Brothers

My brother is a Welder, y'know, one of those guys that climb around in boilers and hang upside down from bridges and build junk, I guess.

And he's all about Building Stuff, he's the Handy Man, y'know, he built his kids a frickin' Water Park with the slides and everything in his backyard heh.

He gets that from my mom, who is totally into making stuff and building things, she's a painter and a carpenter and a gardener and all that.

I take after my stepdad, who is all smart and smokes pipes in the air conditioning and stuff ahaha.

Anyways, both my parents are science fiction buffs, which is kinda weird, but I appreciate how lucky I am in that department, y'know, 'cause I can always borrow some awesome crap from their DVD collection and it makes buying 'em crap for 'em fer the holidays a lot easier on a guy like me who can't stand going to the store because of all the bright lights and screaming children, I feel bewildered and frightened like King Kong in there, man.

And last christmas, my mom got me and my brother these little hand-torches, y'know, like the Colonial Space Marines used to weld doors shut in Aliens.

My little brother no doubt uses his hand-torch to fashion sculptures of dinosaurs out of wrecked vehicles for the neighborhood hillbilly kids to play on.

But all I ever used mine for is lighting cigarettes.

Which is prolly the least destructive of the bad stuff I could be using this blasted thing for, I guess, so at least I got that goin' for me heh.

Yah, the joke in my family is that my brother fixes stuff, but if you ever need something totally wrecked and destroyed, you know who to call ahaha.

The Udvance Rule

Okay, its like, 4:52 am on Sunday in Chicago, Illinois.

And it's also 4:52 am on Sunday in most places in Texas, which is a country in Amerca that's about the size of China, if yer in Europe, or the Little Brother of Mother Russia, if yer one of my awesome underground Russian programming buddies who gave us all free copies of Autocad back in the 80s and hooked me up with all those Murder-You-In-Your-Sleep Awesome Russian Chicks.

And I been drinking.

Well, y'know, I made a Rule that I would always tell you when I been drinking, and when I wasn't writing cold sober, so there you go.

And you know that I told you all the Rules before, and that I told you I never break my own Rules, and to my knowledge, I'm the only one that never broke his own Rules yet, so I figger I'll get special seating in Heaven or something ahaha.

And I hate when I write when I ain't Cold Sober, 'cause I never remember writing it, and I can't exactly take credit for it, and I wake up in the morning and I end up being my own biggest fan, which is a Mental Pretzel I can't really get my head around, and it totally pissed me off when I was younger and wanted to take credit for everything I did, so I try to avoid doing it, but I couldn't help it this time heh.

Anyways.. Ex-bouncer left like three bottles of hard liquor at my house after we got drunk last time, my guess is that he was trying to nuclearly disarm himself, and that he's turning into some kinda booze-hound, 'cause he can't get his drug of choice, which is the drug of choice for all Matrix-Loving Twenty-Something Carl Sagan Science lovers like him, and that's the Weed, y'know.

And I din't touch any of the bottles he left here, 'cause I used to have a real Drinking Problem, y'know, I even had to go to government sponsored classes to keep a hot blonde swedish chick out of jail for Incriminating a Minor, back in the day, when everybody thought I was gonna be a Famous Poet, 'cause I was about fourteen points smarter than the Believers think Jesus would do on the IQ test.

But I been sipping at this bottle of Southern Comfort, which is called So-Co, in the local shorten-everything-for-efficiency-purposes midwestern slang.

And I been drinkin' outta that one 'cause it was already opened, y'know, 'cause somebody, I won't name names, had already drank most of it, and there was less than half of the bottle left, so it didn't seem half as dangerous as it actually was.

But it was plenty dangerous, turns out, dangerous enough to make a Will Farrel Cheesy Ass Saturday Night Live Feel-Good Movie seem almost like an Important Life Lesson (WE NEED TO STICK TOGETHER AS BUDDIES IN THIS WORLD GODDAMIT! THAT CHICK IS POISONING YOU MAN! SHAKE AND BAKE!, MAN, SHAKE AND BAKE!!)

