Suboptimist

How Much did you Pay for your Sedentary Lifestyle?

I know, I know, but I am so busy during the week.

Here is a word that sounds strange to me: disclude. I don’t want to say that it isn’t a word, because it sounds like it could be, but I don’t think I have ever heard it. Online dictionaries have it listed as an entry, and I am seeing it used more and more in World of Warcraft, in the context of something like, I have a full valor set discluding helm. I went and searched a couple of corpora, but only found one citation of one possible form in the British National Corpora:

…my Lord, my Lord er unless I’ve miss understood your Lordship it fits in the sense that if you think that unreasonably or even unfairly disclude someone from the market, you’re are excluding someone who would compete in the market, you’re taking someone out who may of had an impact on the market, may of brought prices down, offer better terms and conditions… [context obscured]

I had an idea of what the word meant, ‘exclude’ is what I would have used. Barbaric, I say. Maybe it is evidence of further development of an Azerothite dialect of English.

The newest episode of South Park featured World of Warcraft. It was funny, but I am predisposed to think so, since I already love South Park. It depicted a character who had played so much that he reached a level where he could kill all new players, preventing anyone from playing. Stan, after losing a fight to him, said, “That is one tough badass.” The camera shot to the player in real life, and he was a fat, pimply guy who clearly had no life. In order to kill ‘that which has no life,’ the South Park boys had to reach a level equal to him, losing their lives in the process.

Let me digress for a second. WoW is mostly harmless, but clearly has the potential to be harmful to a player’s social, work, and school life. Blizzard even warns its customers against playing too much by way of loading-screen text with saying like, “Take all things in moderation, even World of Warcraft,” and, “Invite your friends to visit you in Azeroth, but be sure to venture outside to visit them as well!” Given that Blizzard cooperated with the episode, I think it may be another attempt to discourage players from playing too much.

It’s ironic that Blizzard says that. In WoW PVP (and some higher level PVE scenarios), Blizzard rewards the players that have ‘absolutely no life.’ In order to reach the PVP rank of Field Marshall, an Alliance player must play nearly every minute of every day for X days. With the new PVP system in Burning Crusade, the system changes, dumping the PVP rank system all together, ending the incentive to play endlessly to reach high PVP ranks. However, the epic loot system remains the same, leaving players like me, players with lives, to be marginalized and unable to acquire good raiding gear.

Finally, I attended a friend’s birthday party this evening. It was at the kind of place where people call everyone ’sir’ and ‘ma’am.’ I hate being called ’sir.’ My dad doesn’t even go by ’sir.’ I’m not old enough to be ’sir.’