Black Friday Cometh...

Yes, every year... the dreaded day after Thanksgiving....

People get up at the crack of dawn (or never go to sleep) and camp out for the best crap the money can buy for X-Mas. X-Box, iPhones (ugh for AT&T) and Wiis still seem like the big ticket items this Black Friday. Maybe 32" 720P LCDs too.

For your reading pleasure, I will Linky some really good sites to look at Black Friday deals.

Black Friday - http://www.blackfriday.info/
BFAds - http://bfads.net/
Black Friday #2 - http://www.black-friday.net/

All three sites are pretty good and update regularly without a ton of ads.

Enjoy, and send me something good for my birthday :)

M

OK, I am seriously tired of Late-Night TV

Note to advertisers:

I do not have mesothelioma.
I do not have a structured settlement that I need paid out.
I do not have student loans from college that I need to pay off.
I don't need Lasik eye surgery
I don't need a loan consolidation.
I certainly do not need to meet sexy singles in my area tonight!

Why do advertisers believe that we're all sick, poor, blind and horny (and watching late-night TV)? I mean, seriously. I watch a lot of late-night TV. I watch anime every Saturday on Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. I watch bad movies almost every night, on any number of channels.

Please, please, please for the love of all that's holy... Let's target late-night ads to a younger audience.

You know about Guitar Hero... Check out Bike Hero !!!

Seriously... this is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Watch the lights on the handlebars sync up with the music, and the lines on the road.

Follow me --> http://break.com/index/bike-hero.html

Google shuts down Lively!

According to Google, Lively is no more! For those of you who don't know, Lively was Google's aborted attempt at building a Virtual World, like Second Life and Kaneva.

In the message that came out today, Google announced that Kaneva is now poised to take over the world!

Oh, well, they didn't quite say that... But it's pretty good news for the Kanevans! :)

KolMafia - Relay Browser - How to really play Kingdom of Loathing!

Well, we looked at the KoLMafia basic interface last time, and this time we'll take a peek at the manner of playing KoL in a browser, the way it was intended:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present.... The KolMafia Relay Browser.


This is the left side of the KoL interface, where you would normally see your stats, buffs and familiar information, and it looks the same in the relay browser... but with some subtle differences. Look at the counts on the buffs. They're in parentheses and they have a little arrow next to them. Anything that's parenthetical indicates that it can be removed automagically by clicking on the number next to it. Clicking on the arrow autocasts that skill, or tries to use the item that causes the buff.

The same is true of HP and MP. You can heal yourself or fill your MP by clicking on the underlined amount. You can also configure KoLMafia to auto-heal and auto-MP yourself, should those amounts get below a specific threshhold, that you can preset.

Nothing shocking... Just a bunch of small tools that make life a little easier for you, as you play.

Where Mafia really shines is running in Fernswarthy's Basement. As you see in the pic below (clicky to enhance it) KolMafia helps you figure out exactly what stats you need to pass every test. It will calculate exactly the number of HP or SP you require to pass those tests, and help choose the items and equipment that will add the appropriate values to pass the stat tests. It's amazingly helpful!

There are two main ways to access the relay browser -

The button on the toolbar will open it, as will the option in the "General" Menu.

There is a third, fourth and fifth way of getting into the relay browser that are both less used. Logging in and instead of clicking login, click relay, will open a relay browser window. Before logging in, putting "Relay Browser" to open in a new tab, will open the relay browser when you log in normal. Before logging in, putting the relay browser to be part of the main tab, will set KoLMafia to "accept" the relay browser URL, then simply navigate to http://127.0.0.1:60080/main.html to load the relay browser (the 60080 part [the port] will go up by 1 for each instance of relay browser).


I use the relay browser for all my adventuring, as it allows more flexibility than the vanilla KoL interface. Give it a try!

Kingdom of Loathing Helper - KoLMafia

So, you ask... "Rotini, how do you possibly play your adventures in a day? And on Groggy too? And with a wife and son? And a job?"

Never fear.... KoLMafia is here!

Well, it's there
<------------

KoLMafia can be located at http://kolmafia.sourceforge.net/ and/or http://kolmafia.us/. It is a combination of an automation tool, turn-burning tool and a KoL helper.

To your left is the opening screen that you'll see after downloading the .jar or .exe. You enter your name and password (note how long and complex my password is) and hit 'enter'.

