In the end we're all somebodies fucking bitch. We grow and we have achievements and we're the best at something, yay you're the tastiest turd in the shithole, whoop-de-fucking-do. Mercy, kindness, justice, it's as likely as giving a  pity-shag to your own lonely widow. We live in a story, written by a drunken cocktard on bad acid. Life sucks the life out of us  like a fifty-rand whore and we make it seem allright by covering our own memories in dumbass window-dressing. In the end the best you can hope for is that the dickhead who ravages your ass might feel kind enough to give you a reach-around. Happiness is as fleeting as an orgasm and as hard-to-find as a conservative virgin's clit. The only truth is love, and the only joy is getting fucked well by somebody who loves you enough to  give a flying fuck about fucking you the way you want to be fucked. Whether she's your goddess or your little slut, she's all there is. Find her, worship her, devour her pussy a hundred times a day and be grateful every time you get to make her cum because life is as short as you deep-down suspect your dick to be and love is as rare as an all-virgin orgy and slightly harder to make work. But it's worth it, it's the only thing that is, the only fucking thing we get. Sex and drugs and rock and roll and love. Because love is the only thing that's really honest, even if we so often lie about it, the real thing is the only thing we cannot lie to ourselves about. You can fake an orgasm, but you cannot fake the reason why you faked it.  Because it's the only honesty we have… love is the dirtiest word of all. 

Now it's probably a good idea to state my biasses upfront for this one. The original Diablo was the first RPG I played on a computer, and it instilled in me a lifelong love for the genre. When Diablo II came out, I loved every second of it – even though I missed the old Wizard class I had enjoyed back in Diablo I. 

Now nearly 12 years later, I am playing Diablo III. This second sequel in the series is thoroughly modernized in it's technology. The graphics look spectacular and the new classes are exciting and different from most other games. Blizzard also clearly learned from their lessons with WoW and the RealID battle.net integration is smooth and makes setting up multiplayer games easier than it ever was in the past.

That said, for all it's modernizing the game remains utterly true to it's roots. This has annoyed some people – especially avid WoW players who are used to playing keyboard piano to max out their usage of a rotation handpicked from among thousands of options. Diablo is much simpler in it's core gameplay – you use your left-click to build up a resource and your right-click to spend it via powerful moves. Generally this means you're using a selection of two moves for the whole fight. Adding a bit of complexity to the mix at least is four more moves you access via the numbered buttons on the keyboard, generally these are situational or defensive spells however.  The game is isometric and the mouse is used for motion rather than for controlling the look. 

The game is also built around a concept of feeling overpowered that hankers back to the FPS games of the original game's era (like Quake) which puts you into an almost superhuman position in terms of fighting. No wow player would survive an onslaught by 10 or more simultaneous on-level mobs. In Diablo III that is standard fare – you kill, a lot, fast. 

So for younger gamers or those who got into gaming in the post-2000 era Diablo III may feel a bit dated. Unlike most RPG's you don't play a "your character as class X" but rather a specific member of class X living a specific history (in previous versions you could not even choose your gender as it was predefined by the class you chose).

If you were a fan of the original games though then this game is a truly fun addition to the stable. Either way I personally am glad that it didn't adjust the gameplay to more WoW-like or Skyrim-like approaches, theorycrafting and carefully constructed rotations are one kind of fun and that's well provided for, Diablo however is about being the lone hero standing against and overpowering onslaught and murdering your way through it like a god of death.

So perhaps both the biggest pro and con of the game is the same thing: it remains very true to it's roots. If you remember those roots fondly and want to relive them with modern graphics and intense storytelling (which right back in Diablo I was already a staple feature of the game) then you will love it. If you are not, then like many of my friends from the WoW world you may find it lacking and simplistic.

