Destination Barcelona – Be Back In 2 Weeks’ Time

Today is such a warm day and I wonder what the weather in Spain will be like.  Cynthia steamed hot buns this morning and we were sweating by the time we finished our breakfast ready to go to work.  Today is also the day that stands between where my routine work takes a pause and my 2 weeks block leave begins.  My 2 weeks block leave!  Frankly speaking, I don’t feel a thing right now.  Probably will be, once we have passed the immigration checkpoint tomorrow evening.  There is something magical about airports.  Travelers, transit passengers, strangers from all around the world, happy to visit a holiday location, sad to leave home for work, happy to return home for whatever reasons, there is this feeling of “point of no return”, “leaving all that behind” which make airports special.  Your loved ones pass that checkpoint and you have no clue when to meet again; the gate is closing and ready or not you have to board the plane now.  Ready or not!  I am having butterflies on my stomach thinking how unprepared I am for this trip to Spain. Not even my close to non-existence Spanish, which by the way I should have been revising hard, would save me.

I have thought long and hard on what to do with this website of mine during my 2 weeks of absence.  Intuitively, almost like a reflect action, I have – believe it or not – planned out what to publish for the month of June.  Three entries a week I have worked out the titles and what the contents will be.  Running a website is like running a magazine, except I don’t have bosses to report to and editors to tell me how badly I write or how I could and should improve.  Like my real work.  Year 2007, I have scheduled 10 entries in an attempt to keep my readers happy while I was away.  However, most who knew that I was away probably assumed that I would give blogging a rest.  When I returned, I chatted with some of my readers and they were surprised that my website kept churning out contents while I was holidaying somewhere away from home.

And through this process of thinking about it while not thinking about it, looking at the lesson learned in the year 2007, maybe it is a good idea to give blogging a rest and truly have a holiday without thinking about what my readers may comment, which I by the way would love to read and response.  That decision has certainly lifted a big task off my back.  I mean, writing 10 blog entries at one go is no easy feat.

So I have decided to write something the way I have always wanted to write: a mind dump.  Almost similar to an author’s note at the back of the book that most people would skip, that I often try to read and gain a certain idea of what the author is like in real life.  Like Piers Anthony, my favorite fantasy writer when I was young.  His books always end with a chapter on his real life chores, what he plans to do, the books in the making, his daughter (I think), amongst other frustration and rewards he gets.  These texts are certainly less entertaining than his stories but I think it is important to know the artist behind the art.  It enhances the art appreciation process.  That’s why I find reading the biography of Pink Floyd intriguing.  That’s why I have become an even more hardcore fan of Marilyn Mansion after watching him being interviewed by Michael Moore in the documentary “Bowling for Columbine”.  Behind the mask of bizarre make-up and shock lyrics is a man of decent intelligence.  Why blame the entertainer for the school shootout just because the shooter was listening to Marilyn Mansion when in the same day, Bush was dropping bombs in the Middle East killing innocents?  So he said.

By and large, I think I am a disciplined blogger.  I write consistently, in terms of timeline and in terms of tones and contents.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading some of my friends’ blogs that could begin – and possibly end with – I f**king hate myself or today or my work.  That kind of raw emotion, so genuine, so expressive, and so entertaining in a weird sense.  Such class that I don’t have, that I wish to have.  If I was to write on that free form, self expressive genre, it could possibly be one of the most depressing thing you would read online.  Not all have that class.  Those who have are a joy to read.  Not only from the entertainment point of view, but also to genuinely care of that someone who may have gone through a not so great day, or a not so great episode in life.

Maybe it is also because negativity does not dwell on me or grow on me for long.  I could think of a thousand words entry on “I get burned for caring too much” – a would have been suited title for today – but as soon as my thought solidifies into words, the thought dissipates and there are no more words.  I am a disciplined blogger because by and large I have a certain pattern to follow, however diverse the topics it may seem.  There is a soft word limit of 400.  And there is a harder word limit of 500 except key reviews that can run into 1,500 words.  Why 400?  I reckon typical readers only have a minute or so or less to spend on any one particular site so if I could, I would write my entries with a 200 words or less.  But I can’t.  I am a long winded boring guy.  I am not good at being concise.  That’s why I enjoy writing this entry right now.  Because I have made a point not to impose any word limit for this I-am-going-for-a-holiday-and-see-you-in-2-weeks-time entry.

