Paul Keating says Tony Abbott is a “young fogey” and has compared Malcolm Turnbull to a firecracker – a “bit of fizz but then nothing”.

I do miss him so.

Well, for about the past week, I haven’t been playing, due to the fact my hard drive decided to shoot itself in the face. When my comp originally started to falter, I couldn’t even run WIndows, so in the remote chance someone had hacked my computer, I called a friend and had him change my password for me.

I get a call last night when I’m installing Windows on this new hard drive from another friend in guild – “Dude, why’d you leave the guild last night?” Needless to say, at first I freaked out… then I realized the dolts I have in my guild, and wanted to see what kind of stunt they pulled on me.

Finally get WoW up and running this morning. And to my “suprise”, log in to find Milkasaurus standing on a random platform in the middle of the Twisting Nether (way south of Netherstorm).

To see the names of the bodies next to me (it must have taken quite a while to get them there – man, you guys have too much free time), I just popped up my new guild info.

Good laughs were had by all.

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Until I realized I didn’t have a mount and my hearthstone was gone.

I’LL GET YOU, SHADOW COUNCIL!

First, the pally:

So we had this pally in our guild whom we tolerated for a long while. About the only person in the whole guild that we did tolerate. We tolerated him for a number of reasons:

1. He was a healer. Not as good a healer as he thought he was, but more often than not his healing assignment lived. Mostly.

2. He had a bunch of real life friends already in the guild. Couple of them were totally cool and really awesome. This helped us tolerate the pally more.

3. Umm I am sure there are more reasons I just can’t think of them. Oh I know. Our GL is totally awesome, and tries to be nice to totally everyone, and doesn’t want to upset anyone. Even those people that deserve to be upset.

I had my suspicions about him for a long time. He joined the guild around level 62. Quite some time after his “RL friends” joined. The barrage of questions on /gchat commenced. How do I? Where do I? Who is?

Hmm I thought. Odd questions for someone over level 40. Really fucking odd questions for someone over level 60. I continued on my level 70 rep grind with barely a glance at gchat. Finally after 6 weeks of him levelling his pally from 62-70. Huh? 6 weeks? 6 weeks to gain 8 levels, for someone who seemed to play 24/7, this seemed to be an eternity. (A glance at his warcraftrealms character history shows it only took him 10 days to get to level 55. That’s 10 actual days, not 10 /played. Hmmm I thought, odd it would take 42 days to get to 70 from 62 then.)

So after him being in the guild for a couple of months and the only thing I know of him the voluminous comments he makes in gchat and vent, I find myself in an level 70 instance with him. I agree to lolsmite as he is a brand new healing pallie ready to show his stuff. As one of the main healers in the guild I am keen to appraise his abilities. Truth be told he seems quite keen to show them off. Turns out he is also keen to show off his consecration abilities. First multi mob pull he runs in and consecrates.

Me : “What the hell are you doing?”

Him: “Oh just helping DPS”

Me: “You are the healer. Save your mana for healing. Do you realise how much threat that generates WHEN THE TANK HASN’T TOUCHED THE MOB YET?”

Him:”Well I get bored standing around waiting”

Me:”It’s the first pull, if you are going to heal you want a longer attention span than 3 seconds. Let the DPS, DPS, just heal”

We die a lot on that run. I am slightly pissed off at dying so much and more pissed off at his seeming inability to take advice in how to keep people alive. His inability to play his class, along with his annoying questions, his total lack of knowledge about how the game works, his inability to shut the fuck up on vent lead me to go one of my infamous investigations.

First stop, the armoury. Thank you Blizzard – almost anything inquiring game hags can ever want to know can be found here. (I realise Blizzard spell it the American way, but I damn well am going to include the U when I write armoury).

I am immediately confused and alarmed over his old-world reputation. How the hell does someone get to 70 and not be honoured with any of the Horde factions? Since 2.0, and it’s much faster rep gains, you hit honoured with your home city by level 20 . It is impossible to hit 70 without being at least revered with your home faction. Yet, I was looking at old world faction that was only friendly. FRIENDLY? Had this guy seriously levelled a paladin with NO QUESTS WHATSOEVER?

