Midir

Midir is a member of the Tuatha De Danaan; the "People of Danu". People who get paid to study such things believe that the "Danu" in question is also the being that the Danube river is named for. A lot of old goddesses are associated with rivers, but that's probably another post for some far future day. Most people who are interested in such things believe that the Tuatha De Danaan are gods. Strictly speaking, they are literary characters with very unusual attributes, not classical gods in the Greco/Roman sense, but not exactly mortal beings, either. There are many, many such beings in Celtic myth.

A few years ago, I was quite the Celtic Kookball (or maybe "Cuighbhall") according to my children. I immersed myself in the various cycles of Irish mythology and some of the Welsh. Midir was an interesting character to me for some reason at the time, and I developed a fondness for him, but there really isn't much in the mythology about him. He's sort of a peripheral character who occasionally pops up to steal someone's wife or to foster someone, not the focal point of any really key stories. One remembers the main characters: Lugh, the Dagda, the Morrigan, Brigit. Midir is one of those characters that it is very easy to forget, and so I did.

Then, a few weeks ago, I remembered that there was a particular character that I had a fondness for back in the Kookball days and that he had been the foster father of Aengus Og, and I just couldn't recall his name. It bugged me that I couldn't remember it. Every so often, I'd struggle with it, and it just wasn't there. You know how it really just nags at you when something like that happens? You can't remember the title of a song or the name of some obscure movie, and it just bugs you.

