The Madman and the Death of Boredom

Inspired by Nietzsche’s infamous “God is dead” Parable of the Madman

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a screen in the bright morning hours, who ran into the marketplace and cried ceaselessly:

“I seek boredom! I seek boredom!”

As many who did not believe in boredom were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter.
“Has it wandered off like a child lost in the woods?” asked one.
“Has it overslept? Is it late like a sluggish guest?” said another.
“Or is it hiding in the shadows of TikTok and Netflix? Has it emigrated to the far country of monks and hermits?”
- thus they shouted and laughed.

The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.
“Boredom is dead. Boredom remains dead. And we have killed it - you and I.
All of us are its murderers. But how did we do this?
How could we drink distraction like water?
Scroll faster than the sun? Swipe away silence itself?
What festivals of banality, what sacred games of triviality must we now invent to cleanse ourselves of this blood?
Where shall we go when every moment is filled, and nothing remains empty enough to give shape to longing?

Do you not feel it? The abyss of endless amusement yawns before us.
Depth no longer grows - because nothing is still long enough to take root.
We are condemned to stimulation without satisfaction,
to pleasures that leave us hungrier than before.

Boredom was the womb of creation.
But we strangled the mother in her sleep, and now demand her child without her labor.
Do we not now wander as hollow men, without silence, without waiting, without rapture?”

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his audience; they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment.

At last, he dashed his screen to the ground, and it shattered into countless pixels.
“I have come too soon,” he said then; “my time is not yet.
This monstrous event is still on its way, still traveling - it has not yet reached the ears of men.
Boredom is dead, and yet they sit scrolling as if nothing had happened…”

Leiðleitatil Bindrún (The Pathfinder Bindrune)

I know that I hung
on a wind battered tree
nine long nights,
pierced by a spear and given to Óðinn,
myself to myself,
on that tree
whose roots grow in a place
no one has ever seen.

No one gave me food,
no one gave me drink.
At the end I peered down,
I took the runes - 
screaming, I took them -
and then I fell.

- Rúnatal, Hávamál, The Poetic Edda (Cōdex Rēgius)

First, as with most things necessary in this world of judgement and jumping to conclusions, a disclaimer:

This entry deals with a certain level of esoteric beliefs that, for many reasons I fully understand and acknowledge, may be completely irrational. 

I acknowledge that, when dealing with the subject of Norse Mythology, there is a modern take on the ancient Vikings and pagan beliefs that has elevated a certain level of mysticism that scholars simply have no reasonable evidence to corroborate on. 

This is primarily due to two inescapable truths:

1. Most of the surviving artifacts - items, rune stones, etc, have extremely mundane translations utilizing Elder and Younger Futhark runes. Almost always to denote some sort of factual, boring account: "So-and-so made this" or "Here I bury my son, so-and-so". 

2. The manuscripts that would go on to become things like the iconic Poetic Edda , containing all of the lore, originally come from manuscripts like the Cōdex Rēgius, translated hundreds of years after the peak Viking era, and well after those pagan cultures were converted to Christianity.  These second-hand accounts are especially confounding in their iconography, such as the popular Vegvísir (Viking Compass), and Ægishjálmur (Helm of Awe) which often appear in several variations, some of which  simultaneously invoke the divine powers of Odin, Thor, Jesus, AND Mary... all within the same spell. 

The reality of a people, concerned primarily with surviving in a harsh environment with limited resources, does lend itself to a more pragmatic view of their language. Elder futhark rune meanings likely had more mnemonic purposes rather than mystic symbolism. Bindrunes were more of a space-saving or "stylistic" way of combining runes, rather than “magic bindings”, and nearly all staves originate in manuscripts confounded with Christianity iconography which do not trace back to any truly pagan primary sources. 

End disclaimer...

Depressing. Well, despite all this very rational understanding – I still find myself in a difficult place trying to reconcile the scholarly views vs two key observations:

1) The idea, that for a set of otherwise "mundane" phonetic runes, the skálds would dedicate an entire section in the Hávamál to the excruciating trouble Odin puts himself through just to obtain them, seems odd to me. Having to sacrifice himself, to himself, at the world tree Yggdrasill and rip them screaming into knowledge gained from the Well of Urd,  and add to that, how other sections of the Edda speak to "wise men" knowing how to use the runes for more than just language - how to carve them, how to invoke them for spells, etc., it just seems a bit sus that the remainder of the culture would simply devalue the runes down to phonetic oblvision. 

I mean, not even Christianity dedicates anything significant to the discovery of language or letters - language simply exists. seemingly as a product of man..

"Now the whole earth had one language and the same words" - Genesis 11:1

A product that becomes a problem for God. when the people use this common language to try to organize and build a tower to heaven (Genesis 11:4), causing God to put an end to that nonsense quick, fast, and in a hurry:

"Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.” So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused[a] the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth." - Genesis 11:7-9

But, what do I know. Its hard to argue the lack of evidence. I tend to speculate that, perhaps, while the generic Æsir mythology may have been preserved by transcribing scholars, there must have been explicit instructions to leave out any details that would have accredited actual divine power.  Kind of a big deal when the conquering religion preaches the only true "Word of God" with no room for competition...

An example of this selective preservation comes at the heals of Christian Scholars transcribing the wine sacraments found in the Greek Dionysian Mysteries, which were the primary influence for the Christian Eucharist. They adopted the motions of consuming a blessed wine, but scrubbed the divine aspects like the role of psychedelics in the preparation, which was crucial to the true divine nature of the original sacrament. What survived, then, was a hollow simulacrum of the original traditions, which leaves me wondering how much of the magic of the runes were similarly scrubbed . (See: Immortality Key and the work of Brian Muraresku)

2) Second, and way more close to home, and the real point of this entire entry, is me trying to reconcile a scholarly perspective of a dead runic language, and a very real and modern inspiration I encountered on a vision quest that led me to this:

Now, this final iteration is obviously stylized – not only in terms of the graphic visuals, but also in the expression of the bindrune comprised of raidō, ansuz, and tīwaz in a repeated arrangement around the central hagalaz rune. The runes initially presented themselves in a singular alignment (more on this soon), so this particular "stave" arrangement came afterwards as reflection on my original vision, and an internal gut feeling to present the concepts as a "many roads lead out of chaos" wheel, admittedly and likely inspired by the likes of Vegvísir, and Ægishjálmur to create a symbolic, stylized representation.  

So what happened? 

Well, I quite frankly “saw” these runes presented to me in a vision. I won’t sugar coat it. 6 grams of dried psilocybe semilanceata is a sure-fire way to put oneself in an altered state of consciousness where visions like these are entirely possible. 

To this end, I’ve had a small number of rare, ego-death level sessions where I’d asked the universe to reveal some level of esoteric truth or meaning to me, to which my subconscious and whatever other entities out there in the ether flooded me with roller-coasters of emotions, feelings, and visions.  

Almost always, the visuals are geometric – fractal, too complex to remember, and never really anything religious or otherwise branded and readily identifiable in the real world as sacred geometry or the like. 

But this time… this was the first, and only, time I had ever been presented with any sort of concrete iconography I could later recall.  I cannot underscore enough how odd this was. I’m not a “rune caster”, or a self-proclaimed pagan. Hel, I’m not even Scandinavian – my lineage is almost entirely Iberian, and as such, my family is almost entirely Catholic as a result. (I managed to escape)

Growing up, I only had the top level, basic understanding of Norse mythology that the average American possesses – of Odin and Loki and Thor and Ragnarök as surface level as any Marvel movie would care to portray.  More recently, I did have basic exposure to shows like Vikings, and games like God of War, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, so I was later exposed to a few more characters and stories, like Mímir, Jörmungandr, Hel… and generally exposed to the runes visually on carvings, shields, face paint, and other related visuals pertaining to those games/movies/shows.  

Finally, I had recently discovered the "amplified history" music genre, where the likes of Wardruna, Heilung, and Danheim exposed my subconscious to deeper lore (although I had no translatable knowledge of Old Norse, Norwegian or Islandic to guide me).

The only Futhark runes I could easily identify at the time were that of Tiwaz, aka Tyr’s “victory rune”, as one of the runes I looked up because I couldn’t understand why Vikings were obsessed with painting “Up Arrows” on all their war gear, and þurisaz in reference to the "thorn" rune used in one of the early Halloween movies as the mystical mark on Michael Myers. 

So one could argue that I was, perhaps, subconsciously primed for what came next, but regardless, there I was, an hour into an ominous trip where I stood face-to-face with a chaotic, turbulent swirling portal of… black sleeting ice, for lack of better identification. (it was a cold, yet burning, black swirl of fluid and hail). 

It was difficult to stare into, but at one point I felt compelled to do so, and I could see the slanted "H" shape of Hagalaz clearly within it. I recalled the shape, but had no perceived connection to a meaning, yet. The dread, at the time, was a gut feeling that, in order for me to “progress” or “move through”, I had to face this chaotic turbulence and somehow step through it. But I was scared, not knowing what was on the other side.

 After some immeasurable amount of time,  not wanting to gaze back into it, I decided to try to lean and look around the storm to the other side. There, on the far end of a trail, I saw that familiar “Up Arrow” (Tīwaz), like a shining beacon on the other side, pointing along a path flowing out from the backside of the chaos.  Seeing this one familiar shape would be the only thing that clued me in to the idea that what I was seeing were "Viking Runes". 

