Dollymistress

Exact same error for me. I just got home and loaded the Updater. It patched quickly, I tried to log in and I can't.

I've tried running the updater again but it won't connect. Ahh! What's going on it's DOOOOM!

Here ya go BaB, problem solved!

http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/7696/graniten.jpg

I don't understand why Granite Armor is any different from the tier 9 Electric Armor, which has been customized easily.

If changing the armor really is the only way to make it customizable, then why not start with Ice Armor as a base, then add more pieces to it until it covers the character (especially huge characters, which Ice Armor doesn't fully cover) and then make it opaque?

I think Granite evolved because there was no way to create an "all-over" Armor that didn't occasionally have a part of your costume peeking through it, requiring a complete swap of character model to ensure the effect worked. But again, electric Armor does this without any hassle - why not start with Electric Armor's tier 9 and work backwards to Granite-looking Armor from there?

Maybe Electric's tier 9 is actually an invisible character model with a dancing lightshow around them. That's fine - use that concept and create an aeefect that looks like the rock monster in the Galaxy Quest movie - not a distinct physical form but instead more of a pile of loosely-connected orbiting bits of rock with a vaugely-defined head and limbs.

Alternatively, make granite a multiple-choice power where you select one of four(?) possible options, each one a distinct tier 9 power that prohibits use of the others.

I'm worried that BaB will annoy people by going down a road that's easier but not entirely necessary. Players won't be happy with just a bulkier version of poo armor that has gaps and doesn't look invulnerable.

Hiya again.

Thanks for the nifty help. Sadly, NCSoft refused to sell me a copy of the USA version of Aion so I used the sage advice of a nice boards member to get a copy from a US store that doesn't mind selling to UK peeps.

Or at least I think they don't mind. I haven't actually received the code yet... -_-

Anyways, I will now stop drawing worshipfulness away from this kewl game and hope to see a few Champs at the other kewl game soon

tee hee!

Unnnnh.

Being driven insane again. Can any nice peeps here help me?

I'm trying to sign up to Aion to get involved in this new game. I'm not leaving CoX, I wanna play both.

The problem is (as always grr) I am in the UK and need the USA version of the game. The PlayNC store keeps re-directing me to the stupid European pack and when I try to get around that by using a proxy my paypal account won't work.

Is anyone else here going to play Aion? Any advice on how I can get my hands on a USA key (Collectors edition + preorder so I can get all the extra items please)?

Any help would be appreciated muchly!


I hate how this happens every single time. CoX, AoC, TR and now this too. Why can't I just buy the USA version directly (for AoC I had to buy the damn game when I was on holiday in the USA to get my Rhino code!).

[QUOTE=Schismatrix;2197097]Sure, i may be missing out on the awesome experience of having groups of players camping out spawn points hoping to beat others to the mission objective when it spawns that the new game has, but i'm still here. (Do any other current MMO's still use that mechanic?)QUOTE]

Conan does, but the respawn is really fast and there are so many quests close together that you hardly notice.

LOL.

I came back on September 1st, to even the exodus out. I'm worth 100 CO deserters!

Kinda...maybe in terms of noise level...*shrug*

1. What is your favorite word? Thanks!

2. What is your least favorite word? Bye

3. What turns you on? Pink

4. What turns you off? Bullying

5. What sound or noise do you love? Rain

6. What sound or noise do you hate? THe buzz of a wasp

7. What is your favorite curse word? Fiddlesticks!

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Superheroine

9. What profession would you not like to participate in? Politician

10. If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? Yeah...sorry about that mix up. Don't worry, here's another turn...for free!

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Yeeeeeah, I had a feeling you'd been sodomized repeatedly.

...kidding!

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Just wait until those guards publish their "research" results...

Tee hee Happy Birthday!

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This thread delivers. Thanks for the entertainment, all.

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Oh c'mon my threads always deliver. Elf and I aren't even allowed to post in the same thread anymore due to the drama levels that creates.

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Try to look at this another way. There are some people who are hardwired differently than you. Looking at what Dolly wrote, she HAD to keep doing her routine. I don't expect you to understand why. But at least understand that not everyone is like you.

