It appears the weekend's warm weather was not the end of the war, just a lull in the shelling. Being outside right now is like that moment in "Flowers for Algernon" when then the effects of the experiment began to reverse, if that's not too obscure a reference. I wonder if this will kill the tulips. They're coming up fast. They have no idea what they're getting into.

So you're feeling bad? Quick! Emergency compliments needed STAT. Here.

GAMES This is brilliant: game developers write a game about being . . . a game developer. They release a cracked version of their game and strew it amongst the pirate sites. One small detail makes it different than the one people have to pay to play. Their blog says:

At the developers' site, they post the sad bleatings of people who stole the game and want to know how they can get around all the people in the game who stole the game. This is usually where someone insists that this cost the developers nothing, since the people who were playing the game probably wouldn't pay for it anyway - and besides, maybe some of those people who downloaded a cracked version would pay for it later, because it was so good!

Suuuure they would.

The horrifying stat: 93% of the people who played the game were using the stolen version. Not everyone earned the developers' ire:

He concludes by noting that people who hate DRM / always-connected games should deonstrate that their preferences have heft in the marketplace. Buy the games so everything doesn't end up like SimCity!

But everything will.

HISTORY Welcome to the World Wide Web: the first site ever created has been reupped to the original URL.

In related historical news:

Uh oh. Be very, very careful.

PSY WEPT Until he cashed the check, anyway. Remember: Samsung will eventually beat Apple because they understand the appeal of well-designed, minimal things that are not derivative. Yep.

TV Imagine you're the guy who had momentary internet fame because you started cursing on camera on your first day at work, and you see there's a compilation of April's best TV News Bloopers. You might think great, it's time to see someone else fail. And then you're the first thing. Aw man. Obviously that's NSFW if you have the sound up. There's much more. If all local TV news was like this, I'd watch it.