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Diary: Thrift Shop WOW

A lot of my readers will probably find this post offensive. Not because I am talking about politics or sex or the usual offenses against good taste, but instead I will talk about a means of wasting time that I have episodically used to shield myself from the vagaries of a world that I no longer understand.

World of Warcraft has been around for over 20 years now. I first began playing it when I was the last man standing in a failing biotech firm. The powers that were spend their time scraping together rent and the nickels for my salary without bothering to actually spend money to produce product. So for three months, I went into the lab and spent time playing WOW. Got paid for it. Life was pretty good in an odd way.

I was deeply into "winning" back then. I actually had a character that the other players were impressed with. But that was then. Now I am playing an hour or two every day split up over two or three sessions (my chair and the table that serves as a combined kitchen table/desk are not ergonomic and I need to get up and move around between).

I still play what is referred to as "classic". It is the same old, non-improved game that I played 20+ years ago. I have a sneaking hunch that a fair number the folks there are like me in that they are older and not interested in bells and whistles, and don't want to go to the effort of Dungeons and Dragons. A lot of folks seem to noodle around in the game without taking it seriously and trying to "win".

I believe that I will try not to do that. It is possible as a "strategy" to just be lower-middle class in the game, wandering about, making some coin when you can, and not get into the digital dick matching of winning. In a sense, you can just play the game without needing to "win". I have been doing this mindless thing for a couple of days now and I find that the frame of mind I play in actually relaxes me and fills up part of the day of a retired old man.

Now, I kinda feel like I have to keep quiet about this around my friends. I have a set of "successful" friends who feel like their means of filling the day are superior to mine. If they find out that I am not filling my days with meaningful activity that advances me in some way, they will spend time trying to "set me straight". I don't want any of that flavor, thank you very much.

Diary: The last chapter of the book (trash fiction) I just completed

All men, all women, all children have their illusions, and those illusions both sustain and destroy them.

The counterpoint to illusion is not truth, not in the way in which truth is now and apparently always has been defined by human beings, although many would claim such. Truth is, as popularly accepted, just another form of illusion, if a well-meaning illusion, because, over time, it has been corrupted from its original meaning, which was conformity to reality. As culture and language developed, men applied the term to words, or more properly, nouns, then next to principles, and finally to beliefs. Yet none of those conform directly to reality.

Nouns are single-word terms that attempt to name or describe either something real or something unreal, but no word encompasses the completeness of whatever is being so named. Every noun is at best a name of the principal attribute of what it purports to represent.

When one applies the term “true” or “truth” to belief in a deity, how can a belief in the existence of any deity be true, or even false, when there is no demonstrable physical proof of the existence of that deity?

In the end, truth as it is, and not as so many have described it to serve their own ends, can only be the open acceptance of what is. Not what we remember, not what we hope for, not what we fear, not what we love … but what is. Nothing more and nothing less.

For the truths that men claim, in their vaunted principles, and in the governments that they have built based on those principles, and will build long after I am gone, are all part of the grand illusion that words can describe all of what exists.

AVERRA The City of Truth Johan Eschbach 377 TE Modesitt, Jr., L. E.. Contrarian: A Novel in the Grand Illusion (p. 611). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Diary: A History of Being Wrong

I have been a frugal prepper doomer for a while now. If you have the poor time management skills required to go back to my blogger account and the older posts here on Dreamwidth, you will see an amazing assortment of predictions concerning how the whole damn thing was going to blow up.

I am pleased to announce that while it still looks shaky, it is still holding together somehow. Granted, it doesn't resemble anything that I would call stable, but truthfully I don't see any difference in intensity, just a dance of the political flavors of the faction that is currently predicting doom.

Right now I am approaching the end of the slide from upper middle class affluence to working class adequacy to retirement frugality. I have enough. My income exceeds my outgo by a touch and there is room to cut costs even more. I have a feeling that a lot more people will be joining me on this path and if they manage their expectations, they will find out that they are probably just as happy.

The "doom" that is coming isn't armageddon, and even if it was there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it. Nope the doom will be the reconfiguration of expectations. In our keep up with the Joneses and status/money seeking society, this will be painful for a great number of folks.

Diary: Early Morn temperatures

For some reason I woke up at 05:00 this morning and knew that going back to sleep wasn't an option. Kinda wish I knew why, but nothing comes to mind.

I have been huddling down of late. I am retreating into the areas of my life where more certainty is possible. That does not include anything other than a brief scan of news headlines to see if the direction has changed any at all. It does appear that the trend toward nastiness and name-calling continues apace with no real change in intensity. The conditions in the proxy wars we have so come to love are proceeding smartly along their path to failure. The economy of the rich is doing fine, the economy of everyone else is beginning to show signs of going off the rails.

Growing up in a family of fairly recent immigrants (My grandma was the first person to actually speak fluent English, Great-grandfather came to America as a draft dodger who decided that being drafted to the Austro-Hungarian Empire's army in 1913 was a losing proposition). But Italian was the milk tongue of the family until the 1950's and I caught the tail end of that. But there was a phrase that stuck: Tempo Freddo (cold times).

When used in the house, it didn't refer to weather outside. That was other phrases involving dogs and when outside vulgarity. Nope, tempo freddo was for when the craziness was closing in. I remember it being used a lot in the late sixties when I stayed at the farm for the summers (I was farm labor before it was cool).

I am tempted to start using it again. But I won't. That reference is from a time and culture that was dying fifty years ago. But the craziness is closing in. We are in the process of choosing sides to lay blame. But the actions happening here and now can't really be "blamed" on one side of the other. We would have arrived at this exact same place regardless of what political faction "won" the last election and exerts nominal control. The only difference is in which group of assholes is currently being repressed.

Diary: Checking in

I am sorta sick of the shenanigans currently going on in the "land o' the free".

I am ignoring it and concentrating my limited mental resources on playing World of Warcraft and pretending the world out there doesn't matter to me.

That's all. I am not ashamed.