That guy who leaves the party and comes back and then pretends he never actually left...

It just leaves us thinking that he spent the past two hours in the bathroom.

Apparently at some point I stopped writing posts. I cannot imagine that it was because I had nothing to complain about. Here, a list:

• Requiring specific BGs for the legendary cloak
• PvP pet battles
• My inability to ignore cross-server
• Healing
• Not having three specs
• PvP having a gear grind
• Not being Horde (I admit it, I think male trolls and female blood elves look awesome)
• Cobalt nodes
• The next expansion (nothing in particular; I just get angry at change)
• My usual bank alt name being unavailable on Blackhand
• Healers who heal DPS who pull
• DPS being allowed to talk
• Groups that don't kill Ahune during the first submerge
• The valor cap during the Have Lots of Valor in-game event
• The lack of target dummies for healing

Where does one start? By putting that in another post, of course!

In the meantime, some positive things. I'll try not to make this a habit.

Despite three months to do so, I have not yet been fired. Madison has a lot of farmers markets. I met some cool people. I'm moving to a larger apartment. There is a bag of popcorn just out of reach, so that if I really want it, I can get it, but I won't waste it on a stupid whim (sorry, I might have just slipped into another complaint about badly-implemented 'accessibility'). And I'm still playing WoW, alongside a few other games.

PSA: Notepad is the greatest program ever created

Did you know that Facebook stores unposted posts? Like many sites, it uses scripts to store what you type into its fields, even if you do not post. Some sites use this so you can recover from problems. Facebook uses it to gather more data about its users. I'm trying to develop the habit of writing everything elsewhere first, then post only the exact thing that I want.

Web pages in general, and blog comment sections in particular, are not perfectly reliable. They may fail to accept your comment, losing it in the process. Who hasn't run into an impossible or misloaded captcha and lost their comment as a result?

Excel can be finicky about the data it will import and the way it handles it, resulting in fun problems such as an entire spreadsheet contained in a single cell.

Games may have hidden preferences that are not easily changed from within the game, but are sometimes necessary. Or they may be of the sort that requires a game restart to change, so you have to launch it, change it, and relaunch it. If only you could directly edit those preferences

There is a solution to this: Notepad. It's a built-in bare-bones text editor. Use it to write your posts before you submit them. That way you can edit out all your unflattering grammatical mistakes before Facebook can use them for blackmail. Use it to save your comments before Blogger can devour them. Did you know that Google's servers are powered by the energy of failed posts? It's just like how you could hook up a battery to your landline and then write your number on bathroom stalls to get free electricity. Paste your oddly-formatted spreadsheets into Notepad and it can often strip out the problems. In my experience Excel can easily import text-based spreadsheets, even if you don't think you actually changed anything. And finally, preference files are often just long text files and may even have good labels, so edit away, on a copy.

Or as my grandmother sang to me as a child,

Posting can be,
a nightmare for me,
so remember the keys:
ctrl-a (pronouced cu-ter-ul)
ctrl-c
and post
happily!

NBI: When the muse stops

The Newbie Blogger Initiative is over. Maybe that's some symbolism right there. There you are, writing high with your fellow initiates and people giving you topic ideas. Maybe you just started your blog and you've still got all that pent-up stuff to talk about. But it's running out, isn't it? The initiative ended and so did the initiative.

Uh oh.

For the record, I've been staring at this part of the post for a few minutes.
Don't Panic.


There is another pause here. What do I say?

Say something. You're going to work and presumably expecting to come home. Then what do you do? Play a game? Not play a game but wish you were? Which game? What will you do? There's a post. Too dull? Then ask why you want to play that particular game.

It doesn't have to be a new game. It could also be a retro game. It could also just be a game that you like. You know what I played a few weeks ago? Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the game that came out before Fallout 3, which came out before Fallout: New Vegas, which is not a new game.

But what could you possibly say that hasn't been said? See how it holds up over time. See how it compares to its successors. Maybe the game came out back when everyone was 10 years old and with a few years under your belt you realize that the plot of the game was ever so slightly totally racist. Maybe the social or political situation has changed and the game looks entirely different from the new context.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but that doesn't mean we've found it all, or remembered it. Remember that for the most part, great explorers didn't get there first or even second, rather, they got there first after someone forgot who actually had.

