Amen Break, anyone?

What hype? Apple puts a 4 inch simple teaser inside one of it's applications, and today presents a classy front page on it's web site. The collection gets a stylish presentation in iTunes, but not much more than any other high profile act. How much collective hype do we get from all of those fly by night 2-cent hip hop acts? Should they have just hidden the downloads away someplace or would your world be a better place if they didn't offer them at all?

You should be grateful that this gave you all a chance to buff your egos by claiming your superiority over Steve Jobs for all the world to see.

I've got most of those tracks in my collection, but this still made me smile, especially the free concert video that Apple is streaming. It reminded me of a more innocent and kinder time.

Look, maybe it's you. If you see a paladin in the video and you don't know what to do because you're a warrior, it's not the game. It's not the class. It's not the encounter. It's you.

And no, tanking's not hard. You survive, you did a good job. You die, it was either your gear or your healers. Tanking involves very little skill nowadays. You've got a handful of cooldowns you use every couple minutes, and that's about it. DPS has to manage more at once, and healing is where the challenge really is.

"I don't know how to raid" is sort of meaningless on its own. What part is it you don't know, exactly?

Joss Whedon.

I'm mostly hoping each level is challenging. Original Shattered Halls in BC was pretty rough. Doable, but rough. In Wrath, there are plenty of dungeons I simply never ran on normal, because my gear from BC was good enough to head straight into heroics.

A 5k gear score is doable with 5-man dungeons. I mean, even before this last patch.

You can "know the fights" by looking them up on wowpedia.org or youtube. Or tankspot. Or bosskillers. Or a half dozen other sites.

ICC pugs on my server routinely clear at least half of icecrown. I've known pugs attempt heroic bosses, and some even kill (normal) lich king.

Once upon a time, you could play a Blizzard game over a LAN.

Once upon a time, you could install a "spawn" copy to play against a friend, allowing the two of you to play multiplayer off one install disc and CD key.

Once upon a time, you didn't need the internet to play single player.

... and it annoyed me to no end that I couldn't just get something like my old phone, a Nokia 6150. All the phones now either flip or slide, and are chock full of "features" which are really thinly-veiled attempts to get you to cough up more money for a data plan.

I just wanted a regular phone with a 12-key number pad that could send text messages with predictive text input. Nope. Not offered anymore. Hell, I can't even send an email to someone without using a data plan and some email "service". (On the Nokia I could simply set an email address as the recipient of a text message.) And one of the features about it I really liked—the ability to set "profiles", multiple preference sets for ring volume and the like—isn't on the one I have now. But dammit, I can take pictures and... not do a whole lot with them.

And even the 6150 doesn't have something my original cell phone did that I gave up in 2004... I miss Snake. :(

Depends on the poll?

10/10/10 is my birthday, I was born in 1955, so I'm 55 today.
It's sort of cool except that it's also true for David Lee Roth today.