I really, REALLY don't care about CS:Source or any of the weeny online games that have been made with Half-Life, but I remember playing and enjoying the STORY of the first version.
And I can break out my install CD, install it and play it whenever I'd like, no internet required. Same thing with the game I play most often, Master of Magic, which is so old I don't even think there are any remaining fan pages online.
I'd like to play Halflife 2, but as long as it's associated with all that online registration and updating bullshit there's no way I'm going to bother with it. Basically, I want to buy a game and own it, not buy a game and install it and let it download 2GB of crap I don't want or need... but only as long as Valve keeps the serial validation servers running.
I played techie-guru for a LAN party over the weekend, where five or six of the players were playing WoW (as a group, in the same room, which should have been really cool).
On the one hand it looked pretty OK graphically, but then I heard someone explain crafting, and how many X-random-pieces-of-crap he needed to find to make some baseline piece of armor. And the whole group was wandering around killing IIRC rabbits (like rats in every other MMO, I guess. Maybe they were Monty Python Vorpal Bunnies or something but everyone was attacking 'em).
And then... fishing.
At one point all six of these players were standing around a virtual lake throwing in their virtual lines and attempting to fish. And because they were newbies with no fishing skill, none of them could catch anything.
Pretty soon the other folks at the LAN party started calling the game "Bass Avenger", asking why the WoW players didn't just go buy Cabela's Varmint Hunter 4, and whether they'd really play a game that required them to stand around NOT CATCHING FISH. They pretty much had a better time with making fun of WoW and its players than playing CS:Source.
And I thought, "Man, that game looks really, really bad."
I don't play many games in general (I was at the LAN as a tech not a player - didn't even bring a PC of my own), but in talking to the folks who were "playing" I saw just how right City of Heroes seems to have gotten things: the guys who were playing were highly annoyed with the crafting and non-combat skill aspects of WoW, especially with the fact that for whatever reason they had to stand around fishing instead of fighting bad guys. Some people say CoH is shallow since fighting is about all you can do, but everyone I talked to said they'd rather be killing stuff than repairing their weapons or learning to mine.
I don't know what kind of person WANTS to wander all over Dwarf-Land looking for +2 Balls of Twine but from talking to the Diablo and Warcraft fans I met at that LAN party, it doesn't seem like much of Blizzard's fan base is going to appreciate the final WoW product.
My media PC is a AthlonXP 3200 with 2GB of RAM and around 2.2TB of disk space. It has an ATI 9800 Pro All-in-Wonder for graphics and uses the soundstorm digital output for sound. It lives in a 6U rackmount case along with most of my audio gear (Integra DTR-8.2 and some Sony CD and DVD jukeboxes).
All that lives in a closet.
Control is the main issue. I have several solutions for that, however. One is an ATI remote wonder. I can have the PC directly output to my TV or to my Projector, giving me a desktop and a standard Windows 2000 or BeyondTV interface. I use WinAmp's media library for most digital media functions, but honestly, if there's something I want from the PC, it's usually easier to put it on a CD or DVD.
Another is VNC from my laptop, which works just fine when I don't feel like switching the receiver to the computer's input. Since my laptop is usually somewhere around my coffee table, that's a perfectly acceptable control as well.
My receiver also has a radio remote, fortunately, so receiver functions are just as wireless and just as easy to deal with.
I enjoy City of Heroes. It scratches an itch I've had practically since the moment I sat down in front of a computer. My friends and I dinged level 50 not too long ago. Unlike most of the other posters who claim to have high-level characters or who have spent a lot of time in the game, we still play, at level 50 and with lower-level toons. There's tons stuff to do at high levels - there are at least a half-dozen story arcs or mission sequences that open up above level 45. As for content, well, a lot of it comes from the Clues that many players don't bother to read. Too bad for them. There's some great stories being told.
--- Anyway, the thing I *really* want, perhaps more than anything else, is to flex my own imagination in the World created by City of Heroes. COH has (or had) a mod community for a few weeks until the developers cracked down on it, which is really too bad, because one of the things that is obvious to me, as a player, is that it takes a lot of effort to come up with new stories, new art and new models for the game. Many FPS gamers know the joy of making something completely unique within the realm of their favorite game. COH has glimmerings of possibility as well (here I think of the "skating rinks" in the Frostfire mission), but it seems like the devs are so completely overwhelmed that a lot of those things will never get beyond that glimmer.
