Yeap, I wasn’t joking around, every hour of free time has been in WoW but on friday I’ll ding 70 which is the max so after that it’ll be a bit easier. Last weekend I was so totally into it that I completely missed a blizzard that had swept over sweden last weekend with all the snow and all the minus degrees that I’ve been yelling for. I don’t like this cold but I like the fact that it’s cold.
The expansion to Warcraft was released today. Good bye.
(but before I go through the portal, here are the pictures from Italy)
Oh that was one of the best weekends of my life ! ! ! The background story : When I’ve played Warcraft in our old guild, “Evil Inc”, we had alot of italians. One of them was called “Dago” (real name is Mario). So now that our guild is kind of splitting up me and my buddy Mats decided that we have to pay him a visit seeing as we have been playing and talking to eachother over the internet for a year now. So on friday we started our journey to Milan…
Friday : After an uneventful drive to Skavsta we checked in. Knowing Ryan Air hates luggage we decided to only have one carry on with us each and they warned us about new regulations and bla bla, “whatever, I’ve done this a few times”… but oh no, now there are really strict regulations regarding how volume of liquids per container and all that stuff so they confiscated my shampoo, hairspray and stuff. And after that I walked 10 meters to the tax free and bought new stuff. Doh!
Flying down there was uneventful, found the bus into Milan and taxi home to Mario at around 9 pm. Then we decided to go out for a real italian pizza, a beer and just talk. Naturually it was one of the best pizzas ever and we had no problem talking about everything. Then we got home to his place at midnight. Great time to go to bed… NOT! Mario had called some of his students from the snobby school he works at and set us up at Milan’s hippest club where they had VIP passes. I don’t do the club scene that much but that was pretty sweet and they were great, but unfortunately you can’t talk that much. Came back at 4-4.30 something and tried getting some sleep but failed _totally_!
Saturday : After not sleeping at all it was time to get up at 11 for breakfast (and got served coffee in bed!). Then we went out to the shopping part of Milan where we found a huge, sweet cathedral and Mats went crazy with my camera ’cause he loves these things. And my own church – the Ferrari store! After some shopping it was time for lunch – best lunch ever! And after that we went out to his home town of Piacenza where we checked into the Holiday Inn and got an hour of sleep before we went to the next party! We met up with some 20 other warcraft players and some other randoms in a nice little restaurant outside of Piacenza and we sat down for a very long 4 dishes (and 4 hour!) long meal. It was so fun meeting all these people I’ve played with and the bizarroness of the situation, 2 clueless swedes with 20 crazy italians, half of which could barely speak english, it was just great fun. And the food was absolutely awesome! We got home at around 2.30 and this time I had no problem falling asleep.
Sunday: We got up at around 11 and got ready for another long day. We were all very very very tired so we stoped by a nice little street cafe for coffee and walked around the town for a bit, checked out the local cathedral and then we met up with some of the people from the night before for a little lunch. It was suppose to be little cause they said it was a “slice of pizza”. Yeah, it was a slice of a pizza – a 2 meter pizza!! And the crust was like an 3 cm. thick and 1/2 cm thick layer of mozarella all wrapped up in ham. Massive but oh what a feeling. Somehow everything tastes better in Italy 🙂
After that we went out to a little midevil tourist town and walked around in there for a while looking at swords and stuff we’d never get through customs, but it was nice anyway.
Then we went back to Milan to get the bus back to the airport. After the checkin and security screening and again being robbed of my shampoo and now even hairspray we were ready to get going home. But oh no, due to fog the plane had been redirected to it’s alternate airport so we had to take busses over there. That shouldn’t be a problem, right? but it took around 3 hours and we lifted off at 23:59:30 as opposed to 20:35:00! The reason I know it was 30 seconds before midnight is because the captain kept yelling that the aiport shuts down at midnight since it was close to a residential area and we had to leave NOW! And we made it with 30 seconds! Landed at 3 and got home and crawled into bed at 4 am, got up at 10 and went back to work!
Oh man what a weekend that was! It totally owned everything! The food, the company, the atmosphere, everything was just awesome!!!
(pictures coming soon)
After almost two years I’m going back to Italy today! Only for the weekend, coming home on sunday night. It’s a perfect example of just how social playing computer games can be – I’ve gotten to know a bunch of italians that I’ve played WoW with for about a year and now that our guild is splitting up and the WoW expansion coming on tuesday we thought “it’s now or never”. So now it is! So me and Mats are just about to leave now for a weekend that will be awesome!
And today I did something I’ve never done before – I passed the annual “let’s see if your car is road-worthy”. They have pretty high standards, MTV actually had a problem finding a car for “pimp my ride” since all cars were in such good condition due to this. And I’ve always failed on the first one, but that’s good cause you get a list of things that’ wrong and you go to the shop and say “fix it!”. But today it passed with flying colours!!
