Current Entertainment:
DVD ¤ Lord of the Rings:The Two Towers, Special Extended Edition
CD-ROM ¤ None
Music
¤ System of a Down - System of a Down
¤ Nine Inch Nails - Still
¤ Tool - Opiate
¤ Marilyn Manson - The Golden Age of Grotesque
¤ Anthrax - We've Come For You All

Books Lying Open
¤ A Storm of Swords, George R. R. Martin
¤ The Complete Tales and Poems, Edgar Allen Poe
¤ The Complete Far Side, 1990-1994, Gary Larson
¤ Wolves of the Calla, Steven King

Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Cherry-picking nit-picking.

Life's Too Short For:
¤ Going from one worry to the next.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your last meal be unexpected.

Rush replied in typical form on his radio show.

Yeah, that rabidly left-wing state government in Florida.  The one that engaged in huge vote counting irregularities and threw 20,000 black voters off the voting roles just before the 2000 election, and which cheated the vote counting to be sure Bush won.  They're really likely to be going after Limbo for his political leanings.

Of course you know if anyone else, especially a Democrat, were being investigated for this sort of thing Rush would spend 90% or his radio show calling for that person to be put away, saying how celebrities always get special treatment and get out of crimes other people can't, how they were weak and evil for using drugs, etc, etc. Oddly enough, it's different when it's him.

I almost wish I were religious, just so I could spend an hour a day praying that they actually put his formerly-fat ass in prison for some of the laws he's broken.  It would be such a glorious karma slap, for a venal man who as built a career on insulting and castigating others for their sins and failings, imagined or otherwise. Obviously the part where God/Karma struck him deaf wasn't enough to get the message across, so perhaps actual prison time will do the trick.  Not that I believe in karma any more than I believe in God.  Though I might start if Rush gets some hard time.

¤ The German cannibal trial is ongoing, and despite the weirdness of it, I really have nothing to say about it.  The story speaks for itself.  Some guy has a fetish to eat another person, and he ran Internet ads asking for volunteers, and got quite a few of them.  He nearly did it to several other people, before rejecting them or letting them back out, but finally found a special someone who he wanted, and who wanted him as well.

They're trying him for murder, but that seems absurd, since the guy he killed came into things knowingly, wanted to be killed and eaten, and there's even video to prove it.

So then he hung him up and slowly bled him until he passed out, at which point he killed him and butchered the body.

In testimony so frank it drew gasps from the public gallery, Meiwes said he had kept his victim's skull and plastic bags of flesh in his freezer. He ate about 44 pounds of the flesh, defrosting it bit by bit.

"With every piece of flesh I ate I remembered him," Meiwes, a self-assured and well-spoken computer repair man, told the judge. "It was like taking communion."

While vore fetishism is bizarre to most of us, there are people who get off on it, both wanting to eat and be eaten, and while few of them go so far as to actually do it, some do.  This guy is just the first to be caught or tried for it, in such a ritualized fashion.

Another article talks more about dick-eating, with information you know you've been eager to hear:

I suppose I should be outraged at this whole thing, but I'm not really into controlling other people's actions, so long as they're not doing anything against anyone's will.  I certainly have better things to do with my life than be killed and eaten, which is why I stay out of polar bear cages. But some people are a lot more fucked up than you or me, and so long as their fucked-ness doesn't manifest itself into anything that inconveniences me or other third parties, I'm pretty okay with letting them go their own way.  Even if it's fatal to them.  Rather libertarian of me, I suppose.

Hello

Reading your site and dii.net I have the feeling that you don't play the game any longer. I don't blame you. It is pretty hard to find the joy in it anymore.

While I risk that this mail gets filtered by your automatic or semi-automatic (unconscious but personal) spam filtering system, I have to use this subject since you're one of the few americans who could truly appreciate this playstyle.

What you need to do to get back to the game? Role playing, that simple! Get a character, develop it's personality, and play along.

I for one created a necromancer named GeorgeWBush_II on the Europe realm. He is obviously one of the new skelemancers, hiding behind his staff to do all the dirty work for him. Now all you need to do is to get the personality right. You can be uppity with your team members, say that God supports your cause (and they should hand over the drops), declare that the Waypoint has weapons of mass destruction and that you should invade it, and keep asking people wether they have oil or not. Keep dieing from the scarabs in the maggot lair? Just say "I believe the Maggots are ready for self government" and leave the place.

Trust me, the fun never ends :)

-C 

His suggestion isn't a bad one, and trust me, there are tens of millions of Americans who hate Dubya, most of them a lot more than me.  In fact I wouldn't say I exactly "hate" him.  I think he's a colossally-incompetent president who is surrounded by controlling and very misguided advisors and the country and the world would be much better off if the last three years of US actions could be erased and the next year was the last one he had to run the country, but that doesn't mean I'd floor if it he were buried to the neck near the red line and I were driving a Zamboni.

