Thursday's activity was actually sort of fun, mostly since it was easy and I didn't have to leave the house or make any phone calls to do it.  At least the part of it that I'm talking about right now.

All I did was root through my dresser and closet and pick out all of the old/ugly stuff that I don't like and haven't worn in years, or can't imagine wearing again. I rooted through and picked it out, and stuffed it into a big plastic Pier One bag, which I'm going to give to some charity and claim a tax deduction towards the imagined value of the crappy clothing I would just as soon throw away.

I cleared out about a dozen old t-shirts, half a dozen button up shirts, ten more old white work shirts, and quite a few pairs of old shorts and pants.  Basically everything I don't like and didn't want in the first place, plus stuff that was worn and old, or else just unwanted.   It was rather liberating, at least for a non-clothes whore like myself, and I like having so much space in my closet now, as well as totally empty drawers in my dresser.  The dresser itself is not going with me, nor is my bed, any of my sheets (twins won't fit Malaya's bigger bed), most of my towels, and so on. I'm not pitching those out yet since I need to use them for another three weeks here, but I am giddy at the prospect of throwing more crap away.

I have to place some classified ads and try to sell the snakes and aquariums off, since those have some resale value and I need the money, and I also hate to throw away something with some good use left in it.  The rats, unluckily for them, have no resale value, other than as reptile food, and since I'm not taking any of my pets with me to Malaya's, their days are numbered.

It's a happy time for them now, since in addition to the rats I have a ton of rat chow, both official (dry stuff in bags) and unofficial (cans of corn), and I'm pretty well letting them gorge themselves.  I am not carting 30 cans of corn up to SF with me, and I don't eat the stuff very often, so into the furry rodents it goes.

I feel a bit like that myself, since I'm trying to eat up all of the frozen stuff at least, and I have a 5lbs bag of frozen shrimp that's untouched in the freezer, as well as an almost-full jumbo pack of Garden Burgers.  Sure, I can just give them away to my mom or dad before I leave, but it's more fun to pretend I must eat it all, or bad things will befall all humanity. Or something like that.

Other things far less likely to be fun are staring me in the face from every direction. One thing I'm not dreading at all is work, oddly enough.  I have to work tonight and the next six days, and then after a week off I'm back on for six more games.  However since I know they are the last baseball games I'll ever vend crap at, I feel rather giddy about it all.  How well that will last past the 6th inning of another sparsely-attended Padres loss remains to be seen, but I'll let you know tomorrow.

Today is my birthday, BTW.  I'm not asking for gifts, though I wouldn't turn down site donations.  Someone kicked in $20 yesterday, and I'll add him/her to the Donations Page just as soon as I hear what name he/she would like to be thanked as. Put that in your comment space if you make a donation, please.

As is usually the case, I have no idea what I want for my B-day, and have zero plans to do anything special.  I have to work tonight and no one at work knows it's my birthday, and I'm certainly not planning on telling any of them.  I'll get up around noon, yawn a lot, make some calls about my imminent move, sort some papers and such, and then be off to work.  Afterwards I'll come home and try to get a bunch of work done. I did a lot Thursday, mostly in terms of cropping and resizing images from my recent trips, in preparation for adding several more pages to the Vacation Photos section.

Usually I go out to dinner with my mom and stepdad one day, and then with my dad another, and hardly ever on my actual birthday.  Malaya had some clever B-day plans for me, but we didn't have time to get to them while I was there, so she's saving them up for when I return. She did send me a lovely B-day card, which is more than anyone else has done thus far.  Well that's not true, my mom sent me an e-card a few days ago.  She's out of town for another few days, hence no celebration dinners with her yet.

I'm not sulking or pouting or anything; I never do anything for my birthday and since I don't expect gifts from anyone online, and don't really have any real life friends who know anything about me (such as when my b-day is), this is all going according to plan.  I guess it could be better some time, but whatever, I'm fine with not doing much.  I don't really celebrate any holidays, so this one isn't an exception.

Oh yeah, and I'm 29, if you were wondering.

Again.

In other semi-news, Blizzard at last held a fansite chat on the forever-upcoming v1.10 D2 patch.  I didn't know about it since I hadn't gotten through all of my D2 emails yet (500+ stacked up in the week I was gone) to get to the one from Bliz PR announcing when and where, so I found out about it just as I got home Thursday evening with a bunch of groceries. (Frozen shrimp aside, I had nothing to eat after being gone 12 of the last 13 days.)

I was annoyed with the whole concept at the time and didn't read it, and when I finally got around to reading it hours later, my annoyance returned with reinforcements. I considered doing a chat analysis, something I started doing years ago and have continued until the present time, but I just didn't have one in me.  I don't really care about the patch changes, I'm not looking forward to playing D2 again other than out of occasional idle boredom/curiosity, but what really annoys me is the whole NDA situation.

