I would use my super power for good, not for evil, only touching you when you were in a safe situation. I mean, I would touch you while you were driving or carrying a pot of hot water. I’d even resist touching you while you were using the toilet, since that would be icky.

If I could design a character for you for dungeons and dragons, I would design a totally smoking Neutral Evil drow elf babe with enormous breasts dressed in magic belly dancing clothes. They’re magic because they give you like a -10 armor class even though nearly all of your smooth, jet black skin would be exposed.

I’d play your enormous, well hung ogre lover and body guard. My cock would be so big that you’d need to use magic just to accommodate it when we had sex. It would be a magic + 12 cock of shaking orgasms. You’d need to roll a 99-100 on two 10 sided die to prevent having enormous shaking orgasms every time it touched you. That’s why you’d keep me on a long chain, so I’d be able to stay way behind you or way in front of you. You wouldn’t want it to accidentally touch you while you were casting fireball or anything or you’d burn your own party.

If I could work for some cutting edge technology firm, I would design a pair of electric bodysuits for us to wear that made it feel like we were having hot sex every time we moved all day long. The suits would have off switches for when we were in business meetings or something, but when they were on, I’d set your on “mind blowing orgasm” for the whole day.

If we could be Star Trek characters, I would totally be Kirk and you could be Spock.

A hot, female version of Spock from an alternative universe.

That said, I’ve been writing a lot about music lately and I’ve discovered that there are four basic fabrics used in making costumes for bands.

1) Leather

I should specificy “leather and products that simulate leather,” since many rock stars try to be animal friendly.

I’ve always wondered what the attraction of leather is. Its not something that’s especially comfortable to wear (unless, I suppose, you’re in someplace especially cold). I’ve asked my leather wearing friends why they wear it.

“For safety.”

Presumably, they mean while riding on their “hogs,” as motorcycle enthusiasts say. You know, when I go into an area with high radioactivity, I put on one of those shiny metal suits. I don’t continue to wear that suit after I leave the area. Wearing one’s “safety” jacket when one is no longer in any danger seems silly.

I suppose rock and roll is so dangerous that one needs to wear one’s leather clothes at all time.

2) Lace

Specifically puffy lace. Lace looks great on antique dining tables, but it seems sort of functionally useless on clothes. Big floppy swaths of lace are more likely to get caught in the string of your bass than not.

Furthermore, it make artist wearing lace look sort of delicate and antique like. I guess that’s the point?

3) Vinyl

I could undrstand this when records were still pressed on vinyl. It was sort of a way of reminding people “buy our albums - which are pressed from the same material we are wearing.”

I suppose now that digital media are all the rage, nudity would serve the same function, though I think dangling flesh is as likely to get caught in the strings of your bass as lace.

Anyhow, vinyl is suppossed to be “sexy.” Presumably because it feels smooth and doesn’t sweat. Maybe because it feels like you have a condom all over your body and condoms, of course, equal sex.

When I see somebody all dressed in tight vinyl, the first thing I think of is the noise that it must make when they peel it off their sweaty - likely stinky - body. It would sound like “swthhhhp.” Sometimes, when I listen to the music of somebody wearing all vinyl, I spend time trying to lister for that sound sampled and repeated in the background music. I swear, that sound is there.

4) Black Stuff

I refer to the color black.

Black is slimming, but also makes people think of death and ninjas, both of which are “cool” images for fans of rock.

Also, black is pretty good at hiding spills or sweat. Its lousy at hiding dandruff, though, and historically, rock musicians are notorious for being dirty so I’m guessing that might be a problem for more than one.

Anyhow, this update is presented as a public service.

With this in mind, I present to you the ten songs by Michael Jackson that annoyed me the most, with links to accompanying video.

10. “Somebody’s Watching Me” by Rockwell

Oh, sure, not technically a Michael Jackson song, but c’mon. The only reason this was a hit was because Jackson was singing on it and he was the most popular artist in the world. It combines the storyline of “Who Can It Be Now” by Men At Work (minus the wit) with Thriller style backing vocals.

