Author: Zubon

I have sometimes worried about how freakish we sound using our gamer jargon. There is an old (Gen Con?) sketch in which two TSR employees are discussing Top Secret: SI in a bar, in which they terrify the patrons (and get arrested) by excitedly discussing having shot a bunch of people on their latest mission. Our own people get confused looks when we talk about raining fiery death upon our enemies and who got that huge gun that dropped.

Then I heard my brother telling some poker stories, one of which involved a poor fellow who kept losing despite repeatedly flopping the nuts. And no one even blinked.

: Zubon

I was away from MMOs for a little while this year, so could someone tell me if the vocabulary shifted?

• Does “inc” now mean, “I intend to solo this group, so the melees should just watch the enemies run by”?
• Does “pulling” now mean, “I’ll distract this one while half the group rushes into the middle of the spawn”?

I hate looking dumb because I don’t understand what’s going on.

: Zubon

You have had a few months to work on those New Year’s resolutions. Hopefully you are looking a bit better and not gunning for supermodels. We are now ready to meet some women.

Today’s edition of our occasional series for the introverted heterosexual male focuses on assortive dating and mating. Our dominant theme will be supply and demand, along with how birds of a feather flock. Economics, psychology, and gaming, woot!

Continue reading Dating for Gamers Part 3: Spawn Points

Over in the funnies section of our blogroll, Order of the Stick sure has taken a dark turn over the past couple of weeks, hasn’t it? That latest one is particularly jarring when you mix the strip’s normal tone (which Xykon is maintaining) with what is going on there.

For those of you who have not been reading Order of the Stick, I recommend it. You can see the first strip here, and you have a few years’ worth to read as you catch up. I read a few hundred in a weekend, and if you have never watched an entire season on DVD over a couple of days, it is awesome.

: Zubon

Raph asks, Is Text Chat Corrupting Our Language? I agree with his answer and direct you here for an understanding of why. The letter that Bob Yates transcribes is not some off-the-cuff IM — it is a representative letter to a head of state. I will fully grant that more stupid things are written today than ever before in history. This is because more people are writing today than ever before in history. A century ago, a 50% literacy rate would not have been bad. Now anyone with a two-digit IQ can get on LiveJournal, MySpace, and Blogspot to tell you all about what her cats did today (LOL!) or how he wtfpwned that n00bz0r pally (cmn l2p). Our language has been corrupt for centuries, we just have slightly different forms of degeneracy these days, combined with better records of it.

: Zubon

Yes, I am a daily reader of a blog about linguistics. I read a lot.