Rant 394 / Back

Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) has recently launched a free-to-play (ftp) server on a trial basis, aka closed beta. I've just tried the game, but after reading some of the conversations in the game, I learnt that everything in this beta will be wiped after it ends in early August, except for any stuff bought with cash.

So now I've lost interest in this game. I will probably try the game again after the beta, but for now I'll just leave the game in my computer to rot.

The graphics are pretty old, comparable to Morrowind's. Much better, but it somehow resemble Morrowind's more than, say, Neverwinter Nights 2.

So now I'm going back to Runes of Magic.













In the future, everyone would eat yeast and mushrooms. Why yeast? Because they grow everywhere, even in vaginas. Why mushrooms? Because they can grow in anything, even in dung.

Though food scarcity is going to motivate scientists to make more advances in food technologies, each acre of land can only contain so much nutrition. Even if they can create a miraculous crop that practically sucks the life out of the land and produce obscenely huge harvests in the process, they are still going to need a lot of fertilizers.

Even now, various farming methods have been found to be destroying the land and making it less arable. In response to this, we have to create even more farmland by deforestation. In this month's Nat Geo magazine, an article describes how farmers in some parts of the world are suffering from an increasing rate of cancer due to the heavy use of chemicals and fertilizers. Even if they don't eat their own crops, they still have to drink from the same river that washes away excess pesticides, herbicides and etc.

At worst, Soylent Green will become an instructional manual instead of just a sci-fi novel. In the world of Soylent Green, only the wealthiest can afford real food and frozen beef is a delicacy even for them. If you didn't read the book, you can always download the movie (download because I'm quite sure there isn't a CD or DVD commercially available today). The part where the detective and his father ate the small cut of beef and a few sticks of vegetables like they were caviar is something that I can't forget.

Or else, if medical technologies allow, people can also inject nutrients into themselves instead of eat. Lunchtime? Where's my food syringe? Lives would be so much more efficient. Everyone would have their stomaches surgically reduced, if not removed, so that they could swallow a few crackers to feel full and rely on the nutrient injections to survive. No on would ever get fat. Tooth aches? Don't need them, so pull them out and give me dentures. Mealtimes would be obsolete because injections only take seconds. No more junk food and all the bad cholestrol and trans-fats.

Best of all, farms would be much reduced to grow only certain crops to extract different nutrients.












Some guy who doesn't seem very familiar with the Internet thinks he can sue it. A certain business owner found out an unhappy customer was describing his troubles with his company and got seriously pissed.

Basically, this was what happened:

1) Dude orders a monitor from the company on Ebay.

2) After 2 weeks, he still hasn't received a tracking number despite numerous ignored/dodged phone calls to the company. Actual description from the since-deleted post:

Some guy answers and I calmly ask him why my e-mail hasn't been replied to, to which he replies that he shouldn't even be speaking to me and if his boss finds out he was talking on the phone to a customer about an eBay purchase he'd get fired. So okay, I just tell him I'll send another e-mail in case it got sent to their spam box. He tells me not to do that, and to cut him a break, they can only do so much work in an 8 hour day and they were on vacation so they're still catching up.


3) Customer gets very frustrated. He emails the company using understandably foul language in response to the poor service he is getting.

4) Company owner sees this as harassment. He demands an apology and threatens him with lawsuits just because of the expletives included in the email. Actual email:

You need to immediatley [sic] apologize for the unacceptable name you called us. We can and will delay this refund as long as possible and report you for written harassment for you use of the expletivie, which is completely unacceptable.

I told you we would look at this. Things happen and we were on vacation. You gave less than 24 hours to respond. That's not enough time.

AGAIN - APOLOGY DEMANDED IMMEDIATELY. I have 3 attorneys in my family and would be happy to show your email to them as well as the authorities for harassing, threatning and offensive language.

5) Customer sees no other way out, gives a meek apology and whines at SomethingAwful.com. Consequently, this story spreads to digg.com and 4chan /b/, causing a major wave of unity as lots of bored forum users overcome their differences to harass and slander him together.

6) Company owner forks out 10USD or so to register an account at SomethingAwful.com and posts replies filled with outrage and raving madness. Meanwhile, another person does the same at /b/ claiming to be him (it might really have been him, but no one can confirm that). Normally, such complaints on the net are ignored, but because the owner actually took the shit so seriously, everyone else got serious too.

