During the past few years I kept hearing that the winter’s gone around these parts, and for good reason. But then you have a day like today, a little below freezing, moderate snowfall and winds at 30-35 km/h gusting up to 60-65 km/h.
As blizzards go, this one seems pretty modest to me, yet now people went the other way and started complaining about the wind and the snow and the cold! They don’t have a winter for a few years and they complain, then they get a slight trace of winter and they complain again. Honestly, make up your minds!
I went out today and actually enjoyed it. That’s an extremely rare occurrence for me in itself, enjoying myself outside of the house, it almost never happens… But what I noticed was how deserted the streets were, and how even fewer people were walking against the wind. Only saw one or two people going the same way I was while I walked against the wind, and then there was a rather long stretch of road that was completely empty, I didn’t see a single other walker for several minutes!
It’s a little blizzard, a tiny proof that we are, indeed, in the middle of winter, what are you people afraid of? Why aren’t you getting out there and enjoying it, feeling what nature is supposed to feel like this time of year? We haven’t been getting this in quite some time, after all…
Yeah, sure, snow getting in your eyes might not be so comfortable, and neither is having a gust of wind knock the breath out of your lungs or make you need to take turns in order to walk straight, but it’s fun and it’s nature. Not to mention that “walking” on icy pavement with the wind at your back makes you feel like a little kid again.
Be a part of nature instead of fighting against it, get away from your manufactured convenience for a while and embrace what’s around you! And, next time you say you want something, could you please make sure you actually want it, so you won’t be complaining all over again when you do get it?
What I usually tell others on such well-wishing occasions as New Year’s might be taken as a rather harsh thing to say if you don’t think about it for a moment (or if you value life itself more than it’s quality, or if you’re a selfish ass), plus that I actually came up with it in Romanian and when it’s translated it makes less sense because the traditional wishes differ. That can create some rather interesting moments, especially since I only tell these things to a few people, you won’t catch me sending off greetings to a whole list… It’s a bit strange to wish someone well and then have to explain that you actually wished them well…
You see, the regular thing to say over here is “la multi ani”, which means something along the lines of “many years to come”, so simply wishing for a long life. But I changed that into something that seems to make far more sense to me, and been trying out several translations for a while now. The last one I came up with is: “Wish you’ll live just as long as you can be happy and fulfilled, without your happiness requiring the suffering of another who doesn’t deserve such pain.”
It’s quite simple, wish you’ll either be happy and fulfilled, without hurting anybody who doesn’t deserve it in the process, or die. It would mean that if you’ll still be alive you will be happy and fulfilled without earning bad karma, and if you’ll die it’d be because you couldn’t be happy and fulfilled without destroying others’ lives in the process. Sounds good and fair to me, but it did piss off a few people in these years since I’ve been using it…
Then again, I could always use my grandpa’s regular saying for such occasions: “May what you wish for me happen to you and what I wish for you happen to me.” He’d say that, usually when more people are gathered around, and look at faces to see if anybody got upset, to know how things stand. I think it’s really well said, at least when you’re among people you consider to be friends… Besides, it would include my wish without actually saying it. It would mean that it applies to myself instead of them, but that’d be great too… But I’ll rather stick to mine, be more specific.
Either way, still interesting to see how many people are bothered by it…
We just started talking today, she said something about herself that bothered me and we ended up talking about all the things that changed about her since she left, and her listing them… Actually, she said just two things now, but I guess they were the icing on the cake, what made me put everything together…
Almost everything I appreciated about her is gone, but the bad things are still there… Told her as much and she said she takes me saying she changed into somebody I’d hate to have around as a compliment… That stung… Though, now that I think about it, it might have simply meant something she told me before, that she likes being told she’s very different from the one that left here, because she was unhappy with who she was then and now finally became somebody she actually likes being, so people noticing the differences, whether they like them or not, prove to her that she’s no longer the person she wants to put behind her.
