Holly Ward

My life got turned upside-down a few weeks ago.

No, not my Real life.  That’s just fine, thank goodness.  No, it was my online life.  My World of Warcraft life. See, a few weeks ago Blizzard decided to come out with a new expansion.  New continent, new weapons, armor, dungeons, enchantments… everything.  And a new maximum level that your characters could reach, ten levels higher than before.

Now before the expansion I was (trying here not to sound smug, and failing miserably) Fairly Well-Off. I had a resto (healer) druid in all the finest epics, a hunter in reasonable epics to do all the grunt work so the druid wouldnt have to soil her dainty hands with actual work, and not one but two private vaults stuffed to bursting with enough supplies and equipment to furnish a medium sized guild.  All that stuff is obsolete now. It’s like being stuck with a warehouse full of VCRs, now that everybody uses DVDs.  (And that reference is going to make this post really dated in a couple years, I predict.)

I’m not criticizing Blizzard. The new content is breathtaking.  But it’s all new, unfamilar…  I mean when I’m questing on a new alt in Westfall, I’m remembering long, lazy summer evenings there, kicking back listening to the cicadas and slaughtering gnolls. Or making that long run through Ashenvale to the Barrens, remembering just how scary it was to the newb I was then. Northrend isn’t “home” the way those places are, not yet anyway.

Yeah, I know. It’s a video game. Get over it. But I’m a bookworm, have been since the age of four.  I basically have lived my whole life in a fantasy world; Lord of the Rings was far more “real” to me than high school was. Although I’d venture to guess that my high school had more orcs.

So what is my point?  Well, it seems to me that much the same thing is happening in the Real World.  People are getting laid off and discovering, to their horror, that their skills are obsolete. Whole industries are disappearing.  Bill’s reading this over my shoulder as he potters about the house, and he just said “You know, the last remaining manufacturer of VHS tapes just announced they won’t be making them any more.” Or, remember pagers?  Remember when having one was cool?  I can’t remember the last time I saw one.  But then I’m old enough to remember when using somebody else’s phone didn’t feel like you were using their toothbrush.

When World of Warcraft changed, I basically pulled back into my shell.  Neither of my high-level characters has hit the maximum level yet.  Instead I’ve been playing new characters, seeing all the old familiar content through the eyes of a warrior, or a warlock, or a shaman.  And for the first time I’m starting to understand people who say they “just don’t like technology”. Because the real world is changing even faster than World of Warcraft, and you can’t just decide to stop playing.  So my question is, how are people reacting to this?  How are they coping?

Okay, when I started this blog, I made a promise to myself.  I was going to be positive. Upbeat. Cheerful even, almost to the point of being annoyingly so. But I can’t do it. The truth is, I’m depressed. I wasn’t even this depressed back when I was so sick.  And frankly, I blame Facebook.

I was dubious about Facebook right from the start, but everybody else seemed to love it and to spend lots of time posting madly about … well, everything. And you can’t see any of it unless you join. So I joined. Bill “helpfully” sent me a bunch of Facebook links to people that we used to know, not realizing that doing so notified THEM too.  So all of a sudden I have a Facebook full of people I haven’t given a second thought to in 15 years.

To understand why that was bad, you have to understand a bit about me.  I’ve always had the attitude “I’ll try anything once” and “What’s the worst that could happen?”  And when you approach life with that kind of mindset, you make a lot of very, very, very, very, very, very stupid decisions. However I had a combination of a cheerful disposition and a very short memory, and most of the bad experiences rolled off me like water off a duck’s back.  Which it actually does, by the way. When we lived on the boat I used to spend a lot of time watching the ducks, and when they got wet the water would sort of bead up and fall off.  But I digress.

Anyway, every time I looked at my computer (which is most of the time, what can I tell you), I was forcibly reminded of a period of my life I’d just as soon forget. I finally dropped everybody I hadn’t seen in the last year or two, but the damage was done.

So screw it.  If I’m going to keep a blog (and I am), I can’t wear a fake happyface. At the very least, I owe all of you the courtesy of being real.

So why this blog? Why now?

I used to be a software engineer, but then I got too sick to work.  I finally got better, after some very long and very expensive medical treatment, and I found that the LAST thing on earth I wanted to do was to go back to being a software engineer.

A lot of what happened next can be traced back to my brother Jim.  He lives in Tokyo, and I went over there and visited him a few years back, and became completely obsessed with the Japanese language. I must have been a complete pain in the ass, because Jim kept showing me all these amazing things around the city, and all I could talk about was “What does that sign say?  What does that character mean?”  I made him take me to a bookstore so I could buy some Japanese dictionaries and started studying. The day before I left, and this is something I will never forget, I actually read a word in Japanese.  It was on the back of a liquid propane truck, and it said “高圧” which means “high pressure”.  I recognized it from the TV weather the night before. I was hooked. When I got home I started taking classes, eventually picking up a AA degree at the local community college.

I got into blogging  because of Jim too.  One year he put up an April Fool’s parody of Joi Ito’s blog. Joi is a venture capitalist and one of the very first A-list bloggers.  He’s now the CEO of Creative Commons. I seriously couldn’t  believe it, but the parody is still online!  You have to go read it. My favorite bit is about Joi letting the Pope ride his Segway. Anyway Joi thought it was funny and hired him.  I started reading Joi’s blog after that, and then more blogs, and more, and then I started blogging myself.

Which is what I was spending my time on when a friend demanded that I at least TRY World of Warcraft.  Joi had blogged about WoW, so I let my arm be twisted.  I didnt think I would like it.  But for the last two years, when I wasn’t at the gym or riding my bicycle, I was playing WoW. I forgot all about blogging and pretty much everything else.

Meantime, like I said, I’ve been working out at the gym.  Shortly after I was pronounced “cured”, I started working out with possibly the world’s best personal trainer, Daniella Dayoub. After six months of being so sick that my idea of a really good day was being able to make it to the living room and sit on the couch, she didn’t have much to work with, but she managed. I’m in pretty damn good shape now, at least compared to the way I was.

So that brings us up to the present.  Lately whenever I go over there for a workout, I end up bending Daniella’s ear about social media, SEO, all this “new marketing” stuff that I’ve become obsessed with for some reason. And the cool thing is that Daniella actually has a website,  and we both got excited about trying some of these ideas out.  I finally got her new blog set up and she’s started posting. And I’m trying to learn as much as much as I can about this stuff so I can help make her more “findable” on the web.

And here’s the weird part: I’ve been in a serious slump for a while now, and my performance at the gym has been, shall we say, less than spectacular. But when I started trying to help Daniella with this stuff, I got really motivated. I’ve been kicking some serious butt at the gym, and I’ve been waking up in the morning excited about starting the day. Some days I even forget to play World of Warcraft.

I realized that even though it’s been a long time, I really missed blogging. I didn’t want to try to restart my old, stale blog though - for one thing, the title no longer fits who I am.  And I’ve been sitting on the hollyward.com domain for years, and I just feel like it’s time to start blogging under my own name.

So here goes. It’s good to be back!