Three Ring GeekCircus!

For a while, StarCraft made up a lot of our social life.

We’d get babysitting, then head to the office where my husband worked. They didn’t care if we used the network. So we’d get together with our friends, order a pizza, or fire up the office grill, and settle in for a day of Terrans vs. Protoss vs. Zerg.

I still remember the game on the map Lost Temple where my friend hadn’t protected his base well enough. He was in the north spawn point, and I was in the west, the husband (as my partner) was in the east, and our friend’s partner was in the south. I crept a Protoss arbiter around the very back corner of his base and found a place where his turrets didn’t overlap protection. And then I recalled my entire fighting force into the center of his main base.

The excitement. The carnage. The cussing.

Those were good times. Friends and games. Good-natured, shouted smack talk. Being able to get up and walk to the snack table and debrief on the match while we noshed.

And I’m pretty sure that LAN play, with the ability to even make temporary spawn copies for someone who didn’t have it, played a large role in the game’s success. It gave people a reason to get together. Sure, people would play on BattleNet, but the internet can’t duplicate the vibe that playing in the same place has. This remains true today, when we have XBox LAN parties to play Gears despite getting together online twice a week.

LAN parties were the roots of the multiplayer game. It seems like Blizzard has forgotten that.

StarCraft II is destined to be a big seller no matter what. Despite their questionable move of splitting the single game into three installments you need to buy, and the classic, neverending Blizzard development cycle, gamers are going to buy it in droves. They’re going to spend extra for the collector’s editions. There will always be pirates, but the people who spend money for three games based off one property will outnumber them. Blizzard will not be losing any money.

Instead of leveraging the community energy to find new, better ways to make money off their game’s popularity (which others have done with success), Blizzard has gone another route. They have essentially called their entire fan base thieves. We, it seems, are not to be trusted. And because we are such naughty pirates, we will have our toys taken from us.

Despite the fact that those toys made the first game what it is today. They still sell it for $20. After a decade, people still buy it.

Perhaps worse, they’re also trying to tell us that it’s a large pile of dung, but that it’s the best dung ever! Sure, we can’t play on a LAN with our friends anymore. Want to have a LAN party? Make sure you have a net connection, and you can all sign into the wonderful thing that is BattleNet!

It’ll be great! You can be part of the community! It’ll give us the chance to make it better! What’s more, you can all be forced to interact with the foul-mouthed 14 year old twitch gamers that everyone can’t get enough of! Won’t that be fantastic?

I suppose the notion of building a quality online experience and letting it lure people in didn’t occur to them. They need real impetus. Like, say, forcing millions of gamers to connect to their servers. I’m sure opening day will be smooth as silk.

Blizzard hasn’t learned from the example of Spore. EA took draconian measures to counteract piracy, and offended its player base. That player base responded by making Spore the most pirated game ever. I can only imagine what the pillars of moral behavior that make up the bulk of StarCraft’s devotees will decide to do. I don’t think the answer is “repent and buy legit copies”.

I’m disappointed in this decision. Disappointed enough that foregoing the game has occurred. I’ve been waiting for it for a decade, just like everyone else. But I’m also not going to give my money to a company who treats me like a misbehaving kindergartener, not a customer.

And I’ll bet I’m not the only one.

Ed McMahon: I watched him on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson as a kid. While I didn’t tune in to see Mr. McMahon, he was a constant presence.

A very strange deadpool, this.

It’s been a long time since I was truly enchanted with an MMO.

Dear Bioware: Please, please don’t screw up Star Wars: The Old Republic. Vanguard’s good for the moment, and I’m having fun, but it’s not going to last forever. Please give us the magic. I want to be enchanted again.

I’m not really much of an astrology buff. I’ll accept that there may be some influence, but generally, I don’t pay much attention to it. It was just never My Thing.

Until Mercury went into retrograde this time. As the song says, now I’m a believer.

Yeah, life goes into suck periods sometimes. But that it pretty much started when Mercury threw it into reverse, and so much piled in with so much intensity, makes me go “hmm”. We’ve had quite the pile-up. And I’m pretty well ready to launch rockets to send Mercury into the heart of the Sun.

Tobias RIP - not during the period, but it was kind of a sucky warm-up.

The Dog Situation - it was bad, and it was heartbreaking, and I’m not talking about it, but this is where the whole thing started.

World War Zzz - a week without sleep, followed by spotty sleep, followed by an argument with my circadian rhythms and the addition of a second, somewhat pricey sleep drug to my nightly regimen. I now have to take Ambien to put me asleep, and Rozerem to keep me there. I hope this’ll sort itself out.

Back Issues - various personal stuff, from anxiety flare-ups to fallout from the other mentioned situations. Little, annoying stuff that’s all getting worked out, but is irritating enough to be worth noting, as it contributes.

