Since Littleton, the cost of being different has gone up. Thousands of powerful e-mail messages have chronicled an educational system that glorifies the traditional and the normal, and brutalizes and alienates people who are or who are perceived as different under various names -- geeks, freaks, nerds, Goths and oddballs. One of the powerful messages coming out of Colorado is that so many of these "different" kids say they find school boring, oppressive, and utterly hostile, feelings echoed by educational survivors, many of whom are now parents. The hysteria over Littleton has only made things worse. It's time geeks defined and lobbied for some new rights. From their own messages, here are some places to start.

In the days after the Littleton, Colorado massacre, the country went on a panicked hunt the oddballs in High School, a profoundly ignorant and unthinking response to a tragedy that left geeks, nerds, non-conformists and the alienated in an even worse situation than before. Stories all over the country embarked on witchunts that amounted to little more than Geek Profiling. All weekend, after Friday's column here, these voiceless kids -- invisible in media and on TV talk shows and powerless in their own schools -- have been e-mailing me with stories of what has happened to them in the past few days. Here are some of those stories in their own words, with gratitude and admiration for their courage in sending them. The big story out of Littleton isn't about violence on the Internet, or whether or not video games are turning out kids into killers. It's about the fact that for some of the best, brightest and most interesting kids, high school is a nightmare of exclusion, cruelty, warped values and anger.

Nightmarish high school massacres like the one in Littleton are now an almost ritualistic part of American life. And increasingly when they occur, journalists and educators blame new media like the Internet, computer games like Doom or violent movies. Why kids kill this way is an urgent and complicated question. But teenaged crime isn't rising, it's falling. And there's no evidence that the Net or other new media are the reason for massacres.

Today's idiotic lawsuit...parents are suing Hollywood and some porn websites because some kid shot a bunch of his classmates. Here is an exceptionally choice quote: "The lawsuit claims that confessed shooter Michael Carneal, a 14-year-old freshman at Heath High School at the time of the Dec. 1, 1997, shootings, was influenced by the violence in ``The Basketball Diaries'' and by several violent computer games such as ``Doom,'' ``Quake,'' and ``Mortal Combat.''" The Mortal Combat techno track does make me want to kill whoever produced it, and I've never been fond of DiCaprio, but wow. What a great country we live in. Update: 04/13 02:11 by CT : several people sent us this story which says that 14 game companies will be sued. Guess who is among them?

Jeffrey Starr writes "Loki Entertainment Software is posting on their web site that Civilization: Call to Power for Linux will be released April 26. " Hemos got on the beta testers list so I played it a bit last night. Its a strange feeling- I haven't played a "real" (you know what I mean *grin*) game under Linux besides Quake and Doom. It gave me warm fuzzies. I hope everyone follows the trail the Loki is blazing over there. They did a good job.

Jacek Fedorynski writes "Graeme 'Zaphod' Devine of id Software updated his .plan, in which he wrote that the test of Q3A that everybody expected to be out in March will be out in a few weeks. I can't wait much longer. "

Scitechsoft has released a preview release of their Display Doctor for Linux. It now supports more cards, an SVGAlib wrapper so you can use any card with any resolution and use SVGAlib based applications (Quake, Snes9X etc..), and a universal text mode driver to switch to any text mode you want and your card can support. Evaluation version is now available - worth a shot if I may recommend.

Jim P sent us a link to Shugashack which has a cool article talking about porting Quake to Linux. Its official though, there's gonna be a shrink wrapped box too.

Anthony Fuentes writes "According to this .mp3 interview with John Carmack (@37:15), he is planning to release the source to quake in late 1999. Doesn't sound like he has completely committed, but cool none the less. "

Dr. Blackwood writes sent us a link to a LinuxPower interview with Dave "Zoid" Kirsch where he talks about (big surprise) the Quake 3 for Linux Port. Lots of interesting bits to read.

doobman writes "I found an article here that is a summary of the upcoming Quake III and all the multiplayer only hype. But the kicker is, in the middle it says that "Quake 3 will be on shelves for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems". " Now if I can get good 3d support, I'll be content. Course I'll still suck, but I don't think any port will solve that problem.