And Southern Comfort always makes me remember something from my childhood, this kid we called Udvance, 'cause, uh.. that was actually his last name in Real Life (I used to call everybody in my Testosterone Powered Teenage Gang by their last names, like some kinda ancient echo of past-life military stuff, I guess).

And I always been too sober to write about him, 'cause I don't know any other way to refer to him 'cept by his Real Life Last Name, which is something I would normally try to avoid, if I was Cold Sober, which I ain't at the moment.

Anyways, Udvance was the Nerdiest Kid of his age group at Maine South, which is the school Hillary "the Rodham" Clinton probably went to, since she grew up over there in Park Ridge, which is a haven for rich white kid stereotypes in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago, y'know.

And I went to Maine West, which is the Bad Side of Tracks for Rich White Chicks From Maine South, so I had lots of fun in those early Post Breakfast Club Days, I even had the honour of having an arthouse chick make a painting of me with my fly unzippered (Breakfast Club was shot at Maine North, which was closed down the year before I went to High School).

Anyways, there's two things I remember about this kid Udvance.

The first thing I remember is that he was the biggest nerd in Real Life that I ever met, straight out of Revenge of the Nerds.

And so I did the My Fair Lady-Pygmalion thing with him, y'know, as a proof of my own Hannibal-the-Cannibal Powers.

Look it all up on Google if you don't know what I'm saying in that last sentence before you go on.

Anyways I taught him how to be cool, and I actually used my powers to hook him up with the Most Perfect Girl I ever seen in my entire life, Beautiful, Sweet, and Rich, and he turned evil and actually treated her like shit and cheated on her (that's when I finally learned my lesson about using my Hannibal-the-Cannibal powers to screw with shit in Real Life, and I made the Rule to Never Do That Again).

And the second thing I remember is that he'd never gotten drunk before, until somebody gave him a bottle of Southern Comfort, which basically tastes like cough syrup, and he got so wasted that I had to have my Mindless and Nameless Minions put him in a bathtub, and he had been drinking this cough syrupy shit out of a cup, so it had painted his lips all red, Smart Guy From Dune-Sytle, y'know, and he was smiling all the time, and I'll never get rid of the mental picture he left me with, where he looked exactly like the Joker from Batman.

And I made this other Nameless kid carry him around and follow me everywhere after that, just 'cause it made me laugh to look at him.

That's it, the two bits of memory that So-Co, and this guy Udvance bring up.

'Cause they're permanently tied together, since I hooked him up with the Most Perfect Girl I Ever Saw In My Life.

Yep, see, previously to that, she took me to her house, Wounded Lion Style, and even though she was a perfect Sweetheart in Every Way, and she took care of me when I was wounded, and took no advantage of me in any way, even though she was all smart and understanding, and she had me meet her parents, and they liked me right, 'cause I'm a good guy, deep down, and all the animals love me, y'know, so I always pass all those tests with ease.

Even though all that is true, I ended up telling her (and her parents) that I didn't want to "partake" of her myself because she was too much of sweetheart, and I knew that I was Messed Up, that I wasn't fully sure of my capacity to treat her the way she deserved, because I was the Ultimate Teenage Bad Guy, y'know, even though everything that flowed from my lips sounded like a Rain of Golden Honey from Heaven, I couldn't remember the last time I had been sober, and if I knew one true thing thing about the universe, it was that I was definitely a goddam Evil Hillbilly Hobo Transient Piece of Shit that couldn't be trusted with anything important, and I definitely didn't trust myself with anything as valuable as her.

And so I gave the Most Perfect Woman I Ever Met to this nerd Udvance, thinking he'd at least treat her right, thinking that if anyone would appreciate her, a total nerd-ass loser like him would.

And what happened?

