…Aw fuck

I don't have any actual animosity towards this kid. I do think it's funny that so many people express such intense dislike for him. To me, he's a non-entity, and I probably wouldn't recognize him if I saw him on the street without a throng of weeping tween girls.

[Edit: WordPress gets wonky when adding pictures with captions. By wonky, I mean, it likes to chop out chunks of  an intro, like this introductory paragraph that Beiber gobbled up. If my post seemed like it was starting out in the middle of a conversation, that’s because it was. Sorry about the mix-up!]

I was happily going about my weekend, doing things that I do. I got my Shadowknight in EQ progression server to 18. Was happy about that. I should have just been content with that. I should have just kept on rolling with the leveling, and continued to enjoy the social atmosphere of playing a game that actually reinforces group cooperation. I should have, but I didn’t.

When I knew I only had a bit of time for short-term play, I was jumping into EQ2. I played around a bit on a new character, and then on a level 39 alt I had, and eventually on my old 80 Shadowknight – and I just wasn’t having fun. There’s too many abilities, my old standby UI (Profit) has gone out of date it seems, and I can’t even update collection quests with it. Mostly, my issue was just too many abilities. Three hot-bars of combat abilities, and at least one of buffs – it’s absurd how much there is. The only thing that keeps me coming back to EQ2 is the housing. What SOE did with housing in that game is amazing, and the level of integration with the rest of the game should be lauded. Beyond that, the ingenuity of players to craft amazing looking homes is some of the best emergant creativity I have seen in any game.

So, my eye kept straying to that Rift icon. After my post on Friday, I was kind of curious to get the first hand experience with the queue. I still had the headstart active from a pre-order I had put with the game a bit back as a “just-in-case” measure, and as a way to ensure a name-grab. All the tweets about the game weren’t exactly pushing me away from the game, and there is nothing like that new-launch smell…

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