Punkass Kids

There's a couple things my mom can make for dinner that will automagically summon every other family member to her house.

Last night it was Egg Roll Night at Mom's house, so we all had to go, even though everybody had to drive for an hour through an Ice Storm.

My stepdad, the Engineering Mogul Turned Computer Guy College Professor with five degrees, is only months away from retiring, and after being a no-nonsense hardcore workaholic scientist his whole life, he's finally starting to relax all his adult muscles and experience childhood.

Yah, its weird, he's actually coming up to me with all these twilight zone science fiction ideas and asking me to help him write screenplays and stuff.

Well, it'd seem weirder if you knew what the guy was like up 'till now.

Meanwhile my little brother's kids think I'm the coolest guy in the universe because I've flown all the spaceships from star wars and I can answer all their tactical questions about them in detail.

They frickin' love star wars, even though I'm pretty damn sick of it ahaha.

They watch all those movies over and over again, I guess, and even though they're only five and six years old, they can name all the scenes from 'em better than I can.

And they got some cool console Lego Star Wars game that they play that really has them hooked.

But what they really want to do is play the kind of games that I play.

They imagine us adult computer guys have ALL these impossibly awesome games we play.

And that's mostly because they can only imagine it, since my brother and his wife are computer illiterate and I've never shown them the games on my computer.

But it works to my advantage, y'know, I fill their minds with stuff like how awesome it is to walk around inside the Millenium Falcon and how we could all fly it together and take turns on the guns or fly X-wings in formation where we'd each have our own droids...

...and then I tell them they need to learn how to read and do math really well before they can play any of my games, 'cause they'd be way too hard for 'em to play otherwise, spaceships have lots of engineering components to monitor and complex control systems and you need to know which types of missiles to use to take out shields and armor plating and navigation droids are complicated and require a knowledge of programming and in order to repair and modify and upgrade your ship like a hotrod you need to understands physics and starship mechanics...

Haha I know, I know, I'm such a dick.

But they're always in a rush to show me how well they can spell and do math and stuff when I show up heh.

Smart as they are, they're still a good three or four years off from being able to play an ordinary MMO, I think.

And that's probably more important info than it seems, 'cause they're part of the next baby boom that's coming along down the pipe, the kids of the kids that they had to expand schools to double capacity last time for.

I know its gonna be a huge pain in the ass to hook my brother's family up with their own individual computers, though, that doesn't seem realisitic to me, especially if folks keep making bleeding-edge technology games like Vanguard where you need two gig of RAM.

Yah, stuff like that makes me wonder if all the game designers are orphans with no real life non-computer-nerd buddies or something ahaha.

At least WoW was smart enough to make their game run on an Applemack, so liberal arts shmucks like the guys who did South Park and all of Hollywood and Journalists could play it.

Man, seems like every time you say "WoW has X Million People Playing It!" you have to add another million to X.

But that makes sense, y'know, 'cause you know how it works, you bump into somebody in Real Life that likes MMOs, and you ask them what MMO they play, even though you don't actually have to ask because you already know the answer, don't you?

Well it ain't gonna be Horizons, is it? AHAHA.

So back to WoW you go.

Oh, I feel for ya buddy, I'm so damn sick of WoW, but the alternative is playing games without any Real Life friends and that is infinitely worse ahaha.

You know, WoW is turning into the Microsoft of MMOGs, there's like no getting away from it ahaha.

Still, the MMO industry should be thanking their lucky stars that WoW didn't have player decorated dollhouses and player crafted furniture and human models that didn't look like hillbillies that run with their elbows attached to their hips, 'cause there wouldn't be any goddam crumbs left to eat.

Well, okay, that ain't totally true, WoW doesn't have cool smash-em-up Mad Max stuff like Autoassault and no spaceships you can build to your own specifications and fly, and they don't have Superjump, but once the guys who made WoW make a couple of those kinda games, then it really is over.

Hopefully they'll do it in the next few years so I'll have something better than some damn fruitloop purple elf and sword game to play with my brother's kids heh.