While I totally understood the “victory” concept of Tīwaz, I still didn't understand how to get through the chaos safely or why I was even being presented with the situation to begin with.

It was then that I noticed something else as I peered around the chaos storm. A second, different kind of arrow was just ahead of Tīwazit, also in line with the path leading out from the back of the storm. This arrow was odd, in that both arms of the point were on the same side. This rune was Ansuz, but I had no frame of reference for this rune either. It simply... gave me comfort, and subconscious peace to see this overall arrangement.

The final rune, raidō, didn't actually manifest as a giant "R" in my vision, it simply appeared as a literal path leading from the backside of the freezing chaos portal, passing directly through the two beacon runes in a straight line.  

As I mentioned, seeing this road, with the pleasant outcome on the other side, changed my fundamental feeling towards the chaos storm. I was still apprehensive, sure, but no longer afraid to pass through with dignity and honor.  

Sadly, I can't tell you how the journey went, though, because the moment I took the step into the portal, I was immediately snapped back to reality, lying in a dark, quiet room.

Later, sober, I immediately took to looking into the runes I was presented, and reflecting on the overall experience. I first had to figure that there were in fact two different runic alphabets, Elder and Younger Futhark.  Thankfully, the presence of Ansuz helped, as it is absent from the Younger Futhark. 

From there, (Please suspend scholarly skepticism for a moment), I discovered the general consensus among those who ascribe some level of meaning to each of the Elder Futhark runes.  In these subsequent studies, the shapes I saw made a whole lot more sense:

• Hagalaz - Hail, calamity, obstacles, chaos, uncertainty, adversity, etc. To me this felt like a fair representation of the amorphous storm portal I was faced with right at the beginning, and why this rune takes it's place front-and-center in the final stave. Chaos, adversity, and uncertainty confront us at every turn in this life. It's unavoidable. 
• Raidō - The ride, the journey. This rune, I attributed to the significance of the path from my vision. I initially added it to explicitly represent the significance of the road I was shown. Much later, as I learned about the concept of Bindrunes, I thought perhaps, the "line" of the path was shown without rune imagery as a dual-purpose of binding the ansuz  and tīwaz runes together, which visually creates a bit of a "road" naturally. As such, I suppose the raidō rune is therefore optional/redundant within the stave configuration, but I still like having it explicitly called out. Finally, as far as positioning, you will notice the rune starts partially within the Hagalaz circle - this is intentional to signify that there's a road out of chaos and uncertainty. 
• Ansuz - "God/Odin", but also wisdom, knowledge, understanding, communication. This later resonated as the "how" portion of overcoming adversity. This clarified my perspective on the original juxtaposition of Hagalaz to Tīwaz. Seeing Tyr's "victory rune" and having the freezing portal initially made it all seem very physical, but it was clear after looking into Ansuz that the vision was existential, metaphorical, and mental. This is is what primarily led me to concluding that it was a metaphor for personal growth - overcoming adversity, working through problems through communication, learning, and understanding. 
• Tīwaz - God/Tyr, victory, but also honor, and sacrifice. The deeper study of this rune, also proved to be a bit of a surprise over what I thought I knew about it originally. At first, I thought I was being shown "the payoff" or reward of walking the path; the "why do it". But it's fascinating that this rune can also be interpreted as further extension of the "how" that Ansuz begins - that is, to walk the path in such a way that you conduct yourself with honor, and with the understanding that sometimes it takes great sacrifice as means to some ends, as reflected in the rune poems for Tīwaz that recount Tyr's sacrifice during the Binding of Fenrir.  It was this duality of Tiwaz being both "how" and "why" which gave me the final design idea to arrange repeating path bindrunes around the circle, in each of the cardinal and intercardinal directions. A stylistic choice, sure, but also one that represents the idea that there are often several paths of freedom out of uncertainty - but no matter the direction, we should always strive to pick a path that includes  knowledge, understanding, justice, and sacrifice to achieve honorable victory. 

And that was it - I mulled around with this vision and these concepts for months and months as they resonated with me. I took to learning more and more about the runes, about the culture, and the lore of the Old Norse. Admittedly, like most ancient beliefs and traditions, not every concept translates well to a modern audience, nor would they be considered acceptable. 

But by-and-large, the practical advice given in the texts like Hávamál resonated with me more on a deeper level than anything I can vaguely recall from Bible study as a teenager. The absolutely binding commitment of giving someone your word, even if it most certainly leads to tragedy, is of the Nobelist virtues worth subscribing to.  The other themes related to personal accountability, being wise in many things (but not too wise), and other such concepts truly captured my soul as though I was raptured back into a previous life. I mean, who knows... before all this, I *did* go on to marry a 5' 11' Valkyrie with deep Scandinavian and Germanic roots. :)

So with this, dear reader, we conclude the origin of the "Leiðleitatil Bindrún" (Pathfinder Bindrune).  If you've made it this far, and any of this resonated with you - then take the stave with you and use it in good health. 

My oath, bound here with these words, as the seer and creator of Leiðleitatil, is that it is an open gift to those who need it, and will never been copywritten, or restricted. 

Skål!

Nú eru Háva mál
kveðin Háva höllu í,
allþörf ýta sonum,
óþörf jötna sonum;
heill sá, er kvað,
heill sá, er kann,
njóti sá, er nam,
heilir, þeirs hlýddu.

 

Want to use the Leiðleitatil ? Start here: https://leidleitatil.art/

Five Things

A friend in our circle recently asked if we could come up with "five things you wished someone would've told you before you were shot from a cannon out into the real world". These were my responses:

1. Your peers will hand you everything you need to get ahead in a career; just listen to what they complain about (or fear) and act heroically. Nearly every innovation, process improvement, and subsequent promotion I've enjoyed came from running towards a fire everyone else was running away from. There's little competition in solving hard problems, and taking the initiative to even try is great material for your performance review.

 2. Finding a companion should be viewed less like handing someone a delicate egg and hoping they don't break it, and more like inviting them along for a long morning jog.  That is- there's no real bond to be formed if you immediately outpace them, or if they immediately outpace you. Piggy-back rides are cute precursors to long term resentment, while real, healthy love comes from a jogging partner that has a natural pace equal to yours. And true love? That soulmate shit everyone desires? That's when you jog beside someone who makes it feel like you aren't jogging at all and cultivates a positive feedback loop that improves your pace. (And vice-versa- You should be providing these same boosting benefits for them!)

 3. In all failures, no matter the magnitude, rip the Band-Aid off quickly and face the consequences with an explicit plan for correction. In nearly every situation, the loss felt now will always be less than the sum of the situation plus the delay in avoiding it, or worse, any extra steps taken to try to hide it. Don't be afraid of failure. Failing (with a plan to resolve) cultivates a resilient mind that embraces adaptation and suffers less the trappings of anxiety, regret, and embarrassment.

 4. The world is 95% NPCs. Your first goal should be to strive to become one of the 5% active PCs. Your second goal should be to surround yourself with the other 5%. What's an NPC? A scripted individual with no real actionable dreams, and nothing of unique intellectual or spiritual value to add to the mix. While there's nothing inherently "bad" about being an NPC, if you want the most content-rich experience moving through this reality, then seek and seek-to-be interesting, dynamic, helpful, and adventurous.

 5. Limit, to the greatest of your ability, the number of capabilities you outsource to others. Learn how to build stuff before you buy them (where feasible). Learn how to perform basic maintenance and troubleshooting on your vehicles and appliances before just sending them in. Learn how to properly cook (not just reheat). Decide what your own first response is in the event of an emergency rather than assuming 911 is the best you can do. People will say that there's just not enough time in the day to "learn all the things", and that preparedness is wasted in a modern information and consumer age. This is a myth, but assuming it’s true, the things you elect to outsource should be inversely related to the risks & consequences of that dependency being severed.  In the extreme, it’s better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war.

Rich Man's Trick

A resurgence of the 2014 JFK to 9/11: Everything is a Rich Man's Trick is making rounds as more "red pills" make their way into the dark abyss that is realizing most of us have been bot and sold since before our time.

Each time a new contrived crisis arises, skeptics (like myself) will begin highlighting inconsistencies in the narrative being crafted and look for signs that a racket is being formed. Each time this process commences, it introduces a new crop of people (usually young adults) for whom this is the first time they are struck with the idea that the government and other authority agencies may not be acting as honestly as they should, and may not be acting with their best interests in mind.

Looking into the current crisis, many will ask the next logical question - "If they're lying to me about this, what else are they lying about?".  This, ironically, creates a zombie effect on all previously known conspiracies as their minds try to grasp the vast expanse of fuckery that has shaped our history.

I say it's ironic, because I imagine there are some conspiracies that are - lets say resolved as quietly as possible - decades later through released documents and lawsuits that vindicate the generation that lived through the hell first-hand. Bringing these to light again years later creates an inflation of what I call "legitimized conspiracy capital".  The old tropes of "that only happened once!" or "that was how many years ago?!"  lose power as citation after citation mounts to a rapid indictment that of course this is just "War on Terror 2.0" or "9/11 all over again"

Which brings us to Rich Man's Trick - which bubbled up on social media recent as all this quarantine free time means lots of time to watch conspiracy documentaries.

