Inception (THIS IS THE REVIEW WITH SPOILERS! THAT MEANS IT HAS SPOILERS!)

And, since this has spoilers, I am writing here in this first paragraph in the hopes that Facebook, when it simultaneously posts this, will cut the article off before actually revealing anything that I want to "spoil," to people who have not already seen this wonderful, brilliant, thought-provoking film. Just in case you missed it, this is the review that HAS spoilers, which means that I am going to talk quite openly about my interpretation - and my lovely copilot's interpretation - of the meaning of the events in the film, and that's impossible without discussing the events which led each of us to our wildly different conclusions about it.

That said, it is almost impossible to truly spoil this film; there's no twist ending or big surprise that can be given away, because the structure of the film is such that every event has meaning, and yet conclusions cannot be drawn without seeing all of them. You literally cannot "give it away," because the story, and the telling of it, itself will lead the viewer to their own conclusions about it.

I will, however, note that it's really better if you watch this movie without reading this review the first time, so if you haven't seen Inception, please, you deserve to experience it the first time tabula rasa, that is, as a blank slate, upon which the movie can paint with strokes both broad and fine.

So.

-------------------------------------------------------------SPOILERS BEGIN HERE!!!!!-------------------------------------------------------------

Since my copilot and I are two different people, we have different views of the movie; in fact, our theories about it almost directly contradict each other. As this is the case, I am going to present to you both my interpretation of the events in the movie, and hers, insofar as I understand her view of it based on her hastily scrawled notes.

Yes, we took fucking notes. It deserves that.

So: my view, in brief, of this movie as a whole, is that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is dreaming the entire thing, start-to-finish. Actual events DO get replayed, but only within the context of the dream itself.

The concept of totems is introduced in the movie: a personal item, that only one person in all the world can use, as a token indicating whether the person is, in fact, in reality or dream. In Cobb's case, this is a tiny metal top, which when in dream never stops spinning, but in reality wobbles to a stop after a few seconds.

The problem is that, as the movie later explains, the top was never COBB's item at all; it belongs instead to Cobb's wife Mal, who either died, or simply left the dreamworld.

As such, it doesn't provide Cobb an accurate touchstone for reality; although he uses it as such throughout the movie, it gives him no accurate information; it is a red herring. Cobb, however, relies on it, thus fooling himself into believing things in the dream to be "real," without any reliable sign that they in fact are.

The movie is riddled with events I saw as clues pointing to this conclusion.

Michael Caine, in theory Cobb's father (or Mal's; which is never made clear,) greets Cobb on their first meeting by telling Cobb to wake up, to come back to reality. This is a projection; as discussed in the movie, Cobb's subconscious is trying to warn him that he is in fact NOT in reality, and needs to - literally - wake.

One of the events which is at least ostensibly "real," though past, is Cobb and Mal's trip to limbo; Cobb convinced Mal to leave limbo with him by letting themselves be crushed by a train. Earlier in the movie, before this is revealed, a train thunders through a dream Cobb shares with his team, tearing up the road, literally plowing a path through traffic; this is another subconscious projection, trying to convince Cobb to return to wakefulness.

One of the concepts discussed in the movie is the idea that the subconscious will reject - violently - anything it "knows" to be false. Persistently, throughout the movie, Cobb is pursued; in the "real" world, by faceless corporations, and in the dream world by projections that are universally stronger and more violent than expected; this is because Cobb's own subconscious knows that he is dreaming, and is attempting to reject that dream, and growing more desperate to do so - and thus more violent in its attempts - as it becomes evident Cobb has totally lost track of reality and cannot get back on his own.

Cobb persistently warns others - in this context, all projections of his own subconscious - against using memories to build dreams, because it runs a greater risk of the dreamer losing track of reality, but he himself persistently does so, creating whole cityscapes out of his own experiences.

Mal either died, or left the dreaming state without Cobb; in context of the entire movie being a dream state, Cobb's oft-mentioned and displayed guilt over her "death" is actually the reverse; he is guilty not because she died, but because he let her return to reality alone; he abandoned her in favor of a fantasy carved from his own mind, and is guilty and ashamed for having failed her.