The thing is that it doesn’t change a damned thing in what I’m feeling, just makes me realize there’s no hope even in hoping. Even if I’d have my wish come true I’d just exchange one hell with another… One that would also offer happy moments, one worth going into even without the happy moments, just to be around her, but still hell overall… It means there could never be anybody at all out there for me, if she ended up like everyone else too. (Whoever feels offended by me saying that probably should be.)
And before anybody will say how this proves that I’ve been loving nothing but an old image of hers, I say again that this doesn’t change a damned thing in what I’m feeling. I still love her, I still want to be with her, I’d still do anything for her, I still don’t want anyone else around me, I still can’t have any sort of life without her… Just makes me realize I’d be unhappy with the new her too… Certainly nowhere near as unhappy as I’m without her, but still…
This was basically the moment in really hit me that everything is lost forever and there can never be even a shred of hope of anything ever going even just a tiny little bit in the right direction for me in any way, shape or form, in any area of my life…
Yeah, happy new year…
Noticed that I have been talking quite a bit about World of Warcraft lately, so I thought I’d write this post about it as well.
As you can see from the title, I can’t stand it and the reasons hardly have anything to do with game mechanics. It’d be quite hard to say bad things about the game itself since I never played it and never plan to. Equally hard to say good things, of course, but really don’t plan to say those anyway.
The only thing I can’t stand about the game itself is the need for groups, the fact that you can’t do well and get everything you need on your own. Being about as much a loner in my gaming as I am in real life, that in itself would be enough to make me stay well away from it.
However, the main reasons have to do with what it represents and the companies behind it. For starters, it’s a MMO with a monthly fee and I have a problem with all of them. I will not pay a monthly fee to play a game, period!
Not to mention that paying a fee in order to play it makes people play it more, at the expense of everything else, since they want to make sure they get their money’s worth. When you get a game and know it’s yours from that moment forward you can play it for a while, then take a break and play something else or even nothing at all, then maybe return to it… But when there’s a monthly fee you tend to stick to that one game, which is excellent marketing ploy and therefore a strategy that’s rotten to the core.
Also on that note, you can see just how this ploy is working if you look over sales figures for PC games. World of Warcraft is basically killing the market, it’s sales are outstanding while everything else drops drastically. It makes existing gamers give up on other games in order to stick to it and creates new PC gamers out of people who had hardly played, and never actually bought, PC games before, but doesn’t make them interested in anything else, they start and end with it.
The problem is that having sales drop makes everyone else invest less into putting new PC games on the market, which might result in fewer games and will certainly result in fewer good games out there, meaning that World of Warcraft’s popularity (with a little added help from the other MMOs) will eventually harm me as a PC gamer wishing to still have great single-player games in the future.
Of course there are many other games that try the same thing out there and the fact that World of Warcraft is the one doing this would say it’s really good, which was to be expected since everything Blizzard touches turns into a masterpiece, but there is also the pressure to play it. Honestly, as a PC gamer these days you feel quite a bit of pressure to play World of Warcraft. It’s like everybody’s back in high school and there’s a hot new trend that everyone must follow, which is extremely frustrating. That makes me wonder how many of those who play it now are actually playing it because they made an informed choice, they knew the options and decided this one suits them best, and how many just went with the MMO flow and didn’t even take anything other than World of Warcraft into account.
Then you have the purely financial aspect. World of Warcraft alone brings in close to 100 million euros per month. I think a lot of game developers would be thrilled to earn that much in an entire year from all their released games put together! I find it sickening that some earn that much and still want more. And the sad thing is that probably the one to blame for it is not Blizzard, but Vivendi, since they bought them.
I absolutely loathe Vivendi, their campaigns, their practices, their priorities, everything about them! And their latest stunt proves once again that all they want is to earn more than everybody else at all costs. Just look at the headline, which is on their official site. It says “largest, most profitable”, nothing else matters… Yes, of course many corporations are like that, and they’re also rotten to the core, but I really think Vivendi would win a “prize” in that aspect…
As a conclusion, about the game itself I could only say that it’s not for me, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s bad or that others shouldn’t play it. The problem is what it represents and what the company behind it stands for. I find that absolutely sickening and that’s what actually makes me hate the game itself…
While I was playing Materia Magica today, somebody mentioned “Xmas”. That apparently bothered somebody else, who said it’s demeaning and offensive to take Christ out of Christmas. That could have degenerated quickly, but oddly enough it didn’t.