I have been running it on two machines my brand new overpowered Core I5 with an Nvidia GTX550 card and Caryn's machine (my former box) running an AMD Quad Core 2700 with a much older Nvidia card in it. The nice thing is that the latter runs it very well. The biggest slowdown you see is in walking speed. This seems to me to have been a calculated decision by blizzard. By slowing down the walking speed they can render and compute to the slower computer without impacting on actual gameplay – there is no responsiveness problem making the fights unfairly hard (now ask any WoW player what laggy network connections do to them in that game).  The biggest downside of this trade-off is that in co-op games players don't walk at the same speed so I find myself having to wait for her to catch up all the time.

All in all Diablo III is well worth the price (which is to be fair, not quite at the top-end of what games cost these days), and an incredibly fun experience. This is not the deeply involved strategic role-playing of games like WoW or NWN. This is pure unadulterated slaughtering fun, with a nice role-playing character growth factor that scales you up to fighting ever tougher hordes of monsters. 

One other core difference is that unlike World of Warcraft teaming up with other players is not nearly as effective at downing difficult enemies. In Diablo if another player joins your party, the enemies get tougher in response. There are still the advantages to be gained from mixing tactics of course but that's not as big a factor. Loot is per-person and not shared and highly random – again true to the original game.  There's no losing the roll in this game. On the other hand, if your friend gets an epic drop you want more, you have to ask them trade it to you.

Diablo I was still however primarily meant for solo-play, and it's solo-game was retained through both the sequels. While the game has powerful co-op facilities and make it easy to join in with others there is no need to do so. You are ultimately living your own story as the hero of sanctuary,  and this gives it one of the most complete and powerful single-player storylines in the gaming enterprize – part of the reason for the enduring popularity of the game with many people still playing Diablo 1 today and Diablo II still being sold regularly. 

All in all I would give this game an 8 out of 10. It's a brilliant game, and among the best of the year, the two lost points are for not having a console version (more and more people simply don't invest in gaming pc's) and as a nod in the direction of those who are used to more modern gaming styles and simply will not find the Diablo approach to RPG's satisfying. Those who came from there into the modern style should have no problem loving and enjoying both for what they are however.

Notes: My country does not (yet) have access to the real-money Auction House so this review ignores that aspect as I cannot comment on it.

Diablo3 shipped in a state of almost working in wine. Wine however needs some patches to install and run the game. For Ubuntu a PPA exists with packages but it only has builds for precise which are not installable on oneiric-level distros such as Mint and Kubuntu.  So I set about to build my own patched wine -and while I was at it, to build a proper debian package. I used the Ubuntu Wine team's PPA as a baseline, and added the needed patches and built the package. 

With this wine package I am successfully playing Diablo3 on Linux Mint. Pretty impressive for a game that only launched less than 24 hours ago. To run the game first install the package (link at the bottom of the post).  Please note that I didn't write any of the patches here, I just integrated them with a debian package.

Then you need to run: winetricks vcrun2008

Now you can install the game. If you are using the online installer, it should just work (I haven't fully tested this). If you are using the DVD installer there is an extra step. Insert your DVD and open it to browse, then open a terminal and run:

sudo mount -o remount,unhide /media/D3C1.0.0

cd /media/D3C1.0.0

wine "Diablo III Setup.exe"

The installer should now run and you can install the game. The included wine also has a patch to fix problems with screen switching and selection. The game seems to work perfectly for me.

UPDATE:

The package conflicts with wine1.3 as provided by LinuxMint native. If you get errors on this regard remove the wine and wine1.3 packages first.

sudo apt-get remove wine wine1.3

This may remove some packages that depend on wine (such as playonlinux), so make a note of them, you'll be able to reinstall them after you install the download.

Downloads:

Package

Source code changes

Inspired by Pinkhairgirls blogpost today I felt I should share the method me and Caryn use to keep our household budget in the green and control our spending. Many years ago my grandmother taught me that to do a budget you draw two columns, in one you write your expenses and in the other your income, then you add them up and compare them.

