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The generally exceedingly hilarious and previously blogged-about Shitmydadsays twitter account is being turned into a tv show that will probably suck. But I’m still ok with it if it means 1. the dad gets paid or 2. the son gets paid because seriously one or both of them probably should be. Oh, there’s going to be a book too I guess.

Well, Merriam-Webster’s words of the year list is out, and the numero uno most-looked-up word this year is “Admonish”. The site states that this is due to the usage of the word in the White House’s statement regarding Joe Wilson’s outburst, and it was apparently confused for a purely technical term by many news outlets. I really had no idea it was that rare.

Also near the top of the list is “pandemic,” appropriately enough. Amusingly, “rogue” makes the top ten for the second year in a row. Who knew Palin would be expanding people’s vocabularies?

Team Fortress 2 has been on sale on steam for $2.50 on and off, so be on the lookout. I was fortunate enough to grab it, though I haven’t played it yet. It’s been one of those games I’ve been meaning to get around to, and since that’s less than what I pay for a sandwich I figured why not.

Torchlight is basically Diablo “II.V”. I’m really torn on whether to laud it for being such fun or deride it for being such a ripoff. There are several improvements over DII (many of which I know from previews will be in DIII) but the core gameplay identical, as you can tell from this Youtube trailer. I’m actually really tempted to list all the similarities but I’d run out of room. Diablo wasn’t exactly a unique game in some ways, but still. Anyway, Torchlight fills the void of waiting, and I wound up getting it after playing through the demo. It actually gives a serious taste of DIII (having 3D animated enemies fly through the air from your powerful attacks instead of just doing The Death Animation is even more satisfying than I thought it would be). All it needs is a horadric cube. Or… wait… no, it has one of those too, actually. Nevermind. [Edit: Single player only, though supposedly an MMORPG version will be coming out in a year or two.]

Very good article in Wired about the controversy surrounding vaccinations. Considering all the death threats apparently directed at pro-vaccination people and all the money you can make sucking up to the crazies I give them a lot of credit for printing this.

Is this an issue in Germany and Switzerland and such? It seems like it is an upper-middle-class white pandemic and that it would thus proliferate there as well.

Edit: If you want to cry, scroll down to the comments. Otherwise, I recommend not.

Here’s an interactive graph detailing the partisan political donations of major companies. It’s actually a little surprising, I’d say on the whole the big companies go red, but there’s some substantial blue in there as well. Interesting to see it split up by industry as well.

I may be a bit behind on what the latest and greatest in podcasts is, but having been fairly recently introduced to The Bugle, I would recommend it rather strongly to those who have not checked it out. It’s basically two British comedians, John Oliver from the daily show and Andy Zaltzman from some British shows I’ve not heard of, riffing back and forth on current events. There’s some overlap with Wait Wait, but the method of presentation is so different it doesn’t much matter.