Uncategorized

The photo of Belgrazer has absolutely nothing to do with this post…  I just felt like I needed some image to break up what would otherwise be a wall of text post.  Yesterday I made a post about the emotional labor it takes to be an organizer in a guild.  Then Scop and I went back and forth with a series of comments.  Firstly I don’t want it to come off like I was specifically making a post about him, or specifically directing my commentary at him.  He got to be the guinea pig because he happened to be the person responding.  The thing is…  I do get his down in the weeds point of view as a member wanting other members to respond.  It has just been in my personal experience that this doesn’t really happen unless someone is out there prodding folks into action.  One of the weird offshoots of this conversation happened in the private slack that the AggroChat podcast crew discuss things on.  Tamrielo a long time friend and similarly long in the tooth leader and organizer and I started talking about the various personalities we encountered.  I made the flippant comment that if I was pressed to do so… I could create a list of pretty much every personality I had encountered through leading guilds and raids…  and then walked away from the conversation to enter a meeting filled afternoon.  When I got out of said meetings he had done just that.  We went back and forth on a few of the points and there were a few cases I felt he had missed, but all in all he was pretty damned spot on. You can now find a revised list over on his blog that I feel is pretty close to whatever I would have cobbled together myself.  I don’t want to copy large sections of his post, but I do want to share the general bullet point list of types of folks we encountered.

• The Socialite
• The Drill Sergeant
• Chill AF
• Things Explainer
• The Ninja
• Side Projects
• The Collector
• The Griefer
• The Devotee
• What’s Going On Lately
• I Got Mine
• You Need Yours
• My Dude
• The Hiker and The Backpack
• I’m Here, Now What?
• Ready To Go
• The Downer
• The Positivity Cannon
• Silent But Competent
• Respect My _____

The thing is…  if I were pushed to do so I could probably rattle off names of players I have played with over the last two decades and tell you which of these traits they were focused on.  Most people are to some extent a “multi-class” of a bunch of these traits.  Similarly every single one of these has a positive version and a not so positive version.  “The Griefer” for example…  can be beneficial to a group by goading other people into reforming their habits or getting better at dealing with things at hand…  or they can just be a merciless asshole that only exists to sow the seeds of drama.  Similarly the “Things Explainer” walks a thin line between being overtly helpful when asked for assistance… and being a know-it-all that everyone wants to avoid catching the attention of.  The term “emotional labor” is a weird one but very apt and is often times brought up in terms of dealing with the emotional maintenance needed to keep a team going.  It is draining knowing that you need to treat each one of these people a specific way to get the results you actually want from them, and know that you are always walking a fine line between getting the positive version and the negative version.

The truth is over the years I have probably been at least part of each of these traits, and at this very moment in my life I have zero clue which one I actually embody anymore.  In most games I am very much “What’s Going On Lately” aka the “Content Locust”…  the person who swoops in and consumes the new content and then bounces pretty soon after that.  I think I have almost always been at least heavily multi-classes into “The Socialite” and “Chill AF” which is an odd blend but I definitely go through phases where I embody one over the other.  I am very much not a good “Things Explainer” because there are so many things I can do easily but could not necessarily tell you how to do them.  I feel like all of the traits that specifically focused on “competence” are not necessarily for me either because I mostly am just winging it the entire time I play a game.  I have “Collector” and “Side Projects” streaks but usually only after I have gobbled up all of the surface level content and am desperately trying to stay rooted in a game because my friends are playing it still.  Ultimately what I am trying to get at is that each of us have multiples of these traits blended together into the player profile that we ultimately are.  However your leaders…  the people who are out there watching for these things probably already have you pegged.  I am absolutely certain however that each person I talk to would probably slot me slightly different.  Regardless I highly suggest checking out Tams post because it contains a lot of good description of each of these types.

Apologies for the super late post this morning, but it’s been an ordeal to get to this point.  I woke up about 3:30 last night with the most excruciating pain I think I have ever experienced.  It was this pain that was super hard to place because it seemed to be everywhere.  It sort of radiated from just below my bellybutton, around the right side of me and also had this sorta lower back pain thing going on.  I spent a good deal of the early morning hours trying to find a way to lay that was less painful than the others without much luck.  Finally after getting up and showering the pain started to lesson enough that I could crash and attempt to get some rest.  At this moment there are occasional twinges of pain but nothing like it was this morning.  I went back and forth about going to the emergency room, because I hate dealing with that nonsense.  Instead I took the day off work and have a doctors appointment at 2:10 that will hopefully get me to the bottom of whatever is going on.  Anyways as a result you are getting a very late and very non-gaming post.  This is in part because really it was a pretty gaming light weekend.

On Saturday I went up to my home town and helped my parents move a bunch of stuff and hang a television on the wall.  I think when I first started to notice the abdominal pain I thought maybe I had just pulled something moving in directions my body is not used to moving in.  Saturday night I felt completely out of it, like I was a little guy in my brain piloting my body badly sort of out of it.  Sunday we had to get up and around and go to a family thing…  that turned out to be its own nightmare.  There are three people on my wife’s side of the family that I really do not like being around and all three of them were at this party.  By the time I got home I was once again out of it and spent the evening watching black mirror.  I remember some minor abdominal discomfort when I first went to bed but I guess as the night went on it just kept getting worse until it finally woke me up.  Here is hoping that the doctor might have some ideas for what is going on.  I’m in this state where I am almost afraid to eat or drink anything because I have no clue what might make it worse…  and the last thing I ever want to feel again is that pain.

