"This world needs to be remade"

Found this amusing example of why some people would rather be playing World of Warcraft than . . . never mind.

Total WoW Immersion

So I’m in the middle of some total WoW immersion. I’m not keeping up the pretense of 9:00 to 5:00 hours, or getting dressed in clothes I didn’t sleep in, or any kind of silly formalities like that. Sims is not holding me at the moment, I almost want to wipe the slate and start a whole new ‘hood, for the most part it’s all WoW all the time.

I did get accused by a RL friend of isolating myself from the world. I repeated this in my private chat, and in officer chat, and a bunch of my friends confirmed that they get accused of this too. Guild membership hit 664 today.

See, from my bizarre standpoint, it’s them who are isolating. They only hang with people about their own age and demographic whatchamacallit. They can’t yell out “yo, what’s the weather doing” and get fifteen different answers. They don’t have twenty people to discuss a movie with immediately after they see it. So I went out and had dinner and got in some RL face time so people don't forget I exist, and listened to some blather about bonobos while smiling politely, and ran into that guy I was avoiding from the Christmas party, argh.

They don’t have to wrestle with communication protocol, of friends who don’t speak your flavor of slang, of learning to temper their casual insults and bigotries. They can be regional, local, redolent of "here." Virtual people, in contrast, can exist anywhere there's a computer. Doesn't matter if they're at home, work, school, an aircraft carrier or jail, they still look the same.

Anyway, WoW Christmas was a blast. I got stuck in a dumb instance run but extricated myself before getting bummed out, I talked to a whole slew of people, I got kewl presents, and I’ve been spending the week dealing with an onslaught of kids home from school, adults home from work, noobs who got a copy of WoW in their Christmas stocking and my chat channel buddies.

I’ve gotten my warrior a few more points of awesomeness, including a sword that looks suspiciously like a lightsaber. I’ve grouped up with guildies from different level brackets.

My guild is like high school in a way. There are the seniors, who have their keys and their purple outfits and spend their time trading in expensive things. There are the juniors, freshly 70 and busy farming for their equipment. The sophomores have made it to Outlands and are exploring a whole new world of stuff. And the freshmen are out there grinding quests in Stranglethorn Vale and 1000 Needles and Hinterlands.

Then there’s the elementary school kids, talking smack in the barrens and grinding to level 11 so they can challenge level 6s to duels and trying to bum gold, instance runs, time, attention, whatever it is they want ("What is 'parenting,' Alex?" dingdingdingding).

So because I have so many 70s (three at this point) I’ve got three different sets of peers and buddies and acquaintances I’ve leveled with. The other seniors have more stuff than me (except 70s, I have more of those) and I have more stuff than a lot of the people I’ve been grinding beside (and I’m definitely underpowered in some of these level 70 instances due to my less than optimized equipment).

Some of my warrior’s peers are finally making it up to the rank of guild officer alongside my hunter and priest's peers, something I’m enjoying watching. There’s this one kid, Anatolos, who’s extremely bright, and who has this curious effect on the other officers. Most of the ones I know really like him, and a couple have taken a strong dislike to him, including Rose, who left the server over him, may she find happiness wherever she ends up.

Anyway, I’ve been running around with him in a few of the Outlands things and he fights the way my old SWG buddies that I like to fight with fight. See, some people like to take the instances slow and deliberate-like, carefully marking each target and planning the strategy and what each person will do. That’s fine in pick up groups. But I’m not normally that patient.

What I like is when you get people whose minds kind of work the same way on a team together. I learned one thing from an excellent tank I used to hang around with in SWG, to have a few consistent rules – like always work to the left (or right), things like that, so people can kind of get the general idea of what you’re going to do next, without a lot of unnecessary explaining.

Also it’s cool when people can think fast, which is something you fine tune in pvp. Things like changing strategy if the unexpected happens, or filling another person’s role in an emergency. And finally, most prized, is a shortage of acrimony, bickering, lecturing, blaming, whining, fussing and general drama. I’m severely allergic to drama. I tend to be very distant with dramatic people, I don’t have the temperament that finds it exciting. I like my adrenalin from coordinated teamwork, not adversarial conflict (which is why I love WoW pvp).