The Persuasive Power of a Soundtrack

A YouTube Channel
Loaded with music from Wrath
Resubbed a month

Haiku for all you
New Blogger Initiate
Almost end of month

Mommy, where do heroes come from?

Doone has the notion that we should publish our less-than-perfect posts, as a way to show new bloggers that we were all once semi-literate unshaven chimps. Apparently that is inspiring. So fine, here you go, here's a post that I was trying to make work, but just never quite clicked for me. It deserves to sit in purgatory among the hundred and a half others of its kind, but it has been shown a rare mercy. Some would be deleted, others beaten into shape, but this one just gets to go out and flaunt its less-than-perfectness. Shameful.

Until we get so far back that we're discussing the notion of time not existing, it's always the case that something had something before it and it came from somewhere due to something happening. In a general sense.

Or in particular, the characters we play came from somewhere. Between being born and the game starting there was something that happened that got them to be here, in a position that we care about what they do. Some games try to tell this back story, but usually they think they can do this by having you play it, at which point it is no longer the past and so we have to speculate a little further back.

A common trick is to just cheat a little bit. Make a generic character, indistinguishable from the nameless NPCs that you'll inevitably ignore or slaughter by the thousands. We're not going to ask for much detail because it is probably boring. There are no adventures to learn of, no prophecies that have been answered by your birth; you're just another bit of filler in the background. Conveniently, this is most people in real life, as outside of royal bloodlines none of us have any wonderful predestination.

Then make something happen to them which is them being neither ignored nor slaughtered. Maybe they're the sole survivor of some disaster. Or they're the random target of some human-shaped disaster. For this second one it's always popular to have a royal or some other beneficiary of inheritance pick on a nobody. The nobody can be you or it can be a family member or friend, thereby blessing you with the angry motivation needed to rise above your peers.

Now that that's over with, I suggest this: bury your shame. Bury it deep. Write it, write a lot of it, and then bury it away. Think of those awful posts as filters. Did you know that you can clean up water by filtering it through a swamp? Yep, turns out those disgusting slime creatures will pick up all manner of contaminants and heavy metals. That's why you shouldn't get rid of all the ugly swamps. But don't spend too much time in them either; let the dirty hippies deal with the mosquitoes. Let the draft folder be a way to filter out your half-assed ideas, stupid ideas, and inevitable wrongness, so that all anyone sees is pure, clean swamp water. I'm not good at analogies.

NBI: Where do you come up with all of those wonderful, creative, brilliant, amazing ideas?

Alright, Syp, I'll play along. Future bloggers, here you go. Here's where you can get all the ideas you could ever need, and the cost.

Try to fall asleep.

There is a horrible time during which your brain is freed of all distractions, but being addicted to them, generates distractions for itself, in the form of an endless stream of new ideas, which it will not allow you to not think about. As you fall closer to sleep it frees up more and more creative and brilliant ideas, so that the closer you are to sleep, the harder it tries to keep you awake.

In the middle of the night, after a few hours of failing to fall asleep, you write the post(s). Schedule it for the next morning so as to not appear crazy. Do not attempt to edit these posts, as they are already perfect and your sleep-deprived brain could not understand them anyway.

Essentially, it is this Dilbert strip from eleven years ago.

Why we do want to read your MMO stories

I stand by my previous post: I don't care what you're doing in your MMO.

The key is in the word your. The stories in the game, we have those covered. Those aren't your stories; they are the game's. Listing them as what you will do or just did doesn't make them your story, unless you're using the old "put the entire chapter in quotations and pretend I wrote the paper" trick from high school. Note that I never did that because I never learned to type and therefore, given my laziness, was unwilling to copy someone's book chapter.

Let's stick with the word your and get rid of your guild's stories too. We're not in your guild, applying for your guild, or friends with anyone in your guild besides you (we like you, though).

But your stories? Those are, for lack of a better word, good. Your stories work. Properly written, of course. The story that you create and experience matters. It is everything.

That story is feedback for the developers. It says that you hate something, even if you feel stuck running it every day (that's why you quit the next month). It says that you love something, even if you don't get to run it as often as you'd like (but it's worth the entire sub by itself). It says something that the player statistics cannot: it says intention, motivation, and feeling.

