snow crash comes to life

I don't know how many of you follow Worlds of Warcraft at all, I stopped playing because it was sucking my life away, but there's something really interesting happening in there right now.

A plague.

Turns out that there was a certain mission where the boss you had to fight could infect people with a plague that was contagious. It was all supposed to be self-contained in the dungeon. However, some people left the dungeon and started infecting people in towns. The damn virus can even spread to NPCs, which heal quickly enough to not die from it, but are able to pass it on to other people.

From a forum I read tonight:

"Almost every single NPC Horde side has the "Corrupted Blood" effect BUT is auto healing the damage - so the effect isn't ever going away. It just spreads indefinitely between a pack of standing NPCs. People keep bagging up the effect on their pet then spreading it around to other cities players and NPCs who then quickly spread it to others. Next thing you know NPC's from an entire town are permanently infected and everyone in the town is dead or dieing. Now every single town has it!"

Man, what a trip. A real plague, ravaging an online world. This has been around for a few days now, and it's apparently still rampant and killing people left and right. It's like high speed AIDS, online. Just the concept alone gives me goosebumps.

Apparently your pet can contract the disease, and then you can dismiss the pet, and the next time you create your pet, it still has it. Which means this opens the avenue for genuine online terrorism. You can go to "safe" areas, spawn an infected pet, and kill dozens or hundreds of people. It almost makes me wish I still had an account so I could go witness the chaos.

late night AIM for your entertainment

(23:55:44) jerkysquid: I did some lapidary project in sixth grade.
(23:56:04) jerkysquid: A rock tumbler, some glue, and a pebble. Two weeks later I was the proud owner of a hideous brooch.
(23:56:39) Tobin00: man, i begged my parents for a rock tumbler for so long
(23:56:53) Tobin00: i was denied. just like with the snoopy snow cone maker.
(23:57:29) jerkysquid: I never asked for a rock tumbler. I saw one on Mr. Wizard's World and thought I had had my fill. The Snoopy Snowcone Machine, on the other hand, was the holy grail of kids culinary devices.
(23:57:51) jerkysquid: My next door neighbor had one. It was the highest possible effort to results ratio I had ever seen in a toy.
(23:58:33) Tobin00: hah
(23:59:08) Tobin00: i did end up getting my wish, kind of
(23:59:19) jerkysquid: yeah, but after realizing that a team of oxen couldn't turn that plastic crank, even kids give up and opt for a bomb pop.
(23:59:34) Tobin00: we moved to this house in florida that was apparently owned by some swinger, and he had a window out to the pool to pass drinks through
(23:59:38) Tobin00: and beside that window was an ice grinder
(23:59:47) Tobin00: hand powered, like a pencil sharpener
(23:59:52) jerkysquid: nice
(23:59:59) Tobin00: it churned out broken ice like crazy
(00:00:12) Tobin00: rusty and i used to eat it with maple syrup on it, cause we're retards
(00:00:37) jerkysquid: heheh.
(00:00:46) jerkysquid: I used to use coke.
(00:01:54) Tobin00: me too, but i stopped when they shut down studio 54
(00:02:11) jerkysquid: See, my heyday was when I was a pimp in Tokyo.
(00:02:23) jerkysquid: I used to do lines off of Japanese hookers' buttocks.
(00:02:34) Tobin00: see, i caught you in a lie!
(00:02:44) Tobin00: japanese women do not in fact have asses at all
(00:02:51) jerkysquid: Who said they were women?
(00:02:55) Tobin00: HAH

reservoir dogs my ass

I'm watching the John Woo film City On Fire, which people say inspired Tarantino's film Reservoir Dogs. I'd say this is true, except for the fact that:

a) The only thing they have in common is that four guys rob a store at one point.
b) Reservoir dogs was actually good.

This movie sucks. Crappy action, crappy acting, crappy plot.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through, and I don't really have any interest in finishing it, except that I'm just hoping there's some cool gun battle or car chase or something redeeming at all.

The only thing I've been impressed with so far is that his music choice was before his time. Most the music in this movie actually sounds like music from a modern action film, as opposed to all the garbage you normally hear in 80's action films.

Edit: Okay, the end of it got better, especially with Woo having the guts to make a non-happy ending. And there was an old dude organizing the robbery, so it was a bit more Reservoir Dogs-esque. But still, I'd only give it about a 4/10.

Anti-Japan War Online

I have a driving urge to try out this MMORPG. It sounds hilarious. I love how incredibly non-PC it is.

They should have timed its release on the same day as some sort of PR event in Japan denouncing the US for the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as a little "Don't forget that you raped and killed and burned a bunch of us, too." Man, would that be ugly.

I always forget how much lingering animosity there is between China and Japan until I hear about things like this. Check it out:

"PowerNet Technology, a Chinese online gaming firm, has developed a new online game in cooperation with the China Communist Youth League (CCYL) named "Anti-Japan War Online," which will begin commercial operation by the end of 2005, a PowerNet official said Tuesday.