Well, he turned into a super shitty copy of me and he totally fucked her over and ruined her.

So I learned my Hannibal-the-Cannibal Sociopath Lesson.

And that's the lesson I'm gonna share with you all you fucked-up budding Hannibal-the-Cannibal sociopaths right now.

Never, ever, trust anybody else 'cept yerself with defending the shit you know is worth defending.

'Cause they ain't as smart as you, and they can't possibly understand the responsibility you are handing them, how valuable that gift is.

Better to have a Bad Man defend it, than nobody at all.

Better to have a Bad Man like you defend it, than anybody else, actually.

Although it took a whole lifetime to figure that out.

Mebbe you'll be smart and rob me of that knowledge, like I rob all the other old guys.

Mebbe you won't.

But if even one of you does, at least my life's Greatest Mistake will be worth something, and I'll have moved our sorry pack of dogs a step forward heh.

News From Bree

They just started this Summer Solstice Party thing in LotRO.

And I gotta say, they did a great job, man.

They got a Pub Crawling quest in the Shire, where you race from tavern to tavern back and forth across the map on a time limit, drinking more and more beers at each stop, until your screen is swaying back and forth and everything looks like an old double-exposed civil war photo or something, and the "drunk" debuff icon is telling you that you should "seek a minstrel immediatley" heh.

And they got this thing where you and fifty other players stand around a stage and follow the lead of a hobbit Dancing Instructor on how to do Hobbit Style Dances, its the MMO equivalent of Country Line Dancing.

I dunno who thought that junk up but its some of the funniest and coolest stuff I ever seen in a MMO.

And to top it all off, my stupid loremaster wasted even more of his college tuition money and mastered the cultivation of Pipeweed, including all the rare ones, here's some Old Toby in action.

All this fun and I didn't even have to kill ten Large Giant Spiders, who woulda thought it was possible ahaha.

Down By the River

With no understanding of mining and smelting ore and the finer points of metallurgy, our village lived in a world where all of our tools were fashioned from wood and stone.

The Village Elders were the Fire Tenders and Healers, practitioners of the earliest forms of the Arcane Arts of Alchemy and Science, and they taught us to blacken and harden the tips of our pointy sticks so that they would be more effective against the armored hides of the beasts of the wood that we hunted, and those that hunted us.

They also taught us to carve mysterious symbols on the shafts our weapons, prayers to the gods, blessing that would make our weapons mighty.

I dunno if any of that stuff actually worked, but in those dark times I was willing to try anything heh.

They had us move the village up among the rocky slopes of the hillside, early on, at some more comfortable distance from where we had originally settled by the river, because all beasts, be they fell or fair, were driven first by thirst and second by hunger, and there was no good reason to provide the beasts with one place where they would be tempted to seek the satisfaction of both of those appetites, or to stand in their way when they sought the first and thus become the satisfaction of the second.

And any new people, late to come wandering in from the strange and solitary places in the deep woods that we had all come from, would still be able to see the smoke of our campfires from the river and join us.

We were not suspicious of strangers, as some folk are, sleeping among many treasured things within the Great Cities of Iron, for we were all strangers in those early times, each new soul that was drawn to our campfires made our village that much stronger, and even if there was some evil, hidden within us, there was little treasure for it to work upon, we had nothing worth stealing from each other, save companionship.

And at night we gathered at the campfire and ate together, and we spoke magic words with one another, words that made us laugh, words that made us feel stronger and healed us, somehow, and we sharpened our pointy sticks, and hardened them in the fire, and we carved the silly runes on our weapons that everyone with the possible exception the Village Wisemen knew didn't actually do a damned thing, but whatever, might as well humor the old fools and cut them some slack since they meant well, y'know?

Easy to forgive them a few of their eccentricities since they knew of herbs and spices and did such a masterful job of cooking and they took care of us when we were overcome with sickness.

Plus the runes looked kinda cool, I guess, at least, right?

