Not Quite So Massive Now
(Not a post about losing weight, though on one level at least, about dropping some baggage.)Assuming anyone from the good old days (you know, when I blogged properly) is still around, you'll know that I've mentioned before that I play World of Warcraft. I usually back that up with the observation that I AM NOT A COMPUTER GAME PLAYER. And it's true that no other game has ever really held my attention longer than a couple of weeks, never mind the six years since WoW's European launch.
The things that I've tended to identify when analysing why WoW works for me when no other games do usually turn out to be about the game's sociability. The idea that there's a human being behind all those other characters, and I can interact with them; trade with them, talk to them, group with them, fight with them even. And that's all supported by the guild system built into the game's structure.
Which means that over the last six years I've met some lovely people in the game while playing it both here and in the US (and a few wankers and arseholes, inevitably), a number of whom have become real-life friends who both The Mrs and I have spent time with outside of the game, and some others I hope we'll yet have the chance to meet. The game was also a thing that The Mrs and I were able to do together while we were on separate continents so it's meant a lot to us in one way or another, and been a major part of our lives.
So it may come as a bit of a shock to hear that a few weeks ago I logged in, did some basic admin on my various characters, had a bit of a chat with those of my friends who were in the game, flew my main character to his ancestral homelands, and logged out for the last time. My subscription's cancelled, and I'll lose access to my account on the 9th April. The end, as they say, of an era.
If you asked me what's the reason for giving up on the game, I'd honestly be hard-pressed to give just one. It's only a few months since the latest major expansion was released, which not only added new content, it totally recreated the old world in the Cataclysm that gave the expansion its name. When The Mrs and I first heard about it and started to see the advance information we were really excited by it. It seemed like it was almost going to be a whole new game - 'WoW 2' we called it.
And then it arrived, and we blasted through the new content in about six weeks, finding that the whole process of working through the game has been rendered so linear and nannyish that there's absolutely zero excitement to be had in levelling through it, and even the reworked old world, after initially looking so cool, ended up suffering for having been restructured in the same dull way. Nothing feels really challenging any longer, and even though all of this falls out of Blizzard's stated aim to make the focus be the endgame, getting people through the leveling content as quickly as possible, even the first attempt we made on the raid content felt just so much like 'meh'.
It was all of that, together with the realisation that I was logging into the game and having nothing that I wanted to do, along with the ongoing challenge of co-ordinating time with the people I wanted to play with, all of whom are 5 to 8 timezones away, that made me decide that my time in the game was finally heading to a close. I especially didn't want my antipathy towards the game to somehow become associated with the wonderful friends I have there.
More widely, the pleasure of another previously-positive aspect of the game I mentioned above has been dulled. Since we moved to the US we've been thoroughly embedded in an absolutely huge guild. A guild which has many positive characteristics and some amazing people in it, but which increasingly I've felt has become too indiscriminately big, too monolithic to be responsive to its membership in any meaningful sense, and with a just slightly too "we know what's best for you" attitude for me to be comfortable in it. Of course, it make no bones about what it is and what it wants to be, and I know it will go from strength to strength while I wish it well - that's not the point of this post. The reason I mention it is that this is one of a number of factors that contributed to the (and it's a word I keep using for my feeling about gaming recently) malaise which led me to depart the game.
Interestingly, even though other MMOs have come along in the last few years that The Mrs and I have tried, none of them have managed to hold our interest, but just recently it seemed like the curse was lifted, and a new game, Rift, grabbed our interest enough that The Mrs actually made the switch completely from WoW. I was planning to play both, though for less of the time than WoW used to occupy. But we've both cancelled that too. Short term, we're both enjoying doing other things with our time. Also interestingly, we've discovered that a bunch of people we know are also either giving up the game or taking extended breaks from their play at this point too. MMO-burnout seems to be on the rise.
I should stress that this isn't a 'never again'. If I wanted to go back to that account and those characters I could, because it'll all still be waiting for me. But if I do ever play again, maybe it'll make more sense to play on the European servers so I can get the full experience of an active, populated world. It's not like I won't still be in touch with the friends by other means. But at this point any thought of playing again is very far from my mind.
It's odd - the game's brought me friendship, entertainment, challenge and a lot of fun over the last six years. But while it's strange and a little sad not to be talking to the gang regularly, when it comes to the game itself I'm actually barely missing it.
