Raithe

One of those yearly things we have is one of the neighbours always drops around on Christmas day. Now, this wouldn't be a problem, but they tend to loiter for an hour or so regardless of what's going on , even if we have other family visiting. I guess that's partly the trouble of being polite rather then kicking them out the door. But then again, this year they lost their mother this last month... But anyhow, they'd mentioned they were going to drop in this morning, so rather then get caught in the middle of family moments and unwrapping of presents we thought we'd have a slow morning and then when the neighbour had been and gone, then do our family thing. Time passed, no neighbour. Finally a little past noon we decide to give up delaying our christmas, divvy the presents up , sit down and open them together. We get the piles sorted, fresh cup of tea.. and then neighbour turns up, sits down and promptly ensconces in the middle of present piles.

So Merry Christmas from Merry Olde England..as it's slipped to the 25th here..

I guess one element of trouble I have with the idea of guns being freely available to most people... Is that most people seem to be morons. I wouldn't trust them with my finances, with looking after my kids (if I had any), so why should I trust them with actually learning correct and proper gun safety and control and a roomfull of lethal weaponry? I can see how you can approach it with the whole "gun control is like insurance. You probably won't ever need to use it, but if you do and don't have it, you'll regret it." But I'm also thinking of some of the utter idiots I've been exposed to in my life, and just whether I'd be happy knowing they could be armed.....

Well my mother has athrisis issues in her hands as well as a bunch of other things, which was giving her problems reading the books she enjoys (such as her regular re-read of LoTR), so a couple of christmasses ago I got her Amazon's Kindle when it first came out. And she's been delighted with it ever since. In fact, I'm getting her the Kindle Paperwhite for this xmas since her old Kindle is getting a bit worn and battered now. I've snaked it a few times when I've been away for a few days and it's certainly works nicely. I still prefer having a proper dead tree copy, but the kindle is nice to slip into a pocket and carry around, especially if you're the type to read a couple of books whilst travelling on the train...

A little TOR here and there, a bit of doodling around on SimCity4...

Hm, I think I've got about 25,000 tracks on my ipod now. Just thinking that if anything takes down my pc drive, the joy of getting all those cd's out of storage and the various nooks and crannies I stashed them in and then re-burning them... The mind boggles.

So the question becomes, were the mayans really crap at predicting the future? Or were they just incredibly good at pranking people?

FR basically started out as the Dalelands in a campaign Ed Greenwood created and ran as DM for his gaming group... As he came up with further stories, he added bits to the map as they were relevant to the plots , stories and characters he was running. Which is one of the reasons FR is just a wee bit madly put together. Not that it isn't fun with a fair few good ideas in there.

My annual income this year is under five grand. I think the "fondly" might be overstated..

Woo Hoo. I've spent the last year working on projects that so far have gone nowhere, which means I've had absolutely zero-income from it all. I get to put all sorts of things on my CV due to the work, but my bank account has squat. The perils of that "famine" point of project work as opposed to the feast times.... Edit: Although to be fair, the government did give me an extra £10 on my "Carer's Allowance" that I get for looking after my mother as part of the "Christmas" bonus.

"If you are truly a pacifist, you can't call the cops. They are going to use force, restraint, and weapons to enforce your position." I did catch a bit of the NRA Vice-President's speech about it all earlier today, and while he made some valid points he then undermined it by saying that having our underage children play Grand Theft Auto is the problem because it teaches them murder is fun. My main problem with that is if he's letting his underage kids play the Grand Theft Auto games he's missing the whole "mature" labelling on them and it's his own damn fault for letting underage kids play the games...

Well my sister's new Alienware laptop arrived today, so she kept poking at me for help since it's all Windows 8 and she has no idea whats what on it. The weather has turned from chill to miserably wet, I cleared a bunch of stuff up into the attic, and I am attempting to get the usual christmas enthusiasm to wrap some presents up and slide them under the tree. Wanted to enjoy the sheer, decadent luxury of a long drawn out hot bath, but time got eaten away, so I'll have to settle for grabbing a quick shower. Pondering on bills and whether I should be rooting for the apocalypse...

