Diablo 1 HD Mod: Belzebub

If you’re a Diablo fan and haven’t played the Diablo 1 HD mod, you have a total delight in store. It’s an amazingly detailed and enormously expanded version of Diablo 1, updated for modern displays and Windows versions. Some of the best elements of Diablo II have been added as well. It’s rebalanced to make it effectively more than four times bigger than the original Diablo 1. The mod is named Belzebub (yes, that’s the way they spelled it). But it is, in truth, the original Diablo 1 game - with huge improvements. And it really seems to have been a labor of love.

The graphics are from the original game. They look a bit better, but they’re still not anything close to modern.

But it wasn’t amazing graphics that made Diablo 1 a genre-creating game anyway. Unlike Diablo 1, Belzebub will run on Windows 10 (and Windows XP, and everything between those OSes). You can set it to as high as 1920 x 1080 resolution, allowing you to see a much larger area of the game. You can also zoom in and out within a large range by using your mouse’s scroll button.

Original Diablo 1 - Tristram (click to enlarge)

Diablo 1 Belzebub - Tristram

Storage

Storage has been expanded to an almost ridiculous extent. Your own character’s storage is still the same; 40 individual slots. But you now have a private stash in the village which contains 50 tabs with 100 slots each, for a total of 5,000 slots.

Private stash

What’s more, you also have a trade stash. This is ten tabs of 100 slots each. It works like normal storage, except it can be accessed by any character that has been run on the same installation of Belzebub. In other words, you can effortlessly trade items between your characters.

Trade Stash

Items in these storage containers are saved with the game. You can exit and come back later, and they will still be there. There’s also an additional storage option, but that’s connected to Crafting. I’ll discuss that later on.

Gold has been made much more convenient. Rather than being limited to 5,000 gold per slot, the limit is now a million gold per slot. You can also put gold in your private and trading stashes. If my math is correct, that means that you can have a total of 6,400,000,000 gold. That’s over six billion!

Installation

Installation is extremely easy. All it takes is downloading the files, copying them a drive, and clicking on Belzebub.exe. That's all it takes to play. Of course you can make a shortcut to the executable, if you want The total size of all files is 560MB. That’s not a typo. Five hundred and sixty megabytes. And you don’t need the Diablo 1 CD to play the game. Nor do you have to have ever installed Diablo 1.


There are several places that you can download the game. You can Google “Diablo 1 HD mod Belzebub”, or just use these:

Links

The mod files can be downloaded here: https://diablo-hd-belzebub.en.uptodown.com/windows

Make a new folder (I call mine Diablo 1 HD Mod) and unzip the files into that. Also download the DIABDAT.MPQ file here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0GjgCzh8BBgTVpXU3NIbVdtNlE/view

Put DIABDAT.MPQ into the same folder as the other files. It makes a Diablo 1 CD unnecessary.

For help with quests and other Belzebub issues, here's the best resource I've found to date: https://mod.diablo.noktis.pl/quests

Saving has changed. It’s no longer a snapshot of the instant that you saved; rather, it saves when you exit. Waypoints that you’ve opened will remain open, but levels will be re-generated and re-stocked with monsters. So it’s now the same as Diablo 2, in that regard.


I’ve heard that Multiplayer play is possible over a LAN, but I haven’t had a chance to try that yet.

Classes

Character classes have been expanded. You can play the original Warrior, Rogue, and Sorcerer classes, but now you can also play a Barbarian, Necromancer, or Assassin. I should note that I’ve only played a Sorcerer so far, so I can’t yet provide class-specific tips for the other categories.

The six classes

Skills

Skills have been fixed and expanded to greatly increase class differentiation. The Repair skill of the Warrior and the Recharge skill of the Sorcerer are now actually useful. Rather than reducing the maximum charges of a staff or the durability of a weapon, the skills now have only a chance to work - but don’t damage the item.

Better still, new character-specific skills have been added for a total of five per class. I’ve only played a sorcerer so far, so I can’t talk about the skills of the other classes yet. But in addition to Staff Recharge, Sorcerers now have access to Elemental Drain (which temporarily increases your ability to penetrate resistances and immunities), Mana Shield (which is no longer a spell, but acts as one), Etherealize (reducing the damage you take for a short time), and Temporal Slowdown - which slows down the rest of the world for a short period, from your perspective. Mana Shield also no longer ends when mana reaches zero; if you restore mana with a potion before all your hit points are gone, further damage goes against mana again.

