Classic Pepys

Sunday 26 March 1665 (Pepys' Diary)

At noon home to dinner, my wife and I (Mercer staying to the Sacrament) alone. This is the day seven years which, by the blessing of God, I have survived of my being cut of the stone, and am now in very perfect good health and have long been; and though the last winter hath been as hard a winter as any have been these many years, yet I never was better in my life, nor have not, these ten years, gone colder in the summer than I have done all this winter, wearing only a doublet, and a waistcoate cut open on the back; abroad, a cloake and within doors a coate I slipped on. Now I am at a losse to know whether it be my hare’s foot which is my preservative against wind, for I never had a fit of the collique since I wore it, and nothing but wind brings me pain, and the carrying away of wind takes away my pain, or my keeping my back cool; for when I do lie longer than ordinary upon my back in bed, my water the next morning is very hot, or whether it be my taking of a pill of turpentine every morning, which keeps me always loose, or all together, but this I know, with thanks to God Almighty, that I am now as well as ever I can wish or desire to be, having now and then little grudgings of wind, that brings me a little pain, but it is over presently, only I do find that my backe grows very weak, that I cannot stoop to write or tell money without sitting but I have pain for a good while after it. Yet a week or two ago I had one day’s great pain; but it was upon my getting a bruise on one of my testicles, and then I did void two small stones, without pain though, and, upon my going to bed and bearing up of my testicles, I was well the next. But I did observe that my sitting with my back to the fire at the office did then, as it do at all times, make my back ake, and my water hot, and brings me some pain. I sent yesterday an invitation to Mrs. Turner and her family to come to keep this day with me, which she granted, but afterward sent me word that it being Sunday and Easter day she desired to choose another and put off this.

As far as I recall, being cut for the stone involved an incision in, of all places, the perineum and then a lengthy procedure to take out the blockage from the relevant organ (bladder in this case, I believe) through that slot. Without anaesthetic or antiseptics. Eek.

Ego-Blogging

The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Re-review // MMO /// Eurogamer

LOTRO looks absolutely, astoundingly right. Characters look correct, the world is beautifully crafted and enemies match the best drawings that the Tolkien Legendarium has attracted in sixty years. The Shire looks as good as the movies, Bree (though bigger than we expected) is gloriously rickety, like an old medieval English town, and the build of the Elven and Dwarven towns nail ethereal and indomitable respectively.

My re-review of LOTRO is up, at last. If you've never been arsed enough to read any of my writing and you count yourself a friend, would you kindly have a gander? It's not brilliant, but it's surely solid.

Shuffle Sex

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language

I think my most embarassing one has to be the entire Best of Bonzo Dog Doodah Band following in quick sucession - nothing kills the mood like the Intro & Outro ("Please welcome - Adolf Hitler on vibes") and then trying to save a situation by miming to "In The Canyons of Your Mind". I seem to remember the lovely girl in question ("And arent;t they all lovely girls, Ted?") collapsing into unrecoverablew fits of giggles for some reason...

E-Cigarette

Heh. Reminds me of the fags in Fifth Element - y'know, the ones that are all filter and no ciggie and are in a red box warning you of imminent death on the wall. (Thanks Alec!)

Identity Crisis.

For any users of Skype out there, my username is Griliopoulos. Duh. For MSN, it's iddleyiddle at hotmail.com. For Google Talk it's daniel.griliopoulos at gmail.com. On Xbox Live I'm OXM Grill (but email me first, as my list is always full.) On Lord of the Rings Online, I'm on Snowbourn and my name's Warslow Wobbleguts. If you're on any social networking site, my full name's my name. If you're on any other site with profiles, I'm likely to be on there with the name Griliopoulos.

Legacy Names
On Planetside, I was Picoc. In City of Heroes, I was both of the heroes Y'gor and The Bomb,and some arbitrary villain. I'm Kip Brasken in Guild Wars. I can't even remember my name in Tabula Rasa. I had a thousand names in World of Warcraft, among them Grittle and Ungolim on Daggerspine and Grill on Bloodscalp. There were a couple of characters in Everquest II and some in Ultima Online, Shadowbane, Auto Assault (dead), D&D Online, EVE Online, Final Fantasy XI, Hero Online, ForumWarz, Kingdom of Loathing, RuneScape, Toontown and many more that I forget...

With this many identities, it's a wonder that I exist at all any more.

Achievements Quandary

Xbox 360 achievements let you get points that total up to mean exactly nothing. Hence, I feel no obligation to play games for achievements and even feel a little disgusted with myself for playing games with achievements. Hence, I don't want to play Xbox 360 games.

However... I also get a feeling whenever I'm playing a game that doesn't have achievement points (PC or even Wii) that I'm wasting my time because I could be getting points. No matter that I don't want to, no matter that I think they're a worthlessI grinding measurement towards inevitable death, I still get that urge to get them when I'm not playing 360.

I'm finding it almost impossible to play any game for more than an hour at the moment. Help!

...Watchmen Character Art

!!!!!

Watchmen

...to help pass the time, here is your first look at some of the Watchmen characters.

Do coat hangers sound as good as Monster cables? - Boing Boing

The cables made by Monster Cable (the company that enjoys suing other companies that have the word "monster" in their name) sound no better than coat hangers, according to a man who ran a blindfold test to compare the quality of audio running through each.

Ha! I remember when these guys made some HDTV cables for the Xbox 360 which they proceeded to charge five times the cost of other perfectly-acceptable generic cables for (around £80 I seem to remember). When they came in, I noticed that they had 1) proprietary optical connections, which made them fairly useless and 2) no HDTV-SDTV switch meaning they were actually much worse than the official or generic HDTV cables.