And that was the way it was before the First Emmisary from the Great Cities of Iron came, and seeing so many skilled hunters and woodsmen among us, asked us to aid them in their battle with a terrible foe.

Everything changed after that.

Well, everything except the runes on my spear.

I still don't think they do anything heh.

Naked Chicks

So I was sick of listening to my brother's kids blabber on and on about Star Wars and Legos, and I knew I couldn't get them interested in Lord of the Rings, 'cause only old geezers who lived in the days where all our toys were made out of wood think that poemy kinda imaginary elf and wizard garbage is cool, y'know.

But since it was Father's Day, I suddenly realized that they'd never seen Stargate before.

Y'know, 'cause that's my stepdad's favorite show, he's got 'em all on DVD, even the Stargate: Atlantis ones (which I'm starting to get used to).

He's even got all the MacGyvers (oh man those are so 80s they'll burn a hole in the back of yer head, they came from an Age of Television when they didn't realize they needed to have fancy crap like plot and stuff heheh).

So I started explaining Stargate to 'em, y'know, selling them on it, telling 'em it had army guys that fought aliens in outer space with awesome spaceship fights and they even had a race of alien lego creatures (the Replicators, right?).

Yah, 'cause I was damn sick of them always bugging me about star wars and I wanted to turn them on to something new so they'd have something else to bug me about.

And my stepdad was all like "oh man this is awesome, you got these kids interested in my favorite thing!" (well, he don't talk like that, 'cause he's all wise and sophisticated and stuff, college professor and all, but whatever).

So we all sat down after the barbecue steak thingie and we watched the Pilot for Stargate.

And we got to the part where they stripped the first chick down to implant her with an alien worm, but they didn't actually show anything, 'cause they only showed her from the back, so we were like, whew, good thing their mom was in the kitchen, y'know?

I seriously don't remember any T&A and Tentacle Rape Fun in Stargate, man, that show was like all goodie-goodie and stuff the way I 'membered it.

But then we got to the part where they show Daniel Jackson's wife getting stripped down to the boobs and bush for like five minutes of full frontal wrestling with an alien worm.

Man, thanks a lot fer that, MacGyver, I thought you were all good and wholesome and stuff!

I guess I shoulda remembered that that show started out on Showtime heh.

Hopefully my brother's kids are so young that they won't be permanently damaged or anything, me and my stepdad tried to do the whole "enlightened" thing and not make a big deal about it but those village of the damned kids can read my mind, y'know, and Daniel Jackson's woman had some damn nice gear!

Anyways, thinking about that got me trying to remember the first few times I saw a naked woman on television and stuff (looking at dirty magazines somebody stole in the clubhouse that were so old that the chicks all had beehive hairdos and gogo outfits is something I file under the "scarred for life" section of my mind).

I think it'd have to be that chick from Terminator, or mebbe it was the Woman in Red with Gene Wilder (holy smokes that was a good one), but my memory is so crappy fer that junk that I'm not really sure.

Did that mess me up?

I don't think so.

At least not in a bad way.

I know my parent's let me watch the Exorcist when I was five years old, and that really messed me up for a while, man, I thought my little brother was gonna turn into that thing for weeks afterwards, y'know, the scariest thing about it was that "it could happen to anybody."

And we had bunkbeds, where I slept on the top bunk, so every time he made a weird noise while he was sleeping I thought he was going demonic and boily, spitting up split pea soup down there.

So whatever, this isn't that bad, I guess.

Still, I feel like I messed up a little.

And its all your fault, MacGyver, man, I trusted you!

"Stargate don't have nothing bad fer the kids innit, man, its got MacGyver in there for cripes sakes!"

Woops.

Exception to the Rule

Back in the oldest times, me and my buddies came from the crowbar-murder-squads of Half Life and the psychologically crippling Quakewhore Clans to the world of MMOs.

