The Ache in my Heart for WoW

I have mentioned several times, that I play World of Warcraft. Though I have great friends I have met from there, WoW has left me with an emptiness and ache in my heart. It is a hurt that just wont go away, no matter how hard I try to make it. Like any deep wounds, covering it up with a bandage only slows the exsanguination.

When I first sat down to play WoW, I was excited. I had heard great things about the game, and it gave me a chance to play online with my best friend who had recently moved away. I still stuck to the mantra, "Only losers play WoW," until I made my second character. I made a Hunter on a new server to play with my friend and get away from drama on the old server. I instantly fell in love with the class.

Gryphven, Scarletdawn and me posing for the camera

A while later, while waiting for my friend to catch up to me in levels, I made a Mage. I fell in love with the class as well, and for several years following those characters, they were the main two classes I played. I quickly got them both up to max level, which at the time was 80, and had a blast running dungeons and quests with friends all day. If I was not working I was playing with great people that also shared the same love I did.

Then things got rocky on that server and fell apart, I moved my toons back to my first "home" server, Blade's Edge. I was not the first to leave the server, but when my heart was broke by my friends there, I knew there was no place left for me. I say my heart was broke for lack of a better term. What I loved most about the group, the server, my friends, had been broke, and the love of the server was gone.

When I came back to Blade's Edge, it was different, but I quickly fell back in and topped the ranks in my old guild. We were small, about eight of us (I think we topped out about 15 active players) but we played a lot and we did things together. But like cancer, death slowly started to creep in again. Real life situations started taking time away from the other guild members. Friendships were strained, and connections broke. Soon we were down to three, sometimes four people.

I kept playing still. I ran quests, did dailies, ran a few dungeons, and tried my best to keep the love alive. But after a few more months, we were down to two, then to one. For months, out of the twenty friends that I had got close to, I was the only one left. Now some of them might have still been playing, but I had lost contact with them when they switched servers. I was alone and I hated it.

First time killing the Lich King with the guild.

I had two hunters on one server, so I faction changed one to Alliance but I wasn't hoping for much. It would be a short time then I would move him to another server where a friend had moved to. At least I wouldn't be alone  playing. But as fate, or God as I think happened, would have it, I was invited to a guild. The invite was polite, and simply asked if I would give them a chance. I did. That day I joined Gentle Persuasion.

The guild leader was very friendly, and the people were nice. I began doing things with people again. Soon I found myself as an officer, then as a First Officer. I was third in command by rank, and I was happy again. We slowly grew and hit the one-fifty mark, two hundred, and continued upward. We got into raiding, and doing things as a group every night. Things were great. I couldn't have been happier with the guild. But the wound that I had in my heart for the game, kept seeping.

Promotions used to be based on simply helping your fellow guild member. I used to view guilds as a good, working communism. If you worked for the better of yourself and your fellow guild mates, you were rewarded and the group as a whole was made better. But I can see now, that guilds suffer the same fate as real world communism. The problem with it all is the people aren't all like minded.

My guild still continues to grow. As I write this, there are 13 people on which is actually rather low for our normal nights as of late. But I feel the blood seeping out of the bandages that I had wrapped around my dying heart. I am seeing promotions based on something but I have no clue what it is. I see people get promoted three or four ranks as a time, and people that have been in the guild only for a few weeks, in the same ranks as the people who have been here for years.

Toxiccupcake and me killing King Dred in Drak'Tharon

The core of the guild is still here, but there is a stagnate stench of dying overshadowing the wonders of this guild. I have my friends still, who I do not plan on losing touch with. Many of them have moved from the WoW to the real world friend zone. I hope not to lose touch with any of them, and actually get a get together going where we can all meet in real life.

Most of the people do not see what I am seeing, many are still caught up in the newness and wonder of Azeroth. But there will be a time, in the not too distant future, when my blood stops flowing, and I pass beyond the realm of World of Warcraft. I am bleeding out. I keep changing the bandages, but it is only a matter of time. It is strange how much sadness I feel when I think of the game, yet how much love and joy I also feel.

I love World of Warcraft. I love the world, the lore, exploring the amazing sights it has to offer. I will always look back at it with fondness and love. I will always have my memories and a few friends who I met through the game, who I can no longer live without. Friends like Jyntri, Scarletdawn, Naibstilgar, Kouga, Valdyre, Childs, Valentynn, Mortis, Jdemolay, Greengable, Hermanodo, Kizrawr, Loppyrogue, Lovelyme, Ayire, Endoflegends, Taiahu, Gryphven, Pinkusfloydd, Mushiruum, Hammycrush, Alunaria, my dear friend Nariva, my best friend and someone who always makes me smile Toxiccupcake, the love of my life, Hails. These are the people who make this game great. They are the bandages and sometimes the clots that keep me going. Without them, I would have died years ago. As always, thanks for reading.