All fair and well but rather limited. It didn't allow for easy projections (if you're saving for something – it doesn't allow you to see how much you will have saved in six months for example). It also doesn't easily deal with two other of life's major realities:

-Sometimes there are unplanned expenses you could not know about, you need to keep track of them so that you can see their impact in the following months

-Sometimes you are forced to spend more than you planned, and other times you are able to spend less-  you need an easy way to keep track of these differences.

So I started to set up a spreadsheet that would meet my needs. It evolved over several years into it's current form. The spreadsheet as it stands has 3 columns for each expense: the actual money spent, the planned expenditure and the difference. It also splits expenses into regular and once-off expenses and provides a series of formulas to allow for extensive forward projections. Each month is a  tab in the sheet. 

I took my own and stripped out all my personal budget data, then populated it with a very simple set of sample data (just enough to show how it is used – but easy to remove/replace). Now I would like to share it with others. Please feel free to make use of it, adapt it or improve it under a share-alike kind of concept. 

If you would like to have a look at it, you can download a copy here.

The hollow cow was made from Iron. It's nostrils open holes with a special shape. The convicted criminal would be locked inside, and then the bonfire under it would be lit. As the screams of the victim coming through the nostrils got reshaped into something akin to a cow's moo, the crowd would laugh and cheer.

This form of "just execution" sounds like a barbarian custom from a long time ago. The barbarians who practiced it was the empire of great Britain, and the long ago was barely 200 years. It used to be a common part of Guy Fawkes celebrations.  Today – practically every person you meet would consider it an unacceptably cruel atrocity. 

Less than a hundred years later the last place on earth which condoned legalized slavery was the Southern states of the USA – to the point where they would attempt to secede from the union to maintain those laws – leading to the American civil war. A decade later the British (again) would kill twenty-seven-thousand women and children in an effort to sway a war their way. Half a century later the holocaust would become one of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed, and lead to the invention of the term "crimes against humanity".

Today virtually every person you meet would consider these things atrocities – rightfully illegal and exposed by the media as scandals when they happen. Relatively mild (by comparison) prisoner torture in Iraq cost many enlisted soldiers their careers. Almost nobody thinks this sort of action is acceptable anymore, but our great grandparents and their great grandparents had participated in it with glee and never a twitch of conscience.

Even within religion such change is obvious. Christian faith embraced slavery until just a few centuries ago, Tibettan Budhists also did until about 60 years ago – and now the leader of that faith roundly denounces all forms of slavery. 

I point these things out because we have a tendency to stare ourselves too blind against our current problems. Of course it's important to be aware of those problems so that something may be done about them – but we have a tendency to see the problems as insoluble, to lose hope and then do nothing – and this is stupid if you consider history.

History shows that we have become more and more civilized at an ever advancing pace. With each generation, humans have become more humane. Contrary to frequently stated concepts of how people will always be horrible, we are in fact a lot less horrible than we were even recently – and we are getting better. We are still advancing into rapid progress. Our philosophies and our cultures are becoming more tolerant, more open and more accepting.

It's a slow process by one measure, but it's amazingly rapid when we consider how far we've really come in such a short time. So my message to my readers today is: do not lose hope – keep up the good work. We can leave our children a better world than we got. A world which is more equal, more loving, more peaceful and more tolerant. They can live in a world with less suffering than the one we got. We must remain diligent – as the diligence of visionaries in previous generations gave us a world better than they had lived in.

Contrary to what we so often hear, we are not in fact living in one of the worst times in history – that's just romanticism from the older generations who have forgotten how much worse their childhoods actually were. Even if we took some steps backward in the last decade (so many American wars…) we took more steps forward than back. Even if there are powerful forces aiming to preserve the status quo for their own benefit there are more subtle shifts happening in our own minds. Minds evolve much faster than bodies do. We are becoming more civilized, more humane all the time.

Sometimes it's good to look back and see how far we've come, to recognize how much progress we've made. Because that's our biggest weapon against those who aim to preserve the status quo with their constant rhetoric: "it was always this bad and it always will be" – intended to make us fatalistically give up. It's a lie. Things were much worse quite recently, they will be much better quite soon if we allow ourselves to work for it.