Watch It Here

9. The Girl Is Mine by Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney

Later, Jackson would purchase the publishing rights to The Beatles songs and piss off Sir Paul, but in 1982 they were best buds. This song earns a special place of hatred in my blackened, shriveled heart for use of the word “doggone.”

No, really, this was a huge hit.

8. Human Nature

This song made me want to puncture my own ears drums when it was getting constant airplay. The cloying “why… why…” sequences are particularly unpleasant. That said, in this live video of the song, Jackson dances. I can forgive him even this song. I confess, though I didn’t care for much of his music, he was one of the greatest jazz dancers of our lifetimes.

7. Rock With You

All right, there’s many people who love this song, but it makes it on my list for one very vital reason. If you’re going to use the word “rock” in your song title, your song had better rock. Unless the song is called something like “I’m going to throw a rock at your head” or something. Yes, yes, the history of “rock and roll” suggests that “rock” was a euphemism for “fuck,” but that doesn’t make this song any more paltable.

Rock with him

6. She’s Out Of My Life

Urgh. Argh. Retch. Gag.

Puke

5. Wanna Be Startin’ Something

This was sort of the practice song for “Bad,” which is a song I rather like. It earns a place on this list for its earworm hook - “Mama say mamasa bu mambusan” or whatever he sings. I would be walking around, minding my own business and those words would start coming out of my mouth. Even now, I am singing it to myself and considering smashing my mouth with a ball peen hammer to make it stop.

I don’t want to be starting something

4. P.Y.T.

I contend that this song was only a hit because Jackson had momentum on his side by the time they released it. There were probably a thousand songs that deserved a thousand times more attention than this one. However, in my mind, the success of this song suggests that Michael Jackson really deserved the King of Pop label. He could poop on a piece of vinyl in 1982 and 1983 and it would have been a hit.

At your peril

3. Farewell My Summer Love

Another song released solely to capitalize on his momentum, this preposterous slab of pop lard should never have been heard by anyone. In a fair and just universe, it would have remained sealed up in a vault where it couldn’t hurt anybody.

A Pandora’s Box of Awful

2. In The Closet

Jackson had a number of “what the hell was he thinking” moments in his career. Specifically, what the hell was he thinking using the single best known euphemism for being homosexual but not telling anyone as a title for a song about heterosexual love. Unless, I suppose, he really was saying “I’m gay, but I’m going to pull a reverse double blind bluff and trick you into thinking I’m just dumb as a box of hammers.”

Out of the closet

1. We Are The World by USA for Africa

I appreciate the sentiment, really I do. I donated to Live Aid. I bought the equally dreadful “Do The Know Its Christmas” (which is a much more offensive song, since Ethiopia is mostly Muslim). I even considered buying the single just to help out, but let’s be honest. The song is dreadful and never would have been a hit if it hadn’t been a charity single. The only redeeming featuring is Cyndi Lauper going nuts on her solo. This song should be banned from ever being played again and replaced with the far superior “Sun City” by Artists United Against Aparthaid. Even though Aparthaid is pretty much over in South Africa, that song kicks some serious ass.

We are the children

Now, there are a number of Michael Jackson songs I rather like. As a recovering Van Halen fan, I still enjoy “Beat It.” I also rather like “Bad,” “Billy Jean,” “Thriller,” “Scream,” “Smooth Criminal,” “Leave Me Alone” and pretty much everything he touched before 1978. In fact, I would say that he recorded more songs that I like than that I disliked.

The ones I disliked though actually had much more of an impact on me, so hats off to you, Mr. Jackson, for making an indelible impression on my life.

Mama say mamasa bu mamambusan.