Fast forward to this past weekend. The Sig and I were camping on the very beautiful and isolated mountain acreage of a friend, and having a very pleasant time. I also used to do quite a lot of camping, and I've always been a bit of a survivalist at heart, so it was comforting and relaxing for me to be out in the middle of nowhere with Sig and our friends. Now, we knew that our friends were thinking about selling a house that they no longer feel they can live in due to extended family obligations. We also know that they love the house, and they never did put it on the market, so despite the fact that we are kind of "looking" for a house all the time we didn't really have this house on our radar because it seemed like their attachment to it was strong and that they probably wouldn't be able to realistically price it even if they got around to ever putting it on the market. But it seems they have now determined to sell it, and they are increasingly anxious to sell it, and they feel that what they have decided to ask for it is incredibly reasonable. I did detect a change in the way they presented the story, almost as if they had noticed how many properties up in their neck of the woods were on the market and were not selling. And they seem to have accepted their new digs, and they are doing a lot of improving of them, and are moving more of their belongings to their current house from their prior house. This isn't the usual "move up" situation, where they actually bought a new house before they sold their old one. It's more of a familial obligation that they feel bound to fulfill, and probably rightly so, but it has plucked them away -- not seduced them away. We are very familiar with their current lodgings, but we've never been to their prior house. They haven't lived in it for a year, although they still maintain it. And in a very diplomatic way, they made it clear that they are interested in us moving into that house. We could rent it, we could buy it, we could rent it for a while and then buy it.
Well, obviously, the whole idea is kind of alarming. I can think of no quicker way to ruin a friendship than to bring money into it. So, the logical part of my brain is steering very clear of the offer. But the seed was planted, and the emotional part of my brain began to steer back towards it. Our friend had spoken to us of some improvements he had invested a lot of his time and creative energy in, back before they knew we were looking for a house and before they were really ready to sell it. And they are just the kind of things that we would have dreamed of doing, if we'd had the skill. And other aspects of this as yet unseen house have been brought up in random snippets of conversation: the large basement, the cellar, the fruit trees. Perversely, as the economy has gotten worse and fuel has gotten more expensive, I find myself once again feeling the urge to move further away. This is another of those logical brain vs. emotional brain dilemmas. I love my job, and I do not want to give up my pay and benefits. I'd probably try to make the commute. If it came down to it, I could get a job in a hospital much closer -- really close. But it would mean a pay cut, I'm certain. And it would mean giving up my seniority and my vesting in my current pension.
So, Sig and I are sitting around the campfire and I'm looking up at the brilliant Milky Way and I'm feeling things. I have a strong intuitive streak. When life keeps heading me in a certain direction, I tend to think it might be good for me to stop struggling and just go with the flow. Life has been leading me in the direction of the Sierra for years. First, old friends who purchased land up in the mountains and came up from the LA area several times a year, during which we'd all camp on their land and tell stories and think about trying to preserve the place for our kids and grandkids. But eventually, they realized that they weren't ready to build in the mountains and they found what they were looking for in Southern California. We are still close, but our dream of a viable, actual community is gone now. One of our group has made such a life for he and his wife in Willits, and has given gentle advice from time to time on living closer to the land in a smaller community in a more purposeful way. I thought about moving to Southern Cali, and I thought about moving to Willits, and it would have been lovely to have moved closer to the closest friends I've ever had -- but it didn't seem right. Life was not pulling me in that direction, but it was definitely telling me that the times were changing and decisions had to be made soon.
When Sig and I discovered our new community and made new friends, I really didn't think it was going to work out so well. I thought it would be another shallow disappointment, leading nowhere.
Nothing could be further from our life in the past year. We have had such fun, and been made to be so welcome. Every shared experience just makes us that much more interwoven into this group of people that have come to be like family to us, and in such a short period of time.
I used to be very cavalier about friendships. When you have less time to grow them, they suddenly become that much dear to you, I've discovered. Our friends in LA, by necessity, we only see for a week or so every year. Sig's friends from back East we host at a BBQ for a day when they're here for a sporting event. Friends are different than family, because you are bound by common interests, and not birth. It is a different kind of love, and it is very necessary for your mental and emotional well-being. Your kids, and your partner, can't provide the kind of sounding board that friends provide. This past year I feel that we've been absolutely flooded with friendship, and we've become physically and emotionally healthier for it. And the roots of it are in the foothills of the Sierra, once again. Only this time, the friends belong to the land and aren't traveling to it to try to make it theirs. I can't help but feel that life has led me to this place, and that I'd better consider any offers very carefully, no matter how alarming the notion of them is. There is something deeper going on here.
So, sitting looking up at the stars, this obscure Celtic supernatural being again came into my mind, for no known reason. He didn't have anything to do with mountains, or friends, or community or houses. But I couldn't think of his name, for the life of me. So, I threw out a challenge to the Great Beyond. If this is really something that I should pursue, the name of that being would be given back to me that weekend. Now, this doesn't mean much, scientifically. After all, I did know his name, I'd just forgotten it. For years. But it was buried in my own mind, just like all those algebra formulae and the names of all the bones in the human body that I could no longer remember, either.
That night, I dreamed of deer in the meadow. Or maybe they dreamed of me.
And in the morning, as I woke up, the name was given back to me. Midir.

Where do we go from here?

It's not like we're at a crossroads where we are forced to make a choice.....yet. But lately I've been thinking a lot about the future, given the increasingly high cost of fuel and food. Of course, opinion is somewhat divided as to whether these costs will continue to rise, but it seems to me that a prudent and safe presumption would be that they will.
So, the question becomes, in a future of increasingly limited resources, what will our communities look like? James Kuntsler believes that they will look an awful lot like villages did prior to the Industrial Revolution, and that big cities are doomed, as they will lack the resources to provide for their population. Others believe that with limited resources, people will need to live in cities due to jobs and distribution centers (in other words, it will only be economically possible to ship food to limited "ports" -- no more trucking avocadoes from Mexico to Maine).

In the past year, we've formed some bonds locally up in the foothills of the Sierra, which is a bit mystifying to me. It all started because we wanted a yard for the dogs. The whole process which began over 2 years ago and has now culminated in us becoming a part of a community that we never dreamed we would fit into, is almost metaphysical and to question whether it is practical seems a bit like rejecting guidance from the Numinous. And that seems very ill-advised.
On the other hand, it is entirely possible that I am letting my emotions have dangerous control over what should be a more practical decision. It's not like human beings are unknown to make poor decisions based on misguided spiritual beliefs and emotional attachments, after all.

