How nerdy are you?This week Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died. A whole generation of pasty dice-obsessed nerds owes him big time. Me included.
So, in his honour, how nerdy were you? Are you still sunlight-averse? What are the sad little things you do that nobody else understands?
As an example, a B3ta regular who shall remain nameless told us, "I spent an entire school summer holiday getting my BBC Model B computer to produce filthy stories from an extensive database of names, nouns, adjectives, stock phrases and deviant sexual practices. It revolutionised the porn magazine dirty letter writing industry for ever.
Revel in your own nerdiness.
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chthonic, Thu 6 Mar 2008, 10:32)
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Not as nerdy as I was a year ago...I logged in to my Ultima Online account. I made a few difficult leather items waiting for my guaranteed skill gain on one character, marked a few runes on another for a project (I was halfway through a book collection that would be over 500 when complete), and then changed back to my main character for my usual online task - sorting out the items I had dumped into storage.
I'd sorted thousands of items, and I was not even close to halfway through. I had armour by sorted by type, multiple variations for different characters. I had weapons sorted by type and special abilities, and also by character. I had spell ingredients all over the place, and was keeping track of how much of each type I used so I could buy it in bulk in the right proportions. I had runebooks to all over the place, quite aside from the aforementioned project, that needed checking and sorting.
I was about an hour into this sorting on this particular evening when I was struck by a particularly pertinent question: "WTF?"
Why? Why do I waste an hour or two of my life every fucking night to categorise virtual items in a virtual house in a virtual land? Do I ever even play the game and you know, use the items? Do I fuck. Could I use an extra hour in bed? Fuck yeah, maybe then I won't be 5 minutes late for work and half-asleep until lunchtime every fucking day. Could I put £20 a month to better use? Fuck yeah, I've been living on nothing but toast and pilfered jam/marmalade/marmite/etc at work for the last month. I hate the job anyway, but what's stopping me getting off my arse and getting another one? A pretend sword that I'll never even use is in the wrong pretend box. Whoop-de-fucking-do. I even spent £50 a while back to buy enough gold to buy a virtual house that was in a nicer virtual location. Maybe my guitar could use a play once in a while - it's been months since I've spent any more than 5 minutes on it. Maybe there's more to life than changing a couple of numbers in somebody else's database, cared about only by other people who are also too blinkered by the truly trivial to notice that they're wasting their lives.
I laughed mercilessly at myself, logged out, edited my credit card numbers to gibberish in my account settings, smoked a fat one and played guitar all damn night.
I've never been back, or even been tempted... but I still can't quite bring myself to delete the accounts. What a twat.
(, Fri 7 Mar 2008, 1:09, 4 replies)
Kudos to youfor opening your eyes. I've never been sucked into this sort of stuff, I actively avoid such things, but my housemate has spent all day in her room levelling up her characters on WarCrack.
(, Fri 7 Mar 2008, 1:26, closed)
WoWI never got quite to that level, but one day I had the same sort of epiphany in relation to WoW. `This just isn't terribly interesting' I thought, and stopped playing, never to return.
My partner plays it incessantly, which is nice. (not).
(, Fri 7 Mar 2008, 3:25, closed)
Had a similar problem at uniUntil I realised that porn is not as good as real sex
Football on the TV is not as good as seeing it live
And if your virtual friends are better than your real friends, then you really need to get out more.
Well done on breaking the cycle, I hope you're getting more sex/laughter/fun
(, Fri 7 Mar 2008, 9:20, closed)
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