Diablo III! You have to love Blizzard, when they do promos they sure do it right. Rather than leave us hanging with initial announcements, then drag on the PR campaign with the odd screenshot, concept art, staff interviews, etc, they usually already have working footage of the game - which is what the fans really want to see.

Kotaku has the links. It looks like it will  be in 3D, but it’ll retain the isometric perspective. Plenty of footage up already.

[Update] Here’s an interview from IGN as well.

Any guesses when the game will be out? I’m betting on a Q4 2009 release :).

Popularity: 39% [?]

Going down to KL this weekend and thought I’d leave you guys with this (if I haven’t told you about this already).

I don’t usually care much for blogger drama but this case feels a little different somehow.

It started with a post by a Singaporean blogger, Jean, titled “Help needed: I was molested by a friend while I was asleep“. To really get into this, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS. Digest it and form your own opinion.

Basically in the post the blogger outlines how she went on a trip alone with a (guy) friend and ended up sharing the same bed with him because the hotel was out of rooms. On the last night:

Half way through my sleep, I thought I felt hands moving along my back. Being a light sleeper (I’m usually a light sleeper when overseas), I woke up and felt fingers running along the right side of my back. With my back facing John, I didn’t know what to do. I kept very still because I was afraid of being assaulted. He’s easily 1.5 times my size, not to mention being taller than me. Soon enough that stopped but I didn’t dare go back to sleep.

Then I felt it. The distinct feeling of a sausage-like object rubbing against my bottom. I couldn’t take it any more and screamed and jolted up. John then pretended to be shocked and asked me if I had a nightmare. I didn’t answer him but took the blanket and went to the small table where my laptop was. I signed in on MSN and turned on my webcam and told my friend what happened. I turned on the webcam facing me throughout the night, on one hand worried that something worse might happen and on the other hand at a lost of what to do.

I think I was surprised to find myself thinking “WTF is wrong with this girl - alone on a trip and agreeing to sleep in the SAME BED with a guy?” I wondered if I was guilty of victim blaming. At the same time, I couldn’t quite shake off the nagging feeling that if the blogger were such a prude, then she would have insisted he slept on the couch on the first place. No girl is that innocent - hey, considering she’s Singaporean.

A Singaporean tabloid even picked up and ran the story. However they also did something else - they got the guy’s side of the story. It turned out to be quite a shocker. Jaywalk has reproduced the articles on his blog.

Quite the sordid account, and will please those who like scandal and sex :). On my part, I was just glad that my instincts were vindicated.

Popularity: 38% [?]

This week’s TIME had a piece on Norway’s Government Pension Fund-Global, Norway’s sovereign trust fund. Profits from their oil and gas resources are channeled into it and invested.

Highlights:
- Assets of USD 382 billion.
- Owns 1% of the entire European stock market
- Scored 100% in governance, accountability, and transparency in a study by the Peterson Institute. Singapore’s Investment Corp averaged 40% (Petronas ranked dead last in a 2006 Spanish study of oil companies)
- Pledges to press firms it invests in to improve protection of human rights.
- Dumped stakes in Boeing and British BAE because they manufactured nuclear weapons.
- Voted in a shareholder push for Exxon-Mobil to adopt emission-reduction goals.

Norway has never sent a man to the moon, they never had the tallest building in the world, and they don’t have a national car, but certainly Norge kan!

Popularity: 38% [?]

Robert Mugabe, the tyrant of Zimbabwe (and good friend of Dr. M), on his impending election loss:

“We fought for this country, and a lot of blood was shed,” Mr Mugabe told his supporters. “We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X. How can a ballpoint fight with a gun?”

The warning came a day after he declared: “We are ready to go to war.” Evidence, say observers, of mounting concerns that he may not have done enough to secure the vote.

What causes men to act like this? Ego? A hunger for power? Mental illness? Or is the man just plain evil? I just hope Zimbabwe has a future.

I wonder what Dr. M has to say about all this. Would he still invite Mugabe to retire here?

Popularity: 42% [?]

“Report is Public”, blares the front page of The Star today:

KUALA LUMPUR: Petronas has been publishing its annual report for the past 18 years and it is easily available, including on its website, said its president and chief executive officer Tan Sri Mohd Hassan Marican.

