The House is amending and voting on SOPA (H.R.2361) today. Your freedoms are at stake. You, an ordinary citizen, could land in prison.

Watch the SOPA discussions live. Or listen if you are at work.

http://keepthewebopen.com/sopa

Currently recessed (no audio during recess).

Despite the seriousness of the bill, there are some entertaining comments that crop up every so often:

“I’m not a nerd, I aspire to be a nerd.” – Zoe Lofgren (Democrat – CA)
“Let’s bring in the nerds!” – Jason Chaffetz (Republican – UT)

There are two bills in the House (SOPA – H.R.3261) and Senate (PROTECT IP – S.968) both aimed to attempt to stop online piracy and much, much more. SOPA is being voted on in the House today. If you like YouTube for watching videos (for any purpose) and like being a free citizen and outside of prison, then you should drop what you are doing right now and make a phone call to your representative. There is now a very easy way to do that for this particular piece of legislation:

http://engineadvocacy.com/voice/

As written, these bills will hurt small businesses and individuals alike – there is no benefit to anyone but lawsuit-happy lawyers and large corporate interests. That is all.

The Humble Indie Bundle is one of the best ideas some video game industry folks have come up with that takes your average publisher (e.g. EA, Ubisoft) and kicks their business model where the sun don’t shine. Basically, you say, “I want to pay ‘x’ dollars and cents for 5 to 7 games, sometimes their source code and game music, multiple platform support, and extra Steam licenses beyond the DRM-free downloads. Plus, I get to help a charity or two!” They’ll even take less than $1 but will display an image of a hungry programmer. And you don’t want to see that.

This Bundle has the following games – in order of awesomeness:

Jamestown
Cave Story+
NightSky HD
Shank
Super Meat Boy
Bit.Trip Runner
Gratuitous Space Battles

Disclaimer: Order is of my own personal opinion (aka what I’ll be buying it for).

Steam is still doing their ‘Wishlist Giveaway’ thing. The prices haven’t been spectacular except for VVVVVV – and I seriously can’t recommend that game. It was insanely difficult for no good reason that made any sense. Twitch gaming doesn’t work well on the PC and the default controls were hideous. Methinks that this is just a warmup to some real end-of-year deals to keep people logging into Steam every day.