Extended Hiatus

I'm afraid this blog is going on hiatus for a bit. The BAR is coming and I'm going to focus on it. I've built up a huge bank of posts so I don't think I'll be stopping the weekly updates. I've also decided to start putting the ideas and energy I apply to the intros into revising the actual posts since this thing doesn't get much traffic. Normally I'd just delete it but the dream essays still get a lot of traffic along with some of my law papers.

I never was any good at this reader relationship crap anyways. I'm not great with people on the web and the pleasant things about my personality don't really translate. Well, if you consider sarcasm and deadpan Southern humor pleasant that is. I think I originally conceived this thing as a casual explanation of what my post was about or where I got the ideas for it from, but I'm not really sure how that's relevant anymore. You can just, y'know, read the post.

I'll keep the updates coming though, Tuesdays on Popmatters like always.

Julian Dibbell's Guide to Gold Farming

I'd be lying if I said I was spending my post law school but not yet studying for the BAR days in quiet reflection. If I come across as erratic on Twitter or something, I've been hitting the sauce. After 3 years of law school the only emotions I'm feeling at the finish of it are an intense sense of emptiness and anger. I was never a good law student. I have a lot of trouble learning things in classrooms and I'm even worse at taking tests. School has always been really hard for me but if it's something like an English course I can write papers perfectly fine so I used to just avoid it. Unfortunately, it's intrinsic to the way law exams work to be able to parrot information back at a person. It's sort of...a good analogy would be if I asked you to explain everything to me about playing a Paladin in Diablo 2. During Act III. If you have the boots of Ice Protection. And sometimes an Amazon player joins you. And your entire grade is based on this.

I don't think I would have made it through this experience without blogging and, to a larger extent, my readers. So thank you for showing up and helping me through this long period of my life.

This week's post ends my economy discussion for a while. It's all about gold farming and the larger principles at work when you try to extract real world value from an MMO. As much fun as it is to talk about the hypothetical value of your chain armor or magic sword of blah blah, turning that into cash in your pocket is another story. A fairly complex one that involves a lot of mean people and unpleasant realities about what happens when people take a game seriously.

Something I know about all too well at this point.