Well. It has been quite some time since my last entry here, hasn't it? And even now I don't have a game I particularly want to talk about. Although, I guess... Hmm. I could talk about MMORPGs some more. Specifically, in this case, City of Heroes(CoH) and World of Warcraft(WoW). Both of which I am currently subscribed to, and both of which I am going to try to maintain on a regular basis. Oh, before I forget, sorry there are no comments allowed, but I can't figure out how to allow real people to comment and block the spam. Dear god I hate spam. Anyway, CoH and WoW. These are, really, completely different games. I mean, the very, very basic core is the same, I mean, MMORPGs can all pretty much be distilled down to their ProgressQuest core, but the feeling is entirely different. For me, anyway. Your mileage may vary. The pace in CoH is much, much faster than in, well, any other MMORPG I've ever played or even heard of. I complained pretty reguarly about the necessity of "physically"(you know, growing up with my family in general and my dad in specific, reading Usenet a lot, and working where I work with the people I work with, has really led me to change the way I write. I originally didn't put the quote marks on "physically", because I was being metaphorical or something like that, but then, automatically, I could hear the argument that all I was physically doing was moving my hand a little bit. Even though not only is there no one to argue with me right now, but even later, when I post this and the two people who still care read it, I won't be able to "hear"(I just did it again) them nitpicking, if they nitpick. Nit, nit, nit, pick, pick, pick, it drives me fucking nuts sometimes. Why can't I speak euphemistically, metaphorically, hypothetically, hyperbolically, or any other -ically and have the people who I know understand what I was getting at just go along with it and admit that they know what I was getting at and not fucking nitpick it to death every fucking time?) running back to my contacts for the first several missions. Until I played WoW and was reminded that in most MMORPGs, getting to just "call" your quest-giver *ever* would be such an amazingly, upliftingly glorious experience, because standard practice is having to plod back to town or wherever to talk to your contacts every time, for every quest. And in CoH, you don't have to go find someone to give you missions. You're told exactly where they are, they're clearly marked on your map, there's a marker on your compass that appears when you're in the same zone as them, and there's a marker on your screen that shows you how far away you are. There's also the compass and screen markers for your missions, unless they're "Kill X enemies" missions. In WoW, it's still fairly easy to find your quests, as people with quests will have exclamation points over their heads, but it's still easy to miss some that are in more out-of-the-way areas. The quests are often fairly vague, generally only telling you more-or-less where you should maybe go, and it takes fucking forever to get anywhere, although not as much of forever as it always took in Final Fantasy XI. There's a lot more I could say on this subject, but I've just decided I don't want to. I don't want to talk about it anymore, I don't want to analyze it anymore, I wish I could just fucking enjoy something for once without all my personal hangups fucking everything up for me. But I don't want to get into what that means, either. Shit, I don't know what I do want. I have been in such a shitty mood for the last week. I just feel, I don't know, weary. I don't get enough sleep because sleeping is boring, not to mention that laying down is not particularly comfortable for me anymore, but sitting and standing are worse, of course. And yet, even though the concept of sleep is boring to me, when I know I should be sleeping it's not like I'm doing something else that's compelling and entertaining. Most of the time recently I'm just sitting here thinking about how bored I am. I am surrounded by thousands of dollars worth of entertainment products. I have 4 video game systems currently hooked up, a gaming computer, a DVD player, a VHS player, plenty of things to play on all of those things, over a hundred books, hundreds of comics, I have jigsaw puzzles, logic puzzles, other video game systems that aren't hooked up but could be, I have a car that works, with gas in it, I have friends that are still up and probably wouldn't mind if I dropped by...I have all this stuff that I could do, that I often enjoy doing, and all of it sounds boring. It's too much effort. And not physical effort, but mental effort. Sleep is too much mental effort. And yet I can't just, like, turn off my mind. Left with no outside stimuli to distract me, I usually think, usually about nothing in particular, at first, but it always seems to end up with me thinking about how much I suck and how much I hate being me and how my really pretty minor difficulties are just fucking overwhelming. I mean, this is ridiculous. I am possibly a few thousand dollars in debt. Maybe as much as five thousand, although I'm pretty sure that's a gross overestimation. I'm having a little trouble at my job, because I can't make it work on time consistently. I start work most days at 2 o'clock in the fucking afternoon, and I can't make it to work on time? What the fuck? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with me? I have trouble paying my bills on time; I never have enough money. And yet, somehow I have enough money that I have thousands of dollars of entertainment products at my fingertips. What the fuck is up with that? And you know, the weird thing about it is, and I tested this, not buying any of my toys for a month made no difference. Somehow I still had no money, still had trouble paying my bills...I'm not sure what it is that goes through my mind. I know that I'm doing this to myself. I engage in foolish, short-sighted, self-destructive behavior, most probably because I hate myself and subconsciously want to suffer. But even though I know that, that I know I'm subconsciously doing it deliberately, I can't seem to stop. And really, self-awareness doesn't help all that much, it actually sort of makes things worse. Since I know I'm doing it on purpose, and yet am unable to stop doing it, it makes me feel like even more of a failure. Which, I guess, feeds into the whole thing and makes me hate myself even more, ad infinitum. You know, vicious cycle sort of thing. I usually end up sitting there, staring blankly at nothing, thinking of how being rich would solve all my problems, when of course it wouldn't actually solve them, it would just... No, actually, now that I think about it, being rich pretty much would solve all my problems. Although really that just points out how caught up I am in consumer culture. I don't even fucking know what I'm talking about anymore. I'm going to go lay in bed and think about how much I wish I were someone else, and I'm going to try not to let my worries about my nearly insignificant problems overwhelm me. Such petty, stupid bullshit to be so worried about...