FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
Sure, I get that dynamic. But we're dealing with the particular scenario of players who have already chosen the middle-child form of WoW. Retail, modern WoW has about 7 million active players, tbc classic had a few hundred thousand. Players in tbc classic have already self-selected into a less populated version of the game from a social perspective. It doesn't make much sense to me to drop the game suddenly, all at once, because it loses some of its already limited popularity. I could understand someone playing a very popular game, one that most people would recognize, say whatever the latest and greatest CoD is, moving on instantly when another game attracted popularity. But this is a population that has already chosen to play an unpopular game. I have trouble comprehending how 100,000 players is materially different for so many people than 50,000 players.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
Thanks, George.
My wife did not find my gaming particularly attractive.
It's an irony of women: they want you home and quiet, but hobbies that keep you home and quiet are unattractive, while hobbies that keep you out and around at all hours are attractive.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
Thank you much. At the moment she is in the pure loaf stage, and it's basically no different from the various orphaned kittens I cared for in my youth. I'm excited for her to get older and more active. I of course think she is and will be the most beautiful and interesting and intelligent baby of all time, but she's probably pretty normal.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
3d ago
What do you mean exactly by Pointless?
Thoughts on Classic WoW
So this summer I got back into World of Warcraft for the first time since about 2010 era Wo, when I lost my virginity and left for college and didn't really have a ton of time for video games anymore. WoW kept adding expansions, and with each expansion your old character became irrelevant and there were new levels to grind and new gear to seek out, and as it left me behind I never had interest in coming back to it. But at the start of the summer, a fit of pique fueled by a knee injury and my pregnant wife's hormonal desire to have me around the house combined with a hormonal antipathy to doing anything interesting lead me to find a video game to play to kill time. I had heard that Blizzard had revived the classic games I had played back in the day, and I downloaded TBC classic and re-upped my subscription. I'll note that any of my thoughts on video games probably suffer from the guy who has only seen Boss Baby syndrome, because I'm not really a gamer.
And it's been a ton of fun. Most serious gaming I've done since, well, 2010. I was really surprised how much interest there was in the game, I had figured on playing mostly solo on a dead server, but in reality I played in groups constantly because there were so many players that at times it was unaesthetic or impossible to play solo. Over a month or two of screwing around, I got my orc shaman to 70, and figured why not try to get into an easy phase 1 raid, that might be fun to do once. Well it turned out to be so easy to find raids as a shaman that I quickly got geared to the bleeding edge of progression content, despite just kind of logging in when I had time to raid and PUGging into a guild group that needed a fill-in. I was amazed at how committed a lot of people were to being absolute best at a 20-year-old video game that is widely denigrated, but I was happy to hang out and sponge off their higher levels of skill in a supporting role.
Then, tragedy struck, Blizzard announced a whole new version of World of Warcraft, Forever, dropping in November. Given the level of no-lifeing in the game, Forever feels like a threat for some people. The nature of WoW is that, as a game built around expansions, the original game was great, and ever few years an expansion came out and fixed some problems with the old game and added some new features and content, but over time changes and improvements and expansions stacked up to the point that the old game almost disappeared. Forever promises to be the original, vanilla experience, with minimal adjustments to fix some major flaws and add some major features, but without the slowly stacking changes that destroyed the original. Instead of vertical progression that makes your old character irrelevant, it will have horizontal progression, new content that doesn't make your old work redundant every few months. You can keep playing whenever you want for as long as you want, and nothing will ever really change, just endless new content.*
For players in TBC classic, this was tragedy, in that so many players got so excited about the new game that they immediately left the old game. There were stories of 25 man raids losing half their members instantly during the middle of a four-hour raiding session, and lots of serious guilds that had been putting in 10-20 hours a week on raids simply shuttered rather than fight the roster boss every week trying to continue. Like a bank run, this worked its way down: some players quit instantly because they wanted to play Forever and didn't want to "waste time" on TBC, others quit because they knew they'd want to no-life Forever when it dropped and needed to take time now to "farm Rep with their wife/employer;" then more players quit seeing that so many others had quit, figuring that the game was dead and further effort was "pointless."