Just imagine, what we can be in another century or two ?

This blog post is unique, not in being written from my android tablet – I’ve done that before – but in the fact that the writing is not even slightly annoying because of the difficulty of typing anything long on a touch screen. The reason being I’m not using the touch screen to type. I am typing this on a bluetooth keyboard dock which Caryn bought me for my 32nd birthday, which is of course today.

The little keyboard is no wider than the tablet and I can easily hold both in the same pouch I always carried the tablet in  so my mobility isn’t harmed but for writing longer things when mobile it’s a major blessing. I’d been wanting one ever since I got the tablet back in December so my beloved certainly got me exactly what I wanted for this year.
Big mwahs to you Caryn.

I suspect this won’t be the last blogpost I write with the combination of these technologies either.

Happy birthday to me.

The world is flat and travels through the void on the back of four elephants who, in turn, stand on the back of giant sky turtle: Great A'Tuin. And next to the circle sea lies the greatest of cities. Ankh-Morpork. For many years now it has flourished under the mostly benevolent dictatorship of Lord Vetinari, a politician who learned the fine art of really knowing everything that happens in the city, and keeping all it's disparate forces and power-blocs in check so that nobody got powerful enough to upset the running of the city.

And now… Vetinari has gone missing.

It's of course no secret that I'm a huge fan of Pratchett's work, so when I spotted the boardgame in the shop I had to try it out. So the question becomes: did it live up to the high expectations it created ? Especially for a long time well-versed reader ? It delivers. 

As a game it's among the best I've played. The core dynamic is an adaptation of a system of conquest familiar to anybody who has played RISK or Smallworlds but it isn't quite as drawn-out as RISK and there is much less actual bloodshed (by which I mean getting another minion out of a zone is trickier). In a large part because it's not a pure board game like either of those but really a card game with a board-aspect. More-over tactically it gets much more complex. Many games boast not having a single winning-strategy but Ankh-Morpork boasts not having a single winning goal. Each player takes on the character of one of Ankh Morporks powerful people, working behnd the shadows through their  minions to wrest control of the city to themselves – but what constitutes a victory isn't the same for everybody. Vettinari is there (suggesting his disappearance was engineered by himself), and all he has to do is get minions in enough zones (his spies). Several of the old-time lords are there, and for any of them to win they need to establish clear control over a certain number of zones (and as you progress in zones and build in them you gain powers that expand the game further). Chrysophrase the troll is there, ready to win it for the Breccia by merely making it enough money,  still other characters win by managing to dump the city into riots and chaos and then there is Commander Vimes. Vimes wins only by preventing anybody else from doing so. By keeping all the forces in check – and the city stable – in short, to win if you drew his card – all you have to do is get through all the play-cards without anybody else managing to win.

That's a lot to digest and it's just one aspect of a fascinatingly complex game with nonetheless a simplistic enough gameplay that it doesn't get in the way of having fun. If you are not a fan (or familiar) with the books the game will lose some of it's depth, unlike most card-games the cards do not tell you anything about the characters or organisations represented on them – but their actions and abilities are intimately based on what those concepts imply within the books. So if you're not familiar with the books, you may not really appreciate why playing Nobby Nobbs lets a player take 2 dollars from every other player for example – but the game will I believe still be enjoyable on a mechanical level (after all – many are) – while those of us who do like the books get an entire additional level of humour and enjoyment from the way the characters and organisations influence the outcomes around them.

At the gaming store Ankh-Morpork is among the more expensive games available but genuinely worth it in my opinion. It will be a fun game for any group of 2 to 4 players to try out for a table-top play (and likely to be replayed many times) and if you are also a fan of the books then the fun factor increases many times over.

While browsing this mosaic of the milky way galaxy,  I came across this. 

For the record, not being an astronomer – I have no idea if this is, in fact, a nebula – but it definitely is a wizard.

