1. Went to lunch. We were going to see Ratatouille, but there weren't any afternoon showings.
2. Took a nap. I may have done this several times. It was a nappy, dozy day. (Largely because of #3 and 4.)
3. Read extensively in Arthur. Actually, I finished the reading for Arthur. If you listen closely, you can hear the rejoicing throughout the land.
4. Started writing the Arthur course; finished most of the first week.
5. Level 30 Human Paladin. Various Arathi & Hillbrad quests.
Now hear this: if you want me to sign your guild petition, don't just plop it up in front of me while I'm trying to do stuff. All of my characters are at least level 30, and only one belongs to a guild (and that's sort of an accident). My characters are doing just fine. Why am I, a player with a fair amount of experience, going to join your guild if you don't know that just thrusting your damn guild petition in my face is rude, or if you seem unfamiliar with the fact that putting a guild petition in front of someone at a mailbox is going to close the mailbox interface, where the person was probably trying to accomplish something, or if you seem unfamiliar with the fact that putting a guild petition in front of someone who is at a store or the bank makes it much harder to do what the person is trying to do.
Basically, why would I want to join your guild if you seem ruder, stupider, or less clued than I do?
There's also the basic question of why would I want to join your guild if you don't already have nine friends willing to sign your petition? You are apparently socially challenged and are only forming a guild so you can be the Guild Leader and stoke your ego. No, thank you.
Yes, I have been tempted to sign guild petitions for people paying for signatures. Yes, I know I could take your money, sign my name, and then quit the guild once it's started. What I've decided is that I'm not whoring my name, even though it's a pretend name in a game.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Friday, August 17, 2007
8/16: What I Accomplished Today
1. Went to lunch. Spent birthday gift card on new tennies.
2. Took a nap.
3. Pogo badges.
4. Made logistical phone calls. Blech. Big bore.
5. Watched Gigi. I love this dumb movie. As I was watching it, I also realized that it shares many of its assumptions about passion with the tradition of the medieval romance that I'll be dealing with in Arthur; this could be a more accessible route to the mindset. (One of the NetFlix reviews said, "How could they just train their daughters to sleep with men? It's not right." a. If you're ignorant about the centuries-old tradition of the courtesan, perhaps you shouldn't type in certain situations. b. I'm guessing this reviewer was never a female American teenager.)
6. Level 34 Draenei Shaman. Various Hillsbrad and Arathi quests. Dinged 35. Stats check and mail check. Started Level 30 Human Paladin.
7. Still working on Arthur.
2. Took a nap.
3. Pogo badges.
4. Made logistical phone calls. Blech. Big bore.
5. Watched Gigi. I love this dumb movie. As I was watching it, I also realized that it shares many of its assumptions about passion with the tradition of the medieval romance that I'll be dealing with in Arthur; this could be a more accessible route to the mindset. (One of the NetFlix reviews said, "How could they just train their daughters to sleep with men? It's not right." a. If you're ignorant about the centuries-old tradition of the courtesan, perhaps you shouldn't type in certain situations. b. I'm guessing this reviewer was never a female American teenager.)
6. Level 34 Draenei Shaman. Various Hillsbrad and Arathi quests. Dinged 35. Stats check and mail check. Started Level 30 Human Paladin.
7. Still working on Arthur.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
8/15: What I Accomplished Today
1. Went to a meeting on college-high school curricular articulation. Pretty good meeting.
2. Went to department office and turned in my copying for the first week of school. I am very smug about this, and I'm a little disappointed nobody bought me an ice cream cone to thank me.
3. New pogo badges. Finished 20% of each one.
4. Watched Jeff Corwin's Into Alaska and Build it Bigger. We like Jeff; his enthusiasm is infectious. Sometimes it sounds like (and forgive this gross image in advance) he's just 30 seconds from orgasm on an hourly basis, and maybe he should seek therapy for that, but we still enjoy his shows.
