It's a reality I've learned to deal with over the years that upon reaching any level of notoriety, crazy comes out of the woodwork. That's not to suggest I'm a celebrity by any means, but I've been on the internet a long time — some of my earliest writing was on "blogs" before the word ever existed, and I've had to deal with anonymous nastiness in a variety of incarnations. Nevertheless, I have still always been willing to put myself out there; being in the spotlight combined with an opinionated and often acerbic personality means that sometimes retaliation crosses the line. This is my experiences with one such individual, Jonathan Beitel, and how he has been harassing me for the last six months.

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The astute reader may have noticed a screeching halt when it comes to updates. I haven't abandoned anything, but much of my free time for the past month and a half has been absorbed by a writing project I've been incredibly interested in. This past week I released my first piece of published fiction, book one in an episodic series of sci-fi/fantasy. It's already on the Amazon Kindle store as we speak and it will be popping up on other distribution sites (like the iBooks and B&N stores) as soon as they update their listings.

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On Friday, the magical and revolutionary iPad was finally released internationally, arriving "down under" at 8 AM. Like a couple hundred others, I stood in line outside the Apple Store to buy one. Given my previous thoughts and commentary on the device, such an announcement may seem surprising. And yes, I went into the purchase unsure as to whether or not I would be keeping it or returning it in a few days, thinking it would be simply something shiny that I'd get tired of in a short amount of time.

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NaNoWriMo has been an event that has intrigued me for a few years now. I've often thought of doing it but never actually committed the "thinking" into "doing," despite seeing it crop up every year in my friends' status updates on various social networking services. I admit to a certain level of elitism preventing me from getting involved, as well: NaNoWriMo has always seemed like an interesting idea, but in practice I always come off feeling that it's the sort of deal bored housewives do to make themselves seem more interesting– "I'm a novelist," etc. No, dear, you watch Oprah.

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In a previous entry I talked about the way many games implement "moral choices" these days and how lackluster I generally find that implementation to be. One of the things Bioware has advertised about regarding Dragon Age is that their story will be much more nuanced and realistic, not pigeonholing players into these sock-puppets of emotions. While I'm no where near far along enough in the campaign to make a qualified statement on things, I wanted to break for a moment and explore my previous point a bit further using this game as an example.

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Adam happened across an interesting ad on the Borderlands Wikia page earlier today.

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Wherein one guy with a free weekend sets about using VirtualBox as a cross-platform, all-in-one webhost solution in order to do local website development whether connected to the internet or not. Warning: nerd content within.

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