So... knowing that there is a modding spirit somewhere in the player-base, and there are a LOT of creative people playing CoH, are there any plans to have some player-created content recognized and officially made part of the game?
--
Second question: How do you justify the present role of tankers within City of Heroes? You've got guys who... take damage. Unlike the invulnerable badasses of comics, these guys really lack any real ability to hit back and REALLY seem more like a traditional MMO archetype than anything Stan Lee might've come up with.
On a related note, what do you say to people who deride certain power sets within the game as not being "super enough", e.g. Super Strength, Psychic Blast, Ice Armor? --
Why don't the interiors of office buildings in Paragon City have windows?
--
Last question: My single frustration with CoH is that it feels like nothing players do has any ultimate impact on the state of things on my server. I'd love to fail a mission and find, as a consequence, that Bylde Square was turned into a smouldering radioactive pit, or find that my level 50 could permanently evict Clockwork from Skyway City. Do the actions of any player or group of players have an impact in the goings-on of their server? Will this ever be a possibility?
In my area, the local monopoly doesn't have any options compelling enough for me to make use of its services. I live in an upscale area, in a newly-constructed home, in a subdivision filled with white-collar professionals, yet I can't get cable internet. My local cable company's basic and extended packages include several home-shopping networks and multiple spanish-language stations (there is not significant spanish-speaking population in my area), but if I want basic-cable staples like Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network, TLC or the History Channel, I'd have to pay for uber-premium Digital Cable - $70 a month without the expensive movie channels.
So how are cable fuck - I mean monopolies - a good thing for consumers? The one in my area (Comcast) doesn't provide any service that I would willingly partake? A second cable network might very well realize the wisdom of offering a better selection of channels in its less expensive packages, or even better, might offer a la carte service (I know, keep dreaming). Perhaps (gasp), there might be a downward trend in the price of service as the two companies compete for business. As things presently stand, the local cable company has absolutely no incentive to change anything, and if that's "a good thing for the customer", I'll eat my shoes.
A 1.5GHz Pentium M compares well with a 2.4GHz P4. The confusion caused by these different frequencies is precisely the reason Intel is moving to Performance rating its chips. Both a Pentium M and a Pentium 4 are classed as "500-series" chips.
I can't prove it, all opinion being subjective, after all, but I've wanted to have a decent super-hero game for a long, long time. I bought "Freedom Force" and "Superhero League of Hoboken" to support the genre, and that's originally why I bought CoH.
I wouldn't say I an MMO person. I never felt even a moment's interest in Everquest or DAoC. But I played CoH for my introductory month and I found it on the whole to be a lot of fun. The settings might be repetitive but I've had great fun pursuing the various story arcs and discovering the hows and whys of Paragon City.
Now I have a high-level character (I'll ding 45 this weekend), and to be honest I haven't really noticed the "grinding" aspect. I've mostly had a very good time with the people I play with (very small asshole factor) and I'm finally to the point of learning the "big picture" of the game; interdimensional wars among incarnations of the Prussian Prince of Automatons (by the way, I LOVE the conception of Nemesis... he has a great classic villain feel), Rikti suborning peaceful Hydra-men for war against Earth, the origins of the Freakshow and Devouring Earth, all these things have unfolded from reading the mission notes and paying attention to villain comments while I adventured.
In City of Heroes I really feel like I'm unique. I've met other people with roughly my combination of powers, but in playing I really DO feel powerful and heroic. It's a small thing that someone comes up to thank you when you defeat a villain on the streets of Peregrine Island, but I have to say it's a damn sight more than I remember getting in all those Fantasy games I played growing up. Because everything is instanced, I really am the person who gets to end the menace of Dr. Vahzilok... no two-day-long camps for the ultra rare Dr. Vahz spawn! And when my missions and contacts send me out of zones populated by Vahzilok's minions, I come away with the sense that, yes, I really DID stop the zombies from destroying the city. Even now, months after I did it, if I happen to click on a citizen wandering through town, she might remind me: "I heard that Angry-Frenchman gave Dr. Vahzilok the thrashing of a lifetime!".
