If you've been to a lot of concerts, chances are you've talked smack about an opening act. It's something of a time-honored tradition—we don't really want to see opening bands! They are, after all, just warming us up for the show we paid to see.

Sometimes talking smack on an opening act will get you in trouble, even if you only do it on Twitter. Sometimes, it'll even get you kicked out of the show.

That very thing happened last night to Mike Taylor, who writes for the gaming site Game-Boat.com. Taylor was attending a show by nerdcore rapper Christopher "MC Chris" Ward in Philadelphia last night, when a tweet critical of the opening act got him ejected from the show.

UPDATE - MC Chris has since posted an apology video.

According to an account posted on Kotaku's Talk Amongst Yourselves forum, Taylor was unimpressed with one of the opening acts, Richie Branson. "I felt his lyrics were lame and pandering to us gamers and other assorted nerd fans," Taylor writes. "I also didn't think his delivery was good and his beats were mostly sampled from others songs and music (from games, anime and whatnot. I didn't like any of it."

So, Taylor tweeted the following:

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I spoke with MC Chris on the phone, and he explained what happened when he saw the tweet. "I was in my green room checking on my Twitter," he said. "During the show, someone tweeted something negative about Richie. And I don't have a problem with stuff like this. I get made fun of and called all sorts of name every day. But if someone messes with my friend I have this weird reaction that happens, and I do things that probably are kind of not normal, abnormal. I just become extremely protective.

"I marched onstage, and in between songs with Richie, I grabbed the microphone and I said 'Who is this person's name,' he came up, and I said, 'You're going to have to go off with somebody with the venue and tell them to escort you off for talking shit on Twitter.'"

From Taylor's account:

I walked out to the lobby, grabbed a soda and was sitting there when I heard the crowd went nuts and mc chris started talking, and I heard him ask for my real name. My friend and I looked at each other confused and heard him ask for it again. I got up, walked back onto the floor and raised my hand. He then pointed at me and yelled, "Security is going to take you the fuck out now! That's what you get for talking shit on Twitter!"

"People can say whatever they want on Twitter," MC Chris told me. "I'm not naive, I understand what Twitter is. This is an MC Chris show. It's different than other shows. You're not at a Sleigh Bells concert talking about the opening act. You're at my show, where we're all nerds, we've all been bullied, we've all suffered, and now we're together, we're having a good time, and we're not talking trash on each other while we're in the same building together."

Taylor felt differently:

As you could imagine, my combination of humiliation, shock and disappointment wasn't great. I've been a diehard mc chris fan since about 2004, with plenty of fond memories of listening to Life's a Bitch and I'm Her Pimp and Eating's Not Cheating on repeat while commuting back and forth to college. This situation kinda sullies those memories. I realize my tweet is snarky, but I'm a smartass and I can understand a guy being mad and protective of his opener. However, publicly kicking out a long-time paying fan because they tweeted a negative response about the opener of your show? Are you serious? I realize what I said was petty, but how immature is it to publicly humiliate someone for something tweeted to just my hundred (which are mostly bots) or so followers? Am I not allowed to have a negative opinion? Didn't mc chris just post a video on Youtube not long ago criticizing the Avengers movie for screwing up Hawkeye? Should the producers of the movie publicly embarrassed him and Marvel cut off his comic book description? No, they're bigger than that, and he should be too.

In an email to Kotaku, Taylor explained that the venue gave him his money back, and that even after he was escorted out, he asked if he could stay.

"When I was escorted out to the lobby," Taylor said, "no one put their hands on me or anything a security worker politely asked me to come with him and I walked out under my own power, MC Chris's tour manager was waiting for me, as were representatives for Union Transfer, the venue. The tour manager apologized, saying that Chris has thrown out fans from his concerts before for other slights. The tour manager and venue worker asked me to please leave without a fuss. I expressed to them my sadness and disbelief, letting them know I wasn't angry and I wanted to let Chris know I'm a huge fan of his and would like to stick around. They advised me it wouldn't be a good idea, they wouldn't want other fans to point me out or for Chris to see me there. They simply gave me my cash back and I left, promising I held nothing against them."

MC Chris concurred that this isn't the first time he's kicked fans out of his concerts. "I've had people hold up Nintendo DSs that say 'You Suck' to my openers," he told me. "I kick those people out. Because it's rude. It's not because they have opinions and I'm Hitler and I don't like opinions, it's because they're being rude at a nerd show! You don't go to Comic Con and call everyone a geek and push them down."

I asked him if he sees a difference between behavior that's actually disruptive at a show, like holding up signs or being loud or dunk, and non-disruptive behavior like Twitter criticism.

