Ode to the Gee-Oh-Gee
It is no secret that lately I have been kinda down, and missing the social interaction which came from either a) living in a big city, or b) playing online games. Last night I must say that I was reminded about World of Warcraft, and more specifically my clan, The Guild of Guilds on Khaz'goroth. I was reminded by a car in front of me in the drive thru at Tim Hortons. I first noticed the "Blizzard" at the top of the license plate frame. Then Noticed the "World of Warcraft" at the bottom of said frame. I then noticed the SW and IF bumper stickers, and another bumper sticker, which displayed talents, which I think were priest talents.
I thought, oh, Alliance Priest, cool! Then I thought about my former main healer, who was a priest. Jaquanztyre, and also about Jessmyn. Both from the Guild of Guilds. And that got me thinking how much I enjoyed their company and in a sense, loved them. I got thinking of Hairymuppet, Marise, Coaster, Whisperin, Caeili and Dagery, and a number of other people I used to enjoy the company of in the GoG. And how much I missed them. Sure I was kinda upset when I found out that my guild I had spent years crafting, was essentially ruined when many of them joined another raiding guild in my short absence. But I understand that they wanted to progress and with me being gone, no one could run the guild, and thus I was holding them back. But at the time, and even a year later when I returned to WoW, I was still quite bitter.
I am no longer bitter, and in fact I do long to make some sort of reconnection with any of them, if they will have me.
There was the Department of Magic which was my 2nd big guild, but that only developed a short lived social clique, which grew out of control faster then I could contain it. It was not a well developed social circle as The Guild of Guilds was - and eventually it failed as well.
Team Fortress 2 was my sanctuary, as was FLC. Fast Lane Crew, of Fine Luscious Cheeks, or any other number of various names we came up for ourselves... That was a good crew. Granted it was not my clan, but I did run the server. It was run slightly differently then I would of liked, with only a few 'officers' and the rest kind of had no real say. They just had to kinda take it and like it. There was no due process for kicking someone out, it was just done. Well that never ends well, as one may assume. And the people who were in charge of that eventually lost interest / gave up, so that kinda went downhill. And my attempt to keep things together and keep the server popular with TFC (The Flying Circus) failed poorly.
Anyhow... I do not really foresee myself having the time in the coming few years for online games like WoW or TF2 to occupy a majority of my free time. However I do foresee myself having the time to set up a real life group. Therefore I have created a local Buffalo area meetup.com group which will focus on geeky subjects. Exactly what subjects? Well we will find out. Likely either radios, electronics, hacking, computers, gaming, photography, train spotting, modeling, RC Cars / airplanes or a combination of all of the above. If this sounds interesting to you, please go and check out the meetup.com group.