(I Am) A Trifle Upsetting

Oh lookit - its the delightful little fellow Mr. F*cknbugger, he's all jumping up and down and excited about something! Maybe its because he missed the Andrew Bird show. I remember sitting down to tea with him and little Miss Halfnass and we read the local music newspaper which said Andrew was coming to town, but we ignored it because we forgot to connect Andrew's name with someone we really liked. How frightfully VEXING!

Lol and DIE!

Hi there - u too can have skin like this! ...and a giant bat...


...and horrible kids jamming the chat channels with their opinions on what is, variously, gay, today.
Actually the ones in the screenshot (lower left corner) are quite civilised and focused on the topic of the channel in which they appear. This is not as common as I would like it to be. - Sigh - this is what u get when u start playing WoW as an old person.
I've been doing it a bit, so I thought I might post about it, although I think 'teh n0velty' of blogging about warcraft is minimal.
I have found it confronting, simply because it is the largest game i've ever played. Never having MMORPG'd before this (i play games to escape people usually - more on that later) i find it strange that gaming writers (gouts of laughter ensue) still manage to talk about games like Morrowind and Oblivion as large. Still it's more than just physical space, the scale of character-building (and isn't that term quite ironic in a gaming context) is just enormous - i suppose it would have to be to keep people coming back and paying their subscription fees. For me, and I'm unusual among even gamers I guess, my way of getting the monkey of gaming off my back (and any serious gamer knows the burden of time taken by gaming) is to get through a game as quickly as possible - then I can leave it behind and experience a period of satiation, free of the desire to game. In any other game going lvl 1-60 (now 1-70) is no probs (relatively), even in RPGs where time spent reaches to weeks rather than days. WoW is, then, to me, like a tar pit that I tried to swim across as fast as possible.

...

I need to get a screenshot of my character drowning in tar. I haven't found any tar pits yet...but I'm quite sure I will find some. If you know that old philosophers tract about anything in a universe of infinite possibility eventually appearing - they used it to try and prove the existence of god. All it proves in reality is that WoW is slowly drowning me.

A fantastic way I've found in the past to justify the serious wastage of massive amounts of time, is to turn the said time into 'participant observation'. This is probably going to come back and haunt me when my life's work is accused of being dumbed down 'leisure studies'. [Cartman voice please]: SCREW YOU GUYS! I think a political / post-colonial study of the most populous MMORPG in the world would be interesting. I was suckered into this thinking when - and i have to get some screenshots of this and also deploy a Wild West allegory - I was recruited as a sell-sword to go to the Barrens (read Wild West) by the local Orcs who don't admit they are a colonial force (but if you know the Warcraft back-story, that is exactly what they are) and there I slaughtered Zhevra (read Buffalo) for their HOOVES and threw the rest of the carcass AWAY. Then I incited a fight with the INDIGENOUS centaurs (Native Americans, anyone), who had been attacking the colonists for no reason (cough) by murdering the weaker ones till their warlike chief showed up, whereupon i assassinated him with my superior weapons.
Not all the game is like that, but most of it is susceptible to interesting political readings, and y'know, I like the game but I'm tempted to start talking all Jack frick'n Thompson about 6 million susceptible minds and crap. That's bollocks, i'm not saying slaughtering polygonal beasts leads to slaughtering school kids, i'm much more interested in more subtle political hegemony, that sort of thing. Just interesting at this stage. More at some later time.

Oh, if i weren't such a noob, I'd start, at the very least a guild, and quite possibly a CRUSADE against......LOL! I hate that term, it is used till it is almost completely lacking in meaning but yet it maintains a recursive undercurrent of derision - ugh. That would make an interesting linguistic study, a field about which I know next to nothing. It'd just make me angry anyway.

Peace out.