That story is a review for other players. It tells them what other players have experienced. They can learn from it, knowing what to expect. Guides sterilize the experience. Posts can bring it to life. That life may be good or bad and to write about either is to help players know what is coming. It helps players pursue that which they enjoy and avoid that which they do not. If I say that World vs. World reminds me of old Alterac Valley, despite being void of facts or analysis, that will clearly tell some people to rush toward it, and others to avoid it at all costs.

The feelings that come with a relaying of an experience can help other players with their perspective. It's easy to fall into one's own perspective and fail to see any other. It's not a lack of empathy, but of imagination. A post can nudge us out, show us a different way to see it. Dull may be relaxing; frantic, exciting; rushed, efficient. Maybe we'll see both at once. For example, during a round of champion farming I found myself feeling two feelings. I was in awe of the efficiency of it all as the zerg went from spot to spot, with pinatas popping with showers of whatever that yellowish shade is that is better than green. I was also annoyed at the pace of it, as a bit of loading lag meant a missed kill. What an awfully stupid place! Yet, how wonderful to see players working together for mutual benefit, calling out where to go if someone was lost or new (I was both). Worst case scenario I skipped ahead to the next spot and waited a few minutes.

Sadly, that last bit was not from a post that someone wrote. Rather, I thought of it myself but couldn't post it. How could I? I'd said that no one cares about those stupid sorts of posts. Thankfully, my terrible writing left me a wonderful loophole, or perhaps merely refinement of meaning, to explain that we play more than what is scripted, and that's the whole fun of it all.

I'm a terrible MMO blogger

I don't think it's a leap to say that if you're going to write well about a game or genre you should play or have played that game or genre. Recent experience is important too. Which all adds up to me being a terrible MMO blogger. This is not a new thing.

I've never been an MMO player. You heard that right, in whatever voice you use to read this blog. Hopefully it's not too whiny.

I played World of Warcraft for years. I've tried some MMOs. But I've never really played them, gotten deep into them, worked out all the little bits and community.

Of course WoW is an MMO, which would seem to make me an MMO player, for having played it for so long. Yet I see it as primarily being WoW, a genre unto itself. Why else would there be the WoW tourist who wanders away to look at these others games, yet never stays? Surely other MMOs have something to offer. Maybe they're newer, prettier, have slightly more suitable mechanics (an individual thing, of course).

The factor there is that they, like me, are not  MMO players. Rather, they are WoW players. Of course there are many MMO players who play or have played WoW and will play other MMOs. I don't think I'm one of them.

This could be due to entirely different factors. Social factors. While everyone plays or has played WoW, other MMOs have not had the same broad audience. If I go to one of the other games I may find myself alone. Of course there will be other players, but they are strangers and those are terrifying. They're like zombies: they look human, but are dangerously different. Some of them run quickly too. Most don't bite as often.

I'm disabling anonymous commenting

I prefer to allow it so that people can say their bit without needing to set up another account.  I don't recall having any problems with anonymous trolls.  But lately I've been getting a lot of spam.  Since posts older than three weeks are automatically moderated, I was catching all of it.  Then this week I saw it get through the filter and into recent posts.

Because of that, I'm turning off anonymous commenting.  I will turn it back on eventually; maybe the filter will have improved by then.  In the meantime, I'm sorry to anyone who cannot comment.

Not a bang, but a whimpered "Goodbye"

I started this blog to talk about WoW.  I branched out slightly to talk about other games, many of which no one played or cared about.  That's how I roll.

My first post was February 12, 2008.  That means that I've been blogging longer than I was in high school or college (but not both).  Those had start and end dates, times when I had to have figured it out and regurgitated it and then I'd get a piece of paper and maybe a handshake.  Blogs don't have that.  I haven't figured it out.  I'm still working on it.  By analogy, I think that means I'm that person working a dead-end job who is going to take night classes to finish up his degree.  But never will.

WoW changed, I did as well, and those changes were not complementary.  The result was that I left WoW.  A couple friends brought me back.  I left to play Guild Wars 2.  Sadly, I left on my own and that died off as well (not saying GW2 is dead).  For weeks I've been meaning to get back into it, to play again, to explore and even try some dungeons.  Sadly, that all turned out to be too difficult.  Mentally I've been too drained.  I'd hoped to log on a few days ago and check out some Halloween content, but there was a patch and when that was done downloading I was tired and went to bed.