It will automatically log you in and do some very basic things for you if you click the "Breakfast" button. Breakfast consists of Cocktailcrafting, summoning Reagents and Noodles, getting Clovers from the Hermit, summoning Tasteful Items and Snowcones, and and taking all the Clan meat trees that are available to you.

After logging in, you'll see the screen on the left. It presents all your stat information on the left-hand side of the interface (in the green bar) including a calculation of Monster Level, Combat + / -, Initiative, bonus Meat and Bonus Item drops.

Along the top nav, there are buttons that can take you to various tabs to help you cast spells/use skills, change your equipment, buy stuff from the mall, listen to chat etc. The tabs are Excel-style ways of getting to the same screens, if you prefer tabs to icons (I certainly do!). You can use KoL Mafia as your single-source of adventuring, or you can use the KolMafia Relay browser (which I'll discuss in tomorrow's Blog.)

The tabs contain a wealth of information about your inventory. If you'll look to the left, you'll see my "Food" section of my "Item Manager" tab. Note the ability to see the range of adventures and substats a food will give you when you eat it. Also, you can one-click drink Milk of Magnesium for bonus adventures, sort for Myst, Mox or Musc-only food and look at your inventory by Adv / Fullness or just raw # of Adventures a food will give you. The Booze and Spleen tab look very similar to this, but have an addition of one-click Ode to Booze casting.

On the 'Gear Changer' tab, you can equip yourself nicely. Any weapon or accessory that you cannot equip due to stat requirements will appear as greyed out. As you put on clothes or weapons, all the stats in the green section change on-the-fly, as your oufits can affect meat and item drops and the other stats. You can also funk with the Custom Outfits here, as well.

On the 'Purchases' Tab, it is a quick interface into the KoL Mall of Loathing. You can search for an item, a group of items or a wide swath of types. I searched for the cheapest 3 Hi Meins of any type below, and you can see the results.

It is much faster to buy things through the KolMafia interface, as there are far fewer clicks, and you are not susceptible to price-switching scams.

There is also a direct interface to the Bounty Hunter Hunter, which will allow you to choose your Lucre of the day, and then setup a condition for you that allows you a one-click Lucre. It puts you in the correct zone to adventure, and sets a condition that has you go back to the BHH when you have the correct number of BHH items in your inventory. So, if the Lucre of the day is 40 Broken Petri Dishes, KolMafia will show you to the Knob Goblin Laboratory, and set a condition of "40 Broken Petri Dishes". When you complete that, it auto-sends you to the BHH and gives you a Lucre. Easy, eh?

You can set your own conditions. I often eat, drink and spleen, and then tell KoLMafia to go to the Orc Chasm and run adventures until I have 25 31337 scrolls. It automatically makes them for you, when it encounters the Rampaging Adding Machine, so I just give it a couple hundred adventures to work with, put on my best Item Drop outfit and go. If I'm feeling really special, I'll set up a Custom Combat adventure that casts Transcendent Olfaction on the first Anime Smiley I find, so I can farm 334 scrolls. Woo me!

Hopefully this introduction gives you a fair overview of the capabilities of KoL Mafia. I'll go deeper into the Relay Browser and other facets of KolMafia when I tackle this subject next.

Kingdom of Loathing Clan Administration, Part 1

So, many of you wonder what the Kingdom of Loathing Clan Adminstrator does that is so different from the rest of the clan. Truth be told... Not really a lot, after setting up the Clan in the very beginning. There's not a whole lot of management, aside from promotions and demotions. This entry will disclose a couple of internals about Clan creation.

So, to your left, you'll see the clan rankings page. Click on it for a larger view... I have expanded my rank, so you can see all the options that can be set on a clan rank. Most are screamingly obvious.

Approve, Boot, Change Ranks and Titles - Can approve, boot and change the ranks and titles of clannies.
View Log and vie/edit WL - Every clan has a log of who does what, stash activity and such. Any rank with this check can see the logs and/or the Clan Whitelist.

Announcements and messages are self explanatory.

There is a Clan Warfare facet to KoL, but I find that it is largely a meat-sink and ignore it.

Buying Clan furniture and boosts allow a person to change the Rumpus Room or buy clan buffs. As this is VERY expensive, I limit the ability to do so.

The adventure / administrate Clan dungeons allows you to enter the dungeon, if 'administrate' is checked, you may give out loot and restart the dungeon.

The Forum moderation and administration allow someone to create sub-forums and/or delete posts.

Finally, all the Karma-Level options are indicative of how much stuff that rannk can pull out of the stash in a given day. In RHoP, the higher your rank, the more you can pull. You can also configure the ability to pull 0-karma items (like Mr. A's or IOTMs) from the stash here.