So I’m developing my Consistent Tank Philosophy in these groups with all kinds of different people. Little things like Kill The Mages First and Tank Charges When Blue Bars are Up and Not When Someone Says “Go!” I want to learn how to telegraph what I’m going to do in as smooth a way as possible – a different skill from anticipating the tank’s move, something I did as healer.

That’s because I’m also a healer, and I appreciate a tank that is predictable. Also one that understands if I throw mind control they have to pounce on the mob the instant it breaks because it will then come after the healer with homicidal fury.

I also don’t want any pets drawing agro, because holding agro is my job, and if the pets die the hunter and/or warlock is at half strength, which means they draw extra hatred from the mob without their pet to balance their damage and are likely to get charged after and eaten. That’s from playing a hunter. Playing three classes is definitely an advantage, and I almost feel that to truly know WoW I need to master them all. But that could take a while. Right now I think I want to aim for perfect tanking.

And so, as a tank, I'm morphing into this team player. I'm doing at least one instance a day. And now that I'm not hell bent on grinding I can take time to goof off, to help other people, to break up stretches of farming. Anything that promotes the happiness of the team is good. Anything that disrupts our harmony is bad. I wouldn't say I'm thinking Marxist type thoughts, that would be really stretching it, but watching all these different gamers come together over the Christmas holiday from their different homes and different lives to do cooperative friendly stuff together has been more like "togetherness" than any houseful-of-kids-adults-food-and-presents real life Christmas I've ever had, simply because there are more of us, and we've all got our e-community in addition to our RL families.

Isolation. Hah.

Have Yourself a WoWy Little Christmas

My Christmas in real life blows.

First, I’m still unemployed, so I am only sending and receiving cards. I thought this might be sad but actually I’m having a blast avoiding the part of the holiday where I go to the mall and get blitzed with 3D spam while pawing over the trinkets desperately trying to select one that might actually please somebody rather than be exclaimed over and then thrown on the stack of trinkets we all have lying around somewhere, destined for eventual landfill.

Then there’s my family. I have only my mom and brother in my immediate family, and he isn’t speaking to me ever since I told mom to call him a noob for getting frustrated over WoW. He still lives with her, partially to be her caretaker and partially because he’s nerdy, but that’s okay, I don’t want to be her caretaker, I’m glad it’s working out for him. But anyway, we can have a friendly convo for a little while (when we’re speaking) but our lives don’t really intersect much, and mom’s getting old and a little batty, and we’re all pretty much fine with phone calls. There’s a great big extended family where they usually go to feast and celebrate. These are all great people who would totally be there for me if I should need them, fine upstanding family types. I don’t have much in common with those guys though, and they are also cool with keeping in touch via phone. We’re about 500 miles apart.

There’s my significant other. We have a bizarre relationship. We were together for about six years before family issues dragged him home to the Midwest – he’s the caretaker in that family. I have to deal with some stuff here before I can uproot. So we decided that May 2008 we’d decide what to do. We were having a long distance relationship with phone calls and stuff for a while before deciding that talking to each other all the time was only making us more miserable, so we’ve had a moratorium on even talking to each other for a while now. So I’m still technically attached, at least for another five months, but it’s the most detatched attachment ever and currently I’m leaning toward breaking up and drifting in separate directions but I’m not entirely sure.

Some of my girlfriends, upon hearing this, come out with the “omg he’s soooo mean, you poor thing!” rant but I hate that. No, I am not a poor little victim of a heartless neglectful boyfriend. I am quasi-involved with someone as vague and commitment phobic and autistically devoted to creativity and hobbies as I am. We are saving all those warm blooded passionate people who need constant validation and cuddling and attention from having hellish relationships with us by being in a relationship with each other. But anyway, that’s why I’m not spending the holiday with the SO. Before he moved back home we had some nice quiet little holidays with our own feast for two and . . . computer games. Either him on Madden and me on Sims or both of us in Star Wars Galaxies, where he played a pistoleer until getting fed up with the NGE and abandoning it.