It's this last category that fascinates me personally. I've had a number of conversations with people who were sinking a ton of time into the game a month ago that go something like "Well, I'm enjoying playing TBC, I'd prefer to keep playing TBC, but now I'm going to quit because playing TBC is pointless with Forever coming out soon." And that is such a confusing statement to me. My brother in Christ, what was the point of playing TBC last month? This was never getting you laid or getting you paid. It's always been pixels on a screen, lusted over by us dorks, an utterly pointless but fun hobby. It's always been a twenty year old game being replayed by bored dads to recapture their teenage nostalgia fix, that was inevitably going to move on from whatever content you were doing now next year when next expansion anniversary hit. And they can't explain it to me. They just keep saying that "now" it's pointless.
And this feels so odd to me, because if there's any group of people I should understand it's other bored millenial dork dads playing WoW classic. But there's some essential disconnect, where I can't understand what they're trying to communicate to me. We were playing the same game, the same raid, the same way, and yet I can't talk to them. I just don't fit in anywhere, I guess. Other people will never make sense to me.
Assorted other thoughts on WoW:
-- Playing a game developed between 2003-2007, it's amazing how many cultural artifacts you find. WoW wasn't exactly written as a "political" game, it never had a strong central story or message** but looking at it from 20 years on you notice certain things. In theory WoW is built around a racial war between the Horde and the Alliance, but neither is really the good guy or the bad guy, the NPC mobs are the villains, and all the really big threats to the world that result in endgame bosses and raids end up involving neutral factions that give you the quests. The Argent Dawn, the Cenarion Circle, the Earthen Ring, etc. This makes sense in game, it avoids creating exclusive content for either faction in the endgame, or making too many duplicate quests for each faction; it's easier to just have both sets of players go to the same place and do the same quest from the same questgiver for the same reward. But the moral message is very 2000s: nations are fine, armies are fine, but the really good guys are NGOs! Argent Dawn literally tells you in their introduction that they "aren't political and don't want to be political, we are just dedicated to protecting the world from the undead scourge of zombies!" The Cenarion Circle is magic Greenpeace. Leveling and in pvp it's the World of Warcraft, in endgame raids it's World of NGOs.
-- On the same note, I'm curious how other players map Horde vs Alliance to red tribe vs blue tribe. In my mind, the Horde is obviously blue tribe: a mix of indigenous refugees, freed slaves, alt lifestyle burnouts, history's victims trying to make good. The Alliance is obviously red tribe: your classical trad heroes joined by traditional religious belief and racist hatred of the Other. But I could equally see the alternative: Horde is masculine, aggressive, ugly while the Alliance is effeminate pretty do-gooders.
-- The problem with nostalgia is that you aren't a child anymore. This is most visible in nostalgia games, which are basically easy because I'm smarter than I was when I was a child. Pokemon Red took me months to beat in 1998 because I was seven years old, I wandered around for hours trying to do basic things because I couldn't figure out puzzles, and ultimately beat the Elite Four with an utterly absurd team because I hadn't thought ahead about building a good team. Now when I feel like replaying it, I can beat it on a train ride to Connecticut, because I know where everything is and what I need to beat each challenge and I'm mentally planning my route through available resources from the starter straight through to the end in a few hours. WoW is a little harder, but ultimately pretty easy at this point, thanks to playing smarter and the resources available online, along with some nerfs from the developers who want a more casual game. People hate that the bosses are easy to kill, and respond not by casually playing an easy game for fun, but by setting increasingly arcane rules to make killing bosses harder. People don't just seek to finish a dungeon, they seek to speed run it, skipping the unnecessary fights, pushing their performance to the bleeding edge, and refusing to play with anyone who isn't also an elite player. Or alternatively, they try to speedrun the game leveling quickly, or they try to play through the whole game without dying once. Which is an interesting achievement, but ultimately is just about making an easy game artificially hard. What's interesting to me is that Blizzard obviously doesn't want this dynamic to dominate, they want the game to be easy to play casually, but the playerbase refuses and seeks an elitist consensus in game.
