You may have noticed that posts around here are few and far between as of late. This is due to several things. First and probably most of all is the fact that I’ve been extremely depressed as of late. Which honestly makes it very hard to write anything. I struggle to find any motivation to even log in and start on a new post when I get like this. For that, I’m sorry. I also sometimes feel bad that I don’t write more about Dungeons & Dragons or cartoons, things I wanted to tackle but can’t figure out a good way to do it.
Even worse is when the dark thoughts start creeping into my head and make me want to give up this blog entirely. Why bother? It seems like I’m just talking to myself and the vast majority of my hits are just people coming from Google Images to see the few Adventure Time or Thundercats pictures I have used in previous posts. That maybe I should have just left this entire thing to collect dust after I left WoW, as I think most just stopped paying attention after that. I try to stay positive and say that just because I don’t get hits or comments, doesn’t mean someone out there isn’t enjoying this. I’m sure someone is.
The other reason is mainly because I don’t know what to write about because I’m kind of stuck in gaming limbo at the moment. No one game has my entire attention right now. I’ve kind have been bouncing around between playing Mass Effect 3, Skyrim, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, (Deep breath now…) Fallout New Vegas, SW:TOR AND I’ve begun to once again miss WoW.
That last one is kind of weird, because there isn’t much that I really enjoyed in Cataclysm. It’s mostly just that I miss the people there I guess. I was part of a really amazing guild full of fun people, but the game itself was boring me to tears. It just wasn’t worth the money to keep playing. Now with Mists of Pandaria news trickling in, I’ve got the urge to go back and say hello. It almost feels shameful in some respects because I’m supposed to be a “TOR player” now.
I have tried to emulate that experience of finding fun people to play with in TOR too. But it’s been… well, a mixed bag. I seem to play at all the wrong times for the guilds I’ve joined. By the time I log on, there’s one person other person online. I do enjoy the actual game though, the story is exactly what I always wanted from my WoW experience. But I miss the social atmosphere and ease of just hopping in and out of groups from WoW. Say what you want about the Dungeon Finder, it was a godsend to shy people like me. And when the topic gets approached on the TOR forums, someone usually not-so-politely states that if you’re not a social butterfly, you need to GTFO from MMOs. How kind.
However, I didn’t leave WoW for TOR because I hated WoW, or think the game is dying or doomed, or have some personal vendetta against Ghostcrawler. I left it because at the moment, I didn’t have anything to do. I just wanted to do something different. Does that somehow place me firmly in the camp of a diehard TOR-ite? TOR’s great and all, but I would hardly call it perfect. It is improving and the team working on it seems completely interested in improving that experience for everyone. When it boils down to it, I really do enjoy both games. So why do I feel shame about missing WoW sometimes?
It partially has something to do with how other people view the situation. I left WoW, started playing SWTOR, and if I go back to WoW, it must be because TOR failed in some way. Even the slightest hint of talking about coming back to WoW spurs old guildmates’ chuckles about how BAD The Old Republic must be. But it’s not. Each game fulfills a certain need of mine. I enjoy them both in different ways. It drives me nuts to hear people talk like that. It reminds me of the ‘old days’ when – one moment, gotta get my old man hat and rocking chair out… there we go. – when we used to argue and battle about SEGA vs. Nintendo. You could only like one. You had to throw your hat in with one or other. Which was completely STUPID. And worse, continues to happen to this day with Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo or MMOs like Rift/TOR/WoW.
It’s okay to like more than one thing. It is! The only really issue for me is time and money. Honestly, I wish there was a way I could squeeze everything I like about both games into one big gooshie lump of a game-y thing-a-majig but I can’t. So now I find myself in the awkward position of not knowing what to do or what to play. My TOR subscription is set until July, and I hope to have heard SOME kind of news about the Mists release date by then. But until then, it’s hard to play anything without getting my innards all in a twist, and when I can’t play – well, I have a bit of a struggling writing about it.
Ultimately, I wonder if I made a mistake sticking with the word “Odd” in the title. It originally made sense when I would write lavish posts about things that I found very weird in games. Like giant skeletons with no explanation, or how a huge dwarven dam looked like it was spitting at you, but now my rambling is less odd and more… well, I dunno what I can describe my writing as. I contemplated on Twitter about scrapping it all and starting fresh so I wouldn’t have that name sitting on my head, but at the same time I’ve grown quite attached to it. I’ve also been trying to push my posts to be more ‘personal’ and worry less about ‘objective content’ or worrying if something is necessarily ‘funny enough’. I suppose this post would be a good step in that direction but then again I am not sure.
Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know exactly what is going on around here. We’re trying to get everything sorted out and figured out, but as we approach the end of the first year as “The Land of Odd” and my fifth year of writing this blog across all its incarnations, there is a lot on my mind about what to do with it. I thank you all for your patience and would welcome any and all suggestions or criticisms about this website. I want to make it awesome and enjoyable for people, and keep it fun to write. So feedback is – as always – appreciated, and I apologize for all the delays.
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