Monthly Archives: October 2005

Fall?

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Could it be? Have we actually achieved a state of weather that could possibly be considered somewhat fall-like in nature?

Almost, my friends. Almost. When I walked out of the house this morning it was nice. It wasn’t that smack in the face “good weather is here!!” feeling, but it was close.

Of course, Tropical Depression Wendy is threatening to pay a visit to us some time next weekend as well. So it is not quite yet safe to let the good times roll and relax in the comfort that Summer is past us.

There really isn’t much in the way of “positive” to sell people on Florida Summers these days, is there? Not that there ever really was.

Had a bit of guild drama in Warcraft this weekend. Several of our upper level members left the guild to join a larger “raiding” guild. Long story short, for those of you who aren’t involved in the MMO world, this means that they wanted to be part of a guild that has enough high level members to regularly access sections of the game that requires 20 or even 40 people to go at the same time. The understanding, even tempered part of me says that if that’s what they want to do they are welcome to move on with my blessing. The emotional side of me is, quite frankly, a combination of angry, hurt and offended. A few weeks ago I made the decision to disband the guild that I created and merge our members with the current guild. This was done in an effort to prevent this very thing from happening to both of our guilds. The thought was that, together, we could take two like minded organizations (we were both social, “family” guilds) and work towards being able to do some of those higher end raids without sacrificing the things that we held dear as players. In the process of doing so, we lost several members of our guild, including 3 of the higher end players. In this recent exodus we lost another 6.

Of those 9 players, 8 of them left because they wanted to access the higher end content. If we still had those 8 players we would have more than enough with the roster that we still have to access the 20 player stuff.

Am I the only one who sees the irony here?

I know it’s just a game, but it’s hard not to take this stuff personally. You spend hours and hours working with these people, mutually helping each other. I can think of at least one occasion when I have either passed on items that have dropped or gone out of my way to help every one of the players who left. This is not to say they haven’t done the same for me, but that’s the point. The whole time we were working towards a mutual goal of improving all of our characters for the benefit of the guild, and they have taken all of that hard work and given it to someone else. What’s worse is that those things we passed on we still need. Yeah, they say they will still help. But they won’t. Not because they don’t want to – because they will be raiding. Hell, I went to the web site of the new guild this morning to see what they were about. They have a 20 man raid scheduled every night this week in the same place.

Where do your old friends fit in there?

I mean, the people who didn’t come with us to the new guild are our real life friends and we still haven’t had more than a handful of opportunities to do things with them since they left. Why on Earth would these people who know us as nothing more than pixels on a screen go out of their way to be more accessible than our real friends have been able to?

On the up side, the morale of those of us who has left seems to have rebounded fairly quickly. Last night in Officers chat the vibe was very positive and optimistic. It’s a setback, but those of us that are left still have a common goal in mind. And to be honest, even with the losses there are still more high level players to group with in the combined guild than my guild originally had. So we haven’t lost anything in that regard, and there are a whole lot of players in the upper mid levels that will be joining us soon.

And plenty of room for any of you who would like to join us. 🙂

Is it stupid to get upset over a video game? Yeah, to an extent. Unfortunately, this is the nature of a game that actually involves other people. Hell, we met xanyboi while playing City of Heroes. This is a man who lived in our house for over a month, and who currently trusts me with the key to HIS home and his security code while he is out of town. Our friendship was entirely grounded in a random meeting in a game. From that we found we had common friends and common interests, but had it not been for the game we never would have met in the first place.

So it’s more than just a game. It’s…

Hell, I don’t know what it is.

It’s fun, that’s for sure. Even with the occasional bump in the road. That’s what makes it so good, really. The other people. They just make it suck sometimes too.

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So it’s been a while since I’ve made a post with any significant personal content. Figured I’d do a little thought dump here on this fine Saturday afternoon and catch all of you up on what’s been going on in my life.

Been sick since Thursday. I seem to have gotten over the worst of it at this point, but waking up is still a horrid experience. It’s like during the sleeping hours my body stops protecting me from the aches and pains of the illness so that when I wake up I’m a mass of sniffles, aches, and general bitchiness. After an hour or so I feel fine. Very odd. Sleeping a LOT too.

