FFWD Magazine has just printed the first of my two-part series on the New E3.

In this week’s issue, I look at what the three console manufacturers – Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony – had to show off in Santa Monica in July.

And revel in the new design for the FFWD Web site. Shiny!

From Indymedia by way of William Gibson, is this story, about how a group of clowns made fools out of a bunch of neo-Nazi klansmen in Knoxville, TN.

The KKK group were ostensibly trying to recruit, but every time they shouted, “White power!” the group of clowns responded with “White flour,” “White flowers,” and finally, “Wife power.”

The clowns even had signs.

There is no better way to dispel ignorance and hatred, than with a bit of laughter.

Shadowrun is the first video game that claims to deliver the exact same experience regardless of whether gamers play on a PC or an Xbox 360.

For Microsoft, this is one piece of the future. I interviewed FASA Studio head Mitch Gitelman for my latest Trigger Happy column in the Georgia Straight.

I also review the downloadable-only Mad Tracks , for Xbox Live, and Calling All Cars! for the PlayStation Network.

Can’t take credit for finding this, as I learned about it over on Clive Thompson’s Collision Detection (welcome back to the ‘net, Clive).

Jason Nelson calls himself a “new media poet,” which is a pretty apt description for what he does, and the game he designed, game, game, game and again game is a great example.

Thompson calls “game, game” a work of surrealism, and while I’m not sure about that – there are decided themes and objectives to Nelson’s game – I really dig the style and substance of “game, game.”

It’s a nice, quixotic endeavour.

Stumbled onto a New York Times article the other day, which explained how we are quite likely living in a computer simulation.

“In fact,” writes John Tierney, “if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. [Nick] Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty….”

Bostrom is a philosopher at Oxford (here is his Web site on the Simulation Argument), and his idea is that if we assume that post-humans are as intelligent and technologically advanced as our current trends would suggest is possible, we may be nothing more than an “ancestor simulation.”

“My gut feeling,” Bostrom tells Tierney, “and it’s nothing more than that, is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

How cool is that?

If you’ve got a sub to the NYTimes, read the full article here.