Tim Schafer, creator of Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Psychonauts, and the upcoming Brutal Legend, is hosting the Game Developers Conference this week. In honor of the occasion, Schafer and Double Fine created Host Master and the Conquest of Humor, a funny, single-room, web-based adventure game in the style of a very old-school Lucasarts adventure.

Web SCUMM! Why is there not more of this out there?

It’s as tough as the old-school adventures games, too. There are 22 jokes to be discovered, but I only found 6 or 7 of them without consulting a hints page.

I’ve praised Matt Taibbi before, and his latest piece for Rolling Stone is once again masterful. If you have the time to read it — on a lazy Sunday like today, or bored at work this week — do so.

Taibbi explains the AIG fiasco in plain words, and includes a lot of stunning details I didn’t know. (Do you know what the Office of Thrift Supervision is? See, you need to read it!) Towards the end of the piece, he also takes aim at the Federal Reserve and essentially creates a left-wing version of the libertarian Ron Paul argument. By the time you finish, you might want to abolish the Fed, too.

His main point is this: what we’re seeing now is not “socialism” but the final step in the corporate takeover of the government. Based on recent news, I’m inclined to agree. Geithner wants the government to buy up bad assets; Bernanke just proposed an FDIC-style organization for “too big to fail” banks. If this was socialism, government would be changing the banks. Instead, the government is changing itself in order to support the banks. It is taking on all the risk and none of the profit.

This isn’t socialism, and it isn’t the free market. This is something else… perhaps something nobody has seen before. And Obama is getting (and following) the same bad advice from the same greedy tools as the previous administration.

Meep, everybody. Meep.

While I’m on the subject, have some links I’ve come across over the last week:

• I’m usually not a great fan of PvP, but this week of strips made me laugh.
• Nite Owl Coffee, for reals.
• A Watchmen Hostess Fruit Pie ad, not for reals, yet still awesome.

On Friday night, a movie died in New York. Crowd reacted to Watchmen like they’d seen dog carcass in alley, tire tread on burst stomach. Third of audience left before end. All the whores and lechers and communists looked up and shouted “Save us!” …and Zach Snyder looked down and whispered, “No.”

Spoilers follow. Hurm.

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Our president is a black man and a Democrat. Alan Greenspan has called for the nationalization of major banks. And a big-budget Watchmen film was just released into theaters.

If you had told me all of this would happen five years ago, I would have laughed in your face. Are we living in a crazy alternate universe?

I’ll write more on Watchmen once I figure out what to say.

Yeah, I know it’s already been on every blog that ever blogged today. But, as someone who used to occasionally take lunch breaks at home to watch CNBC and laugh at the useful idiots, do you really think I’d pass up the chance to post my favorite TV commentator doing the same thing?