Ok, so HFBB to Weezie as well. Sorry about that - the databases in question have been scolded and corrected. Today was all about the Magic Online - and the release of the new set (Magic: The Gathering - now with Ninjas!(tm)). And before anybody gets all sassy on me I've "worked" the last weekend, and I'm "working" this weekend (at that Potlatch thingie) so spending a Thursday playing Magic is kosher. (Monday is likely to ALSO be all about the MTGO - the release events continue through next Tuesday. I know everybody already tuned out by now, so I can prattle to my hearts content. Magic continues to fascinate me as a game, and especially when I take a short break from it and come back. The block concept is sheer brilliance. It amazes me that Kamigawa block is even considered the same game as Mirrodin block - it plays so different. From a game design perspective it's just poetry to watch them evolve and change the game. It's also interesting to watch the meta-choices they make. I'd say Kamigawa is probably less friendly to the new player than Mirrodin was - it's much more complicated to play. As an experienced player I really like it - I hadn't realized how straightforward and "vanilla" Mirrodin was until Kamigawa released. The combat is so much richer. Mirrodin was an interesting experiment in Magic design but Kamigawa is brilliant. I might even like it better than Invasion block which is generally considered the high water mark of recent Magic sets. In theory Magic should have sequelitis worse than any other game on the planet - after all there's a "sequel" every four months. But they manage to shake up the game enough that it always feels very different. I don't know what kind of updates will see over the next few days (How is that different Timmeh? you ask. Shut up I respond!) as I'm tooling around in da city. OH - random bonus iTunes suggestions. For a while now, I've had a playlist called "Actual Music" which keeps my podcasts separate. Basically it's a Smart Playlist that excludes the following genres: Podcast, Speech, Books & Spoken Word. A few podcasts don't come in on those genres but iPodderX lets you override the genre for a feed. So I set the "Party Shuffle" to play from "Actual Music" instead of Library and now I can shuffle that forever without getting some nattering about tech all of a sudden in my listening. BUT! I found a even better thing to do. I now have a Playlist called "Unloved Tunes" which has the same restrictions but adds a restriction saying "Last Played is not in the last 30 days". Set it to "Limit to 25 songs selected randomly" and Live updating. This will pick out 25 random tracks that I haven't played in the last month. Every time I finish a track it gets replaced with a "new" unplayed track. I have iTunes on Repeat Playlist and it will just cycle like that forever - randomly picking tunes I haven't heard recently. And it will sync that with the iPod as well.