Once again, didn’t do much to do with WoW this week. Part of it is the hockey playoffs. My team, the Montreal Canadiens, is still in the Stanley Cup playoffs as I write this. They may be eliminated Monday night, or they may move on to the third (of four) rounds. Who knows? It’s been a weird playoffs.
The other part is a lack of motivation. I feel like there’s a lot of hoops to jump through to get anything in terms of gear, so I’m just… not doing a lot? Maybe?
Still, as usual, I have things to say. :) (And I’ll note I started this entry on Sunday even though as I finish it, it’s now Monday. But I have Monday off for Victoria Day so I’m still going to pretend it’s Sunday.)
Topic 1: The Old Days
I had a former guildie, Aaza (hi Aaza!), comment on my last post. She’d wanted to know if I had a copy of our Illidan kill. That kill happened in, uh, like August or September of 2008. And I had it! I didn’t realize it was set to unlisted, so I set it to public and linked to it. (Thanks to Dayden for frapsing it and putting together the video!)
That someone, from that old version of Apotheosis, wanted to see our Illidan kill, was kind of interesting to me. I’ve been feeling nostalgic recently. Not nostalgic enough to do all of that GMing/raiding/etc again, mind you! But nostalgic enough to feel as though some of the memories my guild and I had made together really meant something to people at the time. So to have Aaza pop in and be like “hi!!!” was really lovely, because it sort of validated that I hadn’t wasted my time back in Burning Crusade. (Or in Cata, for that matter.)
Topic 2: I miss… something
Growing up, I read. I read, I played video games, I called local bulletin board systems… and, of course, being a teenage girl, I talked on the phone a lot. But I never really had much interest in joining a sports team. I didn’t really feel the need. I got a lot of my social needs met just by hanging out with friends and stuff, and then dating, later on.
But the school I’d gone to for eleven years of my life (grades 1-11!) had taught me a lot about teamwork and leadership. We were separated into different houses (yes, like Hogwart’s — and, btw, fuck JK Rowling for being a transphobic piece of shit!), and so we were forced to participate in teams to do with the houses for various things. Two of my closest friends from school weren’t in my grade. They were in the grade below me — and both were on my house. And we’re still close to this day. One of them is my RL Friend the Resto Druid I have mentioned dozens of times on this very blog!
So when I joined Fated Heroes in, oh boy, like late 2005… I was kind of all-in. It was the first time I’d really been part of a team. And, naturally, I wanted to be helpful. Back then, I was in learning mode. I wanted to know everything about how the game worked. Absolutely everything. I think I reached my peak knowledge of the game in Wrath, when I learned about parry thrashes.
We lost my brother to a rival guild, who was already actively raiding, while Fated Heroes was… fated to stand around a lot. ;) But I worked hard to bring information to the guild, put up a forum for us, dropped info for attunements, T0 gear drops, etc. And we slowly but surely got to the point where we raided. We never had 40 people in a raid (well, maybe once, but that wasn’t even all our guild) and we didn’t clear MC or kill Ony (do not get me started on the warrior who claimed to me he had like 3000 defense when, in fact, that was how much ARMOR he had), but we cleared all of ZG, including Jindo the Hexxar and such. And we did spawn Majordomo Executus in MC. And we did get Ony down to like, 20ish percent. It was just a rough time to get everyone used to raiding on these days at these times when most people had only joined for fun. Still, I pushed as much as I could. I got so many people attuned to everything way back then.
Why?
These people in Fated Heroes, they were my team. And if I knew one thing from my schooling, it was that the sum of the parts of a team are a greater force than the individual parts alone. I believed we could do anything we set our minds to doing.
That was really my first taste of real teamwork in an environment where I cared about the result. If my house lost at floor hockey to another house during 7:45am inter-house games at school, I honestly didn’t care. But if my guild didn’t get Venoxis down? I cared. If my guild didn’t get Lucifron down? I cared. If people in my guild didn’t loot their goddamn Core Hounds? I very much cared. ;)
So that’s the feeling I’m missing right now. I’m not super into any online communities right now. I’m not even really into any offline communities right now. I am missing a sense of belonging to a team. And I’m not sure where to get it.
And it always makes me think about WoW, because WoW is the place in my life where I have put everything I had into running good teams. Whether it was the guild as a whole, just the healers, just the hunters, whatever. I gave it my all.
I’m not saying I want to give my all to something, mind you. I don’t have the time or even the energy for that these days.
But I do miss something team-like.
Topic 3: Rabid end-stage capitalism will be the end of us all.
Between billionaires and AI, I have come to the conclusion that we are not only fucked, we’re super fucked.
Eat the rich. And if you can’t, tax them.
For the first time in my entire life, I have wanted to be offline more than online lately. And you have to understand something about me — I have been terminally online forever. For decades. I started using the Internet in 1994. That’s over 30 years ago. And while I’ve certainly managed to create, you know, a life for myself, I work in tech, and I work remotely, and I have done so for the last decade. (another 2 years spent in an office at a startup here in Montreal, so 12 years in tech.)
