On Warcraft, pt. I

I don't remember exactly when or how it entered our lives, but a certain computer game popped up on my family's computer some time when i was nine. I know its appearance was due to my brother, but the circumstances beyond that have evaporated with the mists of time. A quick Wikipedia search tells me that it must have been either late 1994 or early '95. It was called Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and it required a whopping 4 MB of RAM.

My first introduction into Real Time Strategy games, Warcraft was actually the second RTS game ever released for home computers, the first being Dune II. Interestingly enough, Blizzard pumped out their debut RTS game as fast as they could simply to take advantage of the warm reception that Dune II had garnished, hoping to take advantage of a perceived void in the market. Because of this rush, the saga of orcs vs. humans began with little script to speak of, their bloody conflict existing as a vehicle for the game more than anything else. My brother and i didn't care, of course, reveling - as any Tolkien geek would - in the gory spectacle of orcish combat.

My first experience with Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness was at a friend's house. All i remember from that tiny campaign was the excitement over the new, shiny graphics; the faster pace; the driving, awesome music. Then a small mob of enormous, fat, naked men with two heads waddled into my village and punched the entire settlement into the dirt. Surprisingly enough, this traumatic first experience did not deter me at all and i whiled away many hours with WCII, deepening my love for all things orc. I vividly recall the first time i met Zul'jin and badass teal scarf. Truth be told, i can trace back my love for scarves and unsymmetrical ear piercings to this troll axe-thrower.

While Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos probably didn't get as much play time from me as Starcraft did, i definitely owe it more. Warcraft added a slew of additional features in its third incarnation, including a third playable race, heroes and 3D graphics. More importantly for me, however, was the incredibly dynamic storytelling made through the vehicle of in-game cut scenes. The characters came alive, then, and i found myself truly sympathizing with Thrall, Cairne, Jaina, and the rest of the characters i would come to see so much of in the coming years. It was halfway through the Undead campaign that i first saw the fall of Sylvanas Windrunner, Ranger-General of Silvermoon, the soon-to-be Dark Lady who would steal my WoW-heart.

At this point, i'd be in Azeroth for the better part of a decade. I was intimately familiar with orcish culture and magicks, the role of gnomes in human society, and the fear of an undead scourge. My formative gaming years had been heavily marinated in war paint, battle cries, honor contests, glorious deaths.

To me, orcs will always be hulking and green-skinned.

The Burn Phase, or, Things I've Learned as a Geek, Part 2

In any game involving conflict, the player is given an array of options of varying potency and efficiency. This is done to add dynamics to the game, lest it end up as simplistic as tic-tac-toe. In combat-based games, these options are usually limited by certain conditions or qualities in order to balance the system. If one were allowed to use your most powerful tactic whenever one pleased, the game would quickly become one-dimensional and boring.

In World of Warcraft (for example), each character class is given certain powerful abilities which can only be used every so often. These abilities are categorically referred to as "cooldowns" due to the fact that after each use, the ability has to "cool down" before being used again. This core mechanic to the game means that, at any specified point, the combat potency of an individual or group can increase drastically for a short period of time, followed by a equally balanced cool down.

I have learned something about myself in my observations of how i use cooldowns. If the cooldown was short - say, two minutes or less - i would usually have no trouble using it as it was available since i knew that it would most likely be available again when i needed it next. If the cooldown was long, however, - which is anywhere from five minutes to thirty - i found myself stingily hoarding the ability, terrified to use it for fear that it wouldn't be available to me when i truly needed it.

I almost never use any ability with a cooldown of five minutes or more. My fear of misusing my most powerful abilities prevents me from utilizing them at all.

In my life, i know there are many instances of the same fearful behavior. For example, i'd much rather do nothing than fail spectacularly. I'd rather say nothing than cause pain. I'd rather bide my time in hopeful observation than risk getting hurt again and losing what little i had.

Such behavior is based off of a fallacy; it gains you nothing to wait for the perfect moment and so lose any advantage you might have had. Now, i am by no means saying to cast strategy and logical thinking to the wind and act recklessly. I firmly believe that a clear head and a comprehensive array of data is key to discovering the most advantageous move in almost all scenarios. Sometimes, though, fortune truly does favor the bold. Use the advantage when you have it or risk losing it completely.

