I haven't played Magic since Invasion block, and not seriously since long before that. I've considered starting up again every so often, but it's a bit expensive at the moment for my tastes. (Though there is a store that runs FNM on a regular basis, so there's a pull.)

However, I continue reading strategy articles for the game, browsing article archives, et cetera, even though I do not actively play and haven't for some time. Both because there's a very sharp level of game design theory contained in many, lessons that can be applied to many different fields (yes, Magic theory can be applied to both WoW and Persona 4 with surprisingly good results), and... well, you occasionally find something like this.

And speaking of P4...

(Todd. You do own this game already, right?)

Finally finished P3 (hello again, Nyx, have a nice helping of Armageddon as Satan travels back in time to team up with Golden Age Satan), and the ending was...

Well.

See, I can't criticize it. Not really. Because the game has been on my plate for a long time, I cared about all the characters, there's no possible ending the game could have that would fully satisfy me. None whatsoever. It was a game I wanted to beat and didn't want to end all at once, even with the gigantic fricking annoyance at the end notwithstanding.

However, they were a bit too subtle with the message at the end there. Oh, sure, it was pretty well implied what was going on with all of the "you feel very tired" references, not to mention the reactions of others, but at the same time... subtle is good, but there's just far enough and then there's a bit too far.

I'm willing to wager The Answer helps tie that up a little bit better. At least it explicitly states what was going on in those last couple minutes.

So, B+ for the ending, with the understanding it couldn't have satisfied me. The game as a whole? A solid A, with some very high points and a couple disappointingly low points.

Dear Atlus,

I'm really happy about how awesome Persona 3 was. No, really. I've recommended it to several people, I've enjoyed it enough to buy FES and the sequel when I had the opportunity, and by and large I've greatly enjoyed the eighty-odd hours I've sunk into the game.

No, wait - make that eighty-two hours. Because, see, those last two hours? We need to talk.

I understand where you were going with the last boss. I really do. But this is a fucking problem. Your fucking last fucking boss has fourteen fucking forms to fucking kill before the fucking boss fucking dies. Fourteen fucking forms.

Fourteen fucking forms.

This is a fucking problem here, guys. Because those fourteen fucking forms are not fucking interesting as fucking battles, and they're fucking filler. I had to fucking fight the fucking boss for a fucking hour before I got to the actual fucking boss fight.

And then?

Another.

Fucking.

Hour.

Because she fucking periodically fucking reflects every fucking attack and forced me to fucking spend another fucking hour fucking fighting her, with no fucking breaks or fucking refills or fucking save points or any-fucking-thing to fucking indicate you realized this fucking boss required a fucking commitment on fucking par with fucking watching the fucking Lord of the fucking Rings special e-fucking-ditions to fucking just get through it.

But okay. Slow and steady, right?

Except that then your fucking boss charmed Yukari and got fucking healed back to fucking full, you motherfucking dogfuckers, which meant that the past fucking hour of fucking playing this fucking fight was just fucking wiped to fucking shit!

You shitfucking fucknuts, if you're going to fucking make me fight your fucking boss for two fucking hours just to get her fucking feathery fucking ass down to a fucking sliver of motherfucking health, don't then give me the fucking chance of fucking having two fucking hours of fucking work set fucking back to fucking square one! What the fuck did your mulefisting limp-wristed cockwrinkle of a ball-licking douchehorse scenario designer think would fucking happen, you vomitous man-slugs?

This is not good design. I expect this will be corrected in the next installment, or I will be mad.

Love,
Eliot

PS: Okay, it's kind of Yukari's fault and not the boss, but everyone but Koromaru and Junpei learn Diarahan. It had a unpleasantly high chance of happening.

PPS: Also, what the hell is with Mitsuru's dialogue if you max out her link prior to a date? Is she breaking up with you or what? I took a lot of time to get her to do the horizontal bop with me, don't want all that wasted.

Yeesh. I come back to poke my head in, and what do I find?

Sweeping masses of personal revelations.

Which would be really entertaining to poke my head back in for if I hadn't known all of these things before.

Maybe I'm getting jaded. I don't know. But when it comes to the things that people are unconsciously broadcasting within my ability to be aware of it, I want something, you know, surprising. I want the forty-something-family-man to come out and say that he runs guns for Cuba or something, not the guy with the Che Guevara t-shirt and a permanent case of four-day stubble. No, everyone has to come out with personal revelations that I had filed in my brain back a long time ago and didn't bring up because, well, it didn't matter.

