Lawful Evil

Recent topic brought up by Bio Break:

“I recently had an accident that resulted in the permanent lose of my hearing… I felt more alone than ever.”

“He tells me that i can’t raid unless i have vent. Guild rules and all. I was pissed. After a huge blow out between us i get removed from the guild and put on ignore.”

From Dark Legacy Comics
Lawful Evil: "If you can't do your job, you're worthless."

I suppose it's not a fair comparison, since he can still do his job, just not quite as easily.

It makes me wonder, what type world do we want to live in, virtual or otherwise? Do we want one where setbacks and magnified or one where we work together through problems? Do we want a world that discards people at the first chance? Maybe some people do. Well fuck them.

Happy New Year. Unless you're Chinese or Mayan. In which case, go back to Mayachinaland.

The Blue Wall of Death

Okay it's more of a Blue Wall of Can't Fly There, but either way, I'm sick of it.

You might have seen it. It's the strange glowing blue wall, sometimes floor or ceiling, through which you cannot fly. I guess its unloaded content.

I wasn't really familiar with these walls until the day my mage fell under Scarlet Monstery and found these walls along the edge of what seemed to be the sky, though I was at the bottom of it, not the top, due to falling.

Lately I've been seeing them a lot. This is usually during my cross-Azeroth flights for archaeology. I'll set a course and autofly, usually while blogging or playing Angry Birds. Totally worth the dollar.

They annoy me.

I can't figure out why they are there. I mean, many of these places I've flown over before. And many I've run into at times after I was done downloading everything. I mean that WoW said, "yep, whole world's there," and the next day it says "not this place, nope, just hang out here a minute." Was there such a major zone change that it called for a blue wall of not going there?

Maybe these walls are actually a good thing. They indicate that I haven't actually downloaded the whole game, but I still get to play, most of it. Surely a wall here and there for a minute is better than sitting around with the download manager claiming it is behind a firewall and must therefore retrieve individual bits by carrier pigeon.

Or maybe I have no damn clue what causes the walls. Maybe they are caused by my computer running out of RAM to store zone data and the wait time is some other zone getting dumped, seemingly the next zone I'll need to fly to. But since the wall is often accompanied by a red you have a lot to download wheel, I assume that it has something to do with my failure to download half of Uldum, which, by the way, I have already done, so clearly it's not a new zone. Or is it? Maybe Blizzard is needing to fix phasing issues or something and that requires redownloading entire zones.

I took the GRE yesterday. It made me very very tired while I wrote this. So I apologize if this post made no sense. Actually no, screw apologizing, making no sense meets my usual standards.

So that's how they did it

I fell out of the loop for a bit. Well, more of a stopped paying attention to the loop because who cares? There was some disconnect between the loop and me. No, fuck that, me and the loop. It's a fucking loop, it doesn't get the respectful "you first" grammar.

So anyway, something about an achievement for guilds and legendaries.

I turned in my cooking daily and WOOSH WOOSH ACHIEVABLES BING BLANG BOOM WOWZA! I was momentarily confused as to why a cooking quest would have caused me to make my guild legendary.

Turns out I'd finally hit honored guild rep, which I guess I needed to be able to give the achievement. That appears to be Blizzard's fix for the issue of what to do about grandfathered legendaries and preventing guild-hopping to sell the achievement.

Carebear Highlands

After playing through Twilight Highlands and seeing how often the quests there, especially the faction dailies, would push opposing factions players into the same space, I wonder, could it possibly be any fun at all on a PvE server?

Sure, I suppose the quests can be done faster and with greater convenience. But I sometimes wonder if the focus on faster and more convenient isn't such a great universal principle in MMOs.

Reports of my insanity have been exaggerated

Today I want to talk to you about misinterpretation of actions and perceived priorities and goals. Let's imagine for a moment that someone runs into Tol Barad and after picking up quests, leaps off the nearest bridge, plummeting into the lava below. You might think this is a sign of insanity. But is it?

Speaking purely hypothetically because obviously this incident had nothing at all to do with me, I'd like to offer a modest proposal, a new theory on motivations and actions in this situation. Perhaps the lava was not the intended target, but instead the nearby walkways. This changes insanity into simple accident. And perhaps the motivating factor was not insanity, but merely curiosity, which in this case killed the human paladin that I definitely was not playing. So the overall result is that the apparent insanity is merely exploration.