And doing her routine, she was basically tortured. For months! Of course she's gonna have an emotional response!! Of course she shed real tears. Let's look at the results here, not the how's and why's.

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Note that I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who has been one of Twixt's most outspoken critics so far:

Doll gets zero sympathy from me. Not only did she not HAVE to keep going to RV, but when she was there, she was terrible to deal with. She yelled and screamed at me in Broadcast for killing her a single time. She verbally assaulted me constantly, and she would have epic meltdowns every single time I found her in the zone. She would sic her Heavy on me and then taunt me in Broadcast if I died. She came to these forums and talked about how terrible everyone was who dared interrupt her. She flipped out on me, personally, on numerous occasions.

Twixt has misrepresented his "research" plenty, but Doll's melodramatic reactions and attention seeking behavior do not lend her any respectability.

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I take issue with the part about siccing a heavy on you. It makes it sound like I was hunting you and then using the heavy to kill you, which is something I wouldn't do.

If I was attacked in RV I would put my heavy on aggressive/attack and then run/fly away.

The rest is probably true. I reacted differently to pvpers who attacked me in RV depending on how well I knew them, how often they attacked me and how they reacted to me asking them to stop.

I did have a good few nice duels with some people, but not very often. The times I got upset were when being killed meant losing a heavy (cos someone else grabbed it while I was respawning), when someone was deliberately "farming" me or when Twixt was around.

That's not supposed to be a moral defence, I know full well how crazy I could be if someone pushed my buttons in RV back then.

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Twixt still crossed a line. When it comes to "he dropped whatever he was doing the moment I walked in the zone and hounded me till I left, every time I was there" there's something wrong. Folks defending the virtues of the PvP zone keep deflecting what the real issue is. Twixt went too far. End of Story.

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I'll put it to you this way. Let's say we are on a base in Afghanistan. If I'm going "outside the wire"(off the base, past a point of protection, etc) then I can reasonably expect to be shot at sometimes. It will NOT happen every time. However, just because I know it probably won't happen every time, do you think I will leave the base without my Flak Jacket or my Kevlar helmet, my M-16 or my frag grenades? No. I will prepare each and every time to encounter the enemy, and so will the people allowing me to go off base. They won't let me go alone, they will send people with me so that we can watch eachother's backs.

Now, apply that to the PvP zone. Going into the PvP zone is like going "outside the wire"(outside of protection from enemy contact, right?). Sometimes you can go to Warburg and get nukes without a hitch, without even seeing a villain. I've done it. But sometimes you end up having to fight some, or leave the zone. Hell, I've killed people for their codes before. It's what the zone is there for. To go to Warburg for nukes(Or RV for XP) and not be prepared mentally and physically for enemy contact means that you have already lost. So for Dolly to go to RV expecting that eventually she can just be left alone for her exploitive xp gathering while other people should not do what the zone was intended for is just ignorant. Makes me wanna go to RV with a hero for a few nights.

Stay inside the wire, Dolls, and the bad man can't hurt you no mo'.

[/ QUOTE ]

To extend this analogy a little further. Let's say that I go out into battle one day and I'm captured. I'm then thrown in the enemy jail.

When guards arrive at my cell with food, sometimes they beat me up. A few punches here and there. It's ethically questionable in a vague sense but hey, it is war after all and I'm not stupid enough to think this wouldn't happen. I did kill some of their friends after all.

But...there is this one guy who even disturbs the other guards. Every time it's his turn to bring the food, he comes into the cell and does some very very bad things. Over and over.

After I'm freed and the war is over, the bad guy who shocked his fellow guards writes a book about what he did. Nothing he did is technically a war crime by the current definition, in fact his behavious even helped his side becuase it was a good interrogation technique for gathering information.

People across the world read the book. They aren't very impressed. What the guy did was so bad that governments actually pass a new law that redefines his activities as war crimes. He isn't put on trial retrospectively, but his career certainly isn't helped by his actions and eventually he drops out of the army and is forever known as "that guy"...

The fact that he's completely unrepentent and fails to even acknowledge the public outcry makes him less popular than the actions themselves.

