Connectedness
I finished Harry Potter 7 on Monday. You’ll find no spoilers in this entry – I’ll just say I found the book satisfiying, and leave it at that.
Both the forums for World of Warcraft and my LiveJournal Friends had to declare spoiler bans, and I’ve had to politely interrupt friends and co-workers to avoid hearing too much. I still accidentally read a leak or two, though nothing to ruin my fun. (I had decided that even a complete spoil wouldn’t kill it for me – little of the book truly surprised me – I felt more curiosity about the journey than the destination, if you get my meaning.) Still, it took effort to avoid knowing more than I wanted. Somehow, my separate worlds of WoW, LJ, NASA, and my local friends circles all became united by this series finale, and there was Potter discussion in every direction.
As the days move forward, it seems to become harder and harder to keep separate all the little facets of my life. Without my involvement, my separate friends groups are merging, my interests are crossing over, my worlds are colliding. I think that the Borg used to be terrifying (pre-Voyager) because we know we are headed in that very direction; a race of minds linked instantly to each other, sometimes even when we’d prefer not to be; a race increasingly unable to escape our dependence on the tools we’ve created without drastic, unpleasant changes in who we are and who we want to be.
I’m not saying it has to be a horrible thing. It’s less stressful, in a lot of ways, to be able to avoid keeping up these compartments in my mind. As well, I’ve gained access to new opportunities and experiences this way. I don’t at all think that we must lose all we treasure about our humanity and become a race of blotchy drones with frickin’ laser beams on our heads; but still, every time I see someone reading e-mail on her Blackberry while talking into her Bluetooth earpiece, I wonder how close we are to the line at which Resistance Will Become Futile.
P.S. Wrote this up on the Newton, moved it to the laptop when I got home, then posted it to LJ. Beep.
Getting It Started
Question: Are you, the reader, familiar with both the recording artists a) Shirley Bassey and b) “Pink”?
If you are a member of that exclusive club, you would only be punishing yourself by not clicking “play” on the associated video.
Otherwise, you may still enjoy it, but you will sadly be unable to perceive the true levels of awesome presented here.
Furious slacking
I accomplished very little this weekend, which I think my body and soul needed badly; this morning I went into work quite bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, clearing a lot of tickets over the course of the day. Actually, I slacked a bit too much, as it was my turn to do dishes, dinner, and laundry this weekend, and I only managed 1.5 out of three. Have to do better on that.
I did have a social obligation Saturday, which was nice – got to see some old friends – but the weather had gifted this little cookout with 90-degree temperatures and 90-percent humidity. I was still chugging glasses of water all day Sunday trying to rehydrate myself.
Don’t know if it was related, but I had a weird dream Sunday morning. Someone had physically wrenched the display screen completely off a laptop, and it was my job to fix it with nothing more than a roll of Scotch tape. The dream ended long before I found out how best to approach this little issue.
Mirandala dinged 61 Sunday night, with shrewlet‘s invaluable assistance. Soloing quests in Outland is less practical than in Azeroth, though simply grinding wandering monsters can be good for XP. My last level was in February: at 5 months per, I should hit the level 70 cap around the time they’ve raised it to 90 🙂 Hardcore, yep, that’s me. (Okay, I’d move quicker if I played alts less often. What’s your point?)
Speaking of such – WoW fans are agitating for personal housing in the game. Can the FFXI and SWG players chime in here and tell me what’s so interesting about that? What can you do in your house? Can you watch the magic bard-in-a-box for extra resting credit, or cook special meals for +25 Health bonuses. or throw a party for your friends to get Diplomacy XP? Or is it just fluff? (I like fluff fine, mind you.)
The Running Joke
You’ve probably heard of the “Running of the Bulls”. A WoW guild this week did a “running of the beef”, where around 100 of them created level 1 Tauren (Minotaur) characters; they then ran them as a herd from the peaceful grasslands of their Mulgore homeland all the way the the forbidding, lava-spewing, Blackrock Mountain (an area where a level-one character has no business being). As anyone who’s played the game up to level 45 can confirm, Stranglethorn Vale was the worst bit 🙂
I’m really into this sort of thing – a bit of business which isn’t part of the game, which will net no experience points or loot, and yet was certainly hilarious for the participants. Virtual worlds need more fun like this! There are YouTube videos – search for AIE Bull Run.
Starr and I are a bit socialized out. We really appreciate our friends inviting us places, but we haven’t had a quiet evening at home in days – so tonight will be Azeroth and TV. (What with my <4 hours of play time per week, I think I'm safe from WoW addiction.) Dave and Jodi (ptownhiker & fixitup) were kind enough to invite us to see Pirates 3 last night at one of those dinner movie theaters. There were a lot of fun bits in the movie – plenty of times I laughed out loud – but eventually, the movie just didn’t make any sense. I’m training myself not to mind movie BS as much as I used to, but I still insist on internally-consistent movie BS. I have the terrible feeling that the writers scripted 3 hours of action and double/ triple/ quadruple/ quintuple/ sextuple/ septuple/ octuple-crosses (I’m stopping before the film did) and then suddenly realized that they were going to have to end the flick at some point.
