Getting close

17 more days until Christmas.

Wow.  When I was a kid, that would have felt excruciatingly long.  Now it’s more like, “Only 17 more days?  How did it get here so fast???”

I’ve heard conflicting reports over the last week or so.  Some said that Frostfell was scheduled to go live on Dec 8 (which would be today, so if that one is correct, I guess it is already running) and some said Dec 9… which would be tomorrow.

I could probably find out for sure by doing a simple internet search, but my motivation simply isn’t there.  It honestly wouldn’t matter one way or the other.  Even if it is live today, I won’t be experiencing it until tomorrow.  I had what had better be my last overnight maintenance for the year at work last night, so the second I get home today, I’m going to bed.  Frostfell could be a 1 day and 1 day only event that promised the be the best world event in the history of online gaming with a side guarantee to completely change your life for the better… and I would have to skip it.  I’m too old for this all-night shit any longer.  All I want to do is sleep.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am looking forward to Frostfell this year (as I do every year).  I generally start looking forward to the next Frostfell by mid-February every year.  I’m just more interested in sleeping right now.

Combing the desert

I don’t have much exciting to talk about from the weekend.  Last weekend, I suffered through 3 of the tradeskill instances for the point of getting the achievements.  On Saturday, the 4th was around again so I knocked that one out to finish those and get my house item reward.

Saturday evening, we ran through Ward of Elements.  Most of what dropped went to alts I believe.

Yesterday, I spent the day taking my ranger through the Desert of Flames.  Sure he has outleveled that content, but DoF was always one of my favorite areas to adventure in and I completely skipped over it when I was leveling the ranger.

Through the course of the day, I managed to get the exploration achievements for all 3 areas and the questing achievements for Sinking Sands and Pillars.  There are a few other questlines in Pillars that I want to finish up, so I’ll spend some more time there in the coming days.  It’s also time for me to head into Maj’Dul and work on some of those quests.

What the heck?  Grayed out content is certainly more enjoyable than doing more shard zones.  I’m definitely sick of those at this point.

At least Frostfell goes live some time this week.  I’m definitely looking forward to that.

The Most Important Post I’ve Ever Written

I’ve been trying to think of a proper title for this post for days, but I can’t think of anything to imply that this is simply the most important post I’ve ever made other than to title it The Most Important Post I’ve Ever Made.
 
I will tell you right now that this will not have a single thing to do with gaming, but I ask you to please read it anyway.  Even if you don’t like me, please read it.  I’ve been thinking about this post for days… trying to find the right wording because I don’t want to screw this one up.  As it is, I’m jumping the gun a little bit because the meat of the subject will require a link that I don’t have yet.  I’ll go back later and add the link in once I have it.
 
And now to the subject at hand.
 
The odds are not in our favor.  Chances are that at some point in every single one of our lives, either we ourselves or someone very close to us will suffer the debilitating effects of cancer.  I know that I always heard about it, but I figured it was something that only hit other people.  And then the flood gates opened.
 
When I was in high school, my grandmother on my mother’s side came down with breast cancer.  She survived, but was never quite the same.  A few years later, my other grandmother came down with lung cancer and didn’t survive.
 
When I was in college, a woman who was like a second mother to me came down with bone cancer that quickly spread to her brain and she passed away.  Less than a week later, the mother of a good friend passed away from the exact same type of cancer.  Later that same year, a good friend’s father passed away from pancreatic cancer.
 
Three years ago this month, two friends from work passed away from cancer.  One was a woman in her early 50’s who went home from work complaining of back pain one day.  A few days later, the doctors discovered cancer in her body.  She passed away a few days before Christmas.  The other was a young guy… probably a year or two younger than me.  He was at home with his wife and he collapsed on the floor.  She rushed him to the hospital and they discovered cancer in his brain.  He died on December 23… less than an hour before his first child was born.
 
Earlier this year, both of my parents were diagnosed with cancer.  My father had several patches of skin cancer and my mother had cervical cancer.  Both got treatment and both are in remission right now.  Less than two months ago, the guy who sits right next to me came down with thyroid cancer.  He had his thyroid removed and has undergone radiation treatment.  They aren’t completely sure yet if he is in remission or if he needs further radiation treatments.
 
That is just my life and those are just the cases off the top of my head that have impacted me in the last few years.  With each of those people, I could name hundreds of family, friends and associates who were also impacted by what happened.
 
