Revenge of the Nerds

Fair warning: this entire blog post, except for the picture that will appear at the end of this paragraph, is going to be interesting to exactly ONE of my regular readers, and even then, it's only of interest tangentially, because it's about World of Warcraft, which her husband also plays -- hi, Uelander! (Incidentally, I just felt all your eyes roll back in your heads.) Today's WAB-fest is about how I spent the entire weekend dying repeatedly on a 25-man Naxxramas run, and how this has caused a nervous breakdown / midlife crisis. Again. So feel free to skip this mess, after you check out the photo of the Cupcake below, which I managed to work into this entry because she is wearing my new gaming headset.

Minimage the Pwnstar - "Less QQ, more pewpew!"

Meanwhile, back in Azeroth: recently I have been bored just questing and farming and working on achievements, so unless I knew I had something going on, I haven't been spending a whole lot of time in-game. I hit level 80 back at the beginning of February, and my guild was pretty casual, so we weren't really going anywhere, and there wasn't a whole lot for me to do. I worked on getting some vanity pets, and made some gold, and grinded some reputation, but mostly I loitered.

And then a week ago, one of my guildmates (who was also something of a mentor to me) left to join another guild, one that was more active in running heroic dungeons and raids, and which had actual healers and stuff. When he went, two other of our active high-level players went on to other guilds too. In all of my life -- or at least in the game, anyway -- I had never felt so alone.

The thing about MMORPG's is, they're very social, even when they're also very competitive. Which is pretty much me: friendly, yet competitive. (Ask anyone who's ever played Trivial Pursuit with me.) And as much as I love the people in the guild, I also needed a challenge. Sitting around in front of my monitor for hours at a time, virtually shooting the shit, was not worth the however many dollars a month I am paying to play the game.

I needed to see new things, do new things, blow up new things with my (relatively) new talents. So with the gentle prompting of my mentor (and "game husband"), as well as a fellow guildmate of his who is so many kinds of awesome, I left one guild and joined another.

And suddenly found myself completely over my head.

For the last three nights, I was part of a 25-man Naxxramas ("Naxx") run, which means that 24 other people, most of them complete strangers to me, spent approximately 12-15 hours killing big bosses and getting "phat lewts" and gaining honor and tokens and prestige, and I spent that time trying not to look like a complete asshole and occasionally setting out a Fish Feast.

Great success on the food front; not so much with the "not looking like an asshole."

Which -- as World of Warcraft so often is -- is a total metaphor for my so-called life. I jump headfirst into things without being completely prepared. I fail at first, or come close to it, and feel like a yutz. I wallow for a day or two, cry and scream and gnash my teeth and rend my garments, and then ... I pick myself up, dust myself off, start all over again. That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

Except Patchwerk. He's a badass.

And why are you still reading this? Are you waiting for another picture? Okay, fine:

Cupcake Jenkins - "GTFO n00b! WTF? BBQ!"

Dorkcraft

Am I the only person Earth who, like, just saw this today?

'Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft'

Little Person Update

... and this time, it's not about the baby. Last time I updated anyone on my WoW main, she was a level 28, just a weensy little thing trying to find her way in the world. Now, she is a level 56, practically an old salt, with powers the likes of which you cannot hardly believe. In some areas, I have the ability to kill creatures with my bare hands. My herbalism and alchemy skills are as high as they can get without going to Outland, which will be happening soon -- I just need to get a little bit higher level. I spend a lot of time exploring the map on the back of "Gilda the Robochicken," a/k/a my [Red Mechanostrider]. I speak in "code" so that I know what it means when stuff is in square brackets with blue lettering, and I have not only become an Officer in my Guild, but I am also the Webmaster.

Or, in short, I have become an even bigger nerdo than ever, thanks for asking. And if not for the baby, I'd be a level 70 already: so thanks, kiddo, for saving Mommy some grief.

Progress Report

I don't know when this turned into my officially-unofficial World of Warcraft blog, but since that's pretty much my only hobby these days (goddamned writers' strike!), there you go. According to Xfire, I've spent 22 hours in the past 7 days playing WoW, which is horrifying in so many ways. But I'll be the first to admit that I just love vaporizing giant creepy spiders. Again: surprisingly therapeutic.

At this point I am a Level 28 Gnome Mage. Since my last report, I have joined a guild -- well, actually, two of them. My first guild ("The Yummy Muffins," tee hee) was absorbed by a newer, bigger guild ("Beguile") with more high-level players. My guild leader played "Pimp My Mage" with me yesterday and outfitted me with a whole bunch of improved armor. Of course, I still have 3x as much mana as health, but things are slowly improving.

Oh, and now I have a crown. So I am happy.

Yeah, I pretty much have no life any more, but I am OK with it, for a change. Although I still can't use Flamestrike in real life, which continues to be a gigantic disappointment.