I know it's all artificial, but it's a lot closer than I might ever have hoped to a fully-realized super hero world. I'm more than happy to take part in it.
Neither of the two fairly high-end PCs I had could play it on launch day - it didn't like my 3dfx 5500 cards which, like it or not, were still very common hardware at that point. Basically, the game would crash within two minutes of starting.
Strike one.
Strike two was the unbelieavable level of micromanagement required to get a given result. Once I actually downloaded all the patches to make the game functional (on 14.4 dialup... I didn't have any other option at the time) on my PC I found myself spending all my time trying to teach my pet not to crap on houses or whatever, and on trying to keep the unbelievably whiney villagers in food (there's a field of crops RIGHT THERE guys!).
Strike three was getting to about the fourth mission of the single player game and finding another game-killing bug that hadn't been fixed, all the while realizing that the game wasn't getting any better and I wasn't having any fun.
I got my money back from EA for Black and White. To this day I can't understand why anyone played it.
There were some on socket 423 and some on socket 478. Some for 400, 533 and 800MHz FSBs. Some support hyperthreading, some don't. Some use the Northwood core, some use Prescott. If I really want to think that way I can even say that some are Celerons and some are decent.
I don't follow Intel CPUs very closely exactly because of this. However, I'll bet if I looked for more than a moment I'd find that there have been at least ten intel chips marketed as 2.4GHz Pentium 4s.
NT4 ran on a lot of things that weren't x86 PCs. One of my first jobs involved Honeywell GUS stations that were PowerPC machines running NT4. I still have a couple, in fact.
I vaguely recall seeing beta versions of Windows 2000 running on Alphas. I think there's even an Alpha directory on some Windows 2000 install CDs (which is empty, but still).
My MSDN Subscriber downloads has Windows 2003 Server for Itanium (not x86 but IA64) and Windows XP for Athlon64 (x86-64).
So Windows has in the past and does now run on non-x86 architectures.
So, obviously I've been marked as a troll for my serious factual error: George didn't get up off his ass until seven minutes after he was informed that a *second* airplane filled with americans had crashed into a de-facto national landmark, having been informed of the *first* accident immediately prior to beginning of the school day.
Here's the thing: No matter how you feel about Moore's filmmaking, or Moore himself, the fact remains that, in the middle of that movie, there's footage of George W. Bush sitting around with a bunch of little kids, reading a children's book for *seven minutes* AFTER he was informed of the WTC tragedy.
His facial expression didn't even change! An airplane filled with Americans crashes into a de-facto national landmark, and he can't excuse himself to maybe, I dunno, get a briefing or turn on CNN.
That is real. That is a moment that stands by itself. He couldn't step away from a feel-good PR session in light of something that was at the very least (at that moment) a horrible accident.
The sickening thing is that the same group of people now raise the "terror alert level" every time their oppononents do anything that might attract media attention. Yesterday Dick Cheney came out and said that the consequence of a Kerry win in November would be another terrorist attack (so, that won't happen if George stay in office? Does he know something we don't?). These unctious fuckers, who were so unconcerned in the very first moments of a national tragedy, have gotten untold traction in the mind of the American public by exploiting the fear and the grief stemming from 9/11. I for one hope that people realize what's going on before it's too late.
At the Chicago Comic-Con he was very apologetic about both. And the mini-posters for J&SSB... He's AWARE of all those things but freely admitted that they aren't at the top of his priority list. As we in the audience for his Q&A reminded him of the old stuff he hadn't finished, he ran off his list of priorities.
What he *DID* say was at the top of his priority list - and I'm not making this shit up - was a two-part guest starring role in "Degrassi: The Next Generation". He said he wanted to direct an episode, but Canadian culture laws forbade a non-Canadian citizen from doing that. I guess he's a big fan.
While I'm at it, I hope that someone gets around to making a better command-line tool to generate those ISOs sometime. The batch files I'm using to do it are really, really ugly.
Of course, you need to install Cygwin and a bunch of GNU tools to general ISOs on the fly, which is mildly annoying, but if all you're doing is dumping the ISOs you grab from Fasttrack or the the MSDN Parter downloads site, it's really handy.
And since I'm now apparently a "troll", I'd like to go on to point out that in the 2004 Presidential Election, Cthulhu is not, in fact, the greatest evil in the running, ancient and all-devouring though he may be.