Suddenly, well, mebbe not that suddenly, heh, but eventually, at least, instead of just killing everybody and showering in their blood and eating their souls, we realized that we could actually use our evil circle-strafing super-competitive supernaturally-selected-uber-gamer-powers to help people.

Y'know, by guiding them through dangerous places in EQ, and making the other guys that wanted to be as horrible as we were shut up, y'know, stuff like that heh.

I'm one of those otherwise friendly semi-roleplayery guys that still give in to the random duel invite about fifty percent of the time.

I used to always give in to the random duel invites, but its been a very long time since I learned anything new in pvp combat (in MMOs especially), so now I only do it for nostalgia purposes, and to make buddies with newbs that wanna learn how to bend game mechanics to their advantage and stuff, 'cause if those random duel invite guys bother to keep playing an MMO (which is extremely rare), they'll eventually become really good friends to have around heh.

Of course, me killing somebody in a duel usually shocks and horrifies the gentle "I hate pvp" folk I tend to hang out with, so I'll usually only do if I'm running around by myself ahaha.

Anyways, all this hairy chest-thumping threat-display-posturing braggery bullcrap aside, what interests me the most in these games is the parts of them that are cooperative, and not competitive.

And though I may be a savage at heart and all that stuff, compared to some of you folks, at least, the parts of these games that really do seem to be designed to be cooperative are actually extremely few and far between.

Almost everything about these games is actually competitive, and not cooperative at all.

Heck, most of the cooperative stuff I see is players actually working against the game design to be cooperative, you basically have to put a serious hurt on yourself mathematically to do anything benevolent for somebody else in these games heh.

And I thought that was okay, at first, 'cause if there's one good reason to put aside endlessly competitive game mechanics, using it to prove yer not a greedy little human rat is a pretty good one heh.

But jeesh, man, you'd think somebody would try to make a game that was a little more cooperative than what we've been playing.

One where you didn't have to fight for loot, something with more-the-merrier style grouping, one where crafting wasn't pvp, one where you felt like you were a part of something bigger, where at least some of the stuff you did sorta helped the other human beings around you.

There's a million ways to do stuff like that.

But nobody is even trying 'em.

Even in games that "say" they don't have pvp (when what they actually mean is that they don't have any good pvp heh).

Hmm, actually the game that probably tried it the most was Shadowbane.

Okay, let's just forget I said anything AHAHA.

Well, whatever, it seems like these games wanna be all about bringing together people on the surface, but then every game system they got actually works against everybody in the exact opposite direction.

I dunno why that is.

Mebbe folks just ain't thinking about it or something, y'know, but building the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is uh, kinda dumb heh.

I think its just one of those results of the human capacity for selective memory, y'know, where we all remember great times, but we forget how they were literally the exception to the rule or something.

Slow Rider

My Loremaster/Scholar is an idiot.

I mean, if any of my other hard-working characters give him money, he wastes it all on studying ancient artifacts and collectible knick-knacks and the inscriptions on tiny statues of dwarf elephants and stuff.

The guy is a frickin' antique store hobo with holes in his pockets.

And what does he do with all that awesome knowledge of the ancients?

He dyes his clothes different colors.

What a moron!

Still, everywhere he goes, everybody seems to love him for no good reason and the good times roll.

I'm serious, you ever make a character that strangers seemed to like a lot more than your other characters?

Like everytime you group, everybody gets all excited and happy and morale goes through the roof and people are just charging into battle fearlessly and nothing ever goes wrong and you get all sorts of compliments and junk?

The guy has got some kinda positive energy virtual aura or something.

Its actually kinda creepy when it happens.

And it's getting kinda aggravating for my other characters.

Especially 'cause the guy is so damn stupid with our money!

But he is pretty fun to solo with.

I mean, its kinda like doing the Darth Vader Voice, its take me a while to find the "groove," y'know, but once I get in the swing, I can fight forever and endlessly, healing myself, sucking power out of the bad guys, putting monsters to sleep, debuffing 'em so bad that I can actually tank a little, and whirling my staff around and smashing skulls, getting a little visceral action in there and stuff, sure.