Maybe that’s why I’m achy. I’m sleeping too much.

Have seen some great shows recently. Caught the preview of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair De Lune a few weeks ago, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Much of the show reminded me of the first night I spent with netgoth, to be honest. I even cracked about that afterward. I guess you can say that, like Johnny, I’m a bit intense.

Also got to see Henry Rollins do a spoken word show earlier this week. Just…wow. This is the third time I’ve seen him do this kind of show, and he keeps getting better. The only downer of the evening was this INCREDIBLY drunk woman who was sitting behind us and making a complete ass of herself. Talking, yelling, and being generally obnoxious. She even rubbed my head at one point and asked what I was wearing under my kilt. K. finally complained to the ushers about her, and she got a “talking to.” She left not too long after that. Not sure if she was asked to or if her friends made her. I heard one of them make a comment about having to come back the next day, so I think they may have worked there and wanted to make sure their job wasn’t put at risk.

After she left, it was a joy. Especially since we got to share it with J. and etcet.

I’d talk about stuff in Warcraft, but I know most of you could care less. So it goes.

Went and had lunch with my Mom last week out at Ricky T’s, which was nice. Haven’t spent a lot of time with her recently, but with the holidays rapidly approaching I know that’s going to change.

Yay for the Fall! Party season!

A. and his baseball team have been doing great this season, winning pretty much every game they have played. I think he’s getting better personally, but he’s limited in that by the fact that he is made to play “outfield” most of the time.

Outfield – The black hole they stick you in when they don’t think you’re good enough to play a “real” position.

I can’t quite figure out how to feel about this. It makes me angry to see him relegated to those positions, but at the same time I know that if he wants to move infield he needs to practice and get better. It’s the fine line between being a protective parent and doing what is best for him as a person. I trust the coaches, though. They are good men, and they work very hard to build up the boys instead of bringing them down. So as it stands, I’ll just sit back and do what I can to help him on my own.

New coffee place up on Park Street called Jitters. Might try it out if I feel better tomorrow.

My Uncle Mike from Seattle called me the other day. Nothing major, just calling to catch up. Was nice to hear from him, and made me pine for a trip to Seattle (as talking to him always does). I’m also craving a trip out to Vegas again. One in which I didn’t have to get up at 6AM every day.

Goth Cruise can’t come soon enough. Need a vacation. A real one this time. No computers, no early morning wake ups, no house cleaning, no kids. Just friends and fun.

Oh yeah. I’m digging it.

Haven’t fully decided on what I wanna do for my birthday yet. A party of some sort, of course. Dinner out? Oh yes. Would like to go up to Jacksonville on the 5th to catch the Merry Widow/Cruxshadows show, but not sure I’ll be able to swing that one.

All in all, life is great. Money is tight, but the bills are paid.

And Avenue Q is some funny shit.

Freedom Speech – Just watch what you say

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I think one of the biggest frustrations I have with the internet in whole is the proliferation of misguided or flat our wrong interpretations of our constitutional freedoms.

To be blunt – They don’t apply here.

At all.

The large majority of internet content is hosted on privately owned servers and accessed via privately owned physical networks. You have no right to access this content. The content providers have the right to give you access to it, and you have the right (within the confines of legality) to access this information, but that is where the line is drawn.

Some people don’t understand this arrangement, so I’ll try to clarify. Without using the “fire in a crowded theater” analogy.

Ok – Let’s put this in the scale of my little world. This is my live journal. For all intents and purposes, my LJ is a private enterprise paid for and controlled by me. I am the arbiter of the content contained within. I give my readers the option of posting comments, but I have the ability to remove such comments without notice or warning whenever I wish. I have violated no laws here. This is MY space.

Now…let’s say I’m standing on a street corner saying the same things I say in my LJ. If one of you were to come up to me and say something I didn’t like, I have no right to tell you that you can’t. I can’t stop you, and the law will not interfere unless you are being a threat or a nuisance. In other words, I can’t keep you from respectfully disagreeing with me, but you can be arrested if you are screaming at the top of your lungs that I’m a fucking moron. You aren’t being censored for what you say, in that case, you’re being arrested for being a disturbance.

