Now featuring menus in Mandarin

I'm now a semi-proud owner of a Motorola Ming, which is the coolest looking and least practical phone for my needs. That's how I roll.

I have terrible cell phone luck. When I got this phone, I miscounted and said it was the fourth cell phone I've owned in two-ish years. It's actually the fifth. I'd love to say that I'm really, really into phones, and that I've been happily buying new, exciting models for the HOLY SHIT RAD PHONE factor, but nope. I'm just a fuckwit of a phone owner.

In order of ownership, the various death scenes of my cell phones in the last two years:

1.) Standard Nokia candybar phone, which went by the wayside after getting dropped a hundred times
2.) LG flip phone, discarded when my contract was up
3.) Another LG flip, fried after the call alert vibration dropped it directly into a glass of water
4.) The epic dance with the RAZR: dropped more times than necessary, accidentally run over with car (and LIVED), filled with dust behind screen, battery life declining ... declining ... new phone!
5.) Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, whose epic awesomeness and perfection ended in the ocean while on vacation
5a.) Fucking RAZR, brought back to life through the magic of a new SIM card, battery and intense resentment

And now: the Moto Ming. God help me, I can't imagine what I'm going to do with a tiny, touch screen smartphone, but hot damn, it looks cool. Like a Star Trek phaser, and it's set on DORK! And LINUX!

I'll have a new one in 3 months, mark my words.

On being a queer gamer

There's this, via Towleroad (and a thousand other places):




Watch it. Watch allllll of it, count the number of "faggots" and "fags" and uhm, get back to me.

Allow me to get nerdy (again). As I've said before, I'm a slightly reformed World of Warcraft (WoW) player. I played WoW for an embarrassingly long time. I started playing because a good friend introduced me to the game, and we played kind of happily for while with his friends from college, his girlfriend (my housemate) and a bunch of others. All of that ended when I stopped enjoying the whole getting killed by other players (PvP) thing and started to want to just play the game without that added threat (PvE).

I searched around and found a PvE server that had a gay and lesbian group of folks who played together on the regular (that'd be a "guild" in the WoW vernacular). Unfortunately, the GLBT guild wouldn't admit me because of the hours that I was keeping. Still, I kept on playing on that server, met a bunch of late-night folks (mostly Aussies), and ended up forming some nerdy in-game friendships with a bunch of them.

Here's where the fun begins: they all thought I was a dude. My in-game avatar was a dude, and I didn't stop them from thinking that I was a dude. It was ... easier? I mean, this is a game that, at one point, banned GLBT guilds from advertising that they were looking for GLBT members.

So, it was easier up until the point when my guild started doing stuff in-game that required voice chat. I stalled for about a month, and then I started in with saying that I couldn't talk, but I could listen. And then I got to hear all of the stuff that wasn't typed: mmm, homophobia & mmm, racism!

While I feel slightly (read: I feel really, truly awful about it) guilty that I never revealed my gender to people who told me about their families, their jobs, their kids ... I kind of don't. On one hand, revealing my gender would have gotten the, "Oh, you're good for a girl!" thing, which: fuck off. On the other, it's, "You're a queer, but the lady kind, which is open to all sorts of fantasy ... mmm, ladies with ladies!"

I mean, I didn't stop playing WoW because of gender identity bullshit, but the Halo vid really underlines how hard it is to be yourself in a world where everything is collaborative gaming with voice chat. Hard, huh? Damned if you're a straight woman with a lady voice that's gonna get gamer boners, damned if you're a queer person with a lady voice that's gonna draw the same, damned if you're a gay dude gamer who wants to be out, damned if you're anything but some straightwhiteguywithbigguns.

I can't be arsed to find a solution to it, but I'd love to hear from other queer gamers. I'm stuck right now in feeling okay with playing games where I'm gonna get gay-bashed on the regs.

Help me out, queer gamers?

I need to check my auctions!

A comic about alcoholism gets a World of Warcraft remix. Funny 'cause it's true, folks!

400 posts in one day? Get out of here!

Right, so now that I've posted more in one night that I usually do over the course of a week, I should probably explain.

I've quit playing World of Warcraft. I've been playing for two years, so my saying this is the equivalent of someone saying they're putting down the crack pipe.

(I'm going to kind of queer this post in a sec. Be patient.)

After two years of playing for a insane amount of time nearly every day, after two years of seeing real life friends nearly fail out of grad school because of alarming amounts of play time, after two years of seeing people take days off work to finish off stuff in-game, after two years of getting called a fag for not killing the virtual dragon (or whatever) fast enough: enough already. Enough. Thanks, but I'm done.

To Warcraft it up a bit: WTS 3 epic-geared level 70 characters. PST.

Blech. Crack pipe DOWN.