"What he did was bad by the rules of socially accepted behavior but not wrong by the laws of the game unless we go into that grey area of harrassment. But that is kind of a hard case to make when in was just in this one PVP zone that she didn't have to be in."

This is indeed the central point of Twixt's "research", but it fails to acknowledge that games are a part of social convention and their rules can and are *changed* when following them causes undue harm.

If moving a pawn in Chess causes offence, then a law is passed to stop people moving pawns. There are real examples in the past of offensive games or aspects of games being revised in the name of morality (e.g. negative racial stereotypes being phased out).

Game rules are not sacred, games are created by people and altered by those same people all the time, for all sorts of reasons.

I'm not sure how big the story has been in the USA but in the UK there has been a huge uproad concerning the outrageous expense claims that members of parliament or "MPs" (i.e. lawmakers) have submitted at the expense of the taxpayer. to boost their salaries and make money from property deals.

The defence put forward was that all the claims made were within the rules. This hasn't stopped dozens of MPs from being fired and others being forced to stand down at the next national election. The resulting public pressure, outrage and media frenzy isn't simply a force of social normality trying to stomp out deviant behaviour, it is a force of justice aimed at righting the wrong that has occurred, regardless of whether people were "playing by the rules".

I've read through a lot more of what Twixt has written about the time he spent in CoX, including the rather bizarre defences he has put forward for his actions on various blogs and forums.

Yesterday I was feeling hurt because an apparent sociopath turned out to be an average joe who was running an experiment.

Now I feel differently. It's fairly obvious from Mr. Myers' statements that his professor self - appearing as rational yet obtuse in his publications - is actually the mask or fake persona. As people have argued against him and eroded his flimsy explanations, it is the more familiar, disturbing and maniacal Twixt that shines through.

I don't know how many of you have read much of what this person has said in response to his critics, but I feel that it is the university and the academic website/reporter that he has fooled, not us. Twixt is just Twixt. He has returned to talking about other people and social conventions in the same baffling manner that he did when he was trolling other players in RV.

I think that Mr. Myers probably entered the field of sociology in an attempt to make sense of a large aspect of life that makes no sense to him.

As I said before (and as he has quoted me saying), Twixt doesn't appear to understand that there are other real people in the world who hold different views to his own. When someone responds to him by arguing he has done something wrong, he (both in and out of game) responds by simply denying he has ever done it. He does this in abrupt shorthand, e.g. "Never did", "not done" and seems incapable of explaining further.

His defence on some sites eventually backs him into a corner where he begins to reveal his true motives. This individual seems to believe that "games" and their rulesets create an "aesthetic" that has value over and above social conventions. He fails to comprehend any definition of "game" other than his own narrow version, and therefore denies that social conventions can be considered games too.

Twixt seems genuinely disturbed that anyone has the gall to deviate from "game rules" in favour of social convention. He says things like "it's a shame" or that the world loses value when people don't follow strict game rulesheets.

He reminds me of an autistic person who spends countless hours playing a very intricate and private "game" with a box of paperclips, counting and arranging them, and then screams incoherently when someone takes one of the clips away from him to actually use it because they needed it for something practical.

In short, I feel much more comfortable with the situation now that I see his response to criticisms has caused him to fall back into his old "Twixtisms", where (for example) he is now defending his abusive language in-game by saying this was him being "whacky" or "playful".

Should scientists conducting experiments be "playful"? Was Milgram "playful"? Is it good science or research to say things like:

"slimeball farmer hero bois i wuld kill u if i could ho ho"

to the subjects of your study?

What an odd person.

Anyway, suffice to say that I will be forwarding a complaint to the IRB, quoting some of the things said here and the logs I have from my various confrontations with Twixt. I don't think someone should be able to act as badly as he has and then simply get away with it, let alone profit from it.

I was fine with the idea of him just being a very mean person - people (including me) say lots of stupid things on the intertubez that we don't mean and would never even think of saying to people in person, especially when upset.

What annoys me is the way that he is misrepresenting the past and how he is using it for his own benefit.

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I spent more than a couple of nights during later 2006 in real tears over some of the things that Twixt did to me.

