December 09, 2004 - 2:19 PM

Hard Work and Sword Play Make Paul a Slow Updater

It hasn't been REALLY hard work, but there has been enough of it that I haven't had much time to sit down and type up a few thoughts during the day. We're wrapping up our first season (sorry about last night's episode...it just wans't that funny, was it?) with next week being our last week, so I'm constantly out, running things around L.A. We'll be moving into our own offices in the middle of January so, in addition to the show stuff that we're working on, we're also packing up all our furniture, equipment, computers, etc., shopping for new furniture, and buying office and food supplies for next year.

Why don't I type up an entry at night you might ask? Well, I gave in and bought World of Warcraft for my Mac on Friday and, true to my nature, have been obsessively playing it like a freak ever since. I have little self-control when it comes to videogames, it seems, which is strange because I don't play that many. But certain games will grab my fancy and make it their fancy little bitch and I can't help it because I'm just not a fancy person. It happened with Civilization and Civ 2, it happened with The Sims, it's happened with several baseball games, and now it's happening with World of Warcraft.

What makes this game so great shakes you might also ask? I don't know. I really don't know. You create a character, choose its species, its sex, its profession, and you take it around this massive world, fighting creatures, building up experience, buying and selling gear. And it's all online and interactive- sure you can go off and do the quests and make your character stronger by yourself, but the game is really built for and much more fun when joining up with other players to smash some ugly trolls as a team.

Nick thinks that the character that you choose to be says something about who you are. I agree, and I think that that's also a big part of what makes this kind of game so addictive. Because you do invest something of yourself in the character, and you want to make them good, make them better, stronger, powerfuller. It's like your little geeky innerchild made manifest, and your hopes and dreams are pinned to it.

By the way, I'm a female Night-Elf Warrior named Flushmonkey; Nick's a male Gnome Warlock called Bloatbottom; and Mark is a gnarly Dwarf Paladin who goes by Sheepstink. If you dig a little, you can totally see how appropriate our avatars are.

Incredulous readers might wonder if I was so tangled up in this game that I couldn't even write a little somethin' somethin' over the weekend. Well, on Saturday, I didn't play all day...in fact, I went out to dinner with my cousins and then we all caught a late showing of "House of Flying Daggers" with Nick at the Arclight. Everyone was disappointed by the film, sadly, as it turned out to be pretty cheese-tastic. The film, the locations, the costumes were all gorgeous, sumptuous even, but the story and the dialogue weren't quite up to snuff. After the attention to plot and character that was seen in Crouching Tiger and Hero, I think we were all confuzzled by the return to the logic-defying style of the typical asian martial arts flick with the added left-field bonus of Hollywood schmaltz.

To relieve some of the sugary coating from my mind, I sat down at my computer that night and THEN proceeded to play Warcraft for 22 hours straight.

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Jorane - 16mm (A french-canadian cellist/singer doing atmospheric free-form improv)

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