Digital Alterity

Okay, if I don’t pull soon, my rage from the last fight will all be gone. Also, the DPS will just start pulling without me any second. Hope my healer is ready.

Okay. Feral Charge. Crap. The death knight just dropped Death and Decay. Better start swiping.

Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.

No, hunter, attack the target I clearly marked with a skull! Sigh. Taunt it back to me.

Okay, wow. This is going fairly smoothly now. I bet I could AFK the rest of this fight with the aggro lead I have.

No…NO! Bad shaman! If you use Thunderstorm like that, we’re going to…Dammit! You knocked them right back into the next group. Yeah. “LOL.” Screw you and your LOL-ing.

AoE Taunt. Low health alert. Really? I would never have guessed that my healer would have trouble keeping me healed with the influx of four new mobs. Time to hit the Oh-Shit button.

Crap. All that healing made one of them break for the healer. Dammit! Taunt is on cooldown. Feral Charge. Mangle. Lacerate. Swipe. Okay. Reposition for the melee DPS.

Whew. Okay, if I don’t pull soon, my rage from the last fight will all be gone. Also, the DPS will just start pulling without me any second. Hope my healer is ready.

Dear DPS classes/specs,

Let me start off by saying that I love you. You make the really big numbers show up above the monsters’ heads and make them stop hitting the tank before I run out of mana. This is a critical part of any group, and I want to /hug each one of you.

I would, however, like to broach a difficult subject. You see, as your party healer in a heroic instance, most of my attention has to be focused on the tank. You know, the big guy up front with all the armor and damage mitigation. If I don’t keep dropping HoTs and Nourish on him, he will expire and make the monsters come rape you. No one wants that. If I’m not ready for an emergency Swiftmend during damage spikes, then that poor bugger is going to die horribly.

Please look at your health bar. It’s the little bar beside your picture at the upper-left of your screen. When that bar starts dropping, please make it stop.

If the big ugly monster is hitting you, you did more damage than the tank could compensate for. This isn’t how you win. Use your abilities like Cower, Fade, or Feign Death to make them hate the tank all over again.

If the floor beneath you looks like it’s on fire, it probably is. Move out of that fire.

I understand that a certain amount of AoE damage is going to happen. I’m happy to fire off a quick Rejuvenation at you to top you off. Heck, during really hairy moments, I’ll even throw you a lifebloom. However, if you’re taking more damage than my Wild Growth AoE heal is giving you back, you’re going to have trouble. Every spell that I cast on you is a spell that I’m not casting on the main tank. If you persist, in taking damage, I’m probably going to have to let you die. And, no, I’m not going to use my combat rez on you. You’ll get rezzed when we’re out of combat.

I’m a healer; I don’t want anyone to die. I just don’t have much choice when you’re committing suicide over and over and over again.

With much love,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Druid Healer

So, I’ve spent most of the afternoon drinking Diet Coke. This is hardly unusual for me, and it’s really not the crux of my post but rather the subtle event that leads toward rising narrative action and an eventual literary climax. In any event, because biology works, all this beverage necessitated a trip to the restroom. Again, hardly newsworthy stuff here.

Upon arriving in the second floor bathroom, I discovered a scene of pure Lovecraftian horror. Someone, in an apparent fear of pestilence, had unleashed some sort of unholy bathroom ritual involving yards of toilet paper draped across the toilet set in a roughly circular fashion and a conspicuously unflushed toilet. I’m pretty sure they were trying to summon dark elder gods or some such. The horror took ten years off my life.

I’ve never understood people who live in this terrible, debilitating fear of catching diseases. This admission is not a request for attempted explanations for such behavior because, frankly, I’ve already thrown all those who worry about such things squarely into the “summarily worthless” bin. Nonetheless, I can’t help but ponder the strange dementia that leads to such behavior. I mean, if you’re that concerned about the horrible germs on the toilet seat, maybe using a public toilet just isn’t for you. If you’re too terrified to actually sit down on a toilet sit and then pull the lever to flush when you’re finished, either go home to poo or go buy some adult diapers.