-- Why are middle-aged men playing an old video game still trying to hit on women? Not only will women in disc get harassed if they talk, you can sponge free stuff off men in game by merely pretending to be a girl. Easily achieved by the simple expedient of saying you don't talk in disc because you don't want to get harassed. Lmao wut?
I'll also use this post to announce that last week, my daughter was born. Little Artie FiveHour is happy and healthy, and all around an excellent baby. So whenever I post from here on out, you can chart how fatherhood changes me.
*I suspect, though this is not confirmed to my knowledge, that the progress of AI tools is a major part of this plan. Blizzard devs believe that they can now create new content easily and quickly, on an essentially infinite scale. Reading an account of the development process of the original WoW game while stuck in the hospital last week, Staat's WoW Diary while stuck in the hospital last week, there was a real debate when the game was first on the drawing board over whether dungeons/instances would be a limited number of handmade and unique experiences or "procedurally generated" where a random cave with a randomized set of mobs would be created infinitely based on set parameters. At the time, handmade dungeons won out because they were so far superior to the procedurally generated models, but with AI tools offering the ability to generate effectively infinite additional content, we're likely seeing a swing back towards infinite semi-unique content. Another example of how anything that survives long enough to make it to generative AI is assured of eternal cultural life. A book series can have infinite AI written sequels, a TV show can have infinitely more episodes, a game can have infinitely more levels, an album infinite songs. Some of these, just by happenstance, will actually be good. I think one of the cultural tools we will need to develop is the discernment to decide what versions and what parts of a given series are actually good, and which can be safely discarded. Completionism will be impossible in the future.
**Once again from Staat, I learned just how loose the lore was in Vanilla WoW: Chris Metzen was the only guy actually interested in writing the story. He gave broad outlines of the factions, races, and zones. The level designers then created the zones and populated them with monsters. Then, with this mostly done project, the quest creators came in and wrote the actual stories that your character encounters in the flavor text, using this already existing zone. The lore content is literally just a superstructure built mostly on already existing gaming content. Any messages or stories that are compelling within WoW have a subconscious, egregoric, or emergent. A true experiment in a compelling story, compelling because of the time that players sink into it, without a real author. A true paragon of the "death of the author" dynamic.
This disorganized authorship also explains how uneven Vanilla ends up. They started from the Humans at level 1, and worked outward from there. That's why the Human starting zone feels both so detailed and so poorly made, while other starting zones are much less intimate but also way more technically sound. They never even played any of the raids, because they lacked enough players on the dev team to play a 40 man raid, and just kind of guessed how they would go. Everything was being figured out in real time, and right up to the end they thought Goblins would be playable and gnomes wouldn't exist.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4d ago
I don't think terrorism is a useful term at this point.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
28d ago
It's probably the best example of a glow up I've seen from pure journalism in years.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
28d ago
Explanations that have been mooted in my home:
-- It's a fetish. He wants the dirtiest, cheapest trailer park whore he can find. He can't really let himself be free with a woman of his social class. He can be totally free with trailer trash. It turns him on. I've known men who liked their women a little on the trashy side, though this is another level.
-- He's cheap, and that's how you end up a billionaire.
-- He made the utterly stupid calculation (see: Coldplay couple) that no one would catch him in an East Palestine trailer park. The problem being that when you are caught in an East Palestine trailer park, there is no possible innocent explanation, even after the charges are reduced.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
28d ago
I didn't want it to format as a list, which I find annoying, I wanted it come out the way it did.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
28d ago
What is going on with sports team owners?
