Anna Nicole Smith is a fat, ugly, stupid skank. I can't imagine why anyone would want to see pictures of her, nevermind watching an entire show about her. I mean, it's fucking ridiculous. But we've entered the familiar pattern of success-and-knockoffs. An original idea became a success (The Osbournes) and now we must suffer through the cheap hacks and their attempts to duplicate that popularity. But was it really necessary to go straight to the absolute bottom of the fucking barrel? I mean, who the hell thought that Anna Nicole Smith was the ideal candidate for her own "reality" show? Gah. The whole concept makes me sick.

Yesterday was sad day for the gun industry, as Bill Ruger, the man behind Sturm & Ruger, passed away. Whether or not you liked Ruger guns, it's still impossible to deny that Ruger was a giant in the modern gun industry. A company built upon a simple .22 autoloader grew into an amazing enterprise that put out practically every kind of firearm you can imagine. Single-action revolvers, double-action revolvers, target pistols, defensive pistols, semi-auto rifles, bolt-action rifles, lever-action rifles, single-shot rifles, and double-barrel shotguns. It's the only modern gun company that's remained in the black (made a profit) for every single year of its existence. Rest in peace, Bill.

After this recent shooting at an LA airport ticket counter, some people are now saying we should have security screening encompass the entire airport, not just the boarding areas. What they can't say is what this would accomplish. It's a stupid idea that will cause more trouble than its worth. Why exactly? Airports only have extensive security because of one thing: airplanes. We want to keep hijackers off of the planes. And so we do the screening to prevent weapons from getting onto the planes. The planes are the focus here because of both traditional hijacking and the suicide hijackings of September 11th. And so a shooting at a ticket counter, while tragic, is no different from a shooting at an office building or a busy mall. Are people going to suggest that we implement airport style security at every office building and every shopping mall? Pretty doubtful. So why in the world would we do it for airport ticket counters when it wouldn't do anything more to stop hijackers from getting onto planes?

From where I'm standing, the mod scene is in complete shambles. Every day you hear about the latest-and-greatest Counter-Strike clone. I wish I had foreseen the future back when I started on Night's Edge, because the development cycle was so long that what seemed like a wide-open market turned into a glut of realistic first-person shooter mods for every game imaginable before we even released our first beta. And yet people are still starting up teams with the intentions of introducing absolutely nothing new, except maybe their own pet gun which they feel has been overlooked by all the other mod teams.

Even worse, in my opinion, is the people who start up a project like this with the sole intention of turning it into a commercial venture. Again, with the success of Counter-Strike, everyone and their brother believes they can reproduce not only the game itself, but its unfathomable popularity and path to commercial viability. Talk about starting a mod for the wrong reasons! The only other mod that I know of that actually managed to be packaged as a separate produce was TacOps for Unreal Tournament, and I haven't heard good things about it.

The problem is the age-old concept of jumping on the bandwagon. Rather than putting some thought into a well laid-out original concept, people find it easier to just mimic the successful patterns of the most popular idea at that moment in time. Remember the deluge of first-person shooters that arrived after Doom? Anyone else remember, with mixed feelings, the flooded real-time strategy market that followed Command and Conquer? It seems like every two-bit software company threw together a rushed-to-market game in one or both of these categories, and gamers had to shop cautiously as if stepping through a minefield.

There is a silver lining. Eventually, as we all should know by now, the bubble bursts. It happened with the dot-coms, it happened with the RTS games, it happened with the FPS games. Oh, sure, there are still plenty of bad shooters being made, plenty of bad real-time strategy games being made, and Zebulon knows there are still a mess of worthless internet companies doing nothing more than taking up domain names. But the initial boom has ended and their numbers are now back down to more reasonable levels. So eventually, I think, the mod makers will return to what they do best: making original mods that really test the limits of their engine, not our patience.