What the Fuck is Wrong with Me?
by
Rollo S. Gigante

I don’t know what it is that’s wrong with me, I just know that I’m not right. I suspect that it has to do with the fact that I started watching porn at an early age. I mean a real early age; like 10. I’m 31 now, so I’ve had 21 years of threesomes, midgets, donkey shows, anal, chicks with dicks, S&M and bukkake flashing before my very eyes. Actually, now that I think of it, I was probably 8 or 9 when I stumbled upon my dad’s very secret magazine stash. And by very secret, I mean I’m pretty sure we both could have gone to jail if anyone else found some of this shit. Anyway, it was around the age of 10 that I discovered videos (aka: talking pictures). I believe it was called “Debbie Does ‘Em All. Man that was sweet, especially scene 7, but I digress. It was after that point that I became obsessed with searching the house for any kind of contraband video, magazine, picture or recording of any kind that would lead to confusion about how my body felt afterwards. As a matter of fact, I remember a time when I was about 11, I found myself masturbating to a video I had found of well dressed women singing disco covers at a local club. The problem was that these weren’t women, but in fact, drag queens. I’m pretty sure that incident opened up a Pandora’s box of new issues. Not that I’m gay, but I can only assume that an 11 year old whacking off to someone that looks like Rupaul singing Dancing Queen can only lead to issues down the road after discovering that Rupaul does in fact have a penis.

When I was 12, I entered the 7th grade. Shortly thereafter, one of my uncles died suddenly. Now, he wasn’t a close uncle, but a relative nontheless. He was around my father’s age at the time. So as a 12 year old, I could only equate him with my dad; the same age, bloodline, etc. I don’t know much about medicine, however I knew enough to know that certain things are hereditary. So at this point I became obsessed with dying. I could only deduce that since my uncle was close in age to my father and died suddenly, that my father would then also die suddenly, and whatever mystery ailment these bastards had in their blood would surely be passed on to me. So picture this, I’m 12 years old, starting in a new school with new people, a lot of my friends were gone, my uncle was dead and I was pretty sure my dad was his way out too. I was laying in bed one night, and started to feel strange. I was convinced that this was it. Here it comes, the mystery death bug was coming to get me. What could it possibly be? I racked my brain for an answer and came up with the most logical ailment: Lou Gehrig’s Disease. That has to be it. I was convinced that I had Lou Gehrig’s disease. I don’t even KNOW that symptom’s of Lou Gehrig’s disease, I just knew that I had it. I knew that when I went to take my physical for Jr. High, something was going to alarm the doctor and I’d be sent off for all kinds of extra and special tests and they would sit me down and break the news to me; “son, you have Lou Gehrig’s disease and by extension, 6 months to live.”. What a way to start the prime years of my life.

I spent my early adult years (from 18-24) just sort of awkwardly floating through life. I was more or less alone, save for a couple close friends. I still lived with my dad, but it was almost like I didn’t. We didn’t talk very much through those years. I certainly didn’t have a girlfriend through that time either. When you go through most of your adolescence as a black sheep at school, and enter your adult years as a black sheep in your family, you don’t develop the best social skills. I would meet girls from time to time, and we’d go on dates and whatnot. However, because I had no social skills, I would be nervous as fuck. And after I turned 21, a more sinister vice began to make an appearance; I could now order drinks with dinner. So what did I do when I got nervous? I got as drunk as humanly possible. And that would have been fine had we been out at a club or meeting for drinks at a bar. But when you show up tanked for a Saturday afternoon matinee it sends bad signals to her about both yourself and her. If just getting wasted was the extent of the problem, it wouldn’t be so bad. Unfortunately, I’m the kind of guy that gets real chatty and “grabby” when I’m drunk. That lead to incidents that involved me blathering on about what a failure I am as a human being one minute and three seconds later trying to put my hands on their tits. After a while I developed a reputation for being both depressing and gross at the same time.

