Ross is love.

Hobbit Homos? Not on my shift.

GayGamer.net (yes, there is such a site) is shouting: "We wants gay hobbitses! And we wants it now!" It seems that the new Lord of the Rings online game thinger is cutting marriage out of its functionality for the time being, partly because they want to make sure that they don't include gay, or interspecies, marriage. Since they're not including marriage at all, it seems as though they could have let the gay marriage issue sit for the moment, but Nik Davidson, game designer at Turbine, wants to be especially clear:

"Did two male hobbits ever hook up in the shire and have little hobbit civil unions? No. The door is shut...Tolkien was a conservative Catholic..."

Uhm...OK. Salon.com points out that it's a bit dumb from a marketing perspective, since lots of the gays like their video games. Gay-friendly games like Fable, Sims, and Second Life (sort of a game) have done incredibly well, and World of Warcraft has come around also.

Don't be taken in, homosexuals! Make sure that your games are 100% gay! (But, you know, not if they're gay...like, oh, that game is sooo gay. And not queer, like...dude, that game is fuckin' queer. You know what I mean. I'm sure there's a label or something.)

In "nobody gives a shit, Ross" news, the PS3 odyssey is officially over for now. We spent much of the day getting tantalizingly close to procuring one online from a few different secret sources. Super-competitive/OCD Ross took over for a few hours there, and I felt incredibly dirty for a time after. I think things have returned to normalcy now. Que sera, sera.

Don't let this suggest that I'm not still irate at those fuckers from Marketplace...

PS3 Open Thread

2:45 am - Well, that ended quickly. We arrived to find hundreds of people and bicycles, along with dozens of cars lined up before barricades waiting to rush for the entrance to the two stores along the strip. Wasn't worth it, not by a longshot.

1:30 am - Good morning! Going to get coffee soon. My body thinks that we're going on a flight, since the only times I do things like wake up at this hour are to catch a plane. I don't know how to tell my body what's coming...

9:15 pm - Going to bed. Waking up in time to go back out before three. Now, it's just about winning.

PS3 Blues (or, How I Learned to Hate the Mall)

So, after people had been waiting in line for several hours, following a period of several months during which this whole thing was planned, the mall decided that no one could wait anywhere on any of their properties for a PS3. My poor Mike sat in the rain only to be told along with a few dozen others that he'd be arrested for trespassing if he came back before three in the morning. All for trying to spend obscene amounts of money. This was, by all accounts, much against the wishes of Target and Best Buy, the two stores most affected.

Here's the brilliant part: the parking lot will open to traffic at 3am. So, instead of upper-middle class suburbanites waiting patiently along the sidewalk, they'll now be racing in their cars to be the first ones to pull in. There's no place near enough that the mall doesn't own, so there's no walking option. Way to turn a controlled pedestrian situation into vehicular chaos. Grand Theft Auto IV doesn't come out until next year, by which point we'll have lived it. Very, very cross with you, Marketplace Mall. Very cross indeed.