[Vampire] Predator Vampires.

While I'm here, I'd like to ask you to consider at least looking at all of the mail you recieve. I know a lot of it is junk, and I sympathize. Especially someone who's bought into all of the technological progaganda of our modern age. But, even so, please check it. I know my mother had thrown away a lot of important notes that she should have read, thinking they were junk, and almost had to go to court over it. Tonight, I reap the reprecussions of a dozen people not reading their mail when Tri-County Electric passed everyone in certain areas a card in the mail telling them their power would be out. Despite this, the number of outage calls has risen into double digits, and power calls are the most awkward and painful to handle on both ends.

It's not that bad and, hey, it keeps me busy. All I'm saying is that you can save a lot of headaches by making sure your lame snail-mail isn't even lamer spam mail.

In other, more non-public-service-announcement news, I was spending time on I Blame the Patriarchy again. IBtP is actually one of my very favorite sites on the web, because a lot of really terrific stuff gets said. I could go on and on about where I disagree with the site founders brand of philosophy and where I agree, because there's an awful lot of both, but I generally think Twisty Faster and the whole damn site is excellent and I hope blaming is done for a long time. 

But, I'm kind of a geek, and there's plenty of geek-slamming, and I play Vampire (sometimes, but it's been getting more frequent) and that got slammed a few days ago, too. The crux of the matter is, I think there's something to the argument that a vampire is something of a sexual predator. First of all, because you can (and people will) find the sexual metaphor in any kind of text, but also because the predator metaphor is a particularly violent as well as heavily-romantisized one. 

( In Which I Discuss Predatory Natures... )

[Interweb Toys] FFXIAH

Re: Gaming: MMORPG: FFXI

I play Final Fantasy Online, where most peeps play WoW, and that's ok. If you talk to someone who's played both, they'll usually explain that they like one or the other, but they're very different experiances. Our FFXI group is very social and friendly, and if nobody really gets into character, it's still fun since there's a jargon, no, kind of a seperate physic that permeates the world. While I can talk about this for a long time, this is basically what I think is awesome:

ffxiah.com

I play with this thing all the time. I'm a total Auction House whore. 
For those that don't know, here's how the auction house works. You have an item. You put it up for sale at a price you're willing to sell it for. This price isn't listed anywhere. Instead, there's a bidding history. You can gauge what the going price for an item is by checking the previous sales. 

FFXIAH.com allows you to check any server and any player on that server, plus check the previous sales prices of any item. It provides a link to relevent wikis and tells you how to make that item, plus any other crafts that use that item, and the estimated cost to produce or profit from sales of said item. It also checks the health of your servers market. 

It's pretty invasive, but it's also fun as hell. I use it to project all my long term crafting projects as well as determining how I'm going to craft for profit. It has too many holes to be used as your only projection tool, but it's more useful then maybe it should be.

[Vaugely Related News] Gmail.

I have a gmail account.

There's really no excuse, but I was bitching to one of my friends, and he was like:
"Dude, google docs. Also, google calender."
To be fair, I already knew about google calender.

But still. Neat.