"Is Twitter different than [a drunk fan]? Yeah, sure. It's something that's passive aggressive, and it's a stealthy attack, and no one knows it's happening. And it can just float on by into the ether and never be noticed again. And it probably should've stayed that way, you know, I definitely know my fiancee would prefer it if I left things alone. You know…[laughs], what can I tell you? I hate passive aggressiveness, I hate people insulting my friends and thinking they can get away with it. This guy insulted my openers and thinks he can go and see Powerglove and MC Chris afterwards. That's not how it works. You have to be polite for the people who are performing for you. It doesn't sound crazy to me when I say it out loud. "

Taylor urges caution to those who would attend MC Chris shows in the future. "I feel gamers and other fans have a right to know that if they go to an MC Chris show, make sure to keep your opinions to yourself, you might find yourself kicked out for not praising him or his crew."

For MC Chris' part, he says he's not going to react to further online criticism. "I'm gonna give my phone to my fiancee for the rest of the day and I'm not allowed to tweet anymore. It'll definitely happen again tonight, and I'm not going to react to it. I want to say to everyone: you can say whatever you want at a show. You can do whatever you like. I'm probably not going to react every time."

However, he still urges that his fans be mindful about what they say—and tweet. "Just because it's America doesn't mean anything goes. And just because we have technology doesn't mean we can say whatever we want."

It's a hard-knock life in DayZ. The zombies aren't nearly as dangerous as the people roaming the wasteland, and rookies and veterans alike know that death is always looming close. And so it's all the more remarkable that there are men and women out there like Dr. Wasteland, a flinty, dedicated surgeon who makes it his business to travel around the gameworld dodging incoming fire and healing the sick.

Wasteland is profiled in a fantastic article over at Ars Technica, where he discusses the ins and outs of his survival philosophy. Among other things, he describes the "white list" he maintains of players who can be trusted in any circumstance, reports that he's never been betrayed by someone he's helped, and explains why he's an anti-clan lone wolf. "Most medics on the White List are self-sufficient," he says. "And that's the way I want it. I want them to operate on their own in hostile environments. I don't want them to register, check in. It's still their game, their way of playing."

From the article:

Dr. Wasteland sees himself as a teacher, but he has turned into a kind of folk hero in the game, more Robin Hood than The Hero of Canton. "It's not only medical assistance. It's advice and direction. I give them my strategies for the best ways to get out of certain areas," he says. "If someone contacts me and says they're in Chernogorsk and they need help I tell them, ‘I don't go into Cherno, it's too dangerous… you're going to have to crawl out for me to help you, and here's the best route, and I will meet you the second you get out.'"

Like a true folk hero, Dr. Wasteland isn't in this business for (virtual) material gain. "I usually don't accept payment," he says. "My biggest objective is to keep repeat customers from happening. Why would I want to take things from them that they need to succeed? The stuff I have now, NVGs, rangefinder… it's people who like what I'm doing who have given this kit to me. Not patients. The whole reason I got here tonight is someone that likes what I do drove me here in their scavenged car. They gave me the NVGs, rangefinder, and the ride. All for free."

Dr. Wasteland sounds like the kind of hero the zombie apocalypse needs.

Paging Dr. Wasteland: One man's crusade to heal DayZ's zombie victims [Ars Technica]

At a hefty 17", the Samsung Series 7 Gamer is not exactly what you might call "portable." It's a laptop that's squarely in the realm of desktop replacement. The system specs say it weighs in at just under 8.4 pounds, but it's still not something you'd exactly want to carry around.

When I got it out of the box, everything about it felt ludicrously large. The machine, frankly, is a beast. It is the first laptop in this house (and there have been many laptops in this house) to be larger than the cat. For comparison, I took a quick (if terrible) photo of the Samsung Series 7 Gamer next to an Alienware M14x 14" gaming laptop, which itself is not exactly svelte.

Happily, the feel of the thing is actually pretty nice. It may be a beast, but it's a comfortable beast. The plastic around the keyboard isn't rubberized, but it does have a smooth, satiny feel that seems like it would wear well. The size is an advantage when it comes to the keyboard, which features full-sized, responsive keys and a number pad to go with. The default backlighting, a gentle, vaguely-blue white, works nicely as well, creating light and contrast without being garish. And of course, the big advantage of a big laptop is its big screen. The crisp 17" display runs at 1920x1080, delivering nicely on HD gaming.

The one exception to the nice feel is the trackpad, which honestly is kind of terrible. The buttons are placed in such a way that I routinely hit right-click when reaching for left-click, the touch-tap is not always responsive, and the texture of the thing created a weird sort of friction drag on my fingers, making me feel like using the mouse pointer was twice as hard as it should have been. You'll want to plug in a proper mouse (or use a Bluetooth mouse) for any extended gaming sessions.

