Brad's Soap Box

While everybody else was breathing a sigh of relief that the world didn’t implode when all our clocks hit midnight at the end of 1999, I spent a better part of the year 2000 playing a new video game called “Diablo II.”

I was single at the time, and when I wasn’t busy working or going out on first dates that never turned into seconds, I would sit at home playing this fantasy role-playing game on my Mac.

Back then, there were very few game makers that supported the Mac. Blizzard was a little late to the game, but during early development of “Diablo II,” they figured out an easy way to write the code for the game for a PC and then quickly port it over to a Mac. This allowed for them to release patches for both platforms at exactly the same time, and each platform worked exactly the same (with the same bugs, too).

Again, I had never seen a developer really care much about the Mac users. Back then the marketshare for Macs was pretty small. Once the iPod came on the market, though, users started to see how Macs could be useful in their lives, and marketshare has since improved dramatically. Now, virtually all big name PC game designers port their games over to the Mac. There are few exceptions.

You could safely say that back then, I worshipped the devil – that is, I loved “Diablo II.” Now, 12 years after the release of D2, I’m about to get devil fever again. Blizzard announced that “Diablo III” will be released on May 15. It’s supposed to be the most impressive game ever made, and given what I’ve seen at the Diablo III website, I don’t doubt it.

Here’s the opening cinematic, which features an old character… Deckard Cain.

Yesterday, during the SOPA Wikipedia blackout, I posted a funny tweet following the #FactsWithoutWikipedia hashtag that trended across Twitter. Apparently, someone in Toronto thought it was funny because later in the day, I got a tweet from someone saying my contribution to #FactsWithoutWikipedia had been published in a Toronto Star article.

I won’t repost the whole thing here, but below is an excerpt.

From The Toronto Star website:

Top 15 fake facts without Wikipedia

What to do when Wikipedia blacks out for 24 hours? Make up your own facts, of course.

Twitter has been furiously updating with users’ sarcastic, silly, and sometimes seemingly real fake facts — using hashtags like #factswithoutwikipedia and #daywithoutwikipedia — while the English-language website is down in protest against anti-piracy law.

Here is a look at our Top 15 favourites:
*SNIP*

• Rock band Rush predicted the end of civilization when their Canadian calendar only went up to 2112. (From @BradKimberly)

Believe it or not, I had to explain this joke to my wife. I guess she’s not a Rush fan.