Sometimes, you should just go all in.

Country Wife

[...]On the third day after his return, the Godking gave audience to his rescuers. The young man was still gaunt and had a brittle, sensitive air about him, the horrors he had witnessed still plainly evident through his new clothes and freshly bathed skin. The Godking's seconddaughter stood just a pace behind and to one side of the young man, looking little better. Neither had spoken much over the in between days, forcing little smiles at the servants who insisted on thanking them personally or offering them sons or daughters in marriage. This attention had quickly waned, fortunately for the two youths, and they were allowed to recover mostly in seclusion until this morning, when a page had summoned them here, into the Godking's presence.

A delicate string of saliva slowly oozed out the corner of the old king's broken mouth as he gently coughed. The page boy quickly dabbed it away with a kerchief. Taking a deep, rattly breath, the Godking opened his rheumy eyes leaned forward, resting a gnarled arm against an equally bony knee.

"Boy, the maidens are already singing songs about you," he wheezed. "Never have i ever seen such bravery. Foolishness, my knights would have called it, but thanks to you, my kingdom is once again safe. In thanks, i now grant you a boon: your reward is limited only by your imagination, up to the hand of my firstdaughter in marriage."

The throne room went quite still at this announcement. The courtiers where aghast. It was well known that the dowry of the firstdaughter was the entire kingdom. Several of the wealthier nobles had been angling for years to be in this boy's very position. This farm boy's position.

Throughout the pronouncement, the youth met the Godking's gaze confidently. Now he closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath - which only shook the tiniest bit - and released it. His thoughts gathered, he opened his eyes and spoke in a clear, steady voice:

"King, i want you to know that what your seconddaughter and i did, we did not out of a sense of duty, or nationality to your great empire. We did not do it for fame and we certainly did not do it for any reward. We put our lives in harm's way because it was what was required of us. It was right. Therefore, i humbly relinquish any right to your boon and ask for nothing."

A lady in the gallery fainted.

The king blinked for several long heartbeats before beginning to violently rock back and forth. On the fourth attempt, the terrified page finally understood and helped the Godking to his feet. The old man began to rage, shaking his fist at the youth, foam spraying from his bared teeth.

"Don't be daft, you foolish boy! I offer you land the vastness of which you could not experience even if you devoted the rest of your life to travelling it. I offer you so much gold that you could not count it all before you perished. The hand of my beautiful firstdaughter is your's for the taking and you spit upon her?"

The young man did not respond as the king tired himself out and was helped back into his throne by the page. When the old man had finished coughing and sputtering into the page's proffered kerchief, the youth spoke again, and again his voice was clear and strong

"Sire, i do not wish you to think i spurn your generosity, for i do request something. My lord, i come to you now as a suitor and ask for your seconddaughter's hand in marriage."

Wispy sound of conversation began to drift down from the galleries as the king stared at the lad before him.

"My dear boy, you're not thinking clearly. My seconddaughter has no worth to you; you gain nothing by marrying her and you well know this. Now speak: tell me whatever your heart desires and that shall be the value of your reward."

The young man glanced beside him at the girl by his side, reached out his hand and took her's.

"I want whatever she's worth."

The Red Queen

I am often jealous of those writers i follow on the internets whose products are, day after day, clever and hysterical. They are the sitcom writers of my generation and i often envision their lives as idyllic versions of my own, filled with quiet, sunlit mornings and very few worldly cares. Oh! how i yearn to be one of their kind, recognized and admitted into their most awesome of circles.

To that end, i'm going to be funny today.

My grandmother is bipolar. My earliest memories of the woman involve sad stories my mother used to tell me about the after-grade-school snacks of cookies and creme de menthe her mom used to prepare for her, just so she wouldn't have to drink alone. My own experiences have a much rosier shade and involve mostly images and feelings of adventure: being shown gramma's collection of cane swords; admiring her many knick-knacks from around the globe; looking askance at my brother and cousins as she leaps from a doorway to bar our path, brandishing an antique threshing flail.