Hot Head - and then the air conditioner died. Well, mostly. The cooling coil got jammed up such that after a while, it’d run, but it’d stop kicking out cool air. If we left it for a few hours, it’d work some again, until it froze up once more. Luckily, the temperatures retreated to low-mid 90s, and we could ride the morning cool to the afternoon warmth, when the system would work again.

Oh yes. And for some reason, it took several days for our landlords to get someone out to fix it, because of insurance reasons. Then the tech wouldn’t fix it first visit, because they needed insurance approval. So they had to come back the next day. (The guy’s out there disassembling the beast right now.)

TiVo Woe - with the deposit money return from the apartment, we decided we’d splurge on a new TiVo. They’d given us a really great deal on a new box, since we were long-time customers, and we really like having a TiVo. It seemed like a sound thing to splurge on.

It arrived on Tuesday. I called Comcast to find out if I could just pick up one of the cable cards the TiVo needs, only to find out that no, they have to send a tech to install it. And they couldn’t get someone here til Friday. Having a new TiVo sitting in the house while you wait for your least favorite cable company stinks.

We went to plug the TiVo in last night, so that it’d be set up for the cable guy today, and found that it refused to boot up. This is what our old box, and the box my in-laws weren’t using (so they gave it to us) did. “Welcome! Powering Up…” was what it’d say, then it’d stay there forever. No boot. No love.

Brand new box. DOA. I had to call them today to get a shipping label to send it back so that they can send us a new one. It’ll take a good two weeks for the new one to arrive, if not more.

Power Play - two nights ago, I found Bear searching frantically under his desk, and asked him what the hell he was doing. “Something down here is making a high-pitched whine, and it’s driving me crazy,” he said.

He started going through computer components until he had the answer: it’s the power supply for his computer. It’s an ancient thing, venerable even, and is apparently on its last legs. If it doesn’t kick over in the next month, I’ll be shocked. That’s provided Bear hasn’t thrown it through a window, driven mad by the noise it’s making (which I can’t hear…sometimes, hearing loss is a blessing).

Which brings up the point that his computer is completely, totally and utterly out of date. It can’t run really modern games. We haven’t gotten to try Warhammer Online because his system can’t run it. It’s just old, and it’s starting to die, piece by piece.

Open Window - and somewhere in there, my Windows install died, and I had to reinstall it. Except that Windows refused to cooperate. We had to contort and sweat to get it on the drive. All this for an OS I loathe.

So. I’ve had just about enough of May. Mercury needs to get its ass in gear and go the right way. ‘Cause, you know, I am done.

The last couple weeks have been Hell.

Which is about all I can say about them. Serious problems cropped up, hearts were broken, stress was created, and in general, the dragon won. It happens, and all you can say is, “Well, that sucked” and go right on with your life.

All these things unfortunately conspired to let the lid off my chronic insomnia. I’ve used Ambien to control it for a couple years now. I really dislike taking sleeping pills, or any pills, for that matter, but sometimes, that’s how it goes. I consider it the lesser of evils.

Usually, I have problems falling asleep. My brain just doesn’t shut down right. I take my Ambien, I go to sleep, and I have no problems after that. Then Hell broke out, and that stopped. I started waking up between 2:30 and 4 AM, and not being able to go back to sleep. Nights turned long, days turned longer, and I turned into a gibbering vegetable.

Calls were put in to the doctor. We tried temazepam, which just made me high as a kite. We tried Ambien CR, which after about a week without more than two hours of sleep a night finally kept me down for a couple full nights.

Then the old problem kicked in. See, Ambien CR is meant to keep you asleep. It doesn’t have a mallet to knock you out with first. It’s also very, very clingy. When you haven’t slept for days, you don’t care, but wanting to claw your eyes out in the morning does get old.

Older still when you can’t get to sleep at night in the first place, so you spend a couple hours thrashing before your body catches the hint. That’s been the last two nights.

Now we’re trying a different combo, and we’ll see how that works out. It’s safe to say, though, that I know quite a lot about sleep disorder medication. I’ve been on a good number of them in just the last two weeks.

This all led to a discussion with my doctor about sleep deprivation as an interrogation method. I’ve done this song and dance with sleep before, and every time it happens, I wonder how some people don’t consider sleep deprivation a torture, or figure it’s okay to use under the right circumstances.

Sleep deprivation will make you crazy. Plain and simple. Your day isn’t broken up right. Your mind doesn’t work. Your body stops working. You’re a living zombie, trapped in a degrading shell.

After a few days, things that shouldn’t make sense do. Worse, after long enough, you start to ponder really dangerous stuff. You stop caring if X drug and Y drug play nice together, and figure heck, you could take them together for a night. Just one night. Just long enough to sleep.

Then you start bargaining with the universe. You’ll make any deal, if you could just sleep for a couple more hours. You start pondering if you could call your doctor and offer him sexual favors for the industrial strength sleeping meds you know he has to have access to. Just for a night.

