In 2007, Al Gore and Irena Sendler were in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize. (Yes, there were others, but I’m just gonna focus on these two.) Al Gore won the peace prize for his work on Global Warming Awareness.

I didn’t know about Irena Sendler until I happened to catch a Glen Beck television show where he did a story on her life. Here’s her wikipedia entry.

Here is a quick note from the site:

Irena Sendler was a Polish Catholic social worker. During World War II she was an activist in the Polish Underground and the Żegota Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw. She helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them with false documents and sheltering them in individual and group children’s homes outside the Ghetto.

She would carry children under the noses of the Nazis by placing them in suitcases, under carriages of cars and the like. She risked her life constantly by rescuing children.

Yet she lost and Al Gore won.

So 20 years from now, when we truly KNOW how man effects the increase in the Earth’s temperature (IF WE DO AT ALL) I want you to look back and remember that Al Gore was apparently more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. In my opinion, the Prize has become worthless.

KK

Long time no post. Anyone still check this thing?

Well, I figured I’d come back from posting silence by putting out THIS little article. I <3 L. Ron Hubbard.

I realize that I move closer and closer to death with each Anti-Scientology post I put out there. I’m clearly a S.P.

KK

Another day, another no drop for the shield I am currently after. Yay… =(

I’m grouping with a few regular guild members when I get a phone call from a friend of mine. He tells me that someone has hacked into his account and that it has had it’s password changed. When he went to look at his email the account is registered too, he sees a “You have been suspended for 72 hours due to spamming” email. Needless to say he was a bit upset. He hasn’t played in ages and I wonder how long his account has been stolen. He email Blizzard and hopes to hear from them soon. I am not sure he really wants to play again, but he did want to see why his account had been stolen.

I didn’t do it! I swear!

You know, I get a righteous anger when it comes to people cheating or hacking into things. A bit hypocritical, but just the way I am. I have now re-friended my friend so I can see if the thief logs onto him again. GAHHHHH! Death to idiots!

KK

This whole HD Movie player format war sucks. It appears that the war is almost over and HD-DVD players are about to be obsolete. Sucks I say.

Apparently someone thought it would be humorous to rub salt in a wound by creating a pretty little Youtube video. The subtitles are NSFW, but the rest is fine… Unless you work with people who speak German.

KK

I’m sure that’s the title of many of my posts on the site. Kinda depressing, but I blame everyone else except my laziness. Muhahaha! That’s just the way it is.

We got a new puppy. She originally didn’t have a name. Then we gave her Ella. Amy didn’t care for that name much so we changed it to Bonnie… (JUST KIDDING CHRIS!) We changed it to Harper. Harper is living up to her name. We might as well have called her “Puppy that screams her head off constantly and poops on the floor when she has the opportunity. Fun times! She’s a real pain in the ass sometimes, but her cute factor is what is keeping her around. That and the $300 we paid for her. (Don’t get me started on where we bought her or how retarded we were in our decision.) Luckily she looks and acts healthy enough.

Richard (#1) spent the weekend with us. It was a blast playing Rockband and Mass Effect. It’s good to have a friend around. I miss it really. But he came down and we goofed all weekend. Luckily Amy was cool with it. His TV died just before Christmas so we decided to go looking at the new ones. (Looking = me talking him into buying one) We went around to many stores Saturday and found a pretty rocking Samsung TV, but were told to wait a day since new sales were happening on Sunday. We waited and noticed that the interest free deal went to 3 years and the TV we were looking at dropped 1k. After hemhawing, he decided to pick it up. I had my 4Runner in the parking lot just waiting to go. We picked it up (Poor Richard’s credit) and I carried it back to his place. It was an hour drive to his apartment. We cleaned an area to put the TV and hooked his XBOX 360 and PC up to the monitor.

Oh, I forgot to tell you the size of the monitor.

46″ baby. That thing was huge!

After he fired up the computer, I was so jealous. That beast is huge! I wanted to drive to BB and pick one up for myself, but I knew that would be a marriage deal breaker and swallowed my greed. When we unpacked the box, I put the protective bag over my head. I love the smell of Capitalism in the morning! When he was asked if he wanted to get the 4 year extended warranty, I told him YES FOR GOD’S SAKE GET IT!

Normally I am against the “extended” warranty idea, but since my recent issues with Westinghouse I told him it was worth it. Right before Christmas, the two component inputs died. Kinda died. They ended up being washed out and unusable. Luckily I was still in my first year of warranty for the TV so I contacted Westinghouse. They were cool about it asked me to send them a fax of the receipt. I went online and printed out my receipt and mailed it to them. They told me it’d take 24 hours for them to verify everything was ok and that they’d give me a RMA number as soon as they approved it. I waited a week waiting for them to get back to me. When they didn’t call, I called them back and was told “Oh, it’s been out there for a week. No one called you?” NO! I’m glad I didn’t wait.

That’s when I learned that I would have to pay for shipping to them. WTF is that? I went to UPS store (since I knew the people from my previous job) and they quoted me $400 for box and shipping! OMG! That’s 1/2 the cost of the TV! Amy called them back for me and they said that the original quote was done wrong and that it was $325 or something. They told me that if I had the box, it would cut @ $100 off the whole thing. I called around and found someone at BB that was nice enough to save a box for me. After shipping and boxing, it cost me around $250. That’s a freaking lot!