Permanent effects

Permanent effects have been fixed. Remember the shrines and cauldrons that could ruin your character forever by reducing maximum mana? Those are now timed, temporary effects which can be canceled by simply clicking on an icon in the upper right corner. On the downside, characteristic-increasing potions have also been nerfed. They only work for nine minutes, and don’t stack. But on the plus side, the permanent hit point loss caused by Black Death zombies has been eliminated.

Spells

Spells have also been greatly increased. There are now six levels, with seven spells in each level. In addition to the old familiar spells, there are new spells  - some of which are based on Diablo II spells. There are cold spells, more area-effect spells, and convenient new spells such as Warp, which teleports you to the nearest entry or exit point within range.

One old spell has been seriously nerfed: Stone Curse. It now has only a chance of turning a target to stone, and can be resisted. What’s more, if it’s successful the target gains a very high damage resistance while it’s petrified. That makes it more a spell for crowd control, rather than the ultimate spell that it was in Diablo 1.

Waypoints have been inserted from Diablo 2. There are still the usual 16 levels, but there are now waypoints on every second level. That’s Cathedral levels 2 and 4, Catacombs 6 and 8, Caves 10 and 12, and Hell 14 and 16. The Waypoints must be activated just as with Diablo 2, of course.

Waypoints

Gameplay

Quests which were planned for the original Diablo 1 but were deleted before release have now been completed and implemented. They include three village-based quests, as well as quite a few additional quests underground. Some of these take you to new areas which are effectively areas in themselves. For example, the Butcher is no longer in the usual room; once you’re there, you have to find a way to get to the Butcher’s lair, which is filled with a lot more demons before you get to the Butcher himself.

There are two quests which require a bit of explanation. An Arcane Sanctuary quest has been added to the Catacombs; you reach it when you find three Ancient Tomes in two squares and a rectangle. There’s also a quest in the caves which requires you to stand on four stones in the correct order. A hint: it’s always best to consider what’s new, or what’s snew!

Bosses and mini-bosses are now much more difficult. They tend to have more resistances and to be generally much tougher; it’s no longer practical to just spam a mouse button. Strategy is necessary. For example, the Valor quest is much as it was before, except that the end boss is a killer. He’s not just more powerful; he actually uses spells such as Firewall against you, too.

Death has become less painful. That’s good, because you’re likely to die much more often - or at least, I did. Rather than dropping your equipped gear, you simply drop some gold when you die. It’s a substantial enough amount to hurt, but at least you come back with all your gear!

The number and variety of Items have been enormously increased. Again, this seems to be based on Diablo 2. There are set items which show in green; so far these all seem to be the same as in D2. There are uniques and rares, with prefixes and suffixes. Many items have quite a few properties! Qualities which were once given in absolutes or with a limited number of possibilities now have their improvements listed as percentages, which vary quite a lot. For example, hit recovery speed is now a percentage, and can be increased by multiple equipped items at once. The same is true for speed of attack.

There are also items which can increase Spellpower. These generally increase damage for all spells by a percentage. Items which increase spell levels (either for individual spells, all spells, or both) also still exist, as do items which increase casting speed.

Tristram itself has changed a bit. There’s a couple of new NPCs, including one from Diablo 2. NPC locations have been made a bit more convenient (especially Wirt), and more characters give quests now. Vocals seem to have been recorded for the reinstated quests when D1 was created, so you can hear some interesting new comments from old favorites. As I mentioned earlier, there are some quests which are now village-based.

One thing that seems minor, but that really makes a difference is NPC movement. Some NPCs still stay in place, but others now move around the village; they look as if they’re talking with each other. It gives the village a more real feeling, somehow.

Refreshment has been added at Adria’s. Just as Peppin the healer will heal you for free, Adria apparently offers free drinks; these restore your mana to full. It’s a nice idea.

Village Movement speed can be increased up to 200%. To call up that menu, tap g.

You can make the labels for objects on the ground (treasure and gold) appear temporarily by pressing the shift key. You can toggle those labels to remain on or off with the Ctrl key.

Crafting

Crafting is a major addition. It’s not quite like crafting in D2 or D3. It can only be started once you’ve successfully completed the Anvil of Fury quest. Once you have, the Anvil is set up next to Griswold’s forge. You can use it to Salvage magic items that you don’t want to sell, creating gems, oils, tokens, and symbols. These are the ingredients for crafting new items.

You can also salvage items which have zero value, such as cursed items (they must be magical, however). They generally don’t produce much, but they will produce something of value.