If you're thinking like that, can I at least remind you that you'll also be voting to maintain assholes like Ashcroft, Cheney and Rumsfeld in their respective offices?
I mean, there were at least five other guys in the primary I think would've been better candidates, but it really scares me to think that the wastes of orgasms presently holding the highest offices in our country might get to do it for another four years just because the mainstream democrats had to choose the fucking establishment candidate.
But then, since I live in one of the NASCAR idiot redneck states that will overwhelming go to Prince George, I think maybe I'll vote for Nader, too. Or maybe Cthulhu.
If I just wanted to pop a drive on a network for SIMPLE attached storage, I'd look at Netgear's model 624 "media router". The router runs about $100, supports 802.11g speeds and has a USB port that accepts either a USB flash device or a USB hard disk.
I set one up for a customer. With a 160GB USB 2.0 hard disk, it's just spiffy for everything he needed that volume of storage for.
You need to be level 40+ to do an instanced outdoor mission. They're pretty much the missions you get from Portal Corp on Peregrine Island (and if you don't know where Peregrine Island is, don't worry, you wouldn't live long enough to find out). I know one of the missions gets you to a level 40 Psychic Clockwork King and another set brings you Praetorians, the evil versions of CoH icons like Statesman, Synapse and Bastion.
Last time I checked, anti-virus software was an optional component. Since MOST antivirus packages put you into an unbroken cycle of for-pay subscription renewals, updates that don't install properly and neverending bugs and incompatibilities, I think I'll continue to take a pass.
housecall.antivirus.com is free and requires nothing from me, if I thought I might have a virus.
Slashdot Mirror
I seriously had a client doing that. She didn't know how to make directories so she drug things into the recycle bin so she knew where to find them.
And - seriously - came to me complaining that she was losing files. I was thinking bad hard disk or virus or... well, not that.
Sometime, when you have a moment, take a look at Amazon.com customer reviews for "Family Circus" cartoon collections.
I'd say that yours is an apt comparison, but "Punch Drunk Love" was one of the deepest movies to come out of Hollywood in the last couple years.
And of course it was completely lost on Adam Sandler fans, but that's beside the point.
I really, REALLY don't care about CS:Source or any of the weeny online games that have been made with Half-Life, but I remember playing and enjoying the STORY of the first version.
And I can break out my install CD, install it and play it whenever I'd like, no internet required. Same thing with the game I play most often, Master of Magic, which is so old I don't even think there are any remaining fan pages online.
I'd like to play Halflife 2, but as long as it's associated with all that online registration and updating bullshit there's no way I'm going to bother with it. Basically, I want to buy a game and own it, not buy a game and install it and let it download 2GB of crap I don't want or need... but only as long as Valve keeps the serial validation servers running.
I played techie-guru for a LAN party over the weekend, where five or six of the players were playing WoW (as a group, in the same room, which should have been really cool).
On the one hand it looked pretty OK graphically, but then I heard someone explain crafting, and how many X-random-pieces-of-crap he needed to find to make some baseline piece of armor. And the whole group was wandering around killing IIRC rabbits (like rats in every other MMO, I guess. Maybe they were Monty Python Vorpal Bunnies or something but everyone was attacking 'em).
And then... fishing.
At one point all six of these players were standing around a virtual lake throwing in their virtual lines and attempting to fish. And because they were newbies with no fishing skill, none of them could catch anything.
Pretty soon the other folks at the LAN party started calling the game "Bass Avenger", asking why the WoW players didn't just go buy Cabela's Varmint Hunter 4, and whether they'd really play a game that required them to stand around NOT CATCHING FISH. They pretty much had a better time with making fun of WoW and its players than playing CS:Source.
And I thought, "Man, that game looks really, really bad."
I don't play many games in general (I was at the LAN as a tech not a player - didn't even bring a PC of my own), but in talking to the folks who were "playing" I saw just how right City of Heroes seems to have gotten things: the guys who were playing were highly annoyed with the crafting and non-combat skill aspects of WoW, especially with the fact that for whatever reason they had to stand around fishing instead of fighting bad guys. Some people say CoH is shallow since fighting is about all you can do, but everyone I talked to said they'd rather be killing stuff than repairing their weapons or learning to mine.
