HoHoHo ...

Merry Christmas!

That's all folks!

On this day in ...

1888, during a bout of madness, painter Vincent van Gogh stalked his friend Gaugain with a razor, and then afterwards cut off the lower part of his own left ear and gave it to a prostitute.

Happy ear day, Vince. Happy ear day.

Haffnegaffle.

It's, like, winter, man.

And judging from the way public transport has ground to a complete crawl if not an outright stop you'd figure the dutchies have never actually seen a winter to be discontent in. We're talking about a country that has a significant slice of culture invested in stringy men and women skating impossible distances across frozen lakes and waterways (unbelieveable to others: one belgian gentleman once tried to enroll himself in the 11 stedentocht and tried to book 11 hotels along the way, thinking that such insane distances between cities were naturally skated across 11 days) but five centimeters of snow and the trains stop. In and of itself this is not the worst bit, however. The WORST bit is that when a train happens to be available for travel unexpectedly the announcer immediately does a happy-commercial-style-propaganda-dick-move and calls it an EXTRA train.

So, they yanked 99 trains from the schedule but the one we have managed to make run, we'll call that our happy-making EXTRA train.

One wonders, though slightly prompted, how they manage trainservices in Austria and Switserland. Very much on schedule, presumably.

Anyway, Christmas coming soon. That's nice. tree is up, pressies underneath, Kamiel is coming, live's good.

Woohoo ...

... new Warcraft content.

Usually this does not generate such an enthousiastic response from me. Content patches are nice, you know, sort of a free gift between new big content discs and that is all well and good and we receive them with joy, however, this one is a biggie.

Why, oh, why is it a biggie?

Well ... mainly because of the new way in which one can find a group and enter an heroic dungeon or a raid. It is now possible to do this across realms and at random. Which means that I now get to raid at 6.20 in the morning. Before patch 3.3 I could never do anything else but solo things in Wow. My realm, at that hour, was dead space. Sometimes you could see people hanging out in Dalaran and that was that. However ... now, when I select random dungeon, 'all' the other soloïsts on all the other realms who also have selected random dungeon get tossed together into the fray. And across all those realms there are certainly more than 5 people awake at that godforsaken hour. So, I'm happy. And I'm earning ... stuff. I never seem to remember what, exactly. Emblems of frostbite or something.

Something else Warcrafty, whilst I'm on the subject:

http://forums.questionablecontent.net/index.php/topic,20726.2000.html

Here are people discussing Warcraft!

... I think ...

I'm actually not quite sure what they're talking about but the thread has Warcraft in the title so I assume ... I'm certain that these lovely fellows get a lot of satisfaction from this discussion but I cannot follow it and it also seems fairly silly to take a game and think:'You know what, this game needs more math! Because games never have enough math in them.' Essentially, taking an easy diversion and turning it into a part-time job. With spreadsheets. *shiver*. I guess I stumbled upon the distinction between the hardcore and the casual there. Hardcores are often assholes anyway. Really. that, I just realised, is another benefit of the 'random dungeon thingy'. No more whining about your gear, your specc, your role, your tacs, before you even get invited. No more selection. Just random. Random is good!

With that in mind:

I so hope this is real. Wouldn't that be awesome?

One more, click for larger:

Random awesomeness. I love it.

This ...

... is why people fly planes into buildings:

http://webecoist.com/2009/11/30/super-size-it-the-world%e2%80%99s-largest-food/