PS -- Yeah, that's a mage with a sword. Because I am that much awesome. Mai skillz, let me sho u dem.

Phenomenal Cosmic Powers

So, I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft lately, which explains why I haven't been blogging much: I've been too busy dying a multitude of horrid miserable deaths in far-off imaginary lands at the hands of a host of assorted gruesome creatures, including giant hairy spiders, tunnel rat vermin, these things called "troggs" that look awfully like some of the salespeople I support, and squirrels. (Well, OK, technically the squirrels haven't killed me, but I know they want to. Squirrels are evil and I hate them. They have too damn much power.)

Even though I heckled G for years about his on-line gaming, I've found it very easy to get sucked into WoW. This is probably primarily because of the character I've created, who is -- let's just face it -- so many kinds of awesome. She's a gnome mage, which means she's about 3' tall with purple pigtail puffs and she's totally action-packed with magical superpowers. No leprechaun, this chick: she could completely kick your ass while you were telling her how cute she is and patting her on the head.

Of course, one of the reasons I like playing with this character so much is because I envy and admire her. She is still a "baby" in relative game terms (Level 16, out of 70, and with hardly anything fully learned yet, although I am becoming quite the virtual bassmistress, thankyouverymuch), but she has skills and abilities that I really wish I could have in real life. I mean, it's hard enough to be fighting against the forces of evil, asshattery, and stupidity every day -- and not necessarily in that order, either -- and while it would not automatically be any easier to fight the good fight with magic, it would certainly be more interesting. To wit:

Flamestrike. A spell my mage has that does damage to all enemies within a certain radius. I would love to use this on those days when everything converges on me at once -- emails, phone calls, retarded questions that I have already answered 847,000 times, lame jokes from my cube neighbor, etc. When I hit my breaking point, I could just channel the spell, scorch the earth around me, lay waste to everything in my path, and then go have a cigarette and some Spiced Wolf Meat and regenerate.

Frostbolt. Another spell, which causes enemies to slow down, giving you time to cast additional damaging spells before the bad guys can hit you. I like to think of it as a sort of forced "stop and think" -- like, when I have people arguing with me about why they think something is wrong even when I know it isn't, I could stun them with this spell and then use the slowdown period to hit them with a massive logic bomb and explain why they're giant flaming moron assholes and I am right and they should shut the hell up already.

Polymorph. Oh my ears and whiskers, one of my very favorite spells, even though I don't use it quite as much any more, now that I am levelling up and getting more health and magic powers. This spell is kind of ... ultra-extreme evasive maneuvers for total chickenshits, which lets you turn enemies into sheep for a short time so you can run away (screaming optional). I already know on whom I would use this spell most frequently: my "favorite" salesperson who insists on referring to me by my initials and never by my name oh my heavens such HAAAAATE. (And I can make a very cozy home in the janitor's closet.)

Of course, knowing these fantastic powers exist in WoW and not IRL certainly makes it more difficult for me to get through most days. I have replaced my sincere desire to stab people in the head with a mechanical pencil and make off with their wallets with the sincere desire to Fireball the hell out of them and then loot them for copper and quest items, which is progress of a sort, I guess, but it still suggests that I need to wait a little longer for the mood stabilizers to take full effect.

And also: all the Gnomeregan engineering in the world cannot gerryrig my company's systems into working correctly.

Doers of Dorkcraft

If the on-line gaming community or MMORPG'ers or whatever the hell they call themselves ever does a Google search and they end up on this blog, I expect a flaming raft of shit for things I might have said in the past that were not entirely (or, ahem, even at all) complimentary of what passes for a "hobby" in those circles: namely, sitting in front of a computer for countless hours at a time, vacant and vapid and vacuous, clicking oneself into oblivion while perpetuating what to the uninitiated such as myself appears to amount to nothing more than a giant electronic circle jerk.

But that was all before I became an on-line gamer myself. Er, sort of, anyway.

My very first MMORPG experience came via a friend on the SDMB, my very favorite source for almost all the information I need. We were in a thread about the late un-great TV show "Pirate Master" (blech on a stick, by the way) and somehow I ended up checking out and ultimately joining this awesome game called YoHoHo Puzzle Pirates. (I link to it on this blog, over there on the left, in case you find that you are interested.)

Although I should backtrack a bit and say that I partly joined, at the beginning anyway, out of spite. G is a gamer, and his friends are gamers, and he spends hours at a clip playing games that I don't understand and will never be good at. Counterstrike, and Team Fortress, and I don't even know what the hell all else. He got a special set of "cans" so that he can lurk up there in his den with his headphones on and talk to his buddies and have fun without me while I sit on the couch and pout, all lonely and with nobody to fetch me juice from the kitchen because I'm too spoiled to do it my damn self.

