This article is mostly about World of Warcraft, but this is the paragraph I found most interesting:

I’ve often thought about myself as a character in the Sims, being controlled by a higher gamer. How poorly he manages me! I’m allowed to sit playing games for hours after my fun meter is full and other meters are sinking. I eat before my food meter says I need to; I take showers before my cleanliness meter hits the red zone. Why on earth don’t I get up, go to the bookshelf, and crank up my mechanical skill level by reading some how-to books? This would actually work, by the way. I’m astonished at how much I learn by sitting down and reading things. Why don’t I up my creativity meter by doing some deliberate drawing practice? By going through some Photoshop tutorials online? (There are thousands of good ones out there, quite free.)

On a completely unrelated note, this Wordpress template is really starting to annoy me, mostly because of how it indents the first line of your post. If I hadn’t done this little final sentence, you wouldn’t be able to see how the previous paragraph was in blockquote format.

Me & Andy Walker have been talking about making a website, but we can’t think of a name.  Any suggestions?

If you’ve been listening to the news at all today, you’ve probably heard about the Wal-Mart worker who was trampled to death.  I was talking to Tony about this last night, and was pretty shocked at their complete lack of security.  They keep the stores open all night, but tell the customers they’re not allowed to touch the covered pallets (which contain all the great  deals) until 5:00 am.  Around 4:30, wal-mart workers start uncovering, and pretty quickly they’re shoved away by the rabid shoppers.

Black Friday chaos is nothing new, but most stores have managed to implement systems to keep things simple.  A couple years back, I stood outside Best Buy for 12 hours to get the $300 laptop that I’m using to write this post.

I showed up at 5:00 PM, and was the 11th person in line.  In 15 minutes, there were 20 people behind me. Around 4:00 AM, Best Buy employees started showing up and handing out vouchers for all the door busters.  You took what you wanted, and the people at the front of the line got first choice.

There was no pushing or shoving, because there was no point.  If you had your flyer, the only reason you had to hurry was to avoid the line.  And if you didn’t have a flyer, all the kicking & screaming in the world wasn’t going to get you that 50 inch plasma TV.

This might not work for Wal-Mart, since people are already in the store 5 hours before the sale starts.  But they could at least do something.

Still, Wal-Mart didn’t have the highest death toll this year, so maybe I shouldn’t be picking on them.

Grrrr!  Microsoft bought the rights to The Guild, and now they’ve got Episode 1 of Season 2 posted on their website, unembeddable.  Still, The Guild is back, and now they’ve got funding.  Check out the awesome animation in that awesome intro!

If you haven’t seen the show before, don’t start with Season 2.  Watch the first season on YouTube.

I read Penny Arcade & XKCD whenever they’re updated.  I check IGN every week or so, for the same reason I used to watch X-Play.  It gives me this sense of knowing what’s good & bad about the latest video games without having actually played them.  I’ve been going to BoingBoing.net a few times per week ever since I saw this comic at XKCD, but so far, I haven’t found much of interest there.

The only political blogs I check regularly are DailyKos and Andrew Sullivan, and once a month or so I’ll check up on Christopher Hitchens.  I used to occasionally check out The Corner at the National Review to get some conservative opinions to counter-balance the liberal fantasy world I live in, but lately I’ve just been checking it out whenever someone says something stupid or inflammatory.

I sometimes forget to mention that I check sites like Fark, Slashdot, The Onion, YouTube, and Homestar Runner, as I just sort of assume that everybody with an internet connection checks those sites at least once a week.  Do I even need to mention that I use Google?

So yeah.  What websites do you guys check out?  Anything good I left off the list?

Note: I purposefully took out all the links in this post, as it was getting distracting.  If you wanna visit any of these websites, they’ll probably show up as the first hit in a Google search, assuming you don’t get a Wikipedia article.

It’s funny how easy it is to forget the most exciting details of your day sometimes. I almost completely forgot about this really cool thing that was happened to me this evening, and it only occurred to me to blog about it after I woke up in the middle of the night.

So after work, I was driving the staff 18-wheeler around for some reason, I can’t exactly remember why.  These things are a blast to drive – you feel really frickin high up, and they’re surprisingly fast.  Anyways, I was driving along in a one-way, and all of a sudden I notice another huge semi trailer coming straight at me.  Freaky!  I didn’t know it at the time, but I would later find out that terrorists had removed a one-way sign at a pivotal spot so that they would cause a crash.  Crazy!  Terrorists, right here in Fargo!

It was at this point that I realized I wasn’t driving an 18 wheeler at all.  I was actually a passenger in a mostly empty school bus.  I was sitting up front, so i could see what was happening.  The driver honked the horn, and fortunately, the semi swerved off the road and we didn’t hit it.  We kept driving, thinking that guy was just one lone crazy, but it wasn’t long before we saw a whole stream of headlights coming right for us.

The driver laid on the breaks, but by now, we were on the freeway, so we were going pretty fast.  Cars were swerving left & right to avoid us, but finally, we hit something, and the bus flew up in the air, tumbling end over end.

As the bus was spinning, I tried to hold my place as best I could.  It was easy when we were going end over end, but eventually we hit the ground rolling, which went much faster and I was sent tumbling through the bus like the rest of the pasengers.  After what seemed like minutes (but was probably only like 5-10 seconds) the bus hit something that sent it spinning end over end again, but on the ground, not through the air.  We had lost a lot of momentum at that point, and we were tumbling slower.  Finally, the bus finished it’s tumble sticking straight up in the air, sitting on it’s back.

This was when my instincts took over, and I honestly can’t believe what happened.  I could tell that we were going to be coming down hard, so I jumped out of my seat, climbed a few seats, and slipped out the door of the bus.  I flipped up onto the windshield of the bus, and used my weight to slowly ease us back to the ground.  Looking back, I realize that this seems to defy physics, but I swear that’s the way it happened – and there were witnesses!

Throughout the entire ordeal, I was mostly overwhelmed by a sense of calm.  Now that it was over, I completely flipped out.  “Oh my god I can’t believe that shit!”  I was yelling.  “Did you see me all fucking Jackie Chan?  Fucking awesome!”

Even better: it turned out later that it was indeed a semi truck the whole time, and not a school bus like I thought it had been.  Not only that, but the truck had been carrying secret documents signed by the Bush administration that proved their involvement in the whole US torture scandal, and these documents are being used as the key evidence in a case against George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Alberto Gonzalez.  I’d link to the story, but I’m sure it’s all over the news and you can find it yourself.

Anyways, it was a crazy night.  I can’t believe I almost forgot all that.