Solved It - Sunday - 16th of October

Unfortunately I was kept awake by Abbey and her friend next door, if it happens again I'll have to ask her to be quiet, the result was that when I woke up at 7, I had had less than 5 hours sleep and so was not really ready to go on a church crawl, the last thing I wanted to do was yawn during a service. During the rest of the day I had a full English Brunch (Like a breakfast, just at lunch time) from the refectory and then some noodles for Linner (Breakfast + Lunch = Brunch, Lunch + Dinner = Linner). I spent the rest of the day working on some more stuff for the WoA website, I managed (with some help from a computer lecturer from Australia) to find the problem and correct it. Looking forwards to seeing my Dad on Tuesday, I just hope I don't get held up as I have an hour to get from my final lecture to the halls. Of note today was that I have a very light cough, and when I drink stuff I have a sore throat. Sam has had a cough, but I think that was the one I had last week (I certainly hope so). During the day, I also checked up on some webcomics that I follow, Ctrl+Alt+Del, Penny Arcade and PHWComics are all gaming related comics. A lawyer named Jack Thompson or something such has made some offer or other that he will donate 10 grand to charity if someone makes his game. He's strongly opposed to violence in games and so his idea is probably something about that, I really wasn't interested, violence in games is fine, if not taken to excess. Anyway, the point is that games cost far far more than that to make, it's a ridiculously small sum of money to make a professional game for. What I thought was REALLY funny was that one of the writers of Penny Arcade emailed him, rather than tell it second handedly I'll quote their news blog. Warning it is a little long, I've also edited out the bad language that they like to use. --- Tycho --- As I've suggested in this space before, Gabriel's "super power" (if you will) is to suss out the exact thing that will drive a person out of their minds. He's only utilized this ability on me twice, and it stings to recall them. They're actually too cruel to relate. It's important to me that you sort of like him, even in the abstract. He felt certain that the over half a million dollars raised by Child's Play would jab him brutally. He was not wrong. So certain was he that this knowledge would barb the codger into wild madness that he included his phone number in a hastily composed "sig." He was not surprised in the least when a number he did not recognize appeared on his cell. I was trying to collect the Iron Golem soul, I was busy at the time. Gabe turned to look at me, not just with his head but his whole body, a single motion that had a mechanical look. He asked if it was really Jack Thompson, and it was at this point I knew he had done something wrong. Conversation one is where Jack Thompson asks Gabe if Gabe has ever donated to charity. Of course, we have - it's usually a couple Gameboys a year for Child's Play, but the "take" from the distributed gamer metamind is over five hundred thousand dollars in two years. This answer did not satisfy him. He suggested that if Gabe mailed him again, he would be sued so fast that his head would "spin," and that he, Jack Thompson, had given more to charity that Gabe could even imagine. Gabe isn't very good at math, so he may have a point. I'm told that humbers larger than ten give him a headache. What's more, his donations were more valuable, because he wasn't some flush-with-cash game company. Which I guess is relevant to us, because... Well, I guess it's not relevant. Then he hung up. Usually when a person threatens us with a lawsuit we don't really pay attention. The fact of the matter is that rude people and idiots often try to threaten people by gesturing wildly at the edifice of the legal system. But this man is actually a lawyer, and also demonstrably crazy, and he apparently has time to call random people who mail him on the phone so maybe he's looking for something to do. In any case, we aren't a flush with cash game company, so at the very least my cohort wanted to excise this erroneous statement from the record. This next mail elicited a second call, which we have detailed in the strip. Gabe's own voice rose triumphantly throughout this phase, I thought perhaps he was just getting into the rhetorical spirit of the thing, but the reality is that Jack screamed at him the entire time. The point he submitted went without answer: if a company made his reprehensible game, he would literally have to sue himself and talk about what a horrible person he was on national television. Of course, he's not serious. Machination is too glorified a word for what he's doing. Ruse would make it seem debonair. He's essentially holding money hostage from charity, and if someone did make it, even as a joke, he would say that it didn't conform to his "design." This sort of thing is usually called a shell-game. The song license itself he mentions - Lawyers In Love - would probably run anywhere from ten to fifteen thousand by itself. --- Back to Teifion --- Lesson of the Day - Penny Arcade are funny