This is why Martin Luther King, Jr. taught civil disobedience. If you’re going to get arrested, it should be for violating an unjust law – Not for being an asshole.

There has been talk recently about Blizzard violating the Fourth Amendment by installing spyware along with World of Warcraft.

Let me be clear again – The people who are saying this do not understand what the Right to Privacy is.

If you were required, by law, to install World of Warcraft on your machine and, in doing so, have your personal usage information transmitted to the government that would be a violation of your right to privacy. But you aren’t. You do not HAVE to play World of Warcraft. You don’t HAVE to agree to the Terms of Service that state, quite clearly, that Blizzard will monitor the activity of your machine while you are playing the game. The Constitution Of The United States Of America does not, in any way, guarantee you the right to play World of Warcraft.

Our Freedoms, by and large, are controlled by private enterprise. Like it or not, there is very little we do outside of our own personal space that cannot be censored in some way by the people who own whatever medium we are doing it on.

Let’s not forget one other thing – Everything you do on the internet is tracked, and can be reported to the government. Again, private enterprise is involved here. My content is served to me by Road Runner, and if at any point they want to tell the Feds that I’ve been looking at clown porn sites they are more than welcome to. I did so on their servers, and what they do with that information is up to them. To their credit, in several cases when providers were asked to provide this information they have refused to do so out of concern for the privacy of their customers, but that was entirely their prerogative (and largely influenced by not wanting to lose business, I’d imagine). When that has happened the fed had to go to court to gain access to the information.

Or just use the Patriot Act.

Ahem…you wanna talk about violations of freedom?

Different subject…

So yeah – If you’re playing World of Warcraft Blizzard is spying on you. There is no crime here. No foul. The fact that they are doing so is clearly outlined in their Terms of Service, which you have to agree to if you want to play the game. If you’ve read it you have no reason to be surprised, and if you agreed to it without reading it you have no right to complain. Besides, if you didn’t trust them with your personal information why would you have given them your credit card numbers in the first place????

Bleh…

Hahhaah! I made a big post about freedom and turned it into a post about Warcraft! And you all thought you were getting real content! Suckers!!!

Yeah, verily….The question was asked….

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What do you want for your birthday?

So here are some suggestions. And if you use the Amazon links I get a little something back too! Hooray, Capitalism!

Mallrats 10th Anniversary Edition
Calphalon Contemporary Stainless 12-Inch Flat-Bottom Wok
Tickets to The One Man Star Wars Trilogy
Tickets to Wicked
Jobsite Season Tickets
Runecloth (if you know, you get it)
An Evening With Kevin Smith. The DVD, you freaks!
Paint it Black – A Guide To Gothic Homemaking by Voltaire

Umm…that’s some stuff. I’ll probably think of more later.

Books – Kitchen Crap – Music – Tickets to cool shows – Anything World of Warcraft related – All good bets.

Then I was inspired. Now I'm sad and tired.

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It is just over a month now until my 33rd birthday. I have often joked recently that it is my Jesus birthday because that is how old Jesus was when he was crucified. I suppose at some point I got a giggle out of the possibility of living longer than the Messiah, but it’s really just become one of those things I say now simply because I have said it so often already. The idea became the institution, as it were. Be that as it may, I was reflecting on the upcoming anniversary of my appearance on this little planet, and it occured to me that my feelings about it have more to do with Jesus then they previously had. The Jesus of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar that is.

The title of this post comes from the song “Gethesemne.” For those of you unfamiliar with the musical, this particular song is one in which Jesus is making his appeal for God to take the responsibility of having to die away from him. At this point in the show, all of the divine is stripped from Jesus and we see him for what he really is – A man sad, scared man who really doesn’t want to die but is ready and willing to do so. Despite the fact that Pilate is my favorite role in the show, this is one of my favorite numbers.