That’s one of the main reasons I have trouble logging into SWG. In real life, I’m cold and clinical about things but in SWG, my partner is gone and everything reminds me of places where we used to spend time with each other. Somehow I seem to have displaced most of my major relationship emotions in there. Which is why SWG is sort of synonymous with breaking up to me. After he moved we had fun both logging in at the same time and being galactic gunslingers together even though we were physically separated, but the crappiness of the game itself what with the bugs and imbalance and gameplay issues was making even that a royal pain.

Anyway, that’s what’s up with my relationship. And why I get to play WoW all day and never do housework and wear the same t-shirt for a week and engage in other freedoms usually enjoyed only by the single. So don’t sympathize, being a single slob is actually pretty cool.

Finally there’s my friends. About now, if I were going there, I should be heading to a Christmas Eve party thrown by a guy I’ve been friends with all century, and I met him through a crowd I’ve been friends with since college. Odds are good someone might show up at this party that I have considerable history with. However.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a liberal place. I used to be quite proudly liberal myself and wrote for one of the most liberal publications in the country for over a decade. Then, around 9/11, I got really really really fed up with the way liberalism was going. I decided to shut up, because the first few times I questioned things in public, or declined to read some propaganda, or changed the subject after the Bush bashing had gone on for more than half an hour, people would get in my face and accuse me of being a Bush-loving jackbooted fascist for not going with the party line.

A couple of those people will be at the party tonight, which I suppose you could describe as the remaining dregs of the 90’s scene, people who were at the first Burning Man, who used to play in bands, who quieted down and toned down their image and became respectable grownups. Most of them are gay. The straight ones in the crowd found it a lot easier to transplant themselves into other parts of America when the winds changed, but not the gay ones. I understand that in most cities seeing guys holding hands is unusual and it isn’t here, and that’s a reason I love it here, that kind of freedom for people to be who they really are.

One of the guys who will be at this party is writing propaganda now, quite successfully. He used to tell me I was an inspiration, and how he liked reading my stuff. His own stuff is even more heavy handed and sentimental (and that’s saying a lot, I could really lay it on when I was wound up). Does he buy into it? Not really. Some of my other friends who don’t know him have been very moved by stuff he’s written. I had one of them go off on me for saying “come on, don’t you think that’s a little thick?” when she forwarded me one of his pieces. He’s a nice guy and he deserves the success, I don’t begrudge him.

I know for a fact the food at this party will be good. And I might get to hear some gossip about old enemies. And no doubt there will be at least one good conversation.

But let me tell ya about what’s going on in WoW. First, one of my old SWG guildies found us! We have welcomed him to our new virtual home with open arms. He’s having some medical issues, off work for a little while and needs to get his gaming groove on to hasten recovery, but it’s nice to see another familiar handle returning.

Second, two guildies are falling in love! I refuse to gossip about who they are, but they’re going to meet IRL and everything. It would be cool if they went on to have a happily ever after.

Also, another SWG player found me through this very blog! Yes, the inimitable Kungg Foo, bounty hunter extraordinaire! I have invited him to come WoW with us, we’ll see if he goes for it. This is a guy I might have mentioned who is a genius machinima filmmaker and set decorator. I knew I was writing this bloody thing for some kind of purpose, and making it easy for the community to find me so I can steer them all to the same hanging-out place is a damn fine purpose.

We had a guild photo op and snowball fight last night, probably forty or fifty people made it, which is still a small portion of the guild. We teleported the lower level ones into a big snowfield, and had a great time.

People have been checking in and out, reporting on their holidays, what they ate, how much snow, who got what presents and so on. Some are having great holidays. Some, like my warrior buddy who just got dumped by his girlfriend, are not. But we are all together, chatting and joking and forming little groups to assault things and just being together.

I got my tank up to 70, woohoo! She’s all ready for some hardcore instancing and battlegrounding now.

So, from all appearances, to the RL people anyway, I am so depressed from having a dismal Christmas that I’m hiding from reality in my video games (which is what I’m going to tell the host of this party I’m about to avoid).

(Meantime, in my virtual life I’m in this thriving community with hundreds of people, welcoming old friends who share my favorite addiction.)