So the snapshot I’ve given up until around the age of 24 is this: a porn freak that’s obsessed with his own death, has no idea how to act around other people, and a borderline alcoholic. It really goes without saying that I was a fucking mess. It was around this time that I decided that come hell or high water, I needed to get myself a better half. I figured that if I could find someone to be with, maybe I could learn to not be such a bull in a china shop. I tried meeting people in bars, but I ran into that same problem of getting depressed and grabby when I had too much to drink. This of course led to quite a few drinks thrown in my face and even one time, being pepper sprayed for just saying ‘Hello’. At this point, it was obvious to me that face to face meetings were not my strong suit. They say that prayer is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Well, I don’t like to pray, so I turned to the real last refuge of scoundrels; the Internet. Match.com, date.com, yahoo, you name it. If you could post a profile to meet people, I was there. And this time, I didn’t listen to the devil on my shoulder, and I posted there as the most real me that I could. I went against my instinct to lie and use names like “Hungstud6969” or “MrAllNightLong” or “SirLicksAlot”. My thought being that eventually I may meet some of these people, and well, I wouldn’t want to be branded a liar. I did eventually meet someone through one of my profiles. I can’t remember which one and I certainly don’t remember how it was we built any kind of legitimate rapport. We were supposed to meet for drinks at a local restaurant, but we ended up sitting on a bench outside of the restaurant chatting for about an hour or so. It was good to get that monkey off my back. I can look back now and say that at the age of 24, that it was more or less my 1st legitimate interaction with a member of the opposite sex. Scary huh? I can honestly say that I’m thankful for it because I set out with the goal to meet someone, and I followed through. It’s also one of the few times that I set a goal and followed through. One of the reasons I’m thankful is that I still talk to this person today. And as strange as it sounds, it may be one of the most normal relationships that I have, currently.

A lot has happened since that encounter on the bench outside of that local restaurant. After her & I met and ultimately ended up not together, I became inspired to straighten myself out. I took from that relationship the ability to be less socially retarded. Shortly thereafter, I started lifting weights to improve myself physically. Later that year, I found someone that would eventually become my wife. Earlier this year, she then became my soon to be ex-wife. Yes we met through the internet as well, proving my friends theory that meeting through the ‘net always ends in tears. Unfortunately, I can’t get too into my marriage and subsequent divorce in this column. But someday soon..

As I write this column here tonight I am 31 years old, my wife left me sometime this past summer, I had been arrested 3 times in 2008, I currently don’t have a car and work in retail; an industry I swore I’d never go back to. It’s pretty safe to say that I’m that same fucking mess that I was when I was 24 and afraid to die. I’m still a borderline alcoholic, but I haven’t had a drink since November. I can feel good things coming though, sort of like when I met a girl on a bench one night. I feel as if I’m about to find a moment of inspiration to drag myself off the ground again. I’ll be honest, having my wife leave me fucking hurt like hell; way more than I let on. And I’ve never really confessed this until now but it really had me reeling for months. I think I’m getting past it. The key is going to be not letting the demons I’ve spoken of in this column, and others, consume me again. That’s another issue that’s always haunted me. No matter how well I get things going, those god damned demons are always just ½ a step behind me and every once in a while, one of them catches me. It’s always been this way.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Rollo and I’ve got some scary things running through my head.

Why doesn’t he just come out and say “holy shit flesh eating pirate zombies are boarding our ship”? Because the rules of behavior are different in dream world.

Anyhow, the zombies get on board the ship and promptly pull the commanding officer and his companion into the water. We see one of the zombies eating through the back of the commanding officer’s head like it is a watermelon - he’s eaten so much of the head that all that’s left is the scalp and the commanding officer’s shocked expression.

Several of the zombies have extra eyes or limbs. Apparently, when they eat part of a human body, they grow that part. When they eat a brain, they get some of the information from that brain, but since chewing is involved, they end up destroying a lot of information. The zombies are trying to figure out a way to alter their jaws so they can swallow a brain whole, thus getting all the information from that brain.

Cut to a compound somewhere. This is a compound that has been specifically designed to open fire on approaching zombies automatically.