5. Level 33 Draenei Shaman. Various Hillsbrad Foothills quests. Dinged 34. Hurray.
6. I'm going to play the demo hours Deep Quest, today's BigFishGame, and Venetian, a new PopCap game, now.
2. Went to department office and turned in my copying for the first week of school. I am very smug about this, and I'm a little disappointed nobody bought me an ice cream cone to thank me.
3. New pogo badges. Finished 20% of each one.
4. Watched Jeff Corwin's Into Alaska and Build it Bigger. We like Jeff; his enthusiasm is infectious. Sometimes it sounds like (and forgive this gross image in advance) he's just 30 seconds from orgasm on an hourly basis, and maybe he should seek therapy for that, but we still enjoy his shows.
5. Level 33 Draenei Shaman. Various Hillsbrad Foothills quests. Dinged 34. Hurray.
6. I'm going to play the demo hours Deep Quest, today's BigFishGame, and Venetian, a new PopCap game, now.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
8/14: What I Accomplished Today
1. Prepared my photocopying (except for one document) for the first week of school. Feeling very smug about this. It took a long time.
2. We watched several comedy shows, largely George Lopez's comedy special on HBO. He's very funny, but the show is depressing to me overall; if those are the assumptions of most Hispanic men (which I know is an unfair assumption to make), no wonder the college's completion ratio for is so low for them. (One of his lines was something like, "To an Hispanic man, anything done correctly is.." and he used a not-very-nice word for "homosexual." His examples were very funny, and very in keeping with Hispanic men I have known, loved, and admired ("feo, fuerte, y formal"), but that sort of eliminates the possibility of education being a way out of anything, or even a serious option, for starters.
I think his observations on immigration are spot-on. I lived in the San Fernando Valley long enough to know that, without immigrants, a good percentage of whom are no doubt illegal, nicer neighborhoods will collapse in less than a week; there would be no clean and decent homes, yards, or children.
Three things in addition to the overall tone bugged me (and again, these do not lessen the fact that it was a funny show). a. He had a whole section about "Kids today wouldn't last an hour the way we grow up," and then he used his own kids as examples. Well, duh. Your kids wouldn't last an hour in the barrio where you grow up because your kids have a father with his own sitcom who is asked to do specials for HBO. You chose not to raise them where you grew up for reasons, and I'm betting they were damn good ones. By the same token, but for very different reasons, you wouldn't have lasted an hour in their world at their age. It seems disingenuous to change kids' exposures and then blame them for it. (And most of the things he was bemoaning that his kids wouldn't understand weren't all that fabulous in the first place: for instance, his kids wouldn't know what to do in a world where they aren't offered a whole Popsicle. Good. Tragic loss, that.)
b. The next section was berating his aunt, who does the proverbial "sheep in lamb's clothing" bit and lives in the past. Hmmm. Remember the section before? And what, precisely, were you doing then? Romanticizing and idealizing an earlier age? Yeah, you have a lot of room to make jokes about someone else doing this.
c. This is a strange point, and I know, at many levels, that this is wrong. Nevertheless, I think there's some validity to it. I keep thinking of my parents, who still live where I grew up. In the school system we attended, there were three black families. In the entire school district. It wasn't a big school district (my graduating class had 93 people in it), but figure that's 1200 kids in the school. Three families were black. One of those families only had one child.
In this community, I realized when I was in college that there was an Hispanic family. We hadn't known it at the time because frankly, we lacked the vocabulary to know we were supposed to think about it. But when I went to college and learned a little about diversity as an actual topic for consideration, I realized, "Hey! Steve, Judy, and Joyce were Hispanic!" The last name was Hispanic, and their skintone had been puzzling; they probably benefited that we lacked the background to understand their ethnicity.
Anyway, in a community like that, the only exposure most people are going to have to an Hispanic person is on television--and if the only show about Hispanic culture they choose to watch is this George Lopez show, their image is going to be skewed. (Well, actually, it will be very accurate--but only about a very limited portion of the community. You could make the same accusation in the other direction if people's only exposure to black people had been The Cosby Show.) Of course it's wrong to ask an individual to represent the entire group to which he or she happens to belong; it's unrealistic and foolish. On the other hand, at a basic factual level, for big chunks of America, George Lopez is the only Hispanic who's going to show up on the television semi-regularly. I'm a little disturbed by that.
