Booo for upgrading addons. Fortunately, I have a list of the key ones that I actually care about updating and the rest I don’t worry about. The best part is that I can now join in the raids for D without killing Kael or Vashj. [Read more →]
Kevin Anderson and Brian Hebert, authors of the Dune prequels (varying levels of success), just announced that they are on-board with a new version of Dune coming from Paramount.
We’ve been working on this for years, and we can finally make the proper announcement. Brian Herbert and I will be official co-producers on the film.
Ok… Here is what I see as a giant problem:
The filmmakers consider its theme of finite ecological resources particularly timely.
Fuck, it’s going to be An Inconvenient Truth in SPAAAAAAAACE.
Best way for me so far? Front seat on a wicked wooden roller coaster followed by two hours of soccer the next day.
Otter and I picked up our season passes for Six Flags last Friday. Once again it was a great trip because noone was there and we had to wait 7 minutes tops for rides. Our longest wait was for the Scooby Doo ride (I blew up 1130 points of ghosts to her 600 
)
Then, two hours of PUG soccer on Saturday morning. I love being in a state where they play the real football.
David Mamet wrote an article a few days ago called Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’. Besides him being a very good writer, the takeaway that I get from it is this:
The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.
[...]
What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.
[...]
I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting). (Emphasis added)
He’s getting a crapton of blowback, but that last line is why I am so opposed to idealogues and the extremities of opinion that go along with them. Life is built upon give and take but so often in today’s politics people are elected on the marginal case. What happens after the election? They move to the middle as much as possible so they can stay in power. It’s not worth it to stay in power if you don’t have a lot of it, so then each and every politician works to increase her power through the mechanism of the government. And the Government sucks. I don’t really care about any of the Big Government types in this year’s election because none of them will fix what is wrong about government but instead work to increase it at the expense of you and me. Otter is casting my vote this year.
Forget my current job, I want to work on this project.
The Reynard project will begin by profiling online gaming behavior, then potentially move on to its ultimate goal of “automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.”
Money qoute from the comment section:
Maybe they can start by data-mining Barrens chat.
Or the /trade channel. Would the ERP people get picked up for solicitation?
Ok, the new goal is to get 10k gold before Wrath of the Lich King drops. So far, I’m dead even thanks to epic pattern purchasing. 
After my last whiny meltdown, I do have some good/bad news as far as the raid situation goes. After the Guild Leader quit, the Raid Leader and Main Tank transferred, and the Healing Lead and Melee Lead said no thanks to raiding, that was pretty much if for my last guild. Talk about bombshells. Meltdown for me although at least I confined it to blog whining instead of $25 transfers like our MT did (he came back to the realm forums in 3 days saying how much he missed everyone). The guild overall decided to go back to its casual roots which was goodbye time for a lot of folks including myself.
So, it’s job application time. The top guild on the server wants Resto Shamans, and lots of them. The second group has a soft close on recruitment but took a look at me anyways. That lead to Monday night when I got offers from 4 guilds for my Druid. One was from a solid crew I’ve run with before who are trying to restart the 25 man grind, and one was from one of the middle tier guilds (2/4 TK, 3/6 SSC) who got some people from the guild which just blew up. I also got a solid offer from #2 but with the caveat that I wouldn’t get keyed for BT and basically sit on the sidelines until 2.4 drops. Boo. Wait a minute, #1 is having a backflag run for their recruits soon, maybe I can jump in on that… No, I can’t because it’s for their raiders but why don’t I put in an app since they can’t find a Resto Shaman. Sweet, I have friends there, they’ll key me, why not. 15 minutes before the raid: “You know how we couldn’t find a Resto Shaman? Well, we did in the 14 hours since your app. Good luck with #2.” Ouch. The best part is that their Resto Shaman recruit didn’t show up last night for the backflag run. Me – 1, Shammy – 0. I didn’t get to go, but I get to gloat and I did get into #2 where I’ll learn by listening on Vent. In the meantime, I’ll grind badgers and gold for 2.4 and WotLK; maybe I’ll help out on some other runs to stay in the raid healbot mindset.
Oh yeah, and while I was grinding out AB tokens for my
With the bench time on the Druid, I could have done it, but they wanted me to app and join when I am pretty happy being in my alt guild right now. It’s nice to be wanted though.
This is quite honestly another step up by the Chinese government:
“Xiao Chen” is his online name. Along with his two colleagues, he does not want to reveal his true identity. The three belong to what some Western experts say is a civilian cyber militia in China, launching attacks on government and private Web sites around the world.
It’s in the same area as the missile shootdown that they performed last year, an public escalation of what their known capabilities are. It’s getting hotter.
Edit: Now that I know it’s open source, I can safely say that we’ll find out more about Chinese hacking and infiltration all over the place. Like in that new router you just bought:
Until a source in China tipped off the FBI, no one could tell that the parts were Cisco knockoffs rather than the real thing.
You know what: everytime I try I come in just out of the rewards. Either I am lying to myself about how hard I am trying or I am just not that good. Fuck me. Stop wasting time with fucking games and fucking do my best elsewhere (because working hard in WoW has clearly not payed off) or stop pretending I am anything more than a fucking loser.