At about the same time that you finish that quest, you’ll start finding recipes occasionally among treasure. They look like scrolls, but they are listed in orange text. These are learned by simply right-clicking on them once they’re in your inventory. Once you’ve learned a recipe, it disappears. But you now know the recipe permanently.

Using the Anvil you can put ingredients and items together to create powerful new class-specific items. Recipes include random powers along with specified ones, so you can redo a recipe if you don’t like the result. There are higher levels of recipe which produce more powerful items, but these are only available in higher difficulties.

Oh, one more tip: the area of the Anvil where the gems/oils/tokens appear from salvaged magic items is another durable storage area. The items in it persist from game to game.

Crafting at the Anvil

Difficulties have been increased by one: there’s now Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and Torment. However those levels are effectively seamless. Difficulty has been rescaled, making the higher difficulties feel more like direct extensions of the previous ones. Once you’ve beaten Diablo on Normal, you can start playing Nightmare - but you can’t just cruise through the Cathedral and Catacombs, as you could with Diablo 1. Even first-level monsters will be a challenge.

Also there are many items, spells, recipes, and skills that you can’t attain in Normal. That's part of what makes the game itself feel more than four times bigger.

To get specific for a moment, Golems have been changed a bit. They don’t seem to be quite as aggressive any more, and they’re less liable to open doors on their own. They’re not affected by your own attack spells (which is a BIG improvement), although they can still be injured and destroyed by standing in firewalls or lightning walls. They can be healed with Heal Other, which is handy.

One drawback to golems is that sometimes they can block a doorway or narrow space. If you move towards them, however, they move a little away from you and you can get through.

The Cow Level!

Sorry, there is no cow level in Belzebub, as far as I know. But there is a way to get large amounts of treasure, over and over. Once you've entered the first level of Hell - level 13 - you'll be able to get a new quest from Wirt, the Lost Treasure. That quest gives you access to a new cave entrance to the west, which takes you to the Secret Tunnel. 

Lost Treasure

The Secret Tunnel leads to a small monster-free room with three treasure chests (warning: there's a triple-immune miniboss on the way). These chests hold a huge amount of treasure; there's an example in the image above.

If you trigger the explosive barrels in the room, you'll get an entrance to an area with enemy boss sorcerers. They provide some good treasure, experience, and at least six spellbooks. If you have an effective ranged or remote attack such as Guardian, you can clear them out at virtually no risk. Those sorcerers never seem to be fire-immune, at least up through Nightmare difficulty. And as I noted, you can repeat the Lost Treasure quest over and over - as often as you want to.

Summing Up

Although the game has been enhanced to a remarkable degree (it’s really impressive) it’s still the original Diablo 1 at its core; the classic horror ARPG that created the genre. 

It runs on PCs. It’s a hell of a lot better than any mobile game. It’s huge, free, and has no microtransactions (*cough* screw Diablo: Immortal *cough*). What’s not to love?

#Diablo #Diablo1 #Diablo2 #DiabloImmortal #games

Diablo 1?

If I were to write a longish post about the Diablo 1 HD mod, would anyone here be interested? Should I put in the effort?

It runs on anything from Windows XP to Win10. It's Diablo 1, the game that created the modern computer RPG genre, but extremely expanded - deleted quests have been finished and implemented, as have a number of features from Diablo 2. It's a truly impressive piece of work.

I was thinking of writing it up, and noting all the differences that I've found between the original and this mod. Of course I'd include links to the files themselves, which are remarkably easy to install and don't require the original Diablo 1 CD-ROM. So...should I write it, or not?

Screw it

Okay, I'm done. Every so-called "social media" platform has turned out to either be a dead zone, abuse the privacy and personal information of their users, or be a home for bullies and assholes - and sometimes all three.

I'm tired of trying to share interesting stuff and being abused for it. And of making comments and posts only to be attacked by shills. So fuck it! I'll post here.

Nobody reads this, of course. It's like digging a hole at midnight, whispering your secrets into it, and then filling in the hole. But why not? At least it will be less aggravating.

I can't help feel that there's something wrong, somehow. I've spoken against social media before - I see it as a toxic, ersatz replacement for the face-to-face human contact which we as a species evolved to need. It's easily controlled and monitored by the economic and power elite. And those are the same forces which deprived us of neighborhoods and long-term social connections.

Isolated, inundated with toxic and controlled media, and fearful of each other. That keeps people helpless.
There has to be a better way than this.