“We print 5,000 copies of the report every year even though we are legally required to publish only two. We distribute the report to the Parliament library, ministries and even the media,” he said in an interview.

Replying to queries by various quarters that the national petroleum corporation’s accounts were not made public, Hassan said yesterday that this was not true and it was just that certain people “refused to look for iteven though it is easily available.”

”If they cannot find one of the 5,000 copies we’ve printed, then they should have searched our website under the heading ‘Investors Relations’ in the Corporate webpage.

Seriously. God. Who do you think you are kidding? Everyone knows that Petronas’ revenue is public. That’s how we know that the oil prices are giving you record profits!

What we fricking obviously want to know is HOW THE GOVT SPENDS the money that is taken from Petronas. It sure as hell isn’t in the annual report, or anywhere else. (BTW you can get the report here, Petronas’ site is a bitch to navigate). You would think that journalists and editors over at the People’s Paper would have thought of this, but no.

Popularity: 44% [?]

Finally.

State oil company Petronas will finally open its books to the public after a decision to hike fuel prices by more than 40 percent set off days of protests.

It came with a major opposition party still calling for as many as 100,000 people to take to the streets at a rally early next month amid growing anger over the cost of fuel in Malaysia, which is heavily state subsidised.

Nor Mohammed Yakcop, the country’s second finance minister, told the New Straits Times newspaper that Petronas could open its ledgers to the public as soon as next week as the government looks at cutting the fuel subsidy.

“As a government that is entrusted by the people, we have to make sure our revenues are spent prudently,” he said.

The government has forecast that unless subsidies are restructured, it will spend around RM10 billion in the second half of 2008 in the face of a global surge in oil prices.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Dr. Mahathir says it again [Malaysian Insider]:

Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad has told non-Malays that they should stop questioning the special rights of the Malays and count themselves privileged, having been given citizenship and other rights in this country.

He urged them to understand history and realise that an agreement was reached before independence in 1957 when the Malays were willing to accept other races as people who could “share the wealth of this land”. Part of the formula saw Umno allow MCA and MIC to administer the country.

“Finally, with the agreement of all parties, immigrants were accepted as citizens of Tanah Melayu and people of other races accepted the reality that Malays had special rights as indigenous people of this land. Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra willingly gave one million citizenships to Chinese and Indians. Which country in the world has given immigrants equal rights?

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the word “immigrants” either. Hey Dr. M, have you heard that Obama is poised to become the next President of the United States? I shudder to think of the days I when I had to wear a uniform, when the only things I knew about Malaysia were from the textbooks and the People’s Paper, when we all actually looked up to this man.

On one hand his plight is understandable. It’s safe to say, one month on, that his much publicized resignation from UMNO has barely made ripples. Melayu mudah lupa dude! The only thing he has to turn to now, as Insider observes, is to go back to fanning the racial sentiment.

But it’s 2008 buddy. We voted out racial politics three months ago. And sure as hell no Malay, Muslim, or Mamak is going to buy that if they somehow had a larger share of the economy, petrol and food prices would go down! Perhaps the M feels he needs to distract us from the larger issue everyone is thinking about: If we are an oil exporter, why the heck aren’t we doing better with the current oil prices? Petronas - or rather, how Petronas’ money is spent - has much more to do with our economic situation than whether or not Malays corner 30% of a shrinking pie. And whatever we say about Pak Lah, he has only been in term for a few years, his budgets have been relatively conservative, and hasn’t shown the penchant for mega projects that Dr. M did. Yes, we’re not stupid - all this happened on your watch, Dr. M.

If Pak Lah were you, you would have been thrown into the clapper ages ago. As it is, at least try to salvage what’s left of your dignity. Your gambit didn’t work, it’s time to fade into obscurity and let us sort out the mess you left us with.

Popularity: 35% [?]

The much-awaited Opera 9.5 was released on Thursday. There are several improvements that I’ve been waiting for, especially the optimized mail and RSS feed engine. Opera no longer freezes for a while when you have a lot of feeds subscribed - according to the devs this is due to better spreading of the load among CPU cores. It was pretty much the only beef I had with Opera. Took me about 15 minutes to convert my 70,000 email messages into the new format though.