Aww poor little me, no gigantic plate heaped with special occasion food.

(Hooray. I really hate stomachaches. Instead of overfeeding on rich decadent food and wine and coming back home feeling all bloated and hideous, I just had a really nice chicken, bacon, onion and tomato sandwich, on fresh sourdough, and later tonight I will have the leftover roast beef and some mashed potatoes, and perhaps bake some of the gingerbread cookie dough.)

No touching base with old friends.

(Instead of political arguments and old people bitching the present out for not being the past, I will be hanging out with my new acquaintances, who are all stoked about computers and virtual realities and such, many of whom are going to take an active role in building me a future with more games.)

No job.

(Hahahahaha, no horrendous office party watching a bunch of associates get tanked and listening to the managing partner tell that stupid joke again for the 354^th time while choking down my choice of beef chicken or vegetarian and wondering if my $20 gift swap gift would be as enthusiastically received as the designer martini shakers.)

No flying home to see family.

(Woot! No airport crowds, no taking off my shoes at the metal detector, no contstant-playing Christmas carol loops, no flight delays, no wasted fossil fuel, no wasted hours attempting to talk about subjects about which I know nothing, such as sports and home improvement.)

No boyfriend.

(Hah! The coffeepot is mine, all mine!! I do have to get up and get a fresh cup myself, but then again I don’t have to get a second fresh cup for anyone else every other time.)

No presents.

(Did I ever tell you how much I hate malls? Let’s see, the last time I was in one was November 2001. Ala Moana, Honolulu. Hawaiian malls are okay if they have koi carp ponds. Oh, and I’ve never been in a Wal Mart. I live in a town where it is illegal to build a Wal Mart, or at least we make it that way every time they try to put one here. Our Christian and pagan ancestors alike would be appalled by the way we have turned the solstice into an orgy of consumer greed. To hell with Christmas shopping!)

Why yes, it’s a very dismal Christmas for Darth BobbieSue Cratchitt here, mean old Ebeneezer Scrooge and ghosts and all. Nothing to eat but a sandwich and some leftovers, no holiday cheer anywhere.

Unless you log into WoW, where I will be spending the night rather than attending that party. There it will be one big long party, with people I actually like talking to coming and going, work and school on hold, presents and monster slaying and joking around, and a whole new influx of noobies tomorrow when people unwrap their holiday copies of World of Warcraft and start installing.

Hope everyone reading has an awesome Christmas too, however they choose to celebrate it.

Sequels To Previous Rants

I had some blog rants in here months and months ago regarding feminist controversy surrounding some movie called Knocked Up which I never did get around to seeing.

The guy who wrote it did a new flick about pregnancy called Juno and according to this review from Slate, it bridges a lot of gaps that had arisen in media pertaining to women.

Which I think is a good sign that goes along with my decision to quit harping on gender and gaming from an old fashioned perspective. Male and female gamers can both be obnoxious. Male and female gamers both fall into gender stereotypical behavior that hinders their social and gaming progress. The women gamers I know aren't playing sexist console games full of jiggling gazongas, they're playing WoW, among other things. The industry has bowed to market pressure. Sixty-three percent of Americans play video games. Any company that wants a piece of that has to deal with the fact that some of those video game players don't have the mentality of Beavis and Butthead on Viagra. Any newspaper that doesn't want 63% of its readers to go fire up a game instead of subscribing needs to consider writing about games from angles other than the old tired "let's make people scared of teenage trends."

My job in that regard, of ranting until games became less alienating to persons of my gender, is done. I'm hoping the whole notion of seeing men and women as inherently adversarial is done too. Maybe this movie means the ice is melting. I do hope so. I hate polarization. I want to move on and write something for a world that isn't separated by moronic arbitrary lines.

I'm still unemployed. I imagine things will perk up in January. I'm having a blast in WoW in the meantime, and now that I spend more time living in it than commenting on it, I'm taking things on an individual basis. Instead of seeing players as male or female, I'm judging them solely on their ability to make WoW a pleasant experience for both of us. I throw encouragement and nurturing toward the good kids, I call the bad kids out on their behavior, and I've had enough truly decent teens apologize for the boors in their generation to make me look forward to the day when they are in charge of things.