(Note: Most of this post was written before some events this last week which finally finished off any interest in the guild for me. I've left what I originally wrote on that subject as it was, because I'd already left the game before I left the community this week, so the recent events aren't relevant to this update about quitting the game. I should also note that although I've mentioned that The Mrs and I have both left the game, nothing here should be taken as any indication of his thinking on the subject.)
Not Resolved
I've always tended to the view that New year's Resolutions are rather setting oneself up for a fall, so I tend not to make them. However, starting a year back in the UK for the first time in a few does seem like an opportunity to take a bit of a look at things. So without in any way attempting to resolve anything, I have been thinking of a list of habits I'd either like to break or get into:
Take More Exercise: Not in a 'join a gym and then spend the next year never going but paying for it' way, but just generally. Little things - there's a ten minute walk at each end of my commute that I could take more briskly, I could get out my neglected bike and go out for an hour at the weekend, stretch my legs further at lunchtime than just walking to the sandwich shop and back. That kind of thing.
Less Computer Food: Between sometimes leaving eating breakfast until I get to work, the aforementioned lunchtime sandwich, and some evenings when I'm engrossed, there are days when I can eat three meals in front of a computer. It's just a bad habit, which winter and its lack of sitting outside at lunchtime opportunities tends to exacerbate, but that's not good enough.
More Following Through: I have a terrible tendency to have a great idea for something I'd really like to do and then not do anything about it. This might be a podcast, or a new blog, or an activity with people. I've always been bad about this kind of thing, so a complete change is unlikely, but let's for goodness' sake follow through on a couple of things this year. Which kind of leads to:
Make More Of My Time: I'm usually in work before 8am and leave at 6pm, with an hour's commute at either end. That doesn't leave much time in the weekday for other stuff, but what I do at the moment with that time tends to the mundane. I want to find at least one thing I can do on a regular basis that feels like a more positive use of some of my time, as well as do more stuff like I used to, like more frequent cinema and theatre. Also, entertain more.
It occurs to me as I look at these that very broadly, they're about time and making it count for more. Which it should. Forty five years it seems to have taken me to reach that profound realisation 
The Mail I Receive
I may have mentioned before that I get a lot of mail on my Gmail account that isn't spam, but it is mis-addressed. Someone with a name like mine has both;
1) a problem entering his own email address on forms, and
2) a lot of friends who don't know his address and keep guessing it wrongly.
In fact, this is more than one person with a name like mine, because I get mails for a 'me' who's in Australia, another in the US, and a third and indeed a fourth in the UK.
The guy in the US, I know very little about other than that he has a Home Depot credit card. I know this because I get the emails telling him that his statement is ready. And when I tracked down a phone number to call the Home Depot card people (not an easy feat in itself to begin with), they told me that they couldn't even access the account with my email address on it to note that the email address is wrong because I couldn't give them the account details. The fact that I was calling to explain I wasn't even the person with the account and therefore certainly couldn't give them the account details didn't seem to register, and my suggestion that maybe they just highlight to someone who could follow it up that there's an incorrect email address in their system was met with a blank "I'm not sure I'd know how to to that'.So I just added them to my spam filter and now I don't see the mail every month.
The guys in the UK I've actually exchanged a few mails with, and if I receive stuff that I can be fairly sure is for one or other I forward it on. We occasionally have a laugh about how this has happened *again*.
But the guy in Australia... well to begin with, I think there might be two. It's hard to tell because the subject matter of all his/their mails is broadly the same, but the ways people address him/them differ. Where these mails are chatty notes to a group of people planning a get-together and that kind of thing, I started out sending back a mail pointing out that I'm not the person intended for inclusion, mostly so that I didn't then get another dozen mails as they all entered the discussion. This has happened frequently enough that again, I occasionally get an email from someone apologising that my address has clearly been dumped into so many people's contact lists.
There's an odd crossover too, between some US and some Australian mails, and when a spate of them fall close together it can get a bit annoying. And also disturbing. Because that subject matter they tend to have in common? Let's just call it 'aggressively religious', shall we?
There seems to be a group very actively organising prayer camps, and planning for their salvation, and generally getting happy clappy in a way that I'm sure they think is okay but which comes across as a bit brainwashed and creepy to an outsider like me. The many mails I also get about their 'Youth Challenges' make me worry about indoctrination and far worse when it comes to putting youth with religious types. A few times when I've been the unintended recipient of a particularly full-on diatribe I've replied to the sender somewhat more sharply, which I occasionally worry is going to lead to me being put on a lot of 'burn in hell' mailing lists.