9.5 also sees the addition of a live search which kicks in when you type a term into the address bar. It doesn’t only search through past URLs and page headers, it goes through the content of the pages in your history as well - in real-time!

There were other minor changes I found useful - after downloading a file, you can now open its destination folder directly in the Transfer menu. The image toggle, which lets you choose between showing all images, showing only cached images, or disable images, is now enabled by default in the status bar. There’s also a funky feature called “Create follower tab”, which creates an empty tab in the background. Any links you click on your current tab will then be opened in the follower tab, instead of the current page. The “Next/Previous” buttons, which automatically tries to detect if there are any next/previous links on the page, also have a higher success rate now.

The full list of changes is available in the changelog. There are other features that are great but I don’t use much (or rather, that I have never found an issue ): security updates, speed improvements (Opera was already fast anyway), fraud protection, etc.

It’s not all good though (this is to prove I’m not a blind fanboy). As many people over at the dev blog are saying, the release seems a bit rushed (probably to beat FF3 to the finish). As a result, Opera doesn’t seem as stable as before. It tends to crash if you leave it running for a few hours. The new default skin is pretty ugly as well, but that’s easily fixed by getting the classic skin here.

The dev blog does mention that the number of Opera users has doubled since the v9 series launched, which is good but still amounts to less than 1% of the market share :(. Opera users, evangelize more!

Three more days till the June 17 launch of Firefox 3, I’ll update then with any benchmarks I find.

Popularity: 37% [?]

Entertainment

• A new Street Fighter movie is said to be in production. The title: The Legend of Chun Li. The star: Kristin Kreuk
• A MacGyver film is rumoured to be in the works.
• Hilarious Batman vs Iron Man video:
• Russian Communist Party members threaten to beat up Harrison Ford if he ever steps foot there, following the negative portrayal of Russians in the latest Indiana Jones film.

Tech

• Real-life Iron Man technology boosts endurance and strength by up to 20 times.
• SMS-ing is four times more expensive than receiving data from space.

Games

• A US-based monitoring group mistakes concept art for the post-acolyptic game Fallout 3 as al-Qaeda simulations for the aftermath of a terrorist attack.
• The award-winning game Bioshock has been confirmed for a movie adaptation. The director, Gore Verbinski, worked on Pirates of the Carribean.
• A pole-dancing game is being developed for the Wii (no, not Polish artists).
• PC version of the Bioware hit Mass Effect is launched. Complaints abound regarding its strict anti-piracy measures, among them an online check every 10 days.

World, Politics

• Bush claims to have given up golf in 2003, to honour fallen soldiers in Iraq. The claim is promptly debunked with video evidence.
• Barack Obama has finally cut ties with Trinity United Church of Christ, following months of controversy because of its pastor’s beliefs.
• China looks to outsource certain jobs to the US.
• India is hopping mad after the US apparently blames them and other developing nations for food price increases.

Internet

• A Singapore firm claims that they hold a patent on image-linking “technology”, planning to claim millions from Google.

Science

• South Korea puts its cloning research to good use - by cloning seven Labrador retrievers from a highly-trained “original”, to sniff out drugs an explosives. They are all named “Toppy”.
• Girls are becoming just as good as boys in math.
• Teenager isolates a microbe that can break down plastic bags for a science project.
• Six “human” traits (Culture, mind reading, tool use, morality, emotions, and personality ) - have been observed in animals.

Religion

• French citizens and lawmakers discuss marriage laws after a Muslim divorces his wife because she was not a virgin.
• Vatican astronomer says aliens could exist.
• A group based in San Diego calls for a boycott of Starbucks after the company reverted to an adaptation of its old logo, featuring a mermaid. The image apparently “has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute.”

Interest

• Homeless Japanese woman lives undetected in a stranger’s closet for a year.
• Teacher faces criminal charges after giving out too much information in a sex-ed class.
• Macbook used to cut a cake
• X-ray image of a python that had just swallowed a cat.
• Woman wakes up after being declared dead following two heart attacks. Interesting thing is rigor mortis had already set in.

Consumer

• There is a serious problem with certain HP notebook models that can cause motherboard damage. BIOS update for all affected notebooks rated “Critical”.

Popularity: 40% [?]