Why I Love RuneQuest/D100/Basic Roleplaying

It was the early 1980s. Dungeons and Dragons wasn't the only roleplaying system; there were already many, both commercially produced and home-brewed. But most systems used many of the conventions which had been laid down by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. Levels. Character classes. Experience points. Concepts carried over from the wargaming roots of roleplaying.

We didn't know any better. It was the early days, the good days, and we took the rules and customized them over and over. We hoped we'd find good players and DMs to use them with.

I wasn't part of the beginning. Somehow I missed out. But I'd tried D&D back in 1978 or so. It was a poor experience - the DM may have succeeded in being the most biased referee in history, in part because he REALLY wanted to sleep with one of his players - so after I while I stopped playing.

When I got to college five years later, though, I tried it again. Once again I had the misfortune of playing under a bad DM. He secretly daisy-chained the players in an assassination circle, using incredibly contrived definitions of alignment. But one of the players had heard of another group, and the two of us went over to see if there were any openings.

There were. And they were playing some system called RuneQuest II.

I was dubious. A different roleplaying system? What was the point? Didn't AD&D cover it all? But I was desperate (college can be a lonely place, at first), so I tried it.

Have you ever had the sky rip open above you and a host of angelic beings rain down blinding light while singing hosannas? Neither have I. But the moment when I first started to understand RuneQuest II was something like that. Because it made sense.

The artificial, contrived, it-doesn't-make-sense-but-you-have-to-for-play-balance rules were gone. Classes? Gone. The game was skill-based, the first of its kind. Characters were defined by individual skills, not by some profession which limited your options in ridiculous ways. Yes, wearing heavy armor made it harder to sneak around or use some other skills - but you could certainly try to use those skills, often successfully. Want to use a sword and still cast spells? Why not!

Levels and experience? Gone. Instead characters improved by getting better at the skills they used, or by studying, or by being trained. They could also train to improve physical characteristics. And likewise magical power could be increased by use in meaningful situations. Getting better through actual experience, rather than by suddenly clicking upwards after you've killed a certain number of enemies? Much more realistic!

The system mapped beautifully to the real world. Rather than leafing through book after book to determine the right rule to apply, and arguing about which was the right interpretation, there were a few simple, logical concepts which allowed resolution of almost any situation without any need to resort to duelling rulebooks.

For example, the resistance roll. The concept was elegant, and devastatingly simple. When two equal and opposing forces came into play, the chance of either overcoming the other was 50%. Each incremental difference in those forces changed those odds proportionally. So if two characters of equal strength were arm-wrestling, there was a 50% chance of one or the other winning. If one of them was one point stronger than the other, that person would have a 55% chance of winning. If they were three points higher, their odds of winning increased by (3 x 5%) 15%, for a total chance of 65%. If the weaker character was the active one, their chance was correspondingly reduced.

And the concept applied to almost ANYTHING. In D&D, your chance to resist hostile magic was a saving throw based on your character class, with possible bonuses or penalties from exceptional characteristics. They changed slowly, in most campaigns. In RuneQuest, your chance to resist hostile magic or overcome someone with your own spells was a resistance roll. Compare your magical power with that of your opponent, roll the resistance roll, and see who wins. Each magical combat could be different, and not just because of the dice.

Once you got the hang of those basic concepts, the "physics" of the game were easy. We had far more time for roleplaying, instead of wasting time arguing about rules which had their source in a wargame  - an origin that wasn't intended for roleplaying!

Anyone could learn magic, and did. Healing spells were available to all. Some powerful magics required in-game accomplishments to acquire, but these actually made sense. The most powerful spells came from the gods, so if you wanted that Resurrection spell you had to be highly ranked in your church ("cult", in RQ) hierarchy. Because that was another breakthrough.

Up to that point, most published fantasy game-worlds were bland. Relatively shallow. Kind of vanilla. Basically mild Tolkien clones crossed with generic movie fantasy. If you didn't want to use one of the published worlds, you could make up your own - but you were on your own. RuneQuest could be used with any setting (it could be easily adapted to any genre, too, and would be over the years to come), but the default world was one with more depth than any world published to date. And new material kept coming out. Better than that: it was well-written. Huge reference works came out and won awards. And it was such a fun world! Elves were members of the Vegetable Kingdom, literally. They were plants in humanoid form. Trolls were warriors of darkness, but not monsters; they had culture, religion, history, and grief. Unlike D&D, which artificially elevated human beings above all other sapient races and used differing rules for PCs and NPCs, new species were available to be played.