The truly sad thing is that someone is going to have to clean up the results of this mental malfunction.

me: is it sexist that i’m tempted to re-roll my orc shaman as a male?
when there’s no difference whatsoever between the sexes?
Allyson: are you sure you don’t want to rick-roll her?
that might be sexist.
no boobies
me: i can’t rickroll her because there’s a very real chance that i will “run around and desert [her]” for another toon.
Allyson: Hah

While sitting in my office just now, I heard Allyson start whistling in the shower. Now this isn’t really an uncommon occurrence. Allyson whistles or otherwise makes noise when things get too quiet. What is somewhat funny is the song she started whistling.

She started whistling “Take ‘Em All”, an oi song by Cock Sparrer.

Take ‘em all…Take ‘em all…
Put ‘em up against the wall and shoot ‘em.
Short and tall, watch ‘em fall.
C’mon, boys, take ‘em all.

How did I end up in a life this perfect?

Several years ago, Allyson and I lived in a nice but inexpensive apartment very close to campus. This sort of environment happens to be the native habitat for the university graduate student, a population skewed heavily toward international students. Where many apartment complexes had random undergraduate soirees and bass machines, we had lots of nice people with rich brown and yellow skin hues, people who spoke kindly with unusual accents. We became good friends with some of our neighbors, never failing to offer up a hearty hello as we passed by each other.

I will say at the outset that I am profoundly impressed with the English-speaking ability of most international students. After three years of Spanish, a year of university French, and an aborted crash course in Japanese, I have mostly obtained the ability to spout rather convincing language-like gibberish. In contrast, the international students I’ve met here in Gainesville are often better able to converse than their native American peers. It’s quite easy to forget that you’re interacting with someone for whom English is only a recently acquired linguistic skill. Only unfamiliar accents and peculiar word choices remind you as you otherwise effortlessly chat about rental costs, banquets with free food, and American cigarettes.

One such odd word choice remains humorously seared into my memory. Allyson and I were returning late at night from our second shift jobs, and our favorite neighbor, an engineering student from India, happened to be peacefully smoking a full-flavor Camel cigarette on his front porch. After the exchange of customary pleasantries, our friend recited the most uncomfortably funny sentence in the history of interpersonal interaction.

“I saw your pussy in the window the other day.”

After a second or so of repressed laughter paired deliciously with a slight tinge of paranoia, it became apparent that he was referring not to my wife’s nether regions but rather to our feline companion Tux’s tendency to sit and wait for us in the kitchen window. We talked a bit about how he jumped up there when he knew we were supposed to be heading home and how he liked gazing at the outside world.

But we were always careful about keeping the blinds closed after that. You know, just in case.

You know that kid in your class that raised his hand to answer every question, the kid who waved his head to answer the question as though the fate of the universe itself rested on his success in wresting away the teacher’s attention? Yeah, that was me. At least that was me until I realized that I could just worke ahead in my workbook and piss off the teacher by finishing the year in the first month of any given subject. I was a bright kid who knew I was intelligent, and I had a real obsession with knowing The Truth about everything. I also never did anything without taking things about five steps beyond normal.

As you can imagine, the Santa Claus myth quickly became a point of obsession. I gathered over time that my parents were filling the role of the jolly old elf, but I hedged my bets in case they would suddenly stop buying me as many Christmas presents. However, I also needed desperately to prove that I was intelligent enough to see through their ruse. What I needed was to trick my parents into revealing the lie themselves, allowing me to prove my ability to find the truth amidst their lies while still maintaining enough righteous indignance to justify an annual offering of presents. My initial plan was to rig up a walkie-talkie under the living room table while quietly sitting in my room listening in to my parents. The implementation of this grand investigation, however, was found to be lacking since my mom discovered my covert operation when I was using masking tape to secure the walkie-talkie under the table.

Recriminations about how children who did these kind of things didn’t get presents abounded.

I decided that my ruse was up, but I still needed to play my righteous fury card to ensure a steady stream of presents. Consequently, I sat down and wrote (with pen and paper) a treatise on the folly of the Santa Claus lie and how it undermined all attempts by parents to stress the importance of telling the truth. I was ready. I dug my heels in, and I was ready for an argument.