But oddly enough, for a documentary that's now 6 years old, the reaction is... not what I was expecting.  It seemed to me, that this particular documentary had the brilliant effect of duping the viewer into an ideological illusion right before their very eyes. It regularly enjoys favorable reviews pretty much all around, with only a few "JFK theory purists" arguing against the JFK segments, but almost no one calling the entire piece out for what it more than likely really was: a piece as guilty of selective revelation it was purporting to admonish.

If you haven't seen it, and have the time (and mental fortitude) to watch three-and-a-half hours of depressing Orwellian expose, it actually really is a good documentary for a slice of the perspective it presents- and to that end I recommend it for introducing the viewers to, at the very least, a short order list shady characters and organizations that were often in our blind spots over the past two centuries.

Either way - try to apply the very same rules to it that it's attempting to teach you about doctored narratives. Scrutinize the entire piece on what it may very well really be:

A cleverly written piece of Communism propaganda or worse, just another CIA controlled expose designed to give the masses "something interesting to think about" that ultimately leads to contrived and controlled reaction.

Now, if you've seen it before, you might be thinking "Wait.. Communist propaganda?" Where was Karl Marx slipped in amidst what seems to be a grand tale about the sad fate of John F. Kennedy?.

Here's few clues to consider:

1. The film only ever even mentions Communism as the "real fear" that the rich are constantly defending against, but without speaking out against it as a core belief.
2. In its deep scope of history and revealing corruption, it spends almost no time talking about the Cold War.
3. It mentions Mao for a half a second related to some kind of "get more Asians to smoke" scheme, but avoids some juicy Sidney Rittenberg ties to molding Xi Jinping?
4. The only talks about Castro are in light of his ties to the CIA and the Bay of Pigs, but avoids the Cuban Missile Crisis and how Kennedy may have had back channels into Moscow.
5. So many opportunities to implicate ties to countries with communist regimes but it instead spends all of its time throwing everyone on the Allies side under the bus for their "wealth based ideologies" 

Weird right?  But what's one of the rules? Oh yeah: Keep a low profile

See, a documentary like this doesn't have to slip in a Karl Marx quote to lure you in, that would be too obvious. It simply needs to knock down all the other rackets - monarchies, capitalism, fanaticism - and leave you peering into an uncertain, an empty space to which there is the only remaining choice...

No no, not Communism - you aren't there yet - it has to lead you to Revolution, first.

So just like that, after reinforcing that the casino is rigged at all levels because they own the police, the military, the justice system, everything, that's when they slip in that call to action, right about that 3:22:22 mark.

"The only way to change our corrupt system is through revolution. Everyone has to sign up now to our revolution website. And then the people have to march on Washington" "And they need to kick him (Obama) and every other corrupt politician out and take power, genuinely, for the people's sake!"

But wait - I thought the problem was Ford? and Dupot? and Exon Mobile? the Rockafellers? the mob bosses out on the fringe? I thought the CIA would have run dry if only the customers didn't want that sweet, sweet cocaine and heroin?

The call to revolution is clever because it sets up a perfectly logical set of dominoes:

1. Remove the politicians that have been letting the fat cats get away with murder
2. Make those fat cats pay now that they can't hide behind the government
3. Redistribute the wealth and decide capitalism is too greedy for it's own good
4. And finally - figure out NEW rules s that will stop wealth consolidation from happening ever again....

The logical chain of events leads right down the same path that many countries have walked down before - and woe onto us if whoever leads us down that path turns out to be another Castro or Mao who flips the script on us when we get to step 4, right?

It may be a straw-man the film, nor Francis, were attempting to make. But even then it's a line of unintended consequence that could fuel a Sander's Supporter type mentality into a fools gold idea that Engineering of Consent isn't still alive and well in 2020.

You want a real revolution that doesn't require trying to take on mob families or devil worshiping lizard people head on?  Just stop buying dumb shit.

Become self sufficient. If you buy things, spend a little more on things that last 10 years rather than 6 months and upkeep them rather than throwing them away.

Save your money. Demand banks give us more than a pittance of a return on our savings accounts, accounts they leverage virtually to make money off of our money, or threaten to pull out.

Do things like this, and watch the rich choke on their lack of ROI without having to lift a single freedom-fighting-finger.

And when you suddenly find a new crop of shape shifting companies pretending to be ethical and Nazi-Mob-Free? Don't give them a single dollar until we trace their financials and company heads  back all the way up the chain.

And most importantly? Be ready to walk away. Abandon them completely the moment they sell out.

Could you imagine, when Facebook started undermining our digital privacy and practicing experimental censorship, if we all just collectively said  "turn that shit off or we're going back to MySpace?" That's the attitude you have to have with these people to shackle that contrived "invisible hand of the market" to our will as the workers who actually contribute value rather than simply bet on it. 

They're Painting the Roses Red

The paper below represents two months of sleepless nights and research early in the pandemic outbreak, when instinct told me there was more to the situation than a "natural" outbreak. The paper represents my held theories and evidence as of early May 2020, and no attempts will be made to "scrub" details or stances in light of new evidence. At some point I will instead likely do a retrospect once the dust settles on SARS-COV-2.

   

A question I'm often asked is what the implications of "lab created" means, in terms of who is responsible or at least, which levels of play need to be evaluated and regulated to prevent something like this from happening in the future. To this end, below is an exerpt from a broader research paper I put together which articulates the 3 key tiers of involvement, at least to my mind-

Three Levels of Inception 

I originally visualized them as the 3 heads of a hydra but it’s better to visualize it like spheres of layered truths/realities wherein different actors participate in each tier in a compartmentalized fashion and only a handful of individuals navigate between (Extractors)

The “Inception” concept is also a convenient analogy as the goal of each tier is to give the tier(s)below it compartmentalized autonomy, planting thoughts and beliefs into them so that one does not need a “conspiracy dependent on secrets” to drive progress forward, only protocols, funding,and goals to achieve. From there, the actors simply play their parts honestly and each tier above benefits from having access to any newfound information. (Similar to the ENRON model)

This paper, using the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic as a window into the realm of modern virology and immunology, only addresses a subset of 3 inception levels: 

N+2: The Government/Military Masquerading as both Science Research and Private Industry 

On this tier, the Military complex funds and peers into both the research and private industry cure manufacturers for potential strains that can be bifurcated and potentially further enhanced for bio-warfare. It would take, for example, little effort to pick up a strain like SARS-CoV-2 which is already highly communicable, and synthesize in high mortality aspects, and use them as potentially subversive “act of nature” tools to disrupt regimes rather than having to stage coups or attempt overt assassinations. The reason for playing both sides (as in helping private industry) is that should these bioweapons cause flare ups or collateral damage, it’s the private industries that come to the rescue to provide a “free market” solution to a “natural” problem that casts little suspicion on the military or government operating behind it. 

N+1: Private Industry Masquerading as Science Research 

On this tier, private companies like EcoHealth Alliance provide critical funding for scientific research on the tier below, but also leverage the research results to quickly patent potential outbreak strains and even vaccine and cure strategies to profit off of nature.This funded research is like a scouting program into the potential “futures” of the disease and cure dynamic, where strains like SARS-CoV-2, which are highly infectious, but low mortality, are viewed as gold mines for sustained vaccine profits. The problem with this,obviously, is that it incentivises treatment over permanent cure, and in more nefarious circles, incentivises engineering of similarly infectious but treatable viruses for which you already have a choice vaccine product to offer as the solution. 

N: Scientific Research

On this tier, virologists and other researchers study potential outbreaks from the wild with the genuine belief that they are helping mankind stay ahead of mother nature and prevent or control crossovers before they happen.

Other theories may [elude] to the idea that there are levels of inception above N+2 which include global elites bent on population control and other such nefarious goals, but again this body of work only seeks to focus on the 3 called out at this time as they have direct, verifiable linkage pertaining to the current epidemic and its potential origins. 

We do this to Ourselves...

Recently read an essay which attempts to warn the readers of the impending onslaught of government propaganda and consumer marketing that will barrage us into returning to the old way of life, and make us forget about any benefits we may have begun to observe about a slower paced, less environmentally impacting existence. 

Although I generally agree with the prophecies portrayed, I felt the piece lacked the culpability we have in the co-dependent relationship that is us vs them, and decided to post a follow up comment, which ended up becoming an essay in-it-of-itself, so I figured I might as well capture it here:

~

The problem is herd mentality. We The People are one giant flock of birds that have been sitting on the wire for a month now, and when the signal to fly comes, when the storm blows over and the clear skies of normalcy beckon, the moment we see that initial wave of family and friends take to the skies in a mad rush to exorcise all this nervous energy, it’s going to be next to impossible to resist the urge to join in. We do this to ourselves, and we do so willingly because the one thing we as individuals in a population fear above all else, is being left behind, becoming irrelevant. 

The great myth is that Marketing is some kind of leash that leads us down paths we never wanted to take. The reality is that we’ve always been *looking* for those paths, Marketing just tries to convince you that Coke is better than Pepsi. How often have you heard the phrase “We realize that you have a lot of choices when it comes to _______, so we thank you for choosing us!”

Yes. The gas-lighting will be real. What’s realer is trying to ignore our own internal processes. 

Don’t believe me? Let’s talk masks. Right now, n95 masks and other respirators share one thing in common — they’re basic and unattractive. They were designed to perform a medical function. So the “mask market” pre-covid, was about as influential in our lives as the table saw market, or the mop bucket market.