My memory not being what it once was with dates anymore (too many significant events in my life to remember exactly where each of them fits into the others?) I went on IMDB before writing this to double-check the release year of the original American Pie. 1999. More than a decade ago – considering the plot of the fourth sequel which comes out in South Africa today is their ten year reunion, they obviously aren't following the timeline accurately.

1999 Was an interesting year for me, my first year out of high school – so I could still really related to the characters of the film and their quest (though for me it would not happen until rather later). It's actually interesting to think of how this movie fits into history. For many of us – it's a comedy classic. For many others – it was a terrible film. Like most movies whom anybody consider classic, it spawned sequels. How many depends on how you count. If you want at least some of the original cast (beyond Eugene Levy) then that is only American Pie 2 and American Pie – The Wedding. 

The naughties as a decade however wasn't one where American Pie fitted any more. In a very real way, American Pie was a last goodbye from the liberal days of the 90's. The naughties after 9/11 saw a massive rebirth of extreme conservatism which the movies of the generation would not be able to ignore. There is not a single point anywhere in American Pie where the morality of unmarried sex is questioned-  every single teen-sex comedy since then has been unable to avoid that question. In Easy-A it's a central plot point. Even "The 18 year old virgin" can't help but at least talk about it.

The America of American pie didn't exist anymore. Which is ironic since my own association with it's characters had suggested that the theme was almost universal. Teenage boys on a different continent could relate to their struggles and thoughts. It was never so much American Pie as Western Pie.  Yet just 2 years later, the world changed in a way that left it out of place.

Two more movies followed in the franchise (The Naked Mile and Beta House) but the only original character in them was Levy as Jim's dad, and like most fans of the original I never even bothered to see them. Perhaps part of why they failed was their inability to adjust to the changing cultural world in which America now found itself. Young people and sex had become a political hot topic in which morality was a constant question – with none of the sequels acknowledging this, they were unable to speak to audiences living it.

American Pie – The Wedding was certainly a bit better than American Pie 2 which only barely escaped being a straight-to-video release considering just how unimaginative it was in many was. Though it followed the storyline on in interesting ways… somehow it was just too predictable to be funny. 

American Pie – Reunion then, picks up the original characters ten years later when they meet up again at their high school reunion (in case you were wondering, I missed my own 10 year reunion), and considering my low opinion of the previous sequels… why then do I have tickets to see it ? Because something about the long gap in between holds promise. Of a sequel that can do justice to characters I had once really liked getting to know, characters I had seen something of myself in. Because they are now, in the same place that their fans of then are – they may have something to say to us.

And that is exactly what at least some reviewers say they achieved. Others suggest the film is just tiredly rehashing the same old gags and formula. Who is right ? I guess I'll have my own opinion after the show tonight. But I would like to think that perhaps, the difference between the good and the bad reviews… is whether they were original fans of the original film in it's original context. Could it be that as we are out of the naughties that the 10's (what the hell do we call this decade anyway ?) with it's black American president has a new place for American Pie's whimsical sex-jokes ? That perhaps this decade will be a return to the joyful optimism of that last decade of the previous century ? It would be nice, wouldn't it ? Make no mistake, the conservatives are fighting very hard to prevent that from happening… but they may not have won yet. This may yet turn out to be a good decade. 

UPDATE: After seeing the movie. All I will say is: they totally nailed it.

Wow, hard to believe how long it's been since I've written poetry. Must be months, could be approaching a year. Strange how things come and go in your life eh. But I wrote today, after the first time in ages I did something else I really love – pop on my headphones, cranked the sound and just lost myself in music.

The style reminds me of some of my earliest works – the things you find in "Batteries not included" but the content I would like to think is more mature and the writing and wordplay improved. After-all it is a now nearly 15 years since the oldest poem in that collection was first written. It would be rather sad if I had't learned or improved in that time at all. 

Still, without telling too much about how I see the poem – how about you read it and decided how you see it, and maybe tell me. 

Have a look.