His "triumphant" return to the United States at the end of the movie is an attempt by his subconscious to display the unreality of what's happening to him; it is far too easy for him to return, given his own statements that he is fleeing extradition to the States to stand trial for Mal's death. No matter the power of a giant corporation, it takes more than a single phone call and 20 minutes to get murder charges reversed.

Mal - as a projection of Cobb's subconscious - tells him outright that he is in a dream several times; mentions the pursuit by faceless corporations, comparing that persecution to when projections reject and dismiss things which violate the stability of the dream world.

Cobb misses the kick and is still able to return - because it is his dream, and ultimately he has control of it, and thus is able to switch levels at will.

One of the elements Cobb uses as a demonstration to explain how to detect a dream is the fact that you never start a dream at the beginning; you are always simply in the dream, and things are happening. "How did you get to the cafe?" However, the film opens in exactly this way; Cobb, waking up face down in the surf, with no explanation of his presence.

Cobb uses the top at the end of the movie, and even as the screen goes dark, the top doesn't fall; only wobbles. Even his acceptance of someone else's token is a hint; he KNOWS the totem will not work accurately for him, as it's not his, but trusts it nonetheless because he has chosen to believe it.

In conclusion, going by its own internal logic, my interpretation of the film is that the entire thing, start to finish, is an exploration of a landscape of dream created by Cobb's own mind; there is no objective "reality" in this movie. The only thing of which you can be certain is that there is, in fact, a dreamer.

My lovely copilot disagrees in nearly every detail of my thesis; what follows is her rebuttal, as I am given to understand it. (Honey, when you read this, if I goofed it up, comment and explain. I don't mind editing.)

Her thesis is that the elements and events presented in the movie as "reality" are; that the story progresses as displayed, with a single exception: at the end of the movie, when Cobb ignores the kick to stay in limbo in an attempt to rescue Saito, he then never leaves limbo; from that point, he never wakes up.

To support this, she explains that Michael Caine, in the conversation I mentioned above, is merely telling Cobb to get over his wife's actual death; his choice of language is strictly coincidence.

The top Cobb uses throughout the movie was Mal's totem, true, but after her death, he WAS the only person on earth who would truly know it, and therefore it DID work for Cobb as a reliable indicator of reality or dream. At the end of the film, when it spins without stopping, it is indicating that he is still dreaming, but only that time; all the other times, it worked flawlessly.

The appearance of the train was a manifestation of his subconscious guilt over Mal's death, because it was the way that they "died" together the first time they entered limbo.

The violent events were exactly as portrayed; Cobb was a criminal, and criminals make dangerous enemies for themselves. The violence in the dreamscapes was due to the dreamers' rejection of the changes Cobb and his team brought with them.

She also points out that during the sequence in limbo where Cobb goes to rescue Saito, his "death" is never shown onscreen; there's no evidence that he ever received the "kick" at all, and thus remained in limbo. Even his final confrontation with the vastly aged limbo-Saito never actually ends; it just stops. There's no stimulus whatsoever to bring him out of the dream, and thus everything from that point on remains dream, including his return to the USA and the faces of his children.

And she notes that Mal never shows up during the sequences the movie identifies as "reality," which seems as though it would have been likely if Cobb dreamed it all, given the persistence of her presence within the acknowledged dream states. Her presence within the dream states is a manifestation of Cobb's guilt over her death through his own error.

That last, by the way, is what I feel is the strongest point in favor of her interpretation; Mal is an incredibly pervasive presence in the segments identified as dream, and she didn't show up even once during the putatively "real" segments.

I will note, here, that regardless of which interpretation you agree with, if you do, over 75% of the movie takes place in a dreamscape. I would be interested to see the interpretations of my readers; we can water-cooler this movie to death in my comments. This is an appropriate time for long comments, guys, so feel free. Go wild. Astonish me with your theories.

This is an amazing film from end to end, and like a Moebius strip, twists upon itself, becoming a singularity from which there is no true, real exit; it loops upon itself in its very structure in a recurrence that begs many questions of the audience, and delivers no true answers.

It is what you bring to it - your own perceptions and preconceptions - that give it meaning; it is a perfect mirror for your OWN subconscious.

This is the best movie I've seen in years, and unquestionably one of the most important.

Go see it.

Inception! (SPOILER-FREE REVIEW)

So.