In more general terms, my lack of d2 playing time has almost nothing to do with boredom, and almost everything to do with priorities.  I would enjoy playing computer games some of the time.  I have to spend some time reading news and blogging and playing with Malaya and playing with the kitties and cooking and eating and shopping and showering and sleeping etc.  (Those items are not at all in order of preference or time consumed.)  I desperately want to spend as much time as possible working on my fiction writing, and often cut back or sacrifice time on the above list of items for that.  And while I'd enjoy playing an hour or three a day with new Hardcore ladder characters, I have other things that I'm better off spending that time doing. Hell, if I had the time I'd enjoy updating lots of the old v1.09 info pages on the D2 site, and creating new pages for new v1.10 things, writing and adding strategies, and so on.

It's almost better that I don't though, since just recently there have been exploits to rip off accounts and characters, ways to dupe massively, and that's after the previous townkill exploits, various bugged one hit deaths from monsters, and so on.  I've never been bothered so much by losing a lvl 85 HC char with great equipment when it was my fault, but when I see the economy being ruined by dupes and cheaters, or I die to bugs or cheats, I get very angry. And if I'd been playing all along and had several very high level HC chars and had been enjoying trading for the first time ever with a relatively clean ladder economy, the fact that yet another massive duping trick ruined the economy would have really depressed me.

As it is I didn't even find out about it until a day later, since I never checked my D2 site emails on Tuesday, and when I did I couldn't have cared less.

Anyway, take his suggestion if you're of a mind.  I'd be playing in more serious style as I tried to collect every new elite unique and try out every new niche-build that took advantage of weird equipment and odd synergy boosts for party play, if I were playing.  But since I don't feel that I have the time for that sort of recreation, I'm not.

I do miss computer games though, having played absolutely nothing other than quick games of blackjack, miniature golf, and Seven Seas for the last 2 or 3 months.  Perhaps over the holiday break Malaya and I will spend some time with D2 or something else.

But I doubt it, since I'm likely going to want to pour every spare moment into writing my fantasy novel, since I want to get enough done to start considering query letters to agents, and I need a very polished first chapter and a concrete outline for the rest for that.  And I'll need to be well into chapter 5 or 6 to be decided on the outline.  Or at least that's what I keep telling myself.

¤ And here's another one, just for variety.

I get tons of viruses and scams and other such crap via email, but I had to quote this one, just for the cleverness of it. I've seen cleverer tricks to get a trojan on a remote machine, but this one is pretty good.  I bet hella noobs fall for it, especially since the sender and reply to info is accurately spoofed.

Dear PayPal member,

PayPal would like to inform you about some important information regarding your PayPal account. This account, which is associated with the email address

bands@blackchampagne.com

will be expiring within five business days. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause, but this is occurring because all of our customers are required to update their account settings with their personal information.

We are taking these actions because we are implementing a new security policy on our website to insure everyone's absolute privacy. To avoid any interruption in PayPal services then you will need to run the application that we have sent with this email (see attachment) and follow the instructions. Please do not send your personal information through email, as it will not be as secure.

IMPORTANT! If you do not update your information with our secure application within the next five business days then we will be forced to deactivate your account and you will not be able to use your PayPal account any longer. It is strongly recommended that you take a few minutes out of your busy day and complete this now.

DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE VIA EMAIL! This mail is sent by an automated message system and the reply will not be received.

Thank you for using PayPal.

Obviously Pay Pal is never going to send you an application to run, and obviously I didn't sign up for it via bands@blackchampagne.com, but it's a good try, for an automated trojan that probably sends 500,000 times a day.

¤ The last one today is a second mail from C, author of the first one about playing D2 as Dubya.  He sent it in a week ago, but it's as applicable today as it was then; perhaps more so, with the movie coming up in less than two weeks.

I enjoyed TTT a lot more on my DVD viewing of the extended edition, and thought it was more changed and improved than the LotR extended edition was from the theatrical film. Plus I'm a fan of action movies, and there's a lot more action in TTT than LotR.  Yet despite that I liked LotR a lot more, both the theatrical and extended edition.

I can't put my finger on exactly why, but the most obvious difference between the films is that FotR followed one plot line for the entire film, and built up steadily to a grand conclusion, by which time you were very involved in the story and the individual characters.  TTT jumped around between at least three plot lines, one of which was all action (Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli chasing Merri and Pippin and then battling in Helm's Deep) while the other two stories (Frodo and Sam wandering -- Merri and Pippin with Treebeard) were mostly walking and talking until the very end.  And I suppose that while I enjoyed all three plot lines, the switching between them kept me from enjoying any of them as much as I did the central unified story in the first movie.

I'm not saying there was any other way to do TTT, and it doesn't bother me in books (LotR or others) when there are 2 or 3 plot lines going on at once, but my first viewing of TTT left me feeling that it jumped around too much, and while I don't really think that of the extended edition, I guess the multipart story never involves me as much as LotR did.

Whether more compelling events in the stories would have pulled me in tighter is unknown, but perhaps we'll find out in RotK, since as C says, it's got bigger and better events, including a bunch of the ones that should have been in TTT if they'd made it just as the books were written.

Of course we'll have to wait until fall of 2004 to get the extended edition of RotK, and since I've liked the extended editions of the first two films a lot more than the theatrical, it'll be a year before I can really, truly say which film I like the best.

And then you know there will be some sort of super duper extended double edition of all three movies coming out in 2006, and I'll have to get that and spend an entire waking day viewing all three of the films in sequence to see how they flow together in a full 11 hour saga.

Oh well, at least I'll still have something to blog about in 5 years.