The other issue I had was with the sensitivity of switches along the top bar, just under the monitor. Volume looks like it should be a dial, but it's actually just a (very sensitive) plus/minus switch. The whole bar is so sensitive that when brushing my hand along it gently to remove a stray cat hair, I managed to turn off the wifi antenna without realizing I had ever touched it at all. Since it's easier to control the laptop's volume using the keyboard, it's probably just smart to stay away from that area of the machine entirely once it's been turned on.

Of course, look and feel are meaningless without performance. The specs are nice, with the i7 quad core Ivy Bridge CPU, the NVidia GTX 675M graphics card, and more RAM than anyone can actually use, but do they add up to smooth gaming?

The Samsung came pre-loaded with a number of games, including Peggle, Plants vs Zombies, and Chuzzle. As much as I do in fact love PopCap games (I may have put more hours into Plants vs Zombies over the last year than is strictly healthy), they're not going to put a gaming machine through its paces. They don't even really put my two-year-old phone through its paces. It was time for something a bit more demanding.

The most system-punishing game we have in the house, as it happens, is The Secret World. On my desktop, I run TSW on DX11, with most settings on the default "Ultra," and get an average of just over 30 fps. (The range runs from about 25 FPS to nearly 50, but during normal gameplay and combat hovers in the 32-35 fps area.) That's on a desktop using an Intel i7-930 quad core CPU from 2010 and an NVidia GeForce GTX 480.

So how did the laptop compare? I turned the dial to "gaming" (more about that in a moment), set the game to "Ultra," and ran off to kill zombies. While puttering around Kingsmouth in solo combat it pretty much stayed in the 21-28 FPS range, which—while not exceptional—is actually a lot better and more playable than I expected. It doesn't take many tweaks to the settings to get it running around 30. Naturally, of course, the laptop sounds by that point as if it is trying to take off into space, but that's just how heavy-working laptop fans get.

I mentioned the dial. The knob is the big gimmick of the Series 7 Gamer. Yes, a knob. It's a small dial set into the right side of the machine, just under the monitor, that basically has four pre-configured power management settings. There's a mode that optimizes gaming performance, naturally, but there's also a mode that reduces fan speed (making the laptop quieter) and dims the lights, so that the user won't be That Guy in a library or other quiet location.

The gaming setting is effective. It brings the fan to life and makes sure that GPU has the juice it needs. But it's also, well, garish. Horribly garish. All of the lights switch to a bright, electric blue, except WASD, which go bright red. The volume and power switches, both round, also light up red and then pulse in sync with whatever audio source you have playing. By default, it also comes with a full Windows theme that changes your desktop and mouse pointer. Of course, the settings can be customized, so it's possible to keep the power boost while ditching the visuals, if they're not your thing.

The other feature setting the Series 7 Gamer apart is its attention to audio, with Dolby sound processing. I threw some music on via the speakers to see how they sounded, and started out impressed. The treble and mid-range are actually very good, for laptop speakers. But as soon as the chord of Reaper in E Minor hit, they went all tinny and "blaaat." They may be very good for laptop speakers but in the end, they're still laptop speakers. With headphones plugged in, the sound (from games, music, or video) is as good and robust as you'd generally expect.

So yes, the Samsung Series 7 Gamer makes a good desktop replacement machine. But its bulk and price point—just under $1900—are enough to invite the question of, "why?" If power is what a gamer is after, desktops are less expensive and can be upgraded more easily. If portability is what a gamer is after, there are similarly powerful machines, also less expensive, that can be picked up and hauled around much more easily. The number of players who need what the Samsung Series 7 Gamer has to offer is probably a small segment of the population. But for those who do need a 17" desktop-replacing, gaming-capable laptop, the Series 7 Gamer wouldn't be a bad choice.

I am looking forward to seeing The Dark Knight Rises this weekend, because I like Batman. He's rich and spoiled and self-pitying, sure, but he actively went out and chose to take on the whole caped crusading business, and has to keep coming up with clever new tools to make it work. There's no biology, with Batman; no X-ray vision or surprising spiderwebs. There's just human ingenuity. And Alfred.

So in honor of Batman, I decided to look for Batman-themed human ingenuity in PC case modding. I found many old and new takes on the Dark Knight and his dark computing needs.

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What is Batman without his trusty Batmobile? This Batman Begins-edition car is a fully functional PC. Yes, really. It's made from an RC car.

