I live again!

The first night of summer classes went okay. I’m taking Pre-trial Criminal Procedure and Patent/Trade Secret Law. My evenings/afternoons for the next 2 months are going to be full of law and headaches.

And weekends and daytimes too (for the next week and a half until the law review write-on ends).

Three more of my Diablo III hardcore characters have died; another barbarian (who made it to level 51 and nearly finished nightmare before I fat fingered my way to death) and two demon hunters (one at 48 in Act III nightmare to a pack of annoying elite monsters, and another at 24 in Act III normal to a pack of annoying monsters’ exploding corpses). Somehow I’ve managed to turn into a mainly hardcore player; in Diablo II, I strictly played softcore. I think it’s the shared stash and gold; banking good items is so much easier when you don’t have to switch between characters or get a mod (to share stashes between offline characters). Thanks to my disproportionate time spent on hardcore mode, I’ve now got 6x the gold there that I do on softcore.

I didn’t post for Memorial Day. I’d like to say that was by design, but it wasn’t. Borepatch has a great post, and Mark Tatulli’s Liō strip for yesterday was pretty good, as well.

Swiss Army Knife maker Victorinox is making a bunch of Upotte-inspired knives (Upotte, if you recall, Weer’d mentioned a few months ago, and is about a bunch of anthropomorphized rifles attending a school for girls. Really.).

Ys Origin comes out on Steam this week for $20. Once things calm down, I may have to get it (assuming I don’t just wait for one of those inevitable Steam sales).

For some reason, the Army is banning polymer magazines. Which seems crazy, since they’re light and awesome. All of my mags are polymer!

Namco is teasing the next Tales of game. No subtitle yet, just some vague question about whether or not you’re prepared to break the world on behalf of a girl.

Ever wonder what those electronics instructions actually say?

The Penny Arcade Report takes a look at XCOM: Enemy Unknown (AKA the good upcoming XCOM game). I’m seriously going to have to give up sleep for all these games, what with law school. Especially once this comes out.

This guy has NFI how taxation, social security, or anything else works. Especially in a country with demographic decline issues.

And now that my browser is relatively empty, I can actually tell what webpages I’m reading.

Your help with this episode of Tab Clearing for Diablo III Addicts™ has been greatly appreciated, dear reader.

Today in Diablo III news…

We learn that Blizzard really has no clue. At all. Have they never played another game before, or what? This smacks of more MMOification (making it more of a strict numbers game, like WoW).

Since my last post, I’ve lost a hardcore Barbarian in Act I nightmare, and gotten a hardcore demon hunter to Act II nightmare. My softcore barbarian is in Act I hell, and I haven’t really played any more with my monk or wizard (let alone started a witch doctor).

In non-D3 news, I’ve been busy too; summer classes start on Tuesday, and the write-on competition for the law review started this past Monday (and goes until the end of the first week in June, I believe). So unfortunately, it’s not all demons and clicking here.

Especially since I’ve been dealing with the car service people trying to get my headlights squared away. One or the other will randomly shut off while I’m driving, and that’s not exactly helpful (one time both shut off, and wasn’t that exciting). Turning them off and on again fixes it, but usually only temporarily (and I’m not the only one to experience this problem (yeah, I drive a Prius; the price was right, and thanks to the wonders of ethanol-free gasoline, I regularly get 48-50 mpg (I would classy it up with an NRA sticker or something, just to screw with people’s heads, but I’m paranoid (and here I go, overusing parentheses again; like semicolons, they’re a hell of a drug)))).

I’ve been able to avoid the headlight issue for a while by not driving at night, but since my summer classes are all in the evenings, I decided I’d put it off long enough.

I should be back to a more regular posting and tweeting schedule in the coming weeks, but for now, I’ll probably still be intermittent (Oh, I have some D3 screenshots to post, too, but that will wait for another day. Maybe I’ll schedule daily D3 screenshots or something).

Can’t sleep. Must keep clicking.

Finals wrapped up Thursday morning, and to celebrate, I may be playing Diablo III to excess.

By which I mean I have a Barbarian and a Monk in Nightmare (they finished Act IV Normal at level 32 and 31, respectively; the barb is in Act II NM and the monk in Act I). For both characters, I strictly played single player (though I did take advantage of the shared stash to keep my monk in ridiculously good equipment my barb kept finding). I’ve played a bit of multiplayer with a wizard, but not a whole lot. It seemed to go pretty well, too.