On TOP OF THAT, in all the moving, I somehow scratched the screen! It had little scratches all over it when I finally got it to UPS store. I was sick to my stomach. I figured I’d might as well send it off to see if they’d send me a new one instead of fixing my old one. So here I sit, fingers crossed hoping that they are able to fix it and send it back. The whole process was horrible.

As you can see, Playing $250 for a 4 year warranty that covers everything is MORE than worth the hassle.

Well, that’s the news.

Enjoy the hockey fight:

KK

Ultima Online.

I remember back in 1997 hearing about Ultima Online. (UO) I had only played Ultima VIII at the time so I really didn’t know much of the lore behind the series or how big a fanbase it had. Scottie and I decided to give the game a shot one afternoon and we were hooked ever since. I started learning it slowly, but then grew more and more attached. It was something new. It was social. It was addicting.

There were a lot of things I like about it. In a previous post, I believed I discussed why I liked it. I’m to lazy to reread it so I’m going to assume that I did. Instead of rehashing how I almost dropped out of college over that game, I would like to discuss why I think it was ahead of it’s time. Ok ok… I used to play it at my parent’s house all the time. Then I went to college and not much changed. I roomed with Scottie, but he really never was there. I rarely went to class because I’d stay up till 3 AM killing lizard men in the swamp above Trinsic. Man I loved that game.

UO had amazing possibilities. You could start at 50% of 2 skills if you wanted. (Which were always magery and magic resist because it was such a bitch to improve.) From there you could decide what you wanted the char to become. During the char creation screen, you chose your name, strength-dex-int, starting skills at 50% and appearance. That was all. There were no “classes”. You could literally become whatever you wanted to be. The more you used a certain skill, the better you became. This was pretty much how the MMO genre was started.

Starting with EQ, you became pigeon holed into selecting a class. I started as a wizard and more times then now, I wished I was something a little more solo friendly. Like WoW, when you started a character with a class you were always that class. It pretty much sucked if you leveled a class up only to find at level 20/30/40/50 it really wasn’t for you. To remedy this, you would have to create an alt and try again to find something with your gaming style. THIS SUCKS PEOPLE. I don’t care how visually pretty the game is, when you limit your players to something they don’t want to be, you are hurting your game. People get tired of alts. People get freaking tired of taking this object to this person over and over and over and over again. I’d rather lick yank my toenails out with a vise grip! Where is the fun in doing that?!? Why did mainstream MMOs get away from the UO model?

UO also created Player Housing. It was great! It wasn’t perfect, but it felt good to have something you could call your own. The drawbacks were that 1) people could steal your keys to your house, 2) Players placed houses throughout the world (Imagine Barrens filled with houses. This placing houses was a bitter sweet thing. Great because it changed the landscape and felt like you were affecting a game and could claim a little property as your own.) Bad because it cluttered the land.

Where is player housing now? Why do games today limit or not allow them?

I was talking to a friend last night about how UO was the best MMO to date because of the above reasons. He believed that EQ2 and WoW were close behind. His other complaint with UO was the “need” to macro skills up. Yes it sucked, but even with the need of it in the game, it was still worth it since you were able to be so creative with the direction you pushed your character.

Trying to go back to UO now would be hard sadly. The game has changed over the years and isn’t as hardcore as it used to be. The graphics or horrid and that also turns the graphic WHORES off. (Isn’t it amazing how people will turn their noses up at a game if it doesn’t look good? Even if it is a great game, some people can’t get past the looks and that is sad. I’d much rather play a graphicly dated game then one that looks gorgeous but doesn’t really bring anything new to the table.

The good news about UO is there are plenty of Player run shards out there. These shards go from “old school” to ones that have completely new content never seen before. You don’t have to pay for a thing to play and that is a good thing. Feel free to check it out. You just may find something you like.

I guess that’s all for now. I have to start getting to work now so I’ll leave it at that. I hope you all have a great week and don’t get anally molested by someone named “the Carver”. (Nip/Tuck for the fucking win baby!)

~KK

I love my Battle Ground twink. Sadly it hasn’t seen the light of day lately due to work, puppy and other things. (*cough* Rainbow Six: Vegas *cough*)

But I’m confused on something. If I remember they fixed the pants buff that allowed your player to get +30 stamina. They seem to constantly be working on ways to limit or kill the ability of players to make PVP twinks. So here are my questions:

1) Did they make the change to the enchanting of pants for twinks?

2) So anyone wanting to create a twink from this point on will automatically start with -30 stamina compared to all the old twinks?

3) If that is the case, how is that even remotely fair? As much as it sucks, I would rather them unbuff EVERYONE’S pants instead of making it so that you have this wide gap of haves and have-nots.

I guess my point is, the reason I LOVED twinking out my character and didn’t feel bad about it was because anyone who was willing to put in the effort could do the same thing with their character. Unlike endgame PVP, everyone could get up to the same level if they spent enough time working on it. Yes, I know that everyone could get to the same level at endgame, but it would require HOURS of raiding and time that people just don’t have. Twinking a 19 was at least feasible.

Since they are continuing to make twinking 19s harder and harder, what exactly happens to those of us who have insanely powerful characters? It doesn’t appear that people are backwards nerfing these objects. If I wanted to start a 19 twink rogue now, I would not be able to compete with those who have old school twinks. And if anything, THAT isn’t fair.

I say open the flood gates on twinking in PVP (level 19). They have no put in place a system that divides the twinks from non-twinks so people should be able to play without getting WTFOWND! Am I right or wrong on this one?

KK