Yesterday, my pal Josh told me about Jonathan Lee Riches and the wonderful lawsuits he’s brought against people, organizations, stuff, and ideas. Justia’s archive delivers Riches’ gems in abundance, including this one filed on 11/24/07.
Plaintiff charges that defendant Theodore John Kaczynski is trying to unabomb his life because plaintiff won’t return his manuscript that he received from the Washington Post. Plaintiff also alleges that defendant is rounding up all the Teds in the world to hurt him, including Ted Kennedy, Ted Bundy, Ted Turner, Bill and Ted, Ted Nugent, Teddy Bears, and Teddy Rumpskin.
Here’s Riches’ latest motion, filed on 11/3/08 against Blizzard Entertainment.
World of Warcraft caused Riches mind to live in a virtual universe, where Riches explored the landscape committing Identity theft and fighting cybermonster rival hackergangs. Riches was addicted to video games and lost touch with Reality because of defendants. This caused Riches to commit fraud to buy defendants video games. Riches chose World of Warcraft over working a legit job. Riches mind became a living video game. I hold defendants liable and support Plaintiffs. I move for Amicus Cuaie, I can provide this court with my medical charts, credit and receipts of buying their video games with fraud. I have newly discovered evidence. I pray this court will grant Intervenors motions for relief.
With that, I’m off to the Building Virtual Worlds Show at CMU, amped to see the next generation’s developers in action right out of the ivory gate.
Despite CMU’s well-known ties to Google, DARPA, Koopa, Count Dracula, and so forth, I promise not to sue the venerable institution for mind rape… at least, not until after I’ve eaten dinner.
UPDATE, 9:43 pm
BVW kicked off with a slew of uninspired, dialogue-free short films accompanied by grating electropop, followed by a primer on the Entertainment Technology Center and how important and awesome it is. Conceived by Last Lecturer Randy Pausch, the ETC’s mission statement does make it sound cool.
We do not intend to take artists and turn them into engineers, or vice-versa. While some students will be able to achieve mastery in both areas, it is not our intention to have our students master “the other side.” Instead, we intend for a typical student in this program to enter with mastery/training in a specific area and spend his or her two years at Carnegie Mellon learning the vocabulary, values, and working patterns of the other culture.
In the main, I was underwhelmed by the BVW students’ projects, though, to be fair, they had only two weeks to put them together, and there were numerous crashes and hardware issues unrelated to the conceptual/creative aspects of the projects. One dingus which could be developed interestingly, but which worked wonkily at the show, was the shadow-sensitive PlayMotion. Here’s a video of PlayMotion actually working like its supposed to.
The piece that came off best for me (which had folks interacting with rendered stuff but which wisely relied on timing instead of on the uncooperative PlayMotion) was based on a Chinese myth about a princess who destroys her kingdom’s “guardian drum” so that an invading army, led by her beloved prince, can attack without warning. Anyhow, dropped in the midst of the cutesy stuff, like Kirby in Candyland and the Nacho Brothers’ Vacation Machine and this thing about a grumpy cloud you sing to to cheer it up, was an ultra-brief mention of a mysterious project commissioned by Lockheed Martin, with whom CMU and the ETC are under a non-disclosure agreement, called “Omega.”
No joke.
The student biography of Devdatta Nerurkar, who’s working on it, yields very little in the way of information regarding what the heck it is.
The Omega project is comprised of a group of 4 individuals of various backgrounds and disciplines. Working with Lockheed Martin, the team will be experimenting with various guest experiences, identifying some of the most cutting edge technologies, while developing new interactive programs according to our client’s specifications.
I suspect Omega is software for killer/vendor drones to distinguish targets from potential customers using advanced shadow-recognition algorithms. Once, some sunny day, all humanoid bioforms in a given battlefield/market have been indexed according to shadow type, geoengineering goo could be sprayed causing grumpy clouds to coalesce, scrambling the shadow analysis of enemy/competitor dronecraft.
Time to build some virtual worlds in my dreams.