It's a slow news day, but that's fine by me, because I'm desperately working as fast as I can so I can jump in and play the LOTRO Moria expansion. The only news today is of the World of Warcraft variety, which includes the story of a boy suffering from a seizure for playing the World of Warcraft expansion for too long, and the news that the expansion's raids have already been defeated.

World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King was just released recently, and already the game has its first 80 level player - Nymh. I'm shocked that he could muster through the ten new levels so quickly, but probably only because when it comes to the MMO I play - LOTRO - it takes me forever to level. I don't know if I'm just slow or suck! So congrats Nymh on your news breaking record run...your fifteen-minutes start now.

Have scientists learned nothing from sci-fi films? You've got Terminators that walk among us in an attempt to kill future resistance leaders and even The Matrix shows what can happen when you give computers a too advanced AI - they freaking revolt and enslave humanity! Oh well, remember this day well then when we're all slaves to the machine, as the American Army is going to unleash their computer AI in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft and EVE Online to see if they do well enough to pass as human.

I wasn't a huge fan of World of Warcraft when I tried it out, but you have to give it to Blizzard for doing some creative things. For instance, a flood of zombies are infesting the game now, which is both partly a Halloween event and a nod to the upcoming expansion next month. The event actually sounds really cool, but I'd love to see a real zombie apocalypse MMORPG.

World of Warcraft is a game...nothing more and nothing less. Sure, it has been used in some studies before - such as analyzing the spread of diseases in a community (true story) - but to give a grant to a professor to play World of Warcraft for study in simply asinine. How does someone even justify paying $100,000 for that kind of research? For that matter, she must be a hell of a writer/speaker in order to convince people to actually grant that request.