For propriety's sake, I'm not getting closer than that, since my trawl back encompassed several things, and just because I consider it not-news doesn't mean it wasn't a big step for the people in question. It just meant that I'd divined it already, and when I get to the end of M. Night Shyamalan's Life Of Livejournal I don't like having come up with the big reveal ten minutes in.

Congratulations for everyone who's stepped out in the recent history for whatever reason. But guys, come on, tell me something to surprise me. That's what you have a personal life for in the first place, right?

We are now, for the most part, in the ending moments of the 2008 election in the United States. History is being made. Barack Obama has won Virginia - and with it the office of President of the United States of America. I've been sitting at my computer watching as the votes have come in, as Virginia and Florida and Indiana started out McCain and then slowly crept toward Obama until the gates finally came down.

And this is a historic moment, without a doubt. After nearly two and a half centuries, our country has elected the first African-American man into the office of president. If projections hold out, Obama is in for a very decisive victory, and the Senate and House are both poised to start swinging the country in a different direction. A large-scale change is in the country's course now, and Obama is just the first and most visible of the many changes taking place all across the country.

Despite all of this? I find myself thinking mostly about John McCain.

I picture him sitting in his nerve center - tired, weary, and hopeful. He's had a staunch goal, a single guiding purpose. For years, he has known what he's here for and what he's going to do, and he knows that despite everything that the pundits say - damn it, this is his time. He is going to make this happen now, finally.

I picture his face as Pennsylvania is called. And then Virginia.

I picture an aging man, a man who has given his all for his nation and its people, a man whose missteps on a campaign trail were borne out of a genuine desire to do right by his country. And I see him sitting, watching, seeing his last chance evaporate.

"No," he must be thinking. "Not like this. This isn't fair."

And it's not.

According to CNN, McCain has now called to concede to his opponent. A call that signals, for him, that years of working and hoping and trying have ultimately ended in defeat.

Whoever you voted for or supported - know that tonight, two good men went against one another, and no matter who won someone was going to lose. No matter who won, a dream and a hope would be put down and lost.

I can't stop thinking about John McCain. I wish it could have ended differently.

Remember the better time in World of Warcraft? Back at patch 1.8?

Back when Mages, Shamans, Rogues, Priests, and Paladins were still using talents that had been based on guesses which proved to be wholly inaccurate? Back when endgame meant doing the same instance with thirty-nine other people over and over with nowhere to go but the same place you were already going? In a time where flightpaths didn't link, Azeroth had no weather, Tier 2 looked like crud, Battlegrounds were single-server, and oh hell just forget it. I have lost interest in even the parody.

Level 60 Love is the finest example of rose-tinted lenses that you can ask for. It is remembering a better time that, frankly, never existed. It is cheerleading to roll back before "everything got ruined forever" without bothering to actually examine what's been "ruined".

It's the assumption that you're out of love with the game because it has changed, not because you just fell out of love with it.

On some level, it's not too hard to identify with. The endgame keeps changing and moving forward and darn it, it's not fair. Unless you are completely cutting edge, odds are you'll get blindsided as soon as the next expansion hits, and all the things you worked on for months are no longer the best of the best. Except it's a logic expecting the game to be beaten at some point, for you to be able to stand up and say "yes, I've totally finished the game now!" and then walk away in triumph.

MMOs don't want you to do that. They're hobbies more than games - particularly game-like hobbies, to be sure, but hobbies all the same.

What is it you want? We want servers that mimic World of Warcraft before any expansions were released, when the level cap was 60. To read more about our goal, visit the Our Goal page. Specifically, the creators of this site would prefer patch 1.8, immediately preceding patch 2.0.

This is funnier when you realize that 1.12 was actually the patch before 2.0. For added humor I have taken their statement at face value.

Why would Blizzard do this? What income can they generate from a move like this? There are several ways Blizzard can justify creating level 60 servers. First, we believe many players that quit WoW would come back if “Classic” servers were available. Secondly, if Blizzard allowed transfer off these servers, that would mean players that want to move on would now need to purchase two expansions to join the other level 80 players. Finally, once players complete the content in Wrath of the Lich King, things will become stagnant again. What better way to retain your player base than allowing them to play on a level 60 server, and experience a whole new realm of content!

"We believe many players... would come back if Classic servers were available."

Think about that for a second.

Then think about the fact that the game recently passed 11 million subscriptions.

Now ask yourself, really - is Blizzard worried right now that their fanbase is eroding? Or are they fairly confident that while they might lose an account here or there, the number keeps going up?

