Oh sh-, what day is it? Oh god, I need flowers, pronto!

Apparently February 12 was my blog anniversary. Three years. That means I've been playing WoW as a blogger longer than I haven't. I'm sure that means something. Or not. It's a very good thing I'm not married.

So wow. Three years. Given that my birthday was not quite recent (month ago), that's putting me at 1/8 of my life blogging about WoW. It's funny, how being this age makes everything a really big deal, proportionally. A year unemployed, pretty damn awful. Made me dread approaching holidays because each one was a marker: "you finished school and had no real job until this holiday, plus a year." There are a thousand factors, some personal, some systematic, some neither, but just someone passing me over. But none on their own explain it and none on their own, or collectively, make it feel any better.

Objectively speaking my situation isn't too bad. I have no mortgage or rent or dependents, thanks to still living at home. But emotion isn't objective is it? No. It's funny to me that humans, as far as I can tell, invented reason, and yet we seem to be entirely incapable of actually using it. We're like a guy who got a price gun cheap off ebay and oh man it will be so great but what do we do with this? So we stick it in a box somewhere and sometimes we open it and wave it around to show off, but we don't actually use it.

This past year I've also had a non-problem: posts months ago feel like I wrote them the week before. At times late in 2010 I'd try to quickly refer back to a previous post, certain that it would be in the first page (keep in mind my first page shows about 200 posts), and no, it would be a page back, buried way down, able to be found only thanks to my strange ability to remember post titles and search by them. Though that did break down recently when I had to find a post for a biggish one I'm working on. I really should improve my tag system, maybe add one like "elitists are stupid dicks".

I really enjoyed this past year of blogging. I got to rant, rave, and at times pretend to offer thoughtful analysis and thought-provoking discussion.

Here are some of my favorites, randomly chosen from my list of favorites, which uncut would be a list of dozens. Oh the perils of writing hundreds of posts a year.

I suppose these overlap a lot, but I still enjoyed writing both of them. Sadly, I don't think they'll accomplish anything.

Woo, I changed something!

I like silly. Okay? I like silly stuff. And the comments in Tobold's response post were such fun to read.

I like the phrase "virtual phrenology."

My attempt to draw some parallels between RL and virtual behavior on the society-level. I still like the post, but it's a shame that somehow people thought it was racist.

This post about bubbles and virtual item value didn't really elaborate much and frankly I'm not all that happy with it, but the idea is surprisingly relevant to my current situation. Same with my post about the deeper meaning of how quitting players managed their mail.

I got back from India. I was really, really tired.

Swearing is fun.

Texas does silly stuff. This was a hell of a lot of fun to write. Since then I've had to be careful to not descend into full-time silly fake news post writing.

It makes me feel bad when Larisa feels bad.
Earlier I'd tried to make an Atiesh for her. It failed.

Oh Gevlon, will I ever tire of pointing out your ridiculously flawed logic and distorted view of the world?

I kept my mage in Azeroth and had a blast. That was before it got blasted.

This post helped me learn to love graphs. Really, really badly drawn graphs. And chalkboards.

A look at how our concept of instance completion has changed over time

I mix up Tam and Chas on a self-righteous moral crusade involving time-traveling policemen

My sad last run of Zul'Gurub. LAST RUN, none of this "we wrecked a raid and pretended it's new content" crap.

And Joseph danced on...

I look at how phasing and other quest design has made WoW less of a multi-player game

It was also over this past year that I discovered that I enjoyed exploration, and writing about it. Try the "immersion" tag.

Then there were a variety of posts which picked up some trolling gnats. Obnoxious bugs. In retrospect, their incredible demonstrations of stupidity were rather entertaining.

So that's a year.

P.S. I'm bad at picking favorites. I love all my posts so much. Of course I'm not arrogant! That would be a negative personality trait.