April fools

It was the April fool's day, and on this day I take particular pleasure in collecting especially crazy or delicious pieces of rumor, and help in spreading them through the channels of the social media like the twitter. Through some very strange course of events the April fools had become a sort of international past time, on the similar level as Christmas (itself derived from a pagan tradition, the birthday of Mithras, but that's a story for another time), celebrated in their sardonic and twisted methods on the global scale. People used to do some funny things for April 1st in Japan and Korea, and to lesser extent China. I guess we all look for excuses to have fun with each other. And with the outrageous growth of the power and reach of mass media with the advent of information technology, I think the tradition of the April fools day will grow into something very significant as the time goes on, something that might even make schools close down someday like it is with the Jewish holidays in NYC (seriously, what WASP thought they would have their public school system close down for the religion of ethnic minorities?).


I had some crazy workload for the day though. So I wasn't in any condition to do my typical info hunting and related propagation. There were a few tidbits I found delightful though. Like that CERN LHC collider piece. Anyone interested in keeping taps on physics news probably heard of it by now. Their April 1st joke was that LHC was in fact temporarily been closed down due to damage caused by appearance of black hole within the testing chambers. I think there were some number of poor souls who actually believed that one, before they realized that it was a piece for the April 1st. The amount of hype the largest science project in human history generated was really beyond expectation, in many parts thanks to the nut cases who probably doesn't know the difference between differential and integral calculus (you learn those, or at least passively browse through those topics in most high school curriculums btw). 


Other than that, there also the news I got from the official blizzard home pages for the games Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2. For all their vaporware-ness, they do consistently keep updating their sites on the 4.01 day with crazy info and units, and they did not disappoint this year as well (SC2's last year 4.01 unit was minotaur in rocket suit). 

Diablo 3 homepage showcased a new character class archivist, with spectacular powers like power to throw books and shush the monsters to death. Oh, and apparently the archivist have a lot of customized conversation options as well, ranging from 'in my days it was black and white' to 'where's my pants' and 'where am I?' I'm thinking the eponymous oldman Cain (stayawhile and listen guy) is the archetype for the class design. Those of you who know me that I go a little crazy over books. The central library in the city and various independent bookstores are actually my favorite places in the city, and I have a habit of buying some crazy amount of books at once, usually going over a hundred dollars per purchase. And I still suffer from the chronic lack of reading material even in the busiest of days... So I think the archivist might actually be a cool idea, if the guys at Blizzard (Blizzard or Blizzard North?) can take the time to flesh out the class a little, maybe turn it into a little hidden class or something... 

For all the misinformation surrounding the D3, I'm really looking forward to that one, especially now that the diablo world seem to be expanding a lot more, like the metropolis of mages and the return to the town of Tristram and the exploration of the catacombs beneath the Cathedral. I still remember the times I spent with my friends turning that place inside out in the original diablo. Compared to the rather eerie and hopeless atmosphere of the original diablo the diablo 2 was something of a cakewalk, a relative disappointment. It was almost physically impossible to die in the beginning stages of the game unless you were really terrible at clicking your mouse, and that cut into a lot of fun...

The starcraft 2 homepage also showcases a new awesome unit for the terrans, which will actually be integrated into the mapbuilder program that will be provided along with the game (just like it is with the minotaur units). The new unit (or should I call it upgrade?) is called the Terra-Tron. It's a ginormous robot built by combining the buildings of a standard terran base, with laser canons, machine guns, and who knows what else. The unit is an obvious throwback to the eponymous voltron and other Japanese robot anime (sc series give a lot of nod to the anime fandom. As is with many other U.S. made computer games I guess. Did you know that in the special thanks section of the credit for the game Sacrifice the dev team mentions 'Escaflowne'?). I don't know about the sc 2 game itself, but the community created content for the sc2 game will be amazing. There's no doubt about it. Maybe that's the main purpose of the sc2 dev team after all. I expect to see robot to robot fighting in futuristic city maps, with tanks and other standard armored stuff you might expect to see in Masamune Shiro's works.