Perfect customer retention is a myth, one that fails when you look at the reality that even if Blizzard let each player create the rules of their individual server they still couldn't keep everyone playing and subscribing. And it's the subscriptions that matter, not the physical buying of the disk. I can go out and get both the base game and the expansion for, what, thirty dollars? Three months of playing and I've made more money for Blizzard than I did by buying the game itself.

And trying to advertise old content as new fails on many levels. It fails at the point that no one, ever, has been convinced by that - people know a rerun is a rerun. It fails when you consider that unlike the new content, there is reams and reams of material on the old content available - enough that with a minimum of effort you can find, execute, and repeat the strategy. And it fails when you realize that if you're running content at the level where you have top-end raids one hundred percent farmed out - everyone has every useful drop in your core raid group - then you are going to be done with the old content just as quickly.

Has this ever been done before? Yes! Because of player demand, the creators of Dark Age of Camelot created an “Origins” server, that reverted the game to it’s “pre-expansion” time.

This neglects to mention that this was after a widely reviled expansion that made huge, sweeping changes to the game to ameliorate the fact that they were hemorrhaging subscribers. The same sort of thing that Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes has done, actually - both games that have struggled to keep their head above water many times, because they made the mistake of trying to court the players who had already left.

Look, if I found out that right now FFXI had changed itself to be everything that WoW is? I wouldn't go back. Because to get me back it has to be more than what I'm replacing with it. All that changes like that do is piss off the people who have stood by you as your game has gone into the ground. Similarly, Vanguard managed to shoot itself in the foot by trying to cater to the more casual crowd... a crowd that had long since left and ignored it, while the crowd that cared was annoyed by the changes.

By contrast, games like EvE have always been very clear on what they are and what they want to be. I can say that I don't like EvE, but its designers haven't tried to redo the whole game to get me back. They figure I've left for my reasons and I'm not worth pissing off their existing subscribers to get back.

WoW is what it is. If you no longer like what it is, it hasn't been a sudden change by any means - they've been steadily realizing what people in general do and don't like about the game, and moving things to accomodate that. The times will change, gear will be outdated, old instances will go unused, just like you don't read your books as often as when you first buy them.

The luster dims, inevitably. Blaming it on anything other than time is foolish, and thinking you can go back again is naive.

It clocks in at a little under 72,000 words, which is too large.

It no doubt has a bunch of scene disjoints from how it was put together.

There are parts that are clunky and should be replaced with something better.

I have underused some good characters and overused some bad ones.

But fuck it all.

I finished writing a goddamn book.

So, we're at almost-release-time for Wrath of the Lich King, and while things are doubtlessly going to change over the next month I think all of they "hey boy wow" bits have dropped by now. Numbers will be tweaked, but the core of what's coming is there. And so I sit back, think, and ask myself - where am I going? Where are my favorite characters going to be when this is all said and done?

Micharan is going to be in a pretty good place. She honestly went in the opposite of the direction I thought she would - rather than getting more DPS, she got more pure utility, but I'm hardly complaining. Her DPS will be solid and versatile, and her healing and replenishment abilities will be well-loved. Not to mention that she'll have honest-to-anything crowd control capacity, which just plain makes me happy. If anything, I'm unhappy about the fact that I think her build at the moment is getting just a bit more filler than I would like and not enough real hard-hitting awesomeness. Play will be required to tweak it, but it is an ultimately minor complaint amidst a sea of being happy with where she is. She will, undeniably, be viable for small and large groups, which is where I wanted her to be but never actually expected her.

Truce, on the flipside, is not quite in a place I like. Which is strange, ultimately, because I've been liking the direction they've been going with her talents and abilities overall. My main things that I don't like aren't about damage, really. She looks more than fine there, and being able to get some more spellcasting out of her is nice. It's just subtle stuff here and there:

• Feral Spirits doesn't feel like an Enhancement talent. It feels like something for Elemental. I got my new melee strike, I can't complain about that and I won't, but Feral Spirits just feels... strange. Important but not really meshing.
  
• There isn't a compelling reason to aim for melee stats over spell ones. Okay, there is, but with the push for Shocks and Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning to be a part of our rotation comes a question of how much is the shaman really relying on that spellcasting? I think we would sort of be in a better place if Lava Burst really didn't work so much as a damage spell as a trigger for Elemental Devestation.
  
• Static Shock just isn't good enough for its placement and cost. I had been thinking that when it first came out, but I figured that there would eventually be a chance bump or an "on crit" effect. Neither happened, and it doesn't feel quite like it justifies its place there. That might just be me.
  