Me and Nariva enjoying a moon rise for my birthday

The Ninja and the Butcher

Today is a story for you. My childhood was an interesting one to say the most. I blame it on my mother, who has inherited the fault from her mom. I had fun coming up with this story. I have been working on it slowly for a bit now and I hope you enjoy it. As always thanks for reading.







When I was younger, I was a much better Ninja than I am now. Not that I am not really awesome now, I was just even more awesome then. I used to be able to sneak my way into anywhere. My neighbor, Brad, and I went out once a week to see what we could break into.

An illegal photo of our ninja training grounds from 20 years ago.

This particular night was nothing out of the ordinary at first. We decided to try to break into the small local grocery store. The store was called Chaney's and it had some of the best (Read: most fun) security systems we had run into as children. 

Brad and I walked along the side of the road dressed in dark faded black clothing. We heard a car behind us, so we quickly ducked into the ditches on the side of the road. We waited for the car to pass before we got up and continued the one mile trip.

Burton is a small town. It is a mile square and had a small park in the very center. The road coming in from the north held the school, couple of banks, and a small length of stores like you see in old movies of small towns. There are 3 crosswalks in a stretch of 100 yards, and people are still too stupid or lazy to use them. As a fair warning, since I got my license I will not stop for people not in a crosswalk when they are so close to them.

Brad and I walked past the store we were going for, and rounded the post office next to it. We scaled the top of the small building and crouched down on the side of the roof peering at Chaney's. At the time we saw nothing that looked like it would be hard to get into. We figured we would get in, take a drink or two for our  hard work and get right back out, no one ever being the wiser.

From the roof we planned our entrance. I decided to get on top of the small grocery store and see if there was an access on top. If there was, I would enter from there and drop down into the middle of the store.

Brad decided to go to the "hard" way. He chose to go right through the front door. I thought it was stupid and rather not worth the risk. Burton did have a police officer who might be working that night. But Brad could not be persuaded. With our minds made, we moved.

I quickly jumped from the top of the building to a telephone pole. It was a hard jump with the pole being on the outer most of my range. But I managed to grab the bottom foot peg and climb up it. From there I threw my robe to the top of the building and tied the other end off on the pole. I swung myself up onto the rope and slid/walked down the rope. I had really good balance when I was younger.

From there I walked the roof and found a small access in it. I checked the hatch for any alarms or wires, finding none I opened it and went in. It lead down to the rafters above the drop ceiling. This was a piece of cake. Removing the tile of where I wanted to drop in, I tied a rope to the rafter, so I could get up easy if we had to leave in a hurry.

Brad had made his way to the front door and began picking the lock. He was good at that, much better than I was, since I had little patience for it. I would have rather kicked in the door. He had to hide once as a car turned around in the parking lot, but then was right back at it. With a little work, he had the door unlocked and had a magnet ready to attack to the alarm strip. He had the door open and the magnet in place quicker than the alarm had time to go off. Brad was always nice to work with on these things. Brad causally looked through the movies that they used to rent (Remember VHS?) and made his way to the isle of cold drinks.

I was sliding down the rope as Brad was walking up. I looked  at him and nodded and selected two drinks off the shelf. Because of the anticipation of breaking in here, I was thirsty so I took a bottle of water and drank it. Then I took another bottle of a fruity drink and placed it inside an insulated pocket in my gear. Brad had taken two drinks as well, but I do not remember what they were. The we had decided to walk around the store a bit, maybe grab a Little Debbie or Hostess snack before we left.

That was when we heard the noise. It was the sound every ninja never wanted to hear. The sound of a large man's boot thumping on the ground with two knives sliding on each other. It was a threat much like that of a rattlesnake's rattle. Brad and I spun around to see a massive man wearing bloody white clothes walking toward us.

"Do you boys know who I am?" asked the giant of a man. He was only a few inches from the ceiling, and as big around as the double doors on the front of the building.

Neither of us said anything as we slowly moved into a fighting stance. We did not have weapons with us, since this was supposed to be an easy small town break-in.

"They call me the Butcher, because that is my trade. And now I have come to collect."

I stared at Brad then back at the Butcher. I mustered up as much courage as I could and said to him. "Hit me now and see where it leads. Cut me if you think I will bleed, and strike me down if you think you are a man. Cuz I know you don't understand."

He paused his forward movement for a second. He looked me in the eyes and all he saw was conviction. He dropped the blades to the ground. Then with a laugh he uncoiled chains that were around his arm. With a mighty swing, the blades came rushing at Brad and me. We engaged the Butcher.

