In the meantime, I plan on enjoying every waking moment to the fullest.  This means unlike Jason Samuel I do not have the time to reformat and respond to each and every email that disagrees with me.  If you still insist on sending me an email, let me just paraphrase Jason in advance,  "You are an idiot and I am right."

The only thing worse than working with a monkey is if Erik is playing Lancelot Link and puts a wig on the monkey and some lipstick and gives it a purse and you walk in and you're like "Who's that hot chick?" and Erik says, quite slowly and clearly, "You idiot, that's the monkey!"  And you both laugh, but you're not sure what's so funny.  One thing leads to another and there's a crazy mixup, then you accidently screw the monkey in the dirtiest way imaginable. And the monkey falls asleep while you're making love to it.  That's all hypothetical, so I'm going to change my answer and say that the only thing worse than working with a monkey is working with a time traveler.  Marvin is always starting an argument then travelling into the past and changing the present to support his side of the debate.  It's aggravating, and sometimes, like yesterday when Erik insisted that JFK Jr. was going to live forever, deadly.  But he does give us the jump on every other gaming site.  Or so we thought.  It seems supremely sedentarily conditioned cyber-athlete Thresh, whose grueling regimen of cross training is rumored to include both sitting down and lying down, has used the last of his $11 million seed money to buy a time machine and is letting his Gamers.com readers take a ride.  How else can we explain the reader reviews of Ritual's unreleased F.A.K.K.2?

Score: 1/5 by gray_foxx (5/15/2000)
"I loved the graphics but found zero fun in the game!It is not worth touching."

Score: 1/5 by plutoniumX (5/14/2000)
"the graphics are amazing but the game play really really stinks"

Score: 3/5 by not important (5/22/2000)
"great game I love it"

Score: 5/5 by DRG_Biohazard (6/17/2000)
"this game kicks heavy metal ass!"

or the confusing

Score: 4/5 by bumble (5/16/2000)
"proud"

Why were we at Gamers.com?  In an embarrassing mixup of monkey-screwing proportions, we granted them an exclusive interview.  Don't click here

A few days ago, I exhausted my John Romero photo archive while adding some pictures to Chet's financial analysis of Eidos.  I figured that marked the end of an era.  With no more wacky photos, there could be no more Romero stories.  Hell, what's left to say anyway?  Okay, there is his interview on Evil Ed, the gaming media outlet for people who thought Incite was too sophisticated.   Perhaps taking a spiritual cue from e. e. cummings, who wrote "in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me", Romero uses the interview as a chance to reflect publicly on the power of his feelings for his lover, Stevie Case: "Just imagine having sex with a superhot model.  That pretty much sums it up."  Picture me picturing mobs of Japanese chicks swooning.

Anyway, that's not the point of this update, which is actually more of a concession speech.  I was working my way through KISS: Psycho Circus yesterday, so that I could write something about it and maybe help you make a purchasing decision, when I got a phone call from a collections agency regarding some bullshit beef they have with me about an electricity bill from a state I don't even live in anymore.  I was half-listening to the lady and using my Indian voice to periodically interrupt her to say "Hello?  I must demand to know who eaz dis?"   During our dueling monologues, I scribbled aimlessly on a scratchpad until I finally hung up on her.   Here is that scratchpad:

Here is a magnified version of the important part:

Here, to stress its importance, I mapped the important part onto a sphere and added a light source:

I swear on Linguist's Software's entire line of Macintosh Bible products that I'm not making this up.  I wish this was a joke, like 99.9% of everything else on the page.  But after three years of Old Man Murray, I've started to unconsciously draw John Romero's name in heart bubbles.    Let that be a lesson to all of us about the price of obsession.  I think Avault's Chris Harding thinks Samuel Johnson put it best when he said "Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained."  Well this is one long detaining imagination whose magnification is about to be motherfucking restrained, etc., etc.  Mark your non-denominational Living Word 12 month appointment calendars:   On July 18th, 2000 I gave up.  No more John Romero.

A message from a professional Bob Richards, Director of the Wheaties Sports Federation, lookalike.