4. Level 32 Draenei Shaman. Finished first round of Thousand Needles quests. Did some cleanup in Duskwood. Did the first batch of Stranglewhatever quests (including the first five hunter quests). Dinged 33.
5. Have a meeting tomorrow at 1, and I should go to school and turn in my copying. Not remotely interested in going to sleep, but I suppose I should.
2. We watched several comedy shows, largely George Lopez's comedy special on HBO. He's very funny, but the show is depressing to me overall; if those are the assumptions of most Hispanic men (which I know is an unfair assumption to make), no wonder the college's completion ratio for is so low for them. (One of his lines was something like, "To an Hispanic man, anything done correctly is.." and he used a not-very-nice word for "homosexual." His examples were very funny, and very in keeping with Hispanic men I have known, loved, and admired ("feo, fuerte, y formal"), but that sort of eliminates the possibility of education being a way out of anything, or even a serious option, for starters.
I think his observations on immigration are spot-on. I lived in the San Fernando Valley long enough to know that, without immigrants, a good percentage of whom are no doubt illegal, nicer neighborhoods will collapse in less than a week; there would be no clean and decent homes, yards, or children.
Three things in addition to the overall tone bugged me (and again, these do not lessen the fact that it was a funny show). a. He had a whole section about "Kids today wouldn't last an hour the way we grow up," and then he used his own kids as examples. Well, duh. Your kids wouldn't last an hour in the barrio where you grow up because your kids have a father with his own sitcom who is asked to do specials for HBO. You chose not to raise them where you grew up for reasons, and I'm betting they were damn good ones. By the same token, but for very different reasons, you wouldn't have lasted an hour in their world at their age. It seems disingenuous to change kids' exposures and then blame them for it. (And most of the things he was bemoaning that his kids wouldn't understand weren't all that fabulous in the first place: for instance, his kids wouldn't know what to do in a world where they aren't offered a whole Popsicle. Good. Tragic loss, that.)
b. The next section was berating his aunt, who does the proverbial "sheep in lamb's clothing" bit and lives in the past. Hmmm. Remember the section before? And what, precisely, were you doing then? Romanticizing and idealizing an earlier age? Yeah, you have a lot of room to make jokes about someone else doing this.
c. This is a strange point, and I know, at many levels, that this is wrong. Nevertheless, I think there's some validity to it. I keep thinking of my parents, who still live where I grew up. In the school system we attended, there were three black families. In the entire school district. It wasn't a big school district (my graduating class had 93 people in it), but figure that's 1200 kids in the school. Three families were black. One of those families only had one child.
In this community, I realized when I was in college that there was an Hispanic family. We hadn't known it at the time because frankly, we lacked the vocabulary to know we were supposed to think about it. But when I went to college and learned a little about diversity as an actual topic for consideration, I realized, "Hey! Steve, Judy, and Joyce were Hispanic!" The last name was Hispanic, and their skintone had been puzzling; they probably benefited that we lacked the background to understand their ethnicity.
Anyway, in a community like that, the only exposure most people are going to have to an Hispanic person is on television--and if the only show about Hispanic culture they choose to watch is this George Lopez show, their image is going to be skewed. (Well, actually, it will be very accurate--but only about a very limited portion of the community. You could make the same accusation in the other direction if people's only exposure to black people had been The Cosby Show.) Of course it's wrong to ask an individual to represent the entire group to which he or she happens to belong; it's unrealistic and foolish. On the other hand, at a basic factual level, for big chunks of America, George Lopez is the only Hispanic who's going to show up on the television semi-regularly. I'm a little disturbed by that.
4. Level 32 Draenei Shaman. Finished first round of Thousand Needles quests. Did some cleanup in Duskwood. Did the first batch of Stranglewhatever quests (including the first five hunter quests). Dinged 33.
5. Have a meeting tomorrow at 1, and I should go to school and turn in my copying. Not remotely interested in going to sleep, but I suppose I should.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
8/13: What I Accomplished Today
1. Went to office dropped and dropped stuff off.
2. Went to big campus office. Turned in grades. Verified Fall enrollments. Talked more about placement with person doing placement logistics.
