Yes, that’s a generic Google Ads block on the sidebar.  No, I don’t expect to actually make anything from it.  Since all my stuff is fairly old, and I don’t tailor posts to hit specific keywords (which would probably be misspelled in any case), and this isn’t a blog about how to make money using Google Ads (or a porn site, which is disturbingly similar), it’s sort of a futile gesture against my hosting costs.  Fortunately, it’s a minimal effort sort of gesture, as Google’s fantastic crawler robots, fresh off the set of the finale of Life on Mars, will naturally tailor served ads to things that are relevant to my site’s content, and I don’t really have to anything else except sit back and wait for a check for 43 cents that will never arrive.

Imagine my surprise at how relevant these ads are!  Consider the following examples.

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Once again, a good and quirky UK series was adapted for "US audiences."  Once again, "US audiences" are taken to be unappreciative of subtlety, tragic endings, metaphysical questions, and plot twists that rise above the level of, "You mean the ghost was really old man Witherspoon, the owner of the haunted amusement park?"  Once again, networks kill a show off early heedless of the overall plot arc, and are tragically proven correct.

Warning:  the following may contain spoliers.  Of course, nothing could spoil the series for me quite as much as the finale, so my compassion for you is somewhat limited.

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I had forgotten that I ever signed up for Facebook.  I think I may have done it about a year ago, for some reason so unimportant that I don’t even remember it clearly now.  Suffice to say that for a while I thought the name of the network was "Faceparty," and I was somewhat surprised to discover that in fact it was not a collection of bukkake images involving people I knew.  Didn’t it used to be mostly college age girls posting drunken pics of themselves to be used against them in years to come during job interviews?  No longer.  And so there my account sat, unused, unupdated, unfriended, until yesterday when I happened to read J.’s blog.

Would that it remained so.

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I’m sure that moving 217 pages of content into a totally new format, then moving the entire directory into the root will have no ill effects whatsoever.

Incidentally I found a few things that I never published for whatever reason.  I’m sure the reasons were good, but I ignored them.  Personal favorite:  Mu vs. Tegehel.

I uploaded these to YouTube a while ago, and yet still didn’t update my site.  This’ll show me.

Version 1.003 with Graphical Enhancement 2.5 pack.  Vanilla campaign.

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Film Critic: Comic book movies are terrible because they deviate too much from the source material.

Studio Guy: Hey, we made okay money by bastardizing V for Vendetta, From Hell and the League of what’s-their-names. We gotta find another property to make some money on.

Studio Toadie: Well, Moore wrote this thing, The Watchmen. I like it a lot, it’s on Time’s 100 best novels list, and it won a Hugo award.

Studio Guy: What is that, like a daytime Emmy? Never mind. Let’s make it. Call Alan Moore.

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Now with more obscure inside jokes and weird references than ever before. 

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Not updating for several months generally means I’ve been doing something amusing and having fun with it. This is mostly true… SWG is still the best MMOG in production at the moment. At least on paper. By "on paper" I basically mean that the overall design and potential (I hate that word) of the system are really good, and the level of complexity is enough to keep even nitpicky curmudgeons like myself interested for a while. My level of enjoyment (and play-time) recently has dramatically decreased, mostly because of problems stemming from bad balance decisions and absolutely terrible QA. (Note that I’m not including the customer service system here… like most players, most of my CS issued went unanswered for so long that I just stopped trying.)

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I feel weak. I’m playing an MMOG that Wen got me into. I’m giving money to Sony. I’m in a game based on a franchise of movies that I maybe liked for about a week when I was a little kid and was impressed by special effects. I’m probably paying royalties to the man who forced the character of Jar jar Binks on us all. All this is true, and yet somehow, Star Wars Galaxies is a good game.

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