I appear to be in the middle of a spate at the moment - this morning I had a mail with the subject line "What are you looking forward to the most in the Kingdom?" sent to me and about 50 other people, all of whose email addresses I now have, but who seem fortunately not all to have jumped on the reply-all button yet.
But this week's winner is the mail I received last night from someone in America who appears unable to use subject lines, has difficulty spelling really quite simple words; ("Dear Paster Jon") and is writing to complain about how loud the music was at the YMCA last week, which was apparently "way too LOUD". Also to complain about how she didn't like that she didn't know any of the songs and didn't like that it was new music that was being played.
So far, so uptight bitch. But then, and I promise you this is a direct quotation, she throws this little thought into her sanctimonious little missive:
"Also I though [sic] for a moment I was in a black church with the songs and loudness. Just thought you might like to know."
Yeah Paster Jon, what are you thinking, turning the YMCA into something like one of those churches where the black people have their songs and their loudness. We don't want to be having folks thinking we're anything like them. Good grief, what if some of those black people heard the songs and loudness from out in the street and wanted to come and join us. We can't be having that. Just thought you might like to know.
I'm currently contemplating the most entertaining response.
And people wonder why I have a problem with religion and the religious.
Protesting The Pope
I'm feeling exercised to get out and take part in a protest from the first time here in the UK since the Stop The War marches. It's been on my mind to get involved in the protests around the upcoming Papal visit for a while - I signed the online petition to the government, and have followed the plans for the visit since it was announced while I was still out of the country, but the rash of news items and TV trailers has made me realise how imminent it now is.
His Naziness is in the UK from the 16th to the 19th of this month. During that time, as it's a State Visit, he'll be meeting the Prime Minister and leaders of the other parties, and will be accorded the same status and access given to other heads of state who don't preside over regimes of institutionalised misogyny, homophobia, child abuse and religious intolerance. That doesn't seem right to me.
Of course, the evil old queen is free to say whatever he likes, but a lot of people don't think he should be given any kind of elevated status from which to utter his bigotry, nor that any of the cost associated with allowing him to do so here should be met by people who not only don't follow him, but actively oppose him.
More information on the group organising the main protest next Saturday is here.
Other activities associated with some of the specific events on his trip are being organised locally.
Bread And Circuses
We spent last week away on the Isle of Wight. For those not familiar with this fabled land, it's an island just off the south coast of England separated from the mainland by a bit of water called The Solent.
I've only ever been there for a couple of day trips before, one of which involved that ever-so-British insistence on going into the sea despite thick fog and cold winds, which will tell you what the weather was like. So one thing I hadn't registered before this visit was how classically English countryside the landscape is. Seriously - think of what you'd expect to see in the classic English country view and it's everywhere you look on the Isle of Wight. Rolling fields, woodland copses, little villages with thatched cottages nestled between hills, hedgerow-edged country lanes, sheer cliffs falling into the sea, hilltop churches; they're all there. In a lot of ways you don't register how little of this typical England you see in the ordinary course of events, especially living and working in a city. I know it's all still out there in parts, but on the Isle it's like it's all been concentrated into one small area and you're just so much more aware of it.
We stayed on the edge of a village called Godshill, which is one of the most relentlessly pretty villages you can imagine, and though it's one of those tourist villages where it's not clear if there's somewhere to buy a pint of milk, it does have some good eating. Being an island with a decidedly agricultural bent, there's a wealth of great produce available from both land and sea, and in a shameless plug, I'll say that we didn't find those things being put to better use than at a pub in Godshill called The Taverners. You've got to love somewhere that worries about its food miles but can also list them in fractions, or even in one case "640 yards". Even down to locally sourcing the flour that they use to bake their own bread, The Taverners is a winner on the local produce front, and they do it all justice in the cooking. All our time in San Francisco has given The Mrs and I a serious love of sourdough bread, and The Taverners does a fabulous loaf of the stuff. If there was a way to keep it fresh I'd have brought home a car load. Which ironically would have bumped up its food miles by a factor of hundreds
Of course, the downside of holidaying in England is the uncertainty of the weather, which did its level best to be as uncertain as possible last week. It was so variable that weather forecasts changed dramatically from hour to hour, and while a lot of the rain thoughtfully fell overnight, most of the time there was a generally grey aspect that always threatened more. Given that part of the rationale for going was to help entertain some friends' kids, that limited the options slightly, but it also led to at least one lifetime first for me: we went to the circus.
