In the two years I’ve been playing WoW, I’ve never joined a guild. I’ve had many, many invites, including direct invites without even being spoken to. For the record: I would never join a guild where I’m invited blind without so much as a “hi” in chat. I have respect for the guildies who contact me and invite me in a chat, but I loathe the idiots who just send a invite window.

Well, my friends are all in a particular Alliance guild, and I figured I ought to at least see what the guild thing is like from the inside. So I contacted one of my friends and asked to join. She immediately sent me an invite.

I really have nothing to offer a guild, as I only play once or twice a week, and right now I’m just speed leveling solo. And the guild has nothing to offer me that I couldn’t get from my friends without being officially in the guild.

But, it’s at least interesting to see what guild membership is like.

Last night it was annoying. I was questing in Un’Goro Crater, and the guild chat was like a bunch of silly 10 year olds. Now I’ve got no big problem with silliness, but geez, this just went on and on and on. It was so much that my chat window was full of the gibberish. Game info was being scrolled out of the window faster than I could read it.

One of my friends was online at the same time, and he and I mentioned the stupid guild chat. I asked him if there was a way to leave guild chat. He didn’t know, but he asked in guild chat. The answer he was given was “/gquit”. So he tried it (just before I was going to).

That’s not the command to leave guild chat, it’s the command to leave the guild. The guildies didn’t know if my friend (a male person with a female game character) fell for the joke or quit in frustration or anger. The guild chat then went on, in it’s juvenile style, about my friend quitting.

At first I was humored by the speculation, but it just kept on and on and on. So I decided to just quit out of the nonsense, too. I said my friend “had the right answer,” and typed /gquit, too.

My friend rejoined the guild an hour later, but I was already logged out and gone. I’ll probably rejoin the guild when my human priest reaches 65+ (56 right now) and can join guild groups doing instances. The guild has seemed more mature and less annoying in my previous game sessions, so I won’t hold one night of a big bunch of silliness against them. Besides, it wasn’t the silliness that annoyed me, it was the functional problem of having game info overwhelmed by chat nonsense.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

After I made the post about our recent snowfall, I saw these in our neighborhood:

You can judge the size of these snowmen by the street curb in front of them. (The third one is less than 12 inches tall.) You can also tell by the lack of snow around them that the builders had to use every bit of the white stuff in their yards. These pictures were taken less than 24 hours after the snowfall ended — no real melting had occurred yet.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

As you can see, I changed how I present things here a bit. It was kind of silly to have a static main page and a daily changing second page. If I ever changed or announced anything on the main page, the folks who bookmarked the secondary page would never see the note. I do intend to have new stuff for the site — I’m working on some articles and some serial fiction — so I figured I should bring the daily postings to the main page where I could make announcements on the sides and have it actually seen.

I removed the link to my comic book postings because I just wasn’t making many posts there. I just didn’t and don’t have time to keep up so many sections. My table games and computer games sections are scarcely updated as it is, and I play those at least on a weekly basis.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

Viewed: Theater

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I thought it could be awesome or it could be awful. I purposefully avoided Web sites with speculations about the monster, but I still saw a few ideas — Godzilla and Cthulhu were mentioned by name. I also saw mention that this monster would be something completely new. Other than those monster guesses, I knew nothing about this movie other than what I saw in the trailer. But I watched the trailer probably a dozen times.

What really got my attention the most in the trailer, and made me hopeful, was the idea that the movie might not actually show the monster in full. Imagination is much more terrifying and exciting than any CGI could be. I watched the trailer probably a dozen times, and I had high hopes for this movie — I foolishly set myself up for disappointment. But I am happy to say I was not disappointed at all. It’s a great movie.

It’s less than an hour and a half, but it doesn’t feel short. I didn’t time it, but I’d guess the setting and character introduction is about 15 minutes. And then, without foreshadowing or warning, it starts happening. I was pleasantly surprised that the first roar and rumble didn’t occur as shown in the trailer — it really surprises you. Although, the monster’s roar sounded much better in the trailer — the trailer roar should have been kept.

The characters are well developed, the relationships (including the driving love story) are well established, and the acting is quite good. It’s hard to talk about this movie without giving away parts that should stay unknown to the viewer until they happen.

As for the monster, at first the characters (and the audience) only get glimpses of “something.” As the movie progresses, you see a little more, until probably two-thirds into it when you get a good full view of it. But the full views are quick. I really wanted the movie to not show the whole creature at all, because, like I said, imagination is more powerful than CGI. The creature is never explained in any way.

The entire movie is a recording taped on a handheld camera by a total amateur. This means there are lots of “shaky cam” moments, and moments of nothing but ground or darkness when the characters are fleeing from danger or running to safety. This will annoy some, but it is to be expected from the basic premise that the whole movie is taken from a recovered personal camera. (Recovered from the area “formerly known as Central Park.”)

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, but there were a couple of moments very near the end that strained my willing suspension of disbelief. I want to, and will try to see it again.

There’s a very brief piece of audio after the credits, but it’s an unintelligible radio transmission. It’s truly unintelligible (by intentional design), so it’s not worth waiting to hear. When I heard it, I thought I just didn’t hear it well enough to understand, but I’ve since read about it on the Web, and it requires technology to unscramble, not just personal attention. Don’t wait for it; look it up online — after seeing the movie.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com