I know from personal experience that The Media are often a miserable failure when it comes to getting the story right, but this story that I read yesterday really upset me.
Last month, Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade had a fantastic idea: show the world that gamers are not the mindless idiots the Mainstream News would like to think we are, and help out some children at the same time. Thus spake Gabe:

“If you are like me, every time you see an article like this one – where the author claims that video games are training our nations youth to kill – you get angry. The media seems intent on perpetuating the myth that gamers are ticking time bombs just waiting to go off. I know for a fact that gamers are good people. I have had the opportunity on multiple occasions to meet hundreds of you at conventions all over the country. We are just regular people who happen to love video games.
With that in mind we have put together a little something we like to call “Child’s Play.” Penny Arcade is working with the Seattle Children’s Hospital and Amazon.com to make this Christmas really special for a lot of very sick kids. With the help of the Children’s Hospital we have created an Amazon Wish List for the kids. It’s full of video games, movies and toys. Some of these kids are in pretty bad shape and just having a Game Boy would really raise their spirits.”

Well, the Penny Arcade readers responded, and over $200,000 worth of toys and games were donated to the children’s hospital. Others who couldn’t or didn’t give toys, gave donations that totaled just over $27,000 dollars.
Think about that for a second. It’s a fairly big story, isn’t it? Those Gamers, the ones who play GTA: Vice City and want to come to your home to eat your children actually aren’t so bad after all. Those Gamers, who are planning the destruction of our American Way of Life when they get together for LAN parties are actually a caring and thoughful group of people. It kinda screws up the search-and-replace The Media have done on “Heavy Metal Music Listeners” or “Marilyn Manson Fans” for their shock-and-horror stories, doesn’t it?
A Google News search turns up three stories about the kindness and generosity of Penny Arcade and its readers.
Three.
The other story that seems to have captured The Media’s watchful eye returns 11,100 stories. Those are some great priorities, News Media.
Finally, let’s give Tycho the last word on their experience with The Media:

One hears a lot about media bias, quite a lot indeed, but the accepted formula goes like this:
the “Media,” capital M, an imaginary monolith with a supposedly synchronized perspective, is saying things that I disagree with. The things that I believe are right, therefore these factual distortions are the result of some lens – a bias which is deeply ingrained, like a vein of rich silver.
That’s all well and good, but let me propose the CFR Hypothesis, where CFR stands for “complete fucking retards.” Let’s see if you like it.
The first time the news dumbshits came out to talk about Child’s Play, though they were clearly told who was responsible for it they excised one of the people behind it. I consider this a fairly minor issue, but they’re still retarded. When they came to the Children’s Hospital itself for the toy delivery, there was no reporter even down there with us. A cameraman got some footage and then (I believe) ran away. I thought I heard him say “Ghosts!”, but that’s neither here nor there. When this footage was aired, I learned something new: that the toys had been donated by a local catholic school, and were valued at nearly a thousand dollars. Understand this. A single bin of GBA SPs was worth four thousand dollars, and we had four such bins. That’s above and beyond the seventy GameCubes the other twenty carts of toys, which at our best estimates come to around $175,000. Then there was a check for twenty-seven thousand. Here’s where the depression sets in.
What we – this is a grand We, which includes you – what we did was completely amazing. It was worth doing purely on account of its own virtues. But the other part, what we might call the “Secondary Objective,” was to promote the idea that we are not fucking murderers. This is an effort to combat media portrayals. Here’s the trick, the dark revelation, the Empire Strikes Back which produces our moment of darkness: we need to rely on that selfsame inept machinery to broadcast our new message as well. They’re simply not capable of it. I understand that there’s just no story in people being good to each other, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened from time to time.

Everyone who produces Penny Arcade, and everyone who reads Penny Arcade did an amazing, thoughtful, kind and compassionate act. They should be recognized for what they did, and that’s what I’m doing today.

Please read MORE for a Journalist’s response to this entry.

Every year, Anne and I make tons (tonnes) of Christmas cookies for our friends and family. We do gingerbread men, snowmen, ginger snaps, and sugar cookies with pounds of sugary “frosting” on them. Oh, it’s the opposite of healthy, but so much fun! We take these cookies, put them on a nice festive plate, and deliver them to our neighbors on Christmas Eve. Of course, this year, we were both sick as hell in the weeks leading up to Christmas, so we didn’t bake anything for friends (family still got some plague with their cookies, but if you can’t give plague to your family at Christmas, what can you give them?) Yesterday, we were both well enough to make several plates of cookies, and last night we delivered them as “New Year’s Treats.” Our neighbors are so wonderful, we ended up spending the entire evening in their homes, looking at pictures, drinking wine, and catching up. People talk about “your friends and neighbors,” and we’re incredibly lucky that our friends are our neighbors.
When I bought my first house about ten years ago, I was totally oblivious to the importance of location, and I ended up living next door to The Absolute Worst Neighbors From Hell. Their ability to be slovenly, inconsiderate jerks was stunning. They were so terrible, we ultimately sold the house we loved to move away from them. When we were looking for a new house, even if the neighborhood looked nice, (which many of them did) I went out of my way to knock on doors, and meet the potential new neighbors. (“Hi, I’m Wil, and I may be buying a house on this street. Are you cool?”) I’m sure that seems a bit weird, but if you’ve ever lived next to The Absolute Worst Neighbors From Hell, you may understand why it was so important to me.
I was a long, tough, and sometimes frustrating process, but we finally found a great house, on a great street, surrounded by great people, and that’s where we live now. In a way, I’m glad we lived next door to The Absolute Worst Neighbors From Hell when we did, because they taught us the value of neighbors, and the value of living on a street where there’s real community.

This is quite funny. I’m mentioned in today’s comic from Goats.com. I hadn’t heard of goats until about ten minutes ago, but I went back to the beginning of the story arc, I laughed out loud.
So check it out. Unless you don’t like to laugh. Then you should grab your nuts and say to your nearest buddy, “Hey, I sat in some gum!” If that doesn’t get you laughing, I don’t know what will. (Yes, I realize that this advice won’t work for the ladies . . . so you should just . . . uhm . . . line up to the left for make outs.)
Hey! Look! I sat in some gum!

Check this out:

In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House. He did it in a shameful way–by dividing Americans against one another, stirring up racial prejudices, and bringing out the worst in people.
They called it the “Southern Strategy,” and the Republicans have been using it ever since. Nixon pioneered it, and Ronald Reagan perfected it, using phrases like “racial quotas” and “welfare queens” to convince white Americans that minorities were to blame for all of America’s problems.
The Republican Party would never win elections if they came out and said their core agenda was about selling America piece by piece to their campaign contributors and making sure that wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few. To distract people from their real agenda, they run elections based on race, dividing us, instead of uniting us….
In America, there is nothing black or white about having to live from one paycheck to the next. It’s time we had a new politics in America–a politics that refuses to pander to our lowest prejudices. Because when white people and black people and brown people vote together, that’s when we make true progress in this country.

My pal Keith is running in the AIDS Marathon, and we’re doing two special J. Keith vanStraaten shows to help raise money for him and his girlfriend.
The first show is coming up on Wednesday, January 7th. All the details are here.
The JKvS Show is always great fun. If you’ve seen me on TechTV, it’s like that but without the constraints of television. Also, Keith and I have been friends for years, and when we’re on stage together, we share a bit of a common brain, and that creates fantastic comedy.
If you’re a kind-hearted person who wants to help out, but you can’t make it to the show, go here and show your love in a donation sort of way.