All of that is about to change, and it starts the moment you encounter Sandra with her triple-knit lavender mask or Tom with his Tactical, 3d printed mask shell that makes him look like a spec-op agent out of The Division. 

By this time next year, we’ll be flashing Supreme and Adidas branded masks with Bluetooth Voice Clarity Enhancing technology, and featuring Hepa brand filters that block 78.9% more virus particles than those “basic” n59 respirators. 

You DO want to block 78.9% more virus particles, don’t you? Of course you do.

And that’s my point — we do this to ourselves. WE create new market vacuums in space and time that never existed before, and that is the fertile field those “evil” corporations seek to harvest in our mind-shares. Without our own neurosis-driven need to have a 1 up on everyone around us, the corporations simply have no ACE-2 receptors to exploit in us, as it were. 

I get it. Holding up a mirror is an extremely uncomfortable thing to do. I avoid it, too, especially when there are convenient scapegoats around. But self-examination is the only true salvation from all this. The only way to beat the game is to stop playing it, even if it means a departure from the people around you who need to keep playing it to escape themselves. 

You just gotta fortify your mind and try to — hold on, sorry I gotta run, everyone’s flying off and I don’t want to get held up in traffic. 

Political Lines Amidst a Pandemic

Guess it's been a hot minute since I've posted to ye ole blog. Lots has happened over the past year, but coming back here was an idea that popped up after my wife reviewed a post I made on Facebook in response to a divisive article that was posted by a friend.

The article, 'Jared Kushner makes coronavirus briefing appearance, draws backlash for 'our stockpile' comment', was met among friends with the usual for-or-against points that attribute the sum of the federal government response to the President and whether he's #mypresident or #notmrpresident.

I was tagged in to the conversation by another friend of mine who made the assumption that I was one of his "liberal friends".  Although I have never claimed to be either, the assumption may have seemed fair as I have been calling out other hypocritical behaviors Republicans appear to be quite guilty of when it comes to the also-current Oil Industry Crisis between Saudi Arabia and Russia, where Republicans conveniently forget about letting the "invisible hand of the free market" work things out on their own.

So before I commented on the Federal Stockpiles, I wanted to clear up confusions on my political position and remind folks that the only "us vs them" team I'm concerned with is the Government vs. The People.

This was my post, with only the most minor of spelling/grammatical corrections afforded. One last bit of context, when I was tagged in, my friend was also asking if he was a "colossal shithead" for wanting to defend his position :

I’m not a liberal. Not a conservative either. You’re not a shithead either. The issue is tying oneself too closely to politicians simply because they have a D or an R next to their name and you have a D or an R next to yours.

The issue is cognitive dissonance. It’s like when the “only 2 parties allowed” sat down at the draft they purposely decided to exchange 2-3 critical positions that make absolutely zero sense for the other side to have, just so it’s always a guaranteed shit-show when the family gets together to talk.

I post, speak, and comment to point out the hypocrisy that exists on both sides of the isle. I constantly remind family and friends that the shitty things we attribute to Mr Trump are some of the same shitty things that happened on Obama’s watch as well. Doing so rarely gets met with an objective admittance from the Left. Usually just name calling and excuses.

It’s an uncomfortable fact when people look back on H1N1 and realize that National Emergency (not to be confused with Public Health Emergency, which is declared by the Secretary of Public Health, not the president) wasn’t declared until October and after 1000 Americans had already died.

It’s an uncomfortable realization when you show people clips of that October time-frame where people were in lines for hours trying to get vaccinated even though the administration had months to mobilize and prepare between the public and national emergency states. Yet we sit here and call our current situation a delayed debacle as if it was the first ever, and when in truth it only took about 40 days and 1 death to declare Covid-19 a National emergency. 

You see, I do this on both sides because I have the pipe dream that everyone I care about will one day wake up and realize they don’t have to don the Dem or Rep team jersey featuring some of the ideological brand logos they believe in but also the giant kick-me sign on the back for the things they have to pretend to agree with and rationalize to fit in. 

The only teams we should care about are: The Elected Officials and The Rest of Us (aka We the People).

That means holding everyone in office equally and objectively accountable for in their actions and behaviors regardless of what camp they originated from.

Those aren’t Democrats OR Republicans. Those are Senators and Congressmen. That guy is a President. The moment they became those things, they became job functions entrusted to keep the interests, prosperity and safety of  everyone in this nation in mind.

With that perspective, it’s fairly obvious the dude we elected is, overall, a poor choice. Not poor, perhaps, from a “make shit happen now” perspective, but one where the ramifications of his actions will be carried by generations to come. But you know what? It’s not entirely his fault, just like it wasn’t entirely Obama’s fault then.

Given the fact that the president’s ability to MSH is almost entirely dependent on all of the other committees, agencies, and branches that support him, it’s painful to watch him take sole credit for the positive outcomes, while throwing other agencies and individuals under the bus for poor outcomes and negative consequences.

In short, if you're going to grandstand and say “I did that, you’re welcome”, you’ve also gotta be ready to say “I did that, I’m sorry”.

At Dell, I don’t just get measured on my outcomes. I get measured on “How Behaviors” deigned to stop people from becoming supreme assholes in a quest to make a name for themselves hiding behind achieved target goals. We have to consider a President's "How Behaviors" and stop giving him the "Yeah he's a dick, but..." pass. 

On the Stockpile- Also a dick move by the Feds to take this position. This is tantamount to sitting at a dinner table with all of your friends, agreeing to split the check, and then lambasting the ones who can’t afford their split when the check comes and “it’s way bigger than anyone could have imagined”.

At the dinner table (i.e. in the middle of the crisis) is NOT the time nor place to throw shade, or decide you’re only really wanting to help Billy because Bob was kind of a dick to you last week.  

I’m also extremely troubled by our carelessness as we high five him when he asks these falsely-provocative “Why the hell” questions without considering the risks.

“Why are we throwing away the masks” - Well, because this is the proper, reviewed, and accepted SOP that has been in place for decades as the safest way to deal with biological waste in a hospital setting to prevent cross contamination or reinfection.  The supplies that protect us in those risky contact situations are disposable BY DESIGN to ensure our safety!

It’s why swabs, needle tips, bags, gloves, masks, gowns and alll that other shit is meant to be collected and disposed of properly. Now you got a guy saying “Hey fuck all that smart shit, why are you throwing those away let’s save on supplies.” and people are like "Yeah! Cut that red tape Mr President!!"

But notice, the smart ones have to come in later and interpret this careless behavior to say “Well, I guess we could try to sanitize and reuse.. but it’s unproven and each time you do so, the mask degrades, and you risk not getting it all”. And the part no one wants to talk about: You better hope it actually gets done properly, and no one cuts corners or forgets to sanitize between patients.

Consider this: Would you reuse a condom? Up to 20 times? Or just grab another one to be real sure? I know what I'd do. 

“Hey let’s use all the drugs and see if they work” is also a bold move that brings with it high risks. The fallout is at least less than the PPE situation. The patient rolls the dice on dying to the virus or dying from liver failure right, what’s the difference? I get it. Give them the choice to use the experimental drugs or wait for the clinical trials on the correct drugs and call it a day.

But where we should care indirectly as a taxpayers is the liability when the law suits come from groups given ineffective or adverse medicine in this knee jerk “screw clinical trials” reaction.

It’s the public and legal amnesia that will arise months and years later when no one wants to remember the bold “people are dying!” sentiment and the narrative shifts to how “irresponsible” the administration was for allowing these treatments to go out unproven.

A crisis shows people’s true colors when the chips are down- and that’s the point of this article when it comes to the Stockpiles.

The message from the Feds to the rest of the States was made quite clear...

“We are here to ensure *our* masks are on first before assisting others”.

How do I explain to you, what you are?

Disclaimer 1; This blog entry may, or may not, have stemmed from altered states of consciousness that led to posting to a chat circle of friends between midnight and 1 am.

While a few friends responded in-kind, it was after noticing various memes that one friend in particular posted that captured what I had spent the last 2 hours doing: Contemplating the relationship of man vs. nature. In particular, who runs who.

What you are privy to below is the stream of consciousness exchange that followed between myself, and "John".  

Disclaimer 2: Note that the comments below, on my end, are in some cases elaborated or formatted for reader clarification and as such, this is not an exact transcript. This is due, in part, that about 50% of the way through the editing process, I realized that I could have been using shit like [sic] to preserve the original format. This is also due, in part, to the fact that it's now 3:17 am and I still have not gone to stare at the moon as noted at the end of the chat exchange, so I'm not interested in starting over with a re-paste of the original exchange and then adding in the aforementioned "shit like [sic]" to make it all legit.

You, Squared

The universe is a massive system of equations being solved right now through the passage of time. Life represents a unique unknown: the indeterminate ability to affect conscious change from one moment to the next. Thus, Earth and other life bearing planets amplify these variable outcomes to cosmic scales in ways we may never grow to appreciate.

So look to affect change in interdependent ways, and these choices will have a positive effect on the rest of the universal equation, even if you only perceive the localized outcomes.

This is your life.