There's been a looooooot of hype about this movie, largely based on some really creative-looking trailers (including a distinctive, bombastic soundtrack,) and the fact that it was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the same director who brought us Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and Insomnia.

Allow me to be the first to tell you that it deserves every tiny little erg of energy anyone has spent telling someone else how awesome a movie it really is.

What a brilliant movie.

My lovely co-pilot and I went and saw it last night, and our discussion of it not only lasted the night, but continued this morning (and at the theater itself, roped in several bystanders who had also just seen it.)

So, spoiler-free, let me tell you what I can about this movie.

The premise is both intriguing and simple: a thief, Dominic Cobb, played to a T by Leonardo DiCaprio, who specializes in stealing information literally from the dreams of his victims, is hired to do the reverse; to plant an idea in the mind of the intended victim, in such a way that the victim believes it to be his own idea, and acts on it accordingly.

But the nature of this film is such that literally everything that happens in the movie is open to interpretation. Reality itself is bent - both figuratively and literally - in the movie in such ways that it is impossible to purely nail down exactly what happened - or didn't - in its story, and as such, this is possibly the greatest water-cooler movie ever.

Since so much of the movie takes place in dreams, things in this film don't necessarily mean what they appear to at first glance, and their significance may be simultaneously more and less than you thought when you became aware of them initially.

...See why this movie is hard to critique? Even were I to lay out the entire series of events in the movie, start to finish, it's almost impossible to "spoil" it, because director Nolan plays a magnificent game of prestidigitation with the audience, alternately hiding things you thought you knew, and displaying other things you didn't understand as established facts.

Watching this film is like a fever dream; it makes sense, but only within itself; and yet its greater importance is that it demands so much of the audience. You cannot watch this movie and walk away unaffected; you may not like it, but it forces you to think about the implications of its message - and the meaning, ultimately, of that message itself.

I am very picky when it comes to paying ten bucks a head to go to the theater; a lot of times I choose to watch even big-name movies at home.

But this movie deserves the broad canvas of the big screen, guys.

It doesn't need 3D; it doesn't need cheap tricks to hold your interest.

As a whole, its artistry of filmmaking performs an endless sleight of hand upon you, and transforms what, in the hands of a lesser director, could have been disappointing, into a pinnacle of the art of film; this is what movies should be like.

Christopher Nolan is legit, guys. This was the best movie I've seen in years. It belongs on everyone's DVD shelf.

Lime-Pepper Fajita Time!

As a treat for my lovely fellow chef, I decided to whip up some homemade Southwest food last night; no surprise there.

So, having made that decision, I settled on fajitas.

I will note here that fajitas are supposed to be flank steak; I couldn't find any on my excursion to the grocery, so I settled on chuck steak instead, but for the record flank steak is better for this.

So, I collected a bunch of stuff, all of which will get organized by recipe (there are two, and a trick. You'll see.)

First, I cut two good-sized chuck steaks into short strips. This came out to maybe a pound and a half of strips - half inch thick by around four inches long.

I took two gallon freezer bags, and put one inside the other - you can use one, but two reduces the chances of leaks. (This is my Secret Ninja Master Meat Marination trick, so pay attention.)

When you're marinating meat, there are a lot of ways to go about it, but the technique that's always worked for me is to put the meat into the inner bag, and put the marinade in with it; make sure all the air is out, and then you can knead the meat with the marinade several times during the marinating time without getting your hands all sloppy. This way you reduce the amount of marinade needed, and it works it into the meat more deeply, than any way I've ever found to do this.

So, first the marinade:

Chopped cilantro (get one bundle for this meal, and use about a quarter of it here; the rest you will use in two other dishes.)

Olive oil (1 part per...)

White wine vinegar (...two parts of this.)

Lime juice (If you get one of those little green plastic limes, use about a third here; the rest will go in the aforementioned other two dishes.)

Ground cumin

Chili powder

Black pepper

Minced garlic

As an aside here, when making pico de gallo (one of those two dishes,) I cut up a pepper; I put a few - only a few - of the seeds in with the meat and marinade to give it a bit of kick. I used enough oil and vinegar to roughly cover the meat 2/3 of the way. Spices can be to taste, but be generous, since this is the bulk of the fajita flavor, right here.