The stinky IGN network has once again proved itself to be not as stinky as I originally thought.  Reasonably hot on the heels of being the first major American game site to post the classic Chu Chu Rocket commercial (1120k), they've now published another funny thing.  Volition, the people behind Red Faction, the upcoming shooter rumored to include a sniper rifle and some crates, have taken a recording by the Dead Alewives and added to it some moving pictures from their Playstation 2 launch title, Summoner.   It's 15 large - and by large I'm not talkin mega-bits, like a Neo Geo cartridge, but giga-mega-bits.  However, it's worth the download if you like this kind of thing, with the hilarity and whatnot.  I'm trying to act cool about it, because my brain is still injured, but it's funny.  Click here for the 15 giga-mega shock experience!

The recording I posted yesterday or the day before that allegedly contained a private argument between Kevin Cloud and John Carmack is just one of several recordings I've received from a secret source.  I've decided to periodically post them until I run out.

id audio transcripts

Part 2 - A Fidgety Frolic

With your hosts:

Peter Molyneux

Pac Man Fan Art

SuperBike!

One of Marvin's rocket-powered, camouflaged sperm

Crimes By Women, Issue 15

Dallas Police Officer James Dylan (seen here allegedly protecting and/or serving Paul Steed as he is escorted from id's office)

In today's episode, we eavesdrop on what was allegedly a typical exchange between aggressive Paul Steed and the generally even-tempered Adrian Carmack.

Let's Listen! (77k)

My illness accounts for my recent absence.  I apologize, but want to point out that it's going to be much worse when I'm dead.  Chet won't have me to kick around anymore, just my head.  A few years ago, he persuaded me to donate my body to science - a branch of South American science that is working on a manufacturing process that will allow them to convert corpse heads into soccer balls.  It's written right on both my drivers license and my medical alert bracelet:  HEAD DONOR!  In Event Of Serious Injury or Death, Mail Head To Av. San Martin 475, Pucallpa, Peru, Then Burn Body And Freeze Ashes For Reanimation By Scientists Of The Future, Making Sure To Attach Note To Ashes Telling Scientists Of Future That If They're Apes, Don't Bother.   The people at the DMV thought I was crazy, and my new chronic deja vu has more or less proved them right.  If I could get a doctor to assist me while I crush my head in a vise, I'd have the last laugh.  Though it'd probably be more like a scream trapped inside a bloody bubble sprouting from my mouth.

In other news, Lord British is sexy:

100% undoctored photo

The only thing I can really concentrate on anymore is this webcam that shows a version of the Real World starring chickens.  But I'm going to try to get back into the swing of things tonight by playing some 3D Ball of Defiance

As an Eidos customer, I'm totally satisfied with the results of the money that was spent on Ion.  Entertainment is Eidos's product.  Can you name an Eidos game more entertaining than watching Ion Storm Dallas implode over and over again?  If Eidos had sold tickets to the event, they'd be rich, they could have purchased forty LGS's, and you'd be playing fifty sneak-to-the-key games instead of wiping your puffy, tear-stained eyes with your graduate degree. Besides producing John Romero and Daikatana, the thirty million to Ion also generated Deus Ex, which is entertaining.   And that other team made that game where you could play Tom Hall in chess over the Internet.  I heard from someone that that was fun. 

By January of this year, Eidos had grown accustomed to its monthly payoff to Ion.  This past December, even after three and a half years of throwing good money after bad, Eidos's stock was at an all time high.  And by that point, the bulk of the thirty million to Ion was already spent.  In the final Quarter (ending March 31st), I estimate Eidos spent less than 4 million on  Ion.  During this period, Eidos had a revenue of $83.5 million and a loss of $23.4 million.  For the year, Eidos had a profit of $100.3 million on revenues of $311.7 million. It wasn't until the beginning of the 4th Quarter - starting in January 2000 - that Eidos's stock began its plunge from a high of 21 to a low of 3 5/16. 

In its financial statements, Eidos claimed the problem was caused by a shaky, between-generations period in the console market.  Yet at this same time, 3DO's stock rose and actually peaked in March.   What was Eidos doing wrong?  Thirty million bucks to Ion may sound like an enormous sum, but even if it had all been paid in this last year, it would not have been the single biggest expense for Eidos.  The company made a bigger investment with even worse timing: a fifty-five million dollar investment into a dot com, enacted right before the recent dot com crash.  In January, Eidos sank fifty-five million into Maximum Holdings (MH), acquiring a 20% ownership of the company. MH owns GameFan*, Voodoo Extreme, and other online properties. [Maximum Holdings has since changed its name to express.com but still uses the Maxiumum Holdings name in some transactions -ed.  Hi everyone, it's Erik!!!]