I won’t get into how X can be taken as a text equivalent of a cross in that context, how organized religion is generally a tool in the hands of the power-hungry or how if Jesus would have known it’d turn out like it did he’d have probably went back to practicing the family trade and died of old age after many years of running the ancient equivalent of a furniture empire, I only want to write a little about what I mentioned at the end of my previous post, how the Church of Consumerism has taken over this time of the year from any and all other religions.
If you look back, you’ll find that giving gifts wasn’t originally a part of Christmas. But since the date for Christmas was chosen so it would compete with major ancient Pagan festivals in hopes of gaining more converts, some of the customs associated with said festivals transferred over to Christmas and giving gifts was one of them. Priests were frowning on the practice for some time, but then they realized it’s not going to go away and they found a way to give it a meaning, by associating it with the gifts of the Magi. Still, for a very, very long time the gifts were only symbolic and even when that changed no business was feeding off it. And don’t tell me there were no businesses at the time because economics have existed since the dawn of man.
Turning symbolic gifts into real gifts seems like a normal process to me, an evolution of a custom to make it serve a real purpose while keeping the motivation intact. And you can’t really find a business aspect of Christmas until the nineteenth century, and less than a hundred years ago it was still by and large a religious event even so. Then that changed and that change was no longer a normal evolution of a custom. It wasn’t responding to the needs of those practicing the custom, it was the result of a manipulation from the outside.
I won’t bring good old Saint Nick into this and won’t get into who created Santa Claus or how Coca Cola managed, with what undoubtedly was one of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time, to imprint his current image into the collective mind. That campaign might have started everything, but it did it by showing the others that it can be done, that customs can be hijacked and advertising can convince people to believe differently. Yes, it proved a point, but a bigger problem were those who later made use of that point for their own ends.
Still, the biggest problem, and the main culprits, were, and are, the billions of people who fell, and keep falling, for it! Big Business shepherds are guilty of attempting to lead their herd to a different, and worse, pasture simply because there was a nice inn and whorehouse nearby for them to use, but they could never have succeeded if the rest would have refused to be sheep. Or maybe it would have been possible even so, but I somehow doubt they’d have spent all the time and energy required to herd, say, cheetahs!
So we brought it back to the people, as they say. The people’s indifference, the people’s lack of initiative, the people’s lack of fighting power… The people’s need to be led just so they won’t need to take responsibility for their own actions, their own choices, just so they’ll be able to say “it wasn’t me” and point fingers when something goes wrong.
Honestly, how many people complain about how commercial Christmas is these days, how they’re assaulted from all sides by predatory advertising, how crowded, stressful and devoid of meaning it is, how all the joy is gone? Then how many of them lose that train of thought after they see the latest special offer for that nice shiny thing they’ve wanted for so long? How many make gift lists including people they hardly know and add themselves to the crowds frantically searching for every item on said lists plus perhaps a few more things for themselves? How many send dozens, if not hundreds, of greeting cards? How many get into the decoration frenzy and buy “just this one” new thing to make the tree and the house look differently than it did last year since, of course, it wouldn’t look differently if they’d use the same items but change the arrangement or create their own things to add to the mix? And, worst of all, how many delegate their wallets to say they care, to speak for their hearts and minds?
Whether we’re talking about Christians wishing to put Christ back into Christmas, followers of any of a myriad other religions that wish not to be assaulted by a holiday that’s not their own or atheists and agnostics that simply wish for a period of rest and/or secular celebration, Consumermas bothers everybody… Seeing as it couldn’t do that if people would walk their talk, why don’t we?
Giving gifts on Christmas first happened because people wanted it to happen and then the nature of the gifts changed because people wanted it to change, so why couldn’t we do that again? All Big Business is saying is “If you need to give gifts anyway, why not buy them from us?”… How about we start answering them for a change?
And remember, the best things in life are free…