In the space of a few weeks:
-- The owner of the Los Angeles Lakers has been forced to sell (to a Kushner brother) the team because of an SEC investigation into financial irregularities at insurance companies he controlled. (((I'll leave the questions about the Trump admin investigating a businessman who then is forced to sell a prized asset to a Trump-family-affiliated entity to Pablo Torre to unwind)))
-- The owner of the San Francisco 49ers was arrested in an East Palestine, OH trailer park in a human trafficking sting, apparently trying to hire a $140 prostitute. He plead guilty to some minor misdemeanor charges and spent a night in jail.
-- The Los Angeles Clippers have effectively been neutered for the next 5-8 years by the NBA's decision in their salary-cap circumvention scheme, in which Kawhi Leonard was paid extra money outside his contract under the table through no-show endorsement deals from affiliated companies.
-- Investigations into the Los Angeles Dodgers are coming to the forefront, involving financial irregularities in their ownership group.
It could all be a coincidence, but it feels weird astrologically.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
28d ago
I don't think it's ridiculous to consider that Bin Laden, who whatever your opinion of his morals was clearly a very intelligent and capable person, could view two closely related terms in shades of meaning outside those of the official translation. Bin Laden likely had some competency in English, though he was not known to speak it fluently in public this may have been a political rather than ability based choice.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
28d ago
It'd be funny if Bin Laden actually had read the first Foundation book, and only the first.
In all honesty, I believe that Bin Laden was influenced by Hari Seldon-via-Quranic-End-times and viewed terrorism as creating the forces that would eventually create a caliphate, rather than viewing himself as a likely future Caliph. 9/11 wasn't the moment the Foundation reveals itself as a power, but closer to the Anacreonian revolt that goes off at the right time to set things in motion correctly. You can see this kind of management strategy in Al Qaeda's internal documents, for example their insistence that while it would be very useful to kill Obama or Patraeus, no one should under any circumstances kill Joe Biden, because Joe Biden was incompetent and if they killed Obama and left Biden in charge it would doom the American war effort.
With a few significant divergences.
I see more similarities than differences. Both used altered mental states and a free-love ethic to draw followers into cults which promised their followers an altered state of being that would ultimately make them rulers of the earth. Both professed their own humility as part of their claim to power.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
One of my favorite factoids: Osama Bin Laden was a huge fan of the Foundation series. And a possible English translation of Al Qaeda is "The Foundation."
Which actually makes a lot of sense out of Islamist political philosophy viewed through that lens. Al Qaeda was so angry at ISIS because they were worse than wrong, they were early.
Curious result, the two greatest titans of early SciFi both inspired legendarily evil murderers: Manson was a huge fan of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and obviously modeled himself after the main character.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
I don't think it should be humiliating to join the metropole. That doesn't mean that it can't be made to be humiliating. Having sex with a woman isn't humiliating, but her demands can make it so.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
I'm a firm believer in the CanadAnschluss, and think it should be offered in a brotherly manner. Canada should be ten states. There is no purpose to the border.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
I guess I'm trying to understand if there's some underlying logic, some theory of demographic-based moral responsibility I'm missing? Or is this all a kind of pre-rational responsibility assignment?
I read an essay once that described the use of slurs as a speech act primarily intended to communicate that I can use a slur to refer to you and you can't stop me. It's a verbal act to demonstrate power relations.
Forcing others to take moral responsibility for their co-ethnics is similarly an act of power relations. Who has to apologize for nothing and who gets to just live their life is a pretty clear example of power dynamics in action.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
Are you under the impression that Puerto Rican citizens are prevented from migrating to America?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
And if we use North Dakota as the referent, twenty states wouldn't be enough!