Once the steak strips and the marinade were combined in the inner bag, I made sure the air was all squeezed out, then sealed the inner bag, and repeated the process with the outer bag, and sealed that, then kneaded the meat for ~2 minutes or so, and then set it in the fridge. I'm not going to annotate, here, but during the preparation of the rest of the meal, I took the meat out and kneaded it several times, maybe every half hour, to ensure the spices and flavors were really worked into the meat.

Now, to complete setup for the fajitas themselves, I cut one red and one yellow bell pepper into strips a little more generous than the meat, and sliced out one half of a Vidalia onion so that there would be mixed vegetables. I set those aside in a covered dish (there are cats here,) and turned my attention to the pico de gallo.

I will pause here for a brief note before I begin the pico recipe to digress about peppers.

There are a ton of different peppers you can use for any dish, and it pays to know the flavors and heat levels for them.

For pico de gallo, it's supposed to be hot, but know your audience.

Poblano peppers are very mild; they're also huge. I diced mayyyyybe a third of one for the pico de gallo I made last night; for a hotter flavor, I prefer serrano peppers to jalapenos, simply because - though slightly hotter - they have a much richer flavor. I am not a huge fan of jalapeno peppers' actual flavor.

If you're really crazy, you can use habaneros, but you and I will be the only ones eating it, most likely.

So.

For pico de gallo, you'll need:

The other half of the previously mentioned Vidalia onion, diced;

Your chosen pepper, diced (WITHOUT the seeds;)

Tomatoes or tomatillos diced in approximately the same quantity as the onion (two good sized tomatoes will come out to about the same as the one-half onion if you get big onions;)

Finely chopped cilantro - roughly half what you have left of your bundle;

Roughly a tablespoon of minced garlic;

Half the remaining lime juice;

And some more white wine vinegar. (Quantity dependent on other factors, see below.)

Put the diced vegetables and peppers in a dish you can cover, and add the cilantro and lime juice. Stir this to make sure the garlic and cilantro are pretty evenly distributed, and then add enough vinegar to cover your vegetables.

Cover the dish, and put it in the fridge.

Next, I made fresh guacamole.

I've posted that recipe before, so I won't repeat myself, but you can use any remaining lime juice, and the rest of the cilantro, in the guacamole.

Put that in the fridge too.

Now, when you're ready to actually start the cooking - the guacamole and pico de gallo need about an hour in the fridge to really soak up the flavors - get yourself a good, high-sided frying pan. A pretty big one.

Put a couple of tablespoons of oil in the pan, on high heat, and lightly sear your vegetables - the onion and pepper strips; don't burn them to a crisp, but if they get a bit blackened, it's fine.

Once the vegetables are done, take them out of the pan, and put in the meat, marinade and all, lower the heat a bit, and let it cook until the meat is nicely browned.

Once the meat is browned, add about 1/4 cup of water, and let it cook down around the meat until you're back to the original volume of liquid, then toss the vegetables back in, stir it around for a minute or two, and you're done.

To serve the pico de gallo, drain off the vinegar mix and serve the pico de gallo "dry." If you make enough for an army, and you know you're going to have some left, you can keep the vinegar mix and put any leftover pico back in it to store overnight.

I served this with sour cream, shredded cheese, and warmed tortillas.

As a note, for those of you who don't have your own tortilla press or a steamer, the field expedient way of making those restaurant-style steamed tortillas is to take two sets of 4-5 paper plates; put a wet paper towel - wet, not dripping - one one set, put your tortillas (maybe 10 at a time but no more) on the towel, put another wet paper towel on top of them, and cover with the other set of plates. Microwave them for 90 seconds and like magic, steamed tortillas.

At any rate, this is a flavorful (and colorful!) dinner; the preparation takes a while, but the gustatory delight once you're done is worth every bit of it.

Enjoy!

...As a final note, here are the commonly used peppers ranked by heat from lowest to highest:

Poblano (the Ancho is the dried version) 500-2500 Scoville units of heat

Jalapeno (the Chipotle is the smoked, dried version) 2500-8000 Scoville units of heat

Serrano 10000-23000 Scoville units of heat

Cayenne 30000-50000 Scoville units of heat

Piquin 50000-100000 Scoville units of heat

Habanero 100000-350000 Scoville units of heat

And for the insane...