I certainly don’t relate to all of the themes presented within the song. I’m not carrying the eternal souls of the world on my shoulders, nor is anyone planning on nailing me to a tree in the morning (at least, not that I am aware of). But the sad and tired part? Yeah, I get that.

It’s kind of funny how you never think you’ll be the person complaining about the “kids of today” but you end up doing just that. Here is the thing that you don’t figure out until you experience it first hand, though. It has nothing to do with clothing or music or hair style. It isn’t about sex or drugs. It isn’t a matter of coolness.

I am not entirely sure that I am processing this in the way I wanted to do so, but I am in a mood to write this morning so I will stick it out and see what happens.

I understand now why there is a disconnect between generations. It’s because there comes a point when younger people start to make you sad. Not sad because you want to be like them, no. Sad because at one point you were and you realize now how utterly wrong you were about the world.

The most recent example I have seen of this took place on a community that, as of this morning, I no longer belong to. It is a Goth community, and a few children have taken it upon themselves to ridicule the people who are members of it. They have started a GoHoWa (Gothic Holy War, taken from the Aryan Nation RaHoWa – Racial Holy War), and their targets are apparently anyone who they perceive to be an ingenuine Goth. I’m really not inclined to go into the specifics of their case (which on some levels is quite valid) because it doesn’t matter. I’m really not even all that concerned with the people whom they have offended. This is the internet, and if you haven’t learned to filter out the assholes from your perception you really shouldn’t be here because there are more of them then there are of you.

No, what bothers me about this post is the people behind it. Specifically the fact that some day they are going to wake up and realize how utterly and completely horrible they were – and they are going to regret it. They are going to wish they could go back in time and reverse what they had done, and of course they will not be able to.

What’s worse is that regardless of how certain I am that this will be the case, I would never in a million years get them to see that it is true. They’d laugh. They’d talk about how silly people on the internet were, and how they deserved to be knocked down a peg. They’d talk about how Live Journal doesn’t really matter, and about how anyone who thought it did needed to get over themselves.

Here’s the truth of things – Dragging others down never helps you. Ever. It is, at the best, a temporary high. If you have any kind of conscience, or ever develop one, at some point you’ll regret the cruel things you have done in your life.

There have been people in my life who have practically begged me to tear them down, and I have obliged them. Now? I feel like crap for it, and I have often let these people take advantage of that guilt in order to prolong my exposure to their horrid behavior.

I’m a softie, I suppose. My moments of cruelty are now generally limited to a select few individuals who share in my occaisonal cynicism and are almost never revealed to the victims of said cruelty. I vent, it’s done, and it never touches the intended victim.

When I see people doing the opposite, I am sad.

I see how fucked up the world is, and how so many people want to put up their blinders to the truth, and I am tired.

The world is a mean place, and it is bringing me down. Negativity is winning. Doom and gloom is the order of the day. It doesn’t seem like anyone wants to be happy anymore. There is always some reason to be down. Something bad to say. Even when things are good they are bad.

It’s everywhere.

There aren’t enough people out there clapping their hands and saying they believe in Faeries, and as a result Tink is dying.

This is what getting old is like.

This is why our parents distanced themselves from us, and this is why we are distancing ourselves from the youth of today. As we get older, we start to see the world for what it really is, and the fact that we cannot get that knowledge through to them no matter how hard we try makes us close ourselves off.

Well, I’m quite the moper this morning, aren’t I?

And yet…

And yet…

There is still part of me that clings on to optimism. There is still part of me that says we can all be happy, if we just try. That says we can all get along. That says we can find a way in this world that doesn’t involve bringing other people down.

It just has to start somewhere.

It hast to start with me.

And you.

Do something nice today. Even if it’s only for yourself. Look in the mirror and smile. Say “Hi, it’s nice to see you!” Say hello to a stranger. Call a friend you haven’t spoken to in a long time. Do something, anything. Just do something positive.

And do it again tomorrow.

Make your little part of the world nicer.

I’m going to try.

Yep. That post was all over the map like Mr. Magoo behind the wheels of a Tractor Trailer with no brakes. Ah well. Not like you guys have gotten any real content from me in a while. Enjoy it!