...get a life.

After talking in class this week about MUD's (multi-user dungeons) I started to think about how I could talk about them in my blog. I sat here for about thirty minutes thinking about what my avatar would be like and what I would do with it. After all this time I realized that there is no aspect of MUD's that amuse me, the only fun I would get out of it is acting like a "Mr. Bungle". I mean I wouldn't go as far as making someone eat pubic hairs or violate themselves with a steak knife (from class reading, not my own thoughts) but the only fun I would find would be to go around causing chaos. The users who get so involved in these games that they don't know the difference between real life and virtual reality need a good ass beating. Life is not about sitting on a computer pretending to be someone your not and pretending to do things that you aren't really doing, they have a place in the real world for people who act like that and its called an insane asylum. These people need to get addicted to something more productive, like planting trees or something. The reality is that you can't live your life in html codes, users who "can't get enough" virtual reality need to wake up and smell the coffee because the real world isn't going anywhere.

My apologies if this blog post is just a list of my complaints towards those who display obsessive behavior over MUD's but I just can't seem to wrap my head around this. The only positive thing, and I stress only thing, I can come up with to say about MUD's is that I guess if your having a bad day in the real world you can take a small escape for a little while. That being said, you actually have to have a life in the real world for me to give you any approval for spending large amounts of time in virtual reality.

Unexpected Encounters...

After reading the story in the Clay Shirky reading I recalled a similar event in my life in which a group was formed unintentionally. A few weeks ago my roommate borrowed one of my purses to take to the bar that night, she returned the bag the next day and I nothing ever became of it. About two weeks after I had let her borrow the bag, I decided to use it to bring out with me. As I was putting my wallet and cell phone into the bag I noticed that there was a green TD Bank ATM card in the side pocket of the purse. Neither me nor my roommate belong to this bank, so I read the name on the card, for privacy reasons lets say the name read Johnny Appleseed. neither me nor my roommate had ever heard of this person before and none of the friends we were with knew who he was either. So how did someone's ATM card (a pretty valuable item to find) end up in my purse? I decided to log on to Facebook and look this person up, luckily there was only one Johnny Appleseed who belonged to the Catholic University Network and to my advantage, no aspects of his profile were set to private. This Johnny Appleseed must loose his belongings a lot because he had his cell phone number posted on his Facebook page, which is really not safe in my opinion. Surprisingly, I had nothing better to do with my afternoon so instead of sending him a message or email, I picked up my phone and gave Johnny boy a call. A groggy voice answered the phone and I asked to speak to Mr. Appleseed. The voice informed me that it was him speaking and I proceeded to tell him the story of how I found his ATM card in a bag that i had let my friend borrow. Johnny told me that when he closed his tab out at the bar that the bartender accidentally gave his card back to the wrong person and that he had already cancelled the card and told me I could keep it as a souvenir if I wanted? On a side note, My roommate came home with her own ATM card, so it remains a mystery as to why she thought is was okay to bring two ATM cards home from the bar. I thought that my conversation with Johnny Appleseed was over at that point, but he ended up having a conversation with me about what I was doing with my day and what my year and major was in school. Although odd, i answered the questions and eventually the conversation came to an end, A few hours later my roommate and I both received a Facebook friend request from Johnny followed by text messages sent to my phone asking if he could meet us for drinks to thank us for being to gracious to call him about his ATM card. We met up with him because we really didn't have any other plans, and since then we have remained friends and occasional have conversations with him when we see him out. We formed a rather unusual friendship or group from a rather unusual event. This life experience really goes to show how social networking sites, like Facebook, can create groups among people who would never have had an opportunity to interact with each other.