So I had this weird dream...

So I had this dream I was reading a comic by Shen, The comic was a D&D styled adventure about two groups, one trying to make it’s way through a mountain ruins, the other trying to access the ruins themselves.

One group was very much Shen’s style of thin, kind of lanky characters, no real “fighter” style amongst them, but they relied on a lot of rogue and illusion spells to keep themselves safe.

The other was a sorceress (kind of on the dark side of magic) and two fighters who seemed to know each other but weren’t on great with each other. This party all came from an adjacent country that had supported an evil great wizard in a previous conflict quite a long while ago, the group also had a mysterious character who kept themself shrouded.

The two fighters know each other and the reluctant one decides to group up with the one he knows and the group because of a term that (in my dream) was something like “crenellation” which he didn’t really understand but had heard before.

The two groups met up because the “hero” group, for lack of a better term, was bickering amongst themselves when one of them noticed the oncoming group and right before they stumbled across them, cast invisibility and disappeared. He had referenced an illusion spell during the argument, but I didn’t think much of that.

The “evil” group is making the pilgrimage to the ruins because it’s the location of an artifact tied to the old ruler, it like many other parts of the evil one’s armor and weapons, were bound in spells by the great good wizard and left scattered in places of key importance in the world.

The evil group forces them along with them into the ruins when they get into one HUGE antechamber they strike up a light and there is a MASSIVE red dragon sleeping in the room. The evil group decide to use the red dragon to do their dirty work and leave the good group in the room and bar the door, to look for the artifact on their own.

In a twist, the red dragon slowly disapates and the missing mage from the good group walks out of where it had been and comments that he couldn’t have held that spell much longer and was glad it worked. It was a trick! I had completely forgotten about this mage and my mind was BLOWN reading this dream comic.

The other group begins to talk between the two fighters (and at this point I remember drawing a page from like a story book of the former big enemy guy, whose body apparently began to resemble black obsidian stone/crystal) and the fighter explained that “crenellation” was declared, giving amnesty to all exiled and defunct members of the region that had supported the evil wizard because he was in the process of returning to the world. The exiled fighter takes pause at this, and you kind of realize he will probably join the “good” group eventually.

The “evil” group’s sorceress finds the artifact and begins to try to breach the barrier surrounding it.

The robed shadowy figure of the evil group just ignores her, shoving her a little as it marches past and simply absorbs the purple magic shielded object into it’s abdomen and begins to grow from a shriveled weak looking person to a monster of obsidian, building around and shattering the containment spell it uses the armor piece within as it builds itself.

In some kind of mental draining on the sorceress it questions what she knows about the good wizard, and how, as he died with the evil one in the final battle, he was able to come back so soon and to such great prominence and regain his former strength. She doesn’t know, he asks her something along the lines of “why does no REGULAR person ever come back from the other side” and her response is that they’ve asked mystics and seers before and those on the other side say “it’s not that they cannot come back, it’s that they would not want to.”

At this point the being, whose size and mannerisms make it seem like quite a large person wearing obsidian armor, but his abdomen is missing where he pulled in the magic sealed armor, and is an upper body, and a pair of legs with no real connection except a small shard of obsidian that floats between the two, discards the sorceress as he’s drained her magic and life away in the process of questioning her.

He then summons a massive obsidian monster and he and the rest of the “evil” party begin to head back down the mountain to return to their lands, and it’s left as that the good party will assumedly fight the obsidian golem thing the evil sorcerer has left in the mountain ruins.

Top 10 Reasons you shouldn't read Internet Top 10 lists.

I try to be relaxed and understanding, but I'm prone to geeky "you're wrong!" and such now and then, but i'm really getting annoyed/sick of the lists i keep seeing. Take a TV show/comic/movie that's pretty universally liked and then make a top 10 list about how it's got bad moments. I just read one that was "the 10 worst episodes of Batman: the Animated series" and i nearly did a spit take.

You know what happens when I find myself watching one of the "bad" episodes of B:TAS? I thank the light that i found a good show on so i don't have to all the other dreck out there.

Beyond that, it seems like so many of the lists Cracked.com or other sites do are purely opinion. You're entitled to your opinion, but using that opinion as if it's self evident that it's factual is pretty presumptuous to say the least. And assuming everyone else is just nodding along at home with your list is hubris at an obvious level.

So basically, if you're gonna make a top 10 list, assume what you're actually doing is trying to convince other people that what you're putting out there is true, and not that you're the long prophecized geek messiah and your word is law for the rest of us.

*Salute*
I'm BATMAN!

MASS EFFECT 3 ENDING SPOILERS

SPOILERS FOR ME3, you've been warned.

I'm having kind of a hard time wrapping my head around the ending of ME3. I mean, I know what happened but that ending kind of came out of no-where and blindsided me. I made my choice, and I stand by it, but I was so utterly devastated by Shepard's death. And not because he's me, and i've been playing this character for three games now, through every moment. That's a part of my feelings but a small one. I'm sort of grieving for Liara and Shepard's children. Those little blue girls he'll never have now, and I am just devastated by their loss.

I've played my Shepard that he truly fell in love with Liara in ME1 and remained with her in ME2, that their relationship was a large part of the reason he had to save the universe, was to be with her. Hell, after Lair of the Shadowbroker when he reunites with her, he mentioned having children with her and i just sort of assumed Bioware inteded that to be a possible outcome.

So the moment I made my choice and sealed his fate. making all life in the universe both organic and synthetic, saving EDI, the geth, everyone... I thought I'd done something wrong. I immediately scoured the internet. Surely, there's an ending that feels right, and Shepard lives. My Shepard would never sacrifice the synthetics just for the chance at life.

But there isn't. There is no way to save them all, and have Shepard and Liara have that future with those children and just live their lives. And frankly, that is just heartbreaking to me.

The universe is saved for the billions of other lives, but there is a hole in it in the shape of a Hero.

/melodrama over. I think i'm gonna have a good well deserved cry.

Piracy.

Now that PIPA and SOPA are stopped and we're raising awareness of ACTA, i have to put forward a notion that may alienate alot of my "Digital Samurai" brethren, but here goes.

We need to stop pirating stuff.

I don't mean stop sharing information and dry up the well of the internet, but come on. You know downloading a program you enjoy using and is well done and giving nothing back to the creator is wrong. That is not debatable.

Sure, the way we interact and purchase things online needs to change. But all the rational people I know that have pirated anything and enjoyed it, have made efforts to compensate the parties responsible for what they enjoyed. For example, before it was released to the public I downloaded the soundtrack to the game Bastion, because i adored the music from the game so much. The moment that product became available on the amazonmp3 store, i bought it, because i loved it so much, i wanted to make sure i was not harming the creator of the thing I loved.

So maybe you'll make the argument you're pirating things you're not willing to pay for, to which I have to say, why are you pirating them if you're not happy enough with them to pay?

Then there is the concept that sharing is piracy. It's not. If I give you a song, and you give it to a person you know, and they pass it on, it takes quite a long chain to finally reach the numbers that piracy reaches in an hour, let alone a whole day.

However, the issue is not totally mapped out yet. There are some times when Piracy becomes shades of gray.

For example, Johnny has a cable subscription, but misses a show because he's at work, if he downloads a torrent of the episode he missed the next day, is this piracy? Why is it if he used a DVR or VHS to record the episode it wouldn't be piracy? This doesn't seem to make sense.

The issue still has to be argued and debated over, but we all need to seriously realize when you download a movie or an album with the express intent of circumventing payment to the creators of the content, that is wrong, and we know it is.

*Salute*
Download this song, Na, na, na, na, na-na-na-naaaaah...