In an interesting move by the Texas legislature, sex offenders may be required to register their online identities with the state, according to this article at Kotaku. While it (intelligently) doesn’t explicitly mention Xbox Live or the PSN, it’s clear that they’re talking about services like that or AIM. The bill, if passed, could even be extended to restrict sex offenders from even having identities on social networking sites altogether. It’s a bizarre move by the government to limit freedoms, but then again it’s to convicted sex offenders. I’m no lawyer, but I’m not sure how the constitution falls on this topic and I predict that if Texas does pass this into law, it will quickly be challenged as high as it can go. Not that I don’t support vigilance with respect to sex offenders, but it just seems a little too big brother-y to not let you use a social networking site, since the government doesn’t have control of those. Not allowing you to teach or work with kids is a smart, good thing, but cutting you off from the (if the trend continues) vein of modern society seems harsh. I do support registration of online identities though, since it’s really no different than publishing on those websites where they all live like in Knocked Up. ...

It’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up. Poor Cole Hamels can’t catch a break. A poor spring training with injury leads to two starts where he’s beat up, another start where he’s hit by a batted ball, and another where he rolls his ankle and lands on the DL again. Hopefully his luck starts to turn around soon, a month of the season has already passed us by. ...

The famous McGraw Tower. A Cornell icon… …About to be consumed by Domo-kun

Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter. Auto-Tune - a proprietary audio processor created by Antares Audio Technologies that uses a phase vocoder to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances. It is used to disguise inaccuracies and mistakes, and has allowed many artists to produce more precisely tuned recordings. It is often used by artists such as T-Pain. Apparently the Gregory Brothers are fans too. Their video series Auto-Tune the News is a pretty awesome way to take in the week’s news. Here is the second of their videos. ...

We will return to our regularly scheduled posting on Monday

It’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up. It doesn’t take a sports guru to know that a seven game losing streak is a BAD THING. Back the Marlins up to 19 April and you see a team five games ahead in the AL East with a record of 11-1. Just ten days later the team is sitting half a game up on the Phillies with a 12-8 record. Yeah, it’s been that kind of week for me, haha. The Fish were FINALLY able to bang together a win last night against the dreaded Mets, but will this momentum start to carry the team forward? They face Johan Santana tonight on the mound, a guy with a sub 1.0 ERA and who they only managed to beat last time thanks to a Daniel Murphy error in left creating two unearned runs. Luckily for the Fish, they’ve got Josh Johnson to trot out onto the mound, but he’s not gonna be able to do much unless he gets some run support. ...

Last Friday I went out to Towson to see one of my favorite bands, Streetlight Manifesto. The last (and only) ska show I’d ever been to was back in 2003 for Five Iron Frenzy’s farewell tour, which primarily means that I didn’t really go to a ska show. You see, FIF skewed mostly to a Christian audience and so at their shows they mostly discouraged the shoving and pushing endemic of most ska concerts. Naturally, SLM had no such qualms about the shoving, so I got firsthand knowledge of just how hard it is to jump/dance, sing, try and stay on two feet in all the shoving, and, most importantly, breathe. Other than all the unnecessary shoving (I get why, it’s all the energy, but it just seems kind of pointless…maybe I’m just old?), the venue was my kind of place. The last show I went to was at the DAR Constitution Hall (that’s Daughters of the American Revolution for the uninformed), which was a huge venue that meant that we had assigned seats that we were mostly confined to. Now, I was mostly turned off by Ben Folds’ all-new stuff set that night, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t want to be out in a crowd for it too. The Recher Theatre, on the other hand, was a tiny venue, with capacity for maybe 1000 people, if you stretched the limits of the place and maybe ignored a fire code or two. Perfect for a rock show, although I do also like the setup they had at school for Slope Day for the same kind of show. ...

Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter. Now, I know this is going to sound both bizarre and boring in concept, but hear me out on this, cause it’s actually pretty awesome. Here’s what I’m proposing to you: Watch two other people play an ~65-80 hour game on a daily basis at about 20-50 mins long. Sound awful? Well you haven’t heard the icing on the cake: they’re going to Mystery Science Theater 3000 the whole thing! ...

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen. The Left 4 Dead survival mode has finally hit the tubes and I think there’s really only one adjective that can accurately describe it: hard. The video I posted below comes from Giant Bomb’s Brad Shoemaker playing it on the 360, but let me tell you, the unprepared will fare no better, even on a PC. ...

I was totally supposed to do some MLB news yesterday and I spaced and forgot. The Marlins dropped three straight to the Pirates to end their road trip 6-3. The Fish are off today, but starting tomorrow they take on the former World Series champs, the always challenging Phillies. If they do as well as they did against the Mets, I won’t worry, but if they pull a Pirates against these guys…this season could start getting dicey soon. Honestly, I’m not too concerned with the sweep at this point, it’s one of those math things where the team that’s just won so many straight can’t continue doing it. Hopefully the bats get swinging and the pitchers start dueling hard tomorrow. ...