I guess it’s “People Who Are Wrong” day here on e! = A, ‘cause I just discovered another winner thanks to m’boy Brandon’s blog over at TimesUnion.com.

According to Katie Rossomano of DailyTitan.com, Blizzard Entertainment’s insanely popular “World Of Warcraft” (or WoW) is a sexist game that treats women like crap.

it’s no secret that I personally despise WoW, and constantly make fun of the tons of friends I have who play it, ranging from the innocent jab (“So, going out tonight, or sitting in your basement as per usual?”) to the downright nasty (“Does it bother you that your mother cries at night, thinking you’re sexually attracted to a virtual warlock named ‘N00bPwner’?”).

However, they’re my friends, and it’s my God-given right to mock them… it shows I care. Ms. Rossomano, on the other hand, doesn’t seem like she really played the game at all, or has friends who do, either, based on her article. Her complaints range from the fact that any female character you create is designed to look as “hot” as possible, encouraging sexism, the assumption that everyone is a guy, and, if a girl is playing, she must look like the love child of The Grimmace from McDonalds and one of the Garbage Pail Kids.

Where to begin?

Yes, you’re correct, female characters in video games are designed to appear “sexy,” just as male characters are designed to appear “muscular” and “handsome.” Let’s face it, none of the friends I have who play the game look like the massive he-men they have designed… these are “idealized” people, and you have the mass media to blame for pushing that “ideal.” Also, the idea that a 3-D model of a woman is going to encourage a sexist viewpoint is about as stupid as the idea that seeing a person do something “stereotypical” is going to make me a venom-spewing racist. It takes a lifetime to turn into that, and no video game is going to push you down a spiral of disgust and blind hatred, unless the game in question is “Pokemon: Silver.”

You discuss that it is assumed that female characters are actually being played by males, because, you suppose, that women are “incapable of learning and understanding a relatively complex video game,” ignoring the simple statistical fact that 84% of WoW players actually have a Y-Chromosome, and might not, in fact, have anything to do with a women’s inability to understand such a complex system as “click on an enemy, choose an attack, repeat.”

It is, sadly, the last part of your half-researched rant that is the most damning, where you flat-out state that if a women is (God forbid!) discovered in Azeroth, they are told that they are, quote, “fat, ugly, and acne-ridden.” To get to the bottom of this, I asked my friend Kraft, who has the distinct honor of being addicted to Warcraft like any regular person is addicted to breathing. The conversation, had moments ago:

Me: Hey, if you’re playing WoW with a group of you’ve never actually met before, and you find out one of them is an honest-to-God girl, how often do you hear someone say something like “you must be fat, ugly, and acne-ridden?”

Kraft: Not often. Usually she gets hit on.

Which leads me to my ultimate point; yes, you’ll find sexist people playing “World of Warcraft,” just like you’ll find racist people playing “Yahtzee!” However, just like in real life, you’ll find there’s a bunch more people who are just looking to get laid, and even more people who generally just don’t give a damn so long as you know what you’re doing and don’t prevent them from “pwning some n00bs,” or whatever the hell these loser friends of mine do. And, by condeming an entire game as a sexist experience, you’re no better than those who say stupid things like “girls can’t play games.”

But I suppose I shouldn’t be too harsh… after all, “logic” and “self righteousness” don’t often go together, as you so expertly demonstrated.

I generally dislike most “popular” tech columnists that are out there; they range from the painfully boring (The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg) to the obscenely annoying (whoever is paying super-tool John C. Dvorak this week). However, there has been one tech columnist who I’ve always found amusing, informative, and generally awesome: The New York Times’ David Pogue. He seems to have the same weird sense of humor I do, and doesn’t spend all his time talking in “nerd,” which, as someone who also has to explain technical nonsense to people who’s eyes glaze over when you have to talk about something more complicated than Spider Solitaire, I can appreciate… it’s harder to do than you think, and I challenge you to do it sometime.

However, that being said, it is with a heavy heart that I must say the following sentence: David Pogue’s column today was full of crap.

Mr. Pogue reviewed the new MacBook today in his column, and he made mention of the good things about the unit: the sleek new style, the simultaneous lightness and sturdiness of the unibody aluminum enclosure, and the fact that the thing just looks freakin’ sweet. I kid you not when I say that my friends and I stood around one, drooling like a bunch of 12-year-old boys who just found a Victoria’s Secret catalog when we saw it; the thing is hot.

What disappointed both Mr. Pogue and my friends was the removal of the FireWire port on the MacBook, a jack that had been a staple of Apple products for years. FireWire is an insanely useful connection, which allows for a range of things like importing of video from a MiniDV camcorder to your computer’s hard drive with lightning speed to allowing for diagnostics to be run on a Mac from another Mac (or a FireWire hard drive with OS X installed on it), making Mac repair a bit easier. It’s a great port with a lot of utility, and there’s a great number of people who can’t understand why Steve Jobs would take it away.

The answer is simple: the fact that I had to take a paragraph to explain FireWire, and why it’s useful, proves that the target audience of the MacBook wouldn’t even notice it was missing.

