I remember when World of Warcraft, more commonly known as WoW, first came out.  I resisted the call of my nerdy peers to partake in the MMORPG.  I knew the probability of addiction was too high to risk.  So I avoided it, and justified that I wasn’t willing to pay to own a game, as well as play it.  Then the first expansion came out, the gaming audience grew ever further as word of mouth spread and people go their friends in on the addiction.  Still, I avoided the call.

Then I got a roommate that plays.  It seemed that no matter where I turned there was WoW.  People at work raving over the game, then at home it was the same thing.  I couldn’t get away from the subculture of the WoW gamer.  The temptation grew.

I screwed up by allowing myself to be talked into trying a “free server”.  I assumed that the novelty would wear off quickly, after all how many quests can you really do before you just get bored?  The server was glitchy and problematic so I stepped away for a little while.  The seed had been planted.

A few weeks later I finally folded.  I bought the combined Chest of WoW and the Burning Crusades expansion.  From that fatal moment I became invested.  So I did the refer-a-friend program, linked my account to my roommate’s and am enjoy triple… let that sink in for a moment… yes TRIPLE xp while leveling to 60.  OMFG I’m so hooked.  We play constantly, I’ve learned all the little sub-cultural references and am a bubble-whore priest.  You can search my toon on the WoW armory, level 64 she’s a Holy Specced Priest for Enigma.

For the others out there, wondering is it worth it?  Is it worth the investment of time, money, and social life?  F*ck yes!! Dude I am pwnin the noobs with the uberl33t hax with the wtf omg ftw…. roflmao.

For the Alliance!

I love it when people say: Wow it was so warm out yesterday and today it’s 30 degrees cooler!  I bet everyone gets sick!

Well in reality, the weather has NOTHING to do with whether you get sick or not.  Yes our mothers and grandmothers always told us to wear a hat and coat in the cold weather to keep from catching a cold, but technically, it doesn’t really help that much.

Germs, i.e. bacteria and virus are what get you sick, fungi as well believe it or not.

Why do people seem to get sick in the colder months? Because our immune system is over-stressed and can be caught off guard, thus allowing germs to take root in our bodies. 

What is the easiest way to combat these baddies?  WASHING YOUR HANDS OFTEN AND THOROUGHLY.  I can’t say this enough, the amount of times I see some dude/kid walk away from a urinal or out of a stall in  a public men’s room only to check their hair in the mirror and REACH FOR THE DOOR HANDLE on the way out without even rinsing their hands.  That’s right, these guys go from holding their man meat, right to grabbing the door handle and out they go.

Disgusting isn’t it?  Yeah this is why I have never touched the handle of a door in a men’s room in my adult life.  I use either a paper towel or sometimes my shirt if no paper towels are available (stupid electric hand dryers).

I keep a bottle of hand sanitizer in my car and in my office at work, I make sure not to touch my face or put my fingers in my mouth for any reason (unless washing my hands first).

I bet your probably thinking:  ”This guy is pretty anal about this whole germ thing!”

Well you are right, I am… I missed 2 days from work last week due to a bad chest/head cold, and I have no idea how I got it, noone else in the household was sick, just me so I probably got something from either the public or from work (where half the guys dont wash their hands after pissing).

Do us all a favor, wash your hands several times a day, cover your mouth when you cough/sneeze and if you are sick, DON’T COME TO WORK!

A bit of a back story:  My father and I have similar likes and dislikes when it comes to music.  I.E. classic rock, 80s hair bands, metal, you get the idea.

On Sunday whilst on the way to the bowling alley, we were in my car flipping through the stations trying to find something decent to listen to.  As always I became frustrated at the horrible amount of CRAP radio that has saturated modern radio stations lately.  Every station that claims to be “THE” Classic Rock station, is nothing more than a carbon copy of the next one, playing the same 3-4 songs from The Eagles, 38 Special, Molly Hatchet, Ozzy, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the like. Here and there they will mix in some Led Zep, or Metallica to try and appeal to the “heavier” crowd.

