Face to Face >> all other communication.

I hate phones. I hate texting. Phone calls are useful for figuring out details of a subject that requires clear communication from both parties back and forth. But it's pretty shitty for conversations. It's much harder to talk on the phone and do something else yet the conversation is rarely as engaging as face to face conversation. also it's usually one on one, which is lame.
Texting is like IMing but shittier. Few of the benefits but all of the frustrations

How much do you trust that glaze?

1. Are you Catholic? Is your name a variant on "John"? Do you have a hot wife in the medical profession? Do you work in the stock market to maintain your upper middle class lifestyle? Is your view of the geo-political climate as deep as a game of "Cowboys and Indians"? Is revenge your sole motivation in life?

Congratulations, you are a Tom Clancy protagonist!

I liked Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger because they felt plausible and pulled on real-life conflicts in the news. But with Rainbow Six Clancy disappeared up his own chocolate starfish. Bio-warfare bomb-creating eco-terrorists as your villains? Really? Going from nail bombs, arson and spiking trees to advanced knowledge of killer genetics is a science-fiction leap.

2. If you like trippy space superheroes, Mike Mignola illustrated the 4-part Cosmic Odyssey mini-series for DC comics.

I'm pretty much in total agreement with Azhrei here, which is a shame since my ass still hurts from the last time. Except I did enjoy reading LOTR and also enjoyed the movies. LOTR is the greatest!

I hate phone calls. Just like someone knocking on your door, it's a demand for immediate attention, sometimes with consequences (even if just social pressure) for not responding. The beauty of email is that I can send and receive messages at my convenience. I would love to keep every feature of my smartphone and just strip out the phone part!

As for social networking, I have a somewhat different view. First, I'm really terrible about remembering who I've told what. So left to my own devices, one peer hears it ten times and the other nine never hear it at all. Second, there's a lot of people that I don't have a regular, face-to-face connection with, but I'd still love to hear even the banalities that give character to their lives. Social networking solves both of those issues.

All of that say, I agree that there's nothing quite as nice as meeting someone face-to-face. But in lieu of that, I'll take email and social networking any day of the week.

So, I hate it when someone says "there's no good fantasy, it's all shitty Tolkien knock-offs", since it basically just means all you've read is the shitty stuff. There's plenty of good, original fantasy if you look a little bit further past the mainstream.

On the annoying engineering guy, I can definitely be him. Two weeks or so I worked out the gravity acceleration whatnot to figure out how much reaction time a wizard would have to cast feather fall (30' range) on a guy falling from the max height reached within the duration of a Fly spell (answer: not much), thereby bursting the bubble on one of our less workable ideas, and of course I'm always wanting to do trig when someone in the air is being targeted... it's hard to resist those impulses, dammit!

But that's not so much of an RP/immersion-heavy game. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

I believe the canonical pronunciation is "Lie-ber", not "Lee-ber".

Chad, I will come and plunder your bookcases if Amazon doesn't come through on this.

In general, German pronunciation favours the second of any pair of vowels.

Hence, Leiber has the same vowel sound as Frankenstein.

Fronkenschteen, got it.

And you wouldn't BELIEVE how tangled up Americans can get when you try to explain it that way. It's as though the Great Vowel Shift never happened.

Lee-ber would be Lieber, yeah.