Solve for (x)

The [Re:]humanization of the MMO

Foreword

A month ago I posted some comments on the psych-state of affairs within the online gaming experience expecting it to be just another rant in the books. To my surprise, two interesting (and positive) things happened.  First, I got a re-tweet on the article from a total stranger.  Not just any total stranger, but one of the younger demographic that my very rant crucified as a generation of TL:DR gamers.

Second, I received a great email from my good friend Dacian who not only read my post, but had some very insightful points from his unique perspective as a gamer who happens to work for a online gaming company. 

Rather than trying to paraphrase - I decided to post his email (mostly) in tact with the obvious personally identifying details removed so that you might enjoy the journey as much as I did.

~ iRonin

P.S. - I apologize to anyone who ever tried to comment here and had the same issues Dacian had - I never realized the default security setting was so crappy, and have since opened it up so that anyone can comment.

--------------------------------------------

God dammit, this is way too close to the blogging line than I ever wanted to get. I apologize if the thoughts are all over the board, since this was a type and go to meeting, type more and go to meeting, kinda effort. For the love of God set up that remote podcast or something…

I recently stumbled across your The Dehumanization of the MMO post and felt the urge to toss out my two cents, thoughts and experience. Why am I doing this in email and not in the comment section you ask? Well it’s actually relevant to the larger topic and hand and the line of questions you ask such as:  

Do these people try out a new sport or a hobby, and if they aren't immediately good at it, do they just give up? Do they practice enough to get into their first competition, and then as long as they keep winning they'll keep playing? And what if they suck at those hobbies, or their job, do they even know it?  No one seems willing to provide real feedback - or maybe they just don't hear it? Does their boss give them negative feedback and they just blank out, taking none of it to heart and just quit, or nod and move on passively? Are they even equipped to deal with the consequences of failures where you can't just walk away and try some other time or not at all? Is it just me?

Now I shall reconstruct for you the timeline of events and thought process that has lead me here.

Log in for work today… stumble on http://decipi-revera.blogspot.com/... Notice recent post… Notice topic on video gaming… read entire post word for word…. Re-read entire post again….think on post…

I pause here to point out that my time investment for reading that whole post twice has well pushed me into over the 30 minute mark of time I have invested. This is important to note leading into part two.

Click comment link to respond…  Post a comment section comes up… I can’t click in the box to start writing… Hrm… Check top of the page… Oh there is a sign in button…. Oh it’s a google account… attempt to remember google credentials… hrm…. This is getting annoying… why can’t I just comment…. Remember that dthrax wasn’t available try other names…. Finally remember right now…. Now can’t remember password…. Remember password… Sign in…. Ok sweet now to comment…. Click link back to George’s page… hrm still can’t comment…. WTF still not signed in…. Sign back in…. maybe I have to subscribe…. Subscribe to blog…. OK HERE WE GO FINALLY!............... #&$*(@ STILL CANNOT COMMENT OK FU YOU KNOW WHAT OFF TO EMAIL I GO…

Now all this leads up to a realization of “Wait… did I just prove his post right? Am I unwilling to commit to figure out what the problem is and get my just reward? Am just seeking the path of least resistance as a means to an end? I spent 30 minutes reading this and am not willing to invest more than 10 to be able to comment to help ease my friends wondering if people are out there. To participate in lively discussion that I miss so much. To let him know that his post is so awesome and that I recently found the world’s best bacon cure at  http://himtnjerky.com/ and I as a BBQ fanatic endorse this product and for the low price of 6.99 it is super best deal and he buy now! What the hell is going on here?!? How did it get to this point!!!”

Recounting my Journey

My real MMO experience was when as a Microsoft Fan Boy I picked up a copy of Asheron’s Call, installed it and log in. I had zero idea what the hell was going on as back then MMOs seemed to be more punishing and a lack of tutorial and guide to weed out people with short attention spans or inability to logically deconstruct failures and find ways to improve yourself. After figuring base mechanics I set out in the world and found myself in a zone that I did not belong where mobs preceded to play “wack a mole” every time I respawned near my corpse. Luckily for me a more senor player wandered by and took pity on the poor noob, easily killed the mobs, and informed me how to get back to the starting area so. Before leaving he geared me out with higher level gear that seemed to me at the time as if Odin himself had handed me a set of Destroyer amour and Mjöllnir.

Point 1: Early MMOs seemed to require you to pay a much higher ticket to entry price. There were no tutorials, no hand holding, if you were dumb the game punished you for it and delighted in doing so. The counter to this is the community stepped up wanting to bring more into their fold and this fostered an early sense of belonging and assistance and help. I can remember nothing about that game, but I still remember that guy rescuing me and gearing me out in a genuine attempt to help bring another player into their community. Current MMOs now having gotten better at tutorials and entry level zones and areas seek to guide the player more through their experience and don’t really foster that sense of belonging until it slaps you in the face in the first time you are “forced” to group to complete your objective. I say forced because giving the high amount of focus on solo content and improvement on things like mob spawning, zone design, etc there really is no reason to group with a stranger when doing your normal quests or grind. And given that most solo content is designed to be well… solo able… you don’t really experience a failure unless you yourself do something stupid, pull to many mobs (harder to do, due to those improvements in mob placement, aggro mechanics etc). So the first time you group and fail its shocking because you’ve been doing all this stuff yourself and haven’t died… so it can’t possibly be your fault…. Otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to do all this stuff right?!?.

From Asheron’s call I didn’t really play an MMO again until Star Wars Galaxies. Thinking back on it now… Again lack of tutorial, but there we had Fatal Exception, who had figured out all the tricks in beta and was there to hold hands, help gear out and ease the transition of noobs into the world and into the world of an MMO. This was in turn passed on to other people brought into the fold who signed in. Looking back on Galaxies though I think it might actually be a good precursor for what would later happen with WoW, due to the popularity of the Star Wars license suddenly lots of people who had never really played an MMO were picking up the game and trying that game type out. Galaxies further supported this by having the social classes and crafting classes that did not require the understanding, skill, and awareness that more traditional combat roles required. Eventually though the casual player either through their own desires of wanting to try something new or perhaps having to overhear war stories of how awesome it was taking a Rancor down, or destroying the rebel base and owning the revival rebel guild, decided that they too want to start down the combat path. Now I honestly have no idea what Galaxies overall market penetration and share  was or what its subscription numbers were, but it felt big. The power gamers who had long since figured out the OP builds (Rifleman/TKM/Brawler, Pistoler/Fencer/Smuggler, Combat Medic/Anything) welcomed their new casual friends into their fold as they have always done and shared with them their builds and how to own (with one button pushes). It’s here were downfall started I think, and it wasn’t just Galaxies either. Think about City of Heroes, the Matrix Online, etc.

Point 2: The start of the introduction of casuals and MMOs with poor balance and shitty mechanics created the perception that they too were awesome at this combat stuff. I can remember how awesomely proud you were running up a Martial Artist in the Matrix only to go into shock and awe watching the broken mechanics of a Hacker or struggling as a pure bounty hunter against people far, far, far less skilled that just happen to stack the right boxes in skill trees and to them they felt they were awesome. This again started down the slippery slope of “I deserve to be awesome cause I showed up” which is very similar to the “everyone deserves a trophy” mentality that was being pushed outside of the gaming world. I think even those who had been gaming for a while fell into the seductive warm embrace of how easy it was to win with some of the builds.

Out of these new MMOs relationships were formed, the internet was taking off more and more rapidly, social sites were coming up, forums were more and more common. Vent and team speak were taking off so it became much easier to stay in touch. EQ2 and WoW fired up their serves and joined the fray. Whats interesting to not here is both games had very good starting level tutorials and zones. Which we has power players loved cause it made our ramp up time even faster, but also allowed for the casual player to start figuring things out themselves and not having to form those bonds you mention for guilds and groups. Having played both with EQ2 seeming to take more to it’s EQ 1 roots and WoW taking inspiration from EQ, but by seemingly limiting choices on classes, spells and mechanics at higher levels it’s easy to look back and see atleast in my opinion why people moved from EQ2 over to WoW. WoW was less punishing on death. WoW seemed to balance more towards the solo content. And since all your friends new to the MMO scene were having fun over there why wouldn’t you want to play! It’s here where the irony of the Dehumanization of the MMO really starts to come to light. We dehumanized it by inviting more and more people in and setting expectations that they can be successful with little to no effort.

Path of least resistance and Email and choices

Vanilla WoW still held to a lot of the old rules of the grandfather MMOs, but over time the new crowd of subscribers who had not played began to complain. Often times on things that bothered the longer term players. Getting Warlord is a pain in the ass cause Alterc Valley takes too long! No one wants to PVP on my server! I can’t find a group at the time I play! All of these at the time seemed like valid things to us and we happily threw our voice in with the lot. Other shouts began to trickle up from the casuals who were not top end masters of their class or lucky enough to find a raiding guild willing to help carry them through. “We want to see top end content! We are also paying XX.XX a month!” What game designer wouldn’t want to expose more people to their work? What graphics artist wouldn’t want people to gaze upon the assets he spent hours or days rendering? What encounter designer wouldn’t want as many people as possible to talk about how awesome the mechanics he pieced together were? Gradually the bar was lowered whether it was  from 40 man to 25 to 10 for raids. Or introducing buffs or nerfing fights after top end guilds had already made it through so more people could go in and see the parts of the game. All of which again done with the pure intentions of sure let’s help get more of the community in to see how awesome this stuff is. What the designers failed to consider along with the rest of us is that as things got easier and easier and players got more and more choices, people will always move toward the path of least resistance. Just as you point out in your Game Theory PVP balance post.

