Ever met that special someone who simply refuses to leave you alone? This video was made just for them. Send your personal stalker to this video and pray that the phone calls stop.

This poor fellow, full of caring and idealism, chose a to work in the service of others as a social worker. Reading this, I wonder exactly how long it took before this person's ideals were crushed under the cold, hard reality that people really, truly, suck.

A video of a Japanese program teaching some basic English sentences. Trust me, even if you're a native English speaker you should watch this video. It's priceless!

Xtazy energy drink is a guarana-based energy drink which, in a decided break from energy drink conventions, comes in 3 distinct flavors instead of just one. It also utilizes some unique ingredients to further set it apart from the competition. All of the available varieties offer a smooth taste with no aftertaste to speak of.

Orange Blast is my least favorite of the three. It's surprisingly bland and flavorless, bitter, and tastes almost nothing like oranges.

Cranberry Blast is sweet and syrupy, with a pleasant touch of cranberry flavor.

Lime Blast offers a smooth citrus lime flavor reminiscent of Fresca and similar beverages. Overall, this flavor is my favorite of the three.

While by no means potent, Xtazy does provide a good boost of energy and noticeably increases focus and awareness. This is a good drink to choose if you need to write, study, or perform any task which requires focused thought.

Overall this is a good choice, both in terms of taste and effectiveness.

Want a creative way to give someone a loan, or simply freak out a friend? Why not give him or her a spider made out of money?

Play the Papa Johns Sizzlin Summer game online. Even if you do not win you will receive a special code good for some free side-orders when ordering off the Papa Johns website.

Expires: 9/03/06

Discount Code: daddy40
Expires: 12/31/06

Expires: 6/30/06

Two years after his battle with the Lord of Demons, Seyonne is tired, troubled, angry, and frustrated. As Ezzaria's only remaining Warden, he carries the entire burden of the worsening demon war on his shoulders, and some Ezzarian elders have set a watch on him to make sure he has not brought some subtle corruption back from his years in slavery. Then a demon encounter unlike any in Ezzarian memory leads Seyonne to question everything he has ever believed. And his search for a demon-possesed child becomes the search for his own soul and the soul of his people.

Whenever I read a novel I consider to be outstanding I am hesitant to read its sequel. This is because sequels to good books tend to disappoint, especially in comparison to the first. This is especially true of fantasy, a genre with no shortage of sequels and trilogies. So, in my opinion, the true measure of an author is not whether he or she can write a good first book, but whether he or she can write a sequel without screwing it up.

I am happy to say that Revelation truly is a worthy sequel to its predecessor. Taking place a few years after the first book, the story follows Seyonne once again as he struggles to settle back into his old life as a Warden of Ezzaria. However, his own people are all too happy to turn against him at the first opportunity, and early in the book he is banished from his profession and shunned by the very people he'd heroically saved in book one. Seyonne then goes on a quest to investigate the true history behind the war between the Ezzarians and the mysterious Rai-Kirah, a search that leads him to some shocking discoveries.

This books sees the return of the first book's beloved characters and introduces some new ones. Among them is Fiona, a fanatical Ezzarian with a deep resentment for Seyonne who is sent to spy on him, and Blaise, an enigmatic outlaw with outlandish powers. Also making a return are the Rai-Kirah, who play a much larger role in this book than they did in the last one.

While not quite matching the first book in terms of attention-grabbing plot twists, this volume is no slouch. My only real criticism would be that Revelation sheds some of the first book's uniqueness in favor of some more tried-and-true fantasy conventions, such as the "ancient prophecy" plot device. But this is only a minor gripe at best. Revelation does what it sets out to do, and that is more that can be said for many books in the fantasy genre.

Overall, if you enjoyed the first book you'll enjoy the second. Definitely check it out if you happen to see it on the shelf. It's one of those sequels which can be read and enjoyed by itself even if you haven't read the first book.

This guy attempts to cancel his AOL account. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, he's about to get a little more than he bargained for.

Note: The mp3 linked above is hosted here so you can listen to it without killing the poor fellow's bandwidth (which, given the attention this file has gotten him, has been taxed quite enough).

You can read the original story here.

Why the country's reliance on imported brainpower is on a collision course with its home-grown distaste for science.

Inform 7 is the latest edition of Inform, one of the most popular programming languages used to write works of Interactive Fiction. The first beta of Inform 7 was released April 30th, 2006, and its presence caused a shakeup in the IF community as a whole because of its radical new approach that flies in the face of IF tradition and conventions.

Normally to write interactive fiction one would need to have a firm grasp of Object-Oriented programming languages such as C. Writing even basic elements of an IF story, like adding a room and allowing the player to travel from that room to another adjoining room, required typing out long streams of convoluted code. This is best exemplified in Wikipedia's sample code for a small, bare-bones room coded in Inform 6. As such programming languages tend to be extremely finicky when it comes to what code you're typing in, even the slightest error could break your entire game, causing you to have to go hunting for the bug responsible and fix it.

This structure makes writing IF difficult, especially if you don't have the mind of a computer programmer. Languages like Inform 6 can be next to impossible for the non-technical layperson to even learn, much less use effectively. There are GUI programs out there like ADRIFT which requires no knowledge of programming at all and reduces the functionality of languages like Inform to an easy to use point-and-click menu-driven interface. However, programs like these lack the power and flexibility of a programming language, and can easily frustrate IF writers who've advanced beyond the novice stage and want to do more and more complicated things.

Inform 7 retains the power and flexibility of an object-oriented programming languages while becoming so easy that even the most non-technical writer can pick it up and use it. It accomplishes this by using what is called Natural English (a subset of the English language) as its programming language. What used to require writing complicated lines of code can now be accomplished by writing a natural, easily readable and understandable sentence in plain English. Wikipedia provides a very nice example of this. Note that this example code is for the same game which was linked to earlier in this article. Take a moment to compare the two source codes and decide which one is easier to write.

Having taken this new language for a spin myself, I can personally say that if is very easy and feels very natural. While writing a short game to learn the ropes I actually spent more time brainstorming story ideas and plot elements and much less time contemplating how I am going to get a technical feature to work. It took me only an hour or two to learn all I needed to write a basic game, whereas learning to do those same things in the TADS language took days.

A mind that is technical enough to master a programming language tends not to be abstract enough to master storytelling, and vice-versa. Inform 7 stands a good chance of bridging the gap between the two, allowing writers with abstract minds to write compelling works of interactive fiction without being hampered by the technicalities of a complex programming language, and programmers writing IF to focus more on honing their writing skills. April 30th 2006 may very well be remembered as the day Interactive Fiction took its first step out of the shadows and re-emerged as a viable form of entertainment.

Inform 7 Homepage

In Soviet Russia, Mario plays you!

An homage to all the happy mothers out there and the joy of the first discovery that you're about to bring a new life into the world.

Semen makes you happy. That's the remarkable conclusion of a study comparing women whose partners wear condoms with those whose partners don't.