And if I want to try something crazy, I can always kite-n-joust some really tough stuff, although it looks a little funny to see an old Gandalf-lookin' geezer running around all panicky kiting stuff heh.

Well, whatever, its pretty frickin' fun.

And the debuffing thing is what makes folks go berserker-style in groups, I think.

'Cause anything that can help a clown in cloth armor tank, like Loremaster Debuffs do, really helps a guy in some real armor tank heh.

Anyways the only thing that really bugs me about him, besides the way he's always wasting all our money on absolutely useless crap, is that he runs so frickin' slow.

I'm serious, all my other characters are hobbits, y'know, so they're all low-riders, they got bumper-cams, like in a sportscar commercial, zooming along low to the ground, and when they run it feels pretty fast (especially on my hobbit hunter who has the run buff, I mean, on that character I'm always tempted to make the VRROOM VRROOOM noise out loud on voicecom when I power him up heh).

But my loremaster is this big ole human geezer who runs like molasses in a wiffle-waffling corduroy dress.

And to make matters worse, he's always gotta stop and wait for his infernal-ass pet to catch up to him, 'cause pets run even slower than he does for some reason (wtf is that all about, anyways?).

And the pet can't follow him down steep slopes, and sometimes it paths off all crazy to get around objects in absoshmiggenly lethal ways, and its lower level than my Loremaster is so it aggros mobs that wouldn't normally bother him (actually just running near somebody in combat would put me and the bird into combat mode for some reason, probably to keep me from helping people in fights with powers like Leechcraft I ain't supposed to use in combat, I dunno, mebbe they fixed that in the patch), and blah blah blah, the pets are a frickin' festival of aggravation most of the time.

I wish my Loremaster was smart enough to pick the stupid ass bird up and carry it like a football or something heh.

Okay, that wouldn't work for the bear, but mebbe the bear could pick up the Loremaster and carry him around like a football, if yer one of those guys that use the bear, I dunno, the only bear that I ain't afraid of in this game fulla killer bears with nasty debuffs is the one I got for a pet 'cause he's such a wussbag ahaha.

Well, whatever, it feels so daaaaaamn slow to play that guy.

But I guess that's realistic, 'cause he's an old geezer who would grumble whenever you told him he had to run up a couple flights of stairs in slow motion to save somebody or something heh.

"Where do we have to go for this quest? Oh man, yer kidding me, I'm already out of breath and that's all the way across the map! Its gonna take me hours to get over there, even without any bathroom breaks!"

Not exactly Gandalf, that.

But I suppose thats why Gandalf was always ditching out on the Fellowship, y'know, like in Isengard and Moria, and then he'd only come back after he found himself a sweet eagle ride or a killer horse to sit on in the books, none of that Marching Along Through Swamps and Bogs In a White Dress, Sweating His Ass Off in Deserts and Picking the Twigs Out of His Beard and Munching Dusty Elf Crackers for good ole Gandalf, nossir, he's too smart to fall for all that pedestrian shiz heh.

"You guys go on ahead without me, I'll just show up mysteriously at the ending and help you do all the really cool stuff once I'm done with this important phone call."

Hello Kitty

"What the hell are these?"

"Cat pelts."

"I asked you for bear pelts."

"Yah, well, bears are dangerous. Plus their fur is all sucky and stuff. Feel how soft these are!"

"Yah, they're pretty damn soft, I guess. But my woman is never gonna go for this cat pelt stuff. She's a cat person."

"Just tell her its rabbit pelts. Rabbits are all soft like this."

"Well why the hell couldn't you just get me some rabbit pelts like a normal person anyways?"

"It'd take more than a bowl of milk to catch a bunch of rabbits."

"Hmm."

"Yah, I'm telling you, we're sitting on an economic goldmine, here."

