But my problem with trying to keep up with forums these days is that sometimes they are incredibly fast paced. A topic can balloon into several pages in less than an hour and then be basically done. Or go onto several hundred pages in weeks which you can never catch up on.

So you have basically two options: mark all as read every once in a while, or start to ignore the forums. I started with the first and then moved on to the second.

Now my addiction is RSS and twitter, both of which I can more easily control the flow of. Want more? Add a follower or a feed. Want less? Drop a few. I only wish there was a way to not have duplicate RSS items about the same news story from separate sources. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an Apple story reported on by 10 different feeds with no new information after the first.

What do I mean? Sales and bundles. Look at what Valve has done with Steam. Valve does basically 4 things with products to make them sell better.

1. 10% off on pre-orders or new products. Little bit of a discount for new items let’s them stand apart from older products and gives a little incentive to buy them.
2. 4 for 3 package deals or buy 4, get 25% off. Link people together, get more sales from people who sometimes wouldn’t have bought it otherwise.
3. Multiple product bundles. Things like a discography or similar artists for a larger discount.
4. HUGE HOLIDAY SALES! Steam has holiday sales so popular people complain about buying things just because they are so cheap, even if they have no intention of playing it.

The point of all these sales? To sell people things they might not want, but in such a convincing way that they can’t help but do it. Another part of all these sales is to only do them on whole albums, selling all the filler songs that are generally lackluster.

The differences between music and games is actually better for music sales as well. People become bored of music much sooner than they become bored of games. People don’t (usually, minus one old roommate) become obsessed with music and not listen to anything else like they do with games.

Many people have vast libraries of music. Thousands of songs. You can’t expect people to pay $0.99 at a time to spend a thousands of dollars on a library of that size.

So that’s it. You now have direct control over the price of items. The cost of selling an item has gone significantly down. (transport, packaging, materials? hah!)

Use it.

1. Steam offers me many, many deals, especially on older but still relevant games.
2. Steam offers large packs of games at discounted prices.

I began using steam back in 2004 when they were throwing around Half-Life 2 with every video card, but before it came out you could play the older games. And a $10 upgrade got me Day of Defeat: Source and I could keep the back catalog. $10 for Half-Life and all associated mods PLUS a new game that I was waiting for? Sign me up.

From there I bought a few more retail games, some were older collector’s editions on the cheap, that could be activated in steam. Almost every game since then has been a game on sale in one way or another. The last time I bought a game in a store was last January for Mass Effect, Bioshock, Fallout 3 Collector’s Edition and a few others. And then Bioshock went on sale on steam the next week for $5… d’oh!

Last week steam had some very nice sales (25-90% off various games) and I ended up with 7 games for just under $50. Even if a store was having the same sales I would have had to go to the store 5 days in a row to see them. That is never going to happen.

So I love steam, and pretty much everything comes out on it anyway. Except for collector’s editions that’s where I am buying all my games for the next LONG while.

I got my own name though, and that’s very nice. Favourites so far are facebook.com/Default.aspx and www.facebook.com/index.aspx. Many that I expected to be gone are still not taken, like facebook.com/Satan but I have a feeling those are disallowed somehow.

I also know a bunch of people who have yet to jump on this at all, get on that internet friends!

Second chat? He started with “Electric boobs and fallopian tubes” and just went downhill from there. I won’t get into the details but I had to tell him to see a doctor… and then a vet. -1 for Omegle.

My third chat started with him saying “cyber?” and ended with me saying “notnx” rather quickly. -1 for Omegle.

And my last chat? It went absolutely nowhere, neither of us had anything to talk about. No points either way.

Should you try it out? sure, it’s worth 5 minutes. Just don’t expect to gain anything at all from it.

I also brought my server into my room and have started using it for TV and such. I realized that it was being used almost exclusively for storage and since it had a lot more power than that I wanted to use it for something else. That combined with my problem with a few games not liking dual-monitors made me recommission it as a Debian box which is sitting in my room now. Whenever I’m playing games or other things on my desktop I use that box for TV. Apart from that it still serves the exact same purpose as before, but it’s also easier to maintain with Debian.

But because I only had one cable coming into my room my desktop had get connectivity through my server. This was a real pain in the ass because it meant that nothing on the rest of the network (wireless, which means my laptop) could connect to my desktop anymore and I had to move everything through the server if I needed it. I also needed to have the server on if I wanted a connection on my desktop. This really wasn’t working for me so I dropped some cash earlier this week for a nice gigabit 8 port switch, couple of cat6 and I hooked everything up faster than before.

I hit 75 last Sunday night and that felt good because now I finally have the shadowpriest ability that allows me to do massive AoE damage while still in shadowform. Since 65 I’ve increased my haste and SP considerably but I’ve dropped about 10% in crit chance. Now I get more consistent damage which is nice. Here is my Apocryphai’s stats if you want to check them out, I’m a Blood Elf Shadowpriest on Mug’Thol.

The game feels like a repition of the same sorts of quests for the most part, they’ve thrown a few cool ones in there but everything else I could mindlessly solo. It does feel like I’m making progress though, so I’m happy with that. I keep reminding myself that the real content begins at 80 and I’ll just have to hold out til then. For a game that I’ve already put $120 and almost 200 hours into it had better pay out!

Apart from that I’ve been trying to start FEAR2 but I keep getting sidetracked by WoW or by generally being busy. I’m about 2 hours into it but I’m not feeling the pull that I had with the original FEAR. I’m still going to finish it but there are a few things about it that I don’t quite like but can’t pinpoint yet.

And I’ve been reading. Or attempting to read. Between all that WoW and the other things I’ve been up to I have barely had a chance to start my books. Currently on my to do list is: Diablo: The Sin War trilogy, Ender’s Game, V for Vendetta and Watchmen. Diablo is just some trash fantasy that was supposed to get me back into reading when I picked out a few other books but it’s just been piling up while I try to get to 80. Once I get there I’ll be able to give it more time and burn through them in a few days so I can hit the real books.

Other good bookmarklets I’ve come across are:

• BugMeNot for getting past registration quickly on large sites.
• is.gd for making urls smaller, similar to tinyurl except an even smaller url.
• You can also download videos from youtube and other places with this link (not a bookmarklet)