Malaya and I got to go play it at Blizzard North during my first visit up there in late May, but due to the NDAs we signed neither of us can say anything about what we saw in the patch or at Blizzard North.  I was supposed to have written an article about the experience, and posted that article just for various Blizzard people to get a look at it, but I've not done it yet for various reasons, and it's looking less and less important that I do one, as more and more information about the patch is released in advance.  Most of the stuff I knew that was secret and new has now been made public, and due to the NDA, I can't even discuss or speculate about things the way I'd like to.  So when there's a question in the chat that I could have answered a month ago, I grit my teeth.  And since I'm still NDA'ed, I can't even say something simple like, "Yes, I saw Change X at Blizzard North, and here's what the designer told me about why they are doing it. And I can't even quote things and then elaborate:

Q: Are you adding any new unique throwing items?

Blizzard: Yes, we are adding exciting new unique throwing items. There will be lots of other types of uniques as well.

I'd say something like, "Yes, there are lots of new uniques, ones for every item type, and in fact the one new elite unique that I found while playing was an elite javelin dropped by Baal. Which was part of the big MF bonus the first time you kill an Act Boss, but as the chat also said, your MF is not factored in at all on later Act Boss kills, so you can say goodbye forever to boss runs for phat itamz."

The annoying thing is that me saying that would add NOTHING to the issue.  No one cares that I found one, and me confirming what Blizzard said in the chat would mean nothing.  So why can't I say it?  What's the point of an NDA when I can't even comment on things they've already confirmed?  God knows, I'm too aggravated and disinterested in the whole thing to mail Bliz and ask about it at this point.  I don't want to be the one who does all the work in the fansite community and gets muzzled the one time I really do have a ton of new info.

I could have held my own fansite chat a month ago and answered 95% of the Q's in this chat, and 90% of those in much more detail.  And I find that so frustrating that I'd just rather withdraw from the entire thing than sit here uselessly-muzzled.

And yes, I realize that I knew there would be an NDA going in, and I'm being a big baby and acting like I'm not even happy that I got to see the game and play the game so far in advance of everyone else.  My point is that since I get so much enjoyment and fulfillment from sharing the info I have about the game, it's very annoying to not be able to do that.

While we're on the topic of Diablo II (well, sort of, I think the main topic here is me bitching, but then again, when is that not the main topic?) I thought I'd throw in this amusing email that I just read, as I'm digging through the 500+ mails that piled up over the week I was visiting Malaya.  I never pulled any D2 site mails since that would just be folly over dialup.

Anyway, this one came in June 11th, to flux@diabloii.net.  Blizzard deleted a ton of cheater accounts around the 10th, while I was out of town, so the first I knew about it was reading the news on dii.net from Malaya's house the next day.  And obviously I'm not affiliated with Blizzard, I just work on a fansite, I have nothing to do with who gets banned or how they are selected, etc, etc.

i want my account back thats not right to steal my account fuck u and who ever u thing u r ppl use mh all day and i buy a items off d2elven.com and that gives u the right to take my money u and your b.net is a bunch of fags. how would u like it if i came to your house and stole all of your shit you'd be mad wouldn't you yeah i though so i want my account back my acc was smelly_lay and i want u to put my old pw back on it [darklotus] have a nice day

It's just such a classic of impotent pre-teen outrage and confusion and AOLese... I love this mail.  I love how he insults and flames, in the process of asking for a special favor.  I suspect this technique works just about as well in real life as it did here.  Except that in real life people can't easily copy and paste his remarks to the store bulletin board for everyone to laugh at, while online I can do that with a click of a mouse.  Just one of the innumerable advantages that online text has over vocal communication.  Adapt or perish, worthless meat units.

ince I said I'd do this, I'm doing it, but just a little bit.

Here are a couple of very recent reader emails.  I'll do a more comprehensive survey in the days to come, time permitting, so just two for now, each accompanied by my ridiculously long and digressing discussion of them.

Hey I was reading your site, and wanted to tell you congradulations on your happiness with Malaya, and moving in together. Im going to be living with my girlfriend pretty soon too, as soon as she moves down here. Talk to you later, and good luck with your woman. From the way you described her she sounds like a all around great girl.

Hoop

I don't have any comment on this, other than a desire to say "thanks" as well as "good luck with your GF as well".  This is why I get paid so well for this blogging thing; my relentless humor.

Thank you for giving me an enjoyable read most everyday for quite a while now. I have your site hot keyed on my keyboard, (along with dooce and lileks) for a quick ten minutes of reality, or is it fantasy?

Congrats on your new found love, I found mine 12 years ago and everyday would be just as wonderful as yours if it weren't the pesky 4 kids we accidently made. I finally found out how they were made, and we shut off the factory. (jk)

My questions is how do you have Lotr : TTT in your dvd, it isn't going to be released until August somedate? I assume you must have some great connections in Hollywood, because I would assume you don't have anything Illegal *cough* in your house do you?