But the more I think about tech and the world and where it’s all going, the less I even want to sit down at my computer.
Who would have thought that AI (and the billionaires, let’s not forget those motherfuckers) would be the thing to push me away from online? Who would have thought that something I’d always enjoyed thinking about (in a very “someday in the future” sense) would come to be and be one of the worst blights on humanity?
Sometimes I do wish I could just live at my parents’ cottage for the rest of my days. Read. Canoe. Write. Even go swimming, occasionally, despite the fact that the lake is fed by mountain streams and is always bitterly cold.
And yet, we have to at least play along with the capitalism that is eating us all alive, because we have to do things like pay for rent. And food. And everything else that comes with being a human in the early 21st century.
It’s a major bummer.
What are your thoughts, gang? What’s on your mind?
Grats on the Canadiens making it past Buffalo! In OT, no less!
I feel you on wanting to be part of a team, and yet not into the hardcore notion of it. I guess I’ve seen a lot of casual type of raiding teams collapse because people get recruited away or decide we’re not hardcore enough for them that I refuse to engage these days. But I still miss it too.
Would it help to know that last Thursday was the first day that TK and SSC opened up on the Anniversary Servers? Watching how Illidan went down (probably will get released in Phase 3 in September) is just prep for the future.
As for the online/offline thing, I tend to concur. I’ve been online since the late 80s, and I’ve been actively avoiding Facebook and some other forms of social media since early in the pandemic. Too many people I know (especially relatives) have disappointed me too much to want to engage with them, so I keep them at virtual arms’ length. The really sad part is that I can see the naked manipulation happening in real time, and I’m unable to stop it. Such is the pull of how social media is implemented these days.
We call them the Cardiac Canadiens — always making our hearts race. hahahaha! Hoping we make it past Carolina, but I don’t think the odds are in our favour.
As to casual vs. hardcore teams, my problem is I take my hobbies super seriously. It’s called “serious leisure”. I pour in a lot of myself and my energy when it comes to my hobbies, and WoW was no exception for me. But I don’t have the time or energy to do anything hardcore. And I don’t have the ability to be super casual about something either. I need that Goldilocks zone, you know? It’s like everything above what I want to do is obviously too hardcore and no-life, but anything below what I want to do is way too casual. hahaha. I maintain there’s a way to play rigourously, intelligently, be dedicated, AND have a life outside the game. It’s just so hard to think about finding the “just the right place”. And when I’ve tried to do that, I’ve basically just made my own guild. And I’m emphatically not doing that again. haha!
re: Anniversary servers, I haven’t paid any attention to them at all, I’m afraid. But oh, such memories of SSC and the elevator boss, our buddy Toga forgetting to unequip his fishing rod during Lurker, WEST SIDE STRONG SIDE on Vashj, not to mention TK and how poor Kam never lived through Kael (and it was ENTIRELY my fault).
That’s the other thing, you know? You can redo the content and be years and years (decades) older and smarter and wiser, but you can never again recapture that moment when these big bosses died. You can never really go back again. That said, I haven’t played on my hardcore toon in a long while. Maybe I should do that. I’m pretty sure she’s in her 30s now…
re: offline/online, I try really hard not to let Meta get its claws into me. I don’t use WhatsApp, I use Signal. I don’t use Facebook at all. I do have an IG account but I never post and slightly poison my data now and again, while also making sure I do whatever I can to protect the mere concept of privacy on that app. I totally get why you’ve stopped, even though it’s for different reasons. Thankfully, most of my family is of the same mind on various political happenings in the USA. My uncle’s wife (I guess technically she’s my aunt, but she’s his fifth wife) is MAGA and they live in a red state. My cousin’s wife (that uncle’s son) is anti-vax, and they live in Australia. But because I refuse to use Facebook for privacy/data concerns, I don’t have to see any of it. :D
I was in the car with my nephews, my brother and my sister-in-law a couple of weeks ago and I said something “trumped” something and my littlest nephew says “WE DON’T SAY THAT WORD! IT’S BAD!” ahahahahhaa. Had to explain to the kiddo that it’s also a verb. He was not thrilled by this news. But yeah, we’re fairly well-aligned in my family, thankfully.
The manipulation is horrifying to see. The outright lies. The pages taken directly from the playbook from 1930s Germany. It’s astonishing to me how few people can think critically nowadays. And, worse, they think they ARE thinking critically. There’s a great documentary called Behind the Curve, all about flat-earthers. And it doesn’t hesitate to show when flat-earthers are wrong. It’s a very interesting watch, because you can see that people really just don’t want to lose the community they’ve found. Changing their idea about the earth being flat means that they would be ousted from these communities. And that would be life-changingly terrible for them. I feel badly for them, I just wish they’d keep their “science” to themselves, and enjoy their communities and just … move on from the flat-earth subject. I made tons of friends in the mid-90s in online communities about Star Trek. I still talk to some of them now. Just not about Star Trek. We have moved on and maintained our friendships. Wish that could be the case for some others, you know?