I've not stopped gaming, but I've stopped new gaming.  I've gone back to Civ IV and Call of Pripyat.  Neither of those are new, neither of them are MMOs, and neither of them are inspiring me to write grand posts.  Well, I do have one that I keep trying to write about the Civilization series and history education, but it keeps falling into pedantic droning and I close it and forget about it and weeks later make a new draft post.  I could probably keep 'blogging' for a few weeks just by posting my failed Civilization posts (slight exaggeration).

You've probably picked up that I'm limping toward something and that that something is that I'm probably out of ideas and out of content.  In other words, probably stopping with this blog for a while.  Probably I have a problem with qualifying my statements too much.

I'll still be around commenting and reading, but that's about it for the foreseeable future.  So, I'll call this a goodbye.  Thanks to all the great bloggers.  No thanks to the terrible ones.  And biggest thanks of all to Larisa, whose linking and commenting and referencing is probably 90% responsible for this blog being a slightly bigger insignificant blip, with another 5% being split between a bloggers with large audiences, 3% to hilariously bad Google search terms and results (Skyrim porn edition is still top), 2% to various WoWInsider writers who linked me (Thanks, Allison), and finally 1% to me for writing a lot of words.  It's pretty awesome being in the 1% and getting all the credit.

Bye!

P.S. I have a more politically-oriented blog over at Delusions of Truth.  Sometimes I talk about science as well.  It's not always relevant to the current news cycle and comes with a liberal dose of liberal bias.  I try to post about once a week.
P.P.S. I snuck this edit in after the first comment.

Regarding spam comments

I have a spam filter on.  I forget to check it often enough.

 It apparently caught some comments. Coreus, Mana Manipulator, Laura, and Umrtvovacz all had comments eaten in the past few weeks (no clue about further back, I think they get auto-deleted after that).  Sorry about that.  They're up now.  Very late.

With that in mind, if you leave a comment and you don't see it, send me an email.  If I delete a comment I will almost always leave some sort of response such as "no trolling", in a terrible bit of hypocrisy, and unless there are many such comments, I leave it only in the "this comment has been removed by an administrator" state, rather than the super-deletion that makes it as if it was never there.

Sometime this week I'll get Guild Wars 2.  Then I can begin making unwarranted comparisons to WoW!  Someday, when another game comes out, maybe GW2 will be my go-to game for bad comparisons.

Thanks for all the comments!  Except the spam comments, I don't want to visit your website.

Second-guessing ourselves

I've noticed that we as bloggers have a tendency to second-guess ourselves.  We have an idea or opinion and write it down, but before we hit publish we get all worried.  Did I forget a side?  A perspective?  Am I being balanced and objective or just claiming to have the absolute truth and moral high ground?

It's all quite discouraging to see that.  I say we should just go ahead and put out our opinions, right or wrong.  Just like relatives at a Thanksgiving dinner.  Excluding Canada, because they celebrate Thanksgiving wrong and are too polite.

Though I don't actually have much evidence for this.  There is me and my ten million drafts.  Probably less.  I should confirm that figure before I post this.  Sometimes I chat with Syl and she tells me that I second-guess myself too much, but that's probably just her trying to trick me.  You know how those Europeans are, all pretending that they don't speak English no matter how loud I talk and other things like that.

I don't want to just jump out on a limb and act as if my experience is common or representative.  This needs more analysis, more thinking, maybe some other perspectives, such as people who think we're underthinking, or single or triple-guessing.

This made so much sense before I started writing it.  Note to self, don't hit publish until you've given it a few days to work out the bugs.

All the ways that WoW changed me

Syl of Brown & Pink Monkey's has a post up about all the ways that WoW has changed her. I'm not too good for a bandwagon, or anything else, so while you're at it, imagine that you opened this post because you saw a scantily-clad attractive young woman in the post and only clicked to get a bigger picture.