The MacBook is the “gateway drug” into all things OS X. If you’re going to be doing video editing, you’re likely going to get a MacBook Pro; if you either want to look trendy, not have Vista, and/or have some weird obsession with Justin “I’m A Mac” Long, you’re buying a MacBook. These are not people who are going to lament the fact that they now can’t transfer their family movies to their hard drive for editing and burning to DVD; hell, most of them don’t even realize that’s an option. The MacBook is there to lure people away from the $699 HP laptop that they might have bought (which, coincidentally, also doesn’t have a FireWire port!).

Mr. Pogue didn’t look at the MacBook from the perspective of who it’s aimed at, which is why I say he’s wrong today. However, I’ll also up the ante by pointing out that he missed the biggest complaint I’ve yet to hear from anyone with “power” in the tech world: the glaring lack of a simple memory card reader on either the MacBook or the MacBook Pro. There isn’t a metaphor appropriate enough to describe the wide gap between people who use their computer for video editing and people who use their computer to store, edit, and share digital photographs, and the fact that I had to buy a third-party card reader for my stupidly expensive MacBook Pro, while the same person who bought the $699 HP has one built in, drives me insane.

I wish I could claim credit for this observation; sadly, all credit must go to my friend Dave, who is closer to a “real” computer user than Mr. Pogue or I could ever hope to be. I was out to lunch with him, talking about how awesome the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros looked, but how disappointed I was about how FireWire was now going the way of my other favorite obsolete ports, a list I will have to remember never to share if I don’t wanna seem like the biggest nerd ever. I rambled on about how I was pretty pleased about the new trackpad, and the fact that El Jobso had finally picked up that people wouldn’t use a battery meter that was on the bottom of a computer, and that I was pumped that he wisely moved it to the side where it could be used easily. Dave’s response was simple:

“I’ve had my MacBook since April, and I never knew there was a battery meter on the bottom of my computer, and I have never had the urge to use the thing. It’s pointless; if I wanna know how much power I have left, I’ll turn on my computer like a normal person. However, you know what I would have put on the side where a row of five stupid LEDs are? I slot where I could stick my damn SD card from my camera so I don’t have to carry around either my external card reader or a spare USB cable! IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK?!”

As I mentioned before, both Mr. Pogue and I are often required to explain technology to people who either don’t want to understand it or are afraid of it, and that can sometimes lead you to think that although you’re a total gearhead, you can still see new products from a standard users point of view. Clearly, that’s not the case.

I just happened to notice it first. Therefore, on the internet, I win.

I’m interviewing Cobra Starship drummer Nate Navarro for Brandon’s Times-Union blog, and want your questions.

Leave ‘em as a comment or e-mail me via the contact page and let me know what you wanna know.

UPDATE: Because of a sound-check issue, the interview has been pushed to next week… So, if you had some question that was burning in your mind and you thought you may have missed your chance, get to it.

This comic from xkcd.com has marginally inspired me to post again. Hopefully, in the next few days, I will find other things that will make me get back to writing, because this all-work-no-awesome is starting to bring me down like a boulder tied to a sparrow.

Discovered via Wired, a new ad promoting Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference, where Windows 7, the successor to Vista, will be shown for the first time.

This bit would have been funnier if it was about two minutes shorter. Sitting through the nearly four minute running time is torture, but I’ll let you see for yourself.

I’m so sorry.

Have you ever sent someone an e-mail you later wish you hadn’t, thanks to the harsh intervention of alcohol? Well, Google is trying to save you a little bit of embarrassment with their new GMail feature, ‘Mail Goggles.’

Basically, if you try to send an e-mail at a predetermined time (the default is the weekend, late at night), Google will ask you a series of math questions to verify that you really, really wanna do this. You can set it to do this at any time in the preferences, so if you’re likely to be boozing on a Monday afternoon, this can save you then, too. Of course, this all hinges on the assumption that you use their web portal to send e-mail, and not an external app like Apple’s Mail, Mozilla’s Thunderbird, or Microsoft’s Outlook, but Google can only do so much, you know?

Google: Caring about your interpersonal relationships, even when you don’t, you crazy booze hound.

The economic crisis. Global warming. Terrorism. War. Let’s face it, we’re in pretty bleak times at the moment. However, the despair and horror we are facing as a nation is second only to the next terrifying thought: It’s 1:26EST, and iTunes has yet to release Weird Al’s new single.

What the hell, iTunes? I know, you’re thinking that there’s a lot going on in the world, and maybe the fact that I’m complaining about the lack of updates on Al’s new track is indicative of me being pretty well off if that’s all I can whine about, but screw that.

The debate tonight is a town-hall style thing; I want someone to ask what the candidates are going to do about this.

UPDATE: Weird Al’s site has been updated with the following comment:

Apparently there was a glitch at iTunes last night and Al’s new single - “Whatever You Like” - didn’t debut with the rest of the new releases. We’re being told that they’re working on the problem and (hopefully!!) it will be up later today. We’ll definitely let you know when that happens!

Oh, Apple… You can’t seem to do anything important right on the first try anymore. I mean, MobileMe was a mess, iPhone 2.0 software glitches were all over the place… must you screw this up, too?

I don’t like Sarah Palin. I do like Keith Olbermann. Mix the two, and you’ve got comedy gold.