I don't think I like Christmas much

Don't get me wrong, I love Christmas, I just hate being involved in it. Despite my pro-social attitudes, I'm not really a people person. Social interaction beyond more than a handful of people quickly tires me out. Guess what Christmas has a lot of? Yea, family parties. Then there is the gift-giving. At times I wonder if it exists solely to remind people like me just how bad we are at thinking of other people. What is this person's life? What else do they want? Need? That I can afford? Sadly, paying off mortgages and law school loans are not within my means.

Sometimes I feel like an alcoholic who's been asked to stop drinking and gets that ultimatum: If you loved us you'd stop. Yea, if I loved my family I'd get them gifts they'd love. But dammit, maybe love and buying thoughtful gifts don't always go hand in hand. I'd love it if I could just "stop being bad at buying gifts". But that's just not how my brain is wired. I do the best I can, but please understand that the itunes card isn't because I was lazy, it's because I don't know much about music and have no ability to pick out CDs.

There's always the sociopathic/loner route, but fuck that. What's a world alone, without family, without friends? At that point a person might as well just die and save some time in being forgotten. That sure was cheerful.

On the flip side, I often can't fully enjoy gifts. I tend to just feel bad that the exchange was clearly unequal. In my favor, but that's not the point. In some imaginary world, by now I am fully capable of affording and finding the nice gifts that people give me. Which on that note, all I really want this year is either a job or to be young enough to play with legos again. Obviously not everyone can get me a job, or possibly anyone, so said list would just be one of those irritating ones that offers no help at all to lost searchers.

Actually the other day I got very mad at WoW and did a rare and regrettable ragequit. Not even on a PUG, but a guild group. That was a few days ago and since then I've logged in twice: once to empty my bank alt's mailbox of failed auctions and another to send a couple Christmas gifts to friends, who happened to have been in said run.

But the point was the legos. I really miss playing with them. Creating directly from my imagination. That didn't happen this time. Instead I was confused, because I had forgotten my organizational system and because last time I touched them I had slightly changed it to fit all the creations I was deconstructing. So I was lost. But it was a good system, so I figured it out (Resume: strong organizational skills: check out my legos, I had those organized even when I was a kid). But then my mind was just blank. Well, not fully blank, I had some vague, ethereal idea for a heavy fighter. This wasn't uncommon back when, but it was usually enough. Ideas would grow in my mind, shaping and becoming more certain as I built. That didn't happen. Instead I stumbled through a half-built fighter that I had to partially deconstruct to make the cockpit close fully. It had no elegance, but it did not have any blocky utilitarian theme either. It was just a bunch of crap stuck together with a dusty lego guy jammed in the cockpit with no control panel.

Not much like a bicycle, I suppose.

Tree Weirdness and How Netflix Saved Christmas

Tree Weirdness

My family has its own vocabulary. Words like exuberance and surprises, rather than indicating positive ideas, are for us, negative events. This is not due to any sort of cynicism or negativity, but instead because these are the chosen words to describe a couple dog problems. Incidents you might say.

Dog God rest her soul, a few years ago my family had a dog named Lily. She added her own phrase to the vocabulary: tree weirdness. We've seen it in no other dog. Nothing even similar.

Picture a mix German Shepard and Doberman (or perhaps Rottweiler). Now picture a Christmas tree in the living room, covered in lights, bulbs, and really awful ornaments made by my brothers and me as children. Back to the dog: she's slowly, ever so slowly, with the utmost caution and silence, circling. She does not notice us or the other dog. She can be shaken out, by a literal shaking out, or a lot of noise. She does not look at the tree or away from the tree. Instead her head is slightly lowered, facing ahead, and slowly, slowly she circles.

Like clockwork, it would start when the Christmas tree was at home and vanish when it was away. That was tree weirdness.

How Netflix Saved Christmas
'Round this time o' year a few brothers were in a panic. They searched boxes and crates. They searched this house, that house, an attic here and a basement there. Everywhere. Nowhere to be found. Where where?

