By Balin’s braided beards! A calf was born with two tails last night. A grey fox crossed my path. The auguries are ill indeed for the dawning of Age of Conan. Thirteen rooks were perched in a tree. Thirteen! Worst of all, though, worse still than all those, the head start requires a 13Gb download, the Funcom patcher manages to stumble along at about 50k/s (possibly because it’s torrent-based and swamping the upload, even with an upload limit set) giving an estimated time to completion of “when the moons of Voron align with the twin towers of the temple of Veerun (or about two of your earth weeks)”, so, leaving it downloading overnight, I come down in the morning to check how many nanometres the progress bar has shifted to find the devil himself has kicked me square in the nuts through his earthly emissaries of Microsoft. I’m *sure* I have XP set to “Download your myriad security patches (if you really must) but don’t bloody apply them until I say so”, but the PC was sitting there with a smug just-rebooted expression, and sure enough the event log shows it applied an update and rebooted around 3am. I’ll leave it running the next couple of nights, but unless the patcher pulls its finger out (and Micro-bleedin’-soft can refrain from rebooting the PC) I suspect the client won’t be ready for THE VERY INSTANT the head-start servers are up, which is clearly an outrage of Tony Harrison proportions, but not to worry, who wants to be cooped up when it’s such a lovely weekend in prospect? What’s that, you say? Thunderstorms forecast for Saturday? Oh.

Course, I’m a fool for being in such a rush anyway. A wise man would give any MMOG six months or so to get early kinks worked out, let the population distribute itself over the whole gameworld rather than everyone being crammed into the starter zones like an episode of Mythbusters testing that “entire population of the whole world could fit onto the Isle of Wight” theory, and allow the developers to release an update or two so it finally has all the features they really wanted to get in for launch but didn’t quite have time for (like an end game, player housing, different character classes, combat, graphics instead of the interface being a text parser, that sort of thing). Unfortunately I’m not a wise man, I’m a rash impetuous fool, and worse still a rash impetuous fool with a credit card who’s easily swayed by shiny baubles like a three day head start, so I’ve brought this all on myself. Oh well, I’m off to see what a sheep’s entrails say the coming week holds…

Note: no sheep will actually be harmed in the fulfilling of this post, unless the forecasts are totally wrong and it is a lovely weekend, in which case some minted lamb chops might get barbecued.