By the end of a week, I might have told an interrogator anything he wanted to hear, whether or not I was telling the truth, if he’d just let me sleep. The doctor said that after two weeks, pretty much anyone will give you anything you want.

Which sounds great, until you realize that they’ll make it up for the promise of sleep. Ineffective, inhumane, and pretty much just in-. I know. It’s a hobby of mine.

In closing, I leave you with one of my theme songs: “Nessun Dorma”, or Nobody Sleeps, from Puccini’s “Turandot”. I’m quite fond of this song. And not just for obvious reasons.

He came to us just after The Girlchild was born, one of the three cats I took in after a friend died. We loved the others, of course, but of them all, Tobias was our favorite.

When Brie would cry in her crib, Tobias would jump into the room to stare at the crib. Then he’d give us dirty looks when we got on the scene, as if wondering where the heck we’d been. Didn’t we know the kid needed something? He took to the kids right off.

He had a tremendous amount of personality and heart. He was brave and loving, and very demanding. If you didn’t pet him, he’d nip you to put you back in line, but never hard. Just hard enough.

Every now and then, he’d do his “Crazy Tobie” routine. Suddenly, his hackles would go up, his tail would fluff, and he’d run from one end of the place to the other. Then he’d pause, look around as if wondering if they were coming to get him, sharpen his nonexistent claws on something, then run off again. It was hysterical.

He liked to curl up with me on the beanbag while I played games. He also loved to lay with The Boychild, both of them stretched in the sun on the bed. The boy would pet, the cat would purr, and I’d find them watching the TV, content to be with each other.

Tobias, also known as Sugarbutt to his original owner, was a blessing to our family. He was a good friend. And we’re all going to miss him horribly.

I’m sitting here alone in the apartment for the first time since Wednesday morning. It’s been a hectic whirlwind since then, but an awesome one. Still, the quiet feels strange after all that activity.

I’ve gone cold turkey on chaos, and I’m not sure what to do with the calm. I’ve got that sense that I ought to be doing something at top speed. It’ll take a bit to decelerate, I’d suppose.

Ryan came out for the weekend on Thursday evening. Prior to his arrival, Bear and I spent the morning amok. We had to get new copies of the kids’ birth certificates, as the old ones are walkabout and I need copies to register the kids at their new school.

Then we had lunch, got one kid, started cleaning house, got the other kid, finished cleaning house, and tore off to the airport. For once, a plane got in early. We managed to get there with about ten minutes to spare.

After that followed a high speed weekend of gaming, movies, and greyhounds. We saw Watchmen. We played Mad World and Street Fighter 4 and Boom Blox and Mario Cart and, most importantly, Rock Band. We discovered that Stevie Ray Vaughn is a serious pain in the ass on Hard, and on Expert is mind-boggling.

(Side note: we discovered that Gryph shouldn’t play Stevie Ray Vaughn while the kids are awake, because the language turns really horrible. Also, that they cut the orgasm out of the beginning of “More Human Than Human”, but that Gryph will do it anyway. Gryph will also add all the f-bombs back into the lyrics of that song. Gryph also cannot sing James Brown worth a damn.)

(Also Also Side Note: Bear will sing the entirety of “Creep” in his Perry Como Midget voice. And dear good heavens, but you should hear what he does to the Beastie Boys. Oh yes, and his “Texas Flood” is mind-bogglingly hysterical. I thought we were all going to pee laughing. Just like we laughed at Ryan’s amazing “Texas Flood” rendition, complete with mumbled commentary and quotes from the video game Mad World.)

We went to the greyhound rescue’s “Roo-union” celebration, because I was being honored for doing a lot of dawg haulin’. This is amusing because Ryan’s not terribly fond of dogs, so what’d we do? Hauled him to a dog event. Still, we had a good time, saw some gorgeous dogs, and bought the funniest picture of a badger ever.

We had In N Out Burger, food at Thunder Canyon Brewery, and a really terrific sushi dinner at our favorite Bunbuku. Bear also made chicken enchiladas.

On Monday, we had to take Ryan back to the plane, and we were sad. He’s the best friend anyone could ask for, and we had so much fun. We keep hoping that he and his wife will find jobs out here, and come to live where we can hang out all the time.

Now it’s quiet again. Not for long, of course, but still, it’s deafening in its own way. After most of a week of constant activity, this little lull is odd.

And won’t last long.

We took Ryan to see the new place this weekend. It’s a little bittersweet to see it right now. We went on a bright, sunny afternoon, which showcased the big backyard. The skylights lit the place nicely. The fridge and washer/dryer were back in, and are better than what we have in the apartment.