I've not played much outside of WoW, dabbling in a game here and there, so I've seen the AAA titles, but not gotten much into them.  So I can't really comment on what was different about WoW, beside somehow having a different feel, perhaps the graphics or class mechanics just fit me better.  I tend to find myself turned off by attempts at realistic graphics for people, because they're extremely hard to do, and consequently, fall short, or just a little too far into that uncanny valley.  Fonts are another issue, where I often found myself struggling to read those in other games, which would pull me out of the world, leaving me disoriented and not eager to return.



I can't really say what of WoW changed me in terms of MMOs, because again, there was no MMO before or after WoW.  Maybe that's what changed: I might have explored many worlds otherwise, but by having one which was so dominant, with friends and internet resources dedicated to it, I stayed in one place.  This might have been for the worse, since it meant that I was not used to change, so that as WoW transformed itself in mechanics, social aspects, and then the world itself, I was unprepared.  Maybe players who had more variety would have taken it in stride, or seen alternatives and left even sooner.

Superficially, I think WoW has had some impacts on me.  I've inherited its language, not necessarily words that it invented, but that's where I learned them.  Many concepts came from it (again, it was my source, not necessarily the originator), such as dance fights and the absurdity of mechanics that only make sense when explained rather than seen, by which I mean mob mechanics which would not be readily apparent by battle, but require outside guides to understand in any useful manner.  It was a while before Tuesdays stopped being my Sabbath day.


WoW itself wasn't the biggest change.  It was the people I met.  One of my close friends I met on the forums of all places, where I was the troll shaman on the paladin forums (the troll shaman Klepsacovic was the first character I ever made, knowing only that trolls looked cool and shaman sounded like a nice way to start, being able to do a bit of everything).  Two other friends I met in guilds and still talk to.  And even more I met through the blogosphere, such as the previously-mentioned Syl.  As an introvert, WoW was a great thing, a place where I could fit in as a loser of a college student.  Until the community shifted, I had some notion of where people stood, and where if things were perhaps too much srs bns, that was fine, because we were all on the same page with it.  Different people are playing now, and that's fine, but it's not the place for me anymore.  I'm sometimes a bit sad about that, but loss is inevitable.


Stemming from the blogging about WoW was an increased appreciation for writing.  I hated writing in high school.  It was a torturous process of being forced to write about something I didn't care about and consequently, didn't know much about either.  WoW and gaming gave me another chance at it, showing me that I could write about something I knew and understood and that researching a subject could be fun, making the eventual writing even better.  I think my writing has improved, but as importantly, my willingness to write has increased.  Even if I do not particularly care for a subject, I can at least learn about it and write about it, without hating it.


In conclusion, this is the end of the post.

Thanks, Syl!

You might have noticed that this blog is a bit less ugly.  That's thanks to the urging of Syl of Raging Monkey's, a great deal of profanity on my part (code is hard, especially when you know next to nothing), and Syl making the nifty new header image, based on a wallpaper from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Watch me ruin my blog IN REAL TIME!

If anything goes wrong, blame Syl.  If anything goes right, it's because I'm a genius.  In the meantime, entertain yourself by watching random elements change and periodically, break.

Or watch paint dry.

[edit] I've changed the columns a bit so the posts are wider.  Now the lines that used to divide the columns are in the middle of nowhere and I have no clue where they even come from. If anyone has any suggestions on that, I'd be grateful to see them.

BBB's Writing Challenge

He gone and posted a challenge: http://thebigbearbutt.com/2012/03/16/i-throwdown-a-writing-challenge/
And then reminded us about the challenge: http://thebigbearbutt.com/2012/03/20/writing-challenge-goes-live-tomorrow/

So here's the deal: This post is a dummy post just so I can make the link. Nothing in here until tomorrow! In fact, this post just might vanish. POof! oOf. Just like that. So let's see here what Blogger makes for my link.

Now ma'am, I didn't mean no innuendo by that. I merely was suggesting that the thin packaged meat product was full of water and oil, pleasing to the palette. It had nothing to do with the brightness of this burning pitch on a stick that I was carrying. I can assure you I meant nothing when I suggested when your eyes were like interstellar plasma, except in their tendency to blind me with their radiance.

I... I suppose I should not disguise it any longer. I would be struggling to no avail if I tried to pretend that as we decend down this deep hole that I was not thinking some thoughts. I keep twisting my words all around to try to not say what I been trying to not say.

Aw shucks.

Juicy Slender Vain Shaft Torch Star Hidden and there I said 'em all now, flat out just like that, are you happy?