Life is stressful, with the specter of unemployment lurking and the COBRA about to lapse and the prospect of cashing my 401(k) unpleasantly looming, in addition to weirdness I don't really feel like chatting about regarding my significant other. But at the same time, life is awesome because I spend most of my time in my comfy clothes at the computer with my pets hanging out next to me, overindulging in my favorite hobby.

It's the rabbit's birthday, he'll be six. I don't know the approximate date, that's from counting backwards from puberty. Since I want him to live to be twelve, that means he is now middle aged. He's getting a little chubby, and his face has character since he had his surgery, and he is far lazier. He's got his cat thrall thoroughly trained in rabbit style interaction, to the point where she spent about an hour jumping on me and doing the you-must-pet-me-now head nudge while trying to twist her body into proper rabbit posture today. He's got his human thrall trained to go to the organic place to buy him carrots with tops. He lives in an age in which rabbits may freely disapprove. He gets raisins every night. He's got it good.

Hope everyone reading this has it good too.

Complaining About World of Warcraft

Slate has been running some interesting articles on gaming, including this one that is highly critical of WoW that I thought I'd put here instead of in the WoW blog.

Many of the things I've been ranting about are mentioned. I want my customizable space, I want my customizable avatar, I want to make meaningful decisions.

It's too bad this reviewer never played SWG classic. He might have liked it.

Flabby Baby Boomer Brains

If you have any loved ones who are baby boomers and who have flabby, cellulite-riddled brains, send them to San Francisco, where they can go play video games together while eating walnuts at the brain gym.

Some of my more sarcastic neighbors might feel that San Francisco is already overrun with baby boomers who are not fully utilizing their brains, and it has been that way since the sixties.

As for me, this latest development assures me that I am doing the right thing by staying in the house.

But hey, it's a start, at least they've quit whining that video games are going to make us all into serial killers.

The Economist, on Virtual Economies

Just because I'm getting caught up with my surfing and thought this was fascinating.

Other Blogs

My WoW blog

My Sims 2 blog

Hmm I think I am finally catching that cold, which could explain my recent fit of grouchiness.

Blogging About Not Blogging: An Extrapolation

[There was a long post here. I just killed it. Summary: I am cranky and irritable. I have trifurcated the blog into three entities, two specifically about game tips and one about the usual verbose editorializing.

I have ditched the reference to games and gender, having concluded that men and women can be equally annoying I no longer want to write from a drawing-divisive-lines point of view.

So far, I've concluded that playing way too many computer games has made me touchier, more precise and less, um, cuddly.

The experiment continues.]

Gamer Revelations

Here are some thoughts that have emerged as a consequence of my month plus game immersion.

First, SWG is dead. There might be something similar in the future but it won't be SWG. And what I miss about SWG most is incidental to the very nature of gaming.

Games are elitist and exclusive. You don't hear about any campaigns to make football or basketball more inclusive by allowing short skinny guys to play them. The fact that they are hard makes them challenging and therefore desirable, and the fact that they have scores makes them games, rather than activities or hobbies or pastimes.

Game companies are democratic and inclusive, because they want to maximize profit. So they try to make the games accommodate every potential gamer.

SWG was exclusive and elitist. You needed a mighty computer to run it, and once you logged in you needed to be able to handle a complex ruleset as well as interaction with other sci fi loving computer nerds, who would show no mercy if your spelling was bad or an in joke went over your head.

SOE tried to make it more like some kind of socialist basketball, in which short people were welcome to participate but were forever doomed to score fewer points than the seven foot tall guys who could slam dunk. Meanwhile, the tall people all got random taxes and penalties in a feeble attempt to level the playing field, which put them in the position of lab rats who get random rewards and electric shocks, which tends to make all the sane rats stomp out in protest.

