So anyway, now that I got some money for my birthday, I've paid for a WoW gamecard. Again.

Yes, I have succumbed. Which is fucken depressing, seeing as I have at least the aspiration of getting a life.

The worst part part is that I get double-servings of scorn from the actual players, since I am a)low-level and b)playing as a Gnome.

I can add a few more though. There's c)my pack-rat mentality, which forces me to carry as much as I can, leading to perennially -stuffed bags, so I can't carry the important stuff I need to survive/finish quests/impress other players, d)my habit of procrastinating on unimportant stuff, like "If you actually lived in Ironforge, and had to go to the toilet, what would you do?". Finally, there's e)the fact that I'm playing the game on public computers, but have not bought the expansion. So although the new options and regions and crap are there on the screen, they're decked out in Unavailable Grey. Which sucks.

And my brother chucked out the manual, so I don't even know if I'd be able to install the game on a computer of my own, even if I had one(computer-owners in my house have put their foot down to the idea). Bugger and blast.

It is official: I want Max Brooks.

His first work, that I know of, was 'the Zombie Survival Handbook'. It told you, in beautiful detail, what to do in the event of a zombie attack. It even graded zombie attacks by seriousness, so you can distinguish between a grade 1 attack(farmers vs small group of zombies; farmers victorious) and a grade 4(horde of zombies attack a major metropolitan area; zombies victorious). It told you where to run, what to take, how to cope... It was AWESOME.

His second(current) book is called 'World War Z'. It bills itself as "an oral history of the zombie war". And it delivers. See, in his version of events, zombies are caused by a virus which enters the body, converts all the blood into a viral agent, mutates the brain so it can go without oxygen, then sets the newly rewired body out to kill destroy civilization.

The virus starts around the Three Gorges Dam, where a virus research station is destroyed in an earthquake caused by the newly-built Dam(which is, in our world built on a faultline), which releases the virus, in non-fatal doses into the local populace. Most of whom are fed up with their government and trying to illegally emigrate to the West. As they're travelling, the virus slowly takes them over, so that by the time they arrive, they seem pretty zonked. They die along the way, get dumped by the peole smugglers, then rise and continue the journey. Incidentally, several of the people who contract the virus stay behind, and get conned into selling body parts to smugglers, who then sell them onto shady doctors, who then sell them on to shady patients. Who then die and come back to life.

The resulting chaos means that Russia and Brazil are basically fucked. China weathers it, but their cackhandling of the situation leads to a Chinese civil war, which turns China into a free-market capitalist country and Tibet into an independant entity. A load of refugees from zombie-infested rich countries come to Cuba, and proceed to turn into the dominant market power of the world. In America, businesses take advantage of the panic to sell dud 'anti-rabies ' medicine as a zombie repellant. After the destruction of New York, the American military tries to beat the zombie hordes in a straight-forward battle. Clearly, the American military likes its traightforward battles, up to the point where they realise that handing out computers with direct satellite linkups showing the total batlefield is not a good idea when you're facing a horde number over twenty million.

However, everybody learns valuable lessons in the end. The. Book. ROCKS.

(And Brad Pitt's production company is supposed to have bought the rights to a movie based on it...)

I want to do a list of Doctor Who tie-in websites. Has someone already done that? Anyway:

1. www.votesaxon.org.uk - the online portion of the election campaign of Mister Saxon.
2. www.myspace.com/marthajonesuk - Martha Jones' Myspace account.
3. www.lazlabs.co.uk - The official website for Lazarus Labs. Does bog-all. Now.
4. www.millingdaleiceream.co.uk - For Millingdale Ice-Cream Company, which was mentioned in the same episode where we first heard of John Saxon
5. www.torchwood.org.uk - Official website to the Torchwood Institute. Or would be, if it offically existed.
6. www.whoisdoctorwho.co.uk - episode-guide type thing. With games and everything.

Bollocks, I can't think of any more. Anyone able to think of any more?

Alban Ryder says hello!

OK, so. Let's where this goes.

The first writer I remember liking was Dick King-Smith. Anyone out there remember him? Kid's books. Good stuff. Then I sort of graduated to Christopher Pike. From there to Terry Pratchett, to David Eddings, to Robert Jordan. All good stops along the way, you'll note. But I've now bcome interested in a guy called Ken MacLeod.

I admit, this is hampered by not having read a single book of his. But I intend to change this at my earliest convenience. His latest book is called 'The Execution Channel', and is one of the several books out there on what the War on Terror may look like in a few years' time. Gritty and stuff.

However, he's mostly a sci-fi guy, and his last book before that was based on the idea of first contact(between two alien races) - but done from the context of humans going into space and meeting the primitive aliens. Clever, yeah?

Sorry. I'll post again on the subject when I am better informed.

En fin, c'est fin, enfant.