Vacation is over, and I’ve had time to let some thoughts collect. After repeatedly washing them away with an alcohol induced state, they’ll be under suppression for quite a while. That damned dirty ape we like to call “Real Life” almost had a big ol’ monkey wrench in my grand master plans, but it has appeared to work itself out without much of a disruption. I spent a weekend in the middle of Michigan, thought we like to call it “up north” since basically it’s north of Detroit. Had the chance to cut down a couple trees, capture a turtle for the youngin’s wandering about, nearly catch my head on fire, and began drinking each day before noon as is the custom in those parts. I’ll be up there again this weekend, but with swim trunks and leech-repellent. I don’t exactly know what repels leeches, but I hope to find some. That water looks so damn inviting… except the leeches. It’s a great time to be “up north” in Michigan, although the lack of scantily clad women, and abundance of much older and looser skin makes it questionable. Something about being outdoors, driving a four-wheeler, and wielding a chainsaw just digs at my primal inner man.

It makes me want to hit things.

WAR is my remedy to this demon I call “Real Life” and the urges and tendency to gravitate towards violence. I swear if I didn’t have an outlet I would have joined some MMA style fighting club and probably lost 30% of my IQ from head blows. I remember when I was 18, I convinced the young-ish owner of a coffee shop to keep a handful of guys after hours to start a fight club. Shortly after the movie Fight Club was released of course. This went about 3 sessions over the course of a week before I broke a couple of ribs and sent someone home crying. Then the parental units got involved, but with words instead of the welcomed fisticuffs. Damn civilized people, invoking law and order in the face of brutality and violence. There may have been a moral to the story, but ultimately it made me realize how close I had come to being jailed, and a different outlet for these thoughts would have to do. No more hitting people.

I’m not really sure why I’m going this direction for a rant, but it’ll come full circle eventually I think.

For the next three years I decided to embrace hard laborious jobs as an alternative and release to the pent up energy that desired conflict. With my body tired and exhausted on a daily basis, I more often took to resting on the weekends in preparation for the coming week. In my off-time I actually spent a lot of time out and social with friends, and rarely jumping into the 3 MMO’s or so that I had accounts with. I was a RPG lover with a light tendency to MMO’ing, and preferred tabletop games. As a note, I peaked at 5 different games a week, while running two additional nights of my own game. The height of the RPG addiction was also the bottom of my…ah, emotional output? Something about being in a relationship that you actually cared about, not sure what word that would be. Basically, I had no trouble with the ladies, I just didn’t care about them to any degree under the assumption that my dedication of time to things RPG’ish would never allow them to become anything serious. It was a good life to live for a while, made decent money, had plenty of time to run around and do anything. I was young!

Then I managed to injure my shoulder/back pretty badly at work. I was stuck doing technical work or repairs at a machine shop. Things that were generally very light loads, but required a rathe sharp mind. It changed my dependency on physical labor to suppress my desire for a fight. However something was different, as I felt more energy return on a daily basis I no longer wanted to fight. All the excess RPG’ing developed a new taste and that was really where I started getting into things. I found that I no longer needed 10-11 hours of sleep each night when 5-6 would do just fine. I could go for hours on end without needing to sit down and eat a 3 pound meal. Also around this time my daughter was born, and she kept me plenty busy and in shape as well. Lovely child when she was young, the kid could sleep 10 hours a night with no problems.

This allowed me excess time to seriously get into a guild playing Shadowbane. This was the dawning point of my MMO beginning. Sure I had played UO, AO, EQ, and a minute in WoW, along with dedicated NWN persistent worlds. Shadowbane was different, it wasn’t a mob/quest oriented game. You ran with a guild, a community, and OWNED your own place in it. If someone dropped a rock on your lawn (-banestone), you set up a time to defend your city and EVERYONE knew about it. We used to have 4-6 guilds show up just to WATCH a city under assault. It was truly a RvR game, but with 10 different Realms instead of 1v1. Problem with Shadowbane? It looked like ass. Horrible graphics, and ultimately unbearable.

I heard about Mark of Chaos, this first iteration of a WAR MMO. I decided, either run with the WoW-tards, or wait. So I waited.

Then I came.

Here I am.

I ain’t going nowhere.