I won’t go on a diatribe here, but as much as I don’t want the world to go to pot I also believe that there are certain freedoms that I’m not willing to give up. Part of it is what I consider a necessity (me being a fairly large person), but another part is just ideology.
At any rate, this article from CNN Money caught my eye and is an interesting explanation of hybrid technology and how it should be applied.
Give it a read. It’s insightful.
I just don’t like cell phones. It’s not that I don’t like the idea of them, though.
I don’t have the “usual” problem with people having them, like people talking on them in public, or having them ring during a conversation. None of that bothers me, except in a movie theater. What bothers me is the direction of cell phone tech.
The last time I had a cell phone that I liked was five years ago. It was a tiny little phone from Nokia with a black & white screen. It was small, but not too small, and while it did just one thing, it did it well.
That phone was easy to carry around, easy to talk on, and easy to function. It was a phone – the word that I consider to be the operative part of the term “cell phone.”
These days, a cell phone is almost everything but a phone. The phone is just an afterthought at this point. Nowadays, they’re organizers, browsers, gaming machines, cameras, and music devices. I don’t want those things.
I want a damn phone.
Though I’ve been consumed with World of Warcraft these past two years, my first MMORPG love was actually City of Heroes. It’s not nearly as old school as Everquest or Ultimate Online, but it was my first foray into a world filled with other people. The most online play I had gotten into before that was the occasional Starcraft zerg-fest on battle.net.
I’ve recently gotten the urge to revisit my roots and picked up City of Villains for nineteen bucks. I get a month of free play time with that, so we’ll see if it still has what it takes to entangle me into its web. As I wait for 1.8GB of patches to download, I’m sitting here wondering what it is about CoH that makes me miss it. Would I miss Warcraft in the same way if I were to abandon it as I did CoH two years ago?
Blizzard got a lot of things right with World of Warcraft — over 5 million subscribers for one — but CoH definitely had some strong points that Blizz didn’t bother emulating. The foremost is the character creation system which is almost a mini-game all by itself in CoH. I could spend hours just crafting a character with their character generator. Warcraft’s generator will randomly generate all combinations in just a few clicks.
There’s something to be said for choosing your look before the game ever starts. Every time I start a new character in WoW, I choose carefully to make sure I choose a rare combination. My main is an Orc Female Rogue which is about as rare as it gets (aside from female dwarf anything). In City of Heroes I absolutely never have that problem. Being unique is easy — it’s almost impossible to be the same as someone else unless you’re aiming to do so.
After two years of World of Warcraft, I’ve gotten bored. The only way to even look cool is to raid or PVP for hours upon hours. I can play City of Heroes and start out looking as cool as I can imagine. I’ve gone back for some CoH and discovered all that I missed. Is it a better game? Hard to say. It is a good game, though, and after two years of playing a game where I’m just another rogue it’s refreshing to be something new.
Next up: The feeling of true power that CoH gives the player that WoW lacks.
As reported by Reuters today, a man from Mexico is having surgery to help him hopefully lose weight. The guy weighs 1200lbs, so a surgery is definitely in order. I’m not here to rag on the guy. He obviously has some sort of problem and I hope for his sake that they find a way to fix it.
No, what I’m here to discuss is this quote from the article: “I can’t walk. I can’t leave my bed,” the 40-year-old Uribe, who weighs the same as five baby elephants, said in a recent telephone interview. The bold is mine for emphasis.
Since when did we start measuring things by baby elephants? I wasn’t aware that the NIST had approved baby elephants for official measurement of weight. Not wanting to miss out on a changing trend, I decided to move quickly to help standardize this revolutionary weigh (pun intended) of measuring things.
According to Wikipedia a baby elephant weighs around 250lbs. If we calculate out the information given to us by Reuters, they surmised that a baby elephant weighs 240lbs (assuming equally distributed baby elephant weight). At any rate, for the sake of argument I’m going to set the Baby Elephant Standard to be 1BEs = 240lbs.That’s right, we’re going to call Baby Elephants BEs. 
It makes sense, right?
Anyway, this new way of measuring things should come in really handy. I’ve already figured out that if you’d like to order a 1lb burger at your local burger shop, you need only order a 0.004BEs burger. See, now isn’t that easier?
Curiously, a full grown large African Elephant weighs 58BEs (approximately). The most interesting statistic there is that an elephant grows to be 58 times its birth weight! A person of 0.83BEs only grows to be roughly 20 times his birth weight (and that’s if he’s a heavy baby).
This is a shout out to Dumbo and all of the other famous baby elephants out there for all the hard work they did in Baby Elephant awareness! If Dumbo hadn’t toiled so many years ago in the circus to make us all fall in love with him, the Baby Elephant standard of measurement may have never been born. Let’s just hope the humane society doesn’t get involved and shut the whole thing down.For the record, I in no way endorse the illegal trafficking of baby elephants. As a new pillar of our measurement system, we should treat them with the utmost respect and humility.
Congratulations to Winnie the Pooh for making it to the Hollywood walk of fame! This really brings great joy to my life. If a fat pooh bear that somehow gets fat on nothing but honey and has friends who are slightly crazy can make the hollywood walk of fame, then I just might have a chance. I can tell you this – I actually have hands that won’t soak up the concrete. How the hell did Winnie put his handprints in the star, anyway?
But while we’re on the subject, I really feel that Tigger got the shaft. That guy has bounced his tail off trying to get noticed for years and he doesn’t have a star on the walk of fame. Tigger even wrote his own song that everyone has grown to love over the years – and by love I mean hate. But seriously, the guy has worked really hard. He even got his own movie a few years back.
Also, who invited Eeyore?!!? Everyone knows that nobody likes Eeyore. No way he should be invited to such a big event. And where’s Piglet? Did Pooh and Piglet finally break up? Their weird cross-species homo-erotic relationship was doomed to failure I guess. Piglet was just a little too neurotic for Pooh anyway.
One character I can guarantee will never make the Walk of Fame is Rabbit. He doesn’t even have a name. I don’t know what the rules are on having a name for the Walk of Fame, but I’m pretty sure you have to have some recognizable name. It’s really a shame for Rabbit that his parents never named him.
All that aside, Pooh really deserve a hearty congratulations. He’s proven that there is no shame in Hollywood. Well actually Ben Affleck proved that, but Winnie the Pooh has to be a close second. I just hope we can find Pooh in the next Kevin Smith movie, because that would be nirvana.