Even I am subject to this by writing this in email. It’s not that I’m not capable of troubleshooting to figure out why I can’t post on the comment section. But why bother? Do I not get the same result by sending this in email? I have found the path of least resistance and am following it.  I literally had a half dozen choices and ways I could reply to you… and now so does the modern MMO player.

"The game design industry has made it so easy to do things that the time investment isn’t really there anymore. Your logic on waiting for 60 minutes to get in a group has one major fault. It fails to take into account that these players can go do dozens of other things while they wait. They can run dailies, grind rep, work on primary or secondary professions, advance achievements, all things they likely want to do anyway and can now do so from anywhere in the world. Why wouldn't they min max their chances for success. There is no real cost. Sure they don’t get in and may have to wait 60 minute to get back in, but it’s not a real 60 minutes to them. They have a list of things to do in game. We have given them too many choices of things to work on. It’s no loss. It’s not that they suck or even know they suck. Again your Game Theory post sums it up. Why would I invest the effort when there is an easier way with no real loss to me?"

I have dozens of other points to throw out about what BC and Wrath did to the MMO scene and on other games what an increased number of Save Points have done to gamers as a whole or things like Call of Duty Modern World at Special Black Ops Warfare’s multiplayer XP grind have done to a whole… but when I way the choice… it’s much easier to get you to set up a podcast than just keep typing J.

Oh and don’t forget. Super buy offer now on Bacon Cure!

The Dehumanization of the MMO

15 years isn't a long time to say that you've been around gaming in general- or even to say that you've been around online gaming, but it is a long time to say you've been around MMO (massively multi-player) games.  I was 19 at the time, working for a call center contracted to America Online and CompuServe (R.I.P.)

Tech call centers were the place to be at the time. Sure, on the surface you were just taking calls and troubleshooting hardware and software that would very quickly become irrelevant, but it was the collection of people that were pooled together in that same place. You had people from all walks of life, but more importantly you had a huge, gradient melting pot of hobbies and interests that ranged from "I hate computers but they hired me anyways" to "I'm a hacker and this is just my day job to pay for my ISP".

You have to remember, information had a harder time spreading then. AOL was...well..shit - and the early web pages were still overly focused on self identification while the search engines were still young (I think I used Alta Vista, which was at least decent if you used your +/- keyword logic well).  But as far as really connecting people and groups together, well, that was pretty non-existent -  unless you made your site through some kind of shared hosting like GeoCities, or you were savvy enough to hook into a Webring, or stumbled upon a portal page riddled with links to other sites - (50% of which were broken links at any given time) - and all of it was being delivered to the average consumer at something like 24.4 kb/s while tying up one of their physical land lines, so the amount of surfing possible in one night was a fraction of what I do in an hour on my iphone while streaming the latest Rogan podcast.

But not at the call center. There, we had a T1, baby. Off calls and on breaks, the call center became a hub of information exchange. It was the people I met there that got me into my very first hosted site, 37thchamber.com, hosted out of a then-young Dimensional Communications. It was there that I discovered HTML, and Active-X, and FutureSplash. It was there that I discovered online gaming beyond first person shooters.  It was there that I discovered Everdark MUD.

It was there that I discovered Meridian 59 - my first MMO. The first MMO, by standard of a fully graphical interface.  I was late to the MUD scene.  They already had the idea of a multiplayer, persisted world under their belt, but they were all Text based.  More "choose your own adventure" in that you had to imagine the scene around you.  You had to interact with text as well, no mouse.  This could be frustrating at times - trying to guess at what the command interpreter was expecting and having to word it just right to get a reaction.

So the MUD pros were really just those people who, either by trial and error or by networking with other people playing at the time, had come to figure out exactly how to get around, exactly what to type for each quest, etc.  They were the masters of macros, binding keyboard arrow directionals to the in-game movement commands that were based on the cardinal directions (n,e,s,w) so they could zip through the world map 90-degrees at a time like a Tron light bike rider.

Meridian 59.. and other early graphic based games like EverQuest and Ultima Online reset the playing field for everyone.  We had to port over skills we learned in the FPS world like mouse looking and negotiating terrain in a 3d environment.  These early days of MMO were, in general, slow going and pretty lonely because the greater population of players were getting used to just being in the world, like a toddler still learning how to walk and talk.  There was lots of dying to level 1 beetles, rats, and wolves. There was lots of "where the hell am I" in towns that predated highlight paths, waypoints, and minimaps with tracking.

But something happened after those first few months and years while people were still getting used to their Avatars. They progressed to a point where they were able to get around ok - but things were still pretty hard to find without considerable exploration.  And some encounters were simply too tough to go it completely alone.  Guilds quickly became the glue that brought these individuals together. They were more like families, with a great deal of focus around contribution and nurturing of its members.

Invitations were taken under serious consideration - guilds back then didn't just "take anyone with a pulse".  There were officer interviews, trial periods and whatnot to make sure that a potential member really did fit within the family system.  The fastest you could get in is if you were related or had someone with pull directly vouch for you.  Leaving a guild was unheard of and not usually without a great deal of drama.  Early on, these things usually occurred over something serious - relationships gone bad, personality conflicts, gossip, etc.  Many times, even if the person left, it was really just a cry for help, and after a few days of cooling off and talking things out, they were back in.

And this was life for a while, at least for general questing, crafting, and small dungeons.  It wasn't until the concept of raiding came to be that guilds realized that the family style "no one left behind" system had its short-comings.  Until raiding came around (and arguably even during early raiding) - the rules were simple. Some people understand things faster than others, and it was their job to teach the rest the necessary skills to win.  There was considerable discussion before each raid, hell before each pull, to ensure that everyone understood exactly what their role was and what was expected of them.  If there was a wipe, analysis was done after each attempt to really troubleshoot and look for areas of improvement or efficiency.  But the important thing was this: The people involved were the given. The variable that would not change unless there was a gross imbalance of classes (not enough healers, etc) going on.  If you were on the team, you were on the team and you were, eventually, going to get it down and succeed.

For some guilds - this SOP worked well. Not to toot my own horn, but the guild I led (Illumin Cathari) used this model to train some of the best players on the server - many of which went on later to become guild leaders and "uber guild" officers themselves.  We grew ourselves from the ground up - one member at a time - with patience, training, focus and did I mention practice?

There was a competing model that was starting to develop around the same time. You see, when you build a guild as family first, performance second, the cost you pay is in the ramp time. You are not going to be the first guild on the server to hit end game content.  You are not going to be the guild that only needs to raid 2 nights a week because you can blow through all the content in 6 hours. You're going to be the guild that struggles to fill slots, that has to run lower end dungeons to practice certain techniques. You're going to be the guild that has to wipe and reset many, many times before everyone can get it down.

Other guilds saw this issue from a different angle. They recognized that every guild had a gradient of players from the completely novice up to the gifted.  Rather than cultivating players, they decided to harvest the top 10% of several guilds to form new guilds, like a permanent all-star team that didn't have to deal with anyone below the curve.

It started, as most things do, with competition for resources. Another interesting aspect of old MMOs was the idea of open raid content. "Instancing" didn't exist - raiding zones were simply there for anyone to enter, regulated only be a respawn timer.  The entry fee was literally a guild's ability to "break in" and secure a foothold in the zone, which involved having to blindly zone in to an area that usually had a lot of trash mobs that were ready to swarm, and having to try and pull to a safe spot on one of the zone walls to establish a safe base of operation and proceed from there.

Let me try to paint the picture for you on how this worked from the angle of one of my favorite EverQuest raids: The Plane of Fear.

Imagine a giant, open zone full of hill country, about the size of Hillsbrad Foothills (for those of you familiar with WOW).  You zone in by taking a portal - literally a loading screen - that drops you on top of a hill far out in the zone.  All around you, patrolling randomly, are dozens and dozens of raid-level elite mobs with aggro radii almost as far as you can see.  Now imagine that each one of those mobs are communal - that is - if they see you, others around them can chain aggro.

You are part of the break in team - which consists mostly of tanks, healers, crowd control experts and, most importantly, people who can feign death if things get too crazy.  Everyone calls out who to assist off.  Failure to assist will lead to broken cc's which leads to a wipe. Everyone buffs up around the entry portal and.... 1...2....3.... click!

Loading, please wait....

(Did I mention there was no vent or team speak? all you had was chat. Oh, and remember that you're doing all this over your phone line, so crashing while you zone in is a common occurrence the happened the most to healers and tanks)

Welcome to the Plane of Fear!

Before your screen fully loads, you are already getting beat on by the first mob that saw your crew zone in from a mile away. More are coming. One of the tanks has managed to taunt the scareling off you, but not before it nearly killed you with a backstab. The tank gets a worse fate - after a few seconds of holding threat, suddenly he completely vanishes from your field of vision.  The scareling has teleported him away from the break in area, placing him within aggro range of even more mobs over a different hill nearby.

You realize now why your raid leader said: "Get to the west wall." at least a dozen times. Getting to the wall cuts the raids aggro range in half, and people who get teleported hopefully won't go too much further from the wall.