Now, I'm not sure how I've reached the age I have without ever having been to a circus, but somehow it's happened. And obviously now they're not like they used to be, as they can't have evil animal acts, so I suspect I've missed the golden age. But was it what I was expecting? Not exactly. To begin with, the scale of this one was ... smaller. When you think of circuses, they tend to be those huge Big Tops with hundreds of seats ranked up around the ring and enough overhead space for a serious trapeze act or three. This one was more intimate - no trapeze as such, though various acts worked off the ground, and no tendency to inspire the gasps of awe that I tend to associate with high wire acts and people being thrown and caught high above one (can you tell my circus expectations are totally informed by films?). But it was a fun way to while away a couple of hours; there was a clown, there was a ringmistress - yes, terribly modern , there were young women in many sequins, and athletic young men being athletic. And to give it its due, the two kids in our party were rapt. They loved the slapstick of the clown, and they sat amazed at the acts, so on probably its most basic measure, I'd have to say it was a success.
I'll be frank and say that it wasn't the most amazing holiday ever, but it had its moments, and for the gorgeous landscape alone I'd say the Isle of Wight is somewhere worth passing some time.
Since We Last Saw Our Hero…
... a great deal has happened.
First things first - the apparent eighteen month gap below is at least partially covered by my temporary settling at Suddenly San Franciscan (which should also tell you where I physically was a chunk of that time). I moved blogging activity over there because I wanted to create a specific narrative of my thoughts, views and activities as a transplanted Brit in the City By The Bay. To some degree it worked, but for reasons I won't go into here, as I went into them there, it wasn't as successful a move as we'd hoped. I'll keep that site up for the foreseeable, just as a record.
So now I'm back, and have been for a few months. I didn't restart blogging until now because I had this slightly mental idea of taking a break - time off work, quiet time with The Mrs, a removal from pressures including even those I applied to myself to write stuff online. The reason this was slightly mental is that I should have known better. I've been kept busy with various things, this period coincided with The Mrs being on a deadline for a book, and any number of other things have meant that not only am I not feeling especially chilled after a decent interval off, but I'm now feeling new stress because I need to find a job.
Fortunately at least on that last front there are some irons in the fire which I'll pull out to talk about when the time is right.
In the meantime, hello again world. For anyone new to me blogging (hello Twitterpeeps); a quick summary before we resume regular stuff:
44 years old, London-based, married with cat, previous form in corporate management, radio and TV production and for the last twelve years or so, all digital, all the time. Been leading teams in digital businesses, developing online communication strategies and generally trying to be as good at it all as possible.
Blogging on and off (mostly on) since April 2001, with what I laughingly like to think is an eclectic subject range that certainly takes in digital stuff, comics, film (I used to do film and TV reporting professionally), books, etc as well as regular diversions into politics and current affairs. Also whatever else I find briefly of interest.
When I set up the San Francisco blog I set down some ground rules for the stuff I wanted to talk about, etc. This time I'm going to let things evolve as they go and see what kind of flavour this place ends up with. I've done a quick tidy of the blogroll to trim out anyone who appears to have stopped for good, but haven't yet got round to adding in new people, which I will over the next few days. I also need to give the template a complete overhaul and add in some new widgets - possibly a job for the weekend.
Anyway - that's what you missed last time on Glee.
As Birthdays Go…
... it's possible that this was my suckiest ever (can you tell I live in California now?)
Just very far from home, rattling around in a temporary flat by myself and feeling thoroughly sorry for myself as I sat and ate my solitary dinner.
Ho hum, that's all done with now. Onwards to what promises to be a very interesting next year.
“Leavin’! On A Jet Plane….”
This is the huge news. Following my stint in San Francisco at the end of last year/start of this, I'm going back. For a couple of years. With The Mrs. And the cat.
I was actually asked to do this just before I came back to Blighty at the end of March, but it's taken a long time to get sorted. However, I now have my shiny new US visa, and The Mrs has his (and that's a saga and a half...) and will be leaving within the week.
Jinkies!
I’m Not Dead!
I have, however, been monumentally busy and have been dealing with preparing for a fairly huge life change, or which more later. However, just to let anyone who's interested know I am still alive and kicking.
I'l be back properly shortly with an All-New, All-Different More a way of life...., featuring:
Proper content, not just ramblings about things I've done!*
A totally new look and feel! **
News of some new and interesting endeavours! ***
A new location!****
* Maybe.
** Almost certainly not really.
*** If The Mrs and I can get our acts together.
**** Actually, really, yes to this one. See next post.