We dodged, duck, dipped, dived and dodged attack after attack while hitting the giant of a man with our small fists. Considering we were only 14 at the time, and he was a giant, our hands did seem really tiny. We made repeated attacks in and out punching and kicking, trying to wear the man down. But each attack only seemed to make him madder.

After a little while, the fight began to feel like a dance. It was fluid, rhythmic, and peaceful. We circled, he swung, we dodged, he moved, we countered, he swung, we dodged. It was a pattern, and it was a relaxing workout.

The large man seemed to be getting tired, his attacks slowed, the rhythm slowed, but then we saw what he was doing. He had been moving slowly toward the frozen section. Next to the frozen section was the deli. Where he worked. Suddenly the man burst forward, with speed that broke laws of physics. He hit a bell on the counter and we heard movement in the back room.

Then through the door came a dog. It was a giant dog. What kind of dog was this thing and why would a butcher have a dog in the back with him. I jumped over the deli counter and looked for a few knives, I found two short ones, and tossed one to Brad. As a warning, never toss a knife at someone. Even if they are a Ninja, there is a very good chance they will grab the blade. Thankfully Brad did not. He was good with a knife.

As the dog got closer, we began our attack again, this time the rhythm moved between the dog and butcher, and instead of punches, we had cuts and stabs. We moved together as the blood began to pour from the dog and the butcher. Suddenly an alarm sounded outside. We turned as the doors were smashed open and robots began to pour in. I am not making this up. I have no clue who the owner of Chaney's was, but it was crazy. Brad and I found ourselves out numbered.

Robot with a laser. 

As we ran for the rope the robots opened fire. They were shooting at us with lasers.... No joke, they were small beams of light hitting the walls and causing things to burst into flames. As things got dustier we could see the beams better. Honestly at first we didn't know what was causing the things to catch fire until it got smokey and dusty. Then we could see them. Brad, being younger and with less training than I, started to freak out a bit. But being more mature and adult, I slapped him in the face and told him to get up the rope.

We quickly climbed/jumped up the rope and into the rafters. It was a short distance to the hatch and we crawled out onto the roof. Brad started to run to the front of the building, toward the post office, but I pulled him back and told him to run to the back into the woods.

That is a good example of how small our town was. There was a small stand of trees right behind the main drag then houses on the other side. We ran through the woods as fast as we could. I felt like I had lost grip on reality and I was inside a science-fiction story where robots, ninjas and giants coexisted.

On the other side of the woods, we saw clothes still hanging on the line. We ran over and found some pants and shirts that mostly fit us and changed into them. We hid our Ninja gear in a tree up toward the top, so even if these people had kids, they couldn't reach them with out having outstanding balance in the swaying branches.

We began walking down the street slowly making our way toward the circle. We pretend to talk about anything but if you really heard our conversation, it was a bunch of gibberish. We were pretty freaked out about the robots. This had been our first time, and one of the few that we had run into robots at all. If I had watched it, instead of living it, I might have thought it was really awesome. I hate robots.

Eventually we made it back to our houses. We didn't get much sleep that night,  but we decided to just pretend it didn't happen. This is the first time this story has ever been told. We had agreed to take it to our graves, but I want people to know the real threat in the small towns they think are so quaint.

We went back to the store the next day with my parents to get something for dinner. You couldn't even tell anything out of the ordinary had happened. Brad and I looked at each other and laughed a little. We never went back as ninja's, but we had fun talking about it. I mean real robots with lasers. What more could a boy ever want in life?








The Ninja training picture is from littlegreenfootballs.com.
The robot with a laser is from http://skul4aface.blogspot.com. That is a cool picture.
The only conversation listed above with the butcher is paraphrased from a song by Project 86 called The Butcher.

The Evolution of Words

Words are awesome. I love them. I love to find out where they came from, why we use the ones we do for what we do, and love to find the connections between words you wouldn't expect. Words like ingress, egress, transgress. We know ingress means to enter, egress means to leave and transgress means to cross over.

But what is even cooler to me than words are names. Names of things, proper names, given names, you can tell a lot about someone if you understand a given name. A person with the last name Potter is very likely that they had a person in their family that made pots. But now it is just a name with little meaning.

