Since we have to lead with anything Journey here at SFist, check out the YouTube clip of the ad for Atari's "Journey Escape" we found on Kotaku. Avoiding (pixelated representations of) crazed fans and manipulative music industry types never looked so fun! Buy it now! If espionage is more your game, then the cloak-and-dagger shenanigans at HP should be up your alley. Even reporters were entangled in the web of lives spun to discredit......

In honor of Labor Day, we'd like to point out that every employee, freelancer and consultant in Silicon Valley has to bargain their health benefit terms on their own or take what the company offers, and many end up one of the 46 million Americans without. So this techie is rooting for Tom Ammiano to legislate health security, at least for San Franciscans. While individual entrepreneurial successes like the Mercury News' Matt "Silicon Beat" Marshall......

There are few places where people get their collective geek on like Burning Man. A lot of folks are staying home this year -- Violet Blue gives some good reasons why -- and taking a chance to relax on the full-press coverage and pimp as much anti-party legislation as they can while the freak vote is out of town. Of course, just because you decided not to crash diet to look good in your sand-filled......

The big news yesterday, which hit our feed reader right before our wifi crapped out, was Google CEO Eric Schmidt driving down the 101 to Cupertino to join Apple's Board of Directors. Considering some of the trouble Apple's been in lately -- suppliers suing newspapers over reports of overworked employees in China, a less-than-stellar environmental record, stock option backdating scandals -- could this be a way for Google to outsource all the evil they're supposedly......

With SFist Rita's report yesterday about Apple settling with Creative, Apple fanboys can console themselves with the news that Microsoft is also getting dinged for even more money in a patent infringment suit. Meanwhile, retail workers who downloaded the development version of Apple's new OS, Leopard, are getting canned left and right (scroll down). But BusinessWeek thinks good iPod news is on the way, while Wired News explores the back alleys of Chennai in search......

Locally, the big news was the second best blog party last Friday thrown by TechCrunch down in Menlo Park. Scott Beale was commissioned to take the photos, including the one above featuring an uneasy handshake between Valleywag's Nick Douglas (left) and his favorite whipping boy, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. Nick had been bumped off the exclusive invite list, but Michel must have relented. If he had been dis-invited, apparently crashing the party was not an......

The good news is that the first battle in the legal fight against the NSA's wiretapping program has been won by everyone who doesn't work for the NSA. The bad news is that internet-enabled vigilante mobs could be the next big fad here in the States. Eh, we're too busy applying a new Dasani-branded profile treatment to our MySpace profile and checking out some of the videos. Damnit, we were totally going to lead off......

We've held out this long, and we're only gonna make this jokes once, but this summer, watch out for... Drinks on a plane! (We'll now run across the street and demand of the priest an appropriately harsh prescription for penance.) But don't worry, technology and, to a lesser extent, the Bush and Blair administrations, are here to protect you. With biometric terrorist detectors, other tech that's been around for generations, and the latest in arbitrary......

Hello on your puzzling adventures, Perplex puzzlers! We're hoping they lured you to our site out of your competitive spirit of gamesmanship, and we'll keep you with our obsessive coverage of most things Bay Area. SFist Jon braves the HTML wilds of table-formatting to serve up a heapful of truth about our local SF political scene. Quick, guess who this is: "Nice, affable, and completely ineffective. But we love the whole Gay Marriage thing." And......

It's been a while since we published a tech roundup. But the Internet turned 15 last Sunday, we got a new laptop from an entrepreneur and friend who'll be enabling this 'Fister's addiction to blogging, and SFist Chuck, whom we dearly miss, was kidnapped by Disney, who force him to Imagineer at gunpoint. All the while, you've been lost in the unmapped multiverse, wondering who Supr.c.ilio.us and TechCrunch are, and which is the hipper one......

Remember that totally awesome scene in Return of the King where the Witch King was leaving Cirith Ungol with the Orc army and Frodo started freaking out and then that big shaft of light shot out of the building as the people of Minas Tirith looked on with a dread that something great and terrible was coming? Replace Minas Morgul with the Moscone Center, the Witch King with Kevin Smith, and put a "d"......