Having said all that, I like the increased synergy of abilities and the actual purpose to having different weapon enchantments, not to mention that we get a form of crowd control. Sure, it's about at Sap levels of utility, but it's better than nothing. So I'm not quite as happy with Truce as I am with Micha.

Telsa is going to be fun. Not just because she's a character whose backstory is still a secret to me, but because tanking with her promises to be odd and different and engaging. I've got ideas in my head of what it will look like, but all in all it promises to be an experience unique to tanks. I can't quite explain why I'd rather do Frost with her rather than another option, except that I'm not much of a pet person and I have people who heavy physical DPS already. Frost seems a bit more unique, in context.

Kirlia has been getting pretty much an unabated string of love this whole time. When she is not being distracted by shiny things, she will be well served by her talents. I continue speccing Arcane because, well, it's the strangest tree and it's the one that I like the most. Fire would probably work better for what I use her for, sure, but why would I break the trend?

And... then there are a bunch of other characters that don't quite make top-billing for various reasons. Chiefly my warrior and "pet vendor" (okay, he's a hunter, but he's got a real Elim Garak routine going).

This is for one person's benefit, and one person's benefit alone. You are warned.

So, Luke, if you're reading this, shoot me an e-mail because I seem to have misplaced the one I had for you (or mistyped it, or it's outdated - either way it's bouncing). I would like to catch up.

When I first came back, I was afraid.

World of Warcraft had been the only game that I'd stopped playing for reasons other than disliking the game itself. Final Fantasy XI, Guild Wars, City of Heroes... I broke up with those girls because I wasn't interested in dating them any longer, not because I didn't get along with their parents, to use an obtuse analogy. So there was fear when I went back to Warcraft again, that I would be driven away by the same things that had pushed me off the first time. I tried to leave it behind and start again, start all over, take things in from a different angle.

To my surprise, it caught. I kept playing, and then I started in with Elaine as well. The fear diminished quickly, and how quickly my reluctance became enthusiasm and comfort. Because it'd be wrong to call Azeroth anything but comforting, even at the worst of times. Once you've invested enough time and effort in, there's a massive feeling of accomplishment and inalienable privilege. Nothing can take your epic mount, or epic flyer, or anything of the sort away from you, barring someone hacking your account. The world is maleable.

You are in control. And there is always more to do, always more mountains to climb, enemies to kill, bosses to down, recipes to learn, and so on.

And it became a blanket. Which is fine when you need to keep yourself warm for a bit, but not so great when you really need to get out of bed, look around, and figure out what's going on from here on out. It's an easy and perfectly safe escape, one so easy to justify that it becomes habit. Justify and forget, and be someone else, whether or not you roleplay.

Tonight I had to take a hard look at myself, look inward more closely than I had in quite some time. I looked and I realized that I had turned from someone with a variety of interests into someone who had one real interest alone, that my life was being deformed by the pull exerted by playing other people's lives. When I looked forward to the expansion, I didn't think it would be fun - I hoped it would make things fun again.

And that was what hit me completely. It had stopped being fun on its own merits. Each accomplishment had started to be less fun and more of a momentary sense of triumph before moving on to the next accomplishment. What I wanted from the expansion was to inject fun into something I now found tedious. Yet more time and effort and emotion got shuffled into that void anyway, and the pattern wasn't going to get easier when the link was severed, because it would just reveal how much had atrophied into nothing in the time that had been consumed. There was a distinct slope and I was on it.

When I sprang into action, when I saw who I was and what I needed to do, I knew that one of the first things I had to do was end it. Cancel. Opt out. Let it stop now, before I had another set of goals to bounce toward without stopping to think about it.

I almost hesitated when it came time to cut the bond. I didn't want to leave it all behind, after all...

But I couldn't, not really. Micharan Dawnsworn, Truce Sokolov, Kirlia Gorran, Erbium Sorge, all the rest alive and dead - they weren't going to leave me. They can't be taken from me any longer. Whether or not I log in ever again, they remain deep within me, their stories a part of my memory, their traits and the ideas behind them bound to who I am. They walked with heroes, they walked as legends, they changed the world around them.

Now it was time for me to change the world around me. I canceled without hesitation after all.

Oh, maybe we'll change our minds in a couple days, but the bottom line is that I am in control. I am not afraid of being in control any longer, not afraid of breaking that bond.

I'm not scared of what I have to do to rebuild.