RHoP has 29 ranks, from Normal to Emperor Rotini... Each has it's own Karma pull and abilities.

I hope you enjoyed this quick look at clan rankings!

Why I love Kingdom of Loathing. Part 2

One of the complaints about Kingdom of Loathing (KoL) is that there is very little content for high-level characters. As I mentioned a couple of blogs ago, the designers of KoL are really interested in keeping the experience fresh for people.

Hobopolis is their first answer for high-level content and a true multiplayer experience. In Hobopolis, which is linked from your clan dungeon for a certain fee (10 Million Meat, plus one million every time it is reloaded) your entire clan may participate in a "Dive".

And, true to the multiplayer ideals, Hobopolis is most quickly cleared by a combination of players from different classes, working in different zones at the same time. The pic on the left is a Color-KoL view of what Hobopolis looks like when it's about 1/3 of the way complete.

There are five sub-zones in Hobopolis, one for each KoL-inspired element: Hot, Cold, Sleaze, Stench and Spooky. Each zone has a boss and special loot that drops. As you finish sub-zones (or eschew doing so, in favor of a super-hard final boss) you gain loot that may only be purchased in the Town Square with "Hobo Nickels". All of these items are designed for Level 17+ characters, and can give large bonuses to Mysticality, Muscle or Moxie.

Part of the fun of Hobopolis is moving between several subzones to line up a special adventure. For exaple, there is an adventure called "I refuse" in the Heap (Stench zone) which is only findable when the "Stench" of the zone is 7. How do you raise the Stench level of the zone, you ask? Well, you can either adventure in the Purple Light Zone (Sleazy) until you intimidate a Hobo into moving to the Heap, or you create a Trashcano in the Heap, either of which will raise the stench level by one. So, players are typing out levels in the chat, while looking for an adventure and moving back and forth, in concert with someone's instructions. Luckily in RHoP, we have a number of veteran divers that know the score, and help direct the n00bs around so they manage not to screw up the level. Or the count. Or adventure in the wrong zone. It's so easy to do the wrong thing in Hobopolis. I guess that's the charm.

There are other high-level zones in KoL.... The El Vibrato constructs, the bombed-out frat or hippy areas, the new splish splash Fishy zone... (Not the BadFish zone... that's altogether different :) ) but Hobopolis is by far my favorite.

Come visit Rotini's House of Pasta and try it for yourself!

Where will the bailout madness end?

The timeline of bailout events this year has been very interesting (in Chinese-curse kinda way):

March, 2008 US Government offers $29 billion of credit in the form of guarantees for the toxic mortgage-backed debt held on the books of Bear Stearns. The credit was made available as part of a deal where JPMorgan Chase acquired its smaller rival. US Federal Reserve also extends the availability of cheap financing to investment banks as well as commercial banks

September 6, 2008 The US Government takes control of mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Promises to inject up to $100billion into each

September 7, 2008 Silver State becomes eleventh US bank to collapse. The lender had $1.7 billion of deposits

September 14, 2008 Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy protection. It controlled $600 billion of assets

September 16, 2008 US Government nationalizes AIG. We (yes we... it's government of the people, for the people and by the people, right?) lends the insurer $85 billion for two years, during which time it is expected to break itself up, raise new capital and pay back the American taxpayer

September 16 - 30, 2008 Washington debates the bailout plan.

October 4th, 2008 House voted 263 to 171 to pass the $700 billion bailout bill, and President Bush signs it into law shortly thereafter.

And now...

November 12, 2008 US Automakers ask for (another) $25 Billion "loan" as part of the bailout money. They passed a $25 Billion loan earlier in the year, which is intended to fix up facilities, and produce more fuel efficient vehicles (Can you say... "Goodbye Hummer" ?)

Seriously. Isn't this a Democratic, free-market economy? Why are my tax dollars helping to prop up companies that drove themselves into the ground with either:

a) Poor financial oversight (Banks)

b) Greedy executives, willing to lend money to less-than-stellar risks in order to turn a higher profit.

c) American car companies apparently unable to create a low-cost, quality product to compete with Japanese imports. Unions? Maybe. Laziness? Certainly.

So, stop the bailout madness! Tell your congresspeople to not support additional bailouts. Don't support propped-up banks.