Sickening, because the classic rock stations around here are essentially “southern” rock with a dash of decent music thrown in.  Yeah… I may be ranting but I absolutely hate it.  

So people say: “Go buy an XM radio!” well I can’t justify that being that I only drive about 8 miles to work and don’t really travel all that much.  

But I found an alternative!!  Some time ago I was searching around for some Internet Radio, originally I was using Shoutcast stations via Winamp, but I found a similar trend, the stations played the SAME songs over and over, just like broadcast radio.  

Someone told me to try out Pandora.

All I can say is WOWZERS! The premise is:  you think of an artist, or song that you like, create a “station” using that information, and Pandora does the rest!  For example, I created a station with the band Cinderella (80s hair band), the first song it plays is a Cinderella song, then it starts playing songs from artists that are similar (Slaughter, Skid Row, Scorpions, Ratt) AND more Cinderella songs.  

The true beauty of Pandora is the ability to make your stations even better via the ability to tell the station whether you like or dislike a song on the fly. So if a song that you don’t want to hear comes up, you simply hit the thumbs down button, and Pandora will never play that song on that station again!  Vise versa, if you DO like the song, you hit the thumbs up button, and it will play more frequently. 

The simplicity of it really is what makes it so enjoyable.  I have the Pandora app on my Iphone and love it as well.  There are some advertisements on the interface, but nothing imposing or annoying.  

Go give it a shot!

Most people don’t know but I had a Cornea Transplant in January 2007, since then the vision in my left eye has been about 20/2000 (yes 2 thousand) with glasses. I recently went back to the eye doctor and got a new perscription.

After trying on like 100 pairs of frames, I finally decided on one made by Levi’s of all things. Anywho, I can see about 20/40 in my left eye now with these new specs, and am having a hell of a time actually focusing on anything. The Dr. said I’d have to retrain my brain to use my left eye and I can already tell it’s going to be hard.

Well here is a pic I took with my iPhone:

So TempleCon was a great first experience for us convention virgins. We learned some new games, met some cool people and overall had a great time. If you ever find yourself in Warwick R.I. make sure to get off at exit 10, take 117 East and ask someone where Nick’s Diner is… there’s no sign. Nick makes some awesome food and his one man operation makes the costs just as great. 

The Biltmore Hotel was neat. It has some great architecture and really nice Valet drivers. Overall though, for being as historical, expensive, and famous as it is, it felt rundown. The Convention pretty much dominated the entire hotel. Some of the cool vendors were Rivendell Games, Heather V. Kreiter; C.J. Henderson to name a few. There were also some really cool guys working a place called the Tomb, they make custom fangs all kinds of art, and sold games. 

A quick look at some of the games we played (because Blindman LOVES his lists):

Munchkins- always a classic!

ZombieFluxx- this was really really fun and I recomend the Fluxx games for anyone.

Gloom- Ever wanted to kill your whole family? Gloom lets you do just that! In fact, you have to kill them if you want to win.

Shadows Over Camelot- One we were already familiar with but was great to join in on and play with a full cast. Fckin traitors won.

In order to avoid the hell that was NYC, we drove an extra hour out of the way and went west on I84 and cut down home from Scranton, PA. As a side note: Scranton is a really pretty area once you get past the city and back into the mountainous countryside.

Coastal Beach in Warwick, Rhode Island

So we left at around 6pm EST Thursday night to head out on the 8hr drive to Warwick, RI. The route took us up through Maryland, over and east through Pennsylvania, on to New Jersey and then… well then we entered the twilight zone, the seventh level of hell and Abadon all in one- also know as New York. 

Now for those of you who have never had the pleasure, the thrill, the glory of risking their life by driving around New York City… don’t. We got on I78 and dumped on to I95. The list of things that are horrible:

1. Horribly riddled road system- the exits appear and disappear at the drop of a hat.

2. 8 dollars to go over a gddam bridge!- Why in the F Scott Fitzgerald anyone should pay 8 dollars to go over a bridge is freaking beyond me, it’s unfathomable. 