The zone wall is a steep incline, running up the side you wonder how your toon would ever really be able to have a foothold, but getting to the top, you turn and look down at the situation as it is unfolding around you: a scene of barely-controlled chaos, like a car that's lost its breaks careening down the road whose only saving grace is not needing to turn yet.

One of your friends, an Enchanter, is standing towards the middle, surrounded by motionless mobs. Every 5 seconds he has to pick a different target and "mesmerize it", effectively stunning the mob for about 15 seconds before it wears off.  He's struggling to keep up, there at 6 of them he's having to track, and there are no "spell timer" mods or addons to help him.  He just has to stand there and keep mental count of which mobs are about to break free.

Slowly the rest of the team begins fighting the loose mobs that are being tanked near the wall... it takes a good 2-3 min just to kill one, so if everything goes well, this group will hold it together and finish them all off over the next 30 min, securing a foothold on the south-west corner of the map.


Welcome to the Plane of Fear.


The nature of the rest of the zone is similar... the raid leaders have to decide a direction (towards a boss) and the raid has to progress, precariously, through the sprawling hills pulling and dealing with the hordes of trash mobs between.  Typically, this involves having the bulk of the raid stay still in a secured area, and sending out scouts (druids, rangers, monks) to fish for pulls.  Most of the time a person will discover too many mobs... and when this happens the scout is instructed to NOT lead the train of mobs back to the group, but instead die safely away from the raid so that the mobs will reset.

Sometimes the death isn't in vain... as the mobs wander back from the corpse at random intervals, if you're lucky you get a sickly gazelle that hangs around longer than the others, and a secondary scout can pluck it as a single pull and lead it back to the raid to kill. Sometimes.

And this is the progress of the raid. Inching along a vast zone full of trash until arriving at a boss location, usually a temple of sorts with even MORE trash mobs surrounding it, requiring more careful pulling before you can engage the boss itself. Hours and hours of fun for everyone.

Exciting eh?  Now take all of that - all of the effort that your group had to put in just to break into the zone, and add to it the element of competition.  Your raid zone is not your own instance.  Other guilds that want to break into the same zone, can.  Other guilds that want to establish their foothold so that they can out-pull your team to get to the bosses first, do so without regard.

Now, at first, it was an honorable situation.

If two guilds showed up at 7:00 pm for the reset, questions were asked and negotiations were had.

Are both guilds present, in force, ready to rock?
Did one guild clear out the plane last week, thereby making it only fair that they take turns?
What if the guild that's ready to go is incapable of securing the entrance - do they really get to just wipe all night long until they give up, forcing other raids to just wait on standby until they succeed or fail?

As I'm sure you can already imagine... this "what's fair" negotiating and behavior did not last long.  Guilds who had experience lost patience with guilds who wanted to try it for the first time.  High-functioning, competing guilds argued over whose turn it was, lamenting about how nothing of value dropped the week before, or how they totally got screwed by a server reset.

This gave way to the "asshole" guilds who, regardless if your situation, would show up in force and, without any coordination beyond their own, hop in and start pulling - even if your guild was clearly the one that entered first and established the initial foothold.

The asshole guilds knew that they had the expertise and gear to pull faster than you, so they were perfectly willing to compete for bosses and "leap frog" others to get ahead within the zone.  This led to "anti-asshole guild" behavior, like purposely aggroing a bunch of trash and running it over to the competing raid's camp to effectively "train" them with mobs and cause a wipe.

This retaliation may have left the smaller guilds feeling vindicated, but it had the negative consequence of involving the GMs who sided with the idea of competition, but did not look favorably upon harassment like mob-training.  Their message was clear: If you can't negotiate the zone control with words, you just have to get better at competing for pulls.

Which takes us back to the family structure of guilds.  Whether you were a good player in a family style guild who aspired to one day even SEE the Plane of Fear with your guild, or you were a good player in a guild that managed to raid but had to compete with other capable raiding guilds, week after week you saw the top end gear being distributed to only a select few who could manage to make it happen consistently. This lead to the great guild mergers and the collapse of power.

Greed is a motherfucker. Not only was there the psychology of competition, but even within successful guilds there was a developing sense of entitlement.  It's clear in any kind of team structure that there are some individuals who do more of the work than others - and for some of these guilds, there were people who were basically being carried by a core group of people who were performing above and beyond.  It didn't take long for these elite-minded individuals to get together and share the similar tales and come to the eventual conclusion:  Instead of competing internally and externally - let's just make our own guild and get the best of both worlds.

And so it was, on my server as I'm sure it came to be on others, that the top raiding guilds each had splinter factions break off and form new ones based almost entirely on a meritocracy.  Careful consideration was also given to class balancing - even IF you were an excellent Monk, if the guild already had 2 good ones in it, you may not be let in just to prevent saturation and gear competition.

The guilds who really suffered were the mid-sized ones that were trying to home grow their operation - and I'm not just saying that because mine was one of them.  Think about it: The top players from the top guilds break off and form a new "uber guild".  This guild was made of players who were willing to part from their original family guilds in pursuit of end game gear and content goals. Many of them were nice, but most of them  tended to be more selfish, asshole types with a sense of inflated pride and entitlement that comes with being on the all-star team.  This guild tramples on all the others over content. They can afford to have people do nothing else but sit and "camp" for the appearance of bosses, and their skills and resources allow them to mobilize quickly when they do spawn.

So now here you are, a skilled player, still teaching new people to your guild how to pull properly, or how to heal, while all of this is going on.  Then one day you log in and a representative from the uber guild catches you in whispers: "Hey, I heard you're a pretty good cleric - how would you like to join us?".  Wow - you think - this is like getting called up to the majors! You're excited, but torn - how do I leave my family? I'm the best cleric in the guild - if I leave, their progression will fall behind weeks if not months...

Situations like that happened a LOT, and it was extremely frustrating because it really did establish a sort of caste system within the mmo community.  New players usually started out in small guilds where they learn nothing, but get the hang of the game. Then they want to do "cool stuff" so they try to apply to the uber guild(s).  The uber guilds turn them down because they aren't good enough to join or they have no room.  The player then "settles" for joining a mid-tier family guild (like mine) where they wait and learn all the valuable skills to perform well at a high levels, and then eventually the uber guild recruits them and they leave. The rich get richer, and often times they don't even have to invest the time and energy it takes to build quality players.

But even as shitty as all that might have been - it established an eco system that was still based on two key human aspects: Notoriety and accountability.  Sure, it sucked that a mid-level guild could never aspire to be on the same performing level as a conglomerate uber guild, but individuals form these guilds were looked upon favorably by the uber guilds - and many of us were allowed to tag along on uber guild raids and pick up gear when they were short players or had extra epics. Players also had a clear progression path, from novice to expert, to aspire to. And finally, like I mentioned earlier, many of the people we trained later went on to be officers and guild leaders of uber guilds, because they started out with solid foundations.

Fast Forward to the Present


This week I just picked up RIFT, marking my 10th...that's right 10th MMO to date. It's actually in playing the early release of the game that prompted me to write this blog post.  Let me set the stage for the situation that lit the spark:

I've leveled a couple of toons to level 20 now (20 of 50), trying out the different archetypes to see which one most interests me to stick with.  At around level 17, characters generally have their 3 talent trees and points spread throughout with one class being the most dominant.  It's around this level that you can finally get a feel for the role.  In line with that, the game also presents players with their first dungeon experience to test their characters out in: Iron Tomb.

Now think about this for a moment.  For the first 10 or so levels you were just getting used to the world in general, how to get around, how your class works, etc. For the next 5 you've got the solo-questing thing down and your fleshing out your character's abilities and starting to see some early pvp and limitations.  17-20 your getting this first dungeon to try out probably your first true group encounter where, especially as THE tank or THE healer, the success of the dungeon depends heavily on your direct contribution.

Is it going to go perfectly the first few times around? Probably not.

Might there be wipes? Most likely.

But you gotta start somewhere... right?

... right?

Cut back to reality:
We enter the zone. Tank announces that this is the first time tanking in an instance, so he's going to mark targets and asks the dps to focus on the mob order.  I type "kk, np" as a brief reassurance that I at least will follow his instruction so he can practice tanking. No one else says a word.

First pull - 3 mobs.  I open up on the mob marked "1".  The other DPS opens up... with whatever aoe attacks they have. The mob labeled "3" runs off and starts to beat on one of the other DPS who aoe'd.

The healer, having to heal both the tank and the DPS that pulled threat, pulls threat himself and the mob is now on him.  I run up and Repelling Shot mob "3" away from the healer and hit it with a snare just as mob "1" dies and everyone else moves on to mob "2".

The tank, seeing mob "3" get rocketed back into his range, turns and starts trying to get threat back on mob "3" while everyone continues to attack mob "2". Mob "2" eventually loses threat on the tank and turns to hit one of the melee, but dies soon after.  Everyone proceeds to finish off mob "3", and combat ends.

Sloppy, but we won. No one says anything. Everyone just moves up for the next pull.

Second pull - 3 mobs. As the tank pulls, another 2 mobs that were on patrol come winding around the corner and aggro. 3 becomes 5.  I try to "misdirect" some of the adds onto my ranger pet to buy time, but it's no use, the other dps have already used the opportunity to spam their aoes and subsequently die. Healer dies immediately after. Then the tank dies. When my pet dies, they all aggro me.  I drop a snare trap and book it for the zone out.

Sloppy, but it was a bad pull.

