The commentary goes from juvenile to amusing.

Zack: Also, who makes skin-tight underpants for giants?

Steve: Oh, you're just gonna go on and assume because giants are 50 feet tall they don't know how to craft up some underpants? That's racist.

Zack: Dungeons & Dragons is a series of overlapping race wars. You roll the dice to see how many orcs there are, do you think that's for purposes of hiring them to build a barn?

He's absolutely right. Why don't we ever hire orcs to help us carry our giant friggin mirror, for instance?

Steve: If you think orcs ever successfully exterminate anyone then you've never played D&D. Maybe in some game where they spell it with a "k" and all the orks are super beefy, but in D&D they are always the genocided, not the genociders.

We will soon be the exception to this rule when the Broken Bone clan of orcs takes over the world with their giant orc army, in large part helped out by the truce we made when we decided not to kill them. Oopsy.

A group of gamers from around the world created a 100,000+ keystroke script for speedrunning The Legend of Zelda, which was used by a blind gamer in Ontario complete the game. Jordan Verner, who is blind, posted a video of himself playing Zelda and asking for help to complete the game. This inspired other gamers to spend two years composing a script that Verner could follow...

I mean, i can understand the desire to play a video game. What i can't understand is how this would be in anyway fun for this guy. He's basically just following instructions on pushing buttons for several hours. What's the reward? He doesn't get the fun of figuring out the puzzles himself. And Zelda wasn't designed so that he could hook it up to a machine that would describe what was going on in the game, so what's the pay off for successfully completing a dungeon?

Wouldn't playing on the MUD be more entertaining than following a 100,000+ list of button pushing instructions?

Took back time, take an instant pleasure
Credit is due for the life of leisure
Get to work and work gets done
Best at being was not best at all

Face the facts, being best got bitter
Simple tastes won't suit me better
Used to matter but that got done
Best at being was not best at all

Nothing stays the same
Always change to remain
Less than fine peace of mind
Keep in check there is no time

Tasks take time and time took effort
Packed in pieces and pieced together
Tend to work and work gets done
Best at being was not best at all

Nothing stays the same
Always change to remain
Less than fine peace of mind
Keep in check there is no time
Less than fine peace of mind
Keep in check there is no time

The US justice department is preparing a report which concludes that the FBI repeatedly broke the law by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist to obtain more than 2,000 telephone call records over four years from 2002, including those of journalists on US newspapers, according to emails obtained by the Washington Post.

The bureau also issued authorisations for the seizure of records after the fact, in order to justify unwarranted seizures.

The Washington Post said the emails show how counter-terrorism ­officials inside FBI headquarters breached regulations designed to protect civil liberties.

The FBI's general counsel, Valerie Caproni, told the Washington Post that the agency violated privacy laws by inventing non-existent terrorist threats to justify collecting the phone records. "We should have stopped those requests from being made that way," she said.

I think this is my favorite bit:

The FBI later apologised to editors of both papers.

They prolly said something to the effect of "We're sorry if you were offended" which seems to qualify as an apology nowadays. We're not sorry for what we did. We don't think we did anything wrong. We're just sorry you got upset at us for it (read: we're sorry we got caught).

The website said most new members are registering from areas worst hit by this week's extreme weather, including Hampshire, Berkshire, and the West Country, and the site has taken on several temporary staff members to cope with the rush.

Link

I don't get that last bit. I mean if the storm was as bad as they make it out to be, presumably a decent number of people were snowed in with their respective spouses, no? And really, signing up for an adultery site on your home computer? That seems like such a bad idea.

FYI, using your bank card from your joint account to sign up with one of those online dating services -- also not a good idea. *ahem*

A Sicilian man stole sweets and a packet of chewing gum so he could get arrested and spend New Year's Eve in a jail cell rather than be with his wife and relatives, Italian media reported on Friday.

The 35-year old Sicilian first showed up at a police station on Thursday asking to be arrested because he preferred spending the night in prison rather than with his family, but was rebuffed because he had not committed a crime, the Agi news agency said.

The man immediately went to a tobacco shop next door, where he threatened the owner with a box cutter as he grabbed a few sweets and a packet of gum. He then waited until police arrived to arrest him for robbery, the news agency said.

Dolphins have been declared the world's second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as "non-human persons".

Studies into dolphin behaviour have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.

The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.

It's not a new concept. Corporations are already non-human persons.