And the same rules applied to all! Just like player characters, all NPCs could improve their skills and abilities with use and practice. Opponents were no longer cookie-cutter "monsters" to be assessed and destroyed; they could surprise you, have new skills, and even become friends or allies. Culture and personality mattered.

Of course they could matter in D&D, too. The difference was that in D&D, the primary value of "monsters" was as sources of experience and treasure. To negotiate with one was to give up most of its value (unless you killed it later, of course). By making the same rules apply to NPCs and PCs, and by giving those NPC creatures culture and depth, RuneQuest encouraged roleplaying rather than combat.

In 1984, Chaosium (the original publishers of RuneQuest) made an agreement with the Avalon Hill wargaming company. They'd write the game, and Avalon Hill would publish it. The system was called RuneQuest III. It incorporated a major breakthrough. Previous versions had been percentile-based, but used strict 5% increments. That system had mapped more easily to the D&D system, with each 5% increment equalling one number on a D20. But with RuneQuest III, the system became fully percentile. That allowed far more flexibility and granularity. A few awkward rules were also replaced with far more intuitive ones based on the system's core concepts.

For a while things went well, but the relationship between Chaosium and Avalon Hill went downhill and eventually broke down completely. The system went out of print. And it stayed that way...for ten years.

But it wasn't entirely gone. There were other systems based on the original RuneQuest concepts, some of them quite successful games. Call of Cthulhu was probably the best-known one. Games such as SuperWorld, Stormbringer, Ringworld, and ElfQuest also had some success. And some of the key concepts were picked up by other systems...including D&D itself, which eventually added percentile skills.

As for me, I got older. I'd played many games using RQ, and ran still more. Even when it was out of print, I played and GMed it whenever I could, trying to spread the word of a game system that uniquely made sense. I created a website to support the system back in 1996, and nineteen years later it's still online.

But I've grown away from the system in some ways. The main setting of the system went downhill, in my opinion. I discovered that some of the people behind RuneQuest had feet of clay, although the primary author of the rules has always had my respect and admiration. There are many new versions of RuneQuest now, many of them under different names and published by different companies. I don't keep up with those versions any more. Game publishing is a dirty business, and I'm too old now to put up with nonsense.

But I still dig out my old RuneQuest III book when I want to play. It's a bit shabby and it's starting to fall apart, but if I have to I can use Chaosium's new Basic Roleplaying book instead - it's multi-genre now, and has a lot of optional rules, but it's quite faithful to the original concepts. Even now, it's fun to introduce D&D players to a system that makes sense.

And watch their eyes light up.

This is only a test

Just a test to see if comments are now enabled. I just migrated my blog to the new platform.

"This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test."

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP
"This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. The broadcasters of your area in voluntary cooperation with the Federal, State and local authorities have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency, the Attention Signal you just heard would have been followed by official information, news or instructions. This station serves the (operational area name) area. This concludes this test of the Emergency Broadcast System."

Just for the heck of it, here's a picture of my son.

Damn it!

Here I went to all the effort of reactivating this blog, and as far as I can tell there is no way to add people to my friends list. Why? THERE IS NO FRIENDS LIST!

Unless I just missed it?

I haven't written anything here for three years, since I moved to LiveJournal. So why am I posting now?

Because there are people on Blogger/Blogspot or whatever the hell this is who I want to read, that's why. I don't know if it's possible to have a "friends list" here, but if it is, there are at least two real and one fictional person that I'm going to add.

However, I don't expect I'll be doing much posting here, if any. If you want to read whatever crap I'm writing at the moment, go to http://bobquasit.livejournal.com/.

Hmm. I wonder if this site has improved in the last three years? It was really annoying, three years ago.

He's in a happier place now...
Yeah, I've moved to LiveJournal - the comment function works well there, and it's just a whole lot easier to use. I've already put up a lot of new stuff there, as well as all of the posts from here. So bookmark the new, and delete the old!

See you there!

The Shout Out thing seems to be broken most of the time, so if you want to reach me, email me. pm36@maranci.net should do it.

An Immodest Proposal

The popularity of the National Do Not Call List (60 million Americans are expected to sign up) has led some telemarketing trade associations to point out that the resulting loss of tens of thousands of entry-level telemarketing jobs will be a body blow to the already staggering American economy.

Now, I have to admit that I signed up for that list myself. But I also have a lot of sympathy for low-income people who are struggling to make it; I'm one of them, basically. Come to think of it, I once interviewed for a telemarketing job myself when I was young. So here's my modest suggestion to alleviate the problem: why not start a national program to retrain all telemarketers as prostitutes?

