Enoch

Well, I just ordered the game. (Amazon US already has it $10 off the box price!) If my past experience with their cheap-o shipping option is any guide, it'll be here around Thursdayish. I honestly don't give a **** about the DRM stuff. Is it a waste of publisher resources? Probably, but that's certainly no reason to celebrate the fact that people are currently successfully stealing the product. And absent very unlikely circumstances, it's tough for me to see how the DRM would affect my experience with the game in the slightest. I very rarely re-install games that I've decided I'm done with, and I don't think I've ever done so more than twice (maybe back in the early-'90s when I was squeezing games on the 40MB HD on my family's 286, but certainly not with a modern machine).

I think what CG is getting at is that picking a class doesn't lock you out of any particular skills or abilities. It just gives certain skills a boost at character creation, makes is a little easier to raise them in the future, and indexes your overall character level to your proficiency in those skills (10 increases in your class skills = new level). Thus, there's nothing stopping a Barbarian character from becoming an expert at Conjuration magic if he learns a basic "summon skeleton" spell and casts it 800 times. Now, when combined with the scaling scheme of the vanilla game (which idiotically makes the entire world roughly equivalent to you in level at all times), this led to shrewd meta-gamers deliberately picking class skills that they would never use, so that they could raise their favorite skills to 100 while the rest of the world is leveled to be a good challenge for a 3rd level noob. Mods like OOO destroy the vanilla game's level scaling model, so this is less applicable to how any sane person plays the game now. Plus, these mods make the game quite difficult-- if you mess around with not tagging the skills you're going to use most, you'll get stomped pretty hard in a lot of places.

If Malachor is off the table, I'm picking Onderon. The "whodunnit" quest was long and boring (it could've be interesting, but takes too long, is too tangential to my character's main goals, and involves characters who I have no reason to care about*), and storming the castle was a mindless slog of unending easy opponents. I see where they were going with the Casablanca-ish letters of transit and the Queen-General power struggle, but I don't feel like they pulled it off well enough to outweigh the planet's more tediuos elements. *-- This last element particularly bothered me. The only reason the KotOR 1 solve-the-murder quest was interesting was because the accused was a friend of Jolee's, solving it gives us more insight into his character.

Beatles -- She Said She Said

I'm looking forward to it. I'll probably place an Amazon order sometime this week. (BTW, there are some pretty hilarious anti-DRM screeds on the Amazon customer reviews.)

I'm in a similar situation-- a 5th floor apartment that lacks the storage space to be a decent anti-zombie bunker. Plus, I'm about a half-mile from Arlington National Cemetary. Which means that, instead of plain ol' civilian zombies, I'd be dealing with zombies with lots of military experience. Not a comforting thought.

I think that's just the minimum entry requirement. For alcoholism, or for the military? (On my 3rd gin&tonic)

If I am correct in assuming that "small school" means "2-year community college," that sounds like a very good decision. There really is a vast difference between the career opportunities open to someone with a 4-year degree from a reputable college that people all over the country have heard of and those available to a graduate of a 2-year community college. Even moreso if you can handle the coursework to get a degree in a highly-marketable field like accounting. Edit: Today I worked. (Coincidentially, my job involves working with a lot of accountants.) The office was pretty dead, though, since it's a Friday afternoon before a 3-day weekend. I also bought tickets to go to see the Indiana Jones movie tonight with my fiancee.

Dexter Gordon -- I Was Doing All Right

You never mentioned it was +5 vs. drunken neutral I'm picturing more of a Staff of the Magi retributive strike. Sure, it might take me down too, but that's one bar full of miscreants who won't be hassling my family any more.

I don't think I would actually want to play pool with something worth that much. Nor would I. I'm a fair player, but if I'm playing, it probably means that I'm having a few beers as well. And once I've gotten a few drinks in me, I usually come to the opinion that swinging the stick around as if it were a drum major's baton is a damned entertaining way to pass the time during my opponent's turn. With the cheap sticks my dad keeps in his basement, that's all well and good. With a top-shelf model like that, it wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable.

Ah, Civil Procedure... This court denied a motion by Autodesk for a Summary Judgment. A party asking for Summary Judgment is essentially saying that even if everything that the other side alleges factually is true, he would still lose the case. Thus, the court should just declare the moving side the winner before we all waste time on a trial. By denying the SJ motion, the court is saying that it isn't impossible for Mr. Vernor to eventually prevail on the merits. Edit: On the other hand, in a case like this where the facts are not in dispute much, that summary judgment motion might have been Autodesk's best chance at preventing Vernor from winning outright. By giving credence to Vernor's legal argument, this could be a pretty strong sign that Vernor is going to win the case, and that the only major issue to be decided at trial is the amount of damages to be awarded. There still could be other factual questions or ancillary legal issues at play, though.