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This one is older (our sibling site Gizmodo featured it a long time back) but still awesome. Because what does Batman do? He flies. And this PC—because yes, that giant bat is a fully functional computer—flies overhead, looking exactly as menacing as it should.

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Sometimes, there's something to be said for the simple tactics. Batman's symbol glows in the night sky, surrounded by the menacing red lights of Gotham. Or some such. At any rate, the NZXT Batman case looks sleek and silvery by day, like a certain Mr. Wayne, and is ready to kick ass at night.

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I have never felt the need for my PC to glower at me. Glow, yes. Glower, no. It's probably trying to kill me as is; I don't need the shifty look.

But if your PC needs to hide its real identity behind a mask, for the safety of its loved ones, this is a pretty great way to do it. (source)

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And finally, the utility belt. What is Batman without his utility belt? Dead, that's what. Splatted on the sidewalk.

This utility belt would not help Batman, not even a little. There's no grappling hook, no smoke grenades, no ever-useful batarangs. That's because it's a fully functional PC, if an unconventional one. There's a making-of to go with.

There are times, when playing a game, that the hours just sail past. The player becomes completely immersed in the content and time loses all meaning, buried in a haze of "just one more quest."

Then there are the times, when playing a game, that every minute is like pulling teeth. Nothing works, nothing makes sense, and the player begins to wonder just what the hell that game was ever for in the first place.

I had both of those nights this past week while playing The Secret World.

One night in particular was full of disaster after disaster. An item—a nice weapon—I had scrounged to purchase had vanished from my equipment while I was logged out, and although the customer service representative who responded to my /petition was professional and courteous, in my case there wasn't anything they could do to restore it. Meanwhile, the monster I needed to take down to complete a quest bugged out at 50% health every time, unable to be killed.

But a patch applied the next day actually fixed both of the issues I'd been having. And that seems to be the pattern I'm finding with The Secret World: the game isn't always polished around the edges, and things go wrong, but the team responds to them quickly and seems to be on the case. It's like getting the food wrong at a restaurant: in a good place, they'll apologize, make sure you're tended to, and probably comp part or all of the meal. And a restaurant that does that, that provides excellent and thoughtful service even though screw-ups still happen, is a place you'll keep going back to.

My bigger complaint, on the Night of Terrible Gaming, was with the first faction quest, called "Into Darkness." All three factions assign the mission as some point, but it's different from the Templar, Dragon, or Illuminati perspective. For example, I arrived to find the place powered and had to take out a circuit box to make it dark. An Illuminati on the mission will arrive in his or her solo instance to found that some damn Templar already took out the circuit box, and it's dark.

The problem with free-form, class-free leveling, though is that it's possible for a solo instance to be unbalanced. Badly unbalanced. And that can take a game that has been about careful thought, patience, sabotage, investigation, and thinking, and suddenly make it into an incredibly frustrating unexpected roguelike.

I lost track at death number 17, on that mission. Until then, I'd never had more than two or three unintentional deaths (and yes, there is a purpose to intentional ones) in a single play session. Suddenly, the mood had changed from a sense of nonthreatening guidance to flat-out punishing me. Repeatedly. I was... not pleased. A great deal of loud cursing could be heard at my PC that night.

And yet, the next evening I went back, and everything was fine. Monsters died, quests were completable, and the dialogue leading into my first experience in a group zone was very wry and funny. The group zone, Polaris, was good fun. As is often the case with MMORPG dungeons, if you know who your main tank is and target him or her then you're good to go. And in this case, the level-free nature of the game meant that our group's main tank had top-level, end-of-game gear and skills (QL10, in The Secret World's terms) and knew the fights, so Polaris was a bit quicker and easier than it generally is meant to be the first time you try it.

Kingsmouth is lovely but I'm about ready to wrap up my last few missions and strike out to see more of the Savage Coast. But first, I need to stop in at the Fusang projects and Stonehenge. It's time to take out some Illuminati and Dragon... personally.

Batman week continues! We've posted several "Lore in a Minute" videos - they're always very funny, though sometimes, as was the case with Kingdom Hearts, I still have no idea what the hell is going on in the game.

However, the new Batman: Arkham City lore-in-a-minute video taught me something about the game's backstory that I didn't know. Maybe I missed it somewhere in all the grappling and bataranging, but I had missed the backstory of Arkham City itself. The sequence of events leading to its creation must have been outlined in a collectible or nested menu that I missed. Or maybe it was super obvious, and I really was too busy double-fist-punching thugs in the crotch in slow motion to notice.

At any rate, these videos are always a good time, and this one is no exception. Watch more videos over at the Lore in a Minute YouTube page.