With its new stake in MH, Eidos had created a brand new money pit.  As the dot coms crashed, online advertising dollars began to shrink. By the time Eidos's stock price reached its low point, dot coms were starting to fail. The fifty-five million dollar investment no longer looked like such a great idea.   Some had this feeling earlier than others.  On the day Eidos actually completed the transaction, Merrill Lynch downgraded its stance on Eidos.  Goldman Sachs followed suit two weeks later.  This investment wasn't the sole cause of Eidos's problems, but it seems to have had a much larger impact on Eidos than Ion Storm did.

As Eidos customers, what did we get out of its fifty-five million dollar investment in MH?  No LGS, no Thief series to kick around, and not even one crummy Playboy spread.   Instead, we get a rocking online store, strong editorial content**, and mature journalism.   Finally, something that makes Daikatana look good.

*Oldmanmurray.com receives advertising revenue from UGO Networks, a competitor of both the GameFan Network and the stinky IGN Network.
**PlanetCrap is not owned by Maximum Holdings.  This is simply a link to a story about Gamefan.

Over the weekend, I noticed an anomaly in the 06/23 transcript between the early morning and mid-morning updates.  The early morning "blah..." segment contained an epic tale by Billy Wilson that detailed his attempts to solve a personal problem he had with a competing webmaster using nothing but karate and misspelled words.  By mid-morning, the huge story had become nothing but a few sentences with the following editorial addition:

[brakes!... Billy hit the Nyquel a little too hard and got a little wacky with a 900 word blah, we return you to your regularly scheduled programming -apache]

Billy and I have had our problems in the past - such as the phase I went through during which I kept calling him Billy "Stupid" Wilson - but he obviously put a lot of work into the 06/23 installment of "blah..."  I know from experience that having your work edited is no fun. And to have it edited on what is widely believed to be your own site is doubly embarrassing, like being so high, on crack!, that you think your cheap-ass whore has two dicks!  Here, then, is the unedited "blah..." as it originally appeared:

blah... 12:10 AM PST [235]Billy "Wicked" Wilson

Back to non-movie stuff, but things that could easily make it to the silverscreen. In a recent interview, it was mentioned that not only had nVidia's Chris Donahue gave me a wedgie (which I'm always up for, no pun intended) but that Fryawns whoops my ass. I want to go on record to clear up what happened with this. First of all, Fryawns did not kick my ass, he licked it (he wanted to), but there's more than that. So, I'm at the local Super Target, hanging out (that's where all of the cool people hang out), out of the corner of my eye I saw Frwayns flipping me off and waving his stinky-ass butt at me. I wasn't going to stand for that, I already wanted to put the smack down at this year's E3, but couldn't make it (too many other people from VE went, we had to keep someone here). I ran on, and gave Fryawns a quick manly-push. He pulled, what looked like a hook from over the top of his head (not sure if he was going for the mid-80s hood look, or what, and low-and behold, it was Doogie Howser, but with a larger forehead. I was stunned. What was Doogie doing over in Farmington, Utah? Fryawns took advantage of my being stunned, and tried to smack me with his signature limp-wristed right hand, it managed to contact my left jaw, but no damage was done -- it actually pulled me out of my hypnotic-like state. I then ran through the typical Wu Ji Chyuan 6-swords "routine", and Fryawns was down before you could even smack a tick. Easy fight, I thought, but the pain wasn't over. Just because I reached down to feel through his pockeds, trying to protect my nose from the stench (who said that the Dutch shower? Ok, most of the Dutch that I know shower, Fryawns is an exception), Big-momma Frans (big - I'm talking 6ƈ" and 432lbs) push me from behind. I rolled to my feet, which brought me face to face with the only thing that has scared me more than my clinic results and Blair Witch Project, Fryawns' mom. I was, once again, in awe (asking questions to myself like "how can this woman fit in a car, how can she walk without starting a fire between her thighs, and why isn't she back at the circus). Fryawns' mom blurted something, that sounded like a threat, I threw all of my weight into my right arm, and connected with her meaty chop -- it just bounced off her. I then decided that a kick would do the trick. I jumped up for a standard frontal kick to the chin. It bounced off too. My last resort was some change in my pocket, I figured if I could get 'magic flying change' to work, then I was saved! I flicked all of the change at her, only a 1976 (poorly molded) penny managed to stick in her right shoulder...I was doomed. She then cocked her right arm back, and threw it my way -- I then blocked, as 6 years of martial arts has done, but it drove right though that block. The punch connected by chin, sending me into la-la land for a good 45 minutes. When I woke up, there was this strange grease stuff all over my ass, and I felt "violated" (but in a good way). Needless to say, Fryawns didn't kick my ass, his master of a mamma did. She moved like a butterfly, she packed the power of 4 German women (and the weight of 4 German women). While her training didn't look to intense, my hat off to one of the better fighters I've seen in ages. I heard Fryawns, or, in particular, his mom is back in Holland, so fortunately I can swing by the Super Target to just drive up and down the parking lot, looking cool. There you have the story of how I had my ass kicked. I don't like to talk about it, but figure you should know. Ok, so I just made this up as I went, I should have quit at the second sentence, but the juices (not creative, unfortunately) juices were flowing. Let's hope some day his mom isn't around, unless she passes on some moves to him, I'll easily kick his ass...err, hopefully, you know how some of those kids with big foreheads are sometimes (usually the type that go postal).