I let the GL know that I had doubts about him and asked him to keep an eye on him. Lucky for me my schedule didn’t conflict with the newly 70 pally too often so I didn’t have to run Kara with him. The first 25 man he ran with the guild he was totally perturbed when he wasn’t put on main tank healing. Hehe he was even more perturbed when his healing assignment died straight away. Hehe fucker, flash of light isn’t so cool now is it? To give him credit, he started accepting advice from one of the other officers and really lifted his game. His healing targets started living more often than they died. The pally also started getting really geared up. Like in about 3 weeks he was fully epicced out. Except for a weapon he had everything he could possibly need from Kara in about three weeks. It was then he started complaining.

“We aren’t progressing fast enough”

“OMG I’ve waited forever for my weapon, won’t it ever drop”

Stuff like that annoys the hell out of me. Firstly, some of us had been 70 for a good 6 months longer than him. Some of us had patiently helped out people like him to 1. get keyed 2. get geared and 3. learn their fucking class. Some of those people who had been 70 had waited over 3 months for their stuff to drop. Some had waited 5 months, 6 months. Hell our old guild, we ran MC for like 18 months - NOT ONE THUNDERFURY. Ever. That particular tank still has that one binding sitting in his bank waiting for the other binding to drop. Curse you random loot tables!

But back to the pally and his terrible luck waiting over 3 weeks for his weapon to drop. Hell maybe he had to wait 5 weeks. Whatever the wait was, this kid had waited too damn long.

The majority of our guild is older folks. The kind with full time jobs, kids, wives, boyfriends, other obligations. It’s part of the reason we joined this guild. The guild has always recruited with the idea that someone’s personality was their most important asset. Guilds full of kids who live in their parents’ basements and don’t have jobs or school have less trouble getting consistent raiders turning up. Guilds like ours with people who have responsibilities it is sometimes difficult to get the same 25 people turning up to learn new fights. Our guild hits the progression wobbles. A couple of weeks and no new bosses are killed. Then people stop turning up to get repair bills. If you’ve played any MMO for any length of time you know how it goes. Always a queue of people waiting to get into the raid when the boss is on farm, and everyone has an early meeting when it is a wipefest.

So stupid pally who has had enough with our lack of progression apps to another guild. (Saw that coming didn’t you). Apps to a guild who is only one boss further advanced than us. This kid is so stupid he apps to a guild that had imploded about 4 weeks before hand. So stupid he fails to post his app in their private application forum, but instead posts his app in the defunct guild’s very public general forum. Posts in their general forum where he fails to notice that any of the other threads are either a) active or b) newer than 4 weeks old.

We discover his app about 2 days after he posts it. After a quick discussion of the officers online (I wasn’t one of them) – he is removed from the guild. Simple enough decision for a guild with our principals.

This was originally the end of this post. I was going to wrap it up with a summary of the stupid fucking pally’s stupid fucking stupidity. Have a good laugh about kids these days and their overwhelming obsession with instant gratification.

Then something stupider happened.

Those of you have played WoW in almost any guild know what’s coming. Trouble is, the whole reason we were in this guild, on this server was because it wasn’t one of those guilds. People were genuinely recruited based on their personality fit rather than their gear, raid experience or skill. Hell, we rejected and removed plenty of geared, skilled people because they were total asshats. The guild has a reputation on our incredibly small server as being full of nice, somewhat knowledgeable folks, who try to do the right thing.

So the guild leader gets nervous about the guild’s ability to field enough healers on a regular basis and is considering inviting the stupid pally back. I oppose this strongly on the basis of 1. his past history, 2. he is too stupid to app in private or to a guild who is still in existence 3. if it was anyone but a healing class we wouldn’t care. Guild leader says the stupid pally is really sorry and it was a spur of the moment thing. I point out it doesn’t seem like a spur of the moment thing, he left his app there for 2 days, and sometime in that two days he removed all of his alts from the guild. I also point out that he seems incredibly focused on short term gains – his obvious botting/powerlevelling which we kindly overlooked although we all knew about it; his focus on loot loot loot; his impatience with getting gear and progression; his constant talking in vent during raids and offering of bad advice for fights he has never done or bothered to research; his posts that demean and insult fellow guild members; a couple of bad attendance weeks and he apps to someone else. These are not qualities we would tolerate in a rogue, and just because the pally can spam flash of light are not qualities we want in a healer. Hell he should have been removed the minute we worked out he powerlevelled and or botted up to 60.

