Snarks and Ladders

Well, I have already had to go over my incredibly minimal budget for BlizzCon because (as usual) people are unreliable and I have to find my own room.  Not surprising I guess, and on the plus side it solves the pyjama issue!

I think I am more frustrated because from the start I questioned the whole thing.  It just felt like an offer that was being made because it seemed like the right thing to do.  Of course, he was all ‘no, I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t mean it’, but when the time came around to actually organise it, he made it pretty clear that he was trying his best to get out of it.

So, I have a room to myself.  Since I am staying such a short amount of time, it’s only setting me back maybe $400, but I was hoping to spend half of that or so.  That’s $200 less that I have to spend while I am there, which really sucks, since my spending money budget was only sitting at about $500 or so anyway.

I probably shouldn’t be cranky (he did say to make an alternative plan in case he decided to stay with other people), but oh well. 

People fricking suck.

I got a ticket for Blizzcon.

Squee!

I am also quite possibly sharing a room with a ‘friend’ of mine, since I have weird issues in general about sharing rooms with people that I haven’t met, unless they happen to be amazingly awesome on the internet.  Then I might be able to handle it.

Anyway, after establishing and settling the whole ‘separate beds, right?  Right?  Right!  Cool!’ thing, my brain has of course been feverishly working overtime.

What fricking underwear do I pack?

Option A: All ugly comfy undies etc.

Packing only ugly underwear increases the chances of drunken whoops sex exponentially.  Because we all know you only get laid when you are wearing your hideous underpants, or similar.  This theory was proven last time I had a guy try to sleep with me – we went to our respective hotel rooms, I got changed into my immensely unflattering Mickey Mouse flannelette night shirt, and then there’s a knock on the door.  Seriously, talk about worst jammies ever.  Thankfully I didn’t actually want to sleep with him, so they served their purpose.

Option B: Moderately attractive underwear

Meaning I’ll be uncomfortable all the time.  And it leaves an uncertain chance of anything happening.

Option C: Hawt hawt underwear

Because, you know, just in case anything happens, it’s nice to know you have the attractive stuff on.  Especially when the attractive stuff spends most of its time gathering dust.  However, packing it is a sure fire way to guarantee that no one will be seeing you wearing it at all.

We aren’t even going to try and work out whether I actually want something to happen here or not.  Because that is ridiculous amounts of confusing and complicated.  On the plus side, I figure he is either paranoid or equally ‘I don’t know what the fuck I want’ about it, because a conversation about drunken vomiting suddenly prompted a ‘By the way, as much as I enjoyed sleeping with you, it’s a bad idea’ type comment.  Which was kinda weird.  Although nice to know that I am enjoyable company in the bedroom (but, then again, who is going to say ‘you were bloody shithouse!’?)

And in what universe are sex and vomit related?  OK, don’t answer that, I don’t even WANT to know.

Also, I am having a pyjama crisis. 

I’m a sleep naked type, which is clearly not appropriate.  The issue is, the only comfy pair of jammies I have?  My boob randomly pops out of them.  Which is also not appropriate.

This whole room sharing thing is FRAUGHT with problems!  But, it’s infinitely better (and cheaper!) than having a room to myself, because it’s not like I don’t do that every day already.

At this rate I am thinking hawt hawt underwear.  Because really, nothing should happen between us anyway, and that way, on the off chance something does, I’ll look somewhat good.  Thoughts?  Ideas?  Someone going to tell me I’m an idiot?  (Seriously, that’s what I am expecting and waiting for, hop to it already!)

Seriously.  I am not a geek.

Proof?

The DS I decided on impulse to buy the other day is the LEAST geeky DS I have ever seen.  Sure, a 5 year old girl might steal it off me (actually, I could easily take on at least 3 five year olds in a fight and have a decent chance of winning, so that shouldn’t happen), but it most definitely does not scream ‘Geek!’

… if I had one of those shiny looking DSi’s, then maybe that would say geek.  However, I couldn’t afford one.

I also may have a Playstation… but the only games I own are Guitar Hero and Singstar.  Oh, and Call of Duty 4 came free with it, but I have never actually played it.

I built my computer, but I had to get a friend to help me choose the parts, because I really don’t know enough to confidently pick out the various things.  And, knowing me, I’d forget something crucial.  Like the power supply.

I wear glasses, but they are designer, damn it!

I may have never been on a proper ‘date’ (or, if I have, we never stuck the ‘date’ label on it), but I’ve had boyfriends.  One of them may have even been cute, and they were nice guys.  Not being superficial doesn’t make me geeky.

Books are not geeky.  All the intelligent people will tell you that it’s actually cool to like books.

Blogging is, uh….

…. totally not geeky.  Right?  Right?

Well, if anyone managed to track me down from my old WoW blog, I guess you deserve to here the full story, just for sheer perseverance’s sake.

For the record – I still maintain there was nothing wrong with my old lifestyle.  I’m just choosing not to live it anymore, because it’s not good for me.  That doesn’t mean I am condemning it, or saying it’s not good for anyone else.

I spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet.  I’m a bit of a social networking junkie.  I love chatting to the wonderful people I have met from all around the world on the internet.  I spend most of my downtime hanging around online while doing other things – the internet is great for multitasking.

Unfortunately, I seem to have a problem with meeting guys online.  I know that there is nothing wrong with meeting people online and forming relationships that way – I totally get it.  I am a little concerned though that it IS how I met my last two boyfriends, as well as the guy who was involved in the dismal mess that I am now trying to get over.  Clearly I either meet the most fantastic people online (partially true), or I am just easily convinced to fall for someone (perhaps also easily true).

In real life, people tend to annoy me more.  You have to actually put up with their little quirks and habits.  I know that I have several annoying things I do which don’t come across online (I’ll compulsively rub my hands together when nervous.  Or my eye will itch and I’ll rub it until it’s red and sore.  I fail at making conversation with strangers, and I invariably end up blushing when I talk to them, which leads to further embarrassment and MORE blushing).  Online, I am a much superior version of myself.  And I guess a lot of other people are too.

So, yeah, I find myself falling for the wrong people.  And then getting hurt when it turns out I am not as likable as they once thought.  So, partially because of this, and partially because I want to try and reclaim my pre-gaming life back, I basically threw my hands up and said ‘no more!’ to the WoW community.

So I’m going to try and be better at my job.  I’m going to try and be fitter and look and feel healthier.  I’m going to try to be a better house keeper.  Read more.  Eat less.  Be a better pet owner.  Spend more time socialising with people who are physically around me, even if I would much rather curl up on the couch and stay in.

And I’m not going to fall for anyone who blindly leads me on, or let myself get in over my head like I have in the past.  I’m just getting tired of it.

Warning: yeah, this is a gaming post.  yeah, you may not care – but who says you have to care about any of the stuff that I write anyway?  Just click ‘mark as read’ and move along

Also – HOLY WALL OF TEXT BATMAN!

I moderate a forum for WoW bloggers, amongst the other random things that I spend my time doing.  It’s usually a pretty straightforward, easy job. I approve new users, occasionally steer conversations back to an appropriate level, but as a rule the people who join are nice people who just want to help one another out.

The moderator list appears to be quite extensive.  We have something like, oh, 8 moderators, 4 administrators… unfortunately, the only moderator who is really at all active is me.  While this isn’t usually an issue… it does present some concerns occasionally.

The other day, someone registered for the forum that I had doubts about.  They weren’t a blog, for starters.  And their site definitely wasn’t about building a community.  In fact, it was more about naming and shaming than anything else.  Sure, that has its purpose (and I may have actually used it once, regarding a certain lazy moron), but it isn’t really what our little forum is all about.  So, I was of two minds as to whether I should approve them or not.

Unfortunately… we don’t have any other active mods that I can hash this shit out with!

Well, they are now approved.  I don’t like to say I was ‘forced’, because I most certainly was not, but you know how it is when someone says ‘I was just wondering… why was this not done?’ etc etc.  So, well, I felt bad (because I have been feeling bad about the whole thing for a couple days now), and I added them.  However, I didn’t like the implication when it was said that OTHER people had not been approved.  Because they had.  Occasionally, it takes a while.  If I am not around for a week, because there are no other mods, nothing gets done.  Some days, well, I just don’t feel up to the rigours of my internet chores.  So fucking sue me.

And if the implication wasn’t that I was lazy, then it was that I had been discriminating against people, and only approving who I felt like.  So not true.  If I approved the guy who can’t use god damn punctuation, then I’ll approve most everyone.  Unless, of course, you are a troll or something.

Or maybe there was just no implication at all.  Maybe I read too much into it all because the whole forum thing is starting to piss me off.

– I don’t mind moderating.  Really.  But I would love to NOT BE THE ONLY ONE.

– If I AM the only person actually, you know, working on the damn thing… y’think I’d be bumped up to being an admin at some point.  Of our current 4 admins, only ONE of them is a WoW blogger.  One who doesn’t have a great deal of time to look after things anyway.  There is a lot of shit that needs tidying up… and I can’t do all of that as a moderator.

– A lot of the old heads in the community no longer use the place.  I guess that’s because, well… the community is changing.  We don’t NEED it so much anymore, because we pretty well know what we are doing, and things like twitter and chatrooms have replaced much of the forum’s purpose.  It makes me sad though when I see all these new people registering, and they will rarely get feedback or comments off the old heads.  You know what sort of things made my fricking god damn day when I started blogging?  Comments from the old heads, from the big bloggers who I respected.  That, I would guess, is one of the things that actually kept me blogging.  Aren’t you all glad that happened?

– And, because I am human… even though I KNOW it doesn’t matter, and I don’t explicitly want it… there is absolutely no recognition for doing this.  None whatsoever.  Which, y’know, is fine… just occasionally irksome when you see people tooting their horns about other shit and getting pats on the back.  But, hey, I’m a selfish bitch who wants her own fair share of back pats, and I’m not going to deny it.