A few months ago, when I first started really getting into cycling, I stumbled across a particular website.  I first clicked the link because the name was funny.  What I found on the other side was a real treat.  For those of you who ever read Coyote’s columns, this guy wrote on a par with Coyote for humor.
 
As I kept reading his site, however, there were times when I got hints that all had not always been well.  When I got to surfing back through his archives, a story unfolded that literally brought me to tears.
 
His name is Elden Nelson and his website is www.fatcyclist.com. 
 
Elden first created fatcyclist as a means to make fun of himself.  He had been an avid cyclist for most of his life, but one year, he discovered that he had gained a lot of weight and could no longer ride very well.  He said that he tried diets, exercise plans, and all the other “loose weight quick” gimmicks out there and nothing was working for him.  He opted to create fatcyclist because he figured the one thing he hadn’t tried was public humiliation.
 
Somewhere along the way, Elden and his wife discovered that she had breast cancer.  Rather than hide from the cancer or deny it was there, they decided to fight back and to educate.  Elden transformed fatcyclist from a site where he only talked about cycling in a humorous way to a site where he talked about cycling in a humorous way but also gave status updates on his wife, how she was doing, what they were going through, and what they had learned.
 
Elden’s wife, Susan, survived breast cancer and they thought that all was well.  A few years later, they discovered that her cancer had returned, metasized, and spread throughout her body.  Rather than giving up, they fought even harder.  Elden got heavily involved with the Lance Armstrong Foundation and started raising money.  He got a lot of companies involved and they would donate things that he would hold raffles for.  All the money raised went to the Lance Armstrong Foundation.
 
Through it all, he continued to tell the world of his wife and the way she fought.  Her story was so moving and so inspiring that many people adopted the phrase, “Fight Like Susan.”
 
Elden ended up forming a group called Team Fatty that participates in fund raising for the Lance Armstrong Foundation around the country.  Last year, Team Fatty participated in all four LiveStrong Challenge rides.  Team Fatty has their own bike jerseys that have the slogan “Fight Like Susan” imprinted on them.
 
In August of this year, Susan Nelson passed away.  That night, Elden made a post that still brings tears to my eyes.  The title, “Don’t Say She Lost” is not a plea but rather a challenge.  So many people would say “So and so lost their fight against cancer,” but that isn’t how Elden sees things.  He says “Don’t say she lost” as a challenge because he doesn’t see it that way.  In his own words, “Susan inspired me to expand the focus of my blog from nothing but bike-related jokes to a serious and pitched fight against cancer.  Then she inspired 500+ of you to join Team Fatty, the largest LiveStrong Challenge Team there has ever been.  And Team Fatty has raised more than $500,000 – a record amount.  Susan’s part in the battle is over, but she didn’t lose.  She led the charge.  She showed the rest of us how to fight: with determination, focus, creativity, and outrageous endurance.  Now it’s up to the rest of us to Fight Like Susan.”
 
When the Lance Armstrong Foundation put in the final count for 2009, Team Fatty had raised more than $800,000 for cancer research… a figure that shattered the previous record held by Dell Computers.
 
Elden is now the single father of two teenage boys and pre-teen twin girls.  He hasn’t given up his focus or his fight though.  He has set a goal for Team Fatty to this year break the $1,000,000 mark.
 
I am very proud to say that I have signed up for the 2010 LiveStrong Challenge as a member of Team Fatty.  I will be signing up to participate in the LiveStrong Challenge 90-mile bike ride in Austin, Texas taking place next October. 
 
I am going to sticky this link to this site and, once I have it, I will add a link to my LiveStrong Challenge page where anyone that is so inclined can go to make donations.  In order to participate in the ride, I have to raise at least $250, but that isn’t going to be a problem.
 
You see, I have been a smoker off and on since I was 16 years old.  That is 22 years of poisoning myself.  Watching people I know and love suffering the effects of cancer and, sometimes, dying from cancer never moved me to say I was going to quit.  Reading about Susan Nelson, how she fought, how Elden fought back, and how a national cycling community rallied behind them and said, “Enough!  It’s time to beat this thing”… that finally inspired me to quit.  I thought it only poetic to decide to take at least a percentage of the amount of money I used to feed into Big Tobacco and funnel it to an organization that fights the very thing I was helping to propagate.  That amount will more than equal the amount I have to raise in order to do the ride.
 
I’m not going to ask for money.  In fact, should you choose to give, I won’t even know who did what as it will all be handled through the LiveStrong website.
 