I particularly remember my first experience with what my mother described as one of my gramma's "manic phases." We were vacationing down in North Carolina (where my grandmother lived for many years), visiting my aunt and cousins, and gramma offered to take the four of us cousins out to a local flea market. For reasons i no longer remember - perhaps a debilitating case of the sniffles - i opted out of going on this adventure. To this day, i regret my decision, for my brother and cousins came back with all manners of treasures! I distinctly remember a neon orange shag throw rug, a couple of turkish fezes, and the looks of exasperation on the faces of my aunt and mother which i would only understand years later.

Gramma lives up in New Jersey now, within driving distance of my house. It was decided that my aunt had had to deal with enough of her shenanigans and - now that gramma was retiring to an assisted-living sort of facility - that it was now my mother's turn to deal with her. This new proximity has allowed me to witness all sorts of new sides of the woman that i'd only previously heard of second hand.

The Thanksgiving of 2008 saw my aunt and cousins up north and my ol' G-Ma solidly in the middle of a manic phase. It was that particular year when my mother took it upon herself to educate my cousins and i about what to expect from an almost-80-year-old woman in full-blown bipolar mania. She gave Paul and i actual photocopied textbook pages with lists of symptoms. I had long known about the inhuman levels of energy, the disjointed thoughts, the feelings of euphoria, but it was that year that i learned about the hallucinations, the delusions, and the "hypersexuality."

Think about that last bit for a second.

About mid-way through that week, i woke up in the middle of the night and ventured downstairs for a drink. Being a boxer-sleeper, the first thing i noticed upon reaching the half-way point in my stealthy descent of the stairs was the frigid temperature of the first floor. A careful look around the corner set the scene quite effectively. The hall was empty, the hall bathroom door open with both light and fan on, the living room dark and empty, the front door open with only the glass screen door keeping out the cold and the smoke from my grandmother's Misty cigarettes. I could see her silhouette out on the porch, so i swept as quickly and quietly as i could down the hall and into the kitchen where i found the source of the cold air: the wide open back door. I shut the door, grabbed my drink and retreated as fast as i could to the warmth and privacy of my room.

The next morning, i mentioned the occurrence to my mother. Apparently when she got up in the morning, she found the kitchen in a similar state to the one i described above. When she asked my grandmother about it, the old lady informed my mother that PSE&G had gotten in touch with her last night to inform her about a potentially hazardous gas leak. Checking the phone, my mother very delicately asked her how the gas company had talked to my gramma, since there were no records of any calls going through last night, either incoming or outgoing.

"There's more than one way of getting in touch with people," my grandmother replied sagaciously and with a sly wink.

The Interminable Skittering of Anthropomorphized Words

I am quickly approaching what feels like a critical mass of nuggets and ideas. They rattle about in my skull to the point of being distracting, what with their collisions and then endless human interest pieces about the loving families of the concepts lost in the great catastrophe of the right prefrontal cortex.

Bitches.

While a cornucopia of potential projects seems like a fantastic thing in theory, my particular creative bent tends to end just there: at the idea stage. I have half-theories and choruses, novel conflicts and juxtapositions, species and tonalities all logged away in my head without any framing in which to put them.

You know how annoying it is when you have the chorus of a song stuck in your head, but you can't remember the rest of the song? It's worse when you wrote the blinking chorus.

Some of my frustration comes from my - for lack of a more accurate term - Renaissance tendencies; that is to say, my interest - and perhaps competence - in many fields without ever achieving expertise in any of them. So while my idea for a sky-born fish monster is nifty and i'd love to show it to other people, my drawing skills limit my ability to effectively portray the concept.

I have entire casts of characters with no plot for them to be a part of; beautiful, poignant scenes which cannot benefit from the scope of context; clever turns of phrase, naked of verse.

Still, they are mine. These little acts of creation, this instances of pristine beauty, give me focus and energy. Just as lethargy and apathy are sure signs of my depression, creativity is a signal to myself of a Good Place. The weather is turning colder and as it does, my thoughts stir, awakening to the world around me and its myriad inspirations.

Customs and Practices of a Man Called Murph

I find myself frequently blaming a man long dead for the seemingly-chaotic happenstance which plagues, oh, pretty much everybody. I refer, of course, to one Edward Murphy.

For posterity, here is the list of "laws" from which i exhume my nuggets of nonchalance (photo-jacked from a poster in the men's room of Zoe's Double Hex Cafe, Manchester, VT):

No good deed goes unpunished.

Leak-proof seals - will.

Self-starters - will not.

