Burrowowl

It looks like WotC has decided its website needs some more filler; they’ve taken it upon themselves to re-explain some character classes in a new series “Character Classes.” Unlike the mind-numbing depth and breadth of the Rules of the Game, These articles are brief and to the point, covering a handful of points about each class.

The Fighter article offers a rather narrow look at the Fighter-as-armored-lunk, treating ranged combat as an afterthought and largely ignoring the flexibility inherent in the Fighter class. The Rogue article does a better job of showing flexibility, but then with the high number of skill points and available class skills, the Rogue is more obviously versatile.

Overall, it reminds me that the articles I started out with a couple of years ago weren’t an entire waste of diskspace, including my looks at parties built around particular classes. I should probably go back through and make ones for the Iron Kingdoms classes of Arcane Mechanik, Bodger, and Gunmage.

This past Friday, Jon Stewart (former host of Short Attention Span Theater) found himself on the CNN debate show Crossfire as the lone guest. Typically on this show, the resident left-wing schill will team up with a guest left-wing schill to yell at and interrupt the resident right-wing schill and his guest right-wing schill about what passes for political news these days. Stewart has been a long-time critic of contemporary political coverage, and in particular the brand of “balanced” shows that Crossfire epitomizes. For reasons I may never understand, they actually had him on to talk about it; things didn’t go well.

Oh, if you don’t have Bit Torrent, Ifilm has a copy, too.

It looks like there will be a bit of a disruption in the School Rumble manga translation project, as the founder and lead translator for Manga! Inc. has thrown in the towel, and professes to not want to translate comics for us, the leeching public, anymore. Translating comics can be a tedious, tiresome, thankless job sometimes. Of course, tedious, tiresome, and thankless are characteristics of many jobs, but scanslation projects have no paychecks attached to make the tedium, energy, and indignity worthwhile. At this time, the futures of the School Rumble, Genzou Hitogata Kiwa, Higanjima, Jaja Uma Grooming Up, GacchaGacha, and NHK ni Youkoso are up in the air.

Thanks for over a year of fun manga, man.

For those of you who are sick of paying outrageous prices for poorly-developed video games and are tired of the effort and skulduggery involved in obtaining illegitimate copies of same, give The Kingdom of Loathing a try. It’s witty, insightful, jam-packed with obscure pop-culture references, terrible art, and even more terrible puns. Adventure as a Seal Clubber, Turtle Tamer, Pastamancer, Sauceror, Accordion Thief, or Disco Dancer. Defeat Saber-toothed Lemons, Orcish Frat Boys, and Dirty Hippies! Build your own Bartender-in-a-Box and arrange some good feng shui at your campsite! It works on all systems, it’s free, it’s fun, go play it.

According to a report in The Register, Motion Picture Association lawyers succeeded in getting Icelandic law enforcement to crack down on twelve internet users that allegedly were distributing copies of movies through DC++. After the raids, Iceland’s total ‘net usage dropped by about 40 percent. Wow. We knew that the internet was all about porno and piracy, but this is just plain silly.