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his actions over the six months or so we saw each other almost every day have affected me three years later.

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I bet Twixt would get a real kick out of reading these two quotes. Honestly. This is how you know that you probably just should have let him win and go somewhere else to lvl.

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I agree. And I can live with someone who was that much of a nasty person, which is what I thought he was. It's all these claims where he feigns shock at the responses to what he did that confuses me.

If his technique had been to play as a character who constantly did things wrong in missions and pretended to be a bit "slow", then his conclusions (i.e. a sad story of how a misfit is rejected by his peers because he "behaves differently") would have made sense.

Instead, what he did was act as THE force of the norm - policing play by the rules in the strictest sense, displacing and exiling the minority loners and outliers who wanted to do something different with the environment. He was the champion for normality who attempted to stamp out deviation of any kind in RV. I just find it so disturbing that his paper attempts to twist the whole thing around against those he abused, like a school bully appealing to teachers about how other students don't like him because he beats them up every day.

One final point I wanted to make is that as usual my conclusion regarding his study is in complete opposition with David Myers' own.

He seems to believe that Twixt's exploits show that even in an "artificial environment", medieval and barbaric practices emerge to re-create pecking orders and enforce "norms" on those who deviate.

If there is anything I have taken away from my experience of this game, it is that no matter how anonymous people are or how free they are to break social norms in the name of "following the rules", basic human decency shines through and we treat each other with respect regardless of appearance or background.

Even online, the vast majority of people can recognise a fool or a mean-spirited person and react to them in precisely the way that such people should be reacted to in order to promote our species' survival and development.

Twixt went beyond griefing and harassed, bullied, stalked and abused players up and down the CoX servers. His notoriety was well earned and it should rightly extend beyond the small pixellated character to the man and his motives which, as far as I can see, serve only to paint him as an even stranger and meaner person than I thought before all these articles appeared.

Since I "officially" quit a few weeks back, it's taken me a while to find out about the story behind Twixt and the papers/news articles that have been written about his exploits.

It's difficult for me to organise a coherent response to these events, due to a lot of factors but I'm going to go ahead anyway because I really think people need to know more about the other side of the story.

By the "other side", I don't mean the CoX of MMO community in general. I'm talking as someone who has been very personally and seriously affected by what Twixt did in the past - a topic that hasn't been touched upon as much as the more diffuse response to his overall actions.

What I really need to explain before adding more is that I feel very confident in claiming that between late 2006 and early 2007, I was easily Twixt's most frequent opponent and victim (I hope that term doesn't sound too emotive). In fact, I think that during the latter months of 2006, I was probably the most killed player in RV on Champion, with over 90% of those defeats being at Twixt's hands. He killed my various character hundreds upon hundreds of times, and that really is not an exaggeration. I'll explain a bit more about why this happened below.

One contributing factor is that back then in 2006, fewer people knew that (particularly for villains) RV was one of fastest and most predictable ways to level from 40 to 50 if you weren't particularly interested in teaming and didn't mind grinding away in the face of occasional PvP danger from heroes.

As a lot of old friends in CoV on Champion will know, I was very fast at levelling up in RV. I knew some neat tricks and during late 2006 I levelled most of my 14 villains to 50 in that zone. Once a character I owned hit level 40, I would travel to RV, grab a villain Heavy, and defeat Longbow with it until I was roughly 47-50, depending on whether anyone I knew needed a 47 to lackey their friends.

A short time after I started using these methods to level up, I ran into Twixt/David Myers.

I'm having trouble continuing this post. What I would like to get across to people more than anything is the sheer relish that this person showed in the days/weeks/months that followed our first encounter. It's something that goes far beyond the "professor researching human behaviour" angle that he is using to publicise his work.

You see, both he and I are incredibly bloody-minded, and we were in the PvP zone for diametrically opposed reasons. I was there purely to gain XP from exploiting the fact that a player could use a heavy to defeat powerful NPCs with little or no risk.

I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in PvP, and when I used to be attacked in the zone I would either retreat or just stand still and let myself be killed. I would then immediately return to a Heavy, grab it again, and carry on.