Several folks wrote in to tell us that 3dfx has announced the Voodoo3 boards. The 2D/3D combo card can do 8 million triangles per second but has no 32-bit rendering. To bad 3d support under Linux still sucks. Quake would be smooth. I figure between Mesa and xig that should change this year. Standard 3d will make modern games much easier on Linux. I think Diablo 2 is coming soon... that would be a swell port.

An anonymous reader writes "Some French students have started to code a parallel version of Mesa 3.0 (PMesa). They can reach a very good speedup (between 1.2 and 1.8). " SMP and OpenGL? Neato. That Mesa Quake thing is looking smoother all the time.

Shane McLochlainn writes "The Dallas Observer Online is reporting that Ion Storm, who employs ex-ID Doom/Quake hacker John Romero is in severe financial & personnel difficulties. Apparently most of the team programming the debut flagship game, Daikatana, have jumped ship to rival Games company Gathering of Developers (GoD), founded by ex-Ion Stormers. "

First up is a pretty cool Slashdot bit: drwii sent us a link to Scanned in Proof that Slashdot is actually in the Feb print edition of PC Magazine. Spiffy. An anonymous reader sent us a wired article explaining Wired. Wired the deal with MP4s. `PEZ sent us a couple of links to more information about the 'Yepp' MP3 player- The samsung announcement and the Yepp Web Page will quench your thirst for knowledge. svetz wrote in to say that Gnome 0.99.3 is on. desertAngel was the first to squeel that 2.2.0pre7 is out. Alron Dameon-ArkMoon wrote in to say that LinuxBox.com is providing free hosting for Open Source developers. schvin wrote in to plug portico.org, a new *Nix tips and tricks page. saturated wrote in to say that apparently Linux Now! is back on line after a little absence. Michael Howard sent us a must see penguin image. ToiletDuk sent us a great pyromaniac web site- fireballs with bic lighters? Don't burn yourself. soren.harward wrote in to tell us that stomped.com has Quake III Arena movies if you're curious what your future will look like. cynbe sent us a link to an amusing piece called The Last Dinosaur and the Tarpits of Doom: How Linux Smashed Windows. It's funny. I think.

In a recent e-mail conversation with Timur Tabi (of Win32-OS/2), I asked him about opening the source to Win32-OS/2 and collaborating with the Wine crew. For instance win32-OS/2 has some Direct X support, allowing Quake 2 3D-Now, and Destruction Derby II to run. And this was his reply: "We have already announced our intent to release the source code as well as use code from WINE. The announcement was made at Warpstock". Timur gave the Win32-OS/2 speech at Warpstock. update In related news, Wine 990110's out.

Cmdr_Pooky asks "I have recently took a long gander at Thrustmaster's Fragmaster. I must say that it is quite impressive looking but I was wondering if anyone out there had any practical Quake 2 experience with it. I see a trend of first person shooter controllers coming out by various but my problem with Thrustmaster is they sometimes will use generic drivers and not device specific for a particular os. Has anyone out there used the Fragmaster yet? "

click the link below to read my ramblings written while trapped in concourse C of O'Hare airport yesterday. I booted my laptop and typed till I got bored. It's strange.

pavewrld sent in a couple of links. The first is over at MacWorld Online and announces the new PowerMac G3's, which look similar to the iMac. The second announces the new iMac's, which now come in a variety of colors. Also in Apple news, NikT wrote in to say that Mac OS X server was announced, and it will include Apache and BSD 4.4. Finally, Ethan Butterfield wrote in to let us know of Steve Jobs' keynote address at MacWorld Expo. Apparently Apple has licensed OpenGL from SGI, and John Carmack demoed Quake 3 Arena on one of the new G3's. You can read more at Macintouch. Phew! With MacWorld Expo going on, the Apple news is nonstop.

Evangelion writes " Zoid was interviewed at the Daily Dementia with regards to Linux, Quake, Server ports for Half Life, and more. If you can tolerate cheesy talk shows, check it out."