All I will ask is that if you believe that we can eventually find a way to beat cancer for all of our sakes, do what you can.  That might mean donating a little money.  That might mean spreading the word.  That might mean linking back to this post or to fatcyclist.  Whatever you feel like you can do to help, please do.
 
One brave woman and her husband set out to change the world.  With our help, her husband doesn’t have to continue that fight alone.

Edit: My donations page is now set up.  You can visit it here.  It will also be linked to the side under the Help Fight Cancer heading.

Is Rome starting to burn?

I’ve been wondering lately if the gaming community is wounded.  Granted, we are in the phase of “between time” where our favorite MMO’s are at the tail end of last year’s expansion and not quite ready to release this year’s expansion.  I can’t speak about how things are with stand-alone games or console games as I haven’t played either in over a decade.  MMO’s have also been stagnant for a long time now with only clones with minor variations being released.  People beg for and call for innovation, but when innovation comes along, they scream “Too hard!” and jump ship.
 
But all of that isn’t really the point here.
 
I have long said that the gaming community has never been as strong as it was back in the EQ days.  I’m not talking gamer numbers here… I’m talking about the strength and enthusiasm of the community as a whole.  Since I wasn’t in on EQ from the beginning, I don’t know when the whole community thing started flourishing, but I do know it was well-established by the time I started playing and was still going strong up until just a few years ago.
 
Some of you are probably scratching your head and thinking, “What the hell are you talking about?”
 
Back in EQ, it seemed that a new fan website sprung up every 15 minutes.  Message boards were everywhere and they were all active.  Every class in the game had its own website dedicated to that class and members of that class, as well as others who had some measure of interest in that class, flocked to those boards.  Posts, write-ups, and walkthroughs by the hundreds were posted every day and most sites maintained a fairly constant online presence of 100 or more people at all hours of the day and night.
 
Over time, quite a few of the sites disappeared as the kings of the mountain were established.  People knew that if you needed information about a quest, general information about a mob, or a brief description of a zone, you went to Allakhazams.  If you had questions about spells for a particular class, you often went to castersrealm.  If you wanted to know what was in a particular zone or how to get around, you went to eqatlas.  If you wanted bard-specific information, you went to the concert hall or eqdiva.  The list goes on.
 
Hundreds of sites visited and contributed to every day by hundreds of people. 
 
And here is the really shocking part… aside from a very small number of sites, flame wars were non-existent.  People got along.  People were interested in helping each other figure things out, exchanging ideas and strategies, and finding solutions to problems.
 
No longer.
 
What message boards do exist for games these days are full of flames and child-like behavior.  There are few people who still visit the sites because those who once enjoyed contributing to the community grew weary of the trolls and instigators and simply quit visiting.  Many of the EQ sites have vanished completely or hardly see any traffic any longer… and it isn’t because of the age of the game.  It is because of the low quality of people who do actually contribute.
 
It goes beyond that though.  In recent years, fan blogs have replaced the message boards and fan sites of yesterday.  A lot of people who were once active in the gaming community or who once ran sites turned to blogging.  For me, I found it was a great way to express thoughts and ideas that I once would have put on a message board somewhere without having to deal with the tidal wave of flames and inane response that is now the norm on regular websites.
 
It seems lately, however, that the fan blogs are starting to dry up.  Much like the old mainstays of EQ, those who run the blogs seem to be either losing interest in the blog itself or gaming in general.  The lackluster attempts by the gaming companies have, I admit, given me more than a small amount of lethargy when it comes to giving a rip about what is going on in the gaming world. 
 
Two and a half years ago, when I first created this site, I would hit every site on my blogroll every single morning.  Every single morning, all of those sites had at least 1 new post up.  Every single morning, I couldn’t wait to write something myself and see what, if any, response it garnered.
 
The list over to the right has changed over time.  Sites have been added and others have gone away.  Only a few have been there from day 1.  That is the nature of the beast I guess.
 
Over the last few months, however, I have started to realize that maybe the old guard is simply ready to pass the torch.  There are very few people that I started gaming with a decade back who are still playing a game of any kind.  Back then, none of us could even fathom a time when we wouldn’t have some form of online entertainment.  Talking to them, it isn’t that they don’t want to be playing something.  They aren’t playing for the simple fact that game developers seem to have given up even trying to do something new.  It’s like the comic book industry from the 90’s.  A couple of titles went ballistic due to a pretty cover, a certain storyline, or a particular artist and then suddenly everyone is churning out copy after copy, clone after clone, until finally, the industry collapsed under its own greed.  Where are all those companies now?  Most are out of business.  The survivors are still trying to find a way to recover.
 