Trolling is serious business, Keredria

This was going to be a comment on your post, but then I figured, "hey, post counts are the thing of the week, so why not boost that?"

Pretty pissed (though I should have been more saddened) that there are people who have to make low, personal attacks on those who don't agree with them. I guess either to make themselves feel better or because they don't have any substance to actually respond to opinions

Being "right" or "ethical" are abstractions with little day-to-day value to an individual. Winning arguments by never ever stopping talking, that has an impact. It boosts self-esteem and can get you a lot of profitable attention. Since most people are concerned about practicality rather than morality, due to eating practicality rather than morality, they will tend to shout until you give up.

Though I still stand by my assertion that such low handed comments are not only unnecessary, but doing it via Twitter where they may not see such comments is downright cowardly. If you want to be a bitch, have the balls to do it to someone's face. Not everyone follows everyone else on Twitter.

What is "to someone's face", digitally-speaking, is a tricky thing. Obviously if I am in an email exchange with someone, that is "to their face" and if I am in a private exchange with someone else, that is not "to their face." What about an @personIhate? Or a #personIhate? The first gets them the tweet even if they don't follow, but depends on them knowing about the Interactions/Mentions and checking them recently enough to be able to respond, something I didn't know about for an embarrassingly long time. Perhaps hastags are just a weak pretend-"to their face" and just tweeting into the tweetosphereverse is the equivalent of calling them a slut on a bathroom wall that they might use at some point and therefore see. My point is that it's a little murkier than you make it seem.

"It's just a WoW blog."

Sure. It is. But no! Wake up tomorrow and imagine your blog is gone. Are you going to shrug your shoulders and say "meh"? Or are you going to be a little tiny bit upset, perhaps more upset than you would be over "just a WoW blog"? I'm guessing the latter. Beyond your own personal attachment to your own blog, I don't much like the "just a WoW blog" concept in general. Is this all of great national importance? Certainly not. But it is of personal importance and it is of cultural importance. I'm sick of seeing the "it's just a game" thing tossed around every which way to trivialize any differing opinions. A raider tells a casual to quit whining because it's just a game and the casual tells the raider to chill out because it's just a game and meanwhile a form of entertainment enjoyed by millions of people is all just a game and if anyone takes it the slightest bit seriously we start questioning whether they suffer from some sort of mental illness or social impairment. Somewhere there is someone who is very concerned that the wood that he uses for model ships is of lower quality and to a complete outsider that may sound silly, but who the fuck are we to tell him to shut up because "it's just a silly ship"?

I'm not going to suggest that it is ideal to have so much time and mental energy devoted toward hobbies and entertainment when national elections in the US don't break 50% turnout with even fewer people following the races. There is an argument to be made for a different distribution of time. But don't fuck with entertainment. That's how you get revolutions and I am not in the mood for one right now.

Furthermore, I'm really getting sick of people linking "immature and petty and ridiculous" and "hateful and full of vitriol". A person is perfectly capable of being immature and petty and ridiculous without being hateful and full of vitriol. Don't link the troll looking for a laugh with the guy who sincerely believes that birth control is for whores. Did I just get political? No, I did not. I've been political this whole damn time, I just happened to mention an issue that we think is "political", as opposed to being "social" or "health-al", while somehow the earlier concept that people focus on day-to-day survival at the expense of ethics is not political. If anything, it should be the reverse.

While we're on the subject and I'm getting angry, what's with "don't talk about politics"? What sort of stupid social rule is that? I can understand religion, since ultimately religion is based on personal believes about that which cannot be measured until someday something happens about which I will make no particular claim. Politics should not be a religion. That's the danger when we put it in the "don't talk about or question this" realm. If you think a certain tax policy will have a certain effect on the economy, that's not a matter of faith or belief, it's something that we can, with varying degrees of uncertainty and error, test or at least predict. It only gets worse over time, because as we push politics further and further away from conversation, we lose our ability to talk about it politely. It's like "the talk". I don't think it will ever be entirely without awkwardness when parents give "the talk", but maybe if we talked about the subject of "the talk" a little more often it wouldn't be such an awkward subject steeped in strange imagery and obscuring language such as "the talk".