Okay. First, I'm going to link an entry. The rest of this entry is going to be talking about that, okay? I encourage everyone to go and read it first and form your own opinion, because this is going to be something that triggered in my mind after reading something about seven years old now. I am using that entry as a type specimen, as an illustration of a concept rather than trying to tie it to someone specific. For all I know, the person who wrote it has grown up and gone past that. Still, read what I linked.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the type specimen of a passive-aggressive wimp.

Understand something - I was friends with Elaine without any romance for many years when I was in love with her. I went through many years of her being with Steve and talking about him without a complaint or a protest, or even any bitterness toward her.

If she took something I said and used it in service of her relationship? Well, folks, I had given that to her. She wasn't beholden to some idea I had in my head. I was her friend despite being smitten with her because I had made a conscious decision that amounted to "she doesn't want me as more than a friend, and I'm a big enough person to just be that friend."

There was no outmaneuvering. Any bitterness I felt toward Steve was the same sort that you feel toward someone who gets the last copy of the book you want to buy because they were there first. I promised myself that if I couldn't be her friend legitimately, if I couldn't keep myself from pining after her hopelessly and started resenting her for that, that it would be time to stop being her friend because I was crossing a line.

She couldn't betray my affections, because I didn't speak them or act upon them, because I had made a choice I knew then and now was the right one. I loved her, and sure, it hurt at times - but love means that you want someone to be happy, and if you can't give them happiness you want them to be with someone who can.

But, of course, there's always the alternative. There's always the option to assume that the other person must know how you feel, and they would feel the same way if they weren't involved with some horrible demon who doesn't deserve them and isn't nearly as good as you are. Just make a long list of your imaginary rival's negative qualities - and that rival is imaginary, all right, not because said rival doesn't exist but because they aren't your rival. You aren't in competition with them. You've never even been in the running, due in no small part to the fact that you've neither stated that you want to be in the running nor stopped to consider that your opposition might actually have positive qualities you lack.

Evaluate, and act. Either make your feelings clear or choose not to, deal with it or don't. But don't act like there's some horrible, arbitrary nonsense guiding the universe that placed someone you like with another person. It's only arbitrary so long as you let things happen without trying to guide the course of events.

If you don't do anything, nothing slips away. You give it away by your own inaction.

So, everyone knows that Kris Straub is one of my favorite people in comics, right? If not, well, there you are.

Now, unfortunately, I've been out of date on Starslip Crisis, which I have also plugged here before. However, you now have the excellent opportunity to get on the ground floor of something he's doing, because reading through all of Chainsawsuit won't hardly take half an hour, and it's a blend of what has always made Straub funny with the sort of off-the-cuff humor you'd expect from what seems to amount to a doodle comic.

It reminds me of Perry Bible Fellowship and Wonderella at times. Those are both good things.

(If today's strikes you a bit slow, start with the mentioned strip and then go backwards. Then forwards. Just read it. Jeez.)

You know what sucks?

Realizing that you have arrived at exactly the ending you have set up so far over the course of the story... and realizing that ending sucks.

That is what I am looking at, here. This ending is running along great for the first couple of scenes, and then it utterly loses the acidic touch that it needs to keep itself thematically appropriate. And I know why I sculpted it in that way, because hell, by the end of the book you feel pretty damn sorry for the protagonist. She's done a lot of awful things to decent people because she's been operating on poor or incomplete information, done a lot of awful things to herself for the same reason, and she deserves something decent happening by the end.

But this isn't it. This isn't what she needs, and she deserves a better lot than to have this ending. She deserves something actually good, not a lukewarm half-baked "yeah I guess this is okay" ending.

Which means really gouging into a lot of what I've done so far. Cool.

After Elaine and I got back from the zoo, I was doing my usual web trawl when I noticed that someone at Wowhead was apparently using their time during the Wrath hands-on to copy down all of the current talent information. That meant that they now had totally legit talent calculators in place based off the current Alpha talents.

So, once I got done figuring out my shaman's new spec (and she gets to be an even bigger fat cracklin' bag of power in Wrath, it seems), I started looking at the Death Knight trees.

It doesn't make sense. None of the dang trees do anything. They're all full of things that can be nabbed for tanking or for DPS or crowd control, and it's all insane and crazy and makes the class look like one of the most versatile hybrids ever. I can't even start figuring out how all of this is supposed to work, it's brain-shatteringly different. I can already see the changes they've wrought in the new Warrior trees, for instance, making Protection more viable for solo and giving you an excuse to dip into Fury and such, but... this is crazy. This is bizarre, it's truly unbelievable.

Well done, Blizzard. Well done.

Now, back to figuring out how the screw all of this fits together.

This is a gigantic load of horsepucky.