The game is pretty good (obviously, if I’ve played it that much). The plot is okay (the twists seemed pretty obvious, though), but the gameplay is awesome.

Given my rant on Wednesday, I thought I should point out that this endless complaining from the interwebs about a sequel to a beloved Blizzard franchise is nothing new: people hated Diablo II at launch (H/T CarbonatedFalcon).

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.

Update: Also, NM is far harder than normal. Elite packs are rough, champions and unique monsters have multiple damage modifications, and death is inevitable. Especially if you get a pack with, say, molten and plagued, so the entire ground around all the enemies turns into one giant pool of “stand here for more than 1 second and you’re dead.”

It makes it a bit tough to melee them when that happens…

Good old Blizzard.

They obviously didn’t learn anything from their 7 1/2 years running a MMO, because the Diablo III launch has been terrible.

Just terrible.

The servers were down for maintenance for a few hours earlier today (on launch day), and now I’ve been disconnected (and can’t reconnect) because of an error that claims battle.net itself is down.

And all I want to do is play the single player game!

Once I’ve gone through the story once or twice, I’ll start doing multiplayer games, but for now, single player is all I care about.

And thanks to their retarded internet connection required DRM, I can’t.

Oh, if the servers ever do come back up, and you want to talk/play, my battletag is DrWyrm#1924.

The Avengers

I saw it the other day (after my Criminal Law final, I needed a pick-me-up), and it’s as good as everyone else has been saying (and the numbers don’t lie; $800 million worldwide so far is insane).

Tony Stark is great, as usual (he had the best one-liners (though Thor had a pretty good one about Loki early on)), but I was especially surprised with how well Whedon managed to make the Hulk an actual character (while he was enraged and green, I mean).

My only real complaint was that the fight between Thor and Iron Man was so dark. It probably looked fine in regular vision, but because of the 3D glasses, it was really hard to see much of anything in that scene.

We’ve come a long way from the superhero movies of the 90s. A very long way.

Okay, back to studying.

When will the racism stop?

I just got an email regarding an “incident” involving students at my university (though apparently not at the law school):

About 2:30 p.m. today, May 8, an incident involving three UALR students occurred at the intersection of Anna and Lucie Streets, two blocks east of Fair Park Boulevard.  The students were approached and robbed by a black male armed with a handgun, wearing a dark gray hoodie, medium build, about 5’8.”

The suspect took the victims’ property and fled the scene on a motorcycle. If you have any information regarding the incident, call the Little Rock Police Department at 371-4660.

[Emphasis added]

Have we learned nothing from the Martin-Zimmerman incident at all?

Just cause a black guy is wearing a hoodie, they go and assume he’s a criminal!

Oh, wait. Maybe it was the armed robbery.

We may never know!

More tabs than a Coca-cola plant playing catch-up with Diet Rite

If you want to watch a sport with the pace, play, and violence of basketball, watch basketball. Don’t make football over into basketball lite. I tend to think the clash of football gets us right in the part of our collective psyche that makes us prefer the clash of heavy infantry to lone warriors dueling, but maybe I’ve just read too much Victor Davis Hanson.*

Of course the FBI wants backdoors into social networks. It’s the FBI!

Buying experiences is a good way to find happiness? No wonder the video game industry is kicking the shit out of Hollywood.

Speaking of video games, Microsoft has decided to sell their Xbox 360 & Kinect via the cellphone model. They’re not doing it right, though; if they were serious about this, they’d screw the customer even more.

The second series of the BBC’s Sherlock started airing on PBS Sunday (with episodes 2 and 3 to follow next Sunday and the one after). If you missed it, you can stream it here. (If you missed the first series, those three episodes are on Netflix.)

I only played part of the first Assassin’s Creed, and skipped the trilogy set in Renaissance Italy, but I might have to pick up Assassin’s Creed III. With that cover art, and the news that the people you’re sent to kill all died when you were sent to kill them in real life (that doesn’t parse quite right, but you probably know what I meant), it looks amazing. Especially in this teaser video:

*I played football in junior high and high school on the offensive line, so that might color my opinion a bit. I think it just means I’m more right, though. For more, see Open Blogger’s post at Ace of Spades.

No, I’m not dead.

Yet, at least. In two more weeks, I’ll probably wish I were.

I’ve been busy studying; finals start Monday, and since they’re the whole grade for each course, there’s a bit of pressure.

Posting and tweeting will be light for the next week or two, until things have calmed back down.

It’s May 1…

And Victims of Communism Day again.