John the Revelator

One of my favorite Depeche Mode songs set to a strange video. This isn't the official video from the band, someone else made it. Kinda creepy, but I like it.

In which I conspiritize

So, did you all hear about the hundreds of people who reportedly saw a giant UFO in Texas? I found the story interesting because of how many people reported seeing it and how the air force denied it had anything going on in the area. People described it as a huge thing, "bigger than a walmart" that was rapidly changing speeds. Now the Air Force is saying that, oops, we did have fighter jets in the area and that's probably what everyone saw. However, several of the witnesses know the difference between fighter jets and . . . other things and claim that they are sure that jets are not what they saw.

I guess the only reason I'm commenting on this is that this is the first UFO story that I actually think could be stranger than air force training exercises or media hype. It surprises me a little that I so quickly bought into this story (granted the governments response seems almost designed to provoke suspicion) because rationally I don't really think aliens would be visiting this planet nor do I think the air force is secretly advanced enough to have sci-fi space ships. However, it is probably true that I WANT either of those possibilities to be true.

In any case, it leaves me with a lingering question: What the hell were aliens/air force experiments doing coasting over texas? Looking for a souvenir store where they could buy a ten-gallon hat?

bonus Lily Allen

The song that introduced me to her music (by way of Australia)

Unsurprising

Those who know me well will be unsurprised to learn that I am playing this song to death now. It's so oddly cheerful and catchy I can't stop playing it. So I pass the demon on to you as a curative for me.

You're welcome.

Unprepared

So it ended up Christmas eve that I needed tortillas. Apparently. So I went out hunting at about 10pm, hoping something was still open. Nothing was, of course, and the convenience stores don't carry tortillas so I ended up out of luck. Which was okay in the end, but what's funny to me about the whole thing is how many OTHER people there were floating around looking for open grocery stores as well. In the time it would take me to drive into a grocery store parking lot and determine if it was open or not, 4 or 5 other cars would do the same. At EVERY store I tried, there were 4 or 5 other people doing the same thing. There wasn't much traffic on the road and I like to imagine that the only people out that night were a legion of poor planners, still hoping to find a store magically open for them in some sort of Christmas Miracle.

WoW Navel Gazing

My latest thought about Wow over the weekend was: "World of Warcraft is where people go to hide from the rest of the world." I think this is largely true*. In World of Warcraft you can feel useful and do things to help people and feel popular, regardless of how shitty your life is going. Because in an online game, when I help someone with a quest that they can't do alone, I feel like I'm contributing and useful even though the thing I'm actually helping someone with has no real value. But still, I feel like I've helped, and they feel happy to have been helped and that I think acts as an emotional salve if you don't feel like you contribute much or are helped much in the real world. Of course, this is only true in an MMOG where the person in question is real and breathing behind another computer somewhere else and not an NPC. None of this is really to chastise the people to play, but only really to admit to myself why I play the game and why I think other people do as well. It's largely because my life IS kind of shitty at the moment, and WoW is the place I escape to while I wait for some things to play out or (worse) when I can't make the hard decisions I need to and so avoid them.

Of course, the positive aspect of this, is that I am playing with real people. Usually your encounters with players are friendly, but shallow and brief. You might chat a little amiably, but mostly it's strategy and game-play focused. But, in the last month or so (after like 2 years of playing this game) I have formed a genuine friendship with two guys who live in Australia.

In Reno, I have completely failed to find local friends I can hang out with a few nights a week. While the co-authors of this blog are my dearest friends (at least from my perspective), I only catch up with a couple of you every few months, one of you weekly, and the other about twice a week. Of course, if we were all in the same town, I have no doubt we would see each other more often. Maybe only once a week as marriages and now children allow, but it would happen. Of course, life being life, we don't live in the same town, we are spread out all over the western U.S. and while we still keep in contact, we all have formed local networks of friends that we can count on and hang out with. That is, except for me. Now I hasten to add that I'm not going for a big pity party here. I'm just in full-on navel gazing mode and I'm trying to analyze why my life is the way it is and what I'm going to do about it. Also let me hasten to add that I do have some friends locally (and this sentence is for them if they have pierced the anonymous veil around this blog) and while I do honestly like each and every one of them, I don't really interact them much outside of work. But I've discovered that part of what I need to not go crazy is local friends that I can hang out with weekly, few times a week whatever. Go out and eat dinner, watch a movie, play guitar hero, whatever, and I just don't have that.

What I DO have right now, is two friends from Australia that I play WoW with nightly. We don't live quite close enough to go out and watch movies together, but we talk about life, and play and have fun, and have even exchanged emails and real names so we know who we are in real life. And right now, that's freaking GREAT for me and makes WoW a good thing. Because while it's still a place I go to hide from the world, at least now I'm hiding WITH friends. And for a guy that's been hiding away in his house for years while Reno ate his soul, it's fucking FANTASTIC.


*The other main reason I would say people play this game a lot, nightly, whatever, is that it is designed to be addictive to certain personalities (i.e. mine) and is pretty much comparable to those experiments psychologists used to do on mice to keep them pressing a certain lever for tiny rewards over and over and over and over. In that sense, I think that games like World of Warcraft are directly comparable to Slot machines. They are both designed to exploit psychological reactions using a system of carrots and sticks to keep us playing and playing, no matter how much time or money it ends up devouring. This is an idea I am still coming to terms with.