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Saturday, August 21, 1999 Bitch at Lum

11:30 PM AND NOW, REPORTING LIVE FROM THE FIELD...

Banstyle sends words and pictures (mmmmmm, preeeeety pickchurs) of Metrofest 99, subtitled "OSI flies out to the Big Apple to give the usual answers about necromancy!" But, of course, there's a new LadyMOI picture, so all you cultists can go here. (Oh, and there's like information from the developers and stuff, too, but judging from my email on the last lunch you guys pretty much are just looking for new MOI pics to print and paste up on your shrine in the basement.)


Friday, August 20, 1999 Bitch at Lum

0:00 PM AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY, LUM SLEPT

Well, not quite, but real life intervened to prevent any updates Friday. My car died and let me tell you I was quite pissy about it. I trust everyone survived the experience.


Thursday, August 19, 1999 Bitch at Lum

3:00 PM FECES PORNOGRAPHY? I DON'T EVEN WANNA KNOW

The plot loosens in the "Gamehut Wants My Baby" story, as a much better written (or better proofwritten, anyway) email from the same email address ([email protected]) as the prior email inviting me into the warm, inviting arms of the Gamehut Network arrives...

Ok, in good spirit:

1) This guy who e-mailed you, Conrad, is a 14 year old. He was never affilated w/ GameHut besides the fact that he was a news updater for a non-open site at www.evilsite.com which is hosted my Gamehut.

2) He was fired for posting "feces pornography" on the site. On his removal he took one of the other members login / password and continued to post his collection of gay pornography. After he was stopped, we reported him to the proper authorities(the FBI Computer Unit at [email protected] and his Isp networktelephone.com). He is one sick puppy who is crying out for attention.

3) Please don't affilate him as part of the Gamehut staff because he isn't. The real Gamehut staff is well over the age of 16 (try 22-25) and we all work in our nice little office. We are tired of dealing w/ the rantings of this child.

Thanks for your time,

Tim Aste
Game Hut Networks

Also, the private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks, Ronald McDonald, wrote us in to school us all on TwisTer's secret identity:

You guys are way off on your Dr. TwisTer assumptions. His real alter ego (you could have just asked me, because yes, all of us "Wtfmen" know him extraordinarily well) is someone I am not sure you know. When not updating his site at Gamehut, he runs a rants page called "The Rantings of Lum the Mad." I have attached the URL so you can take a look at it.

https://www.lum.xrgaming.net/

Hope this helps bring an end to your unsolved mystery.

Don't bother thanking me.
-Ron

Makes sense to me.

3:00 PM WHERE LUM SADLY DISAPPOINTS SLC KYRA

SLC Kyra sent me a long email about the story below which only periphally mentioned her. She told me not to post it (several times, including in the subject line, so I wouldn't miss it), but gave me Special Permission to post this:

PS - 10:30 AM IF I JOIN GAMEHUT, DO I GET A GAGGLE OF HENCHMEN TOO? Now is that your picture? If so your wife has one hot looking husband :) (and yes you can print the PS part - ha ha) see ya! - K

Unfortunately, (or fortunately, depending on what you look for in a man), I am not Keanu Reeves. Here is the official Keanu vs Lum Punchlist so, if you ever meet Keanu Reeves or myself, you will know exactly which is which.


Keanu Reeves, in a movie

Lum the Mad, on his work ID badge
A symbol of outer beauty and inner emptiness
A symbol of what obsessive web site updating can result in
Has a usenet newsgroup devoted to him: alt.fan.keanu-reeves
Has a usenet newsgroup devoted to him: alt.censor.scott.jennings.die.die.die.die
Plays in a rock band named Dogstar
Has an extensive collection of bad music from the '80s on CD
Born in Beirut, Lebanon
Boooooorn in the USA
Is Canadian
Is in a UO guild with Canadians
Often believed to be homosexual
Often believed to be heterosexual
Starred in "The Matrix", which inspired ex-Counselor Senith to begin a fan club
Watched "The Matrix". Did not inspire ex-Counselor Senith to begin any fan clubs
Often crashes when driving a motorcycle
Many people believe that he should not be allowed on the highway
Was "Ted" in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure"
Was "Lum" in "The Rantings of Lum the Mad"
Many women and gay men worship and adore him
Many women and gay men throw things at him
Is used by lum.xrgaming.net as the symbol for stories involving Dr. TwisTer, as a long-running sly dig at the apparent lack of thought in TwisTer's updates
Is used by lum.xrgaming.net as its author, is not believed to be a symbol but an actual person.
Is considered "hot" by SLC Kyra
Is considered "horrible person bad for UO" by SLC Kyra