Naga Jolokia 855000-1075000 Scoville units of heat.

For a comparison, police-grade pepper spray is about 5 million Scoville units, and pure capsaicin is about 16 million.

WASH YOUR HANDS after cutting peppers; if you rub your eyes with pepper juice you will regret it, and habanero juice will make your hands feel like they're under a blowtorch for days afterwards if you don't wash it off with grease-cutting soap.

Just so you know.

Surprising No-One, I Want To Rant (And At Some Length, Too.)

This time, about gaming.

You guys have heard me talk about gaming before, if you've been following this blog for any length of time.

Trust me, and read along, and I will try to hold your interest here; this isn't going to go the direction you may think.

Blizzard Entertainment, the owners and operators of the world's most popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft, have decided that their online forums are a seething cesspit of trolls, spammers, and stalkers.

They're right.

Now, a sane and rational gaming company would respond to this by hiring people to moderate the forums, to ban trolls and spammers, and respond to harassment proactively and visibly, as has been done in every online forum of significance for years.

Blizzard, sadly, is not that company.

See, Blizzard has an investment to protect, which we'll talk about in a bit.

And because of that soon-to-be-discussed-at-exhaustive-length investment, they have no urge to spend a penny more than they have to on policing their own forums.

And they don't want the risks historically associated with taking player volunteers as moderators.

So, they've decided to link players' forum accounts with their game accounts - one forum account per game account - and publish all forum posts, starting with the release of their upcoming expansion pack, with players' real names. (Bonus points for them getting 48 pages - as of this posting - of complaints from players in that thread.)

Go back and read that again.

They're going to post every single player's real, actual name - from the billing records - in a publicly accessible web forum.

Now, in addition to the obvious (to men) danger of identity theft associated with this kind of move, there is the increased risk to female players from harassers and potential rapists; the risk of employers finding out that their employees play World of Warcraft in their off time and responding with some sort of harassment of their own; unwelcome family members, annoying coworkers...

...A thousand, thousand times worse than Facebook.

Now, I said they have an investment to protect, so let's talk about that.

See, World of Warcraft - unlike Guild Wars, which point we'll return to in a minute - charges a subscription fee.

Every month, anyone who wants to play World of Warcraft has to send in a little bit of cash to keep their account active.

The cheapest level of subscription - if you buy 6 months at a time - is $12.99 a month.

Many players register multiple accounts, but let's go by Blizzard's numbers for this.

According to the numbers in December 2008, World of Warcraft has 11.5 million subscribers.

Hold that thought.

Blizzard explains the subscription fee by saying that "The fee is used to support the costs associated with the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft."

I'm sure it does.

But I'm also sure they're making a tidy profit on it, too.

So let's see how tidy, shall we?

11,500,000 subscribers times (at the cheapest tier of subscription; many pay up to $14.99 a month) $12.99, is $149,385,000.

Look at that number again.

I am one hundred percent certain that there is no possible way Blizzard spends a hundred and fifty million dollars a MONTH on "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft."

Let's play with numbers some more, shall we?

Blizzard makes - $149,385,000 per month times twelve months - $1,792,620,000 a year in revenue from this game. For the fees to be justified, they would have to produce the entire Lord of the Rings movie trilogy each year.

Even allowing them a semi-sane and reasonable profit - say, 40% - they're still looking at an operating budget of $717,048,000 per year.

I'm pretty sure they don't produce or supply anything that requires seven hundred million dollars a year, which means that their actual profit margin is way, way higher than 40%.

Bear in mind, I am only counting the subscription fees, and making the totally unwarranted assumption here that all the subscribers use the cheapest tier of subscription.

But there's more to the mix; Blizzard also allows for a huge spectrum of items, privileges, and abilities to be purchased with cash for use in the game world.

That revenue is totally unaccounted for here.

So let's use my patented method of guesstimation, here.

Assume that only 10% of the people who play World of Warcraft ever actually buy anything with cash outside of their subscription fees.

Make the further assumption that each of those people buys one item per year, for $10.

You and I both know that it's more than 10% of the players, and they buy way more than one item per year.

