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I wonder how much good the D&D franchise is going to do Atari as The +6 hammer of NASDAQ is poised to smite them.

Going through my first Ascension ToB, currently Cleric 19/Ranger 16, ran through Watcher's Keep, decided to seal the place up, and now I'm hunting down Sendai in the caverns. Is Sarevok's redemption an Ascension-only thing? This is the first time I've gotten that to work. I wonder how that'll affect the epilogues. I do so love the ToB epilogues. I thought they were all awesome, even the sad ones (Viconia's or Cernd's, for example)

I'm suddenly reminded of this article.

I really liked Chabon's Kavalier & Clay, but I'd been shying away from this one. Based on reviews I've seen, it looks to be full of references based on nuances of 20th century Judaism/Israel/etc. I'm a bit reticent, in that I think most of these would sail over my head. Is background reading necessary (or worthwhile)? I didn't do any background reading, I just jumped into it on vacation, and I wouldn't consider myself especially learned when it comes to the history of the jews, and I got a lot out of the book. As you probably read, in Union's alternate timeline, a jewish protectorate is created in Alaska after the holocaust, the atom bomb is dropped on Berlin, and the state of Israel collapses in 1948. Fast forward 60 years, and the protectorate is a few months away from receding back into Alaska and scattering the jews to the wind again. What I got was that the book is less about jews in the 20th century as it's about the way the jews have always been, their "psyche", if you will. Perpetually homeless, self-pitying and lacking in faith, but often willing to make the best of things. There are some sly parrallells to modern-day Israel. For example, ultra-orthodox ("black hats", as they're called in the book) jews build settlements in claimed native Alaskan land and incite violence, but beyond that there's not much. It's not about the setting, really, it's more about the sad-sack characters (it's a throwback to 40's noir detective novels, so nobody's happy) than about the setting, but it's a good setting. There are also some subtle jabs at the current political climate in America as it relates to faith and inter-faith relations. So in answer to your question, no, background reading isn't really necessary if you've got a vague idea of just what the jews have been through for the last 4000 years (in a nutshell, disappointment). It might also take you a little bit to make sense of some of the yiddish words that are used in place of english phrases ("man", for example, becomes "yid") But reading would be worthwhile, there are history courses dedicated to the hebrews and their descendants, and with good reason. There aren't a hell of a lot of cultures that have survived relatively unchanged for 4 millenia, existing within dozens of other cultures, with only so much as a dream of a homeland in some God-forsaken desert.

Yes. As in, the story goes from being relatively local and centralized to being quite epic.

RON KILLS MEGATRON Just finished up The Yiddish Policeman's Union. It gets all weird and Watchmen-y towards the end. I liked it.

Yeah, and now I can't seem to find SIMPLE anywhere. Hmmm.

What's the wild west without archetypes?

This is exactly the kind of thing less gov't oversight would help to prevent.

Huh, you know, I never did figure out how to get that titan/angel/whatever to reveal Mephistopheles' true name to me. She always refused when I asked.

I think we now have conclusive proof that Shadowstrider is posting from a year in the future.

If you can hook up the 360 to the internet, there are a lot of great games on XBLA. Settlers of Catan is there, and it takes up most of my time on the console now that I've played all the relevant disc'd games. Hopefully they'll work on some of the expansions now. Overlord's there, I think. There's Carcassone, which is sort of like Catan in its board-gameness and emphasis on strategy. The new edition of Pac-Man actually improves upon a nearly perfect game. And Sega just announced it's sending a whole bunch of its classic Genesis games onto XBLA. The addition of Streets of Rage 2 makes my Wii now an effective paperweight.

So which is faster then, gravity or light?

New Ministry leaked. Ministry - Let's Go Meh. It's better than RGB, at least.

Totally. Mine has 64 megabytes maximum memory allotted for graphics (it barely runs Deus Ex without crashing) and has half a gig of RAM. I wonder if this thing could be upgraded. I don't really like a lot of the interface shown in the video. The font for the gun info is an eyesore, I hope it's a placeholder. Also, I'm disappointed by the lack of reaction that the enemies have to being shot. Maybe it's just that they're single-minded monsters or whatever, but when a game purports to be an FPS and enemies can charge you even when you're blasting them with a shotgun at point-blank range it really breaks immersion. That and they also seem to be completely oblivious to environmental hazards, such as a big ****ing pool of burning oil right in front of them. Would Irrational dumb down their AI to make the much-touted environmental manipulation the best way to go about playing the game? Or are their AIs simple enough that corralling them all into a death trap is easy regardless?

OH WHAT

The third one was actually good, directed as it was by Alfonso Cuaron. The rest play flatly within the comfort zone. I stopped watching as soon as AC wisely ditched the series for Children of Men. Another 5 Prisoners of Azkaban put together couldn't have been as good as that film.

Control Weather is a sixth level spell, they're definitely serious. They must have at least an arch-druid at their disposal. Oh, this is scary.

Fred Thompson will be the Taft of the 21st century. Laissez-faire in every respect.

That must have been an early episode. The animation looks downright cheap, and the music cues are way too blunt.

Cabin on Bear Lake. West end of the state.

Pinback - How We Breathe Sort of mid-period RHCPish.

Screw this, it's all about PIRATE MASTER.

Leave it alone, dude. Reagan's been beatified. He was the great say-things-gooder, after all. Reading his memoirs it's readily apparent that he was far too simple a man to have engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unless Bush was right all along and faith really is a formidable Presidential asset. If Carter had been reelected the difference would have been a year or two, if that. Dissolution was in the cards for the soviets for awhile. I suspect that the position of Reagan on a pedestal has a lot to do with reserving a spot in the "greatest presidents of the 20th century" list for a Republican. Which is convenient, because whoever writes that list probably never felt the bad effects of Reagan's supply-side economy.