I don't know what kind of person WANTS to wander all over Dwarf-Land looking for +2 Balls of Twine but from talking to the Diablo and Warcraft fans I met at that LAN party, it doesn't seem like much of Blizzard's fan base is going to appreciate the final WoW product.
My media PC is a AthlonXP 3200 with 2GB of RAM and around 2.2TB of disk space. It has an ATI 9800 Pro All-in-Wonder for graphics and uses the soundstorm digital output for sound. It lives in a 6U rackmount case along with most of my audio gear (Integra DTR-8.2 and some Sony CD and DVD jukeboxes).
All that lives in a closet.
Control is the main issue. I have several solutions for that, however.
One is an ATI remote wonder. I can have the PC directly output to my TV or to my Projector, giving me a desktop and a standard Windows 2000 or BeyondTV interface. I use WinAmp's media library for most digital media functions, but honestly, if there's something I want from the PC, it's usually easier to put it on a CD or DVD.
Another is VNC from my laptop, which works just fine when I don't feel like switching the receiver to the computer's input. Since my laptop is usually somewhere around my coffee table, that's a perfectly acceptable control as well.
My receiver also has a radio remote, fortunately, so receiver functions are just as wireless and just as easy to deal with.
I enjoy City of Heroes. It scratches an itch I've had practically since the moment I sat down in front of a computer.
My friends and I dinged level 50 not too long ago. Unlike most of the other posters who claim to have high-level characters or who have spent a lot of time in the game, we still play, at level 50 and with lower-level toons. There's tons stuff to do at high levels - there are at least a half-dozen story arcs or mission sequences that open up above level 45. As for content, well, a lot of it comes from the Clues that many players don't bother to read. Too bad for them. There's some great stories being told.
---
Anyway, the thing I *really* want, perhaps more than anything else, is to flex my own imagination in the World created by City of Heroes. COH has (or had) a mod community for a few weeks until the developers cracked down on it, which is really too bad, because one of the things that is obvious to me, as a player, is that it takes a lot of effort to come up with new stories, new art and new models for the game. Many FPS gamers know the joy of making something completely unique within the realm of their favorite game. COH has glimmerings of possibility as well (here I think of the "skating rinks" in the Frostfire mission), but it seems like the devs are so completely overwhelmed that a lot of those things will never get beyond that glimmer.
So... knowing that there is a modding spirit somewhere in the player-base, and there are a LOT of creative people playing CoH, are there any plans to have some player-created content recognized and officially made part of the game?
--
Second question: How do you justify the present role of tankers within City of Heroes? You've got guys who... take damage. Unlike the invulnerable badasses of comics, these guys really lack any real ability to hit back and REALLY seem more like a traditional MMO archetype than anything Stan Lee might've come up with.
On a related note, what do you say to people who deride certain power sets within the game as not being "super enough", e.g. Super Strength, Psychic Blast, Ice Armor?
--
Why don't the interiors of office buildings in Paragon City have windows?
--
Last question: My single frustration with CoH is that it feels like nothing players do has any ultimate impact on the state of things on my server. I'd love to fail a mission and find, as a consequence, that Bylde Square was turned into a smouldering radioactive pit, or find that my level 50 could permanently evict Clockwork from Skyway City. Do the actions of any player or group of players have an impact in the goings-on of their server? Will this ever be a possibility?
In my area, the local monopoly doesn't have any options compelling enough for me to make use of its services. I live in an upscale area, in a newly-constructed home, in a subdivision filled with white-collar professionals, yet I can't get cable internet.
My local cable company's basic and extended packages include several home-shopping networks and multiple spanish-language stations (there is not significant spanish-speaking population in my area), but if I want basic-cable staples like Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network, TLC or the History Channel, I'd have to pay for uber-premium Digital Cable - $70 a month without the expensive movie channels.
So how are cable fuck - I mean monopolies - a good thing for consumers? The one in my area (Comcast) doesn't provide any service that I would willingly partake? A second cable network might very well realize the wisdom of offering a better selection of channels in its less expensive packages, or even better, might offer a la carte service (I know, keep dreaming). Perhaps (gasp), there might be a downward trend in the price of service as the two companies compete for business. As things presently stand, the local cable company has absolutely no incentive to change anything, and if that's "a good thing for the customer", I'll eat my shoes.