It's almost Biblical: force the people who have irritated so many to instead bring pleasure to millions. Overall public health would probably improve as people gain the benefit of more easily available sex (less stress! More orgasms!). And prostitutes make more money than telemarketers, so the tax base would increase. At the same time, most prostitutes aren't in a high enough tax bracket to benefit much from the Bush Administration's tax cuts. Another savings.

Changing over the industry would be fairly straightforward. A set of local boards could be set up nationwide to judge the attractiveness and potential earning power of every worker. Deficient individuals would be sent for complete makeovers, with the cost to be deducted from their future earnings. Seriously unattractive workers could get low-interest government loans to pay for plastic surgery and body enhancement.

Since the ratio of males to females in the telemarketing industry may not match the need for female versus male prostitutes, some individuals would probably also need to undergo sex change operations. These operations would also be fundable via government loans (the money for this program could be diverted from something unimportant, like Head Start or the EPA).

Since some telemarketers are actually prisoners, converting them to prostitutes would alleviate unpleasant living conditions in jail; not that anyone in jail deserves less unpleasant conditions, but since they're all raping each other anyway, at least it would be less overtly homosexual if some of them were turned into women. Another advantage: the regendered prisoners couldn't possibly reproduce!

Another possible option...well, this may be too visionary. But down the road, once the rage of the American people against telemarketers has subsided, perhaps selling could be combined with prostitution. I can see it now. Get a blow job and change your long-distance company! Go around the world and get new aluminum siding! Have a hand job and refinance your house! The possibilities are endless.

Some may have noticed one key group which has been left out of my proposal: telemarketing company executives. But the answer is obvious with only a moment's thought.

They'd be the pimps, of course.

Damn. Maureen Dowd beat me to connecting the string of serial cat mutilations in the midwest and Senate majority leader Bill Frist's admission that he used to collect and vivisect stray cats while in medical school.

Oh well. Here's something even funnier: a mirror of the long-lost Dysfunctional Family Circus. Warning, it's almost as sick as the First Senator.

No. I am NOT going to copy

Okay. Start over. I've been writing an online journal since July 27, 2000, which was before there were blogs. If anyone is desperate enough to read all that, go here. Have yourself a field day. Don't forget to wash your hands afterword.

This is a test. This is only a test. Do not attempt to adjust your controls. Have a nice day.

Time out for a poem. I dislike words, so it's punctuation only today, sorry.


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!

...?

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!!!

...


Okay, that's the end of that.

Today's featured bumper sticker is "Down with King George!"

Want a cool site? You probably shouldn't be reading this then. I'm late-30's married with kid former roleplayer current science fiction freak former APAzine editor current website publisher always early adopter angry abandoned Democrat geek. I've got a BA and a mouth, and I'm not afraid to use either one (the BA doesn't do much, though). You're losing coolness by the microsecond, just reading this.

I HTML by hand, for god's sake!

Still here? You're a better man than I, Gunga Din!

Okay, here's something incredibly obscure: "Good Morning World", a Levis jingle from 1972. http://www.maranci.net/levis.wav. If you were born in 1964, you might remember this. Turn your volume down, it's loud.

Not good enough? How about this? Something really, REALLY good. And obscure. Space Moose! It silently disappeared off the web a couple of months ago, and I was apparently the only person who snagged it. The snag was flawed, but most of the strips were saved. And I sent the files to someone who set up a mirror. Flawed, like I said, but still some of the best sick humor ever on the web. And virtually no one knows about it.

I recently found some more of the missing strips and annotations, and maybe that guy will use them to improve his mirror, but if not...I'll still have them.

Anything else? Oh yeah, the name. I used to write political humor online under the name "Quasit". Then I realized that most online activists would rather spend time circle jerking and whining than doing anything meanigful, and that the Democratic Party couldn't be less interested in actually providing opposition to the Boy Tyrant, so I got pissed off and Quasit died.

Now I'm playing with the Google toolbar until my Windows dies. Probably next Tuesday.

I tried to take the name "Omac" when I got here, but somebody else had already grabbed it. Which makes me suspicious. Who else knows about the One Man Army Corps? I thought Jack Kirby had lived in vain.

Okay, stream of consciousness goes here. Half-assed simulation of rationality goes there (on my old site). Do not mix, let stand for three hours, and serve at room temperature.

Chatter
Good Morning World (Levis commerical wav file)
The Lost World of Space Moose