 

12:30 PM PLOT - IT'S A BEAUTIFUL THING

Gamespot's Desslock has posted an interview with Richard "I'm Lord British and I gots the castles to prove it" Garriott. Most of the interview focuses on the upcoming Ultima IX: Ascension but some space is given to Origin's future direction;

Desslock: After initial teething problems, you’ve had great success with Ultima Online, and Origin has indicated that it is now going to focus solely on online games after Ultima: Ascension. Since Ultima: Ascension is going to be the last single player Ultima (and Origin) product, at least for the time being, what does the future hold for the Ultima series?

Richard Garriott: Yeah, Origin is 100 percent committed to capitalizing on the leadership position that we now have within massively multi-player online gaming. I have a personal drive to be a storyteller, which is a lot easier to do in single player games than it is in massively multi-player games. In fact, our storytelling in Ultima Online is negligible, but in Ultima IX, the whole point of the game is to tell a story. We really believe that one of the reasons why Ultima Online has had its success is because the single player Ultimas created this rich fictional backdrop for the world. So in fact we need to be able to do the same sort of storytelling in a massively multiplayer game that we can do for single player games.

We have 130,000 subscribers of Ultima Online now and we're gaining about 500 per week and have been as long as we've been operating the service. Ultima Online is now the most profitable and highest revenue generating PC product in Origin's and Electronic Art's history -- that's how important the online market is financially for our companies. We want to drive up to about a million subscribers by bringing in additional Ultima, Wing Commander and battlefield games and new properties in the online space. Our mission is to get that level of activity done before we consider doing other single player games. But interestingly, if you’d asked me this question about six months ago I actually would have said I don’t know how to tell the sort of compelling stories that I tell in the lineage Ultimas in massively multi-player settings. However, over the last few months, as we’re wrapping up here on Ultima IX and we’re beginning to get our thinking hats on to start talking about how can we best apply our storytelling skills in multi-player environments, we actually believe we now have the answer to that question. We think that we can create what you might consider a hybrid game, which is a place where people have a persistent life where they can collect treasures, socialize with other people and go on adventures either on their own or with groups of people –and that those experiences can be orchestrated in such a way that they are just as compelling as a “Quest of the Avatar” style mission in a single player game. If we can pull that off I actually think that it’s a win-win for everybody in the sense that we can put the best of both worlds together and really create the ultimate virtual world entertainment experience.

Desslock: That’s interesting. Ultima Online wasn’t the first massively multi-player online game but, when launched, it certainly was the most ambitious and it brought the online industry to the forefront of gaming. Now that the genre’s matured a bit, worthwhile competitors are starting to arrive. EverQuest has been released and it’s doing well. Asheron’s Call, by Turbine and Microsoft is on the horizon. How is Ultima Online going to respond to this competition?

Richard Garriott: It’s interesting that when competition finally showed up, we anticipated seeing both a slowdown in the growth rate of our service or even a downturn in subscribers. And in fact, interestingly as successful as EverQuest has been, we’ve continued to add 500 subscribers per week. We did see a brief diminishing in the number of hours per day that people were playing the service, probably because people were playing both. However, fundamentally EverQuest hasn’t affected us really much at all. Which is the same result that games before Ultima Online, such as Meridian 59, noticed -- new products have generally not diminished the market for previous ones.

The good news is that means our market is really growing and we haven’t even come close to tapping the potential massively multi-player audience yet. For Origin that’s particularly good news because we already have a highly profitable service at 130,000 subscribers. While of course we’re extremely proud of Ultima Online, we also realize it’s just a first baby step and there’s just so many things that we will do differently in our follow-up products that we’re confident we can attract many more people per product with our future releases.

11:30 AM I GET TWENTY CARLYPOINTS, JUST BECAUSE I'M SPECIAL

The LadyMOI week continues in fullbore, take no prisoners, shoot up the place with really big guns style as someone on our message board points out this LadyMOI interview from way back before she was LadyMOI pandering to the horribly dysfunctional UO community, but when she was merely Carly Staehlin-Taylor, pandering to the horribly dysfunctional Quake community.

I'm sorry, I can't respect ANYONE who enjoyed Ascendency though. The honeymoon is off, babe.

