Like Sisyphus I laboured and like Icarus I burned

January 17th, 2010

I was up to my waist in Diablo 2 items. I could not move my legs and my arms were slowly being incapacitated as well. The year was 2007, if my memory serves me right. I had been in the business for a few years, and although it had always been quite labour intensive; it had never been anywhere near this level. Business was good overall, and I had reinvested a lot of money into it. I had spent $40K on Diablo 2 items; all of which were bought from two independent chinese suppliers. One a duper, the other a boter. Both dollar thirsty. Additionally, I had invested around $10K in computers and labour to take advantage of a short-lived dupe method. All in all, it had left me with around 1500 accounts or 12000 characters overloaded with items. The characters even had items placed on the cursor.

The investment was, of course, complete madness. The boter in particular had shoved items down my throat, and I had accepted them for no reason other than lacking the energy to say no. No sooner than I had aquired the items; Blizzard started deleting accounts on bnet in response to the dupe going public, and I was forced to mule everything over to new accounts. We are talking about 1500 accounts worth of items to move under time pressure. And not only that, I had to perm them as well due to the changes imposed on bnet. From that point on no accounts were safe unless they were regularly played on permed characters. It was nothing to it but to do it. And I did it. And did it. Over and over again.

It was a job that never ended, and for every character bumped I could feel my soul being eaten bit by bit until nothing remained. In the end even my skin burst out in flames. I cursed the Coh, the Hoz, the Enigma and the Shako but little did it help me. I was beyond redemption, and despite all the love I had given them; the ungrateful items did not give a shit. I was alone and I was burning.

Had I come too close to the sun, melting my wings in the process, or was I actually licked by the flames of hell? I am currently convinced I was in hell, and I am not talking about act IV in the game. I have stood face to face with the real Diablo, desperately withstanding the hellfire, and it has marked me for the rest of my life.

Although I no longer labour in hell; my mind and body will never recover from the experience I had there. Allergy to electricity. Screen dermatitis. Mouse arm. Like the wanderer I must now hide my appearance and stagger towards a dark future.

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The Descent

December 21st, 2009

Through the raging sea she came,
Hungry eyes and foaming mane,
Sparkling beast in lightning rain,
To reach the voice that called her name,
To meet the one that played her game.

In the roaring wind he called,
Thundering from higher ground,
Sundering the world with sound,
To bring the beast that legend told,
Would come and make his dream unfold.

Over rolling waves and fleeting tide,
Heralded by her callers plead,
Arrival of the stygian steed,
Grazing cliff with gruesome hide,
Shrieking as she rises high,
Monstrous towards the sky,
To halt before her kneeling guide,
Where sea and battered rocks collide.

A waning moon enchants the scene,
Its pale light paints a vivid dream,
Man and beast in silent sermon,
Waiting for their bond to form,
Within the eye of the surrounding storm.

Finally, as if in reply,
A gust of wind comes brushing by,
And the fleeting moments in the eye,
That felt like aeons for a while,
Are lost into the stormy wild,
That ravages both earth and sky,
Engulfing the embarking ride,
A summoned demon in its pride,
With summoner installed up high,
On a throne of horns and scales,
As king and ruler over seas and gales.

Through a rising ominous wave,
Then down into the watery grave,
Descends the master and his slave,
Past jagged rocks and horned reefs,
Whose ancient carvings form reliefs,
That brings to life the lost motifs,
Of things that never roamed the sea,
And never knew that they would be,
Fading into obscurity,
Beneath rolling waves and stormy skies,
With none to see their crumbling guise,
Save the one that past them dives,
Guided by the withered sights,
Of godly kings and perfect knights,
That in the eerie dying light.
Assume the shape of ghastly wights.

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People that don’t belong indoors

September 30th, 2009

There are people in this world, men as well as women, that can’t clean, do dishes, wash clothes, cook or keep their material belongings in a sound condition. I am not talking about plain laziness here. This goes much deeper. There is something amiss in their genetical configuration. A complete lack of gene transcription for house chores. At the core of it all is an inability to value-judge and control conditions such as dry, wet, fresh, spoiled, cooked, burnt, open and closed. Wet clothes piled up in dark corners for days; the floor swab and the wiping cloth left to rot in between the swabbing sessions; the food burnt to charcoal in the frying pan; the door to the freezer left open whenever opened; the door to the fridge decidely closed, but only during defrost and other occassions of self inflicted power outage; the door to the house unlocked at best, and the keys positioned in a quantum mechanical state of neither here, nor there.

Pointing it out to these people does not help. They just can’t do it properly. It is not in their genes. What we are truly dealing with here are people with genes that have survived in a completely unaltered and intact state since archaic times. What we are looking at are people that just as well could have walked this earth 100,000 or possibly as much as 500,000 years ago.

It is quite mindboggling that there are archaic humans walking among us today and all the more so because they are unknown to science even though the planet abounds with them. Vast resources of information just waiting to be tapped into. A leap in our understanding of the past just waiting to happen.

Actually it does not take a scientist to deduce the life style of primitive man by observing the speciments in question. Clearly, primitive man did not wash what few clothes he was wearing; did not reside in a permanent dwelling; did not amass material belongings for which he cared and did not cook or store his food. When clothes and place of residence no longer were fit for their purpose they were discarded and replaced and when food was aquired or stumbled upon it was eaten straight away without ritualistic processing, artful presentation or moderation.

Posted in Rant | No Comments »

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