I believe you did not have a happy life.
I believe you were cheated.
I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.
I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.
I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling.
I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.
I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all.
I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as your bitterness.
I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and unassuaged.
Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of the hillside.

-Mary Oliver
from New and Selected Poems, Vol 1

A friend turned me on to Mary Oliver recently, and in fact back on to poetry in general. Much of what she writes is pretty but doesn’t really touch me just now, but then something like this floats across the page and I am struck down for a while, trying to take it in.

Today’s Strolling Music: The Worst of Jefferson Airplane

Today
Today
I feel like pleasing you
More than before.
Today
I know what I want to do
But I don’t know what for.
To be living for you
Is all I want to do.
To be loving you
It’ll all be there when my dreams come true.

Please, please
Listen to me
Its taking so long to come true.
Its all for you.
All for you.

So, I’ve played the Warcraft RTS, and I’m playing the World of Warcraft beta. There’s a fairly interesting and elaborate timeline behind all of this, and I wanted to learn more about the history of the world, so I turned to the 3 Warcraft novels:
Day of the Dragon
Lord of the Clans
The Last Guardian
First of all, if you’re not a Warcraft fan, skip ‘em all. None of them is a particuarly amazing book.

For fans of the series, though, they’re all good fun. Its neat reading about the places and characters you’ve seen in the games. Dragon is the weakest of the three, Clans the strongest and most tightly integrated into the gameworld (it tells the story of the origins of Warchief Thrall). Honestly I couldn’t place the events of Guardian into my knowledge of the timeline, but the places certainly were familiar.

So last night I finally watched the end of Angel.

[WARNING: SPOILERS]

I’ve had a real love/hate relationship with the show. When it was serious, I’ve really enjoyed it. When it was dumb, well, who really needs more dumb TV? Lorne, for instance, was awful. From day 1 to the ending, the character was just what he was… a big dumb pun (Green Lorne, get it? Lorne Greene? … in case you never made that connection).

But when the show went dark, I thought it was pretty good. And I will miss it.

The biggest surprise to me, in the ending arc, was how well Amy Acker did in jumping from Fred to Illeria (spelling?) and back. And she was pretty hot when she was blue, too, but that’s a post for another blog.

As for the very last episode…I thought it was ok. Its…savage, when a cast is killed off in the final episode of a series. It feels like a betrayel. Remember the last show of Blake’s 7? They all died and it was just like… “Shit, how could you do this to us fans?”

So Angel’s “They probably die but maybe not” ending seemed like a decent balance, though it was odd how it was juxtaposed with Wesley’s death. OTOH, the latter wasn’t as awful as the way Anya’s death was played so ‘lightly’ at the end of BTVS.

But was it stellar? No. Was it satisfying? Again, no. I’ll miss Angel, even though a lot of the acting was bad, and so too were a lot of the episodes. But my Season Pass list on Tivo is getting mighty thin these days and with no shows from the Buffyverse on…well, I’m just feeling a bit blue.

Cyber church�reacts to ‘Satan’ visit

I mean, what did they expect? You build a ‘virtual church’ that looks like nothing so much as a MMRPG…of *course* you’re going to get griefers coming in to disrupt things.

I mean, how naive can you be?

In case any friends from the Pub come here to try and find out whats going on…there was a problem with the billing for jadedspub.com. The expiration date on the credit card that it was being billed to never got updated (my bad) and they were sending reminder notices to an old mediaone.net account so…

Anyway, the billing is now straightened out and the Pub should be back (and hopefully intact!) soon.

[UPDATE: Well, its still down. At this point I don't expect it to be back before tomorrow. I have a meeting first thing in the am but after that I'll get them on the phone and rant and rave. Thank you for your patience!]

[NEW UPDATE: We're back online!!]

So for the past few months I’ve been beta testing World of Warcraft.

Even though Blizzard has made every effort to make the game ‘casual gamer friendly’ I still can’t seem to play it casually. In fact, I’ve pretty much lost myself in their world for quite some time: its that compelling. I expect the FDA to get involved and classify it as a narcotic once it releases.

When not in WoW, I’ve been tinkering in City of Heros. I think of this as a ‘lite’ MMRPG, though in truth I may be doing it a disservice in saying so. I so enjoy creating characters (the titular heros) that I’ve gotten none of them anywhere above ‘newbie’ so it may get more complex farther in.

E3 has come and gone and I haven’t really sifted through the news yet. I’m going to attempt some semblance of balance between gaming and life and hopefully that’ll free up time resources to catch up on news and such.

In fact, the average age of game players was 29 and the average age of buyers was 36, with men making up 59 percent of the playing audience.

Survey: Video gamers get older, get online

Sony is showing off the new PSP handheld out at E3:
Sony unveils PlayStation Portable

Let the E3 announcements begin!

EA signs on with Xbox Live - May. 11, 2004

Just found an interesting article on SWG from last month. I personally am an ex-SWG customer. I loved the game for a while but eventually it just started feeling…empty.

But this is more about the “Jedi Slot” than the concerns I had. Still an interesting read…
The Sage of Star Wars Galaxies

EA has just announced a new RPG for consoles title The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age.

Details and a couple of screenshots can be found here.