Not to just grasp at straws here, but I think the whole Earth taking center stage for the Reapers is due to their whole byzantine plot thing. Aka, they pick one specific race each cycle that they're going to render down into a couple of new "Proper" Reapers, and the rest of the races get used for the itty bitty Reapers and general odds and ends. For various reasons, notably Humanity (in the form of Shepard) is the race that has posed the most problems for the Reaper Plan they get voted in as that key race. So a concentration of Reaper's is all about the Earth. With the other Citadel species, none of them are really attempting to organise anything together. Shepard comes across as the only one trying to get EVERYONE working on the same game plan. And because he's human, he's pretty much doing the "look, we need to do this together, I'm helping you here and here, you guys form up and help us defend Earth and we can go on to kick the reaper's arse out of our galaxy together." Shep has a certain amount of street cred, and once he gets the ball rolling, no-one really wants to jump up and insist that people aim in a different direction. Besides, they've already had him going this way and that to help out their races before they actually agree to do anything.

Sushi Girl. Starts off with a naked girl having sushi placed artfully across her body to the strains of "Diamonds are Forever"... Before a reunion of a heist crew consisting of Tony Todd as the machiavellian leader, Mark Hamill doing an almost real life joker, Andi Mackenzie as the psychotic pit bull, James Duval the team pot head, and the fresh from six years of prison Noah Hathaway have a reunion around said Sushi Girl to find out what actually happened on the last heist they worked together where the score went missing. Including some short appearances of Jeff Fahey, Michael Beihn, Sonny Chiba and Danny Trejo. Mainly consisting of the dark and brooding abandoned chinese restuarant with a single room done up as a japanese sushi bar and the principle characters, with flashbacks to the heist inbetween. Very grindhouse feel, but quite entertaining if you enjoy some of the Kurosawa / Tarantino styling. Although there are a couple of moments of almost Torture-Porn that hover on the edges.

Since there isn't really a good spot for it.. http://www.washingto...billion-pixels/ A rather good picture of Mount Everest.. in two billion pixels with some rotational aspects.

Some more details on the Rise of the Cartel Expansion (taken from Developer quotes from Bio on the DevTracker forums) http://www.darthhate...s-new-expansion

It's when you add in "Heroic Moment" and the various Legacy Powers that use it on one side-bar that things look really crowded. You don't need to use them most of the time..but when you do, you need to be able to click fast.. Besides, there's something fun about my Jedi Knight getting into trouble with some boss , and using Legacy Force Storm, Legacy Choke, Legacy Flame Thrower and then finishing him off with a Legacy Dirty Kick...

I have to admit, it's kind of hard to have a fully reasoned discussion on the subject when the majority of people who don't want easy access to guns generally don't know that much about gun safety/handling/the actual legal restrictions.. and the folks who do tend to know those details are the gun enthusiasts who well, tend to want access. We need a few people who are enthusiastic about guns but don't know the specifics, and people who want more gun control but actually know the details..

For a slight comparison of things, an article I found of interest : BBC News - Connecticut shootings: The lessons from Dunblane A look back on the effects of the Dunblane shootings in Scotland 16 years on and how that changed things in the UK.

Jade Empire does have a rather good "magnificent bastard" in it as well..

For a slightly odd set of statistics, I saw a listing of European crimes per 1,000,000 resisdents, and the UK topped the list of highest number of violent crimes BUT came 13th on list of actual homicides. And since we're talking statistics: http://www.gunpolicy...n/united-states Apparently this group which is hosted by the Sydney School of Public Health at Syden University has a slew of US related gun statistics. I haven't looked in-depth at it yet, but thought the really interested folk on this topic might enjoy it.

No matter what, Christensen was a level above the Manequin Skywalker from the Phantom Menace. Of all the kids they looked at, the "perfect" young anakin was the one who was incredibly obnoxious and atrociously wooden? What were they smoking??

Of course, now you can have , what, 6 quick slots set up if you want to crowd your screen?

Pootling around off and on with some TOR as distractions from various things. I have to admit, the group finder doesn't work too badly to hit some of the Flashpoints and Hard Mode Flashpoints...

Some people are talking as if its Act IV, so who knows just how much it lays the groundwork for it? After all, when we wrap up Act III, what you get at level 50 is "Interlude". So we can gather they're certainly planning on adding some further Act(s) to the storyline. Of course, the question would become would it mean Act IV for each class storyline, or are they going to combine them to specific Republic/Imperial storylines? I think I'd feel kind of cheated if they didn't make them expansions of the class storylines, but I can see that takes a heap more effort and money, which might not be a possible thing if it's not succeeding as they thought it would.