I finally cleaned up the foyer a bit. After all that painting, I had been too lazy to put away all the tools, brushes, paint trays and quarter-full paint cans that I’ve piled up by the stairs. The majority of all that is now neatly stored in my now organized basement.

One of my cats, I suspect it’s Thaddeus, has been peeing in specific places in the basement. None of those places include the litter box. I have a feeling he’s either getting stressed or territorial. He’s still social, active, and has an appetite, so I don’t think he’s sick. But he has been a little more aggressive with the other cats lately. It’s not the first time he’s done this, but at least with everything out of the way I know exactly where he’s peeing and it’s easier for me to clean it up. In the meantime, my little kitty currently sucks for peeing outside the litter box.

I’m pretty tired this morning. One of my major WoW objectives was to get my warrior an epic swift mount, and after all this time, I don’t have one yet. My avatar is a mockery in the MMO world. So last night, I spent more time than i should farming for stuff to sell in auction houses. And doing the PvP grind for a bit of gear that I realized wasn’t that much of an upgrade anyway. Life is hard.

Kotaku reports that the South Park episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft” won an Emmy.

I spent a little bit of time with South Park this weekend, but no WoW. In any case, my interest was piqued.

More on my weekend later.

Today, I picked up our uber copies of TBC. I’m not exactly sure what this will mean for my Resolutions. But I think I’ll be ok.

I’ll see you in Zul’jin. Or Elune (horde). Yikes.

I can’t believe it, when I logged off last night at 2 in the morning, my guild was still alive… and raiding no less. Jesus fuck. I was totally getting used to just walking away from the whole mess and against all odds, we managed to keep the bulk of our raiders in. Now it remains to be seen what the repercussions were. The guild meeting we had seemed like a gang bang on our current guild leader, who understandably took things very personally, and kind of ended up with the officers trying to convince the guy to stay and lead the guild. I understood the emotional impact all this had on him. This guy was in tears, literally. I know he’s unselfish and cares about this guild but the miscommunication problems that caused all this shit to go down just amplified some minor things and blew things way out of proportion.

So the upstarts stepped down from their coup and fucking apologized, the guildies renewed their faith in the officers and things (superficially) were all wine and roses. Well, what happens now? Will our GL stay in the guild because if he goes, that will cause a massive chain reaction too. And if he does, how many more embittered people are there hanging around and just not saying anything just waiting for an opportunity to jump ship too? Who knows. Ugh, why do i even bother to deal with this?

Warning, nerdy emo post!

Last night I went to bed at 3am. It’s a work night, and I didn’t mean to lose any sleep. However, my World of Warcraft guild which I have been essentially a part of since April of 2005 is breaking up. We had a very long conversation among the officers in our ventrillo chat regarding the future of the guild and how things are going to be addressed now. The specifics of it do not matter. All I can say was that politics and miscommunication created a rift between the members. That rift won’t be repaired and I’m not going to spend any more time stitching it together.

This is interesting.. I was so stressed out about the whole situation. I still am, to be honest. Sure, it’s just an MMO, but when you dedicate so much time to it, with the developers making it clear that this is a social game, you become attached not only to the game, but the game goals and the people you play with. So when drama happens… and never gets fixed, wounds form in the social tapestry and those can’t be repaired. Not this late into the game, where most of the hardcore players are already experiencing burnout and desires to return to the RL (like myself).

Last night, I faced a debate. I could opt to return as the guild master, and rebuild the guild, or I can walk away. As much as I found myself caring for the guild, and knowing that I would miss the people here, i think that I’ve opted to walk away. Tonight we scheduled a guild meeting (I was going to be online anyway) in which I’m going to see how the situation works out. I think the guild is at an impasse and the damage is irreparable. I’m not even sure how this happened exactly. But it’s been an interesting experience.

I’m not tearful sad about the whole thing.. well admittedly I am a little… all things must end after all. But I kind of hoped that a guild I helped create and build would become a legacy guild on this server. As things are right now, it doesn’t seem that way. It’s too bad though, we’ve done so well.

