My life has been nothing but tolerating something that was intolerable. And I kept on trying to keep my mouth shut; but when I was told to smile and take abuse, to say nothing when I’m being abused, and to accept such a condition?

Yeah, I’m not doing that.

Your Dipshit Friends

There’s something about me where I have this inherent loneliness that makes me gravitate towards anyone who will talk to me. Lots of people have it. It’s a weakness.

You shouldn’t just keep the company of anybody. It’s thought that if you can’t be tolerated by many, that there’s something wrong with you; but, in reality, the vast majority of the human species is one variety of dipshit or another. (The real kicker is when you realize that, even when you’re right, you are still, inevitably, inexorably, somebody else’s villain.)

But I kept the company of anybody. After all, as far as I can tell, I was still a teenager when all of this nonsense was happening.

And it was just me and my dipshit ‘friends’ against ‘the world’.

With friends like these…

… who needs enemas?

I had a lot of ‘friends’. To be perfectly honest, they were merely acquaintances. But there were two people that I loved talking to.

Bonaparte and Saristinae. Not in that order; not in any order. But Bonaparte was this cool guy who once made a YouTube video in which he (fictitiously) presented a recipe to make cocaine using a frying pan, and Saristinae was someone who pissed off the right people so bad that a journalist malded about it, leaving the only lasting evidence of my friend’s existence.

I know where Bonaparte is. I found his YouTube channel again, though I honestly don’t want to contact him again until maybe First Contact is over and done with.

But Saristinae, I pretty much miss every day.

Because Saristinae was smart, and Saristinae had a point.

World of Warcraft was elitist and bad.

And you couldn’t blame children on the shittiness of the game. The people who made the game bad were usually of the age where you’d expect they would have careers and families and 401ks and mortgages. But instead of doing something productive with their lives, they just kind of started / precipitated drama on any one of the servers that were available.

There used to be legends of shit that people would get up to on Illidan. Even now, Serenity Now will probably echo into eternity. And our server was sort-of an offshoot of Illidan: it was the place where people who were too bad for Illidan would end up, after they got banned.

It was the scrapheap. If Illidan was Tiphares, then my server was the Scrapyard.

And I was Gally.

Alone in a crowd

Have you ever felt lonely at a party? Or alone in a group of ‘friends’?

That’s kind of what Bluesky feels like, to me. That’s kind of what everything feels like, to me. I felt at home with Saristinae and Bonaparte; I feel at home, now, with Lloyd, and MBot, and Gavizuli, and Blue, and U-Thought. But, outside of a few people who I feel truly understand me, who are on my same wave-length, and can and do appreciate what actually matters and is important in life, the rest of the World is just a sea of faces. Empty and vacant, holding nothing for me.

And the people in the crowd are not going to understand how I feel, because they either barely understand how they themselves feel; or they don’t care how I feel. And none of that matters.

But.

World of Warcraft was pretty much the social media for video game players, back then. It was a game; and it was also the interactive experience of networking with others.

People found wives and husbands in this game. They got married and had kids, and, from what I’ve heard? Very few divorces.

No one appreciates that this game had more to it than its mechanics. It was the social aspect of it that elevated it beyond a game, into something like an Internet town square. In fact, when I stopped playing it? That’s exactly when I started using Twitter. I found it a similar ‘replacement’.

I tried to ‘socialize’. But the reality of the situation was, people took the game too seriously.

Also, one of the top guilds was just casually sharing revenge porn.

There were many problems with this server.

Oh the misery

Outside of trying to improve my condition, all I’d really do on World of Warcraft was grind achievements. After a certain point, the only way to get any sort of real ‘progression’ in the game was to pair-up with a guild that was co-led by an actual rapist. So I didn’t do that.

This, too, was during the period where Blizzard had absolutely no fucking idea what they wanted to do with Molten Core. Even that is somehow lost to time now; but the reality was, for 2 weeks, we weren’t even sure that Blizzard was solvent. There were rumors that World of Warcraft hadn’t sold enough, and, given the apparent ‘failure’ of Molten Core’s reception (not enough people could even attempt the content: it was tuned to the point where the first Molten Giant was wiping entire raids), the thought was, this is it, Luigi.

Once I had learned that the title of Justicar was a thing (apparently, once used as a title for Paladins, in some such text), I wanted it. I wanted it bad.

It wasn’t until the Draenei came that I got it.

Guarding a base

At the time, I didn’t understand why my Internet connection was so ‘bad’. I was on dial-up. When I’d get disconnected from Alterac Valley, I didn’t know why. I just wanted to play.

At times, not even playing Warsong Gulch was ‘safe’. My disconnects were frequent, and the experience was frustrating.

I got everything from Alterac Valley first. Then, Arathi Basin; or whatever it was called. (Honestly, even as I type this, I’m realizing that my memory of this is fading. It just isn’t important to me anymore.)

But Warsong Gulch, that’s the thing I’m remembering, now.

I remember… my ‘friends’. There was one. I won’t say his name; but he was a dipshit, guaranteed. Later on in our ‘friendship’, I learned he was actually sent by another guild to try to recruit me into being this polyamorous lady’s next husband. That lady would always talk about me giving her a baby (making her pregnant). Disgusting.

Well, he was the one who decided that I needed to be made fun of. He explained it to me thusly: I had done something wrong, and I had to be made fun of. To teach me a lesson.

For guarding the base in Warsong Gulch.

I don’t know where the guy is, now, and I don’t care. I never want to talk about him.

But I remember, standing over the flag room, in Warsong Gulch, guarding the flag. Because, basically, it was all I could really do with my Internet connection.

And I remember . . . feeling so disconnected with ‘humanity’.

There was nothing I could really do that wouldn’t be ‘criticized’. That wouldn’t be ‘mocked’; ‘ridiculed’; and so on, and so forth. And yet, I had no desire, nor ability to do the same sort of things to them. I had no talent for cruelty. I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

I’m pretty sure I hold the world record for getting Justicar as Alliance. On our server, the Horde were all adults who were min-maxing the fuck out of everything, so getting any reputation at all in Warsong Gulch was basically pulling teeth.

But I did it.

I did it, and every single time I did something for myself, there was this asshole, this guy who was supposed to be my friend; this weirdo-asshole who was always trying to get me to talk to this lady who wanted to fuck me.

I need to keep better company.

I’m pretty sure shitdick was going to steal Deathcharger if it dropped while we ran it together.

God, I don’t miss you. I don’t miss you, and, even now, I still think of how I told you I was ‘making good time’ getting a Winterspring Frostsaber, and you just had no ability to not mock me.

There was so much to mock about you, and I never did.

But you never missed an opportunity to ridicule me.

How’d I ever live like that?

Standing in the Cave, in Alterac Valley

I remember feeling so ashamed. There was nothing I could do to exit the cave; sometimes, when my connection (or the data involved, really) was good and/or favorable, I could play the game. But, otherwise, sometimes? Somedays, we were pushed back to the cave, and that was it.

And there was the threat of being banned if you stood in there.

Sometimes I think back to that, and, I keep on fucking trying to parse it. And, you know what?

Now I wish I was just trying to fuck around to get something for free.

At least, then, when people tried to shame me, I wouldn’t have felt bad.

That’s the thing about actually being a bad person: you laugh when people call you out on it.

Good people don’t laugh when people say that they’re bad. They feel bad, and wonder why they’re being punished.

I’ve felt like that my entire goddamned life.

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