Before my screen can finish loading, I zone out to find that at least one person from the group has already dropped out of the party without saying anything.  Moments later, a second one types "fail tank", and drops.  I begin typing "Wow, one wipe and everyone quits?" and before I can finish my sentence and hit enter, the rest of the party is gone without a thing said.

10 seconds later, still sitting there astonished, I see the healer announce in the general chat "LFM IT". I see 2 of the other DPS also announcing "DPS LFG IT".

It was as if the Men in Black themselves had materialized out of no where and flashed the memories of everyone in the party except for me and the guy who managed to utter "fail tank" before leaving.  There they all were, shouting for groups in the zone like nothing happened.

You see, not only was I shocked at how quickly they gave up - I mean literally 3 minutes into the dungeon - but I realized something deeper: The lack of /ragequit.  Other than the one guy saying "fail tank", there were no harsh words. No words at all after the sloppy pull, no words at all after the wipe or before leaving the party.  Just... nothing.

This is a new psychology that has been developing over the past... almost year now, and I began seeing it in World of Warcraft although I wasn't consciously aware of it until now. Long before this point, the sense of loyalty to a guild or a group was destroyed with the advent of instancing, cross server queues, and pugging, but even then there was at least a sense of SOME communication, angry or not, that aimed at identifying whatever issue was going on and at least trying to put forth an attempt to remedy the problem before calling it quits.

So when the group wipes - sure, maybe the days of calmly looking through the logs and talking about what the tank could have done better are long gone - but at least for a while there was the "3 min heated debate" where someone says "fail tank", prompting the tank to defend himself with "fail dps - I told you guys to focus on 1 mob at a time because I was learning" with the healer reinforcing the point "dps if you pull threat on adds, I'm not going to heal you".

A heated debate where, even if everyone agrees to disagree, internally people still made adjustments and in most cases were able to correct (without admitting fault, of course) to see the dungeon through to the end.

Now sure, it wasn't all puppies and cupcakes. In some cases a person was so fail and such and asshole about it when called out that no amount of debate could help, in which case that person was asked to leave or  is kicked out of the group and replaced with someone with a better attitude.  Again, maybe a 5 min ordeal tacked on? 10 max?

But now.. now it's like people can't even be bothered to deal with that 5 min inconvenience, or having to troubleshoot or type out a debate at all. Their time, apparently, is so valuable and their view of everyone else (or themselves) is so dismissive, so dehumanized, that the entire group may as well be a random bad hand of poker dealt to them with no chips on the table. No feeling, no opinion, soon as you look at the cards and see the 2-7 you have to work with, you don't even bother to Check on your turn, you just automatically fold and wait for the next hand.

This behavior wasn't unique to this one instance - I actually have 2 level 20 characters in RIFT that I've taken into the dungeon, and even into the early battle ground where the goal is for one team to take and hold a flag (shard) for as long as possible to generate points for their side.  If the other team gets the shard early and racks up an early lead, you can physically watch everyone folding their hands one at a time as every respawn generates less and less people even bothering to run out onto the field (much less go for the shard).

I scaled this observation back to World of Warcraft and realized the same thing was happening there.  I realized that in most battle grounds where my side has given up.. I'm the only one even talking shit in bg chat - and when I do, I'm not even met with counter arguments anymore.  Just the occasional "lol", "just give up" or "u mad?" comments which completely diffuse any potential discussion.

Here's another aspect I find particularly baffling: In WOW specifically, they have daily "random heroics" which you can queue for (cross server) dungeons.  Completing the dungeon gives you a bonus daily reward of points which are then used to by the top-end gear for the current expansion from the vendors... so it's always good to run at least one random heroic a day.

WOW, just like most MMOs, suffers from a non-uniform distribution of players across classes. There are significantly more people who play DPS classes than Tanks and Healers, but the dungeon randomization queues are designed to ensure that each group gets 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 dps when they are formed by the match maker software.  Now, even with the 3:2 ratio, there are still so many more DPS than support classes that when Tanks and Healers queue, they will almost always immediately find a group, whereas a DPS has to wait in excess of 30 minutes to find an opening.

To deter quitting, Blizzard has additional mechanics built into the game. If you leave a group or a battleground early, you are considered a "deserter" and have to wait a minimum amount of time (10/15 min depending) before you can even queue again, and then you go to the back of the line.  So for a quitter that's a DPS class - you're looking at 30 min to make it into your first group, a 10 min debuff for leaving early, followed by another 30 min wait before you get called into a new group.

That's well over an hour of time between dungeons - which (to people like me that live in reality land) represents the minimum effort time I should be willing to invest in cultivating a group that isn't going well.  If I can help them hobble through the dungeon within even 45 minutes, I still will come out on top vs. telling them to piss off and leaving group and waiting for a new one.

Now - you would think that having to sit around for an hour would be enough to promote a least an angry but tolerant community of people who run random heroics... but the bizarre reality is that it doesn't.

I have had situations in Warcraft where - I'm not shitting you - DPS have left the group without as much as a single pull happening.

Literally, after waiting 30 minutes, the dungeon pops, I zone in, the rest of the group zones in, and the mage says "lol tank only has 110k health", and then drops the party.  If you don't get what he said - the mage basically zoned in and assessed, within a mere glance, that the tank will have problems in the dungeon just by looking at his maximum health and determining that it is lower than average.  But rather than try, or even ask if the tank has all his appropriate gear on, or appropriate spec... without seeing if the healer is well geared and capable of carrying him... without any consideration at all beyond a perception... he's willing to drop group and spend another 30 minutes waiting for a new one at a later time.

What's even more insane is - sometimes rather than re-queuing to fill that last gap with another dime-a-dozen dps, in that and other instances the mere suggestion that the tank or healer are in question is enough to influence other members to do the same - drop without even so much as attempting a pull.

And when the tank and healer drop, you're left there with your thumb up your ass waiting for more of those rare support roles to become available for your instance.

One thing I have to admire about these... lets call them binary players... is actually their lack of rage.  I mean the first thing to go in group dynamics is compassion - patience usually gives way to contempt and when contempt is in play, people begin do demean those that they feel are failing at their role.  But even in the worst /ragequit situations, the general feedback can be gleamed from their rant and there is at least SOMEthing to consider, even if it's just that they are misreading the situation.

This new "silent quit" style is nice, I guess, because there is no animosity; which I guess means less stress which I guess is a good thing - but damn.  Could you imagine trying to learn a new skill and the only feedback you get is whether or not everyone around you stays or leaves?  Or being a stand up comedian, telling your jokes and getting only completely neutral looks as the return?

And yet this is the reality that the mmo community is evolving towards even now.  A new game like Rift is supposed to be a reset - the newness and unfamiliarity of the environment and game mechanics which causes people to want to work together more and grow with each other, (at least until people start hitting max level).  You would think...

But instead, it's like all the habits that were developed elsewhere simply carry over with the individual, completely stunting the natural progression that should be occurring - especially at the level of the FIRST dungeon a new character has access to in the game where they SHOULD be making their mistakes and learning.

I'm still not sure if this evolution is an eventuality or something we should fear. I often have to weigh the changing of a mindset vs. simply having the contrast of experience. I mean in a sense the reason why I care so much is because of the years of experience that I lived through up to this point - in a strange way much like our immigrant ancestors that go on incessantly about saving money and the value of a dollar, where as I don't blink twice about the fact that it's hard to get out of a restaurant for under 10 bucks a person or that the cars I like are all more than $25,000.

I guess I wonder about more than just the dehumanization effect within the game is if this psychology carries over into the real world. I mean, do these people try out a new sport or a hobby, and if they aren't immediately good at it, do they just give up? Do they practice enough to get into their first competition, and then as long as they keep winning they'll keep playing?

And what if they suck at those hobbies, or their job, do they even know it?  No one seems willing to provide real feedback - or maybe they just don't hear it? Does their boss give them negative feedback and they just blank out, taking none of it to heart and just quit, or nod and move on passively? Are they even equipped to deal with the consequences of failures where you can't just walk away and try some other time or not at all?

Or maybe...

Maybe it's just me.

I mean, maybe back then everyone just took this MMO stuff way too seriously, investing too much thought and interest in the other human beings sitting at their keyboards on the other side of the wire.

Maybe MMOs should have just been a game like any other - something you can drop and walk away from at any time since it has no real world consequences one way or another.

Maybe massively "multi-player" is just a euphemism  for a single player RPG inhabited by slightly-more-advanced NPCs rather than players - clever AI, but warranting no more attention or regard than a robot servant or a pet hamster in the real world.

Maybe it's the effects of machines and humans, and I'm just noticing it more than others. Maybe this dehumanization is something we are inherently capable of, which is why there is a deeper part of our nature that wants to bond, emotionally and physically, with other people like our families and significant others. Remove that proximity - remove that personalization - remove the consequences of having to tell someone face to face that they are failing, and we become cold and machine line, making purely strategic choices to maximize our chances for success without regard.

And finally, and ironically enough, here I sit - writing this about the dehumanization within a game, all the while typing it out to the empty void of a blog where it is uncertain who - if anyone - will read it much less want to comment on or discuss it further.  The comedy of it is that 100% of the comments that get submitted here and on my core website are from fake bot accounts pretending to tell me my posts are awesome, then linking to whatever product they want to endorse.

What a mad, mad world.