Your average Android phone is nice and portable, but the display sure is tiny. A full-sized Tegra tablet is a joy to work with, but a larger profile doesn't make for hours of comfortable gaming. With its seven inch 1280x800 HD display, Google's new mid-sized Tegra tablet is just the right size for hours of on-the-go gaming.

But what of Amazon's Kindle Fire, or Barnes & Noble's Nook? While both fall into the same size category and both are powered by Android, the Google Nexus 7 makes them look like children's toys.

Google has given the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble enough time to mutilate its operating system into something nigh-unrecognizable. It's time to show them how it's done, and the Nexus 7 does just that.

Customers flocked to the Nook and the Fire, seeking the safety of established brands to ease their entry into the world of tablet computing. The devices were loaded with restrictive front-end interfaces meant to keep new users away from the more complicated aspects of Android. Both feature a shop with a limited selection of games and apps, places to purchase books and videos; they're both very user-friendly.

The Nexus 7, slowly shipping out to eager consumers as I type, also features a streamlined front-end, but behind it is an unfettered Android tablet experience. You can purchase all the apps without having to game the system, giving you more time to game on the system instead.

The Nexus has the competition beat in terms of power as well. Fitted with a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and boasting 1GB of RAM, it's almost a waste to pick one up unless you plan to take advantage of the latest Tegra HD games on offer. There are plenty of pieces of screen-covered plastic that can display books, stream movies or play music. I claim this tablet in the name of gaming. I probably don't possess the power to do that, but here we are.

Most of my Android gaming these days is done on an Asus Transformer Prime, the fancy Tegra 3 tablet with the removable keyboard dock. And I love playing on it. It's fast, the graphics are crisp and the touch screen is responsive. It's ridiculously expandable, storage-wise. It's unique docking feature draws attention.

It's just not all that comfortable to hold it for hours on end while playing games. In its dock, or propped up in a stand with a USB gamepad attached, it's wonderful. I wouldn't call it portable.

Weighing in at three-quarters of a pound, the Nexus 7 is a device that longs to be held for extended periods. It was built for this, from its slim profile to the rubbery textured back panel that makes gripping the unit both easy and comfortable.

The firm grip really helps when your fingers are flying across the seven inch screen. Again, this is the perfect size for a touch screen tablet, at least for someone with slightly larger than average hands (hi!). It's so small that half of the screen is obscured by your digits, and not so big that you can't reach the middle of the display without holding the unit in one hand.

I made the same observation when the Kindle Fire first came out — I gamed on my Fire quite a bit — but ultimately the limited selection of games and lack of support and updates for many of the titles I did play left me cold.

The Nexus 7 doesn't have that problem. If it's on Google Play, chances are it'll play.

And it'll play well. I've been going through some of my old favorites (Muffin Knight) and a host of Tegra 3-powered titles on the Nexus 7, and so far it's performed like a champ. The zombie shooter Dead Trigger; Diablo clone Heroes Call THD; Shadowgun; Dark Meadow: The Pact; all of these run gorgeously on the tablet.

In fact games seem to run better on the Nexus 7 than they do on my Transformer Prime, though that might just be a function of Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), the latest and fastest version of Google's operating system.

The Nook and Kindle have their place; there are plenty of people that just want a little gaming in between chapters of their Game of Thrones eBooks. The Nexus 7 is sure to steal some of those customers away, but the true power of Google's first table computer is the way it plays.

The Nexus 7 is available for purchase from Google for $199 (8GB) or $249 (16GB).

In the latest video from Activision, Black Ops II's creative team, including lead writer David Goyer and composer Trent Reznor chat about how very excited they are to be working on the game, which they see to be as much an "event" as a summer blockbuster.

I'm not sure if this is a case of Portal making Katamari Damacy cuter, or Katamari Damacy making Portal cuter. Either way, this mesh of two awesome video games is confusingly amazing. Expand the image for the full effect.

Though, I'm not entirely sure how a video game featuring the two would actually work. I suppose you'd have to roll your way through portals. Or would the katamari roll up the portals in its rampage? What black holes would we be creating then?

The possibilities are both horrifying and exciting.

Guys I'm not even sure anymore. [Squid Von Bob]

These pieces of art, made perfect for your wall, were created out of cotton and felt and other fabrics. They're part of an exhibit called "Sew Nerdy: A Geek Craft Extravaganza," so these pieces will be on show until August 11th.

Unfortunately they run from $60-$100, which isn't too terrible, but not enough for me to warrant as a wall decoration purchase. Particularly because my mom is quite skilled with a needle and thread. Still, these look great.

Sew Nerdy [Bear and Bird via Love and a Sandwich]