Something that heavily influences our economic futures, our freedom, and our survival, should not be shoved off to the side to be debated on TV sideshows and ten thousand dollar dinners. I'm not saying it will be pretty. We will, wait for it... disagree! Yes, we might have different opinions! Shocking. But wouldn't it make some sense to talk about those opinions, find where we stand, and maybe have some small chance of spreading a little bit of knowledge or a new perspective?

Can you imagine if we all thought it was impolite to express our opinions on other subjects? Can you imagine a WoW in which no one ever expressed an opinion on class changes? Or a TV show that no one could talk about? How about the food you're eating, can you say whether you liked it, or is that rude because someone else might not have enjoyed the meal?

It's perhaps naive to think this, but I suspect that politics could be a little bit less political if we didn't work so damn hard to not ever talk about it.

P.S. SEX SEX SEX "the talk" is about SEX can't we use the damn word? I'm sick of seeing "gender" when we're clearly not talking about how a person identifies themselves. The word SEX is not going to get children pregnant but having no clue what the hell is going on just might. My point is that abstinence-only sex ed is about as smart as abstinence-only internet. One of these days I need to write that post about why gay people would care about birth control.

The weekend drop, why is it gone?

I used to notice a clear pattern on my blog: more readers during the week, and barely any on the weekend. There are two obvious reasons for this trend: first, that I don't usually post on weekends, and second, that fewer people are at work on weekends and if they are, they are working to get something done very fast.

The drop seems to have vanished. Readership hit a low in December, but had been on the downturn for a while. Then the new year came and as best as I can tell, people made it their New Year's Resolution to read my blog. Well good for you! That's a much better resolution than "lose weight" or "stop being a huge jerk to everyone I meet", neither of which were my own resolutions. Obviously there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why readership increased, that, and the constant stream of people looking for Skyrim porn. Serious, people, what the hell? Go back to Mass Effect, I think that's coming out soon, and so far there are no associations between this blog and Mass Effect porn. Oh. Shit.

But along with this trend is a large increase on weekends. Almost so much that the once-distinctive 'bouncing ball' pattern is gone. If that made no sense, think of those time-lapse pictures of a ball bounding along a floor. It looked like that. Do you people have nothing better to do on weekends? Is this a sign of a terrible economic downturn, that you are forced to substitute sarcastic gaming blogs for three-day coke parties? I imagine that's what you all do for fun, or at least used to.

Is it even worse? Could it be that my readers have increased in number to the point that there would be many times more readers reading outside of work, so that the weekend was pushed way up, but that you all got fired, so now you aren't wasting time at work? I'm very sorry for your job losses, but maybe it was your own faults. Idiots.

The Nazis have won the vote

Is excessive hyperbole killing democracy?

Yes	11 (26%)
No	3 (7%)
Nazis	27 (65%)

Votes so far: 41
Poll close

Apparently 11 people think that overblown speech is a problem, but the even greater threat is that of the Nazis. Obviously this means that we should continue to call people Nazis, in order to counter the greater threat, and later on we can worry about whether this is destroying democracy .

New Blog Appearance

I changed a few things around here. Deleted some clutter. Changed some color. Got a new template which also knocked out my google code, so I missed several days of seeing how many of you came here looking for Skyrim porn. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? What part of "troll racials are overpowered" sounds like a porn site? Though incidentally, I recall a study (I'm using the term loosely) which found that, contrary to blood elves being 'gay', trolls actually were depicted more often in gay warcraft art, though I don't recall if they had done anything to compensate for trolls being out longer (zing). I have no idea why I remember that. But while we're on the subject, I also recall a study that found that children of gay parents were slightly happier than straight parents. I can only assume this is because of a total lack of moral standards, since as any Puritan could tell you, "A Penny Saved is a Penny Burned," referring to their practice of burning children who might become witches, often refereed to as "pennies".

Anyway, does anyone have any thoughts on the appearance? Better? Worse?

It's like my parents always told me: "If you don't have anything nice to say, it's because you're surrounded by losers. Point that out."

-Klepsacovic

P.S. "alexstrasza porno picture"? Also, why did someone have to specify "free skyrim porn"? Was he finding nothing but pay sites? Should I be terrified by the possibility that premium skyrim porn is a potentially commercially viable enterprise?