FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
18hr ago
There're also the evergreen questions, like what the responsibility of a university should be in cases like this, or what the police department or justice system should do. Seasoned culture warriors will point out that wanting to be hard on this kind of crime correlates with wanting to be soft on other kinds of crime.
The most awful part of this, in my mind, is the lawsuit being filed by Jane Doe against the national fraternity, the bar, the university, and her own sorority for failing to "prevent her from binge drinking." I guess that statement might make sense in a lawsuit against a rehab facility? But not against a voluntary organization that you chose to join, which I've no doubt had a code of conduct that you personally signed stating that you would not binge drink or do illegal drugs.
If we really expect Frats and Sororities and colleges to control the behavior of students against the students' own will, then the culture is rotten and they need to be abolished entirely.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
18hr ago
Variation in outcomes is a bitch. Aella is one of my favorite internet personalities purely in that there are so many men who talk a lot of trash about how they're going to raise their daughter mega-trad and super-religious so she doesn't end up a whore....and well...
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
18hr ago
attending a WNBA game Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes.
My dude, come on. You're going to make the world's most basic error in facts in a post about people making basic errors in facts?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
18hr ago
Perhaps I was a particularly stupid seven year old. I genuinely never figured out the Saffron City thing! I spent forever wandering around, trying to figure out how to progress the game from there, before I just randomly lucked into it.
In the meantime the Mankey I had forgotten in the daycare weeks ago was level 50-something. Which slotted perfectly into my bad/stupid team.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1d ago
In the studies you've read, what sorts of interventions prevent the child from growing up to be a moralizing prig?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1d ago
This is a near total non-sequitur, Joe Biden made a timeline, sure, but he made a timeline based on our not being at war with Iran.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1d ago
How exactly does it fix it?
When I download WoW, I hit play and then I play it. You can't get less friction than that.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
Reading about WoW's development, the biggest thing they nailed that got me into the game in 2004 and back in 2026 is that they are obsessed with making it run on everything. They didn't want you to need serious gaming gear to play it, so that more people could play. It's one of the few good games that will run on my macbook air without fiddling around with a bunch of nonsense that crashes anyway. I've downloaded a few games people recommended over the years, only to find that my computer wouldn't run it for a variety of reasons, and given up. I'm not going to spend hundreds on a new console or a gaming pc, and even a bit of friction in getting a game to run on my computer tends to leave me cold about trying it.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
Sure but when I have 9-1 free, I won't want to book it for running Sunwell. The unique factor here is that I am not free from 9-1, I'm on shift watching the baby, I can't go anywhere or do anything, but that isn't actually a very active activity, it's mostly just feeding her every two hours, changing 2-3 diapers, snuggling if she fusses, and making sure she doesn't die, before waking my wife up and passing her off until 6am. Under normal circumstances, my wife is mildly upset if I come to bed late. In these circumstances, I'm being kind to my wife if I stay up extra late, letting her get more sleep.
And anyway, while I'm questioning why everyone else is quitting TBC all of a sudden, I'm kind of feeling like I'm going to be less interested in TBC after I get an Illidan kill. I have Black Temple booked for Friday night with a group that cleared it in three hours last week after running a successful Hyjal with them on Saturday, and I mostly just want to kill Illidan once. He's the guy on the box, and I never got him in high school. That's beating the game for me. After I knock him out, I'm not sure I'll want to run it every week for the foreseeable future, though maybe I'll try to gear up enough to "mothball" my shaman until Sunwell drops in case I want to come back. Maybe I'll level an alt, or maybe I'll look for a single player RPG that offers a similar experience, or maybe I'll just quit video games again for another decade.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
Your intuition seems to be incorrect with regards to normies. Generally I'd figure enlisted are the normiest of normies, and the DoW feels that playing GTA 6 at launch is such an incentive their offering it up to convince people to re-up.
But regardless, my concern isn't really "Do most people feel that the launch of a video game is as much of an event as things I want to do, like getting drunk at an iggles playoff game or setting a rock climbing tournament?" it's "Do people really think that they get to judge how I spend my free time because I have a wife and a kid, or insert themselves as the person I forgot to ask about a deal between my wife and I?"
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
The USA actually seems to be reducing military engagement in the region below prewar levels, with the announcement today that troops are pulling out of Iraq. (Again)
I pray that a peace deal is reached, and to a lesser extent that it is favorable to the United States and does not lead to the destruction of Israel.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
I've always felt that way about popular FPS and similar games, in that I try them when hanging out with friends, who are much better than me, and then I'm not that interested in playing because I suck and I'm not interested enough to invest the effort in ceasing to suck.
