And School Starteth

Tomorrow’s the first day of the school year, beginning my second year as a doctoral student here at OkState.  The change from summer to school has been very abrupt – summer was days and days of nothing to do but hang out with friends, and Orientation Week was a frenzied mania of test grading as starting international TA’s took various tests to be able to teach.  Hopefully the actual school year will be less insane.  I’m presenting at a conference which will make things more insane, but only over a brief period.

I’d been playing World of Warcraft again for a good while, and have recently quit, again.  I think my problem with it at the moment is that there’s virtually no way to be a casual player once you reach a certain point.  A low-level character quests and runs instances, the sort of thing where you can log in, romp around for an hour, and leave.  A high-level character raids.  This is generally a three-hour solid block of time, and if one is in a raiding guild, they do this several times a week.  Of course, you don’t have to raid, but when it’s the only thing that people your level are doing, your other options are limited.  Most any time I’ve stopped playing WoW has been for the same reason – the good, smart players all trickle into raiding guilds, so this is pretty much your only hope of fun social interaction and finding decent groups.  At the same time, these people are all pitiable and scary as hell.

Not due to their demeanor, mind you.  They’re by and large friendly, witty, eloquent folks.  But their lives are pretty damn frightening.  Log in in the morning, there’s Stoffie.  Log off for lunch, go run some errands, eat dinner, hang out with friends, get home at 11, and log in to check your auctions.  Stoffie has been playing WoW the entire time.  As have probably ten other folks in the guild and a couple hundred other folks on the server.  Often I’d see that my guild had done a raid six nights out of seven in a week.  Many of them are parents, which is unimaginable to me.  How do you not do real-life stuff with your kid, so you can do fake stuff in a game?  Stoffie recently told us she had 163 days of play time put in (that’s 163*24 = 3912 hours of playing WoW.  Allowing for 8 hours of sleep a night, that’s the equivalent of doing nothing but WoW from the moment she wakes up ’til the moment she falls asleep for 245 days in a row.  Gaaaaaah)

I am fortunately nowhere close to that, but the bottom line is that there is a really, really depressing undercurrent that comes with playing the game past a certain point.  I’ve had enough of it for right now.

Summer Winds Down Well

Wednesday was a day of helping my friend move, and I don’t think he believed me when I said so, but it was really pretty fun. There’s a certain feeling of being alive that you get from hauling heavy shit around. Later that evening was our group’s weekly trip to the casino for $5 poker night, and everyone did pretty abominably. I was among the first out of the tournament, but this meant that I got to use my voucher for free food that I’d earned the week before – go in with pocket aces and lose and they give you a $10 meal card. Considering the tournament itself only costs half that much to enter, losing the hand is pretty much the better buy. 😉 I got the ‘Blackjack Combo,’ which was a ridiculously large platter of steak, shrimp, chicken fingers, and ribs, and everyone got a bit of the feast. Later that night we played Last Night on Earth at Kim and Louis’, but which was fun, but I hadn’t realized how absurdly dice-driven it is. Although the theme of players trying to outrun a town full of zombies is badass, you could basically play the game as such: ‘the human players flip two coins, the zombies flip three. Whoever gets heads the most wins.’ On the other hand, the guts of some games *coughWorldofWarcraftcough* are even simpler and still remarkably addicting.

Thursday was kickball, which is rapidly coming to encompass sizeable chunks of the English department. This time we actually had enough people on each team for pitchers, shortstops, catchers, and dedicated fielders! Not only that, but the scores of the games plunged as folks are starting to get pretty excellent at catching balls. The proceedings were hella fun, and I’m happy that we’ve done this enough that I wasn’t hobbling about after with sore limbs.

Tonight was a joint birthday party by friends James and Karen, who have closely nested birthdays. Much pizza was consumed, and plenty of general hanging out was… erm… hung? (darn passive voice) We’re pretty well obsessed with Werewolf/Mafia here, and we played some great rounds of it tonight. In the game I moderated, the wolves masterfully kept suspicion off themselves and didn’t bat an eye when they got handed a couple random surprises. I also got stuck as the werewolf in two others games and we won both times, which almost never happens. As a rule I’m a terrible liar (and thus a terrible wolf), but I managed to get people thinking I was nervous because I was a special beneficial role instead of a horrible, slavering monster.  We made sure that any ‘safe’ people were killed off so the village was in the dark, and then closed in for the kill.  Gruesomous.

The party went for a good long time, and after the ranks thinned, we Rock Banded for a while.  It’s been a particularly excellent week, and after having a little too much alone time, it’s been very cathartic to be spending such quality time with such good folks.

I continue to be pleasantly baffled at how I wound up somewhere with such a great cadre of people – Stillwater pretty much keeps providing new additions on ‘What I Really, Really Hope My Social Life is Like Once I Land a Professorship’