I mostly wanted to make a post because I didn’t want folks to be concerned about me…  even though I guess in theory there was reason to be concerned.  I hope the start of your week is going better than the start of mine.

Pay no attention to the lack of a proper blog post this morning.  I’ve squandered what is normally my writing time watching a video of Adam Savage recreate the futuristic binoculars from Blade Runner 2049.  I don’t have a ton to talk about this morning because in truth I didn’t do much in the way of gaming.  I logged into both the Warrior and Demon Hunter horde side and did some emissary work and then logged into Destiny 2 only to log right back out.  Since I got only a couple of hours of good sleep last night I was ending up crashing pretty hard starting around 7:30-8 ish last night.  My focus for the night however was to attempt to get some sleep rather than do a lot of epic gaming.  My hope for tonight is to get in and do some Destiny 2 and at a very least knock out some of my weekly milestones.  I also still have a bunch of work to do on the Demon Hunter in trying to finish its class hall.  Additionally I only actually have one mount from the whole order hall madness thing.  I should in theory do some more.  Right now as it stands I have Warrior, Death Knight and Paladin to 110 on Alliance side and Warrior, Demon Hunter and Death Knight to 110 Horde side.  I would really like to get the 3 other mounts that I have easily available between the two sides.  I also at some point think I am going to push up my Warlock because it is something I enjoy but have no real clue how to actually play.

I am still very much getting used to the new routine that comes with managing three groups of people, and expect me to have a lot of adjustment time and probably low quality posts in the meantime.  I love you all and I hope you will bear with me through this madness.

The last few days have sorta whirred past as we did not do much of anything.  The cold temperatures and the desire to eat up some of the many things we have in our cabinets and freezer meant that we largely just stayed inside.  This mean’t fuzzy blankets and pants and sheets and cats…  while chilling out and playing lots and lots of World of Warcraft and Destiny 2.  I mostly made it to midnight on New Years Eve but crashed shortly thereafter.  In the grand scheme of things 2017 was not a bad calendar year for me personally…  but for the world as a whole it had a rather soul draining visage.  It is my hope that 2018 will bring forth new and interesting things for us…  while neglecting from finding ways to crush our spirits.  On a personal level I want 2018 to the unbridled goodness that seemed to be 2013-2015.  What I mean by that is 2013 was a year in which I did a ton of interesting things…  not the least of which was beginning the whole blog post a day madness.  In 2014 I founded AggroChat podcast and with it a bunch of interesting discussions have been had.  In 2015 I started going to Pax South and also writing some for MMOGames.com.  Not saying I really want to return to writing for other people because I frankly don’t have the time on my hands for that…  but just saying those three years were pretty great for various reasons.  I am not normally the resolution making type, but I figured I would do it just this once.

Sort out my Blog Feed

One of the casualties of trying to write on someone elses dime was my blog reading habits.  Prior to that I had been a rabid consumer of so many home grown gaming blogs, and while I never commented as often as I should have…  I mercilessly lurked in the background.  It was part of my daily routine to sift through the latest posts and they often times served as fertile ground to come up with something that I wanted to say in response.  During the brief time where I attempted to write a column on the blogging community… I felt like I had to expand my horizons by a large bit and with it my blogroll ballooned up into the 600-700 blog range and became unmanageable.  One of the side projects for this year is to sort all of this out and begin reading on a daily basis again.

Organize my Magic the Gathering Cards

Towards the tail end of 2017 I purchased a bunch of stuff from BCW card supplies with the intent of organizing my Magic the Gathering collection.  This has yet to happen in part because the upstairs is sweltering at the moment due to the cold snap.  That said I want to make sure this actually happens.  I have been playing since 1994 and I have a mishmash of cards spanning through the decades as I picked up a pack here or there for nostalgia purposes.  I want to organize all of these and get these sorted not only by set, but also by card color and rarity.  I got dividers to denote sets and colors, but this is going to be a long process given just how damned many cards I have.  I also have some hard cases for the cards that are more valuable and really should be better protected than a sleeve.

Sort out my Humble Bundle

I have a bad habit of snapping up Humble Bundles when they come out and often times not doing much with them.  One of the goals for the new year is to sort this shit out… consume the keys for the games I do not currently have in steam and try and find homes for the games that are duplicates.  I know there are gamers out there that would love to be playing these games…  I just need to find them a new home.  I did this once upon a time…  and need to spend some time getting my lists up to date.  In theory there might be giveaways or something…  or me just going through steam and looking to see if certain games are owned by my friends.  Whatever the case this is on the list.

Get Back on the Wagon

During 2013 and 2014 I lost a lot of weight and during 2015 it started sneaking its way back on.  Now at this point I have gained back every last bit of it and probably then some.  In truth I have never quite made it back up to my highest weight, but I am up there.  Essentially I need to do something about it for quality of life reasons as much as anything else.  I’m an aging fat man and I need to at least fix some of the things that I can.   I know this involves doing regular exercise and also is going to involve monitoring what I am actually eating as well.  I had a lot of luck with the Lose It app in the past and I will likely return to using it religiously again.  Probably also going to go back to having oatmeal for breakfast…  though I failed completely at that one this morning.  Basically the reality is that I need to do something because I am tired of being as big as I am.  I will never be a small person, nor do I really want to be…  but I want to be a smaller person.  I am not going to set parameters here because I am not even sure what the reality of it is going to look like yet, but I do want to make some changes because I am tired of feeling tired and sore all the time.