Kill Ten Rats

You know, sometimes it’s funny how small of a world the internet is.

Every night at midnight I pull up Woot and see what they have, hoping for the BoC to magically appear. After checking Woot, I check its two spawns, Sellout.woot and Shirt.woot. Shirt.woot has interesting designs, most of which are pop-culture related. Each week, a plethora of designs are submitted, many humorous in their own way. Tomorrow (tonight, depending on your time orientation), is likely to feature a shirt that says “The cake is a liar.”, which I didn’t get at all. After researching this, I find out this is from the popular Portal game for the xBox360, which I don’t own so have never played. Reading more about this leads me to find out that the ending song is quite funny (first link is it in its entirety, second is just the words and music), which is sung by a woman with a very haunting voice. A smidge more investigation leads me to find out that it was written by the amazingly talented Jonathan Coulton, whom I first discovered from a funny WoW video link a fellow guildmate forwarded. And it comes full circle. Kinda like Portal, I guess. Amazing, isn’t it?

Tobold ponders what LucasArts-Bioware might be making other that KOTOR Online.

Hey, what about Monkey Island Online, the only MMORPG where the combat is based on a parser of insults typed into chat?

Don’t be silly. It will be called Return to Monkey Island. Please do not call it Monkey Island 5. You don’t think they were letting that franchise languish, did you?

It will be the most difficult MMO to date, with no expectation that any player will ever hit the level cap. If you do, Ron Gilbert himself will call you to tell you the Secret. As a security measure, it is not being put in the game’s code.

: Zubon

The new Katamari game is only for the Xbox 360? Come on, I already bought a Playstation 2 almost exclusively for the purpose of playing the original. Could you at least port it to the Wii, we have one of those. Please?

My wife is secretly happy that she will not need to listen to the songs in the new one. What dear? Oh, not secretly.

: Zubon

You may recall hearing that there is a wage gap, usually something around 27 cents on the dollar. That is the difference between median wage earners, not men and women with comparable qualifications working comparable jobs. Once you take into account things like education, experience, hours worked, and years of continuous work, the gap drops to a few cents (depending on your regression). The remaining difference is explained by the fact that men are stupid.

Men are more likely to sacrifice quality of life for a higher wage. Men take jobs with longer hours, in worse working conditions, and with a higher risk of being killed. Women tend to prefer flexible scheduling, comfort and convenience in the workplace, and fringe benefits. Ask 20 men and 20 women how much they would need to get paid for (1) an additional 5% risk of getting maimed this year and (2) to work without air conditioning, and see which sex comes back with the lower dollar amount. If you said, “My job doesn’t have air conditioning,” you are probably male, and you took the money.

Note which of those things above are taxable. Just one: money. You paid for your new video card with after-tax dollars; the hours you spent earning those, your female equivalent was already logged in and leveling her warlock, tax-free. She found some crafting components while leveling, which you bought at the auction house with gold you bought from a farmer. She won twice before you started playing.

Men are helpless slaves to the big number, the shiny object. You are grinding for hours until you cannot see, while your wife has a good time laughing with people at the tavern. When the raid starts, they will take her over you because she plays a healer. She won twice again.

: Zubon

I need to work around programmers or engineers so that I am no longer unofficial tech support for the office. I need co-workers who understand the power of right-clicking. I spent a while today explaining that you can have multiple folders with the same name, and if you save a file in the folder on your C: drive, it will not be in the folder of the same name on the shared drive. No, that is not a conflict between Word and your e-mail program.

At my next job, I am telling them I don’t know how to type. “The computer has speakers, why won’t it respond to voice commands?”

: Zubon