Last weekend I had alot of issues on my mind, enough to make me depressed. Alot of small things (like my dead car battery, christmas shopping, suit that needed cleaning, photo session and so on) and two major things – WoW guild disbanded and my new potential girlfriend. Well all those small issues are now resolved thanks to friends and my ever supportive sister AC. And WoW guild dying isn’t as bad as I thought, I mean it’s just a game right and I get all my spare time back now in time for Christmas and the holidays. And there’s always the option of joining another guild and I may even end up playing more (!) than before. We’ll see, but it’s not important really…
Which just left that potential girlfriend. I’d met her during a party and we were pretty similar in alot of ways and at first it was “I totally get her!”. But after almost three weeks of dating and her going to Paris to get some perspective we met up again on saturday, talked for an hour then kinda agreed that it wasn’t working out. And a friendly goodbye hug and “I’ll see you around” and one more relationship that didn’t survive the 3 week mark (this was 6 hours short), I’m becoming the expert at that. But since we never got that serious and I saw it coming a mile away it’s not getting me down that much. But it did feel good while it lasted, never knew I could be so happy with a women fully dressed.
So all in all – one week later and everything sorted. Now bring on Christmas and the New Year!
This must be the fall/winter-depression coming on a bit late but now I’m depressed. I saw “Clerks 2” the other day and since then I’ve been in a “who am I why am I here and where am I going?”-state which is all kinds of depressive things. And just like that our WoW guild is splitting up (which is seing something I worked hard for 18 months go down the drain) and if that’s not enough – when I have the perfect opportunity to show a little bit of romance with a prospective girlfriend my car dies on me and ruins the entire thing. God damnit!!!
But yeah, atleast I have a prospective girlfriend, that cheers me up a bit (and thank you Mats for letting that cat out of the bag). But then my ever cheerful sis cheers me up with “you’re doing good, have a job, don’t live with your parents, you got your health and so does both your parents, what are you whining about?”….
True that, what am I whining about? And will that help?…
How can I be so depressed over a little thing like our WoW guild splitting up? Well I joined the guild back in august 2005 and in march this year me and my buddy Mats took over and pretty much ran it from there. I’ve pretty much dedicated most of my free time to it, even some time at work. I’ve never had a problem prioritizing real life over my WoW life (atleast I don’t think so), but in the deeper analysis I guess I could say that I have a limited real life thanks to WoW taking so much of my time. And now all that hard work is gone. I wouldn’t say wasted since I’ve had alot, ALOT of good times with them. Another thing is all of a sudden I end up in this “what to do now?”-mode? It’s probably for the best that it went like this since even if I do go on it won’t be on this level and I’ll have alot more time on my hands to deal with real life and all that stuff. But it’s all too depressing. It’s not that I’m against changes, I like changes, changes are good but in this case… I want it back the way it was.
So you know I’m a member of a really, really old gaming guild in sweden called “Soul Crushers”? We’ve been active since the quake days, going through other games, new members, old members disappearing but the “Soul Crusher” motto of always having fun still lives on! One of them is an “underground” bar in the center of stockholm that we’ve hung out at. And tonigh is the last night there ’cause after that they’re closing the doors. So bittersweet when that happens… But any excuse for a party 🙂
Hate to sound boring but there really is nothing happening. Working and playing WoW is pretty much it right now. But I’ll break that pattern this weekend when I’ll be busy doing other stuff and then head off to Scotland to check what’s happening with the relatives over there. Oh, gay pride week again but for once I haven’t noticed it at all!
Even though I’m not trying to watch that many football games I still find myself semi-watching every one. You know, one eye on the computer playing WoW and the other one watching the game. And sweden scored one goal and all of a sudden the media are discussing how far we can go. But england will put them down to earth again.
Yesterday was a glorious swedish summer and how did I spend it? Inside a movie theater watching Star Trek. But that’s not the sad part, the sad part was that it was the last time we had our Star Trek event in that theater. We’ve been there once a month for 9 months per year for 9 years now! Seriously, it was 9 years since we had our first event there (and ofc I remember it like it was yesterday). ‘All good things must come to an end’ indeed…
And today was another glorious summer day and I spent around 1 hour of it slacking in the sun. Then played WoW for the rest of the day 🙂
So you’d think that our WoW guild dying would make me stop playing WoW. Well, it kinda had the opposite effect since I stepped up and took on even more responsibilities and stuff to make things work.
I wonder if there’s a WoW detox program somewhere…
So not only is our WoW guild dying, but now one of my best friends is losing his job (downsizing – AGAIN!) and this woman I finally asked out is trying to patch things up with her ex…
Regarding the first one, you coul say “it’s just a game”, but it’s become so much more. It’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t been there, but it’s another hurtful reminder that “all good things must come to and end”. Regarding my friend losing his job, that’s shitty but he’s young and has tons of experience and certifications so he’ll get a new one fast as hell, and he also has a girlfriend to comfort him. And the last one… well, I’m one of those “good for her!”-people so… good for her, whatever makes her happy!…
But I’m still depressed… Oh well, I have plenty of cookies!