It’s such a gorgeous house. I want to be in it. The apartment and complex are doing everything in their power to annoy us on the way out. I want my yard, my grill, my big bathtub and my working appliances. But I have three and a half weeks, all of which I will need to pack up, and it seems like such a long time.

Chaos looms again. Three weeks of packing, a spring break in there as well as a holiday, attempts at getting writing work done, all that stuff. I have six days to finish, wash, and block this scarf. I need to get the kids’ school registration done. Other whatnots.

But for right now, there’s calm, and my music, and a bit of time to remember what quiet is before it’s all blown to hell again.

I’m still a little stunned.

We had a long checklist of required features for the house we chose. I had resigned myself to a protracted search, one that perhaps took us into April, even. I was girded for pain and suffering.

What I didn’t expect was getting the very first place I called about.

I certainly didn’t expect terrific landlords who want us to make ourselves at home, don’t mind if we paint or put in a new thermostat or plant roses or bring home a greyhound to foster for a night after a spay surgery. Or a house in a pretty upscale neighborhood for a price we could afford, and with a school that has a teacher I volunteer with.

Or to have it sewn up in five days.

We signed the lease today, and put down both our security deposit and pet deposit. Pro-rated rent for April will get paid when we pick up the keys in the middle of next month. That’ll give us two weeks to get moved and cleaned up here, unlike our last move.

We have a massive backyard. And a two car garage. And a storage shed. And a huge bathtub in the master bath. Tile and laminate flooring throughout. Big bar the kids can eat at. And a fireplace.

And most importantly, I can walk down to the office, put in my intent to vacate paperwork, and not have to worry that I won’t have a place to live come May.

Now to pack. Ugh.

We looked at a house on Tuesday. And we really liked it. I wish I could say it was perfect, but it had a couple nitnicks about it that made us pause. Most notably, the living room was much smaller than we’d hoped to find.

Offsetting this, though, was the amazing backyard, the gorgeous kitchen, and a massive master bathroom. The best features, though, were our potential landlords. I haven’t met anyone nicer than these people. They want us to rent the place and do what we need to to make it our home. This includes painting the inside if we want, replanting, whatever. They make up for a lot of little flaws.

Today, we go see the second place on our list. It’s in a much better area for us, but the yard is significantly smaller. The landlord is nice, but it’d be hard to equal the folks at the first place. It’ll have to really impress us, I think. But then again, it might.

We ought to know where we want to go tonight. I’m not sure if I hope that this second place will win us over or not. Its area has some very important benefits, but I love the landlords at the other one. I suppose we’ll see.

I expected to find a single place we could tolerate. I didn’t expect to find two to agonize over. I’m going to be bald by the end of this. Ironic, because my straightening iron is probably hot now, and I need to go torture the curl out of my hair…which will be gone after all this stress anyway…

There’s one thing worse than moving. And that’s finding a place to move to.

Some people don’t have a problem with this. These are the lucky, wise people that did not completely pooch their credit years ago. Folks like this, who I pay much homage to, can roll up, say, “I want that one” and bingo, have a place to be.

I am not one of these people. My credit looks like your average piece of roadkill.

It’s not just my credit, though. It’s also my list of requirements. Well, our list. Because when you have kids, you can’t just pick any old neighborhood. You have to find a place where they can play, and one with a good school.

And let’s not forget that I have a cat. And want to adopt a dog. Not a little dog. A 50-90 lb dog.

Oh yes. And I don’t need it til late April, but I’d like to get it signed for this month, because I have to turn in a 30 day “intent to vacate” form before April 1. Which I don’t want to do unless I have a place, because I don’t want to say I’m leaving, then have no place to go.

Did I mention that I need it at a reasonable price?

You see what I’m up against here.

I don’t do unsettled well. Not when it comes to living arrangements. I don’t like not knowing where I intend to move, and worse, not knowing if any landlords will be okay with me moving there. I’ve wanted to start this house hunt for months, but we decided that we’d start in March. It’s a reasonable gap between sign and move in.

Yesterday was March 2. First Monday of the month. That means I’m on the prowl. And in a state of low-grade freakout.

It’ll pass, just as soon as I find us a place. Then I can freak out about the move itself. At which point I can freak out about the kids going to a new school. And new bills. And new transportation arrangements. And new situations.

Fuck me, but I hate moving.

We’ve got a place to look at tonight, and one on Sunday. Both sound pretty dang awesome. One’s in a terrific area for Bear to carpool in, which makes getting him to work easier. It’s got a great school. It’s convenient to the kennel we volunteer at.

The other’s less convenient, ride-wise. But it’s bigger, with a bigger yard. It already has a cat door installed to go to the garage, so the litterbox and cat food could stay there, away from a dog’s reach. I also know someone who teaches at the school there. But the people who own it are very anxious to get it rented, which means a quick decision.

Also, this means I’m freaking out about choosing between the two.

I’m going to be a wreck by May 1.