Real Manners in the Kaneva Virtual World

Our friend the Wikipedia defines manners as, "The unenforced standards of conduct which show the actor to be cultured, polite and refined. They are like laws in that they codify or set a standard for human behavior, but they are unlike laws in that there is no formal system for punishing transgressions, other than social disapproval."

So, in short, be polite to others, or there will be some informal punishment, like shunning.

These rules are as true in the Virtual world, as they are in the real world. Avatars are berated, kicked or banned for a variety of offenses, some real... some imagined.

To your left, you see a Kaneva party. Notice how many avatars are jammed in a reasonably small space. This sort of thing happens in the Virtual World every day. Like real life, some rules apply:

• Don't dance with another avatar uninvited. There's nothing worse than a pissed-off player because "Dildor5000" is dancing too close to her.
• Don't jump up and down on other avatars. Again, personal space bubble stuff. No one like strangers that close.
• No swearing in public places
• Don't dress like a homeless person or a hooker in a public space
• Do not impersonate a Virtual World employee or Game Master. Like real life, you cannot impersonate a cop or a judge.
  
• Do not hack into the client, exploit any bugs that are found or cheat the system
• Don't use hate speech in any form. There are no 1st Amendment rights in a Virtual World.
  

Furthermore, as it was pointed out to me by a dear friend recently... It is NOT okay to just teleport to people directly in the Virtual World. You don't just open up closed doors without knocking in RL, so you should do the same in a VW. It's sad, actually that I do this without thinking. I am the one who enforces the rules of the road in Kaneva, yet I was constantly breaking this particular rule.

I kick idiots.
I ban racists and bigots.
Yet, even I break some of the rules that I am supposed to uphold.

No more. I will never again 'port without asking, and I will apologize if I infringe on other peoples' space bubbles.

Why I love Kingdom of Loathing. Part 1 (of many)

Dear Blog,

If you didn't know, I play a game called Kingdom of Loathing. OK, OK. It's more of an addiction. KoL is a Browser-Based, Stick Figure, humourous Role Playing Game (BBSFHRPG ?) You create a character from one of the following archetypes:

1. Disco Bandit (A combination of a thief and archer)
2. Accordian Thief (Bard-type)
3. Seal Clubber (Barbarian-like fighter)
4. Turtle Tamer (Another fighter-type. With some great Ranger-like skills)
5. Pastamancer (Spell-slinger. With pasta. Um... Rotini?)
6. Sauceror (Another spell-slinger, but saucier)

You then take on various, assorted and sundry quests, given to you from the Council of Loathing
Which leads up the the ultimate quest of killing the Naughty Sorceress:

Spooky isn't she?


At that point, you free the King (Did I mention the quest was to free the king?), do something called Ascending (which is a Reincarnation experience) and start out again at level one. But slightly more powerful the next time around.

It can be a grindfest, of sorts, depending on how you play, but the creator, Zach "Jick" Johnson has done an excellent job of keeping the content fresh and exciting.

I'll go into specific parts of KoL (and other games) in future posts.

For now... Go visit! Create a character! And at level 3, you can join a clan. Might I recommend "Rotini's House of Pasta". Best damn clan in KoL ;)

Thanks for reading!

Do we really care with whom Lindsay Lohan is sleeping?

I mean seriously. I know she's cute. She used to be stunning, but years of cocaine parties et al takes a lot out of a girl.

Today, Yahoo "News" reports that Lindsay officially "Came Out" and admitted that she and Samantha Ronson are indeed a couple (and in love..)

a) I don't care.
b) Have you seen a pic of Samantha Ronson? She did VERY well for herself by scoring Lindsay...

On your left is Samantha Ronson (with former Paris Hilton BFF Nicole Ritchie)
(Samantha is the one that looks like a boy.)


On the right is Lindsay.

Outpunt the defense much, Sam? ;)




So, what does this all mean?

Not much, really. I just hope the womynz are happy with each other. I still don't care that they're a couple, though.

There must always be a first!

Welcome to my Blog!

For those of you who have yet to meet me, I'm Mike a.k.a. Rotini. I'm the Director of Operations for a Virtual Worlds company, Kaneva, and a video game junkie. To wit: Our household has three computers, a Wii, a PS3, two Nintendo DS, three MP3s and a PSP in operation at any given time.

And I spend my spare time in Kaneva, playing Kingdom of Loathing, on Facebook, reading or watching movies.

Yeah, I'm a nerd.


This blog will give you a window into my brain-box, and maybe you can figure out what makes me tick.

I wish someone would fill me in when they figure it out ;)