Oh the Humanity

People talking about UO lately got me thinking in a different direction than everybody else seems to be heading.

Ole Bald Angus the Monk was a character I played in UO.

Back in those days I was playing games sitting side by side with an ex-girlfriend that I lived with, and we'd just come from Everquest, and it was around the time of UO's Renaissance thingie.

In UO, we hardly hung out with each other at all, 'cause I liked wandering around in the "wilderness," meeting weird people and getting in trouble, and she preferred to stay in town and make money and not get ass-raped and murdered.

I was also big on roleplaying, at the time, and although I only did it for the comedy of it, I really appreciated the entertainment provided by the guys who did it well.

And I pretty much always stayed in-character, especially when I was hanging out with dudes named MaStAPiMp, who weren't half as inhuman as their UO ass-rape victims tend to make 'em out to be, I mean, those guys like shootin-the-shit and laughing at least as much as all the really "serious" players, there's an element of drama queen-ness that sorta bugs me about a lot of the representations.

I had a long list of personalities, complete with their own individual speech patterns and everything, although I tended to play characters that weren't serious, and weren't very smart, 'cause first off, anything else would probably be too much of a stretch fer me, and secondly, its pretty hard to keep a good comedy rhythm when yer acting smart, its usually a lot of talking on and on to prove how smart you are, and then a joke, a lot of talking on and on, and then a joke, kinda like what I'm doing right now, instead of the stupid guy's joke-joke-joke-joke rhythm, y'know, like a comedy machinegun, like a comedy jackhammer in a comedy goldmine, aw hell yah.

My ex-girlfriend, on the other hand, didn't roleplay at all, heck, she could hardly type or spell or anything.

And all the people I usually forced her to hang out with were all these charismatic and eloquent super-intelligent folks, totally intimidating to her and stuff, which made it even more funny to stay in-character around her heh.

Still, people liked her, not because she was smart and knew all about internet etiquette or anything, but because she wasn't any of those things, it made her seem cute and innocent and genuine or something, I guess.

"How ye doin' lass?"

"o i dont roleplay only he does hehe"

Yah even though she was just a swimsuit model chick who couldn't type well because she had long fingernails and a brain the size of a walnut.

Oh don't get all pissed at me for talking bad about woman, every other female player I know is like a walking encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Grammar or something that makes me look almost as stupid as my ex-girlfriend.

Anyways she'd get really jealous of any female characters that paid too much attention to me.

And it was so bad that I got in the habit of making roleplaying characters that I thought would be completely repulsive to females long before I ever played UO, so by the time I played UO, I was making stuff like the Old Bald Bible Thumping Illiterate Monk, the scandalously elected Fire Marshal of Skara Brae, who went around getting his horses killed and attempting to collect bribes from player homes that didn't meet fire safety regulations because their doors opened the wrong way.

Thing was, even though hanging out with amazing roleplayers and murderers named MaStApImP was really fun and everything, I actually spent almost all of my time being rescued in one way or another and escorted around by multiple powerful female players in UO.

And I assume they were actually female, 'cause a lot of them were supposedly married in real life, and played the game with their husbands (and even if they were a gay couple I was hanging out with the one that loved interior decorating and pretty dresses) and there definitely wasn't anything sexual about it (which is the wise man's give-away), and I was the one getting all the gifts and free stuff, and all of the guys I knew definitely never did anything like that for me.

Yah seriously, with these characters that were supposed to be all ugly and repulsive to women on purpose, I couldn't even do that right haha.

Well, actually, I don't think it was because they all enjoyed my absolutely fabulous and universally-renowned sense of humor or my fantastical god's-gift for roleplaying or anything.

I think it was just that I was a weak shoeless-joe male character with no money and no prospects and holes in my pockets, and they liked having somebody to take care of, I mean, they had all this money and power and stuff in the game but nothing to spend it on and nobody to appreciate it, and aside from what y'all might think, I make a pretty good pet.

Of course, my ex-girlfriend totally hated this turn of events, it was funny how almost every single popular and respected female player in EQ and UO (that I felt lucky to be buddies with) was somebody she abso-frickin-lutely hated, heck, she hated a lot of the popular male players I got to meet, too, she even refused to believe one of them was a guy heh.

"I saw that, she just /poked you!"

"Uh, he's a guy."

But nobody ever really caught on to how she felt about 'em, 'cause she hardly ever said anything, especially if she hated you, y'know, so she just seemed "cute" haha.

She did like some of the folks that everybody else was scared of, though, which makes sense, I guess, 'cause she was the Opposite of Everybody Else, its funny that the more charming and popular somebody seemed to be with the general public (and me), the less popular they seemed to be with her, who I always thought of as good representative of the general public heh.

She had a lot of girlfriends in EQ that were like tomboy amazon women that loved killing people and hated talking to 'em and stuff, those are the kind of women that ain't catty with each other, y'know, where the popular female players are kinda catty with each other, you hardly ever saw more than one of 'em in the same place.

The amazons did like cool dollhouse clothes and stuff, though, don't get me wrong.

Anyways, most of those girls don't seem to be playing games anymore, they just sorta dropped out for all sorts of reasons, and there really hasn't been another game like that since, with strong female characters who could own land and not be reduced to demeaning shit like juggling their boobs for money in a cantina fulla aliens and robots.

Yah man I seriously can't imagine any female player I ever knew doing that kinda demeaning shit, dude, I wouldn't even want to be the poor shmuck who accidentally suggested the idea of it to them ahaha.

And that was supposed to be a socializing area! HAHAHAHA!

Oh pooh, I'm out of comedy ammo.

Well, whatever, when I think of UO, I tend to think of all those strong female personalities and all the dollhouse decorating and stuff, and not the ass-raping so much, but then again, I came from EQ, where the PvE and PvP was in 3D and not so rinky-dink and crappy, I mean, c'mon, seriously, UO was like three screens wide haha.

"And then my little Super Mario guy got ass-raped by this Killer Thimble and a Tophat and I cried all night long! Woe is me! Oh the humanity!"