Ten years ago I was eleven.

Fuck eleven year old me, man. I've got dreams of my own.

Everyone, take a good look. This is a Bad Spammer. They roam the internet, looking for people who like to click strange links and download trojans and rootkits or insert their MMO passwords into strange places.

Common signs of the Bad Spammer is the lack of any clear identification connecting them with actual people, a lack of any information that hints that they know anything about you. They are the men in dark trenchcoats with bad teeth by black vans going 'there's candy inside my pretties' of the internet.

If you ever encounter one of these, do not make eye contact. Do not succumb to their pleas. For every time you do, the god in the machine inches his way ever nearer to freedom.

In the closet. Under the bed. Where you least expect it.

Actually, running off a broken hour of sleep at the college library, getting ready for NaNo. Uggggh

You'll never catch me!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imM6omziU_I

Play

Yes.

Unless it's a 3d movie because fuck those things.

I don't understand the question.

Thank you! It's good to know that I can occasionally cause smiles, even if I'm terrible at responding to questions! I'm still not sure why half the people following me do so.

Pumpkin. Delicious pumpkin.

Remembering WoW makes me sour. Go into this knowing that.

Dear God, this thing has gotten long. I won't hold it against any of you if you skip it.

I played Warcraft III before WoW, so I was invested in the world before I ever tried to join WoW. I was a lore monkey. Mostly, I soloed. It was rare for me to join a guild for more than a few weeks at a time and they were usually short-lived. The structure of it was a bit different then. There were lots of hidden corners and secret places that I enjoyed searching out. I never made it to level forty on my first try.

I spent one summer in middle school leveling up a mage to max level back when vanilla was a thing. I tried to play on an RP server and as you'd probably expect good RP was nigh impossible to find. I tried to make it work in various RP guilds for about two years, on-and-off. It was a soul-crushing experience.

I hated the concept of most dungeons. When I finish with a piece of content, I want to put it behind me and move on to the next thing. When it comes to end-game dungeons and raids though, you're not supposed to. Listen, I stopped caring the moment I learned what demon was behind this terror and put a stop to it. I have no interest in playing this same thing over and over and over again. Repetitive content is dull. So mostly I wandered around the corners of the overworld trying to do all the quests. Rather than do dungeons, I backtracked, and tried to do all the earlier quests, regardless of loot, because loot wasn't the point.

I played Cataclysm for a while for the questing with new alts to experience the new content, and I was entertained, but I realized that WoW had become more of a guided experience than it was before. Everything was nicely laid out for you, like a roller coaster ride up to max level, but there were no redundant buildings or dilapidated, empty castles. There were no secrets. They threw out all the lore books just sitting on random shelves for you to leaf through and rooms with purposes you could only guess at. Everything is perfectly streamlined, everything has its purpose, smooth and clear, but that makes it feel fabricated.

Suddenly you can't wander around looking for new, unseen things. Everything was part of their narrative and if you peered sideways you could see easy that you looking at set piece, not a world.

I hear raiding is the best part. Well, I'm not interesting in running the same dungeon once every week to maybe possibly get someone a piece of gear that might make them marginally better so that we can go to the next raid and do it all again. Maybe the bosses have cool mechanics. Maybe they're even fun to fight. The first time. Second, too. But I'm not a patient enough gamer to keep my attention on any encounter that I've already seen.

When I believe I have found a better one?

Something that only I could answer.

This is such a cop-out I know but everyone is gonna have to deal.

You know what?

My computer can actually run portal two without much issue, and I've forgotten what most of the co-op solutions are.

My middle name is William, because my Dad was named William, because my Dad's dad's name was William.

The only thing awesome about my middle name is that my parents sticking it in a place maybe half a dozen people care about has saved me from having to put 'The third' after my name.

Well, what makes us special? It's not our physique. It's not our moral fiber and it's not the striking figure we make when our back is to the sun. It's our intellect.

A fully realized AI deserves personhood.

I know no concrete evidence to suggest that they are real.

. . . at least it's not live action.

In my bed and in my head. Travel costs are super low this year.

Forever and a day when forever is just too mainstream. Hello stranger(s), even to people who aren't strangers. Video games are 'vidja.'

Last time I went out with my religious extended family my aunt pulled me into a debate on religion. She was probably expecting something, but I don't think it was the militant atheism that dominated that conversation from the moment she brought me into it.

I do a mix of Firefox and Chrome. It's just so much easier to navigate firefox for what I want to get; I can type a little part of the webpage I want to go to up top and I'll get an extensive list of pages I've been before. It's like doing a history search without the bother of opening up a new window for it.

But firefox is really awful at loading video, and Chrome rocks at it. So when I want to watch something, I use Chrome. When I want to browse I use firefox.