Lots of Well-Endowed Monsters in the Sporepedia Being Castrated by Maxis, Still Make It to YouTube

So Maxis is taking too long to come out with its extremely anticipated Spore game, so they have released a free "tech demo" of the creature creation portion called Spore Creature Creator.

Unfortunately, I think they underestimated the toilet humor potential in this creative tool, so I hear that they are constantly deleting penis monsters for obscenity reasons. Well, they can't block YouTube, so it turns out that there are nearly 1,000 results on YouTube already for these.

Does anyone else find it hilarious that Maxis/EA is employing people, right now, to constantly castrate the Sporepedia?

Can you imagine how an interview of these guys would go?

"So hey. Your job is to remove anything resembling a penis from the Spore Sporepedia, is that correct?"

"Yes, yes it is. Although our official title is 'castration specialist'."

"So how would you describe the process of where to draw the line at what is obscenely penile? I mean, I'm sure plenty of designs come close."

"Well, it would take too long to find them all manually, so first we filter the creatures based on whether they have one eye. Then we filter down to those creatures that are 5 times as long as they are wide, with two very large 'feet', and no discernible neck. That usually gets us close."

"So basically, the less impressive penii skate by pretty easily then."

"Yes. Those are the ones we would get the fewest complaints about."

"What if the majority of the creature is non-penis, but it has something between its legs that is kind of like a penis, but not really, more like a baby's arm or something, how do you treat those?"

"Those are actually the ones that are currently giving us the most trouble. The three-legged creatures. We have to make certain that absolutely nobody ever sees a cartoon penis, after all."

"Interesting. So about how many overly endowed creatures do you think you remove from the sporepedia daily?"

"Well, our team of castration specialists average about 5,500 castrations a day which accounts for about 40% of all creatures submitted to the sporepedia currently."

"Does this show any signs of abating?"

"No. In fact we are currently training our way to a much larger team of penis removal specialists for the release of the actual game..."

Intel Dumps Vista

You know... I used to send articles out like this all the time to a select few geeks, but now I'm actually starting to feel bad. I feel like I'm kicking a dog that is already down. My nature is to root for the underdog.

I mean, imagine the amount of money that Vista costed. The engineers that burned so much blood/sweat/tears on it, like engineers always do. And the impression of all this work is not so good. No amount of expensive marketing seems to be erasing that.

So on the one hand, I sympathize with the engineers over there who probably have mixed feelings about the results of their collective work. On the other hand, I have this conviction that an ideal marketshare situation that would give us as consumers (and developers) the best possible tech innovations is something like 50/50 or maybe 40/40/20 (with a third player like Linux or some such upstart). That seems to be very hard to achieve and maintain, however. Unfortunately we cannot tally the number of innovations we're currently missing out on if Microsoft's hegemony of the last 13 years hadn't occurred, but I imagine there would be quite a few.

In other news, I'm officially finally starting a tech blog.