WTF Cornell?

Yeah I refuse to call them the Big Red, mostly because I hate those Verizon commercials and I hate fucking Luke Wilson. YOU'RE THE BROTHER WHO SHOULD KILL HIMSELF. Not Owen, beautiful Owen -- you can derelique my balls any day Hansel!

I actually almost went to Cornell but then I learned that they had a "prestigious" school for Hotel Administration and that pretty much ended that brief love affair. (In all fairness, despite the longstanding snob mentality that only fuckups who didn't get into their top Ivy go there to kill themslves in that big fucking ravine, I would probably have sooner committed suicide at Brown when I finally realized that none of the pretentious granola hippies were Summer Roberts. God I reference the OC a lot...)

I'm pretty butthurt that post- Sean Miller Xavier keeps winning (especially over Pitt) but such is life. The one nice thing about having gone to a school with atrocious athletic programs (besides not getting your bike stolen) is that it lets you be a fairweather fan to a half dozen teams you have "loose" ties to and focus on cheering against the teams you hate. Sup Mich St. Hi2u Kansas.

Does anybody watch Caprica besides me? It's too geeky to talk about irl with people, one of those you've got to hide your love away things (sup WoW and SC2), but despite the fact that nothing ever happens, I love it like dicks and don't know why. Rumor is that it may get a second season which is cool but also kind of sucks because it means the lethargic pace will continue for quite a while.

For those of you nerds who watch the show, you're aware there's an mmo in the show in which the characters just randomly kill people, accumulate wealth, etc, but with no real purpose or specific goal. Which sort of seems quite silly, but then I remembered WoW 1.0 before the honor system and the similarity in mentality is pretty striking. Some became obsessed with griefing/ganking and world PvP. Some farmed for hours on end for gold or extremely rare world drops. Others worked on pointless rep grinds with no specific goal in sight. (Wintersabre lol)

I think that despite my fond memories of this time in the game (memories unfortunately aren't the most trustworthy things), most players hated it and Blizzard has really adeptly shifted the game to a place where there are always specific short term goals with tangible rewards. It's actually hard to login and play for a few hours and NOT accomplish something. Truthfully, this is equally silly as the "accomplishments" are first of all virtual and beyond even that generally ephemeral as new tiers of gear, new arena seasons, and on a larger scale, new characters, and new expansions really trivialize previous work-reward cycles. This is very tired thinking, but I'm somewhat amused by that as the game moves increasing towards a player-centric not character-centric model (by this I don't mean just BoA crap, I mean that players transcend characters and play multiple chars, multiple accounts), the ever increasing amounts of "character progression" are increasingly marginalized, or at best divided.

This is obviously not specific to WoW or Blizzard games, or even just games. Increasingly virtual systems have integrated positive feedback loops to reward participation and give the illusion that time "invested" is "well spent." I don't mean to condemn such a strategy nor pretend to be above it -- I don't think that time used for entertainment is necessarily time wasted, nor am I even sure I believe that if you're enjoying yourself, it's possible you've wasted time, but complex systems (and by this perhaps I mean "REAL LIFE") don't function this way at all. Studying 10 hours doesn't guarantee an A. Working harder doesn't necessarily yield a promotion. Telling the "right" joke doesn't always get you laid. (Or often...)