News You Can Bruise for 2000 June 30

Fri Jun 30 2000 05:23: Hey everybody! I'm Dr. Nick Riviera! I have to move all my stuff back into the truck and into my car. Then I have to drive up to Frisco (nyeah) and unload it (bleah). Then we keep going north, I think, although we might stay the night at my uncle's house and go north tomorrow.

So this is really, seriously, the end of Internet access for me for quite a while. Will I survive? Tune in next week, same bat time, same bat station! Wait, I've been handed an update... it will in fact be a different bat station!

Fri Jun 30 2000 05:30:

Get out of jail free.^*

* Certain restrictions apply to claim.^**

** Certain restrictions apply to previous disclaimer.

My mother got a cooking equipment catalog with a little cover cover (another cover on top of the real cover) which had a disclaimer disclaimer of that form. It said "FREE DELIVERY" but it had to qualify "FREE DELIVERY" to such an extent that the disclaimer itself was misleading, and another disclaimer had to be written adding more qualifications to the disclaimer.

In case you haven't noticed, I love disclaimers. I also love modifying nouns with themselves. Pizza pizza.

Fri Jun 30 2000 06:41: You'd think that a story called The Ecology of the Xorn would be the greatest story ever written, but it's... not.

Fri Jun 30 2000 06:56: Continuing my Google search for "xorn" brings me this "Vade-Mecum" for Rogue, which reads like a standards document and from which you could write a clone of Rogue version 3, 4 or 5. Also offers the official justification for why you can't go up stairs in Rogue until you get the Amulet: the stairways are not stairways but holes in the floor, "the elevators have been out of order for centuries", and the Amulet lets you levitate (but not in the way that the potion of levitation lets you levitate) so you can go up the holes. Yeah, right.

I should also point you to the wondrous Rogomatic, predecessor to Angband's Borg.