be whispering to you, is no ordinary Xbox. For this pristine machine was signed by former governor of Alaska and current literary figure Sarah Palin.

The enervatingly enterprising vendor of this quite frankly priceless technological specimen is David Morrill (that's Morrill, not Imorrill) who claims he resides in Alberta, Canada.

He says he took a trip to Alaska and made sure it coincided with the then-governor's picnic on July 24.

He claims he pushed his way through the crowd to get within sniffing distance of the great Alaskan's hem, told her he had traveled three days just to see her, and asked her to sign his Xbox.

Have you ever written a text message and then failed to correctly multiply 3 by 7 right after you pressed "send"?

Have you ever posted an update on Facebook and instantly reached for your Proust? And have you ever sent a tweet, looked in the mirror, and suddenly believed that you had a twin?

Well, according to the Telegraph, Dr. Tracy Alloway, a psychologist from the University of Stirling in Scotland, can explain all of this.

The good doctor has spent many of her days studying working memory, which allows people to retain and use information. She believes it to be a far more significant measure of the well-being and intelligence of humanity than, say, IQ.

Alloway spoke Sunday to the British Science Festival at the University of Surrey and rather gushed about the success she has had in training children to enhance their working memory.

And she happened to mention that certain social-media behaviors are rather more conducive at developing working memory than others.

Is this man improving your intelligence?

(Credit: CC Andrew Feinberg/Flickr)

While Facebook apparently expands the working memory and therefore "enhances intelligence" because the mind has to work in keeping up with one's 500 friends, Twitter does not deserve such glowing praise.

Instead, Alloway released both barrels of her working memory in a critical appraisal of microblogging. She said that because Twitter was so succinct, "your attention span is being reduced and you're not engaging your brain and improving nerve connections."

She was equally critical of anything she deemed "instant"--YouTube and texting, for example. On the other hand, video games and Sudoku allegedly involve more thinking depth, more tracking of past actions, and more mapping of those things you might do in the future. Therefore, they enhance working memory.

I find myself instantly recoiling from the doctor's pleasantly radical analysis. I begin to wonder whether, for example, it makes a difference if you are watching a four-minute video on YouTube about, say, the Large Hadron Collider.

I wonder if it counts that you find a link on Twitter that leads you to a deeply intellectual debunking of all research methods in psychology.

And I wonder whether it really can be true that keeping up with a bunch of supposed friends on Facebook can make you just that little bit smarter.

Surely when you think of all the time some people spend on Facebook, doesn't it make you think that perhaps, just perhaps, they need to get a life? Or at least a better working memory of one?