A 1.5GHz Pentium M compares well with a 2.4GHz P4. The confusion caused by these different frequencies is precisely the reason Intel is moving to Performance rating its chips. Both a Pentium M and a Pentium 4 are classed as "500-series" chips.
You know Mr AC, there are many fine brands of decaf that taste just as good as regular coffee.
I can't prove it, all opinion being subjective, after all, but I've wanted to have a decent super-hero game for a long, long time. I bought "Freedom Force" and "Superhero League of Hoboken" to support the genre, and that's originally why I bought CoH.
I wouldn't say I an MMO person. I never felt even a moment's interest in Everquest or DAoC. But I played CoH for my introductory month and I found it on the whole to be a lot of fun. The settings might be repetitive but I've had great fun pursuing the various story arcs and discovering the hows and whys of Paragon City.
Now I have a high-level character (I'll ding 45 this weekend), and to be honest I haven't really noticed the "grinding" aspect. I've mostly had a very good time with the people I play with (very small asshole factor) and I'm finally to the point of learning the "big picture" of the game; interdimensional wars among incarnations of the Prussian Prince of Automatons (by the way, I LOVE the conception of Nemesis... he has a great classic villain feel), Rikti suborning peaceful Hydra-men for war against Earth, the origins of the Freakshow and Devouring Earth, all these things have unfolded from reading the mission notes and paying attention to villain comments while I adventured.
In City of Heroes I really feel like I'm unique. I've met other people with roughly my combination of powers, but in playing I really DO feel powerful and heroic. It's a small thing that someone comes up to thank you when you defeat a villain on the streets of Peregrine Island, but I have to say it's a damn sight more than I remember getting in all those Fantasy games I played growing up. Because everything is instanced, I really am the person who gets to end the menace of Dr. Vahzilok... no two-day-long camps for the ultra rare Dr. Vahz spawn! And when my missions and contacts send me out of zones populated by Vahzilok's minions, I come away with the sense that, yes, I really DID stop the zombies from destroying the city. Even now, months after I did it, if I happen to click on a citizen wandering through town, she might remind me: "I heard that Angry-Frenchman gave Dr. Vahzilok the thrashing of a lifetime!".
I know it's all artificial, but it's a lot closer than I might ever have hoped to a fully-realized super hero world. I'm more than happy to take part in it.
I think you misspelled "dreadful".
Neither of the two fairly high-end PCs I had could play it on launch day - it didn't like my 3dfx 5500 cards which, like it or not, were still very common hardware at that point. Basically, the game would crash within two minutes of starting.
Strike one.
Strike two was the unbelieavable level of micromanagement required to get a given result. Once I actually downloaded all the patches to make the game functional (on 14.4 dialup... I didn't have any other option at the time) on my PC I found myself spending all my time trying to teach my pet not to crap on houses or whatever, and on trying to keep the unbelievably whiney villagers in food (there's a field of crops RIGHT THERE guys!).
Strike three was getting to about the fourth mission of the single player game and finding another game-killing bug that hadn't been fixed, all the while realizing that the game wasn't getting any better and I wasn't having any fun.
I got my money back from EA for Black and White. To this day I can't understand why anyone played it.
Yes, because Intel is WAY better in that regard.
How many different P4 2.4s have been released?
There were some on socket 423 and some on socket 478. Some for 400, 533 and 800MHz FSBs. Some support hyperthreading, some don't. Some use the Northwood core, some use Prescott. If I really want to think that way I can even say that some are Celerons and some are decent.
I don't follow Intel CPUs very closely exactly because of this. However, I'll bet if I looked for more than a moment I'd find that there have been at least ten intel chips marketed as 2.4GHz Pentium 4s.
NT4 ran on a lot of things that weren't x86 PCs. One of my first jobs involved Honeywell GUS stations that were PowerPC machines running NT4. I still have a couple, in fact.
I vaguely recall seeing beta versions of Windows 2000 running on Alphas. I think there's even an Alpha directory on some Windows 2000 install CDs (which is empty, but still).
My MSDN Subscriber downloads has Windows 2003 Server for Itanium (not x86 but IA64) and Windows XP for Athlon64 (x86-64).