7) Company owner, overwhelmed by the power of anonymous unity, goes to his local police station to file a report. The police tells the customer not to contact the owner anymore, which is normal in such situations in which either it isn't clear whether a crime has been commited, or the crime is very insignificant compared to the amount of work required to investigate.

8) Company owner thinks this means the police is siding with him and believes that he was right all along. He also appears to believe that the police is willing and capable of tracking down every single bored basement-dwelling retard who slandered him online anonymously.

9) And yes, he sued SomethingAwful.com. =/



A SA user actually called him to record the entire conversation as a joke. I found the phone call hilarious in that the guy actually believed the retards would actually kill him and rape his mother.

Subsequently this user was banned for posting this file at SA.

By now, the harassment has been going on for a while. This is what has been done so far (copypasta from ED):

1. Constant phone calls to his home, cell, and place of business.
2. Black Fax copies that have successfully murdered his home and business fax ink.
3. The shutting down of his personal website.
4. The Provider of his website being shut down.
5. Misc. Porn mags delivered to his home.
6. Dead animals being thrown at his house.
7. Male strippers being ordered to his home.
8. His Myspace account being hacked.
9. Local pizza parlors delivering unwanted pizzas constantly.
10. At least 25,000 UPS boxes ordered to his home and place of business for the next 4-12 weeks.
11. 2000 sq ft of maple hardwood samples sent to his home.
12. Condoms & Lube delivered for the next 4 - 6 weeks.
13. Bibles and Korans delivered to his house as well as Jehovas Witnesses scheduled to come by his office.
14. Various free samples/products/literature/brochures sent to his home.
15. Year-long subscriptions to Gay Newsletters.
16. Constant harassment and billing charges due to excessive cell phone messages.

FYI, "black fax" is a method of harassment. It makes the fax machine print completely dark pages, wasting ink, electricity and paper.

If he had ignored all the initial bs, nothing would have happened. On the net, the best reaction is always no reaction. Any reaction, good or bad, would spread the story.

Internet drama is always funny, as long as I'm not involved.


Also, from the ED page, I found his company services to be, to put it in a mild manner, eye-popping.

Here are some of his services, and what he charges:

• Virus OR Spyware Removal - $199.00 - Includes removal of either viruses or spyware from your computer. If your computer is infected with both, there will be an additional charge of $49.00. Operating System Updates are included at no extra change. On-going Virus/Spyware protection software NOT INCLUDED.

• Wireless Network Configuration - $149.00 - Includes setting up your wireless router/access point, configuring wireless security, and enabling file and print sharing on up to 2 computers. Additional computers are $49.00 each. Hardware/Software NOT INCLUDED.

• Software Installation - $99.00 - Includes installing software to one computer, testing, and applying updates if necessary. Additional computers are $49.00/each. Hardware/Software NOT INCLUDED.

My eyes popped. Your eyes should too. For 200USD the company removes viruses and spywares from your computer. TWO HUNDRED! US$250 if they have to remove both types. Seriously, half an hour of googling would solve any virus/spyware problems. I'm surprised they don't charge for OS updates. Why the hell not??

US$150 for network configuration for up to 2 computers. Extra US$50 for each additional PC. Shit, what have I been doing? I should be getting out there and making myself filthy rich!

The best of the 3: 100 bucks for software installation. Like the step-by-step instructions in any retail software isn't clear enough. That someone would pay US$100 for someone to click "OK" and "Finish" is quite amazing in this day and age.









So after a day or so of selling my 1.6m gold for diamonds in RoM, I've finally saved up 193 diamonds in total (the game company sells 200 diamonds for $9.49 T.T). 33 from selling gold before I first left the game, 20 from the recent event that gave 20 diamonds on each server that contains a character lvl 10 or more belonging to me, and 140 from selling my gold at 12k gold per diamond.

Unfortunately I'm still short of 6 diamonds and missed the weekend sale in which 3 really nice mounts that usually sells for 395 diamonds were sold at 199 diamonds. Oh well, that means I'm going to have to wait for the next sale, whenever that may be. No way am I going to buy with diamonds anything that isn't on sale.