We get a tour of the compound and its explained that the weapons systems are powered by a very poorly designed power grid. Both the tour guide and the man who designed the power grid openly admit that its really poorly designed. What’s worse, to get to the grid, you have to climb this rickety old ladder. Oh, and Joanne the zombie is loose in the grid. She died while working on something up there and immediately came back. Going up to work on the grid is a high risk affair!

The people in the compound are having a big public meeting tonight. The leader is this soldier that looks like Denzel Washington. He is upset because a family had a member who was on death’s door and this wasn’t reported. See, when somebody dies, they immediately come back as a zombie.

The problem isn’t that they eat the people when they come back. The problem is that the zombies are actually powered by a creature that is a little like a ghostly version of a hermit crab. Basically, these creatures wear the bodies like suits. They don’t have to attack if they don’t want to. Indeed, they can leave one body, wait for somebody in the compound to die, take over that body and go undetected until the body starts to rot, wreaking damage to the power grid and weapon’s system.

I don’t know why Joanne the zombie isn’t wreaking havok in the power grid, but she’s not at this point.

Anyhow, the hermit crab creatures can jump from body to body, but also control multple bodies at the same time.

And one of them has finally figured out how to swallow a whole head. After trial and error, which involved biting off heads and throwing them up, he’s finally managed to swallow the whole head of this y0ung boy - maybe 12.

But now the Zombies have a problem. When they eat the head, not only do they get all the information in the head, they get taken over by the personality of the person whose head they’ve swallowed. So now one of the most powerful hermit crab creatures is totally being mentally dominated by the personality of the 12 year old boy.

While the meeting is happening, Joanne gets the power grid turned off, so the engineer goes up to fight her! Zombies invade! The 12 year old makes all the zombies his host controls attack the other zombies!

And then I woke up. Well, I was woken up. Apparently, I was making zombie noises.

Some of you have chosen not to heed my advice, and you’ve picked up your copy anyway. Way to go, genius. I hope you didn’t think I was joking, because now that you’ve bought the game it’s time to install it — which includes paying for it a few more times.

Installing the Motherfucker

First, make sure you have something to busy yourself with throughout this process. Like a good book to read, or a pile of socks to roll in. You should put on a pot of coffee while you’re at it, because you’re going to be up all night responding to prompts and entering credit card numbers.

It took me 15 hours to install World of Warcraft, and many would consider that fast.

The game itself is about 12 Gigabytes. I installed it from a CD, so this didn’t take any longer than you would expect from a game of that size (about an hour for my aging machine). Most people download it from Blizzard’s website though, which is obviously going to take quite a bit longer.

Either way, once you have the entire world of Azeroth sitting on your hard drive, the updater will launch. This is where you are introduced to the feeling of constant disappointment that all WoW fans share, and realize that you’re not actually going to start playing for a few days. It doesn’t matter how you obtained the game, it will be the version they first released back in 2004, and now the updater will get to work on downloading and installing every patch for the game — some of which are over a Gig in size by themselves. If you’re lucky this will be over by sunrise.

While this is going on you should find another computer and use it to go to Blizzard’s website and finish buying the game. You’ll need to register an account and set up your subscription, choosing how much time you want to buy in advance. When that’s done you’ll want to buy the Burning Crusade account upgrade (for the price of the full retail game) and do the same for Wrath of the Lich King (slightly more expensive).

With your bank account drained and your hard drive filled, you’re late for work. When you get home you’ll be dead tired from staying up all night, so you’ll go straight to bed. Perhaps you’ll start playing this game next weekend.

And perhaps we’ll actually run the program in the third part of this series: Creating a Shitty Character.

On my cell phone, a Verizon LG, I am currently playing a six month long (so far) game of Bookworm. The game has been able to last six months because I only play it when I’m on the toilet and because I usually only take one or two turns per bathroom visit. I’m on something like level 178 and my strategy is to simply do everything in my power not to die. I don’t care about a high score, or about spelling great words. I just want to not die. With that strategy in mind, the game is surprisingly easy.

