The Data Stream of Facsimiles

I went to play World of Warcraft last night, but was thwarted by the big new update for Cataclysm, the upcoming expansion/tweaking of WoW. I don't know why Blizzard has to be so fucking coy about how much disk space something's going to take up. The decent thing, it seems to me, to do would be to tell you up front, if not go as far as detecting whether or not your hard drive actually has enough space on it. As it was, the update stalled in the unpacking process at around thirty percent because I was out of space. I found out from Tim that WoW, during the update, needed twice the hard drive space it normally takes--in other words, I had to free up around 25 gigs for the 50 gig ridiculous behemoth. I had a hard enough time freeing up 14. I eventually, to-day, took the entire Beatles flac discography of my computer, several Jimi Hendrix flac albums, and nearly everything in my jazz folder, since I already had this stuff backed up from the last time there was a cataclysm on this computer.

Now, it was from Tim I got this information about how much space I needed--he knew because he'd gone through it. He told me he had a hard drive with just WoW and Guild Wars on it to accommodate the update. But say I didn't have Tim to call. Where would I have found out? I had to click through on the loader to some kind of fucking forum and get the information way down on a list of frequently asked questions. All for something that civilised game companies used to tell you up front as a matter of course.

The crazy thing is, this isn't even supposed to be the really big update. This is just for interface, talent trees, and things like that. I can only imagine the headache it's going to be when the continents actually get new shapes.

It sort of makes me wonder if people are going to be very nostalgic for how WoW used to be a couple years from now. People buy the original Super Mario Brothers, I gotta think there are kids now who will want to relive classic WoW in 2020. Maybe Blizzard will release a single player classic edition or something. Gods know they rarely seem to pass up an opportunity to make a dollar.



I really love that outfit.

I watched the first episode of Doctor Who yesterday with Tom Baker as the Doctor. I'd managed to completely avoid seeing any footage of Baker before actually getting to the episode naturally--I felt sort of like a time traveller, actually, considering myself a Doctor Who fan without having seen any Tom Baker episodes. I had a dream where he turned out to be an American and I got really indignant about it.

Actually, he reminds me a lot of Graham Chapman in terms of appearance and comic timing, but his voice sounds like Christopher Lee. It's amazing, because he seems to quite nimbly switch from comic to serious. He really makes Pertwee seem like a drag in comparison. But I guess I do miss Pertwee a little. It's hard to, though, when I'm currently in awe of the dexterity of Baker's performance.

The last few Pertwee serials had been good, though mainly I was noticing how much of Star Wars I felt like I was seeing in them. I mean, as far back as the Troughton era I was already noticing that Jamie and Zoe looked like Luke and Leia if you relax your eyes a bit, but the late Pertwee serial The Monster of Peladon had one of the Martian "Ice Warrior" commander guys in the role of subordinate villain to an ordinary looking human, a dynamic that reminded me pretty strong like of Vader and Tarkin.



The Ice Warrior even his an odd hiss somewhat reminiscent of Vader's breathing effect.

Last night I dreamt I was with Trisa in an enormous fake city--as in, cardboard skyscrapers actually the size of skyscrapers and we were running from Godzilla. It looked like the old Godzilla, the guy in the suit, only you could sense the size of the creature. Like it was an actual sixty or seventy foot tall guy in what must have been acres of rubber destroying everything. I'd really like to actually see something like that on film.