I say this... well, partly because "horsepucky" is really funny to say. Go on, try it. You get that "uck" sound, which is really pleasant and cathartic, hence everyone's favorite four-letter word... and you also get "horse", which is just weird to twist your tongue around. So I'll use most any excuse for that word.

But I also say this because this article is a grand case of missing the point. Not even missing the point. It can't even see the point. The point is seven miles away and calling on a payphone, but this article left its cell at home and so it's not going to see the point for another good week or three. The abstract, unless I'm doing some grotesque misreading here, is "why are the deities and religions of WoW so absent?"

To which the answer is "they're not."

There is nothing but nothing stopping you from playing a Light-fearing religion dwarf, or the equivalent of a deist draenei, or an atheistic blood elf, or a spiritualist troll, et cetera, et cetera. Agatha (Elaine's main rogue) is devout to an almost scary point, and the hypocrisy of what she claims to believe compared to what she does is a major facet of her character. Her Horde main, Qin, was a leader of a cult. Truce is a religious leader by dint of being a practiced and dedicated shaman. It doesn't have any in-game benefits, no, but we'll get to that in a second.

You see acts of supposed gods in Warcraft any time you level a Priest, or a Shaman, or a Paladin or a Druid. Pretty much every damn thing they do is something that they would point to and say "there, act of Elune/the Light/the spirits/Cenarius." You don't have any proof because once Elune shows up and explicitly does something, it stops being a religion. Once you can confirm with certainty who or what is a real deity and what isn't, then you no longer have the ambiguity necessary for faith and piety. You just have a clear set of facts to decide whose orders you should obey - since worship is no longer relevant, when your deity just tells you what to do.

Why can't you pray for an in-game effect? The whole point of praying is that it's a way of trying to bring certainty into an uncertain situation. We pray for guidance and in hopes of seeing some pattern in things. Taking the uncertainty out of religion defeats the whole purpose of it.

Long story short - if religion isn't a major part of your character's life, then that means you are failing to place that in your roleplaying agenda for that character. And if you aren't roleplaying in the first place, what the hell would religion be relevant for anyway?

Asking "what would you do with Class X" in Warcraft is boring. Either you play Class X and would give it something broken in some fashion, or you don't play Class X and would give it something based on a totally flawed assumption.

Asking "what changes would you make to existing class balance" in Warcraft is also boring, because it becomes the above question writ large. The classes you play get some boosts, the ones you don't get ignored.

But asking "what would you do if you were allowed to remake all nine classes from the ground up while keeping their fundamental mechanics intact"? What would you do if you could remake everything knowing what you know now?

That is an interesting question. And I think I might have an interesting set of answers for it.

Stolen from likeiwassaying, here's ten things I would tell the me of five years ago, back at age 20 in the summer of '03.

1. Ditch the horse. If you have to wait for Elaine, do it. If you have to look for better, do it. But you don't really like her, and all this time is just getting you comfortable with settling. Do better.
2. It's time to stop doing the serial format. You aren't getting the feedback you want, and it isn't doing the right things for your writing. Sit on these ideas for a while. The good ones will keep anyway.
3. Lose the beard. Trim it down to a goatee.
4. Stop pretending to give a crap about things you don't give a crap about. It's only hurting you in the long run.
5. Start planning for the long-term instead of the right now. It's closer than you think.
6. In seven months you are going to face a choice. If you get involved, there will be moments of beauty mixed in with a whole lot of garbage, and ultimately you're not going to be forever there anyway. You might want to start thinking about which option is really better right now.
7. When you get FFXI, just play a White Mage.
8. He's a better friend than you think. Try to be better about not losing touch.
9. Leave the anime club. It's been a long time since you cared.
10. Spend a bit less money, would you? You don't even like Star Wars, leave the game on the shelf.

On a slightly related note, a conversation from Elaine and I yesterday:

Elaine: "When I get old, I want to be so grizzled that I -"
Me: "You can't be grizzled. We're going to be married, it doesn't work."
Elaine: "Well, I meant after you died."
Me: "All of my plans involved you dying first, and me being an attractively stern older widower."
Elaine: "Oh, I get it. You wanted a hot younger wife."
Me: "Now that's not true. My plans didn't include marrying her."

On the eighteenth of March, 2006, Elaine sent me an e-mail that was sweet enough to still make me tear up a bit at reading it. We hadn't spoken in two months, and before that we hadn't spoken in six or seven, because we had realized that we were in love and she was not going to throw away the relationship she was in just like that. And I understood and respected that, but I also wasn't going to stand around waiting for something that may or may not happen. So she sent me a letter, on March 18th, 2006, saying things that I had wanted to hear for six years but hadn't expected she would ever said.

"No one makes me laugh like you do. No one understands me like you do. No one stimulates me emotionally and mentally like you do, Eliot Lefebvre. You have been my soul friend for the past six years, and an integral part of my identity. I love you and miss you, and I am afraid to see you, although I want to so badly... I have been in relationships constantly since I was fifteen years old. Now may be the time for me to break that cycle and discover myself. But I can't get you off of my mind.

I need my growth. But I need my best friend, too. I need to hear you laugh again. I need to hear you quote online comics incessantly (even though that drove me crazy sometimes!), and play video games with me again. Just to see your face will make me smile. I am going through an extremely dark time in my life right now, and you have always been a ray of sunshine to me.

I can't live without you in my life, either as friends or as more than that.

Please let me see your face again."

That was part of it. Not all, but part of it. I've saved it, because it matters, and because ironically enough it wasn't that that got us talking, but the fact that she couldn't wait until I happened to see it to talk to me.

So she called me, and told me she had sent it, then waited until after I'd read it and called her back. Which shouldn't have been romantic, but it was anyway.

We were friends again. But we weren't. We couldn't undo when we finally realized that we were in love, after all. Even from the first moment that we were speaking again, it wasn't quite the same as it had been before - there was more. There was love, there was hugging and kissing and an understanding that went beyond just friendship. I had known Elaine so long, through good times and bad, and I couldn't separate myself from her. I knew that then, even though she didn't want a relationship yet, and so we stayed friends in title.

On May 27th, we finally stopped pretending to ourselves. Not to the outside world, maybe, but we both look back and agree that it was then that we finally stopped trying to convince ourselves that we were just friends, if only for just a moment. The moment passed, and we tried to keep pretending, and kept saying we weren't dating... and for a few months, everyone got to watch us not date with the intensity that most people reserve for engagement ceremonies.

I forget what day we looked at each other and finally decided that claiming we weren't going out just wasn't funny any more. And we both agreed that that day didn't matter, because it was the 27th, two years ago today, that we really crossed the threshold into a relationship beyond friendship.

That was two years ago. Two years of work, effort, triumphs, failures, arguments, rage, resentment, compassion, resolution, growth, hurt, hope, and most of all love. I've had to grow in ways that I wouldn't have thought I was capable of before, discarding things that I thought were absolute necessities for myself, things I realized only belatedly were just crutches. I've learned to stand on my own in ways I hadn't been able to, I've found new goals, I've overcome fears.

But I wouldn't have if I hadn't been with her. Because she's my best friend, and Elaine won't let me settle for second best, or for just good enough. We push each other, stretch each other further and stronger, and have managed to take six years of friendship and meld it into two years of love and intimacy and make the whole thing work. Sometimes it's awkward, sometimes it's stuttering, but it hangs together through everything.

I am not drunkenly happy, though I have been at times. I am soberly, calmly, and completely in love, and content and happy with the progress of my life with the woman I love. And I couldn't be happier to be celebrating two years with her today.

Here's to proving everyone who knew us in college right.

Will moving make everything okay?

Sometimes I do get scared that my relationship with Elaine is past its peak and it doesn't really work any longer. After all, we've been together for two years, known each other for nearly eight (almost a third of my life), danced back and forth on being in love and being together and a lot of other things. What if I'm just deluding myself? What if I'm trying to make things work and pretending that I do when they don't, when sooner or later it's all going to fall apart?

A lot changes in a few years, after all. Maybe we've just grown apart or distant from one another. It's happened before with people I've known, after all. And it's a worry that isn't spurred by anything except, well, being me, which makes it even harder to attack where it lives (so to speak).

I tried to make things work with Erin, after all. And then I tried to make things work with Holly. And the one downside to having a limited sample size like that is that, really, every comparison gets really stark. Elaine has the same problem - worse, even, with only one long-term relationship to use for comparison. And we've both had to deal with it, time and again, the feeling that maybe we've screwed up before and we're just going to screw it all up again.

And so I sit here, wondering - are we moving just to make things work? Are we trying to grab at one last moment of a failing relationship? Is this the end for our heroes?

Then, of course, I think about what maybe the biggest difference is between now and then. Put simply - I'm comfortable.

I'm comfortable with Elaine and I doing things together. I'm comfortable with us doing things apart. I'm comfortable with us agreeing on things and with us disagreeing. I'm comfortable with working with her, and I'm comfortable doing my own thing. I'm comfortable being honest about what I think is interesting or neat, and I'm comfortable being honest about what I don't find interesting. I don't feel like I have to endure things with her - I experience them, I revel in them, I enjoy them.