Sure but on September 1, the inevitable end of the game was known. Either the servers would move on to Wrath and all your TBC achievements would be irrelevant, or Classic+ would drop, or it would be a low-pop Era server. There was no universe where the "vague near-future-but-not-really feeling" lasted very long. Given that state of affairs, it shocks me that people invested anything that they weren't ok with losing?
I will note one thing that seems rotten is people who spent real money on boosts suddenly finding the toon they boosted in a different position.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
WoW also has a lot of interesting colors and shapes for a toddler to look at while they sit on Daddy's lap and watch him tank Illidan.
You know, ironically, I had originally scheduled the baby's due date as my quit time for WoW this run, or at least of scaling way way way back to "maybe I'll log in and screw around every now and then, but I'll definitely have to stop raiding."
It's actually been the reverse as of this week. Before, I only PUGged raids, because I couldn't justify scheduling a block of three-four hours weekly where I was going to be sat at my computer and ignore anything else that was happening. I was always going to respond to my wife, or to work calls, or I should be asleep, etc. Then the baby was born, and I suddenly find myself with a scheduled time from 9-1 every night where I am, in fact, sat quietly with zero other adults and no one to bother me, and I've actually joined a guild and signed up for a BT run a week in advance rather than logging on when I found time and hunting around for a PUG. Artie mostly sleeps on my lap during the raid, and if she fusses I just type "AFK rq baby aggro" and everyone understands. Now, I suppose one could criticize that I'm probably not giving her 100% attention if she happens to wake up during the five minute boss fight, but a) it's five minutes and b) it's not like I'm ignoring her, just comforting her with one hand while trying to work my rotation with the other. Strategic hot keys and macros make it possible, though it may also help that I'm super casual by the standards of the guild I'm in and am ok with accepting corresponding loot restrictions.
I still suspect that as she develops more and requires more active attention I will quit, but I'm almost at the point where I have achieved all my goals already, so it will line up perfectly.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
What do you picture as a functional view of what parenthood should look like? When my newborn is sleeping on my lap, should I sit in quiet contemplation of her? Am I allowed to read? Post on the motte? Talk to my friends and relatives? Where do you draw the line?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
Thank you, much appreciated.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
So far so good, I've enjoyed the newborn stage more than I thought I would. I was dreading it, but it's mostly like raising an orphaned baby animal, except that I care about her way more and she's way more important.
I figure it'll get bad later, but right now she's such an easy baby that if she was any easier I'd be worried about her. Given, part of that may be that Mrs. FiveHour coped with her fear of the vagaries of parenthood by buying every possible baby device and tool, so maybe it's just easy because we are oversupplied with gadgets to make it easy.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
Never played retail, so I'm not 100% certain, but as I understand it, the reward structure has been gradually made less rivalrous there.
This process basically started in TBC, and the course they set in TBC made what the ultimate evolutionary drift of retail kind of inevitable. You started to see Arena epics that were as good as the best raid pieces, you saw badge vendors, you saw heroic difficulty dungeons, you saw a variety of welfare epics offered to help people get geared up. This was a huge improvement over original vanilla in my mind, but it also will inevitably lead to what we have now in retail. Which I never played past Wrath, but I saw the writing on the wall even then as each new expansion was announced and the changes got goofier and goofier in my mind.
The problem is that each convenience change improves the game in the moment, but as they accumulate they eventually kill the spirit.
As for the Anniversary/TBC realms, it was generally understood from the start that those were "Classic plus waiting rooms" and that the population was always planning to drop them as soon as the new Classic came out.
That's exactly what confuses me about the dissatisfaction on display! If I were treating the game as a "Classic+ Waiting Room" I would never choose to invest any amount of effort in the game that I would regret if Classic+ dropped. Many thousands of players are upset that Classic+ dropped when it did, and that seems silly if everyone "already knew" that the game would die when Classic+ dropped. It's irrational, and I can't figure out what's going on there.
We'll see how that goes when it meets the population of minmaxers always itching for a little more vertical.
I suspect that in the long run Forever will be a reboot of WoW, and will eventually make a lot of the same decisions made originally. Maybe not for three or four years, but that's Forever in gaming terms.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
Sure but the launch is an event, no? You can play GTA any time, but you can only play it at launch once at one particular time.
Which I don't find meaningful but clearly many people do.