On my Nintendo DS, my current game is Puzzle Quest. I went into it thinking “this is probably a stupid game.” My opinion hasn’t changed that much, but now I think “this is a stupid game that I am totally addicted to.” Its sort of like playing bejeweled against an opponent, assuming that opponent is a Ogre Mage or what have you. My wife had originally purchased the game for herself and suggested I play it. I figured I’d humor her and now, six weeks later, she’s wishing she hadn’t suggested I play it. This is my “before I go to sleep” game.

I also have time for one online game. Well, two, but one doesn’t count.

What I like in an online game right now is something where I can sign in, perform two or three simple actions to see my statistics improve, and then not play it for another day. Right now, the game that fits that description for me is eRepublik. I don’t think anyone would mistake it for a complex game. At the moment, all I need to do is log on, work, train, buy food and log off. Occasionally, I buy weapons and fight twice then heal. The battle system is awesome since you can only attack but never be attacked. Thus, I only take damage when I want to. Ahhhhh.

I also play Cute Catz on Facebook, but I’m not proud of this. Sometimes, though, I imagine that it would be funny to form a Cute Catz “guild,” which would be as pointless an endeavor as ever existed.

The best thing about all of these games for me is that none of them currently require me to be social. I like to play games, but I’m a reclusive gamer at the moment.

Unless we’re starting an Uniball league again, in which case I’m totally there.

A combination of stress and exceptionally warm weather has led to me being constipated for the first time in my life. For reasons of its own, my colon has declared a embargo on the toilet.

The rest of my internal organs have objected to this. The intestines in particular are of the belief that they are a “no loitering” zone and get rather angry when former food matter is forced to wait in line. From my perspective, it feels like the jack booted thugs of my small intestine are constantly laying smackdowns on the hapless future poop.

My stomach is also concerned about this. In order to address the situation, it is trying to create a gas build up. Presumably, it is planning on lighting a match and blasting the blockage through the tunnel. It hasn’t yet realized that it doesn’t have any matches and, at any rate, the environment is too moist for successful match ignition.

Most of the gas ends up exiting through my mouth. Now, I’ve never been much of a burper. Oh, sure, in middle school I learned to belch the alphabet like all normal 12 year olds, but, as an adult, I almost never burp. The past few days, I have been producing burps that would make Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds envious.

Frankly, its not as if the gas has anywhere else to go at the moment.

Having not experienced constipation before, I always thought it was a rather droll and amusing malady. Now that I’ve experienced it first hand, I now realize its a droll, amusic and exceptionally painful malady. Not only that, but it is robbing me of one of life’s most basic pleasures - anxiety free bathroom visits.

I’ve had a number of solutions offered, mostly involving higher fiber intake. One Facebook friend suggests I eat a wicker basket (with a glass of water). Another friend has suggested I look into the rather terrifying prospect of “ass spelunking.” I don’t even want to google that for fear that I’ll end up with a list of German enema fetish sites.

For now, I spend about five minutes every hour heading to the toilet, hoping that something will happen and remembering what George Harrison once said: all things must pass.

I can’t speak for what the news coverage of the current situation in Iran is like in Canada, but here in the United States of America its all “election stolen, protesters take to the street.” The evidence, at least as its been currently presented, suggests that its possible that the election was stolen. However, its far from a proven thing.

Its easy for us to sympathize with the protesters, since they are protesting in favor of a more moderate leader, but sometimes, in elections, the person we like elss wins. A similar thing happened in Palestine. They got Democracy and immediately elected Hamas.

In fact, this is the big weakness in this whole “let’s spread democracy around” thing. We’ve already learned that its easy to make people so angry that they’ll vote against their own best interests. In the USA, the poor and disenfranchised have sort of traditionally voted for the Republicans, who are the very people who are keeping them poor and disenfranchised.