Ah well.

Like the old adage says, time heals all wounds. Or at least some time heals some wounds.

Knowing how shitty i felt yesterday, the boy suggested we take a night off of raiding in WoW to relax and unwind, which was exactly what I needed, I think.

Now, contrary to popular belief, I am not a WoW addict. I will defend this belief until kingdom come. And no, I am not in denial, for those that roll their eyes and say “sure you aren’t”. Nothing pisses me off more than being accused of being a WoW addict. If I am addicted to a game, I think it’s safe to say that game is Sims 2. I swear I’ve lost an entire weekend to Sims 2 once. Insanity.

Well, if I’m not a WoW addict, what the heck am I? First of all, at a point many, many months ago, I loved playing WoW to all sorts of hours in the morning, spending far too much time on it, where I may be classified as an addict. What my problem is now, is that aspect of my personality where I feel responsible to other people. I’ve posted in my LJ that I stepped down from being the guild leader of a guild I helped create. That guild (for you WoW noobs, it’s an organization in the game, like teams or clans), has been one of the top 5 in a server of many guilds to complete various accomplishments, end bosses, or what not. It takes 40 players to achieve most of thoses accomplishments. To organize this, we wrote out policies, set up rules, recruited loyal, skilled and well geared players, to kill end bosses and collect their loot to make the guild stronger to progress to the next end boss. We do this and still try to make it fun for the people playing, because unlike other “hardcore” guilds, our guild recognizes this is only a game, and many of us play it for fun and leisure. It’s no different than baseball, or chess, or going out bowling. But for an officer, it can be a serious chore, and no where else have I learned better team management than being an officer in this guild. (and no I never really played any organized sports).

So being in a top guild in World of Warcraft, is, as they say, serious business. I’ve meant to stop playing months ago, or at least limit my play time to casual status. Unfortunately, being one of the best geared warriors in the guild means that I feel obligated to be online sometimes to make sure that the raid isn’t undermanned. Don’t get me wrong, it’s hella fun to be able to be part of the 40 to be the 3rd guild on the server to kill C’thun, and it’s hella fun to see these new bosses and new encounters. It’s fun to grind for honour in Battlegrounds. It is a game, it’s fun and in a lot of ways I enjoy it like I enjoy TV or going to the movies. But all the preparing, all the organizing, all the scheduling is making it seem a lot like work to many people, including myself. So in a sense, my WoW guild is my “other” obligation in life, of course lower than my Family, my Boy, my Cats, and my Job. Sad.

So yes, folks, that is my issue. Addicted, no. Obligated, yes.

Yesterday, me and my boy (who plays a paladin and is also an officer in this guild), decided to take the night off. We snuggled in bed and watched Bubba Ho-Tep. Last weekend, I decided to organize all my DVDs into DVD binders instead of having the cases just piled up on top of the entertainment unit and on the floor. I packed the cases away and now i have two DVD binders that can hold 400+ DVDs on a shelf. It’s a lot more neater. The DVDs were never in the right cases anyway. :p While I was doing this, I came across maybe at least a dozen DVDs that were still in their shrink wrap. Bubba Ho-Tep was among one of them. And so for the first time I finally got to see Bubba Ho-Tep.

Unfortunately I wished I liked the movie more. The boy fell right asleep only to wake up as the credits were rolling.

We had intended to play co-op Halo 2 on my new Xbox 360 afterwards, but I just crashed. I had some really, really odd dreams involving some strange menage a trois (with people i didn’t recognize), being in an amusement park that was filled with Horde, and my mission was to bomb the Horde rollercoasters, and something else that involved the Beatles and Paul McCartney being really mad at me.

So all in all, that was twelve hours of sleep. I woke up this morning with those kinds of headaches you get from oversleeping. But I had a muffin and a grapefruit cocktail, so now I feel better. And now it’s time for lunch and I’m off to forage for food now.