WoW on the other hand does a better job of accommodating the short and tall basketball players. Which is why my WoW guild has a few of the intense power gamers that I like to run around with as well as a lot of weaker players who sit in guildchat begging for someone to hold their hand, inspiring endless complaints from the power gamers, who get tired of short dudes begging for piggyback rides so they can win right now, immediately, because they're accustomed to social scenarios where elitism is discouraged and every child gets a sticker and an A+ just for showing up.

And I must admit that the inclusiveness, of having us all performing an activity together rather than having 96% of us sit on the couch watching the 4% power athletes race each other to the slam dunk, has its virtues. Even if it's not a very sporting idea. But there are outlets for the insanely competitive too, such as battlegrounds, so theoretically everybody can find some activity to make them happy.

Now, the gender thing. I'm tired of it. It's fun to write about once in a while, but I really have to admit that female gamers can be just as unsporting as male gamers. Annoying Teenage Girl, for example, was several times as annoying as many of the annoying teenage boys who wander in and out of guildchat, but she got a lot more second (and third, and fourth) chances (a female gamer friend remarked that she had more chances than Michael Jackson had nose jobs).

I've seen both male and female gamers fly off the handle at trivial slights, or try to win through manipulation and power plays as opposed to through actually playing the game, or sit around passively whining for other people to hold their hands and help them win -- this has become our guild's biggest complaint, whiny freeloaders who demand that we drop everything and help them right now. The angry smacktalkers tended to come in the male gender, the needy ones are both male and female, so the problem has become one more about character than aggression style.

I hear the complaints about wives that hate the games and would rather watch soap operas and I wonder if this particular marriage is based more on factors other than intellectual compatibility. And is there anything wrong with that? Not really. It doesn't make the game sexist. It does mean that some individual marriages might be ones where the husband is bright and competitive and the wife is more of a social type, and their interests lie elsewhere. In which case, WoW's a good way for him to get his gaming stimulation while she does something else.

I have noticed that people who get into these traditional types of relationships are more likely to have firm views about what men do and what women do. I've also noticed that in MMOs they come in contact with people who hold different views and learn how to either work cooperatively with them or lose. In that sense, MMOs are basically a big lab project in getting diverse humans to work cooperatively together despite differences, and drawing a bunch of lines about the unique needs of female gamers, or handicapped gamers, or gamers of different races defeats the purpose.

It doesn't necessarily when you're talking about standalone games where all the heroes are white dudes and all the villains are, say, black women with dreadlocks. MMO players probably wouldn't go for that kind of thing however, and I've yet to see one where a particular race and gender of toon always wins (or always is defeated).

So anyway, I'm tired of tackling MMOs from a separated-gender perspective. I've made a new blog for ranting about Sims 2 and one for talking about WoW, and I'll probably keep this one going in case I feel the need for some miscellaneous editorial verbalizing.

Following Up On Evil Myspace Mom, and Some Sci Fi

This just in: that horrible Lori Drew, who came up with the brilliant idea of making a myspace alt to torment a mentally ill teenager, is being given the classic snub by her neighbors, as she so rightfully deserves.

I guess that makes it schadenfreude night, because I spent a gleeful time in WoW listening to an account of how a friend of mine, "helping" a group that I left because it had a guy who had righteously pissed me off in it, managed to subtlely sabotage the entire operation from within the group.

Okay, yeah, it's fun to be mean to people who were mean to me first, especially if they were also mean to my friends. I admit it. I also giggled about Lori Drew's misfortunes. I suppose that makes me a naughty person, but I'm not overly concerned. Giving internet bullies the smackdown is an important part of virtual life, because it's not like you can call some cop to show up and put the freaky man who's exposing himself and yelling at you in jail. Sometimes it takes a village.

Anyway, I also came across this article about science fiction, which made me smile. After all, a blog of how you spent your day so far would qualify as science fiction twenty years ago. I have also noticed that people who hate science fiction tend to be the most stressed out about current events. If they delve into the genre at all it's via sci fi lite writers like Michael Crichton or Margaret Atwood, who seem more interested extrapolating on today's news than speculating about what the news will be fifty years from now.

