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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.

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

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 (flame@evilsite.com) 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 newark@fbi.gov 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.

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.

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.