Adventure Combat Ops lets Vegas tourists tactically assault zombies

Las Vegas Review-Journal entertainment columnist Doug Elfman wins Lead of the Day for this emotional rollercoaster right here:

Las Vegas is about to get a new military attraction made for civilian entertainment — a hardcore, two-hour “Call of Duty”-esque immersion being built by some top forces who were part of the raids that killed Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein’s kids.

Tactical combat sounded so fun right up until we got to the part about killing kids. But don’t worry: Uday and Qusay Hussein were fully grown when we killed them. By “we,” of course, I mean the people heroes of US special forces operations like Seal Team Six, Delta Force, and the Green Berets. By pretty much universal assent, they are the coolest people in American society. It is extremely awesome to burst into a building and surprise hell out of everybody while shooting their center masses. Now you can do that, too, but with pellets instead of bullets and zombies instead of people.

Continue reading

Friday links! Are you kidding? edition

From The Nietzsche Family Circus, which randomly pairs Nietzsche quotes with panels from the comic

From The Nietzsche Family Circus, which randomly pairs Nietzsche quotes with panels from the comic

Now that we’ve all been hoaxed a few times by ZANU-PF’s Twitter and lymphomatic Hawaiian girlfriends and whatnot, it’s easy to read any report with a baseline skepticism in mind. Is this, strictly speaking, real? is a perilous question to ask of the news, particularly since the news is often about events, and events are what we use to determine the quality of the real. To ask whether every new event is real is to fix our standard of reality in the past. Still, certain things that happen seem like they did not really happen. Today is Friday, and the march of wonderment continues apace. Won’t you fall into lockstep with me?

Continue reading