Here is an example of how things changed giving words a whole new meaning:

terror (n.)  

late 14c., "great fear," from Old French terreur (14c.), from Latin terrorem (nominative terror) "great fear, dread," from terrere "fill with fear, frighten," from PIE root *tre- "shake" (see terrible). Meaning "quality of causing dread" is attested from 1520s

 terrible (adj.) 

early 15c., "causing terror, frightful," from Old French terrible (12c.), from Latin terribilis "frightful," from terrere "fill with fear," from PIE root *tres- "to tremble" (cf. Sanskrit trasati "trembles," Avestan tarshta "feared, revered," Greek treëin "to tremble," Lithuanian triseti "to tremble," Old Church Slavonic treso "I shake," Middle Irish tarrach "timid").

 terrific (adj.) 

1660s, "frightening," from Latin terrificus "causing terror or fear," from terrere "fill with fear" (see terrible) + root of facere "to make" (see factitious). Weakened sensed of "very great, severe" (e.g. terrific headache) appeared 1809; colloquial sense of "excellent" began 1888.

How words have changed over the last few centuries is crazy. All three of these were the same; Something that caused fear. The words are the same, but what we mean by them is totally different from what they meant when we started using them.

Now sometimes in fiction, they do use terrific like it was meant, but in most uses it is a good thing. When I think back to papers in school that I did a good job on, and my teachers wrote terrific, it makes me want to laugh.

One reason this popped into my head to write about, is the fact that people in church often say "King James is the only translation we need." I find this completely ridiculous. Though it might be a good version, we know more now about grammatical structure of the ancient languages than we did in the early 1600's. We also have more documents to pull from in translation. We are also smarter as a whole civilization.

Please do not get me wrong, I thoroughly believe that any version of the bible, if read with a searching heart, will find the truths to be the same and just as valid as the next version. But I do not think we should limit ourselves to one version over another simply because it was "good enough for them."

Times change, the worlds changes, people change; the Word of God does not. I urge anyone reading this to grab a Bible, and start reading. I would recommend starting with the the gospel of John.

Our words we use everyday will inevitably change in the future. We will clean and simplify things to the point that what we are saying to day will sound as archaic as Shakespeare does now. But that is one of the cool things about words.

The other reason it popped into my head was that I watched a video on Youtube by vsauce about "Why are Things Creepy?"

On a last note I recently read something about language as a whole. I will quote it for you, much easier than me summing it up.

Language
Children as young as seven months can understand and learn grammatical rules. Furthermore, studies of 36 documented cases of children raised without human contact (feral children) show that language is learned only from other humans; humans do not automatically speak.  So, the first humans must have been endowed with a language ability.  There is no evidence language evolved. 

Nonhumans communicate, but not with language. True language requires both vocabulary and grammar. With great effort, human trainers have taught some gorillas and chimpanzees to recognize a few hundred spoken words, to point to up to 200 symbols, and to make limited hand signs. These impressive feats are sometimes exaggerated by editing the animals’ successes on film. (Some early demonstrations were flawed by the trainer’s hidden promptings.) 

Wild apes have not shown these vocabulary skills, and trained apes do not pass their vocabulary on to others. When a trained animal dies, so does the trainer’s investment. Also, trained apes have essentially no grammatical ability. Only with grammar can a few words express many ideas. No known evidence shows that language exists or evolves in nonhumans, but all known human groups have language. 

Furthermore, only humans have different modes of language: speaking/hearing, writing/reading, signing, touch (as with Braille), and tapping (as with Morse code or tap-codes used by prisoners). When one mode is prevented, as with the loss of hearing, others can be used. 

If language evolved, the earliest languages should be the simplest. But language studies show that the more ancient the language (for example: Latin, 200 B.C.; Greek, 800 B.C.; Linear B, 1200 B.C.; and Vedic Sanskrit, 1500 B.C.), the more complex it is with respect to syntax, case, gender, mood, voice, tense, verb forms, and inflection. The best evidence shows that languages devolve; that is, they become simpler instead of more complex. Most linguists reject the idea that simple languages evolve into complex languages.

Speech is uniquely human. Humans have both a “prewired” brain capable of learning and conveying abstract ideas, and the physical anatomy (mouth, throat, tongue, larynx, etc.) to produce a wide range of sounds. Only a few animals can approximate some human sounds.  

Because the human larynx is low in the neck, a long air column lies above the vocal cords. This helps make vowel sounds. Apes cannot make clear vowel sounds, because they lack this long air column. The back of the human tongue, extending deep into the neck, modulates the air flow to produce consonant sounds. Apes have flat, horizontal tongues, incapable of making consonant sounds.

Even if an ape could evolve all the physical equipment for speech, that equipment would be useless without a “prewired” brain for learning language skills, especially grammar and vocabulary.

I hope this gives you somethings to think about. As always, thanks for reading.





First set of quotes is from etymonline.com and the second set is from creationscience.com. I highly recommend both sites. Because learning should never end.