Oh the holiday could be lost, for tradition itself was at stake! A holiday film, a capture of the season, a heartwarming tale of heroes and villains and lots of snow. Where where? Every season it must be watched or else can we call it Christmas? I think not!

Where oh where is Die hard 2? What you ask, a Christmas movie? Well of course! Of course.

But where is it? Oh have we misplaced that old VHS for the last time? Perhaps. Oh no. Is there no Christmas?

But a thought, an idea, the youngest had, an idea that could save Christmas. Netflix! No, silly, it won't get here in time. But what if it was instant? And in an instant, it was! We watched and laughed and joked and cheered, for with a Wii and a wireless and a webstreaming video we'd finally survived without a VHS. Technology!

And that's how Netflix saved Christmas.

Merry Christmas, Americans. Happy Christmas, Brits*. Happy Holidays, Atheist Europeans. And have a happy winter, or summer depending on hemisphere, to all the rest of you, known as most of the world.

* That goes for the Welsh too. I don't know if it's at all realistic, but we do love A Child's Christmas in Wales.

P.S. Today I learned Wales it its own country. I found this to be a silly idea.
P.P.S. I have no idea who sent this box of tea and chocolates, but thank you, if by some remote chance you're reading this. And if you didn't send it, I ask, why not? Hm?
P.P.P.S. Yes I opened what appears to be a gift early. I wasn't sure what it was. If it was a mail bomb it certainly makes sense to have it go off before Christmas, so as to not ruin the ever-important Christmas morning.
P.P.P.P.S. Mystery solved. Let's just say it's a good thing I didn't eat the chocolate yet. And my initial guesses were only off by one.

Hitler vs. Plato

I had planned to write about how gearscore and racism are not at all similar, but Iapetes pointed out that gearscore is irrelevant these days. And I figure, racism is over too, so instead I decided to write about Hitler.

And logically, Plato.

It is from these old Greek guys like Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle that much of the Western world inherited reason, logic, and questions. Presumably the rest of the world does not yet have these things, having failed to study Greece.

If you've ever run into an obnoxious jackass who insists on asking obvious questions and claims that his goal isn't merely to be an obnoxious jackass, then you're probably familiar with the Socratic method. In theory this helps to bring out some deeper truth or challenge assumptions. In practice it tends to be an excuse to be an obnoxious jackass. Note that children are excluded from this rule since the first word they learn after "no" is "why", so they must be forgiven.

In contrast, there is Hitler. I'm sure we're all familiar with him as a man who bravely tried to unite and purify the white world and in the end was forced to commit suicide to prevent capture by Slavs.

Which of course leads to the Great Battle of Logic.

On one side we have the old Greek guys who are more or less credited with the idea of logic and who have retained the credit through their after-life armies of professors who have ruled by the logical theory of "might makes right", which is a shorter way of saying "give them credit or I will fail you and you'll end up homeless on the street". And on the other side we have Nazis.

You might be asking, "what contribution have Nazis made to logic?" Of course you'd ask that. How about I just use an example.

Imagine that you want to reduce poverty. A logical, reasonable approach might be to analyze the characteristics of people in poverty, their situations, how they spend money, how they get money, where they live, that sort of thing. The general goal is to figure out the causes of poverty. Then formulate theories on how to remove the causes, attempting to separate symptom reduction and actual solutions. Weigh costs of implementation and benefits of various plans. Finally you may even attempt to implement some of the plans, most likely those which are cheapest or offer the quickest improvement. At this point some obnoxious jackass will come along and, pretending to use the Socratic method, ask why we should care about the poor at all, thereby proving that he is an obnoxious jackass. Well damn, so much for reducing poverty; it's all over. Or is it?

Call him a Nazi! Problem: solved.

Until of course he claims that your attempt to improve society is actually much like the plans of Hitler, ergo you want to kill 11 million Jews. In practice he wouldn't say ergo because he probably thinks ergo sounds gay. But the point is, he calls you Hitler.

And here we can see that logic has ultimately lost out to Nazis, a proxy war for the true war in which Hitler always beats Plato.

Hitler may have lost WWII due to his arrogance and racism, but he always wins arguments for the exact same reasons.