So Windows has in the past and does now run on non-x86 architectures.
So, obviously I've been marked as a troll for my serious factual error:
George didn't get up off his ass until seven minutes after he was informed that a *second* airplane filled with americans had crashed into a de-facto national landmark, having been informed of the *first* accident immediately prior to beginning of the school day.
There. That's better.
Here's the thing: No matter how you feel about Moore's filmmaking, or Moore himself, the fact remains that, in the middle of that movie, there's footage of George W. Bush sitting around with a bunch of little kids, reading a children's book for *seven minutes* AFTER he was informed of the WTC tragedy.
His facial expression didn't even change! An airplane filled with Americans crashes into a de-facto national landmark, and he can't excuse himself to maybe, I dunno, get a briefing or turn on CNN.
That is real. That is a moment that stands by itself. He couldn't step away from a feel-good PR session in light of something that was at the very least (at that moment) a horrible accident.
The sickening thing is that the same group of people now raise the "terror alert level" every time their oppononents do anything that might attract media attention. Yesterday Dick Cheney came out and said that the consequence of a Kerry win in November would be another terrorist attack (so, that won't happen if George stay in office? Does he know something we don't?). These unctious fuckers, who were so unconcerned in the very first moments of a national tragedy, have gotten untold traction in the mind of the American public by exploiting the fear and the grief stemming from 9/11. I for one hope that people realize what's going on before it's too late.
At the Chicago Comic-Con he was very apologetic about both. And the mini-posters for J&SSB... He's AWARE of all those things but freely admitted that they aren't at the top of his priority list. As we in the audience for his Q&A reminded him of the old stuff he hadn't finished, he ran off his list of priorities.
What he *DID* say was at the top of his priority list - and I'm not making this shit up - was a two-part guest starring role in "Degrassi: The Next Generation". He said he wanted to direct an episode, but Canadian culture laws forbade a non-Canadian citizen from doing that. I guess he's a big fan.
That should be "generate", not "general".
While I'm at it, I hope that someone gets around to making a better command-line tool to generate those ISOs sometime. The batch files I'm using to do it are really, really ugly.
Of course, you need to install Cygwin and a bunch of GNU tools to general ISOs on the fly, which is mildly annoying, but if all you're doing is dumping the ISOs you grab from Fasttrack or the the MSDN Parter downloads site, it's really handy.
And since I'm now apparently a "troll", I'd like to go on to point out that in the 2004 Presidential Election, Cthulhu is not, in fact, the greatest evil in the running, ancient and all-devouring though he may be.
If you're thinking like that, can I at least remind you that you'll also be voting to maintain assholes like Ashcroft, Cheney and Rumsfeld in their respective offices?
I mean, there were at least five other guys in the primary I think would've been better candidates, but it really scares me to think that the wastes of orgasms presently holding the highest offices in our country might get to do it for another four years just because the mainstream democrats had to choose the fucking establishment candidate.
But then, since I live in one of the NASCAR idiot redneck states that will overwhelming go to Prince George, I think maybe I'll vote for Nader, too. Or maybe Cthulhu.
When my fiance came out, I stood beside her, too.
That doesn't mean it doesn't completely destroy you. Trust me: It does.
If I just wanted to pop a drive on a network for SIMPLE attached storage, I'd look at Netgear's model 624 "media router". The router runs about $100, supports 802.11g speeds and has a USB port that accepts either a USB flash device or a USB hard disk.
I set one up for a customer. With a 160GB USB 2.0 hard disk, it's just spiffy for everything he needed that volume of storage for.
You need to be level 40+ to do an instanced outdoor mission. They're pretty much the missions you get from Portal Corp on Peregrine Island (and if you don't know where Peregrine Island is, don't worry, you wouldn't live long enough to find out). I know one of the missions gets you to a level 40 Psychic Clockwork King and another set brings you Praetorians, the evil versions of CoH icons like Statesman, Synapse and Bastion.
Last time I checked, anti-virus software was an optional component. Since MOST antivirus packages put you into an unbroken cycle of for-pay subscription renewals, updates that don't install properly and neverending bugs and incompatibilities, I think I'll continue to take a pass.
housecall.antivirus.com is free and requires nothing from me, if I thought I might have a virus.