Unhelpful

For your entertainment, I present iGun:

For centuries there have basically been three kinds of guns. Guns that are large and hard to use. Guns that are small and hard to use. And guns called iGun.

Now the company that started the personal munitions revolution is helping parents, kids, students and the Israeli military take advantage of munitions evolution.

Introducing iGun, the gun that combines all the possibilities of munitions with all the magic of high style.

Read it.

Comments?

I am sure that if you’ve ever played any online game; be it a simple MUD, massive RPG, 3D Shooter, or read a Dragonlance novel, you know who Raistlin is. Hell, if you’ve been on the internet you know him. But which one of the 25,000-some Raistlins or Raistlin variations am I talking about? Is it Raistlen? How about Raisslin, or Rastlen? Maybe it’s raistlin00421@yahoo.com? It’s none of those actually.

Probably one of the most popular fantasy novel characters ever. There’s thousands of people choosing to call themselves by this name or a variation therefor of. What does it all boil down to? Elves of course. Elves and the uncreative mind of fourteen year-old boy #3532.

Popular fantasy/science fiction/fiction names being used as handles by people. Idiocy. I guess the genre of game you play, or place you hang out helps determine who is going to be the Raistlin.

Playing a fantasy role-playing game today are we? Raistlin is it?
Science fiction game? You’re Jean Luc Picard, aren’t you?
Ah, but here’s what I wanted to get to all along. There’s a new Raistlin on the block — William Wallace.

How many variations of this can you think of? So far I’ve seen Wwilliam, Will, Wwill, Willium, Willyam, Wiliam, Wilyam, and Wiilliam.

Unique naming system for games are a crime to society. I don’t want to see these dullards, let alone have to actually speak with them. The very sight of a Raistlin makes me want to lacerate someone’s face with a sharp stone.

I used to be a contributor to a site called “The Rantings of Lum the Mad”, and its successor, “Slownewsday.net”.

As the original site went away, followed by its archives, I was reminded of all the interesting discussions I read and participated in from the old 8-bit BBS days. Then, we didn’t value our archives; having an online storage of archival material was expensive (it meant having a separate expensive external floppy drive for each disk you wanted to host simultaneously - 10 meg hard drives were out of the question, as they cost several thousand dollars), and having thorough records of past threads really wasn’t a priority.

Today, there’s no such excuse. We don’t have to carve the present at the expense of our archives. We can have it both ways. In that interest, I’ve archived my own contributions to that site. Sadly, I only have the right to archive my own work online, so most of the truly great moments are gone. At least we still have Kiki.

Update: It is fittingly ironic that while I was in the very process of creating the LTM-era archive, slownewsday.net collapsed in a spectacular conflagration of egoes, unprofessionalism, and bile due to what appeared to the readers to be a very overplayed disagreement between Mythic, developer of Dark Ages of Camelot, and current and past members of the SND staff. Of course, it’s never that simple, is it? My take on the whole thing is that there were far too many people acting far too unprofessionally who presumably should have known better, on “both” sides of the issue. Somewhere along the way, the developers’ and the site’s obligations to the community seem to have wandered off. Hopefully the Diaspora of Lum the Mad won’t forget this.

I’ve added an archive of the SND logos I created for the launch of SND and those created afterwards (some of the holiday logos and unofficial logos haven’t been seen).

[The logos are also in the continuation for your convenience. All ltm/snd articles I archived are also reflected in the current content management system.] Read more »