"The game will allow players, especially younger players, to learn from history. They will get a patriotic feeling when fighting invaders to safeguard their motherland," a PowerNet Project Manager, surnamed Liu, told Interfax.

The background for "Anti-Japan War Online" is the Japanese invasion of China during World War II, from 1937 through 1945. Players are able to play simulations of key battles, but will only be able to play as the Chinese side."

http://www.interfax.cn/showfeature.asp?aid=4907&slug=INTERNET-ONLINE%20GAME-JAPAN-POWERNET

Breakin'

Oh my good lord, I'm re-watching Breakin', which I haven't seen since I was like 10 years old. It's a freaking GOLDMINE. My god, I can't stop laughing. Notes from Breakin', since it's too crazy for me to even coherently put my thoughts together.

1) There's a Jean Claude Van Damme cameo! Right in the beginning, in the park, where a bunch of people are standing around watching people breakdance, he's standing there saying nothing, for no reason.

2) Ice T is the rapper in the underground club that they breakdance at.

3) Breakdance fighting is hilarious. I mean, dance fighting is always funny, but we forget how much breakdancing has improved since 1984. If you go back and watch Breakin, their dancing is so freaking GAY. It looks like the Villiage People doing West Side Story.

4) Acceptable decorations for one's house are hubcaps from cars, and spray painted murals that say things like "poppin".

5) I'm completely unable to determine what wins a dance fight. At some point, everyone in an entire crowd just gathers around one team or the other, in complete unison, and the fight is over. At which point the losers have to glare angrily, shake their heads, and stalk away.

6) In the 80's, any white man in a suit is Evil. Unless you can get him to tap his foot to the beat. In which case he is your friend.

7) No matter how poor you are, in the "ghetto", you still own a convertible.

8) The only "street name" cooler than Ozone is Turbo.

9) OMG a breakdancing cripple! Breakdancing on crutches!

10) No one can resist an 80's girl with a dyke haircut, spandex pants with a bikini bottom OUTSIDE of them, and ankle warmers.

11) You can rip the sleeves off of any shirt or suit with little or no effort.

12) You can apparently prance around in glittery half-shirts as a male in the ghetto and lose no street cred.

13) The avant-garde street dancing theater production at the end is worth watching the whole movie for. It's like a bunch of gay pimps doing Cats on Broadway, in a glitter storm.

14) There's a freeze frame at the end of the movie of the three stars jumping into the air in slow motion! Oh my lord the cliches! I'm drowning!

15) At the end, Ice T says "this story proves the way to part two". They knew that the greatest movie ever made, Breakin' 2: The Electric Boogaloo was yet to come. And indeed, it's the next movie in my Netflix queue.

As hokey as this movie is, there are some great moves in it. Every time I watch a movie with breakdancing, I want to learn how to do it. If I could just break out with popping and locking in the middle of a meeting at work, and then jump up on the table and spin on my head, that would be the greatest thing ever.

opportunism

Gas at my cheap station on my way to work: $2.75

Gas at my cheap station on my way home : $2.99

There is no freaking way this hurricane could justify a one day, 10% increase.

California has its own oil suppliers and its own refineries. I would love to see some stats on how much oil we even get from the NOLA area. Bastards.

R&B has taken over

While working tonight on some code, I had the TV on and flipped around the music channels, and I noticed something strange. I flipped around between MTV, MTV2, and VH1, and everything was either rap, R&B, or hybrid pop, which seems these days to sound like a mix between sensitive singing/songwriting and R&B. Peppered in here was tame crap like the new Green Day non-punk slow garbage and the 80's sounding vanilla stuff No Doubt sings lately. Even the White Stripes are coming out with tame crap. Nice job, douchebags. And the rap wasn't even good rap. I love good rap. This shit is rap love songs or club anthems.

We're getting to an age of music reminiscent of the 80's again. Music is non-threatening, non-angry, non-intellectual, non-thought provoking. Take a look at 80's videos. You see weird meaningless montages, love songs, songs about partying, meaningless nonsense. Look familiar?

And yes, I know there's music out there that's good. What interests me is the mainstream. This is what most of the nation is listening to. There's a reason why if you turn on rock radio stations, all you hear is the songs from the 90's. Certain genres are absolutely stagnant right now, in terms of what's being created for the mainstream.

I'm trying to remember when this started. Did we start backing away from any sort of challenging and creative music after 9/11? Did that scare us out of good music? It could just be cyclical. The 70's had a lot of earthshaking music that pushed boundaries and commented on politics, the 80's were a lot of nonsense and fluff, and the 90's had a lot of opening of doors and breaking down of walls between genres. Maybe we're due for generic shit. Maybe we have to wait a few more years for people to wake up and want something more challenging.

One interesting side note is that if you want to hear any rock at all, actual rock(contrary to popular belief, Coldplay is not rock), you have to actually change over to Country stations, I shit you not. When you consider rock and roll in the original Elvis and Beatles sort of rocking, you can't get that anywhere but mainstream country at that point, and that's just *weird*. A lot of it isn't any good, but god help them, they're trying to rock out and tell a story. That's more than I can say of most of the other genres.