But even given those assumptions, that's an additional $15,000,000 a year that Blizzard has coming in, bringing their operating budget to a little over $730,000,000.

You might object here, and point out that the number I used for the subscriber base is old; that's fair, but doesn't really affect this.

Why? Because the primary cost, once development is complete, of operating an online game, is the bandwidth necessary to transmit the data back and forth to the players; if the numbers of subscribers grow, their subscription fees directly offset those costs, and if the numbers of subscribers fall, they use less bandwidth, and therefore the costs drop.

So.

Blizzard has to make a buck; they are apparently making plenty, but they cannot afford to hire moderators, and must therefore subject their entire player base - eleven million people - to an increased risk of identity theft, stalking, harassment both on and offline, and potentially violence.

How much WOULD it cost them to moderate the forums, anyway?

Taking a page from the service industry as a whole, let's start off by assuming they hire every moderator at part-time, and therefore don't have to give them benefits in the form of any compensation other than an hourly wage; but because dealing with trolls, flamers, spammers, and harassment claims all day is stressful, let's say they're generous and pay the moderators $20 per hour to police the forums.

They'd need at least a thousand moderators (not really, less than a hundred would be more than adequate, but I am trying to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt in every way I can, here,) for 32 hours per week.

So, that's 32,000 hours per week at $20 per hour; $640,000 a week for forum moderators.

Outlandish!

Crazy!

Why, that adds up to $2,560,000 a month in payroll for the moderators alone, or a total of $30,720,000 a year - just for forum moderators!

Insane!

Unprecedented!

That only leaves them...

$700,000,000 a year to pay for "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft," without affecting their profits one tiny bit.

...Whoa, there.

That's right; in exchange for the expense - which is small enough that even if it's wildly exaggerated (a hundred moderators at a much more believable $12 per hour adds out to $1,843,200 a year, a number so small as to be unnoticeable in a 730 MILLION DOLLAR budget) it's hardly significant - Blizzard has decided to place their entire player base in direct physical and emotional danger.

Great job!

This is necessary, of course, because of "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft."

Guild Wars, on the other hand, can be had for the low, low price of $40 - for all three campaigns and the single expansion pack.

And then you never have to pay them another penny.

You CAN, of course, if you really want to; they do a tidy business selling all kinds of little perks and extras in the game, and I'm sure it's a pretty good source of revenue for ArenaNet (the makers of Guild Wars.)

So much so, that based off their profits from the development, maintenance, and operation of Guild Wars, they're developing a sequel.

Without ever charging a subscription fee.

The sequel won't, either.

And yet somehow, for Blizzard, $149,385,000 a MONTH is required for "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft."

Let's see how that stacks up, shall we?

$149,385,000 a month, minus profits - $730,000,000 a year - buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from World of Warcraft.)

By contrast, $0 a month buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from Guild Wars.)

$149,385,000 a month, minus profits - $730,000,000 a year - buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from World of Warcraft.)

By contrast, $0 a month buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from Guild Wars.)

$149,385,000 a month, minus profits - $730,000,000 a year - buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from World of Warcraft.)

By contrast, $0 a month buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from Guild Wars.)

Y'all poor Blizzard kiddies are getting raped to a fare-thee-well.

So, I'd think, having given examples - in matching resolutions as far as was possible, to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt everywhere possible - that we've established that they're not spending $149,385,000 a month on "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft," especially if ArenaNet can provide almost exactly the same thing for (errrrr...) $0 a month.

So what ARE they spending it on?

Well, this:

MTV Shows

That's right.

Those subscription fees are going so Blizzard Entertainment can have a twelve-foot statue of an Orc Warrior on a wolf.

Because fuck your privacy, and your safety.

They gotta have their basketball court and a FUCKING TWELVE FOOT TALL STATUE OF AN ORC WARRIOR ON A WOLF.

Have fun with the spam you get after your REAL NAME and REAL EMAIL ADDRESS are discovered by spammers, after you make a single post in the Blizzard forums, guys.

Or...

...Wait...

Maybe you could NOT POST THERE ANYMORE?

Because then, well...

...Blizzard won't have to pay for customer support at all.

And then they could have TWO twelve foot tall statues of an Orc Warrior on a wolf!