11:00 AM LADYMOI WEEK CONTINUES AFTER THIS WORD FROM APPLE COMPUTERS, NOW IN BLUEBERRY AND BOTTLE BLONDE

The LadyMOI stalkerfan site continues to gain accolades and attention, especially from law enforcement officials. In response, here's some words from the owner of the server.

I am the administrator for the entire Maywon't website. The site was orignially founded early this summer to put my schools underground newspaper online and save me the trouble of spreading it around campus the traditional way. I bought a 100mb spot on my host server (I did this because I wanted to also host more pages with other themes as time went on) and started work on the scripting. Many of my friends at school play UO, and a lot of them asked to move into some of the empty space on the server. I figured what the hell, I have a lot of it (free space) and I know these guy personally, so i did it.

When I first heard from my buddy, who will remained un-named for his own good, that he wanted to make a Lady Moi fan site, I cringed. It sounded like a terrible idea; but he really wanted to try out his new HTML skills so I let him. I admit, the site is cheesy in worst way. It sounds like a 15 year old infatuated with someone he never even met before, but that's not the case. In his defense, I have to stress that he is trying to be funny and informative, but failing miserably.

To the point: I happen to read your site every day, along with the WTFmen and (ok ok i admit it) Dr. Twister. You are very entertaining and I keep on coming back to hear what you have to say. What do you recommend he do to change the site? I am not gonna take it down because I did promise it to him and a promise is a promise no matter how many flames he and I might get. Besides, the little shit actually talks to Lady Moi about three times a day. By "talks" I mean that she writes back answering all his fucking questions and they get along. That's more than my Wal*Mart UO site ever got, so I guess it has some potential. I am very curious about your thoughts on this matter. Please be gentle if your just gonna post this and mock me, although that would be funny too. Thanks for listening.

My thoughts? The site itself seems harmeless enough and actually basically tells people to get a clue and not stalk the poor woman, but I think the hysteria that is springing up around LadyMOI is a serious sign that everyone needs to get up, turn off the computer, and go meet an actual woman. Once again, here is Uma Thurman to demonstrate what an actual woman looks like.


Clip and save, for future reference.

I recommend you print this out, go to a bar, church or other place where women occasionally gather, and hold the printout up by her head, so you can contrast her head and Uma's head, side by side. If they have enough matching characteristics, congratulations! You've found an actual woman! By the way, that tingling sensation in your crotch is because she just kicked you there. It hurts less if you bend over.

(By the way, I'm entitled to mock this hysteria, since I basically started it. Nyah.)

10:30 AM IF I JOIN GAMEHUT, DO I GET A GAGGLE OF HENCHMEN TOO?

A couple people thought I was actually taking Gamehut's offer of hosting this site seriously. One concerned ex-Gamehut site webmaster wrote:

Gamehut is ran by an immature sixteen year old kid who goes by the name of Fool, a name that fits him. He makes money off the sites, which isn't a bad thing but it comes with consequences. Fool forces upon you a small, yet noticeable, amount of censorship. Bad mouth Dr. Twister, his money maker, he will tell you to remove it, if you do not he will remove it himself. Posting a link to R33T.ORG would suffer the same fate because they host the Anti Twister site. You will have to belive in everthing Fool belives in or take that off your site. I highly enjoy your site and moving to Lamehut would be a bad move IMO. Thank you for your time.

Kind of ironic, considering Fool's moneymaker just posted a bitch about there's no free speech in UO. Speaking of Fool's moneymaker, the speculations on his actual secret identity continue to grow. This person writes:

Lum, first I urge you not to openly mock me and such, as in my current emotional state I could walk to the top of a bell tower... and, well, you get it.

Anyways, if you go to https://www.wtfman.com/mcd/september.htm and scroll down to the date 9/08/99 you will see something about new members, Vader and Shaitan. Now we all now Shaitan is TwisTy's pet, and if you recall a few months ago, people were saying Tw. Drister was Vader....and GM Darwin said as much in your interview with him... and... well... since the entire WTFman crew prolly knows Dr T..... you get where I'm going? The guild (/m\ on Baja, the Malagents, was Ron's guild) probably had Twister in it, thus furthering the proof that Twister is a person that would actually name their character after a well known Star Wars character. But don't quote me on this.

OK, I won't quote you on it, I'll just post your entire email verbatim. As for the Ronald McDonald - Twister connection, it's possible, although I see him as more a Nighthawk henchman myself. I mean, Ron is too funny for Twister, and I'm not saying that just because he's shamelessly ganking my mojo.