Poor Hapless Flunkies

Yer all a bunch of hapless flunkies and water carriers.

And its gonna be especially true of any of you no-name red-shirt newbs that think you aren't heh.

The Hobbit Catacombs

As a Loremaster, there's one thing that's been kinda buggin' me about hobbits.

What exactly do hobbits do with the corpse when a hobbit dies?

I mean, they do eventually die, y'know, they aren't like the blasted immortal elves who take a boat to America when they die, and I've been all over the Shire, and I've perused all the Hobbit Texts I could find, and I haven't found a single gravestone or mention of any hobbit funerary practices.

I'll be honest, I'm afraid to ask them in person, I keep having these dreams where they lick their fat lips and their eyes suddenly start to glow like the bad guys from Stargate.

Bah, they probably got catacombs somewhere at the bottom of their hobbit mounds, filled with gross little Hobbit Mummies.

Or maybe they dump their creepy little Hobbit Mummies at the "Mathom" House, I should check there next, I s'pose.

Women Game Designers

I think hiring female game designers is great.

But I just wish they'd hire some male ones, too, for once, 'cause I don't like my purple curly toed shoes and funny hats with jingle bells on 'em.

And when exactly am I gonna get to decapitate an orc?

Mmm-hmm.

Strange Adventures

So I been playing Lord of the Rings Online for a whiles now.

I've got four dirty little hobbits and a crusty old human loremaster.

All of 'em are bald, y'know, 'cause I like doing my part to prevent the spread of virtual lice.

And I've mastered every trade skill thingie they got up to Expert, 'cept farming and cooking, so I've made a pretty penny or two and I don't need to worry about not being able to afford some drooly awersomes purple item or horses or anything.

I play on the Nimrodel server, of course, 'cause it was the only server name that made me laugh no matter how I tried to say it out loud.

And I've been in and out of a couple of guilds, and met a lot of interesting folks and stuff.

The most interesting was this guy (well, he still is this guy, so far, at least), that says he used to be the Lead Sentinel for Asheron's Call 1, and he was the leader of his own guild.

He's really old and he has a nurse 'cause he has lots of heart attacks, which can really add to the suspense and tension of hanging out with him, especially since his client crashes a lot and you always have to wonder if he crashed or if he was dying in Real Life or if the Frustration of Crashing So Much was Gonna Make Him Have a Grabber And Kill Him In Real Life or something, y'know?

Anyways it was cool to meet him, 'cause he's from a Different Club of Ancient MMO People than I'm used to (even though I was a beta tester for Asheron's Call), and the similarities between his crusty club of jaded MMO Veterans and the ones I'm used to are kinda funny and almost spooky, I mean, they have their own version of every guy I know from other Crusty MMO Vets Clubs.

I'm serious, I was almost wondering if I'd accidentally stumbled into the same people I always end up hanging out with, y'know, I felt like Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz, where she realizes the Scarecrow and the Tin Man were really the farm hands and shiz, saying "and you were there, and you were there..."

But these guys, although almost exactly like certain other people I could name, were from all wrong countries and stuff around the globe, so that settled that.

And they had their own version of MMO History which was much different than ours.

I'm serious, they all played UO, and SWG, but they never heard of Raph, or anybody else I knew of, or knew the dumbo nicknames for, like Designer Dragon and Sunsword, if you can believe it.

Yah, they were dropping other names I never heard of for all that stuff.

Weird, huh?

Yah, so, that whole Parallel Universe Thingie was kinda giving me the heebie jeebies, and I got myself outta there.

Plus, I didn't really wanna stick around and wait for a Heart Attack to happen to the guy I liked.

What am I, some kinda Last Wish Foundation Good Samaritan Guy?

Why do I always end up getting stuck with these folks?

I'm frickin' sick of people I like croaking on me heh.

And now I'm like getting shoved into Alternate Universes and helping folks who aren't even from my own universe!

That's bullcrap!