In other guilds I can see this not being a big deal. I point out we left our old guild precisely because they started to not see things like this as a big deal. All of a sudden it became raid progression at all costs, and even though someone is a lot of an asshole we will overlook it.

Guild leader invited him back even though I was pretty clear I wouldn’t stand for it. If I won’t stand for it, by default my husband won’t stand for it. So the most only geared holy priest and the most geared prot warrior in the guild won’t stand for the stupid pally getting reinvited. I fully appreciate that my stance was hard assed and somewhat inflexible. However, I’ve sat back one time before and watched a guild focused on personality based decisions make the switch to progression based decisions. I won’t do it again. To be fair we are talking about a holy priest and prot warrior who by nature of our timezone can not attend every raid during the week.

But a priest and a warrior who have tried really hard over the past year to go out of our way to help people out. Passed on gear so other people can take it. Run instances we don’t need to help out others. Helped people level their alts, get keyed, get gear. The best tank in the guild. By default, the best holy priest in the guild, but more often than not people don’t die when I am assigned to heal them. We helped the newbies find where to get gear, helped them with what mods to install, helped people get consumables, generally helped helped helped.

I just don’t get it.

So tomorrow, after arena points update (God how fucking selfish is that) we are not only gquitting, we are changing servers entirely.

Part of me hates me.

The other part reminds me that we will be much better off on an oceanic server, where we can actually play during the time we want to, rather than re-scheduling normal activities around US play times. Then I remind myself that we were relatively happy to be dreadfully inconvenienced because this guild was different. Playing in server off-peak times has it’s advantages: you know almost everyone who plays at that time; farming is easy; little competition for contested daily quests. It also sucks a lot playing during server off-peak: no raiding during our night time; hard to get 5 mans; only chance to raid for me was on weekends and it was generally only once a week. But the fact we were part of something ‘different from normal wow guilds’ kept us putting up with the inconvenience and kept us there on that server.

The day the guild started being like any other guild was the day we weren’t prepared to be inconvenienced. It was the day I opened up all the bookmarks with oceanic guilds and their forums. We knew we would have to move to an oceanic server when we headed west, but were preferring not to think about how inconvenient raiding at 8.30 in the morning is when you have a toddler running around.

Part of me still hates me though.

For the really cool people we are abandoning to their fate, I still hate myself.

But I know that I will hate myself more if I am party to the decisions based on progression rather than people.

Edit: I am just going to save this to draft and post it after everything is said and done – who knows who some of you folks reading are. Dumber things have happened

Another edit: Ah screw it, I’m posting it now. It is after all how I feel, and the truth.

UPDATE: So it’s been a week – I chickened out and held it in private/unpublished (where all the really cool posts are ) for a bit, just in case.

I am far too lazy to go and do the research but I suspect that people who drove their cars a lot in 1920 weren’t hauled off to a psychologist because they were neglecting to keep their fridge properly stocked, or not using their horse and buggy as much as they were before they got their car. I even suspect that the first couple of people to own a car spent an inordinate amount of time actually driving their car. It was probably enormously fun, and had a high novelty factor. They probably also drove about picking up random people to share the experience of their new car, encouraging people they knew to get a car, and begin making use of the car. I’ve bought a new car, I know I found all sorts of excuses to drive it; I even gave people I knew lifts to places to get them to also experience my new car. Back when cars were first available people probably wondered what on earth was the point. After all everything they needed they could pretty much walk to, people didn’t live far from where they worked, and for anything further there was a horse. However, I think it is a pretty sure bet that people who bought cars and drove cars were not castigated or shouted at by the tabloid media that they were addicted to their cars.

Why then, are people becoming addicted to the internet? According to the popular media, Internet addiction is some kind of massive problem. Umm hello? How the hell does making use of an enormously useful thing make it an addiction? Hold on to your seats, but apparently students are neglecting their studies in favour of spending time on the internet.

“According to Mitchell, neglecting schoolwork and studying in lieu of perusing cyberspace is a definite sign of Internet addiction.”

Guess what? When I was a student I used to alphabetise my fucking record collection to get out of studying; I pulled weeds in the backyard, had an urgent need to reorganise my underwear drawer, visited obscure relatives not seen for months prior, baked cakes, jesus I even fucking exercised to avoid studying. Spending time on facebook does not mean you are addicted to the internet. It just means you are fulfilling a long held student pastime of creative procrastination. Compare stories with some ex-Uni students sometimes. It’s amazing the things you can come up with that are so desperately urgent right around exam time.