As I've said before, counting Michigan's Soviet-style primary would be insane. With just Florida in, Obama's lead is somewhere in the area of 250,000 votes. Link. MT & SD are small enough (both under 1M residents, a pretty small minority of whom will bother to vote in the Dem primary) that they won't matter much. Puerto Rico has almost 4M people, though, so it could move things if the turnout is decent. But even if Clinton takes the popular vote by a slim margin, Obama only needs about one-quarter of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates on his side to give him the nomination. And some of them have already promised to support whoever has the delegate lead (Nancy Pelosi is among this group). It's not over mathematically over yet, but it's close enough. If Obama is anywhere outside of prison when the Dems have their convention, he'll be the nominee. Are you saying that arrogance and narcissism aren't "traditionally American"??! Seriously, though, the "no regard for the prestige or safety of this nation" bit is taking it a little far. Partisan rancor has gotten pretty bad in this country if people seriously believe that politicians of their least-favorite party don't care about the safety of their countrymen. Heck, I think that many of the actions of the current administration have put Americans in unnecessary danger and dramatically damaged the nation's prestige, but I don't for a minute doubt that, when they made those decisions, they earnestly believed that they were acting in the best interests of the country as a whole.

Tom Waits -- 9th and Hennepin.

Jimmy Smith -- The Cat The hammond organ is such a damn cool instrument.

Meh. Piracy is the biggest threat to the continued viability of non-solitaire PC gaming. If my spending a couple of minutes jumping through some hoops when I install a game can have some positive effect in deterring pirates, it's a price I'm willing to play. I'm planning on picking up ME on PC. Seems like an entertaining title, and switching to a console would start far too many "who gets to use the big TV" fights with my fiancee.

Duke Ellington & His Orchestra (mid-'40s personnel) -- Concerto for Cootie

For my part: 1) Kid A. Most satisfying Radiohead album to listen to, front to back. 2) OK. Highpoints: Airbag, Exit Music*, No Surprises 3) Bends. Highpoints: Planet Telex, Fake Plastic Trees, Street Spirit 4-5) Hail and Rainbows. I think Hail is under-appreciated. There There and Scatterbrain* stand up with their best work. The rest is uneven, but has its pleasures. Rainbows is really good from Weird Fishes on. The first 3 tracks are kind of dull, though, and Reckoner has potential but just doesn't seem quite finished to me. All I Need* is really pretty close to a perfect love song. I'm leaving Amnesiac out because I haven't listened to it in a long time. I seem to have mislaid the CD before I got around to writing it on my new PC. Pablo has one very good track (Thinking About You) and one decent one (Stop Whispering). *In the conversation for my favorite track of theirs, along with about half of Kid A. Robert Johnson -- From 4 Until Late

"All I Need" is better. Springsteen-- Incident on 57th Street He tried sellin' his heart to the hard girls over on Easy Street But they sighed "Johnny it falls apart so easy and you know hearts these days are cheap"

R.E.M. -- (Don't Go Back To) Rockville I will be dogsitting in Rockville, MD this weekend. This song gets stuck in my head whenever I think of the town (which is frequently, since it's nearby and my sister-in-law-to-be lives there).

erm... What??!

You know, in Celsius that's really keeping the IQ standards low. Doh! Typical American arrogance (or is it ignorance?) forgetting that we are the only country still using the farenhiet scale. Don't even get me started on us not using ther metric system. Sorry everyone, I hang my head in shame! Wow. I think that we may have found a topic where you agree with Jimmy Carter! As to your Reason link, I'll criticize it in that it is overly alarmist and incorrectly conflates federal power with presidential power in many instances. It is certainly true that both have increased over the course of the 20th century, but one does not necessarily include the other. Just because decisions are being made by bureaucrats, legislators, courts, and agency experts, in Washington instead of by bureaucrats, legislators, courts, and agency experts in State Capitol, USA does not necessarily mean that the presidency is a step closer to totalitarianism. Things like the Federal Reserve Act, the wartime nationalization of railroads, and large parts of the New Deal-- all of which are cited as part of the growth of presidential power-- didn't give much, if any, new and lasting power to the presidency. It's a huge stretch to imply, as that essay does, that these reforms led directly to abuses of power like Watergate, the Church Committee findings, and Guantanamo Bay.

Radiohead -- The National Anthem Will be seeing them live about 6 hours from now.

I'd guess that he's planning to sleep off the New Years party. (Inauguration isn't until Jan. 20.)

Ohhh, that one takes me back. My high school band used to cover it. It was in E, if I remember right. Or maybe we just played it in E, ha. Cake - Is This Love? Ah yes, E. The key you get if you let the guitar player decide. At which point any horn players in the band throw their duct-tape-bound copies of The Real Book at him. All Es should be flat. (And if E's flat, Ah's flat too!) Liars -- It Fit When I Was a Kid