I feel like that particular community is breaking down.  Part of it is that it has gotten bigger than what we can all stay in touch with.  Part of it is the community becoming more diverse.  I guess another big part is the attrition that community is currently seeing.   I’d like to see the community booming again like it used to… but I can’t do it on my own.  I think it really has to grow again, from the bottom up, with the new people.  And some days, I really just feel like packing it in.  The current state of the forum, for example… makes me want to cry!

/end wall of text.

Yeah, a big part of me knew that I would fail at maintaining a RL blog.  My fundamental laziness and outright busyness would just conspire against me until, lo and behold, it’s been something like 2 months since I updated!  So, what’s new news?

• My beloved baby, my shiny new car, is off with the parents getting a spray job done.  Only set me back $450, which was kinda OK I guess.  In the meantime, I am driving my mother’s clunky Rav4, which is slow and snailish and annoying.  Not to mention having stupidly light steering – guess who has accidentally been doing fishies around corners?  Oh, how I miss my ‘lil car!
• Work is still occasionally a big ball of fail.  I am getting tired of being the only one in my faculty who knows how to do my job, so I have no mentors, no help, nothing at all.  It’s like finding the village idiot and getting them to run the show, I swear.  On the plus side, the kids haven’t worked out yet that I have no bloody idea what I am talking about, which is always nice.
• Things are –mainly- going Ok with the BF.  I keep half expecting him to dump my ass, to be honest… but,

I get to see him!  In less than two days!  That’s right, my nerdish butt is hauling it’s not-so-delicate self on to a plane, which is then going to (successfully – never mind what my Year 9’s  said!) make it all the way to LA, where he will pick me up from the airport.  That is, if he doesn’t run screaming

Part of me feels kinda bad about the whole situation.  I mean… I lied to get time off work.  That’s gotta be against the rules, right?  Well, let me explain.

One of the downsides to being a teacher is not getting to choose when your holidays are.  Now, I can’t reeeeeally complain, I get a fair chunk of time off in a year, but I wish I didn’t have to put up with holiday-making families and pay exorbitant peak season fares every time I wanted to go somewhere.  Not to mention that it’s stupidly hard to have time off when you want it.

In case you guys hadn’t worked it out… I’m kinda a nerd.  Yeah, I play WoW.  I blog about WoW.  I spend a large chunk of my day talking about WoW.  So when I realised I could (just barely) afford to go to Blizzcon this year, I leapt at the chance!  Unfortunately… Blizzcon is in the middle of the school term.  When I am meant to be merrily slaving my ass off.  I am sure that work will be thrilled to know I want time off to go to a…

Nerd convention?  With people in costumes and shit?  Mingling with the great unwashed (literally)?  Yeah, that leave is TOTALLY going to get approved.  Along with the leave to sit around the house all day ‘just because I feel like it’ and the ‘oh, but I have to wash my car!’ leave.

So, internet… I am going to a wedding.

Keep it on the down-low, OK?

I would usually talk about this sort of thing in my gaming blog, but I decided that I should really talk about it here as well.  Why?  Well…

When I was bookshopping while I was on holidays (which is where I have been rather than writing here, because, let’s face it, I do need a life outside the internets, ya know?) I came across a little book that intrigued me – “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the rise of raunch culture”.  A flick through confirmed that the author of the book and I found the same thing in life bloody confusing -  How does prancing around half naked with a Playboy bunny symbol on your shirt make you sexually liberated?  Thus persuaded, I purchased my book, counting it as a strike against the ditzes and bimboes in the world that I seem to encounter everyday.

Well, I came home, half unpacked since I am a lazy ass, forgot about the books, and spent the week doing what I do best when it’s holidays: played games, chatted to the potential BF on Skype (a topic for another post, not sure if he is at the bloggable stage yet!), avoided the psycho I.M.E (DEFINITELY the topic of another post!), and ate Tim Tams.  While I was playing the game I play best, as it is the only game I play, I decided to participate in one of the holiday activities.

This holiday activity sounds fairly innocuous – collect eggs, eat chocolate, get a bunneh pet.  I got all that stuff done, got myself a pretty dress, a basket, and a cute set of ‘I’m totally fuckable bunneh ears’

… wait, what?

Fuckable bunneh ears?  And that’s not the end of it!  In my total ignorance of my own fricking beliefs, I screenshot said bunneh ears (perched oh so cutely on top of my sophisticated head), crop it to REALLY draw attention to my ears, and stick it up on Twitter.

Yeah.  I basically just advertised to the internet that I am a fuckable bimbo.

Way to go Angela, way to compromise your beliefs right there.  To be honest, I am not sure why I find the ears so appealing… I haven’t taken the picture down, despite the objections I have to it.  Guess we can just add hypocrisy to my list of faults – it’s OK to compromise all my beliefs if I look damn hot doing it!

Of course… I could look more like this chick right here: next to her I look downright Victorian Prudish.  Skank.