Filed under: life
So I got this peer recognition award at work for my ass-kickiness during tax season this year. I’ve gotten them before, they come with a certificate, a nice letter using corporate-speak to tell you how corporately awesome you are (team player, good attitude, talk of things “crossing desks,” of “tackling,” of “dedication to a vision”) and a $20 gift card.
All the other ones I have gotten (I did mention I was awesome, didn’t I?) have been for Best Buy (woo hoo!), but, blast it all, this month was for Borders.
But TJ, you say. TJ. You’re trying to save money! And we all know that when she-geeks like you aren’t working, playing video games, dicking around on the internet or checking out how your boobs look in that top, you’re reading! $20! You’re going to save $20.
No, no. The exact opposite is true. A $20 gift card to Borders certainly does NOT save me $20.
See, when you’re going to Best Buy, you’re probably going there to get more RAM. Or another monitor for your sweet dual-screen set up. Or something else that costs significantly more than $20. So yes, when you take your $20 gift card to Best Buy, you are, indeed, saving yourself $20.
But who SAVES UP for books? Who hears about a great book, lusts after it for months, feverishly hoarding their pennies until they can scurry off and acquire it? No one! Not me, anyway, so as far as I’m concerned… No one! No, you wander into Borders, you poke around, you lose track of time, you pick up this and that and look for things you can’t really recall the title or author of, but you know there was a mention somewhere in it of reuben sandwiches and you think the cover was blue?
And do you know what a $20 gift card to Borders is? It’s not a money saving device. No. It is a REASON. It is a reason to convince yourself to set foot into that moneysuck. You tell yourself and you tell yourself, look, self, you’re on a tight budget right now. We’re going on a trip, remember? Wee! A trip! So, self, let’s just take this little $20 card and buy ourselves $20 worth of books with the pretend money, and go on home.
To quote to great Wayne Campbell…
Chyeah, right. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.
So, self. I hope you’re happy with yourself. Er, happy with me. Whatever.
And I hope you like the taste of paper, because guess what you’re eating this weekend!
TJ: mcdonald’s dollar menu is the best thing ever when you’re a bit poor for a day
TJ: and also? green straws.
TJ: For shrek!
The Redhead: i fully support the dollar menu
The Redhead: but i oppose the shrekification of basically everything in america
TJ: Whatever, dude. I got a green straw!
TJ: also? hahaha “shrekification,” nice one.
Filed under: World of Warcraft
Kala had a bit to add in the comments on this post.
She says,
You missed a few though. There are the women who are ‘damsel in distress’ types who have men and women alike flocking to them to save them. The abused housewife who squeals in delight at any positive male attention they might get. [...] This could go on forever…
[...]I’ve gotten to the point that rather than trying to befriend any of them, since I get stomped on at every attempt, I just stick with the guys. They are much easier to please, but keeping them happy seems to end up in black-mail. “Do this or I’m leaving.” I’ve been on the verge of deleting this game for about a month now. I should probably get on with it.
As I pointed out in the post – there ARE tons of females who play this game now. And some of them, like Kala, are ending up deleting the whole game. Again, call me sexist, anti-feminist, whatever you want, but it’s not “being a girl in a man’s world” that is driving women away from WoW, it’s the territorial, attention-whoring women (and again, it’s not all women who play WoW, just a very, very vocal sect) and the behavior they invite and encourage from the males in the game, that is making many of us throw our hands up in disgust.
Filed under: quick clips
Gadgets: Weener Kleener Soap Ring (SFW) – Gizmodo
Can you even comprehend this kind of awesomeness so early in the morning?
Filed under: quick clips
I was coming out of work at the same time as one of our recruiters yesterday.
She says, “Well aren’t you a sight for sore eyes!”
So I pause a second, thinking she needed something from me, but no, she was just using the phrase completely wrong.
“Hm?,” I say.
“No shoes on, smoking… you remind me of… of… Brittney Spears!”
“Great. Thanks.”
Note to self, no matter how sick I am of heels by the end of the day, they stay ON the feet til I am IN the car.
So, I like to play World of Warcraft, like I said below, and you can tell from the links I’ve got going on over on the side there that I read a lot of WoW-releated pages as well.
One of the pages I’ve always liked is WoW Insider – they always have a few good, information-filled posts a day. News, techniques, advice, etc. Well, they did up until recently anyway.
Month or so ago, WoW Insider had a post up asking for new writers to make some submissions. I thought about it, briefly, since I was at the time thinking of getting back into blogging, but it was the middle of tax season and it just wasn’t a good time for me.
So recently, the amount of posts per day has gone way up! Yay, my feed reader celebrates. I guess they did find some new writers.
But my dear Wow Insider – Quantity is certainly not the same thing as quality. Has anyone else noticed these things, or am I just a picky bitch? There’s a few new specialized “columns” that seem completely useless (but the Big Red Kitty column is awesome!). I’ve seen what is essentially the same post posted repeatedly. There’s at least one writer who seems to post just for the sake of hearing herself talk, and I can’t help but have *giggle, giggle, hairtwirl* in my head every time I read one of her posts. I don’t even need to look up and see who wrote a post to know it’s hers. Does it give zero helpful information? Does it give a personal opinion on a minute, unimportant detail of the game? Does it give the impression that this person is uncomfortable giving any actual technical information, leading one to believe she has no idea how to play her class? Yeah, that’s her.
There’s a LOT of girls who play this game. It’s not an exclusive thing any more. But the women who do play fall into a few different categories:
1. Hardcore, asskickin females, who you would never know was a girl unless she spoke on vent. She doesn’t mention it, she knows the game, she raids as hard as anyone else.
2. Giggly airheaded idiots who, in every situation in their life, gravitate to areas where there is a higher concentration of men than woman. You know the type, you’ve met them. Sure, they’ve got level70 characters – leveling isn’t that hard in WoW, and it’s easy to do while you’re flirting with your whole guild. This species often draws loud attention to the fact that they’re a gamer chick and isn’t that cute!!
3. Casual gamer females. That’s where I would fall, I think. I’d never call myself a gamer girl – I play WoW, Guildwars, StarCraft and… Mario Party. I like WoW, though. And I am pretty social in the game. I have a level 70 lock, she’s running around guildless at the moment. And the fact that she is guildless is what separates this group from group 2 – the last guild this lock was in, the women were all from the second group above. All of them. Now, the guild prided itself on being an “adult” guild, which is cool at first. But every time I tried to get into a conversation, game related, a female would see someone who wasn’t her getting attention and jump in with a comment about how tight her bra was.
Or, I specifically remember an incident, grouping up to go after Taerar in Duskwood, hanging out, you know how long these things take to come together, and I was the target of [what they considered to be good natured] sexually-toned emote after emote.
Now, I’m not a prude. And I know I was in an adult guild. Foul language, I can handle. Sexual toned conversation, I can also handle. But once it crosses over to stuff like “So and so hits TJ from behind,” or “Hey TJ, how do you and your boyfriend like to dooooo it?,” once it crosses into not just silly chatter, but actually personal towards me, I’m not having it.
And call me sexist if you want, but I didn’t blame the guys in this situation. No, every single girl in that guild seemed to love to talk about how much they love sex, about playing naked, flirting with every single guy. The guys were conditioned to treat the females in the guild like that, and I was one of the females. They were just behaving like they’d been conditioned, and to them, it was part of their “adult” guild. So I ended up leaving that guild (don’t worry, I did talk to them GM and he totally understood), but it was a really great guild, I really miss a lot of them.
So you group 2 girls, besides considering your own decency and self-respect, how about you consider what you’re doing to the rest of us who just want to play, as well?