3. Level 31 Draenei Shaman. Went to Forest Song and picked up the flight path in Azshara while I was there. Went to Thalsamar and picked up Highperch quest. Ran to Barrens border & picked up Shady Rest quests. Ran through Barrens to Thousand Needles; did Highperch and picked up that flight path on the western border. Returned to Thalsamar and turned in quests. Flew back to west of Thousand Needles, ran east along the southern border, picked up Thousand Needles quests. Picked up Gadgetzan flight path. Did first Ratchet quest, then returned to Thousand Needles. Was having a fine time working on quests when started getting server maintenance messages, so I tucked myself safely into the racetrack place so nothing mean will keel me and logged.
4. Worked on Miss Management.
5. Read a fair amount in Arthur.
Don't really feel like going to bed, but I need to be a responsible adult here.
2. Went to big campus office. Turned in grades. Verified Fall enrollments. Talked more about placement with person doing placement logistics.
3. Level 31 Draenei Shaman. Went to Forest Song and picked up the flight path in Azshara while I was there. Went to Thalsamar and picked up Highperch quest. Ran to Barrens border & picked up Shady Rest quests. Ran through Barrens to Thousand Needles; did Highperch and picked up that flight path on the western border. Returned to Thalsamar and turned in quests. Flew back to west of Thousand Needles, ran east along the southern border, picked up Thousand Needles quests. Picked up Gadgetzan flight path. Did first Ratchet quest, then returned to Thousand Needles. Was having a fine time working on quests when started getting server maintenance messages, so I tucked myself safely into the racetrack place so nothing mean will keel me and logged.
4. Worked on Miss Management.
5. Read a fair amount in Arthur.
Don't really feel like going to bed, but I need to be a responsible adult here.
Monday, August 13, 2007
8/12: What I Accomplished Today
1. Puzzle Day was evening today. We came in second.
2. Finished the week's Pogo badges.
3. Watched American in Paris from Netflix. Neither of us had seen this all at once, so this was interesting. Wonderful visual movie.
4. Level 30 Draenei Shaman. Worked on Sven's line of quests. Got 1st Air Totem.
5. Finished all 50 levels of Wedding Dash. Not all are at expert (I don't think even half are yet), but I've finished them all.
6. Started another Miss Management. Got three stars on the first 16 or 17 or so.
My two week vacation from real work is over; starting tomorrow, I have to either finish some research or do substantive work toward getting my classes ready for Fall.
2. Finished the week's Pogo badges.
3. Watched American in Paris from Netflix. Neither of us had seen this all at once, so this was interesting. Wonderful visual movie.
4. Level 30 Draenei Shaman. Worked on Sven's line of quests. Got 1st Air Totem.
5. Finished all 50 levels of Wedding Dash. Not all are at expert (I don't think even half are yet), but I've finished them all.
6. Started another Miss Management. Got three stars on the first 16 or 17 or so.
My two week vacation from real work is over; starting tomorrow, I have to either finish some research or do substantive work toward getting my classes ready for Fall.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
8/11: What I Accomplished Today
1. Pogo Badges.
2. Watched Bill Moyers. Now hear this: government cannot be about polls. If Civil Rights had been polled, the process would not yet have begun. Just because a majority of people (growing or shrinking, or even if it's not a majority or is just perceived to be such) seem to believe something doesn't mean that's what the government has to, or should, do it. I was reminded today of the Ben Franklin quote (which I'm not going to quote but paraphrase): "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat. A constitutional republic [I may not have this right] is when the sheep has some recourse."
I don't care whether you call it marriage or civil unions. (I know, I should care; if we don't, then in 20 years, we'll be called cowards and appeasers by those who follow us). But you know what? I don't care. Call it whatever you want, but let me provide me self-employed Co-Vivant with health insurance from my job so we aren't obliterated whenever something, however minor, comes up. Financially, the current set-up makes us sheep. We have no recourse.
We also watched some comedies.