Can’t say it was a wasted evening… it’s not like the movie was lousy, and the company was excellent.
On a quick note, they previewed The Golden Compass before Pirates. Now, the books impressed me little, and I wasn’t planning on going to see the big-screen version. However, there’s some fair acting talent on board, and the visuals in the preview were gorgeous. I may just go for the eye candy.
Flapdoodle!
This meme claims that the incarnation of the Doctor I’m most like is the Fourth. I can see that… goofy demeanor, odd choice of dress, encyclopedic knowledge of arcane subjects.
More interesting to me are the runners-up. The Third was the Bondian action-hero gadget-freak (yes on two, no on one), the Ninth was the charismatic but traumatized survivor, and the First was the cranky, eccentric, elderly genius on the run from his people. (Cranky and eccentric, perhaps.)
My poorest matches are the Tenth and Sixth, which I’m fine with. I haven’t quite warmed to the Tenth yet – he seems a bit flighty and unfocused; while the Sixth, bluntly, was an asshole.
I cast “Cone of Politeness”
On another subject, I played a few hours of WoW last night. World of Warcraft has a few different kinds of game servers: PvE, where you only battle other players if you and the other players choose; PvP, where if you enter certain areas, you can be attacked at any time; and Role-Play, where in-game conversations are expected to remain in the persona of your chosen character.
The point of all this is that I’ve begun yearning for a new kind of WoW server: RolePlay-21, where players don’t have to stay in character, but they all have to converse in-game with maturity, manners, and otherwise like people with fulfilling lives outside the Internet.
I’ll move all my characters over there like a shot.
Short fiction for today
This morning I read When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, by Cory Doctorow, linked to me by wilwheaton‘s syndicated LJ feed.
The last two paragraphs hit me hard, and I honestly needed a few minutes to recover. ‘Cause geez, I’ve suspected for some time that the secret to life, the universe, and everything is hiding right there.
Strong stuff.
Relax! Don’t Do It!
Taking a nice, quiet weekend this week. There are bunches of really cool people to hang out with down here, which is great… but on the other hand, one can get a little over-socialized. So last night, we watched Deadliest Catch and Good Eats, while today we shopped for scrubs for Starr, made a short trip to Barnes and Noble, and took a leisurely walk around the playgrounds and swimming pools near the apartment. The rest of the day will probably be WoW, or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, or something else as quiet.
Did you know that there are officially-licensed M*A*S*H and Grey’s Anatomy scrubs available to nurses? Now I want to dig for patterns and fabric to duplicate the ones Dr. McCoy would wear during surgery.
Getting two people to DragonCon and finding them places to stay is turning into an expensive proposition. 🙁 I haven’t given up yet!
Still having one Hades of a time finishing Terran Mission 9 in Starcraft. The cheat codes are calling my name, but I have stood firm this long!!
Are You Sure This Is the Atlanta Exit?
Cthulhu on a crutch. I am gobsmacked.
Keith “southernsinger” Brinegar, of White Plectrum, has been asked to be the Filk Guest Of Honor at DragonCon!
This may well be my first and only SQUEEEE! in my LiveJournal.
Now I HAVE to go down there. I gotta research hotel rooms tonight!!
This is wonderful!
Zombie HORROR!!
Yesterday, of course, was ‘blog like it’s the end of the world’ day. Several people I know were caught a bit off guard, especially when reading the better-written entries. I’m interested that most of the zombiepocalypse bloggers posted as if they expected to survive all this, and with convincing feeling rather than easy melodrama. Frankly, this was more fun than NaNoWriMo as far as I’m concerned.
But I wrote in mine about ‘going mad’ with the shock of what’s happening. I tried to imagine the other day a horrific event that would ‘drive me mad’. There’s not a lot I can imagine – I mean, I can imagine being terrified, sickened, appalled, but not driven insane by an event. The very sight of Cthulhu was supposed to do this, or the reading of his forbidden books; but I suspect that had more to do with the awful realization that such things could exist in a universe of which we’d pridefully assumed we were the supreme center.
Last week I read about a story involving a 100-foot-long house with a 110-foot-long hallway inside!!! For a while, i thought that might be my road – how would my scientific, skeptical mind embrace this physical impossibility? It might DRIVE ME MAD!
But maybe not. I have a built-in error-protection routine for these situations, which is to simply say “There’s something going on here that I don’t understand.” If I “know” that you can’t fit 110 feet of corridor in 100 feet of domicile, but I am forced by the evidence of my own measuring tape to concede that that’s what seems to be happening, I don’t need to shriek “That’s IMPOSSIBLE!” and run from the building, I need only admit that I can’t explain this, and start looking for answers.
A zombie can scare me, might consume me, but can’t make me admit there isn’t an explanation somewhere 🙂