Well, Apple is rumored to be anouncing the iPod phone by Motorola at the Moscone Center on the 7th. 100 songs, service through Cingular are the rumored deets. In the meantime, the music business, not happy with the $350 million they've pocketed from the iTunes store since 2003, want a tiered pricing scheme, with new releases bumped to $1.49 -- which would be a great way to send people back to filesharing for the......

Well, Google is set to announce their Google Talk and Google Desktop v2.0 tomorrow -- but folks have already been using Talk for a few hours now (and the client has been released). Was the leak to create 'buzz,' mayhaps? Danah Boyd doesn't call Google (whom she used to work for) out specifically, but it isn't too hard to figure out who she's talking about when she points out that when your competitor is......

Oh, so much geekery, we're gonna do this bullet-style. Shall we get started? Jeb Bush dropped by EA's Tiburon studios and was treated to a simulation of himself in Madden 2006. Sadly, he's not in the real game, so you can't lay him or Dubya out with a virtual Ray Lewis.Kevin Smokler points us to CNET's list of the top ten dot-bombs. Thankfully, we didn't work for any of them, so you can't blame......

Via Brian over at The Bay Area is Talking, we find out that everyone's favorite nerd sweatshop (because of, um, their on-campus exercise facilities, natch), Google, is being accused of workplace discrimination. Christina Elwell alleges Google was very much evil when she was purportedly demoted and harassed after letting her boss know that she was pregnant, and at a high-risk for health problems or miscarriage. You'd think for company of such smart people, they......

So it looks as though there's a little less competition in the Valley, and therefore the world, for portable MP3 player technology. D&M Holdings went and sold the rights to Rio's IP assets to SigmaTel. You may remember Rio as the folks who brought one of the very first MP3 players to market (we bought a 32mb Rio as a Christmas gift for our mom back when we were flush with dot-com boom cash,......

Matt Mullenweg is calling it the "Blogger" Harlem photo, and man, is that a bunch of beautiful geeks. We despatched one of the cuter SFists to the fete, but next time we'll have to give him a little media training -- lesson one: "How to elbow your way to the front of a group photo, babies be damned." Speaking of photography and blogging, local photobloggers are invading the Apple Store tomorrow at 6pm. Esteemed......

Special "Keeping tech sexy, or at least vulgar" edition. We've snarked before on Steve Jobs, um, wardrobe, so it was with great delight that we found on BoingBoing "Dress-up Steve Jobs" flash doohickey. We're thinking it may just convince him to wear something frilly to MacWorld next year -- it would be very flattering, Steve. Anil Dash Goatse'd the New York Times! Potentially offensive, yes. Completely hilarious, yes. What's not to like? If you......

Kevin Rose, the cutie-pie techie on TV who moved to LA when Tech TV became the G4 network, has wiggled out of his contract and is producing a new show for internet distribution, Systm, and also promises to start producing new episodes of The Broken. As long as forties and Ramzi are on hand, we're sure it'll be a success. [via BoingBoing] Niall Kennedy is reporting that seven to eight pink slips have been......

We've got a date with Deadwood, so we'll bring you tidbits from all over nerdville, population: too many. Washington, D.C. Federal District Court says the FCC has no power to foist the broadcast flag upon our wonderful gadgets. The forces of evil Rightsholder lobbyists shall decend on Congress. Gigi Sohn points out that constituents probably don't want their TV's f**ked with by their elected representative. Speaking of rightsholder lobbyists, Hillary Rosen (former chair of......

Art critic and photographer Claudine, who has been something of a modern-day Chalfant or Ahern by cataloging photos of graffitti pieces throughout the city, left a comment in our Get Ur Geek On: Warbussing EssEff piece where we had posted a picture of his trademark frog on the mural space at Galeria de la Raza. She tipped us to a debate about the piece over at Flickr brought on by a posting at the......

It's been a while since our last Get Ur Geek On, so we've got a lot of hottness today and will use a bullet list, power-point style, because our attention spans have begun to shrivel in inverse proportion to our abdomen's expansion: Dan Gillmor, the last top tech writer standing at the San Jose Mercury News, has decided to leave the Knight-Ridder corporate family to become a 'Citizen Journalist.' Is that a fancy term for......