In real life, I see being disciplined pays off.  Like Formula One, boring as it may seem (as I do know viewers who enjoy seeing car crash more than anything else), one key success factor of Jenson Button is to have the perfect execution lap after lap, race after race.  Each lap you only gain a fraction of a second.  That’s why in F1, there are over 60 laps to decide a winner.  The time difference between the first and the second car could well be in the region of 6 seconds.  The time difference between the second and third car could even be a lot lesser.  You do the mathematics and tell me how much time the race leader gains per lap against his closest competitor.  Whenever I am frustrated with my daily chores, I would think of Jenson Button, think of Jewel.  Jewel Kilcher’s first album “Pieces of You” went unnoticed when it was first released.  She then toured around the country, sleeping inside the tour bus, in order to reach as many listeners as possible.  One year later, more and more people requested her songs at the radio stations all over Amercia.  All of a sudden, her re-release album shot all the way to Billboard #1 and “You Were Meant For Me” seemed to have stayed at the peak for weeks.  Whenever I turned on the car radio back in the training days in US, “You Were Meant For Me” was playing on air.  Hard work and discipline pays off.

In real life, I am neither Jenson Button nor Jewel Kilcher.  In real life, Cynthia and I go through a different daily chore after work.  It is not a chore per se.  Just that at times, there is no instant gratification.  Otherwise, I wouldn’t have classified it that way.  Some young folks may think that massively multi-player online role playing game (MMORPG) is a new concept.  It is not.  In about 2 decades ago, I was into MUD (multi-user dungeon) – a real time virtual world that is text based, that demands your imagination as you navigate around the world.  You press the letter ‘n’ to go north and then a few line of description of the terrain appears that opens up options for your next course of action.  These days, the concept remains.  But with a more engaging graphical interface.  The experience is a lot more jaw dropping.  Who knows what 2030 will bring?

One friend of mine passed me a potential opportunity to be interviewed by Digital Life (one section of our local newspaper).  I responded the questions but my piece was not featured, which is kind of a relief looking back.  The article doesn’t have the depth that I would have expected.  Do I think that it is a social stigma to be known as a gamer?  I personally don’t see it that way.  But does World of Warcraft make a good business conversation?  I think not.  Paulo Coelho has shared with us an observation in his new book “The Winner Stands Alone”.  He said society will not fix the problem of workaholism.  Because unlike drug addiction, workaholism increases productivity and propels the society forward, at a cost.  Most people, he mentioned, who are putting in a lot of extra hours into their work ignoring other aspects of life, they don’t admit that they are workaholic.  Deep inside, we all know that our partners would like us to have more time with them; deep inside, we all know that we are trading time for money; deep inside, we all know that we have a choice.

So, where do games like World of Warcraft fit in?  It doesn’t increase productivity for sure.  Neither are the hours you sit in front of your television.  Some are able to moderate the time in gaming, some are not.  Is being a gamer a social stigma?  For your information, there are studies that reveal the positive effects of gaming.  For your information, gamers who shoot good guys or bad guys, monsters or zombies in the virtual worlds do not go around gunning down everyone in the neighborhood.  But like Paulo Coelho said, people are more interested in news rather than information.  Positive effects of gaming don’t make good news pieces.  That couple who left their baby at home dead because they were playing World of Warcraft inside an Internet café makes great news item.  Divorced fathers being able to keep in touch with their children inside the virtual world and be part of their childhood doesn’t make good story.  Negative behaviors spawned from within the game does.

According to PC Gamer magazine (March edition 2009), there are currently 11 million World of Warcraft subscribers.  Each subscriber pays USD 15 per month to play.  The total running cost since 2004 is USD 200 million.  That may sound a lot but having a monthly revenue of USD 165 million only based on monthly subscription excluding merchandise and additional services, I reckon this game is a commercial success in a phenomenon scale.  On the day when the latest expansion was out, 1,944 copies (USD 40 each) were sold every minute.

Cynthia and I have been progressing pretty well in the World of Warcraft.  Successful is probably a wrong choice of word.  To be meaningful in the game, it is not only about mastering the game mechanism, which on its own, it is mathematically complex (click here if you are curious and don’t miss the graphs towards the bottom of the page).  It requires you to have a grasp on economy (everyone in the game knows that we need to transform time and effort into virtual currency).  It requires you to build a good network for the collaboration effort within the game.  It requires you to do virtual daily chores and above all, a deep knowledge on the vast game content.  Some are fun, some are just repetitive.  But the carrot is always there at the end of the stick.  As of today, both Cynthia and my characters are riding a dragon or two, getting exalted in a good number of fractions, almost epically geared, tearing heroic dungeons one after another, and we do it day in, day out.

Potential social stigma aside, both Cynthia and I as a result of that game spend much time together, almost every evening (with moderation).  We laughed at each other, screamed at each other, sitting right next to each other on different computers.  Think of it like a nightly basketball game with your partner, or a nightly game of bridge.  We now have our own private jokes and references whenever we talk about something, something even as trivial as our holiday planning.

High level holiday planning I meant.  We know we will be landing in Barcelona.  We know where we will stay for the first three nights.  What’s after?  I will tell you when we are back in two weeks’ time.  Have a good one.