There's nothing inherently disordered about saying within a marriage "hey I really want to do x, so in exchange I will do y for you." Inasmuch as that structure is rejected as illegitimate, I think that's bad for marriage.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
In that sense, maybe Blizzard has created an effective lore, with the goal being to create good narrative anchor points for a wide swath of diverse mindsets on both factions rather than make interesting lore/characters.
I think it's a fascinating example of how absolutely terrible writing can become deeply meaningful to a great many people by the simple expedient of having them interact with it violently and repeatedly for hours.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
My inchoate thought is the divider is that in modern era "Christian" is red tribe, but in pre-industrial societies it was undoubtedly blue-tribe.
You're picturing a Hegelian dialectical view of history, that the Zeitgeist of progress at one point rested on Christianity, but has now moved on to other things. This was how our old world history textbooks were written: Sumerians and Persians were important until the Greeks, Greece was important until Rome, Rome was important until Christianity, Christianity was important until Humanism and the Enlightenment, etc.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
I always think of a lit professor I heard once who offered the point that the most popular great literary canons are the Russian and the ancient Greek, because a determined reader can read effectively all of the great works of Tolstoy/Dostoyevsky/Pushkin right up to Pasternak in a year or so; ditto Homer to Plato.
But we've become rather comfortable with a concept of fictional canon by which we can easily distinguish the real from the fanfiction, and I don't think that distinction will be as useful going forward.
Where do you draw the line on what constitutes addict behavior? Is it in the behavior itself, or the object thereof?
There was a lot of misandrist Discourse about this with relations to the upcoming GTA drop, a game franchise I haven't played since the PS2 at a friend's house. Men were profiled, and criticized, who intended to take time off work or who informed their wives they would be a little bit unavailable. And it seemed kind of ridiculous, because every hobby involves similar tradeoffs, and the writers generally put in little effort to really justify their disdain, instead relying on vague anti-male prejudices.
Because any hobby or recreational activity means making those kinds of compromises. It's perfectly normal and natural to me to do all the laundry and cooking and spend time with my wife before going on a weekend camping trip, or making sure all my work ducks are in a row before going on vacation. Certainly when I go on a two hour long bike ride, I make sure my wife doesn't need anything and the cats are fed. Surely your position isn't that hobbies themselves are addict behavior? Or the untenable absurdity that no hobby can trade off against other activities? Or the repugnant conclusion, that one should not attempt to correct for one's absences by doing more for their wife before doing something else because the balancing is immoral?
One can take the puritan position, that any fun or recreation is at least a little bad and should never trade off against family and labor duties. But unless one is extreme and anti-human, that fails.
One can take the position that video games are bad and are an invalid tradeoff against work and wife, but that seems like kind of a silly value judgment and limiting on freedom. I'm not really interested in everyone have prescriptivist oversight of everyone else's hobbies.
One can gesture vaguely at "moderation," but that's not really an answer.
...OK, but you haven't applied any of your vague concepts to the situation at hand. What we have here, taking only the individual case, is at best something like:
September 1: Player spends 20 hours a week on World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, a game played by 100,000 people any given week, which will run no later than next summer at which point it will end. They derive immense joy/value/meaning from the game.
September 30: Player refuses to spend any time on World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, and actively regrets prior time they invested, because now 50,000 people play any given week, and the game may drop off further in another month and a half.
There's no reasonably logic to me by which a game that lasted another year with 100,000 people is significantly more meaningful than a game that lasts a shorter period of time with 50,000.
I'm having trouble figuring out how someone loses all those motivations so suddenly under those circumstances. All the aspects of mastery are still there. They're not even meaningfully reduced for the most part*. It's like back in high school, when people would get real upset about breakups, and I'd ask if they figured they were going to marry that particular boyfriend/girlfriend and they'd say no, and I'd say well then obviously you were going to break up some time.
*I may need to check my privilege here, in that I exclusively play desirable classes and I'm not a complete idiot/prick, and so the social aspect of the game may be easier for me even in a reduced population setting than it is for others
A lot is collective. Playing with and against friends on the playground, I realized things like "Having six mediocre pokemon is generally less effective than having three good ones."
Similarly, I played Druid in the original run of WoW, and nobody really wanted a feral druid tank in original TBC. Just wasn't viewed as workable, main tank was always a warrior. Now, in the rerun of TBC, Druid tanks are very highly rated, and warriors are on the outs. Druid became a lot better in later expansions as a tank, and with that knowledge as part of the collective culture it works backward into TBC classic.
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