Last Saturday (June 21st), I found myself laying on a massage table in my local school of Chinese medicine about to receive acupuncture. This is a weekly thing for me. Fate has given me a plethora of medical problems requiring regular maintenance, and I've found that acupuncture is a great alternative to sterile, white rooms where men in white coats stick even more unpleasant things into you than a few slender needles. The drawback to this is that it's expensive, and a new student works on you each time. You have to get to know some one all over again, explain what's wrong with you and for how long, etc. It necessitates a sort of routine Q&A that you must run through each time you go; getting-to-know-you questions to distract from the insertion of a dozen or more thread-thin needles.
On this last visit, my acupuncturist was a middle aged woman who called herself "Cloud." There was a different name on her ID tag, but I went along with it. As she placed the needles, she asked me what I do to relax. I replied that I read, I take walks, I watch movies. Then, reluctantly, I said, "And I... you know... play games."
"Oh!" she exclaimed. "What kind of games?"
I knew it. From the moment I'd walked in, I could sense that she was a sister of mine, a comrade in dorkdom, a fellow role playing gamer. Maybe it was the hippie nickname, maybe the way she carried herself, who knows. After 5+ years of being a gamer, I can smell my own.
We almost immediately fell into a conversation about Dungeons and Dragons 4.0 which was just released earlier this month. I mentioned how some of the classes had been trimmed and how it annoys me because we all know they're just leaving them out to repackage them and sell them to us again in a new book, doubling their profit. We discussed the new skill point allocation system with trained and untrained skills. We went over the new core races and character sheets. It was the quickest needling session I'd ever had.
I'm telling this story to make a point: We're everywhere. The once rare gamer-dork is becoming a more and more common phenomena. We're bagging your groceries, waiting your tables, preparing your loan documents, designing your website, using the stair-climber next to yours at the gym. Even I forget this sometimes, but it's true.
This blog is for people like Cloud and I: Gamers, geeks, nerds, fanboys, fangirls, readers, writers, collectors, intellectual-waxers, and the people who love them.
It's time to relax and have some fun, people.
On this last visit, my acupuncturist was a middle aged woman who called herself "Cloud." There was a different name on her ID tag, but I went along with it. As she placed the needles, she asked me what I do to relax. I replied that I read, I take walks, I watch movies. Then, reluctantly, I said, "And I... you know... play games."
"Oh!" she exclaimed. "What kind of games?"
I knew it. From the moment I'd walked in, I could sense that she was a sister of mine, a comrade in dorkdom, a fellow role playing gamer. Maybe it was the hippie nickname, maybe the way she carried herself, who knows. After 5+ years of being a gamer, I can smell my own.
We almost immediately fell into a conversation about Dungeons and Dragons 4.0 which was just released earlier this month. I mentioned how some of the classes had been trimmed and how it annoys me because we all know they're just leaving them out to repackage them and sell them to us again in a new book, doubling their profit. We discussed the new skill point allocation system with trained and untrained skills. We went over the new core races and character sheets. It was the quickest needling session I'd ever had.
I'm telling this story to make a point: We're everywhere. The once rare gamer-dork is becoming a more and more common phenomena. We're bagging your groceries, waiting your tables, preparing your loan documents, designing your website, using the stair-climber next to yours at the gym. Even I forget this sometimes, but it's true.
This blog is for people like Cloud and I: Gamers, geeks, nerds, fanboys, fangirls, readers, writers, collectors, intellectual-waxers, and the people who love them.
It's time to relax and have some fun, people.
4 comments:
Just try to keep your discussions to 3.0 and higher editions. Remember: THAC0 is wack0 if you're a gamer.
haha
I haven't heard that expression in awhile.
We're everywhere. We're even reading your blogs. You might not believe it, but it's true.
<3
Yay Lily!
Please move to America and play D&D with me!
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