Kings of Chaos - Help Me Build My Army.

I'm playing this silly online game called "Kings Of Chaos." If you click my recruit link and join up, you will help me build my army, which is part of a larger army. Once you join, let me know and I'll send you the link to the larger army's hierarchy page.

If you just click the link for the heck of it and sign up, you need do no more. But if you find it to be fun, you can try recruiting your own folks, fight battles for money, etc. I'm not much good at networking, so my army is growing very slowly thus far. It's a pyramid scheme kind-of-thing, except instead of real money it's fake money and orcs.

A silly diversion from real war, but welcome at this point.

Here are the instructions from the website:

In Kings of Chaos, you are a warlord controlling an army and attempting to become the most powerful force in Middle-earth. You can choose your race, either humans, elves, dwarves, or orcs. Once you choose your race, you cannot change it for the duration of the age, so choose wisely.
You build your army by sending people your unique link (found in your profile page). If they click on the link, they will be recruited into your army!

If someone joins from your link page, they will become one of your officers, and when their army grows your army will get extra recruits. Also, your army will help them when they are being attacked.

Every game turn (30 minutes), you will generate money. The amount of money you generate is based on the size of your army. The larger your army, the more money you will make by using it to pillaging the surrounding countryside.

Use your money to buy weapons from the Armory. Weapons make your forces stronger by giving them attack and defense bonuses.

When you want to attack someone, the number of attack turns you use determines how much money you will plunder if you win. Use attacks wisely though, as you only get 1 every 30 minutes. Different races have different bonuses. Keep this in mind when choosing your race.

So, you don't have to join as one of my officers to help, just clicking on my recruit link helps. But joining is good, too.

I'll eventually add my KOC link somewhere semi-permanent on this page, for convenience.

Quotes o' the Day - What is it with this administration and its ability to give us a straight story?

Vice President Dick Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press" March 16:
"The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but that they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that."
"My guess is even significant elements of the Republican Guard are likely as well to want to avoid conflict with the U.S. forces and are likely to step aside."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN March 23:
"The course of this war is clear. The outcome is clear. The regime of Saddam Hussein is gone. It's over. It will not be there in a relatively reasonably predictable period of time."

Definition of Naive - I had pro-war people telling me this entire war was going to last 10 days. Some were saying we'd be in Baghdad 2 days into the war. Here we are at a week and then some, and this clearly isn't going to be over by Monday.

And so we see how some opinions were not based on reality.

Long Road - Frontline's "The Long Road to War has been recommended to me by a number of people, but I haven't caught it yet. If I keep missing it, I may have to settle for the website. Apparently it has the full text of interviews and such. If I weren't so busy, I might stop to read it. It will have to wait.

Displacement Method - I commented the other day on how the war is pushing other things out of the news. Well, it pushes things out of our consciousness, too. So much that was going on in my mind seems to have been pushed off because of the war. On the other hand, so much outside of it seems to still be going about its daily existence.

Anyone else have this odd feeling?

File under "There Ought To Be Limits To Freedom" - News.com reports that the House is scheduled to vote on proposal which could result in the owners of misleading domain names being jailed for up to 2 years.

Under the proposal, a last-minute amendment to an unrelated child abduction bill, people who knowingly use an innocent-sounding domain name to drive traffic to a sexually explicit Web site could be fined and imprisoned for two to four years. An example of an innocuous-sounding domain name with pornographic content is WhiteHouse.com, which is not sponsored by the Bush administration.

Thanks, JC, for pointing this out.

Cthulhu Ftaghn! (Or whatever) - it's the Random H. P. Lovecraft Story Generator! Hold onto your Necronomicon, it's a long way to R'lyeh. Or whatever.

More Cthulhu links (or loosely related):

• "House at Cthulu Corner"
  
• Yes, Virginia, there is a Cthulhu
  
• Never invoke anything bigger than your head.
  
• Cthulhu plush figures (this takes the cake)
  
• Pokéthulhu

Swamped - I'm buried at work today, so I'm just going to provide a miscellany of quick links.