I'm not too serious about this, and don't want a copy. I can wait until the release date. Just giving you a needle, jab, or hard time about it. (which ever phrase you are familar with), Thanks again for the daily read.

Kernelpops

P.S. I am an heavy reader of many types of fiction, and look forward to reading a novel by you.

One odd thing about the reader mail I get here is how personal much of it is.  I guess that's not exactly "odd", given that most of the stuff I post is pretty personal.  But it's still odd that people mail me and reveal private things about themselves, stuff I'm sure they don't put in any normal email, and probably things that they've not told most of their close friends.

In some ways it's easier to be frank with a stranger; the phenomena of pouring out your sad story to some random person in a bar, or a stranger next to you on an airplane, is well known.  You can tell them things you wouldn't tell anyone else, since you'll never see them again, and neither of you know the other person from the Pope.  It's not quite the same thing mailing some guy's website, but in this case since I'm often posting personal things about myself or my life here, I guess it makes the readers (that's you and you and you) feel more comfortable, like they can, or even like they should, share some details of their own lives, when relevant.

Anyway, it's not that Kernelpops is revealing deep dark secrets here, but he obviously puts more into the mail than he strictly needed too.  The title of his mail is "lotr:ttt", and he could easily have just started with the third paragraph, or skipped the second one, or whatever.  I like that he put in a bit more info and shared something, rather than just spitting out his immediate question, and I don't mean to make an example of him, since this isn't even a very good example of what I'm talking about.

I routinely get mails from people with very personal or private information about themselves, and when/if I quote them, I often do a substantial amount of snipping so as not to embarrass them, since I'm not writing back to them first to ask just what it's okay to quote.  I suppose that I could assume anything they put in a mail to me is fair game to post, but I don't, and a few times people have mailed me a day or two later to thank me for keeping them anonymous, or leaving out some juicy detail.

And of the private emails I've received here, I'd say that less than 10% of them ever say anything to the effect of, "Please don't quote me on this..." I know they don't want me to quote them on it, so do people just trust to my discretion?  Do they not think that I might quote them, even though I regularly quote reader mail and do monthly *cough* mailbag features?

I'm asking this rhetorically; there isn't anything in the mail here from Kernelpops that I had to snip to save his marriage or keep him out of prison. I just wonder why people feel comfortable telling me the sorts of things they tell me.  If you are one of those people, or think you have some insight, feel free to pipe up.

To address his actual question, which I already did in an email to him -- I lied.  I don't actually have LotR:TTT on DVD.  I could, in theory, if I got a DVD burner, but what I actually have is a file-transferred copy of it from an Academy Award submission disk. The type that movie companies create and send out to all of the Academy voters, as a courtesy to people who might not have seen their film in the theaters, and of course to try and get more votes for their film.

The reason I know this is because every so often when a new character/actor comes on screen for the first time, a scrolly-looking message pops up, one that reads, "For Your Consideration."  I do not know where it came from initially; a friend got it off of some file sharing service and I got my copy from him.

I must confess that my "Disks in Rotation" section of the nav bar is a bit of a scam.  The DVD is more like, "Whatever movie I most recently watched or am about to watch."  It might be on my computer, or on video tape, as well as actually on a DVD in my DVD player.  The same goes for the music; I tend to pick five albums I've listened to recently and list those, whether they're on CD or mp3, from whatever source.  And vie the magic of file sharing, I'll often have something long before it's actually offered for retail purchase. I had the new Marilyn Manson album on mp3 about a month before it was in stores, and the same goes for the new Anthrax album, and the Matrix 2 soundtrack.  (I love the Zion song on there, by the way.  I wouldn't buy the CD just for that, but it's such a good instrumental track to put on repeat and turn it down while you write; or turn it up while you grind with your sweetie.)

I don't mean to sound like I'm bragging or anything; tens of thousands of people do far more file-sharing in a day than I do in a month, and lots of them had everything I have weeks before I have it.  I'm just explaining how I get some things before they are available in stores.  And if you're wondering, no you can't have any of these files, and yes, I'm going to buy LotR:TTT once it's on sale.  Well, I'll probably wait for the Extended Edition in November, with the .avi version to tide me over.

I will write about the movie at some point.  About the content of the movie, I mean, not just how I illegally obtained it months in advance of the retail release. *cough*

Much like LotR:FotR, I didn't love it from the first viewing, and also like FotR, I grew to like it more with each viewing.  I still don't think TTT works all that well as a coherent movie; the Helm's Deep scene still seems way too long and repetitious and I still think Gollum talks to himself in narrating fashion a bit too much, and I still have zero interest or emotion from Faramir.  His brother obviously got the acting talent in the family.  But I don't find the plot cross cutting as jarring and overly-frequent as I did during my two viewings of it in the theaters, and I like the Ent stuff even more.  Anyway, I'm not going to go into a full on review now, but I like the damn movie, and am eager to see the Extended Version later this year, even though I fear it will just be twenty minutes more of dark and rainy combat in Helm's Deep.

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