Friday night links while I wait for Jaimee to get home so I can watch some science fiction and turn my brain off.

* George Will is in the news this week for his latest stunningly dishonest column on climate change, which the Washington Post has perversely decided to stand behind. The statement from the paper's ombudsman is here.

* The EPA under the Obama administration will finally be able to take carbon seriously.

* Secure website authentification questions.

* Howard Machtinger looks back at his participation in the Weather Underground to acknowledge the group's failures. Via MeFi and Matt Yglesias.

While “New Morning” signaled the WU’s commitment to taking greater care after the accident to target property and not people, it did not acknowledge the WU’s own responsibility for the politics of the Townhouse collective.

WU leaders––then and since––failed to reckon candidly and directly with what it meant, politically and humanly, that core members of the organization had planned to use fragmentation bombs to kill attendees at a dance.

* The complete Pac-Man dossier: everything there is to know about the game, from ghost logic to how to play the kill screen. Via MeFi.

* Hard to believe we've all outlived Late Night with Conan O'Brien. I haven't watched the show in years, but it was formative to my sense of "funny" as a teenager. Here's Colbert saying goodbye the only way he knows how.

* Wither Burris? It doesn't look good for the man nobody wanted to be Senator anyway.

Link dump #4, son of the mother of all link dumps.

* Still another Pac-Man text adventure. (Previously.) See also: Guitar Hero as text adventure (1, 2).

* It turns out the Bush administration didn't bother to keep case files on many of the prisoners in Guantánamo. Via Pandagon.

* Cultural treasures of New Jersey.

* Make Something Cool Every Day makes something cool every day.

* Crooker Timber had a Charlie Stross book event today with tons of links.

* Also at Crooked Timber: Should you delay parenthood till tenure?

* And Obama gets it.

Three from MeFi:

* "There's Something About Mary," the amazing story of Mary McFate, a nationally known anti-gun activist who turned out to really be Mary Lou Sapone, mole for the NRA.

* Don Hodges looks at the kill screens from Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac Man, Dig Dug, as well as the Defender Extra Life Bug. Bonus: The Duck Hunt kill screen.



* Another set of videos that's been hanging out neglected in my bookmarks for way too long: David Harvey's twenty-six-hour lecture series on Capital, Vol. 1.

Thursday morning links.

* For my people, the right to listen to Bruce Springsteen is literally a matter of life and death.

* Also in the news: a "sniff-squad" of qualified experts is being brought in to determine whether the landfills in Northhampton, Massachusetts, are "bearable" or "foul beyond belief."

* Retro Sabotage has a 100% true documentary on the secret origins of Pac-Man as a tool for mass manipulation and brainwashing.

Very early in its development, it was decided that the game itself should also, at a symbolic level, carry consumerist values. The main character was then reduced to a mouth eating everything that came across its path. At first it would be chased by a stylized specter, symbolic of guilt, but, during play, the guilt itself would be overcome and swallowed.

The North Korean version of the game, towards the end of the documentary, is actually sort of fun...

Retro Sabotage is a great collection of tweaks and variations on classic video games, updated every Thursday. The best by a mile is Tetris: Compromise, where your actions control two boards at once. Pong: Vectrexoscope is pretty neat too. Via MeFi.

Pac-Txt, the other Pac-Man text adventure. (See also: DotQuest.) It's utterly pointless, and yet there's something about it I find really compelling. Be sure to use the autolook and autonibble commands. Via Waxy.