With Erin, there was a clear distinction between the things I wanted to fill my life with and, well, her. Erin was an accessory at best, a decoration, an add-on. I'd say "trophy wife", but she wasn't much of a trophy.

With Holly, I couldn't relax. Parts of that were her fault, parts of that were mine, and parts of that were just the situation under which we met and under which our relationship developed. And it's really too bad, because while I don't think we ever would have been right for one another, we could have been better together.

But with Elaine? I'm comfortable. I'm okay with her being asleep in the next room and me still being awake, and vice versa. I think of her and I smile, because while we have our ups and downs and our little spats, at the end of the day I know that neither of us is going anywhere because we suit one another. There had been discomfort and tension in our relationship when we were friends, but it came from trying to deny what we felt about one another. Once we stopped pretending, it evaporated, more or less.

I can't think of anyone else I'd rather have at my side as we move. We ended up where we needed to be together, and I don't regret a moment of it.

Moving day is Saturday. Although, to be fair, we have our current apartment until the end of the month, so it's not as if we have to quite do the full-court press, if you will.

Mass Effect is apparently dropping for the PC on the 28th. I'm trying to decide if I need to squeeze it into my budget right away, or if I can wait for a little bit. Either way, I'm very excited about this. Knights of the Old Republic single-handedly made me think that the Star Wars franchise was not altogether inherent crap, so it should be quite interesting to see what they (read: Bioware) do with a world of their own devising.

And I know, I could have looked all of this up ages ago. But I haven't. I've taken a look at little detail bits of the world, but I have somehow remained wholly ignorant as to what goes on beyond the fact that there's a main character who needs to go Save the Dairy Bar. (Every game, ever, devolves into "save the area most important to the main character from destruction. So, I now summarize this as 'Save the Dairy Bar', because it's funnier that way.) Oh, and there's apparently some girls kissing if you like that sort of thing, I guess. I'll stick with the straight and narrow, thanks.

I would point out here that my character in KotOR, despite being played when I was notably younger, was fully heterosexual, so it's not a recent thing. But that would be solely for the purpose of pointing out that the only character that she could have been romantically involved with that was the same gender she actually killed without bothering to recruit into the party. Actually, I didn't realize until my second playthrough how many people I could have allowed to live to see the end of the game, but eh. Ruthless works.

I was going to tell my brother to take his meme and stuff it, since that's kind of my thing, but I decided to really break form and actually do it. Seven songs I'm interested in right now. Whatever.

1. Breath (Breaking Benjamin)
I've been a fan of Breaking Benjamin for a while, in a very light sort of way - I think they make songs that really tug at a certain emotion quite well, and it's cathartic to indulge in a bit of overwrought anger and resentment at the world for a while. If you don't like the other things they do, you won't like this one. If you do, it's more of the same. I just like it a bit more than most.

2. The Mayor of Pussytown (Adam Sandler)
I've heard this one over and over, and yet it still at least makes me grin every single time.

3. Bleeding Love (Leona Lewis)
There are two parts of my brain that sound off on this one. The first points out that it is what amounts to an American Idol song, with all of the substance you'd expect from that, with nothing redeeming about it but an engaging melody, inoffensive lyrics, and decent vocals. The damn thing is catchy, though, and I'm a sucker for melodies that sound like they're building to something.

(Also, as a footnote to anyone reading this, I had absolutely no idea of Ms. Lewis's ethnicity until I looked the song up on Wikipedia. There's a point to be made about British cultural integration here, I know it.)

4. Goodbye to Carolina (Lyle Lovett)
My dad introduced me to Lyle, and this song still remains the essential song when you're moving, I believe. I sang it when I moved out of UCONN, I sang it when I moved out of East Hampton, I'll be singing it when we move out of here. Situational, sure, but it's on my mind lately.

5. Mole From the Ministry (XTC as the Dukes of Stratosphear)
This one is kind of an odd pick, as since Elaine introduced me to them I've generally had at least one XTC song running through my head at various points through the day. This week, it's this one.

6. Don't Let Us Get Sick (Warren Zevon)
Moving also usually brings the stew of worries I call an emotional state to a boil. This song calms me down.

7. Walk of Life (Dire Straits)
My musical to-do list reads something like this:
- Get some Dire Straits albums.
- Get Elaine to like Dire Straits better.
- Also get that BNL album you're missing.