10:30 AM THE HOUSE IS THE KEY

Another correspondent on the slickazoid smurf on LS writes:

Well I can give you a second opinion on all this Slade thing. Ya see I'm the guy in red next to the pack horse. I was basically practicing stealing on the pack horse named "you". Loads of fun watching the newbies call guards and threatening to call gms cause I don't flag, while waiting to see my skill raise. Anyhow this guy Slade wasn't a counselor cause this moron was yelling guards and was trying to sell his spiffy blue shield. I talk to him a bit basically telling him I wasn't going to stop stealing his bag (which I was stealing from the horse called you remember :P).But he was right, this counselor Stark was a show. He wasn't typing full sentences just typing abbreviations and word enter word enter word enter, you get the idea. He even told a guy how to trap chests without getting flagged a criminal. (for those that don't know you trap the chest on the ground of your house. to quote Stark "The house is the key".)

9:00 AM BEFORE THIS GOES ANY FURTHER, WE REALLY SHOULD EXPLAIN TO THAT GUY IN HIS MOM'S BASEMENT DROOLING ON HIMSELF WHAT "INTERACTING WITH THE COMMUNITY" MEANS AND DOES NOT MEAN

The UO community's infatuation with LadyMOI continues unabated. Essentially as one, the active UO community (consisting of 1,274 oversexed male adolescents, 182 middle aged males who still live in Mom's basement, 390 teenage males who pretend to be women so that they can get free stuff, 2 actual women who pretend to be men because they are terrified of the consequences otherwise, and Sorsha the Amazing UO Cyberwhore) has begun, as one, to have a small fleck of drool slowly run down their chin.

Crossroads of Britannia, which unlike this web site you're reading now actually does real journalism from time to time, actually asked LadyMOI what she thought of all this hoofrah. Here's what she said;

I think the whole situation is hysterically funny and I am glad everyone is having a good time. My job is all about interacting with the community and if this helps to serve that purpose, then all right! A really cool side effect is that more people will hear about Origin's Online Community Relations and about my and Calandryll's work. This is good because the more people that know about us and what we do... the more we can do for those people. Huzzah! Everyone wins!

Calandryll, The Other Guy No One Pays Attention To Who Actually Answers UO Questions, when asked about this hoohah, said "No one pays attention to me! I can be a sex symbol, too! Really! Picture me in Speedos!"*

* Note: Calandryll did not actually say this.**
** but he COULD have.

8:30 AM DIDN'T YOU KNOW? THE SKILL CAP IS 200 ON SIEGE NOW

Adrick sends in a story of what many of us have suspected.... atrophy on Siege Perilous is hosed.

I think your readers should know that skill atrophy on SP is wacked out bro. As you probably know I lost GM smith twice in 30 min to this. I refuse to play Adrick (Smith) as anything now other than a smith. I created a new guy who only has 6 skills. His skill points add to a whopping 238 as of last night. Anyway I wanted to tell you that last night after Hiding not 10 min before I lost a .1 of hiding and gained a .1 of mace. I then hid and gained it right back and lost a .1 of resist. Similiar see saw gains happened on many of my skills and what was disturbing was I was usuing all of them and have only 6 skills with values above the base.

So the moral of the story is - on SP dont play a gm smith as anything other than a smith or get the smithing last. Im kinda pissed I have to use my second account on there but I am left with no other choice. I think this is a legit beef for skill locks - I really dont care about any skill other than smithing because of the makers marks. The other skills are only nice for the title Grandmaster on the paper doll - the .1 is meaningless.

What many GM smiths and GM archers are doing on Siege is buying 30 of a skill they'll never use (cooking or fishing or some such) and hoping that that gets caught in the atrophy trap.

You know, dev team, it would NOT BE THAT HARD to code in a little skill lock. Hell, make it so it only activates when you hit GM in something. Speaking from experience, hitting GM in a skill is hard enough to achieve without having to do it over once you accidentally gain .01 in camping or something.

8:30 AM TRUST NO ONE

The picture of the irritable smurf sent in yesterday elicited some comment, as well as some healthy skepticism from this guy:

Come on Lum, who knows what the smurf said. People make up stories all the time to get attention or just to be malicious.