I do think the funniest outcome to Trumpisme is the incorporation of Venezuela into the Union, resulting in an end to illegal immigration, as we'll simply have 25 million broke venezuelan citizens who will suck up so many low-end labor jobs and drive prices down so far that there will be no gap in the market for the illegal migrant to fill.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
The oddest thing to me is the repeated insistence that Canada will be the 51st state, when Canada would clearly be states 51-61.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
That's exactly my point! Americans feel perfectly comfortable saying that America's economy should remain the world's largest! We feel that it's the natural order of things! We don't reflect on what we're saying and what it means!
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
The other angle of this argument is typically that our wealth was sent to China to enrich the elites. But if you look at everyday Chinese, their lives may be better than their parents generation but they definitely aren't good. The successful ones work crazy hours and there's a much larger precariat than here without a social safety net. If your father's generation was so much better off, where did the money go? Or did we just globally become less productive?
Not calling you out in particular, but "China is a big country inhabited by many Chinese." This may seem obvious, but I think China vs USA discussions often ignore or elide this point. China has a population about four times the size of the United States'. I think this is the most important fact about the world to consider when discussing such comparisons.
When we say "We want the USA to remain the biggest economy in the world, and not to have it surpassed by the PRC." We aren't just saying we want to be richer than China, we're saying we want the average American to be at least four times richer than the average Chinaman. That's an insane level of arrogance and privilege to state!
I can imagine my richer friend saying: "FiveHour, I hope my two kids are as wealthy as I am, and that your two kids do a little better than you did, but in my heart of hearts I hope that my two kids are always richer than your two kids." I could accept that.
If my richer friend said: "FiveHour, you have four kids and I have one, I hope my son is so much more successful than all your kids that he is richer than all four of them combined and it is important that this remain the case, it would deeply upset me if your four kids combined made more than my son." I would be dumbfounded by the weirdness of that position and assume he kind of hated me.
If China and America are equally wealthy as states, all the wealth that is in America can go to China, and just bring China's standard of living up 25% from where it was. (obviously this is a ridiculous economic concept, wealth and income are different and neither China's nor America's economies will make any sense with the other eliminated)
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
The "choice" in a local planning sense for a municipality choosing where to zone for AI, if you have a site for a 1,000,000sqft industrial building, is between a data center that might have two dozen or so permanent employees and a warehouse that would support a thousand unskilled jobs or a factory that would have 800 skilled workers.
So yeah, rounds down to zero.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
Strong disagree. Bikinis were at least mildly riskee when I was a kid, and twenty years later they are the default, to the point where the tyranny of the bikini is (in my mind) a women's freedom issue that isn't discussed enough.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
I might grant you the Dodgers or Red Sox, but probably not the Pirates, who generally only draw national attention when they have a star that's on the trade speculation stage.
At this point crypto is a known, if poorly understood, thing. The Crypto.com arena in Los Angeles is mentioned on national sports coverage more than the Pirates. Any financial investment news covers crypto at least in part, WSJ local business section CNBC etc. Most (substantial) Americans are involved in investing in some way. They're all aware of crypto, and at least peripherally involved in it but the way it correlates with other assets.
I'd say that more people follow the Pirates than invest heavily in or understand crypto (not a perfectly overlapping Venn diagram). But people are aware of crypto and know it impacts the world.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
Better still: large forested buffer around the building, reduces noise and makes it invisible from street level.
My father strongly believes that the future of data centers is in placing hydroponic greenhouses around them.
Yes. I would have a similar reaction to someone making a similar statement about ragequitting rock climbing or BJJ or golf, if they were obsessed to the point of sinking second-job hours into it one week and the next week quit saying it was pointless. If it's not getting you laid or paid, then you should be doing it for some reason that is largely intrinsic to your own sense of values and not be vulnerable to the whims of fortune. It points to some pre-existing emotional imbalance in how they were relating to the activity if outside actions can impact you to that extent emotionally.
I always remember the Christopher Moore line that people are happiest when they have someone to look up to, and someone to look down on. In most male hobby spaces, the guys in the middle are happiest (in terms of the hobby). They have people better than they are to aspire to reach, and they have people worse than they are to bully or to help.
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