The vast majority of Heroes who defeated me would kill me once or twice, and then get bored. If they did it repeatedly, I would ask them not to keep doing it and almost all would be very nice and leave me alone after that point.

Some ignored me, or took my request as an invitation to keep attacking. I would then get upset or angry if they continued for long enough. Some would continue for dozens of kills before getting bored, making me very upset indeed but very rarely did I find someone who had the patience to keep attacking and defeating me to the point that I would be the one who gave up and left the zone.

Now, I'm not trying to defend my actions here. I know that it was I who was mis-using the zone and that players who attacked me were perfectly within their rights to do so. I'm also not claiming that I didn't say things to people that were designed to offend them, in my efforts to make them go away and stop attacking.

Twixt was not like other players. Either due to his research intentions, or his own deeper motivations, he and I became the immovable force and irresistible object.

He never, ever, left me alone.

For several months during late 2006, I played CoV almost every day. I had a lot more free time back then. A large chunk of this time was spent in RV.

I would go to the zone, and most of the time, Twixt would be there.

The moment that he realised I was in RV, he would abandon what he was doing and single me out as his prime target. He would kill me by droning, TPing into other NPCs, fearing and Tping, all sorts of ways, and then I would respawn and carry on with what I was doing.

Unlike other players, no matter where I resumed my NPC hunting, he would find me, attack me, and kill me again. If I retreated to a turret he would wait me out, sometimes for over an hour and then if neither of us budged he would find friends and heavies to get me despite my defensive position.

I can remember times when I would get so angry and upset that Twixt and I would become locked in a battle of wills, where for hours (literally hours) we would go through a ten minute routine where he would kill me, hunt for me, find me again, and kill me again while I was going through the equivalent process of dying, getting a Heavy back, returning to kill Longbow, then dying again.

In Twixt's various articles and the stories about him, everything he does is portrayed as someone following the rules of the game in some sort of objective sense that made him surprised at the response of CoV players.

This appearance is a complete sham. When I was in RV with Twixt, he would abandon his routine project of capturing pillboxes and hunt me exclusively. This happened to such an extent that a lot of other villains (mostly Stalkers) at the time even used me as BAIT for him, so that they could ambush Twixt while he was attacking me.

There were times when he would chain-teleport me across the full length of the zone from just outside the villain base all the way to the Hero base, so he could drone me. When I found ways to nullify his tactics or had friends to back me up his behaviour showed a true sense of frustration and rage at what I had accomplished, such that he would find even more mean ways of getting his revenge.

There were times when he would fear me in a group of NPCs and then manipulate the situation so that it took as long as possible for me to die, as if he was torturing my character.

This is why I really feel I need to write this response. During the months that we encountered each other in RV, this Myers person became as morbidly fascinating to me as he claims villain PvPers in general were to him. Over time I learned how to push his buttons in the same way that he was pushing mine. Certain things I could say would trigger responses form him and break the usual silence. I knew how to make him break out into his rather bizarre "poetry" in the zone, or start with his "ho ho ho" and "base is safe" quotes.

This is the side that the articles don't seem to be getting to the heart of. There were times when Twixt would follow up defeating me by making up a rhyme about how bad a player I was, or how stupid all villains were. He would engage in very well-timed, enraging taunts that were specifically aimed not only to "breach the social norms" of the game but actually to target specific individuals and ridicule them with boasts about what he was doing.

None of this reflects a reasonable, objective person attempting to study an online phenomenon or cultural sphere. In the same way that Mr. Myers has rather oddly defended his "successes" by posting kill lists in recent comments to his articles (is he genuinely proud of them? How does that make sense?), a lot of what he used to *say* in RV on Champion indicates a real life sociopath who truly delighted in the sort of harm he used to deal out to players like me.

There were a few other points I wanted to add. The first one is that the comments he writes show that he wants to have things both ways. On the one hand, he writes about online games as if their norms and customs are "artificial", as if when people expect courtesy and respect in a game (or on a forum) they are taking things too seriously, like someone who would be offended if he cussed at one of their Chess pieces while playing a game of Chess with him.

However, in the same paragraphs where he attempts to press this point of view, he also writes about his genuine shock and sadness at the reactions he received. This is a contradiction - either what gets said and done in a game is artificial and outside the scope of usual social norms, or it isn't. It can't be both. He plays up the death threat he received as something that worried and harmed him (implying the player involved might be dangerous) but he also mentions nothing of the real life upset that he caused to others.

I spent more than a couple of nights during later 2006 in real tears over some of the things that Twixt did to me. Like when my SG tried to organise AV-hunts in RV or spend double-XP weekends earning XP, only to be thwarted by his actions. There were times when I had planned to spend my only free evening in a week levelling a character and no matter how much I attempted to debate, reason or plead with Twixt my actions would simply make him even more determined to push my buttons and ruin my day. Perhaps he thought I was a particularly interesting subject, and would respond with more useful material for his paper and book?

I'm already quoted twice in the short paper on the internet - I believe it was me who likened Twixt to an NPC and wrote about his seeming incapability to see players as real people (my search-fu isn't good enough to confirm this for certain but I'm almost 100% sure that paragraph he quotes in the paper is mine).

So anyway, this is me reacting to what he's written. It all feels a bit surreal really. I think I should contact him directly, he will probably be ever so fascinated by how his actions over the six months or so we saw each other almost every day have affected me three years later.

Predator - version 1.1: PATCH NOTES

"Lush Valley" PvP zone revamp:

Fixed a bug that allowed players to get the Predator stuck in geometry
Increased minigun accuracy from 0.0001 to 0.6
Billy should now attack and move when aggroed
Hostage pathing improved - they should now stay with their teams after being released/kidnapped
Decreased Dutch's Energy resistance from 100% to 10%, in-line with other players (the original error was caused by misplacement of a decimal point)
The Predator should now be affected by Devices, Gadgets and Traps and clip against deployed objects
Defeated Preadators should no longer still be able to activate Self Destruct after reaching 0 HP
Defeated players now drop Inspirations and Enhancements as well as Skulls/Spines
Players defeated by the Predator should no longer lose their costume/skin options
Dutch should now take falling damage
"Mud" buff toned down - this should no longer make players untouchable/phased
The Predator should now take falling damage
Fixed Predator blood graphics - players should no longer see his wounds as bright glowing green
Predator perception increased from 6ft to 40ft
The Glowing Eyes aura should no longer be visible while Hidden
Predator AI improved - pathing issues have been addressed and he should no longer get caught on/in/under Objects
The Predator should also no longer remove his mask for no reason (this was decreasing his perception by 90%)
Fixed a bug where wild boars caused certain defeated players to vanish completely
The Choppa can now be got to

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Being the lead ethnic-minority icon in the world. Equality and stuff like that.

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I hope this is a joke.
There are far better ethnic-minority icons that are far more respectable than MJ. Even in is hey-day MJ wasn't half the inspiration of Magic Johnson, or Will Smith, or Bill Cosby or Gregory Hines, or Morgan Freeman. Heck, even Omar Epps, and Billy Dee Williams earn more respect in my eyes.

Most African-American people I know have considered Michael Jackson as a source of embarrassment for their people than an inspiration.

And as a American who voted for Obama, I find it insulting to compare him to Michael Jackson.

While I seem callous to MJ's death, I do mourn the meaningless death of any person, regardless of who they are or what they have or have not done. But, I don't agree with the caliber of respect you seem to shoulder on him.

But, that's the great thing about freedom. The right to peacefully disagree.

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Aww I wasn't thinking in that way at all. I was actually reacting to the media talking about african-american society group and organisations paying tribute to MJ for breaking into MTV and being a huge stepping stone towards racial equality. They were saying the chain was something like: MJ - Oprah - Denzel Washington (sp?) - Tiger Woods - Obama. But MJ was first, and achieved in music what the others achieved in other spheres later on.

Plus MJ wasn't really about race, he united people at a more fundamental level.

That's where the whole idea came from.

It spent most of the night in a sink filled with cold water. I don't wanna go to bed in case it gets worse, it's really painful and swollen!