What the smurf really could have said

Asha'man

Then again, we have this report:

If I'm not mistaken, Slade would be one of the original counselors coming from the era of post-bassanio pre-ironwill reign of terror on the C program. I should know, I was part of it :) If Slade of LS is indeed the counselor Slade i'm thinking of, it would

1) Make quite a bit of sense (Slade was one of those guys that would draw crowds of people around him going "ur mufh betr than gms")

2) Cause me to belive he either got kicked or quit the counselor program (I quit due to creative differences to my SRC... we didn't get along. That and the whole thing was and still is a joke)

I, for one, completely agree with your views on the volunteer program. In my time, the SRC's would hire twice as many counselors as they needed, because they knew that either they would quit because it wasn't as r33t as they thought, or because they exploited every possible loophole in the system. And the age limit is pretty much a joke also. I knew counselors that were decent fellows that would of gotten hit by that rule. I was under 25 also, yet I was a C for almost a year. I seriously doubt that system will ever work like its intended to.

On a side note, there certainly are more idiots in the C program then before... maybe they should have a requirement for you to write a 200 word essay on your life in UO or why you want to help the UO community. That'll kill about 90% dewds.

A former Counselor. I'd prefer to stay anon (Kyra would have my head)


Wednesday, August 18, 1999 Bitch at Lum

10:00 PM I SURE AM GLAD THAT OSI MADE ALL SMURFS OLDER THAN 25 NOW, IT ENSURES A HIGH LEVEL OF MATURITY!

Slade of LS writes:

Whilst strolling through Minoc, I stumbled upon a certain Counselor Stark. Now, I know many counselors aren't packing too much in the way of brain power and/or people skills, but this bad mutha fucka was lacking both it seemed. He didn't even talk in complete sentences. After laughing uproariously at him for a few minutes, I realised that this was one of those Kodak Moments I had always heard about. So, I whip out my ScreenShot utility and, using all the compiled knowledge of my Photography 101 class, captured this moment for generations to come. Here, in all its glory, is the sum of (Counselor)+(Minoc Bank)+(Possibly large amounts of alcohol)

2:30 PM I DON'T KNOW, MAN, THE THOUGHT OF LUM.DRTWISTER.COM IS JUST... IT'S JUST... BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

I just had to share this email exchange with you all.

From: ****@evilsite.com
Date: Wednesday, August 18, 1999 2:10 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: I really like your site. =)

Hi There-

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is *** "****" ***** and I work at the "Game Hut Network". You may know that name from such sites as Dr. Twister, Land of Eden, EvilSite.Com, etc...Well, we were looking at your site "Lum the Mad" and we are very intrested in it's uniqueness. We are intrested in offering you either a subdomain at yourname.gamehut /drtwister /evilsite.com or maybe a domain name if your site is large enough. We offer you unlimited disk space + transfer, being publicized through many of are larger sites as well. We offer many benefits as well as placing your own advertisements in the ad run. Well, if your intrested feel free to E-mail me back or icq me at ******* or perhaps find me in irc.drtwister.com or by phone at ***-***-****. Thanks!

*** "****" *****
Game Hut Networks

From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, August 18, 1999 2:15 PM
To: ****@evilsite.com
Subject: Re: I really like your site. =)

Have you actually *read* the site?

Lum "the" Mad

11:30 AM CRACK STRIKE FORCE BLOWS UP ANOTHER MAD TOWER... OR WAS THAT STRIKE FORCE ON CRACK?


Courtesy of https://www.anothermadtower.com/

Once again we at Lum the Mad have laid waste to a perfectly innocuous message board. It seemed that someone followed the link I posted yesterday regarding the Avatar of Love and Purity and posted a juvenile flame involving me, my writing, the fact that in real life I look like a mutated cross between Jabba the Hutt and Andre the Giant, and muttered aspersions about computer programmers and my wife.

This prompted about 40,000 replies, all defending my better half's honor to some degree. Her response was a quizzical "Huh? I mean, I'm no raving beauty but I don't think anyone needs to put a bag over my head or anything..."

For the record, I like her, she likes me, and last time I checked, neither one of us were looking for dates. Now go make fun of someone else!

11:00 AM HI, SAILOR!

Old Man Murray has posted a detailed guide to being an incredibly gay person in Asheron's Call.

11:00 AM EVERYONE GETS FIFTEEN SECONDS OF FAME... HERE WAS SECOND 14 FOR ME

Just in case you missed it, Stratics, The Celebrity Network, posted the log of my visit.

 


All original copyright © 1999 Lum the Mad, LLC. Investors are invited to watch for our IPO. Trademarked content on this site owned by its original trademark owners. Stuff I made up still is mine. What's yours is mine. What's mine is mine. In 1999. Hunh. WAR! What is it good for? Absolutely NUTHIN. (Say it again!)