3. I don't know what brought this thought on, but something that was said on television tonight or last night at book group reminded me I want to be on the record with this: we need another word for all the "-oholic" groups, because "addiction" isn't right. I will accept that alcohol, for some people, is an addiction; there are serious physical side effects if they use it. I will accept that tobacco and other substances, for most people (perhaps all, although the jury's still out on that) are addictions; there are serious physical effects if they use it (or, more precisely, when they try to stop).
But shopping is not an addiction. Videogames are not an addiction. I will accept that they are used as drugs, substitutes for something else that cannot possibly fulfill the roles they are being asked to play. But anybody who has physical side effects from not shopping needs therapy. Anybody who has physical side effects from not playing videogames is probably throwing a blessed tantrum and needs to be ignored. I think it lessens the word "addiction" nearly to the point of rendering it meaningless when we apply it to abuse of everything people have the capacity to misuse (which is everything).
4. Level 34 Dwarf Rogue. Various Hillsbrad and Arathi quests. Dinged 35. Stat and mail check.
5. Played the demo hour of Fever Frenzy, which is essentially "Diner Dash in a hospital." I have mixed feelings about this: the game's not bad (although not new or fresh enough that I have a compelling need to buy it; I've played this before). The problem for me is that it's harder to score well by using chains because I'm perfectly willing to delay the meals of pretend people for a few seconds so I can do four in a row. I'm not willing to jeopardize the health care of pretend people by delaying treatment of someone so I can do four in a row. Having been in a hospital, I can't bring myself to do that. Yes, I know the people are pretend. That's hardly the point.
6. Read a little for Arthur.
2. Watched Bill Moyers. Now hear this: government cannot be about polls. If Civil Rights had been polled, the process would not yet have begun. Just because a majority of people (growing or shrinking, or even if it's not a majority or is just perceived to be such) seem to believe something doesn't mean that's what the government has to, or should, do it. I was reminded today of the Ben Franklin quote (which I'm not going to quote but paraphrase): "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat. A constitutional republic [I may not have this right] is when the sheep has some recourse."
I don't care whether you call it marriage or civil unions. (I know, I should care; if we don't, then in 20 years, we'll be called cowards and appeasers by those who follow us). But you know what? I don't care. Call it whatever you want, but let me provide me self-employed Co-Vivant with health insurance from my job so we aren't obliterated whenever something, however minor, comes up. Financially, the current set-up makes us sheep. We have no recourse.
We also watched some comedies.
3. I don't know what brought this thought on, but something that was said on television tonight or last night at book group reminded me I want to be on the record with this: we need another word for all the "-oholic" groups, because "addiction" isn't right. I will accept that alcohol, for some people, is an addiction; there are serious physical side effects if they use it. I will accept that tobacco and other substances, for most people (perhaps all, although the jury's still out on that) are addictions; there are serious physical effects if they use it (or, more precisely, when they try to stop).
But shopping is not an addiction. Videogames are not an addiction. I will accept that they are used as drugs, substitutes for something else that cannot possibly fulfill the roles they are being asked to play. But anybody who has physical side effects from not shopping needs therapy. Anybody who has physical side effects from not playing videogames is probably throwing a blessed tantrum and needs to be ignored. I think it lessens the word "addiction" nearly to the point of rendering it meaningless when we apply it to abuse of everything people have the capacity to misuse (which is everything).
4. Level 34 Dwarf Rogue. Various Hillsbrad and Arathi quests. Dinged 35. Stat and mail check.
5. Played the demo hour of Fever Frenzy, which is essentially "Diner Dash in a hospital." I have mixed feelings about this: the game's not bad (although not new or fresh enough that I have a compelling need to buy it; I've played this before). The problem for me is that it's harder to score well by using chains because I'm perfectly willing to delay the meals of pretend people for a few seconds so I can do four in a row. I'm not willing to jeopardize the health care of pretend people by delaying treatment of someone so I can do four in a row. Having been in a hospital, I can't bring myself to do that. Yes, I know the people are pretend. That's hardly the point.
6. Read a little for Arthur.
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