In fairness students are susceptible to getting addicted to all sorts of things, so it is possible some of them are addicted to the internet. Hell some of them are probably sniffing the light bulbs in their room and getting high. They’re students for christ sake, it’s what they do. Studying is something they most definitely do not do. University degrees are all about doing the least amount of studying for the most amount of entertainment. Frankly I am amused by these studies that seem surprised by students who avoid studying. I am assuming the people conducting these studies have actually attended university and possibly even participated in student life, rather than just spawning spontaneously into a fully grown researcher from a student’s unwashed lavatory.

The addiction in China seems particularly alarming as it seems an awful lot of Chinese people are getting addicted to the internet and it’s quite a deadly addiction in China. I’ve got a feeling if you spent three days doing anything to the exclusion of all other things that you would have health issues. Part of me suspects there might be some bias against this internet thing in China. Pardon me if I am sceptical of anti-internet propaganda coming out of China.

Can it be classified as an addiction if it is a useful thing? I need oxygen to survive, and would suffer sever withdrawal symptoms if I was to be denied oxygen. Not even the most unoccupied psychologist with tonnes of time on her hands is suggesting that I am addicted to oxygen. Oxygen is useful, so is therefore not an addiction even though I can’t seem to stop myself from literally inhaling the stuff 24/7.

I actually use the internet for a lot of things. Our family is spread out all over the globe. We can actually communicate cheaply and instantly using the internet – I am going to mark this down as a good thing. I don’t think anyone is going to accuse us of being addicted to our family. Are they? We bank on the internet, shop on the internet, work from home via the internet, do research, play games, look up stuff, resolve arguments using the internet, find out the lyrics to that annoying tune half stuck in your head, all sorts of USEFUL stuff. I am connected to the internet almost every waking hour of the day. Like electricity, running water, my car, doors, carpets, furniture, I can get by without it.

Like electricity, running water, my car, doors, carpets, furniture, I would much prefer to NOT get by without it.

How to write good by William Safire [thanks to Garry Febey]

• Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
• No sentence fragments.
• It behoves us to avoid archaisms.
• Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
• Don’t use no double negatives.
• If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times: resist hyperbole.
• Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
• Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
• Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
• Writing carefully, dangling participles should not be used.
• Kill all exclamation marks!!!
• Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
• Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
• Take the bull by the hand, and don’t mix metaphors.
• Don’t verb nouns.
• Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
• Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague.

You are attempting to set up your Election Blogs to be some sort of on the spot commentary.  When your feeds don’t work the bloggers will get tired of you.  Who the hell has time to actually visit a web page when you have over 500 web pages in your reader?

Make it easy for people to read you, and if the content is good enough they will read you.  If you want the blog to engage people, make the content good enough or stirring enough for them to want to comment – if you make it good enough they will click.

Don’t bloody expect me to click on your goddamn web page every freaking day to see substandard writing.  Sigh, lucky for you, you employed Jack Marx.  Damn you, now I have to click to see what he said and how many people he pissed off.

    27. Re: Quick Question (doesn’t have to be blue : | 09/13/2007 11:05:58 AM EST

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Q u o t e:
If a demon possesses you and play on your account, is it considered account sharing?

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No, Indicium, though the language and harassment policies will still apply and any inappropriate language that occurs while possessed will not be removed.

If you believe you are in danger of possession and wish to protect yourself from possible violations by an unwanted internal residence you may wish to pick up the new and improved [Blessed Tinfoil Hat].

Beautifully written Jack, although apparently you need to include <irony> tags to get the-ever-so-self-important-bulletin readers to understand your points.

I am disappointed that I have to put the whole Bulletin election (bolloxy) coverage into my reader, rather than just have Jack’s articles appear in my reader.  Sigh.

I’ve never wanted to go out in a small forgettable way, so I decided to do something big, and perhaps somewhat irrational and stupid. But it was worth it!

I’d like to contribute to Barthilas what I would hope to be a very entertaining video which pretty much describes what this server is about: heart-pounding adrenaline, and the “do anything” attitude laced with much humour.

And he frapsed the whole thing!!

At all.

Apparently even my own comments could be spam.

Go figure.