Our WoW guild is dying out now, think we’ve been pushing it a bit hard and people have just woke up and realised “hey, I’m almost 31, maybe I should do something else than play computer games”. And yeah, I’m people… thing is, I’m not very good at taking on huge tasks like for example cleaning my apartment that is in serious need of a good cleaning crew… nah, just one more Rend-run (WoW talk)..
Now I’m gonna force myself to play WoW less ’cause I’ve been putting so much stuff off in the past months that I have alot of stuff to catch up on. This place being one of them…
So 4 years ago we had all the expectations in the world to get some olympic medals and that didn’t happen. So this year we didn’t, but we did get tons of them. Think we ended up like 6th or 7th all in all. Biggest one ofc was the hockey, and now there’s alot of legal issues with that because of the celebration party they had here in Stockholm. Since it was arranged by the swedish ice hockey organisation it had their logos and sponsors, not the official olympic sponsors which goes against some rule somewhere. I just love legal mumo-jumbo and there are even talks that it might disqualify our hockey team. Good luck with that 🙂
This is terrible, I’m falling so behind on updating this place I feel kinda guilty about it. But there isn’t that much going on. Well there is, but nothing you would ever be interested in. Like our plans to migrate to another WoW server, doesn’t sound at all interesting but you’d be surprised at all the discussion about it 🙂
But the good news is I haven’t had a headache in quite a while. Actually can’t remember when was the last time I had one. The bad news is that the problem migrated to the left front of my head! Something is really messed up with my blood circulation in my head because now I feel the blood pumping through my veins behind my eyeball sometimes, extremely annoying. So maybe that MRI is still on 🙂 But I guess I shouldn’t complain, if that’s all that’s bothering me right now.
Now I’m just pure lazy! I was reminded I even have this place today when I bumped into one of the managers of the projects that had me travelling the globe. And it made me feel all kinds of happy so I went through my logs and updates during that time and it’s so funny reading it now 2 years later 🙂 I think I should make some kind of special section on this site (or even design a new one) for all that stuff. I actually wish Blizzard would have some kind of melt down at their datacenters so I could get my ass out of the cyberworld and do stuff!
WoW is still dominating my free time. It’s gotten so bad I haven’t even seen the new “Battlestar Galactica” episodes that we’ve waited half a year for. But last friday we proved just how social that game can be. Our guild (Evil Inc.) was doing an instance in the game called Molten Core which is huge, difficult and time consuming. And it requires a group of no less than 40 players! So from around 7pm on friday night to just before 4 am on saturday morning 40 people were connected playing and talking with eachother (voice communication is a must in that place). I don’t think there’s any other game out there that can do that. In Battlefield we found it hard to get 10 players together at a given time. In Counterstrike you only needed 5. But 40 – for 8 hours… And yes, we’re all nuts!
This kinda stuff never gets old! Let me translate – an 18 year old girl says she got raped at a party. The lawyer to the guy who’s accused is requesting that she wear the same jeans and tries to strip in front of everyone at the court to prove that they were too tight for any rapist to forcibly remove. If it wasn’t such a serious matter I’d laugh… And no, I’m not taking sides to if he did or not, I’m just scared at the fact that the legal system is so good at protecting the accused but doesn’t really care about the victims…
Speaking of serious – alot of you are probably wondering what happened to my headache? I wish I could say. The truth is that it’s almost gone. But I still feel … weird up there. But I’m still not sure if it’s mental or something actually wrong with me. Right now I’m in a holding pattern to find out if I’m gonna get a steady job or go unemployed from october 25th, because that is the only mental thing I can think of that can cause this. If it doesn’t get better after that I’m gonna have to get some kind of checkup of my head but right now I’m just waiting. And playing too much WoW…
WoW! That’s the reason my freetime is totally wiped out of existence, why my personal life has been reduced to a bunch of ones and zeroes in a database in Germany! I don’t know how Blizzard creates this addictive feeling in their games but yesterday I stepped over the line between “avid player” to “junkie”! Our old SoulCrushers guild has decided to merge with a guild that has high standards and expects alot of us. The entrance exam is to get the so called “Onyxia key”, and to get it you have to complete 14 different quests and most of them you have to be in a team of 5 to do and 3 of them in a team of 15 players. So when you get a chance to go with a large group of people you value it. And in the very last quest you have to collect something from the last boss and it takes some 3 hours to get to him. We did it all 3 times and I never got it and that third time I got so pissed, angry, depressed, bitter and a general asshole. Until I realised it’s only a game, it’s only a few numbers in a cyberexistence, in the final tally it’s not worth crap. Fortunately I have the ability to distance myself from… well, myself to think about stuff like that. But I’m not the kind that gives up and on my fourth attempt, at 1 am last night, I got it. But I didn’t get that many hours of sleep because I had to get up at 6 to go to work.