Under a Gibbous Moon

Who the fuck needs a warrant or probable cause or any of that. Evidently a judge has decided that the outside surface of your car is public property. I never understand people that comment on stories about violating constitutional rights. Apparently if you aren’t doing anything that you feel is wrong, then you shouldn’t need the Constitution. I want to quote Ben Franklin here, but I think we all know which quote I’m going for.

Governments never take a dramatic action to remove freedom. They always will one step people into total tyranny.

Give up?

It’s supposed to be a deep dish pizza. Went to the local Pizza Hut with my wife tonight and instead of a large deep dish pizza we got a large hand tossed pizza. When we asked the waiter about the pizza he went back to check on it. When he came back we had what was probably one of the most awkward conversations he’d had as a server.

Apparently, they were out of large deep dish pizza dough and so, instead of saying anything, they just made a different pizza and hoped that we wouldn’t notice.

Yup, sounds like a plan to me. What makes this hilarious, is that this must be standard Pizza Hut policy because this happened to me better than a decade ago. I forget exactly what I ordered but the toppings were wrong. When asked about it, they said that they were out of the one (sausage if I remember correctly) so we just used this instead (pepperoni if I remember correctly).

Now Pizza Hut, shit happens, I understand that. You run out, things don’t go right, it happens to all of us, but please just be up front. This whole, hope we don’t notice thing turns small problem into a big mistake.

This says to me, “Road trip!”

I’ve been playing with a camera lately. Not just any camera but the one on my cell phone. With enough effort, I think that it takes some really good pictures.

I’m very pleased with how this one turned out. Taking pictures of small children is a lot like wildlife photography, you take a lot of pictures and just hope to get lucky. I got really lucky with this one.

Another lucky shot. The one I took right before this is nothing but a blur as she turned her head but then I managed to catch her right as she was focusing on something.

Nothing particularly special about this one, though I do like the framing, mostly I was going for a “arty” look and I like the way it came out.

While I don’t think that cell phones will ever replace those $12,000 behemoths, I do think that they have come a long way. A good cell phone camera can take some very crisp pictures with varying depths of field (though I have yet to see one with true manual focus). Maybe in another five years or so, there won’t even be a need for any of the mid range digital cameras.

MMOs have been out for quite a long time so this is probably not very new to everyone but bear with me anyway. I have played some browser based MMOs for quite some time, notably KoL and Urban Dead. But I had never played any of the client based MMOs made popular by World of Warcraft.

The first one that I tried was Dungeon and Dragon’s Online (DDO). I tried it specifically because it was one of the “free to play” games. For the most part it is true. There is no up front cost thought accounts are limited to a total of two characters and the classes and races that you can play are restricted (though the classics are available for free). Anything fancy, like more character slots, races, cool gear, and more of the world map must be bought with points.

While you accrue points in-game in order to keep with the whole “free” mentality, you accumulate them very slowly as an incentive to get you to buy them. Eventually, I found this system annoying so I figured I’d give the free ten day World of Warcraft (WoW) trial a go.

I must say that so far I am enjoying it, much more than I thought I would. One of the first things that I noticed, coming from DDO is that, except for a few exceptions, everybody coexists in the same world. In DDO all the quests take place in their own instance (which is apparently what they call it in WoW).

There are advantages to this method. Because it is always just you or your party, DDO quests are much more tightly scripted than in WoW. Also you don’t run into the problem of everyone trying to grab onto the same quest goal and having to wait around for it to respawn.

The downside to this is that, since you only see the other players in taverns are going to and from quests, the world feels rather empty while WoW feels more alive.

My biggest complaint, so far, is tedious wholesale slaughter of the fauna of Azeroth. WoW often feels like it should be used as test for people who may have personality disorders because killing small animals is a large part of the game.

Some guy with and exclamation point over his head will tell you to run out into the woods and kill 50 squirrels and then come back. Or even worse, he’ll tell you to bring back 50 squirrel tails. This is my most hated type of quest because apparently, not all squirrels are gifted with tails and only ten percent of the damn things will have tails.

While there are many interesting quests, some of the quests make you wonder if the game designers weren’t just phoning in content. My personal favorite so far one where I earned a bunch of experience points ferrying messages between two NPCs that were standing about fifteen feet apart. It felt like one of those family get togethers where two people aren’t on speaking terms and I’m stuck in the middle.

The way the trial itself is set up is strange. They give you ten days to try it out but then limit what you can try out. Going out and adventure with other people, hell no, you can’t form your own groups. Want to chat it up, nope chat functionality is limited because since it’s a social game we might as well eliminate that from the trial. Seriously, Blizzard, it is a time limited trial so you might as well let the player try out everything so that they can make an informed decision.

Despite these complaints, it is otherwise an entertaining game. The sheer volume of are to explore and the available content is staggering. Having all of the players roaming the same world gives it a feeling of really being alive. Right now, having reached the level cap, I’m stuck trying to decide if paying Blizzard money every month is worth the experience.

As a neat ending, WoW has a character viewer that you can embed into websites, so here is Bonebox in all his glory.

Ten free interents if you can guess the character’s name reference.