The neo-imperialist in the Boston Phoenix. (Thanks, Patti)

Harvard says common virus, MS may be linked reports the Boston Globe. Interesting to me, because my daughter's disease is, in some ways, similar. Both diseases have mysterious causes. I often wonder if it wasn't triggered by some infection she had, causing her immune system to go into a crazed overdrive. The more they learn about this kind of thing, the better.

China Pneumonia Toll Jumps; Singapore Shuts Schools via Yahoo and Reuters. Holy cow. What's this doing in the "Oddly Enough" subhead?

An apple a day
keeps the doctor away
but what would you say
to teachers who flay?

Moore Than They Bargained For - So, Michael Moore gave a speech at the Academy Awards. (He won for best documentary)

A lot of people have been outraged by his speech. Many were offended by the fact that he had people on stage with him who may not have shared his views, and sprung this on them without their knowledge. I can understand why that might bother people.

I was thinking about this. I am not always a fan of Moore's tactics, though I have long followed his work and agree with a lot of his politics. And I have gotten a real kick out of a lot of what he has done.

He claims that he told people he'd be making a statement on stage:

"Moore said backstage that he invited the other nominees to join him while walking up the aisle. He had warned them during the commercial break that the invite and the rant were coming."

Realistically, when Michael Moore calls you onto the stage and is about to say something, don't you know what's coming if you know anything about the man. Just the warning about the rant should have been enough.

Folks were applauding his political commentary (in his movie) moments before, and then when he gives them his honest opinion in his statement, all of a sudden it's distasteful. It's a little inconsistent. People don't have to like it (and many don't) but at this point to be surprised by it is puzzling.

I know a lot of people aren't going to agree with me on that. But I also think it's great that someone is willing to express an unpopular conscience. The people booing didn't get up in front of the world - they remained anonymous.

If Moore is guilty of anything, it's putting those other directors on the spot when he invited them up, since they knew what was likely coming. They weren't denied their decision just because they didn't know the exact text of his rant - they were forced to make a decision. No one made that decision for them, but no one likes to be forced into making a decision.

That's not a very strong complaint, in my eyes. And if Rush Limbaugh told me he was going to rant on stage and invite me up, I sure as hell would not follow him up there.

They knew what they were getting into.

(And I've stayed pretty much away from the substance of his speech!)

In Search Of... - Anyone notice much in mainstream the news lately about corrupt corporate CEOs, taxes, etc?

No?

I didn't think so.

Conservatives Gone Wild! mentions a little of what's been happening while you were watching the war.

The City Drops Into The Night - The here and now is fucked up. Self loathing doesn't stop the war, make it right, or fix the here and now. Neither do jingoism, gung-ho mentality, apathy, or a host of other things. Killing more people doesn't "fix things" but it is a way of moving on. The way through the Gordian Neighborhood is, apparently, to blow it up first. That's what we're looking at in the here and now. So, what happens next? What will we do in Iraq? Will we hand control over to people who will rule it like Saudi Arabia? Turkey? Pakistan? A new version of Saddam? If we don't point to past administrations, and the ghosts who have risen again to haunt the current one, how do we have any hope of avoiding just starting over again? Same Git, Different Decade. Is "democracy" just something we say as long as the democracy makes decisions we like? If you're an Iraqi daisy about to be cut, what's your feeling about the democracy that built the bomb, and the pumping fists and surging popularity numbers riding that bomb like a skeletal Slim Pickens? How, exactly do I learn to stop worrying? Is it easier to be killed by a few madmen with a plane and a mandate from god, or by someone with who feels he has a mandate from the voters? A war about our safety in a world where it's not nations who are our worst enemies, it may be that perception is an important battlefield. I guess there are a lot of questions in the air.

Who Moved My %$&$@!#@% Cheese? - At WEEN---AUDIO you can hear the two versions of a jingle that ween wrote for Pizza Hut. The jingle was rejected. I don't know if they wrote that second version before or after the rejection, but it made me laugh out loud.

I guess I have a love/hate relationship with advertising. Whoop - scratch the "love" part. Thanks Mike, for pointing this out.

Talk Radio - I don't listen much, but when I do I'm usually disgusted. If I were a magazine publisher, I'd... (Yes, I have too much time on my hands late at night)


A fellow named Brian who posts on EAForums had the idea for most of the text and I laid it out.

Click the image for the full-sized version. Print quality versions available on request.