Out of all my Pandora stations, no matter which artist I started from, Grandaddy, Ben Folds, Genesis, Tears for Fears, Joni Mitchell, Yazoo, the Beatles, Soundgarden, Thomas Dolby, UK, etc., etc., the one and only station that didn't start playing Coldplay after a day or two was the Black Sabbath one. No, I never hit thumbs up on Coldplay. I probably never hit thumbs down on them twice on any given station, either, because they're the modern version of Styx 30 years ago, seemingly innocuous but secretly a black creeping musical evil. We can only hope that in two or three years they'll come up with a bombastic lite-rock opera with Broadway musical aspirations about a guy dressed as a robot trying to rebel against the rise of technology, so that the world will finally ignore them.

But the Coldplay effect is a symptom of the underlying problem: adding tracks requires human intervention on Pandora's part, making their pool of music kind of tiny and inbred; another symptom is that the second or third artist I tried to use to start a station didn't even have any tracks available, and many of my favorite artists had only a few tracks from soundtracks or compilations. That problem made me stop using Pandora altogether a couple months after I started.

Joel, thank you for the wildly appropriate sketch in my Artist Edition. Also, for letting you comically maim and molest them as you do, you have the best friends in the world.

Hmmm, looks like Intensedebate isn't a fan of people posting links when they're not logged in. Anyway, here's the relevant CAD comic, assuming logged-in people are allowed to post links: http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20080602

Having grown up about 10 miles from Easthampton, I have to confess surprise that it actually has streets (as opposed to lanes, drives and little cul-de-sacs) but would gladly make the 2-hour drive back there if it meant seeing Joel naked, covered in blood and screaming in his Col. Tigh voice. But mostly the naked part.

Something weird going on in Texas that makes your eyeballs flatter, or is your style evolving again?

My guess on this is that Suda 51 was asked whether he'd do any more Wii installments of NMH and said something to the effect of "No, we'll do the next one on the next gen machine" and there are some people, mostly in the games media, clinging to the idea that the 3-year-old PS3 and 4-year-old 360 are still somehow "next gen".

I'm pretty sure most the people who responded to this are really just looking for an Xbox 360 that plays Zelda or Brawl, and they couldn't care less about mainstream stuff like Wii Sports. So take the number of Wiis sold, subtract the number of copies of Brawl sold, and the resulting difference is how many console sales Nintendo would lose if they adopted this strategy.... that is to say, their sales would drop by 80 percent.

I'm pretty sure this is marketed towards us 40-year-olds who had already grown out of videogames by the time the NES showed up, not to kids who think all those old games are the same. I could write a game in a couple of days with gameplay similar to these arcade games in Java or Flash or Python (or in assembly for the Atari 2600, which I've actually done.) But no matter how great it would be, it wouldn't be Mappy or Donkey Kong, any more than some garage band's retro CD is Abbey Road.

Hundreds of people have written clones of Mario and Space Invaders and Tetris and Pac-Man. Most of them are either freeware or live in the bargain bin, and it doesn't stop new people from discovering the originals every year. I agree that they're overpriced for what they are, but people will still buy them.

Which game is that? I haven't seen any emulated arcade games legally released for calculators, and on cell phones the carrier will charge you 5 or 6 bucks a month for a poorly reimplemented version.

I'd like to see the arcade versions of Donkey Kong and Galaga. Mappy they've already got covered. Maybe Tron would be possible with the Wiimote/nunchuck control scheme.

Beyond that, I'd love to see some vector games get some love, but the Wii doesn't really seem like a vector game kind of system.... I think XBLA is my best hope for that kind of thing, if at all.