Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Becoming suddenly petless.

Or do both, see if I care.  It's not like I can stop you.

For a quick follow up to the whole "Blizzard North visit announcement" from yesterday.  The big forum thread about it on the D2 site has some interesting stuff to read, mostly from players who are taking it somewhat personally that I got to play, but can't tell about what I saw yet.  Though mostly people are annoyed at yet another release date miss.

I'd like to ridicule people for actually putting hope behind any announced Blizzard release date at this point, but I guess if Bill Roper has yet to learn not to give a firm date, the fans can hardly be blamed for falling into the same trap. 

My favorite post in the whole thread is what's currently the very last one, by Alrin.

You all sound like Flux was invited to Area 51 and given a tour on the Roswell spaceship or something. Geez, he got to play a patched diablo2. Big deal. Download a mod or something.

Such a delightful example of how to utterly take the piss out of things.  As it happens I am in complete agreement with the guy.

The thing I am most surprised by is that no one has started yammering on about Projects X and Y, the as-of-yet unannounced titles Blizzard North is suspected to be working on.  I'd think people would be far more interested in asking if I'd seen anything of that/those upcoming games than whether Berserk barbs will be slightly faster or slower come v1.10.  Yet I've not seen a single mention of that in any post or comment.  I suppose people just don't know enough about the whole situation to wonder, or else the ones who would are elsewhere, and all we've got are players who still actually give a damn about D2.  Poor damned souls.

One and two more amusing posts from far angrier fans can be seen in the Battle.net forums, where a couple of threads started from people who were apparently furious that the v1.10 patch won't be out by the first week of June, when Bill Roper said it would be.  The problem seems to be that he said it in an interview with Elly at E3, and since we conducted the interview and posted the transcript, it's like, "Dii.net posted it, therefore it's their fault that the patch is late.  Or else they were lying to us in the first place."

What makes these two troll-filled Bnet forum posts amusing to me is how other readers totally shoot down the idiots with cold hard facts.  One guy in the first thread eventually quotes our actual page entries, both of which clearly say "maybe", "possibly", "if there aren't further delays", etc.

People really are quite stupid.  Online is worse than real life, but unfortunately there are dumb people everywhere.  But you really realize it when you see what people are upset about, and how often them being upset is 10% the other thing, and 90% them just being too stupid to comprehend any nuance or subtlety, and therefore being all infuriated over something that shouldn't even make them blink, if they were smart enough to read a one paragraph introduction before leaping right to a quote.

The selective memory of people is interesting also.  To quote from one post:

As for the Eta's I don't belive it's Diabloii.nets fault. However they are the ones that brought us many rumors such as what the chat gem does every other week, The infamous "no portals" when killing baal rumor, and the ever popular full tome to create more cows, rumor.

This is just wrong.  We've had a Chat Gem page since the fricking D2 beta (over 3 years ago) and it has always said that the chat gem doesn't do anything.  I should know, I wrote it.  I'm not even sure what he's talking about with the "no portals when killing Baal" thing, but I vaguely remember that as one of the stupider MF boosting rumors.  And yes, it's listed on the MF Misconceptions list in part of the giant MF guide I wrote, where it's specifically labeled as bullshit. We have also said several times that full tomes have nothing to do with the number of cows you get in the Cow Level, including lampooning it in the April Fool's FotD just last year. We even have a "stupid rumors" item in our main FAQ, which specifically rebuts all 3 of the things this guy says.

So how does a seemingly-competent individual matter-of-factly attribute the spread of 3 stupid lies to a website that has repeatedly made an effort to shoot down those rumors? Good question.  Did I mention how stupid people are?

Ahh, Mike Tyson.  You're almost enough to make me wish I believed in hell.

Former undisputed world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson denied in a television interview that he had raped Desiree Washington in 1991 but added he would like to rape her and her mother now. (AFP/File/Tannen Maury)

s lamented above, I didn't get to write much more about the emotional evolution of my love for Malaya over the course of my visit, as I had planned to.  I was in the mood for it, but there was much else to write, and I can not yet exist entirely outside the flow of time in our dimension.  It's on my list though.

Anyway, there are at least a few new things to divert you, while you wait.  Shiny!

There are two new photos pages today, and major changes to the Photos Main Page.

First for the main page; it's finally been given the "All About Digicams" treatment wherein I describe their pros and cons, recommend features to look for, and talk about my particular model of camera.  A model I'm looking to upgrade, as it happens.

The first new page is another addition to the pets section, and it's a few photos of Dusty, Malaya's fat black kitty.  There is funny talk about her funny kitty, but for now the shots on this page aren't very interesting. I'll try to get more action poses on my next visit.  This is the place where I'd make a joke about how you can finally see Malaya's pussy if you click this link, but that would be in poor taste.

The other is a potentially more interesting page, and it's a series of pictures of from the Blizzard North visit that took place last Saturday, and that I described in some detail yesterday. There aren't that many pics, and you've already seen several of them (if you were here yesterday) but I've added some more detail about them, and the pics posted on the Photos page are larger.  There is zero new info about the D2 v1.10 patch though, so don't get your hopes up for that.  Damn that NDA.

I'll be adding two more photo pages in the immediate future; one showing a series of pictures taken while walking in the beautiful windy grassy hills not too far from Malaya's condo, and the other showing where we walked in the woods near the hills.  I posted one shot from there yesterday, the hobbity looking one of me before the tree-lined pathway.

Here's a nice hills shot just to give you a taste of the next batch, and yes that's the mysterious and exotic Malaya looking coyly back at the camera.

One thing I really liked about the hills was how much they looked like the terrain in the Warcraft III cinematic.  This photo isn't very illustrative of that concept, but others I'll post soon are.  It's mostly that they are steep and drenched in very thick grass, but also that most of the trees are gone, so you see the clear outline of them against the blue sky.  Very pretty, very green, very windy.

Malaya had seen the War 3 cinematic also, so we laughed for a bit at the thought of a horde of Orcs suddenly swarming over the top of the ridge and down towards we puny humans.  No such luck, though there were some cows on other hills in the area, and we saw a deer cutting a brown slice through the thick green grass.

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