So it’s now official… I am leaving once again to terrorize the peaceful residents of Tokyo… The residents have until July to prepare for my visit. My coming to Japan is only rivaled by Godzilla himself. (I shall knock down buildings and stomp on the little people and perhaps fight Mothra… perhaps). In any event, it’ll be fun to terrorize the populous again [someone better alert the staff at Yodobashi Camera who were perhaps the most terrorized by my last stay in Japan]. Any who wish to join me are of course welcome to drop by.

There is the original pen & paper RPG you like. It has a distinct look, feel and maybe even smell. So far, you’ve perhaps taken it for granted that no software could improve or come even close to that gaming experience you enjoy while playing it with your friends. Well we’ve brought all of that online, save the smell.

Fantasy Grounds is a virtual tabletop for pen & paper role-playing games. It provides all the tools you need to play your favorite RPG online, including the dice, sheets, tokens, maps, notes, the whole works. D20 fantasy rules are supported out of the box, but Fantasy Grounds can be customized and extended to suit almost any RPG. Additional rulesets, token packs, map modules and campaigns can be created and shared with friends.

Check it out over at Fantasy Grounds

… registered users will be relieved to hear that very little, if any, useful information will end up in the hands of the MPAA.

“They don’t have anything, they have air,” an ex-torrent site owner told Slyck. He chose to remain anonymous. For arguments sake, we will call him Paul.

Paul also ran a Torrent site based on the same scripts and source used by LokiTorrent. They conferred regularly. Referring to the website logs:

“Those access logs have no value it all. They only display whether you downloaded the .torrent file, not if you actually downloaded the content using that Torrent,” Paul explained to Slyck.

The Torrent file is merely a key; the MPAA can not prove that it was used in any locks …

… “Logs files tend to grow at a rate of 1GB per day on this kind of site. Most site owners � either disable logging or purge the logs every few days. So there’s little to no information for them,” he explained. “Perhaps Loki [Webber�s alias] even disabled his logging completely recently because of the large influx of new users.” …

… The MPAA would be able to gather more usage statistics and IP addresses by monitoring public trackers themselves. The announcement that they have acquired a roadmap to those behind file sharing appears to be nothing short of a scare tactic.

Slyck News: Loki�s Map Leads MPAA on Road to Nowhere

So, perhaps, Webber is appropriately named Loki after the Norse god of mischief, master of guile and deception …

A trailer for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is up on Amazon!

So Wordpress 1.5 was released today. Now, when I decided to upgrade the blog, there had a 1.3 CVS version which most people where using … but I figured I’d go with 1.2.1 until they released 1.3 … *sigh* now they release 1.5 after what, two weeks of running 1.2.1! What happened to 1.3? Hell, I didn’t hear of 1.4! TWO WEEKS! It figures … that’s all I’m saying … why should my luck change?

and I know there are a lot of you. I figured this comic was a little too close to reality. I figured I should share.

Ong-Bak is about a man trying to get ahead. No, that’s not right, Ting (Tony Jaa) is trying to get a head. The head of Ong-Bak, the ancient statue of Buddha that a group of thugs stole from his village’s temple. A curse, akin to the “Temple of Doom,” has befallen the village and Ting goes off to reclaim the stolen head. A very basic plot, even for a martial arts film. Talking about martial arts, luckily for us (and Ting), he just happens to be a master of Muay Thai (this really comes in handy during the next 90 minutes).

Tony Jaa is incredible. Despite the basic plot which delivers such important moral messages from “Smoking is bad and will turn you into an evil guy who is obessed with getting head … err heads” to “Never take a Taxi in Thailand (they can’t drive worth sh*t)” to “Stay in School” to “Don’t do drugs” … where was I? right … the film is essentially laid out as a forum for Jaa to show off his awesome physical skills. He kicks, punches, and flips his way all over the screen. He might not be the most gifted actor (surprise, surprise), but he does have the charisma needed to succeed as a martial artist actor (ie: he can do some really cool martial art moves). The chase through the back alleys of Bangkok, where Jaa uses all his acrobatic tricks to stay out of grasp of the villians, is very reminiscent of Jackie Chan. Then there is the amazing fight clubs scenes and the scene where Jaa’s legs are on fire, literally. I mean it has to be seen to be believed. This type of insane stunt hasn’t been seen for years since Jackie Chan decided to “value his life” … it’s good to see someone new being suicidal for my movie going enjoyment.

In any case, if you’re looking for a complex, plot driven film … look elsewhere. If you’re in the mood for 105 minutes of breathtaking, blood spurting, random violence, then you just can’t go wrong with Tony Jaa … er I mean Ong-Bak. I mean, what other movie starts with King of the Hill style violence in a tree? As Colin said, “There had better be a point to this or this is the greatest movie ever made.”

Some things just don’t have to be explained. This is one of those things. Perfect for V-Day as well.

I ran across an interesting thread on Apolyton today. Basically a T.A. for a class on program design at the University of Toronto was requesting people familiar with the game Call to Power II to volunteer to talk to their class about the game itself. The purpose of the class is to design, or at least plan out, a new interface to the game. Since Call to Power II’s source code has been released, it will be interesting to see if anything comes of this.

We all know bit torrent site admins take pride in their grassroots, non-profit image however most sites make huge amounts of money. Suprnova which claims to have shutdown due to MPAA pressure and to finish working on their Exeem project for their client is completely just lies. Suprnova was making alot of money. Figure if they had 2,000,000 visitors per day (which is what lokitorrent claims to have, suprnova many estimate had closer to 5,000,000) they would have made close to US$90,000 per month just from per-click ads. [...] Exeem also will make them a ton of money through Cydoor. Some estimate they can easily make $1 per user per day which would put them at close to US$300,000 per day with their current user base. [...] Our prediction is this Lokitorrent will sign a deal with the MPAA to shutdown, they will claim to shutdown saying that do to lack of donations they [cannot] afford to fight the case. The Lokitorrent admins save face with the BitTorrent community and continue their mufftorrent porn site and everyone goes on thinking they were just underdogs that could not afford to fight.

Torrent News: Rumour Mill Jan 31st, 2005

The BitTorrent hub LokiTorrent was shut down by a lawsuit from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) yesterday at 4:30PM EST. As part of the settlement, Lowkee/Ed Webber turned over control of the website and all its access logs to the MPAA. As such, if you downloaded anything illegally (Movies, Games, TV Shows, etc) from Lokitorrent recently, you might be getting a letter from the MPAA or one of its cronies.