And I'm not a big fan of shoot-'em-up games, anyway, because I am highly suggestible and get nightmares, plus I don't really see the point of blowing other people's virtual heads off. Why? Are there prizes for winning Counterstrike? Does that game even have a story? I mean, some of the stuff that comes out of on-line gaming is hysterical and fantastic and I love it, like "im in ur camp killin ur dudes," and also "the cake is a lie," and the occasional "Leeroy Jenkins" -- but even then, I have to use my Google-fu a lot so I don't look like a giant clueless tool (any more than usual).

But Puzzle Pirates is altogether different. For one thing, the game is mostly puzzles (duh), not shooting -- although as you get better at it, you can progress to games where you have to shoot things. Cannons, mostly, at other people's ships. And the puzzles are all based on things that hypothetical pirates would really have to do: bilging, sailing, carpentry, shipwrightery, rumbling, sword fighting, drinking, carousing, playing spades. (Well, OK, maybe the spades are more purely hypothetical than other parts of the game, but still.)

And also, there are the people. I have been lucky enough to have only dealt with really nice people in my experience with the game. I'm sure YPP has its fair share of jerks and buttheads, but so far so good, for me. Only once has anyone made me cry, and I'm pretty sure that was a 13-year-old kid. My crew has been awesome, patient, teaching me what to do and how not to behave, and just generally not caring if I "level my druid" or not, as long as I show up and have a good time and help other people have a good time. I even placed in a couple of contests, including one where I wrote about Mother Teresa in an adventure with pirates. (Total fiction, of course.)

So ... not to make this long story any longer, but I think I finally understand what all the fuss is about. I know that hardcore gamers probably think that the YPP people -- "puzzlins," I believe my husband called us, once -- are lametards or whatever. And, exactly: whatever. (I don't care how lame he thinks I am, anyway, since I know what's really on his iPod.) I'm an old woman who never did this kind of thing before, and because I got my foot in the door in an environment where I felt safe and comfortable and encouraged, I am willing to try other games too. Which is kind of the point, right?

My heart will always belong to YPP, whatever I do, because that's where Pondera is, and my people, who know strengths and my skills and my language. (LOLcat.)

Dōmo Arigatō, Mr. Super Mario

Dear Nintendo Corporation of America,

As a person who watches entirely too much television, I watch a lot of commercials every day. (Well, hypothetically, anyway.) In the run-up to Christmas, I saw shills for several thousand products, but I believe that only one did as advertised and brought our family together.

So, thanks for the Wii. We didn't get one for Christmas because we already had one, but we did get a lot of use out of it. My husband, father, and brother-in-law all have rotator cuff injuries from playing the Home Run Derby game. And we're actually going bowling for real later this week!

It's been so long since I've worn rented shoes, and I have the Wii to thank. Happy Holidays, Nintendo.

Sincerely,
rockle.

Picture it: Sicily, 1917. No, wait, wrong story. Let me start over ... ahem. Now then.

Picture it: Phillipsburg, 2007. Sunday morning. 7:15 AM. Clear, bright, and NINE DEGREES. We made a brief stop at the 25th Street Dunkin Donuts for some hot chocolate with extra whipped cream, and then we were on our way. We were up late the night before due to some ... uh, shenanigans ... so we are still half-asleep, greasy-haired, and booger-lashed, but still and all, it is a lovely day, and We Are On A Mission From God. Ever so optimistically, we head over the bridge into New Jersey, even though it is only NINE DEGREES.

We miss the turn-off from Route 22 at first, but eventually we pull into the Target parking lot, our Spidey-senses tingling, only partly because it is NINE DEGREES outside. There is also a Circuit City in this shopping center, and there is a Toys-Backward-R-Us across the road, so we're trying to gauge where we're going to have the best luck. Because, let's face it: What we're looking for, the good stuff, is in short supply these days. Nobody has any. We drove to every single store in the world on Friday, when it wasn't NINE DEGREES, and we came back with nada. Zero. Zilch. Nuthin'. Or, as they say in Spaceballs, "We ain't found shit."

Long story short, because I am getting tired of writing trying to figure out how to fit NINE DEGREES in to every paragraph in a place where it makes some kind of sense, plus I want to commence with the entertainment: WE GOT A WII! The P'burg Target only had 7 (!!) and we got ticket #6 (!!). We got in line at 7:15 for the store's opening at 8AM -- some people pulled up at 7:50 and later, only to be turned away, because all the consoles available had been claimed. The Circuit City in the same plaza started issuing vouchers at 8:00 for a 10AM opening, and forget about Toys-Backward-R-Us. There was already a 40-person line at 7:00. Some people apparently got in line at 4 in the morning, the fools.

Wii's are cool, yo. Get one. And if you have one? Send me a message -- DO NOT POST TO THE BLOG, FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY -- and we can do the parade of Mii's, or whatever you call it. Ryan's the tech guy. I just kick eleventy kinds of ass at Wii Sports Bowling. Even if it is only NINE DEGREES.