WoW is probably more like how life actually was in the middle ages: a world overrun with aggro lads where anybody over thirty qualifies as a wise elder and where your fellow villagers will turn their backs on you if you get too far out of line. I'm racking up the points at it due to having spent a whole month doing little else, and since I'm immersed in it I've been contemplating the irony of the first majorly successful virtual reality being steeped in the medieval.

Although one thing it's doing is helping us to reframe the past in a way that's more compatible with modern sensibilities, with most of the everyday horrors airbrushed out or confined to atrocities practiced by fiendish enemies in order to justify our going over there and kicking their butts.

I went out of the house yesterday (whoa! major event!) to meet with the EDD to assure them I am diligently looking for work, which I am, I even had a phone call and exchanged email with an agency yesterday. Anyway, while I was out there I figured I had enough points for lunch at this Pakistani restaurant, which totally thrashed my stomach due to my deprivation from rich restaurant foods, which is probably a good thing actually. And since I needed something to read during lunch and there was a bookstore right there, I got this sequel to Pillars of the Earth, which I read some time ago and remember enjoying as well as being aggravated by it.

The enjoyment: well, it's (a) a fat historical novel, which I tend to like and (b) it's Ken Follett, who can write a well plotted spy story with female characters that aren't bad at all. And since it seems like he's doing more of a labor of love type novel about cathedral archetecture than a calculated best seller, even though the first one was pretty successful, it doesn't have that yucky screenplayishness that so many novels seem to have lately. You could maybe do a miniseries out of these books but not a movie, too much plot complication. And the best parts are really the history of engineering type stuff, finding out exactly how they put the roofs on cathedrals and things like that, but I'm sort of geeky that way.

The aggravation: some historical novels seem to give a lot of insight as to what it would be like to live there and then, as though the author has pondered these issues deeply. Other historical novels tend to put people with modern brains into the past, which was amusing when Mark Twain first did it in A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court. But Twain's story ended with the yankee has a major mea culpa about his cultural arrogance (notwithstanding its clear virtues, like soap), and Follett's characters are each in their own tale of Great Moments In Modernism. We've got a couple of misunderstood doctors (one female), a misunderstood architect, and, so far my favorite character, a girl from a hard knock life who shows great resoucefulness at recovering from cruelties. I can see Follett setting her up for a happily ever after. And speaking of cruelties, the villain characters all embody the worst of their times: stupidity, brutality, willful ignorance and superstition. Plus there are plenty of power mongering nobles and clergy and merchants and guilds weaving a net of intrigue over everything. And yeah, I suppose it is an interesting change of pace to see a historical novel centered around middle class tradesmen rather than royalty or warriors or beautiful maidens betrothed to the flatulent old Earl of Lancasterworcestershire who suddenly meet a pirate that looks a lot like Fabio.

I guess I think that comparisons between the now and the past are sort of like sixth graders congratulating themselves for not being third graders. The past is a necessary step towards growing up, not an evil that must be combatted. A sixth grader proudly announcing he doesn't play with baby toys is one thing, a sixth grader that goes out of his way to beat all the third graders at dodge ball is sort of pathological.

So I already know how this big fat brick of a book is going to turn out. The modern-thinking characters all win, after first having to defeat the medieval types who heap cruelty upon them to justify their triumphant revenge. Especially the female ones, who will all probably get raped or terrorized at some point so the good guys can save them, although this is a Follett novel and his heroines have an admirable quality of taking matters into their own hands. The torch of knowledge gets carried forward. The spark of intellectual achievement and all that. Progress.

Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of progress. Hey, I'm a sci fi fan after all.

But given my recent and very strange month of living in a fantasy world with a few magical conveniences here and there to cut down on the utter fragility of life in the past, there's a nobility to these conjectured worlds, a sense of tribal unity, a unique aesthetic quality to candles glowing on pagan shrines and being caught in the rush of a stampede of armored warriors, especially if you're not likely to get killed or catch the plague as a result of it.

It's sort of the antithesis of what Follett's got going. He's writing about primitives who are nice suburban kids at heart. And WoW is more like a bunch of nice suburban kids longing to be primitive.

Both nevertheless enjoyable.

Loving and Hating WoW

The toon was named after a character from a sitcom. I know this secondhand only, I haven’t seen a sitcom in years. Not due to snobbishness, you can watch all the sitcoms you like and I won’t fault you for it, more about lack of interest. And I do note that people who spend more time with sitcoms than interaction often share that special kind of negativity this toon often spouted.

There’s art involved even in being a sitcom actor. Someone who’s funny can make a complaint amusing. Someone who’s not, trying to imitate that kind of riff, can come off as petty and irritable.

Anyway, this sitcom-named toon was constantly griping about how nobody ever does the things he/she wanted to do in WoW. The old high level instances, raids, things like that. And the reason nobody does them any more is that they are doing Burning Crusades content, and the level 60 rewards are no longer in demand.

Now it’s entirely possible there are whole guilds organized around pre-expansion content. Ours is not one of them. The sitcom-name toon, however, was upset because s/he could never find a group to do them.

And then – the unthinkable happened. The other people in guildchat rose up against the complaining. They informed the sitcom-named toon that the negativity was overwhelming and nobody really wanted to hear it. The game had changed. If the sitcom-named toon wanted to organize a team that specifically wanted to do all the old world content they would have to put some work into it, possibly even form a guild dedicated to that purpose or shop around for a server with lots of like minds. Simply making occasional announcements in guildchat and then getting upset because no instant enthusiastic response is provided doesn’t cut it.

And even better – sitcom-name toon realized that the negativity had gotten a little thick and apologized. No drama, no ugly scene.

We had a couple of new members join up this weekend, folks from rlmmo. They both leveled up to the 20s and had a good time shooting the breeze in guildchat. Another guy, in response to the same thread, posted this:

Eh, I wouldn't bother reinstalling. I rejoined WoW a month ago after selling my account due to lack of any endgame.

The Expansion is the same shit endgame rehashed all over again. Endgame is pretty much sitting around Orgimmar or Ironforge waiting for the next patch.

I started wondering exactly what people like sitcom-name and grumpy-forum-poster do for thrills. Head over to the bowling alley and tell everyone there that bowling sucks? Go to night clubs and tell everyone there hasn’t been any good live music in twenty years? Head to the movies and yell at the audience that they’re morons if they’re actually enjoying the picture?

It’s nice to see people standing up to that kind of thing anyway.

For the most part, the guild has been doing great. Snow is falling in some places, which could have to do with the fact that our membership is back over 600. The current buzz is all about the new armor, and the pending expansion, and the fact that more and more guild members are getting their Karazhan keys, which means we might finally be able to go there as early as next week.

Sadly, Rose quit WoW, and showed up to make a speech about it. She happened to show up on the day that the season one arena pvp armor became available to battleground pvpers, which was sort of a holiday. Orgrimmar was full of enchanters and jewelcrafters making piles of gold, and players joyfully running around in their new shiny purple armor, and the battlegrounds were full of people trying to grind those last few points, so it was like some kind of national PVP holiday or something.

Anyway, Rose doesn’t like pvp because on two different occasions, other pvpers tried to tell her what to do. Also she doesn’t like pvp because she doesn’t want to spend money repairing her armor. And she wants to bring up her child in a world where video games make people smile. So she’s no longer playing WoW, and best of luck to her.

I missed Acalis in game, but I went to check out South Park’s meditation on Guitar Queer-o – I mean, Guitar Hero – due to her recommendation. It made me laugh many times.

Today I have a headache, because it’s raining and that usually gets me, the pressure shift. I am faithfully guarding the phone and don’t have anything really to do until Wednesday, when I have to go meet with someone at the EDD. I have been unemployed for one month today. I was sort of thinking about separating out my WoW scribblings and my Sims 2 ones from my general rants and giving them their own separate blogs but that’ll have to be done after the brain stops throbbing.

On being a full time WoW player – it’s played havoc with my sense of time. Fortunately I rarely have to be timely about anything at the moment, and alarm clocks exist for a good reason.

And yes, I still enjoy the game. And the people. My warrior is up to 63, my priest has only two more steps to get her Karazhan key and my hunter has some of that shiny new purple armor. I guess that means I've been spending a lot of time playing.