People don’t really understand how government works. They don’t recognize basic things like lower taxes = less servives, for example. Sometimes they don’t recognize stuff like war = dead people. Since people don’t understand that, you have to give them stuff they do understand, like “do you hate the people who TRY TO TAKE YOUR MONEY HURF DURF.”

Like all good conversatives, Ahmadinejad of Iran ran largely on a “hey, poor people, don’t you hate those rich, liberal elites who have made you poor and also Americans and Jews” platform. Subtract the “Americans” part and you have the conservative platform for most countries in the world. Its a traditionally successful election technique, hating on the educated and the Jews. Its worked for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Now, mind you, I’m not saying that all Conservatives hate Jews and education. I think they love sending their kids to good colleges - provided they don’t learn too much. I also think they don’t personally hate Jews, they just capitalize on anti-Semitism to get elected. IMPORTANT DISTINCTIONS.

That’s our political commentary this week. Largely ill-informed and based on shakey and cherry-picked evidence - just like all political commentary everywhere.

This is entirely the fault of my girlfriend, Kimber, who came home one night and announced that we were going to invest in becoming WoW nerds. Simple as that. I had absolutely no intention of ever doing this to myself, but had it inflicted upon me by one whom I trust completely. Or should I say, trusted.

In this series of posts I will be exploring World of Warcraft from the perspective of a total noob, and we will begin with the logical starting point for all new players.

Buying the Fucking Game

If you’re a seasoned veteran of consumerism this may sound simple enough, but in fact you’ll find that they have gone to lengths to make this as difficult and painful a process as possible.

Buying the game isn’t enough. You will also need a subscription in order to play, which is paid monthly. This costs $14.99 (USD), and that’s probably enough to dissuade most people from playing right there. I was one such stubborn holdout once, before Kimber brought this curse upon us both.

You might think the subscription would be worth it, and that it implies a dynamic world with all kinds of new shit being added regularly. You might think a subscription-based service would be obligated to provide new content to its users. After all, you don’t pay for basic cable and then also pay for each episode of Gossip Girl you watch. Whatever you may think, the business model behind World of Warcraft is far too innovative to make a good deal of sense, so you can put your delusions of a gaming utopia aside. If you want new content you’re going to have to pay for it separately.

When you’ve become an addict and invested months of your life in leveling your character to the upper echelons of Azerothian society, you will find that you can go no further unless you buy one of the game’s two expansion packs. Fuck. Each expansion will allow you to gain an additional 10 levels. They’re also needed to play two of the game’s races, its most powerful class, and to access two entire continents (half of the game). Essentially, you need both expansion packs to play the entire game, and you’ll never amount to anything without them. You’ll have to buy more in the future if you want to continue playing, too, as the developers have said that their goal is to release a new expansion every year.

Hypothetically, let’s say that you’re willing to bite your tongue and endure all of this. Hypothetically, let’s say you have other human beings in your life. If you live with or share a computer with somebody else, none of this will benefit them at all. They’ll need their own subscription (which makes sense), but they will also need to buy their own copy of the game and both expansion packs (which does not make any fucking sense). If there are two of you, taking the expansion packs into consideration, you will have to buy the game six times and subscribe to it twice every month.

This is the case for me, living with my well-intending but exceptionally troublesome girlfriend Kimber. Our first year of this game will cost $294.85 — unless they release another expansion pack, in which case that should jump another $80 or so.

Yet we will go along with this, merrily achieving nothing at all with our lives while throwing money into a most hungry abyss. There are twelve million others out there who will do the same, and we’ll meet some of them later in this series of posts.

The question is whether or not you believe that there is any possibility of the game living up to what you would expect for that price tag. Even if so, don’t be in any rush to throw yourself off of that cliff, as the rest of this series will mostly focus on how awful the experience actually is.

Stay tuned for part two: Installing the Motherfucker.