3. NY drivers WANT TO KILL YOU- They refuse to use blinkers, they go 80mph in a 45mph zone, they cut you off, they don’t move over on merge lanes EVEN THE FREAKING TRACTOR TRAILERS SWERVE AROUND LIKE A FLAG IN THE WIND!!

4. Hope you get gas before you get to the city- the only real gas stations take you off the interstate and into the city, yeah… you have fun with that.

Then there is Connecticut… in mind’s eye Connecticut is always with pristine and beautiful state with glorious countryside… until you get into a bathroom that tells you to beware the sanitation due to hookers. The other problem with Connecticut is THEY DRIVE LIKE FCKING NEW YORKERS!

Rhode Island is kind of refreshing, it seems rather sprawling. However, like the rest of the region known as New England the roads make no sense whatsoever and they refuse to say words with an AR combination correctly. It’s a MART not a MAWT.

More to follow as I post up pictures and information about the gaming!

Probably one of the funnier “commercials” out of SNL or Saturday Night Live in quite a while.

Enjoy:

Ok so I am a first-person gamer at heart, I started there with Wolfenstein back in the 90s, and have played virtually EVERY FPS released since then (on PC, not consoles, gamepads FTL).  My favs have usually been Online team based games like TFC, Tribes (1,2), BF2142, Planetside, you get the picture.

 I enjoyed the Call of Duty series quite a bit, starting with the original and CoD2, I skipped CoD3 because it was made by a different dev shop, but CoD4 was awesome.  Fast Forward to Call of Duty: World at War and BAM! they make a very smart move (in my opinion) and go back to the WWII genre. 

Well I haven’t finished the single player campaign, but I am quite far in.  The game bounces you between two characters, one is an American Marine PFC that participates in assaults on targets in the Pacific, and the other a Russian that starts out like a Vasily Zaytsev (a la Enemy at the Gates) in Stalingrad.  

The missions are very diverse covering sniping, forward assault, sabotage, squad combat and moving to a few vehicle missions like tanks and aircraft.  Following in the footsteps of the Call of Duty franchise, you get a very immersed feeling of war in the game with comrades falling and the death cries of the enemy when you shoot them in the gut.

Graphics are on par with CoD 4 but I feel the scenery is a bit more refined. All in all its a spectacular game, and I am enjoying every aspect of single player mode. 

Webcomics are great. When you find yourself bored while online but with nothing particularly better to do (especially on a slow work day) web comics provide a world of entertainment to get lost in.  Best of all, there is pretty much a webcomic for every genre of interest that can be imagined.  Here’s a quick list of some of my favorites:

Ctrl+Alt+DEL- This is a great gamer comic that has been around a LONG time, which means plenty of archives to read when you’re bored.

Little Gamers- obviously a gamer comic as well, although really they don’t discuss a lot of games so it’s kind of like Seinfeld a comic that’s not really about anything.

AFBlues- A military comic about the world of pilots, a great comic, but even better if you’ve been in the military.

Cyanide & Happiness- Foul, vulgar, and freaking hilarious. There really isn’t a running story here, but it’s definitely funny.

Looking for Group and Least I Could Do- They are completely unrelated EXCEPT that the guy that writes LFG is also part of the LICD team.  The first is an RPG comic, the second is a story about a manwhore. Both are great.

So that’s my quick list, if you’d like to find more you can search by your favorite categories after you sign up (free) for an account at this site.

Ok so I updated my “Myspace” page and finally signed up for “Facebook”.  I’m really not much into these types of sites but I guess if everyone else is doing it, I better get with the program!

Anywho (I say that alot don’t I?) go ahead and see what they look like, feel free to comment and whatnot.

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/gmoooney  

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1000607052&hiq=gregory,hubey
Meanwhile here is a pic of me at the New Years Eve party we had at East Islip Bowl in Long Island: