Interesting Links for 31-05-2014

• Why ‘Game of Thrones’ needs more sex scenes
  (tags: gameofthrones sex tv )
• Having children is contagious among high school friends during early adulthood
  (tags: children Epidemiology )
• Kids are playing "Jeremy Kyle”
  (tags: children games tv )
• House Votes To End DEA Raids On Legal Medical Marijuana Operations
  (tags: marijuana legalisation usa )
• Maya Angelou’s was a prostitute. She knew this was nothing to be ashamed of.
  (tags: prostitution history )
• When Women Refuse: collecting stories of violence inflicted on women who reject sexual advances
  (tags: abuse sexism women assault murder )
• 86% of UKIP voters likely to vote the same way at a General Election
  (tags: ukip voting politics )
• People who eat high-fat, low-sugar, yoghurt are less likely to be overweight
  (tags: weight food diet )

Buying game keys on the internet is a great example of a stupid business method

We've finished Diablo 3. One and a half times in my case, two and a half times in Julie's case. It's still fun (I just hit level 60 with my main), but we'd quite like to play on into the expansion. Which means buying an upgrade.

There are two main ways of doing this:
1) Buy an upgrade via Battle.Net, the official Blizzard app. This will cost you £32.
2) Buy a physical copy, wait for it to arrive, type in a code, and then throw it in the bin. This will cost you £29. And take longer. And be physically wasteful.

The third method, which I used, is to use a site like GameMafia Pro, which will charge me £20, and then email me a _photo_ of a cd-key taken from a box, and then throw that box away for me.

Which, admittedly, is both cheaper and easier than buying the box myself and throwing the box away myself. But it is absolutely ludicrous that the cheapest option involves boxes at all. Presumably, Blizzard sells boxes for £17-or-so, so that shops can have a markup and still sell it for £30. And presumably they'd rather not sell game keys in bulk without the attached DVD, because they want you to buy upgrades digitally direct from them, and make the extra £12. (And I also assume that they can't undercut their own RRP, because that would piss off Amazon and the rest of their supply chain.)

But the overall resulting situation is just ridiculous, and wasteful.

I've not managed a win of this magnitude before

It's rare for me to manage to get that many high-strength cards out at once. To get them out _and_ a Stormwind Champion to boost them all - not managed that at all. Needless to say, my next turn was nasty, brutal, and short.

Also, I feel good about getting to rank 19. Getting to rank 20 is easy, as wins move you up while losses do nothing to your standing. But once you're there you have to win more games than you lose to claw your way up to the next rank. Against players who may well have better cards than you. The mismatch there puts me off the rankings - but arena play, which uses a random set of cards, is still great fun. Which, presumably, is why they try to charge for it.