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I am here in DC and it is snowing. I thought being DC where it snows more then once a year it would not affect the drivers here the same way… boy was I wrong. So here I am new wife miles and miles away and I am stuck in traffic watching it snow.
Saturday was kind of a blur. First, thank you to every one who made it. Even though I did not get much time to see all of you, it was very important to have you there. Second, there are many more people I wish could be there. Time, space and money not being factors… but alas that ‘finite universe’ concept… Third, I am now a husband. K was the most beautiful bride I have ever seen.
I was very happy with everything. We had few requirements about how we wanted things. They were:
Our wedding be in a church
Our friends and family be there
It be pretty
We be married when is was over
Thinking back, some very simple decisions made things much better. We wanted a church we would make a home. This meant visiting churches and making lists of what we liked and disliked. It took us a couple of weeks to find one we really liked. The church we decided on made a big difference in ways we had not even thought about at the time.
Some friends of ours had a stage manager for their wedding. This is a person with a clipboard and a watch to keep all the players on time. We asked Linnea to handle this job. There is not enough room on my wed server to tell you all the things she just handled. She ran things with grace and charm. K’s father said it was the best run wedding he had ever seen. I can not tell you how much that meant.
Last and best in my mind is that we married the right person.
Well it is days away now. Last night it officially started. Our wedding is underway. My father called last night to say he was in town. The relatives are arriving and things are moving very fast now. We are mostly ready. The loose ends left are things like picking up tuxedos, getting food for the luncheon and organizing flowers delivery and storage. In the last 5 months, we have spent countless hours writing thank you, shopping for gifts, making lists, talking to very kind of wedding related business person. The end result will be a service in a nice church, a reception with friends, and a piece of paper that says K and I are man and wife. As a good friend said, I am already going to spend the rest of my life with this woman, now I just have to tell everyone.
What is your gateway game? Everyone has one. For some people it is Tetris for others it is Sims or Age of King or Halo or even driving games. For me it was Civ. Civilization is a turned based world building game. You are the leader of a tribe of people who have just invented fire and you goal is to land on another planet. Alone the way you have technologies to research, cities to build and of course other civilizations to destroy.
I remember one night playing a whole game in one sitting. At the end of the game it announced, “You have defeated the world in just 19 hour and 36 minutes.” Many nights I would sit down to play for a couple of minutes and end up watching the sun come up. I know the deep dread of knowing that you have to be to work in 2 hours and have not yet destroyed the Mongols.
If play online games, no doubt you have heard of Worlds of Warcraft. This game shared game of the year honors with Microsoft’s Halo 2, this despite being out only a month before the end of the year voting. Now, before you say well it is just a computer game, you should know computer games have been out selling movie tickets for several years. Electronic Arts is a bigger entertainment company then Disney.
The game was release November 23rd. Within the first day, over 200,000 players created World of Warcraft accounts. By 5:00 p.m. that day, over 100,000 were playing the game concurrently. That was 8 hours after it became available. Around December 8th I bought my copy.
… what follows is just one of the experiences…
So, I on the realm one night… My 17th level dwarven hunter is in Darkshore completing quests and leveling. I have just trained a new pet, a saber toothed cat, and I have named Sammy. The quest I on has me looking for some ruins south of Auberdine. I had been walking along the hills, mining copper as I searched, when I spotted something strange. I saw players with red names running across the road. I had never seen player names in red. Green names meant one thing and blue meant something, but red names?
So head down to see what they were. Then it hit me. I had been watching my combat log while playing with the new pet. Any messages from other players would come though on my command log. I switch over to the command log and found it was full of players yelling we are under attack! These where HORDE! The area of Darkshore was under attack! I am standing in the middle of a war.
Running down the hill I spotted about 4 dark elves facing off this huge towering figure. It was a Tauren Druid and he was flattening them with this mace as big as I am. The 4 dark elves were not doing well. I had no options to heal them so I did what hunters do. As I raised my blunderbuss to target him, he turned and ran away at a speed that left us standing there watching him run. In the time it took for me to raise my gun the 4 elves had died.
Someone shouted to lay a hunters mark their healer, this would allow everyone to see where he was. If they could kill the healer the raiders would have to retreat. Just then, I saw a Troll Shaman hiding, yes he was hiding, behind a tree. I targeted him and placed a Hunters mark on him. Off went my cat to get his attention. Checking his level it showed up as ??, that meant he was high enough that I had no chance to defeat him, oh no. As I pondered what I just got my self into I saw a flash of light! With one strike the Shaman had hit me for most of my health. I turned to run… too late...
As I released my spirit to return to the land of the living, I saw a thank you from the chat channel for the brave little Dwarf who spotted their healer.
I must have danced around the room for 15 minutes. There have been many night of staying up past my bed time exploring a world of things that go bump in the night. Before you laugh at me remember, there is a gateway game out there for everyone. First one is free.