When I presented my thesis to my mother, she did the worst thing possible. She laughed at me. Not being taken seriously was the single worst thing an adult could do to me. I took great pains to speak like an adult and think like an adult, and I therefore fully expected people to treat me like an adult at all times. I got so mad and ashamed that I just started crying, which immediately switched Mom over to consoling me rather than laughing at me.

Once I had calmed down, Mom asked me why I couldn’t have just told them that I knew. This question confounded me.

This story tells you several very important things about me.

One of my tasks at my secretarial position is dealing with the Department of Homeland Security for the various faculty and graduate assistants who come here to the Fruited Plain to further their research. All of the processes by which people are granted permission to live and work in the US can only be described as “byzantine” (or perhaps simply “effing ridiculous” if you weren’t the sort of child that played with a thesaurus). Here at UF, we have an entire office devoted to sorting out residency status, visas, and other such forms involving numbers, letters, and judicious use of the word “homeland”.

I have been trying since March to renew a professor’s visa status and also try to earn permanent residency for the same professor. Keep in mind here that the fellow in question is a teacher and a researcher at arguably the most important research institution in our state. He has a PhD. He presents important papers in a scientific discipline at conferences. In short, he’s the sort of guy that any country would love to have around. Nonetheless, I didn’t get his visa renewal back until a week ago. Then today, we finally got back his I-797 approval notice for his permanent residency application. The letter accompanying this notice had a tangled mess of forms the professor could choose to fill out with absolutely no recommendation about which forms he should fill out. This isn’t unusual. Every step of the permanent residency process has been like this. The whole process resembles nothing so much as a giant real-life Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

Turn to page 43 if you want to fill out form I-485.
Turn to page 57 if you want to fill out form I-765.
Turn to page 13 if you want to fill out both forms.

You have been eaten by a wolf.

This whole thing is some bureaucratic version of Hell. I’m convinced of it.

Technorati Tags: residency, green card, Department of Homeland Security, visa, bureaucracy, humor

Recently, I checked out Superman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told from my local public library. I did this in part because I’m a sucker for free comics, but by far the biggest factor in my decision to read this book was some marginalia added to the cover:

Someone had inexplicably added “NOT for children” to the upper-left corner of the book. Having read through the book, I must admit that I’m still amusedly perplexed. The stories in question are almost all from the goofy Silver Age days when Superman fought giant robot dogs and such. The only modern tale is basically a morality play about why Superman’s oath to avoid killing even evil men is a good thing. There’s no sex to be had anywhere in the book. There isn’t even any sex implied anywhere in the book. The only drug use is tobacco.

Was this brief sharpie verdict the product of some kind of ultra-fundamentalist that even I with my years of Southern Baptist lifestyle can’t understand? Or was it the scrawling of a rabid Superman fanboy, desperately needing affirmation that his Superman comics were far too meaningful to be shelved in the young adults section of the library.

Technorati Tags: Superman, Comics, Humor

I am almost completely in love with really old Wonder Woman comics. They fill my ironic little feminist heart with a bizarre sort of glee. They make me smirk.

I have the good fortune to be reading through Wonder Woman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told courtesy of my local public library. The really old Wonder Woman comics by Charles Moulton are the most innocently kinky things I have ever read. By innocently kinky, I mean that you could conceivably read them without seeing some bizarre sexual kink writ large—but not by someone like me. In those early issues, everyone is getting bound up and compelled to do things. It really is like some kind of BDSM fantasy.

Take, for example, how the Amazons deal with their prisoners:

I especially love the feminist subtext played with by having the conduit of submissive bondage being a girdle. That is about as effing perfect as you can get. Especially when paired with this panel later on in the same storyline:

Remember, kids: When women get too uppity, they get bound into loving submission by a strong master! And they don’t just like it…They love it.

Technorati Tags: Feminism, Comics, Wonder Woman, DC, Comic Books, Submission, BDSM, Humor