I went through my blogroll from the top to the bottom this morning for the first time in a long time.  As I have said on more than one occasion, I have largely quit caring… about gaming, about blogging, about industry news, about all of it.  The industry is stagnant and uninspired right now and that doesn’t exactly garner interest on my part.  I do still like to keep up with what everyone else is doing or thinks, so I thought I would hit all of the various sites.
 
What I discovered is that, apparently, a lot of people are feeling the same way I am.  Most of the sites on my list haven’t been updated in weeks, if not months.  Several have folded up their tents and said their goodbyes.  Others are updating far less often.  Pretty much no one has anything new to say because there is very little way to put a new spin on something that has been done a thousand times by a thousand companies.
 
The community is wounded because the industry is wounded.  And from what we have seen over the last few years, I’m not sure if I am hoping more for some miracle cure for what is wrong or for the whole industry to finally be put out of its collective misery.

Here we go again

And so another month comes to an end.  It seems strange to me to be posting so infrequently.  I think I am still averaging more posts than a lot of people out there, but after nearly 3 years of at least 1 post per day, this seems odd to me.  At the same time, how many times can I re-tell a “what I did last night” story and keep it interesting… if I ever did manage to keep things interesting in the first place?
 
If you have been around this site for any amount of time, you have heard me say several times before that this is my favorite time of the year.  I can’t really put into words the ‘why.’  It just is.  During a day and age where Christmas has become a “bad” word and where people battle growing stress and depression, I guess I am still a little boy.  I remember that when I was a child, the days and weeks leading up to Christmas were almost unbearable.  Pretty much from the moment the tree went up in our living room and the first Christmas ad hit the television, I was one massive raw nerve on the edge of my seat.  As the pile of colorfully wrapped gifts grew under the tree, I would reach a frenzy that I almost couldn’t stand… and my mother probably couldn’t.  I would sit for hours staring at the packages and wondering feverishly what was inside.  Occasionally, when I thought no one was looking, I would slink quietly closer, pick up a gift with my name on it to judge the weight, and gently shake it in the hopes of having some magical moment of insight.  These little detective exercises were usually disrupted by a screech from the gate keeper (aka my mother) catching me in the act and shooing me back outside.
 
I’m an adult now.  My family is spread out all over the place and most of them don’t like the rest of them.  We rarely speak and even more rarely get together.  My family was one of the many victims of present-day society where the pressures and expectations simply grew too great and we splinted like shattered glass and got as far away from each other as possible.  My 5-person immediate family (2 parents and 2 older sisters) now live in 5 different cities and holidays are not a family gathering opportunity.
 
Still, in spite of all of that, I love Christmas.  I love the memories of innocence that this time of the year awakens within me and I love the sounds, smells, and sights of the season. 
 
And somehow, through it all, I have created some all new Christmas traditions of my own.  There may not be a big tree, lots of decorations, piles of gifts, and holiday food, but that is alright with me.  No matter where my current attitude lies with regard to whatever game I am currently playing, Christmas time seems to always bring about a new resurgence of interest and enjoyment.  After all, it was Christmas season when I took my first steps into MMO’s so it stands to reason that the overall atmosphere of the season would invoke some old feelings.
 
With talk of Frostfell looming just around the corner, I feel like that little boy again… anxiously awaiting my favorite time of the year.  Instead of hopes of whatever holy grail of a Christmas gift I hope to see that year under the tree, I wonder instead about the Frostfell events and what will unfold in that snowy winterland this time around the calendar. 
 
Here in about 30 minutes, I’ll step outside to head off to lunch.  The temperature hasn’t really turned yet and the clear sky and soft breeze outside are keeping the temperatures in the 60’s, but nature is aware of the time of year regardless.  The trees, which browned weeks ago and started shedding their leaves, are really casting off their summer cargo now.  Brown leaves crunch under foot with every step and blow in the wind.  Houses and shops are lined with festive lighting and Christmas jingles play on the radio.
 
Before I know it, it will be over again and I’ll be packing the Frostfell goodies back into my house vault for another year, but for the next 31 days, I plan to enjoy that feeling of being a child again.