In other news, Marvin says to mention that he told you so

Canadian men have no rights, no security and no safety. They are common- law whores who can be forced to drop their pants at any intersection and grab their ankles while local thugs satisfy their passing desires. Canadian males are essentially everybody's bitch, the government should shave all of their heads and put little toy hats and aprons on them. You gave up your arms, suckers, now you belong to everybody, you have no more dignity than poodles on a leash.

I almost managed to stop laughing before my spleen burst but then I saw the imperial police force standing in the background sipping lemonade under a tree while the european girl was being forced to her knees to fellate about two hundred 'exploited minorities' at once.

This post, in which Blakemore introduces a new topic: his indestructible endoskeleton.

And why the endoskeleton may indicate he's partially black.

Normally, I'd simply email Chris, ask him which printed book is just like an interactive role-playing game, and be done with it.  But he recently put me in his killfile.  I started thinking more about it.  Then I started thinking about RPGs.  And then I began to get the fever to play one.  Without the possibility of Chris's help, I was left to think about the RPGs I knew - online RPGs.   Eventually, I managed to convince myself that I actually wanted to play Ultima Online again.  Sure I knew I'd hate playing.  And, of course, I knew I'd be bored.  But once the desire grips you, personal experience and common sense are forgotten.

I needed someone to remind me that everything that people like in UO, I hate.  I started browsing through some UO sites looking for reasons not to play.  This plan backfired.  The idea of working a virtual job 10 real hours a day so I could buy a pair of virtual shoes actually started sounding good again.  There in the world of UO, I could live out my fantasy life, free from Marvin's yelling and Erik's whining. I could become the simple tailor I've always wanted to be.

Against my better judgement, I dug the UO disk out of a pile of fish tank gravel near Erik's desk.  Through some miracle, as I waited for the game to install, I discovered this article.  Apparently, if you post how to dupe items (whatever the hell that means), Origin and/or EA will ban you from UO.  Forever!  That's just the cure I need.  One moment of strength is all it took for me to find the cheat.  Here are the instructions in a big neon-green font: 

How to dupe items in UO or How to be banned from UO.
Get a rune book with some town runes in it
Put all the items on your character that you want to dupe.
Wait about an hour to make sure the items were saved on your character
Either give the items you want to dupe to a friend or put them in a secure container inside of your house.

5)Recall across a server line using the rune book
While your still casting the spell log out.
Sell your duped goods as soon as possible
What is a black hole?
When someone refers to black holing themselves or getting caught in a black hole in Ultima online it means that there character is stuck in between two different places. The way OSI corrects this is to load your character using a backup taken before you got caught in the black hole.

Duping the smart way
Each item has a unique item id number that OSI can use to determine if a item is duped. I would recommend duping only house deeds, since they can be sold easily. One you have black holed yourself you will not be able to log in till the next server up, so doing it at night before you log out would be a good idea. To be sure you have black holed your self try to log in, if you cant log in with any of your chars the dupe worked, if you can log in, try the dupe again. Now that you have duped the house deed you need to either have your friend sell the deed you gave hem before you log in again or sell both deeds first thing when you log in the next day.

If anyone wants to do me a solid here, please see that news of my flagrant disregard for the rules and regulations of Brittania makes it to the proper authorities.  Fast.   I don't know how much longer I can hold out.  I'm not kidding around - I need to be banned