Interchangeable parts - won't.

There is always one more bug.

Nature is a mother.

Don't mess with Mrs. Murphy.

50% of everything is crap.

If you're feeling good, don't worry, you'll get over it.

All warranties expire upon payment of invoice.

Where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit.

Never eat prunes when you are famished.

Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.

If you try to please everybody, nobody will like it.

A short cut is the longest distance between two points.

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

You will always find something in the last place you look.

The chance of a piece of bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.

No matter how long or hard you shop for an item, after you've bought it, it will be on sale somewhere cheaper.

No one's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

The other line always moves faster.

In order to get a loan, you must first prove you don't need it.

Anything you try to fix will take longer and cost more than you thought.

If you fool around with a thing for very long, you will screw it up.

A $300.00 picture tube will protect a $0.10 fuse by blowing first.

If it jams - force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.

Any tool dropped while repairing a car will roll underneath to the exact center.

The repairman will never have seen a model quite like your's before.

When a broken appliance is demonstrated for the repairman, it will work perfectly.

A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth.

Everybody believes in something - I believe I'll have another drink.

Build a system that even a fool can use and only a fool will use it.

Everyone has a scheme to get rich quick that will not work.

In every hierarchy, each individual rises to his own level of incompetence and then remains there.

You will remember that you forgot to take out the trash when the garbage truck is two doors away.

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.

There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over.

When in doubt, mumble, when in trouble, delegate.

Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.

It is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.

A bird in hand is safer than one overhead.

Murphy's Golden Rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules.

Everything east of the San Andreas fault will eventually plunge into the Atlantic Ocean.

Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of an oncoming train.

Celibacy is not hereditary.

Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself.

Beauty is only skin deep, ugly goes to the bone.

To know yourself is the ultimate form of aggression (Freudian Psychology).

Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.

A Smith & Wesson beats four aces.

If everything seems to be going wrong, you obviously don't know what the hell is going on.

If more than one person is responsible for a miscalculation, no one will be at fault.

In case of doubt, make it sound convincing.

Never argue with a fool, people might not know the difference.

Hope for the Hopeless/The Kindness of Strangers

I love PostSecret. For those who aren't familiar, this dude, Frank Warren began in 2004 what he calls a "community art project" which displays the secrets of others. Every Sunday, Frank puts up 20 postcards that were sent to him anonymously, each of which reveals a deep-dark secret from its sender. Some are depressing, some are inspiration, some are funny. Just in the past four years he has received over 300,000 cards.

I first heard about the project not to long after it went live, sometime in my freshman year of college. Over the years, it has provided innumerable instances of true humanity into the landscape of my experience. It has helped me form my Everyone Is Crap theory. It has helped me love people for who they are.

For Frank, he has used his stumbled-upon fame to support The National Hopeline Network and 1.800.SUICIDE. He has created an anonymous, mostly online community of acceptance, honesty, forgiveness, love.

Today, i stumbled upon the postcard above. It yanked at my heart, as i know the pains and struggles of that level of depression. I know, for that person, even send that card must have been amazingly cathartic. I hope it helps him. If not, there's always this:

The Please Don't Jump facebook group is now 26,000 members. It was started the day the secret went upand was over 20k in less than 24 hours. Covering the wall of the group's page are exhortations from randoms strangers saying "come live here. We want you." This sort of support is inspiring, but in the sort of social media sitethat has a Group supporting a pickle who's sole purpose was to have more members than the Nickleback-supporting group. That group had 1.5 million members, apparently.

The Together For Life! facebook group is taking a FAR more active approach to this kid. An anonymous member of the PS community wrote in saying:

"On Sunday the 13th at noon I plan on printing up all the caring comments from facebook, taking them to the Golden Gate Bridge and taping them up all along the walkway."

Lindsey Salazar saw the comment and started an event to garner some further support. So far, 107 people have said they're going to show up and show this random individual how much they love him or her - even though none of them have ever met the anonymous sender.

Hopefully, this story will have an ending we can see. Hopefully, it'll be a happy one. I know that PostSecret has had a huge impact in the short time its been around, but this would be a big win for the kind of awareness that Frank - and everyone who follows PS.com - is hoping to see.

EDIT: Sorry for broken links. Now i can't even find the groups anymore, blarg.