In the last few years, I developed a real admiration for modern design, because it is clean and simple. And that has led me to become fascinated with modern housing architecture, and to almost exclusively track a particular type of mid-century modern tract house built in the Sacramento older suburbs by the Streng Brothers. If the New Urbanists are right, then living in an older and established suburb in a Streng home would be perfectly workable, and in many ways ideal. There would be nearby public transportation, shops and parks. It would be much closer to my current work territory. Additionally, my chosen career path is heavily dependant on driving and as the cost of fuel becomes more prohibitive, I don't see that my employer will have any choice than to limit services to higher population density areas. If Kuntsler is right, then it would be better to move even further away (but closer to our social circle who live mostly in the Placerville region). My job prospects would be less appealing. I could probably find work doing pretty much what I'm doing now, but it would pay a lot less and yet rent and food would remain around the same cost. Where we live currently is at a border area, literally. We live right on the border of Sacramento and El Dorado County, right on the border between urban and rural. We are neither here, nor there.
The Armstrongs, my Scottish clan, were a borders clan. The borders of Scotland were a wild and crazy place, of nearly constant warfare and invasion. People lived in modified towers, basically, in which they could draw up the ladder to the second floor and have some defense against casual opportunistic foes. Just thinking about the daily lives of my forbears makes me anxious, and while my borders are nowhere near as tumultous as theirs, the resonance of the borders as a place in space and time does seem apt and descriptive of where I find myself.

Life in the Current Middle Ages, Plague Free Edition

Sig and I have been spending way too much time in the Middle Ages, and it's getting pretty darned expensive. We already had the basics of a good period encampment, but then Sig decided to try to get into the combat archery in ernest. We also already had all the components to make the arrows, and the correct weight of bows, and the armor -- but he needed an expensive helm, and rigging leather, and under-armor padding, boots, gloves, etc. And we began brewing a lot more, and we bought some kegs and cheap-O carbonation equipment, and some additional supplies. Then we realized the cheap-O stuff was not cutting it, so we purchased a CO2 rig, with gauge and tubes and doohickeys, which is not really very medieval at all, but it's pretty darned expensive to waste 5 gallons of ale that you've spent several hours making and several weeks aging because oxygen got into your keg. Stale and sour ale is actually VERY medieval; but our motto is "The Middle Ages As They Should Have Been". Not with sour ale, highway brigands, high infant mortality, famines, body odor and plague.
Since buying garb is pretty expensive, even though most of it is of much better quality and craft than my mundane clothing and lasts pretty much forever, I have taken my fellow Shire member Solveig up on her offer of a monthly sewing meeting. And if my garb lasts forever, you may ask, why do I need new garb at all? Well, Sig needs a gambison and a surcoat to cover his objectionable Kidex armor. I need to line my wool cloak. I need a couple more underdresses, as I only have one. We need some banners and hangings. It would be nice to make my grandbabies some tunics, trewes and leines. Sig could use a couple of long tunics, too, although he does have three really nice ones. And he REALLY needs some trewes. He only has one or two pair now.
And then there are the target archery arrows. Those cost about $25 per dozen, and if you've ever shot target archery in the field, you know that wooden arrows are often damaged and lost, much like golf balls. Arrows also require actual functional quivers, which tend to be expensive. Again, you can get cheap-O quivers, but they aren't big enough and they don't have enough strapping to really be very useful. You also need either very long and tight leather gloves, or leather armguards, because the bowstring WILL snap your bowarm. And you will need new bowstrings periodically, bow string wax, finger tabs or a three finger glove to pull your bowstring, something in which to carry all of this, etc.
Calligraphy requires pens, points, inks and a vellum-substitute parchment paper that is more expensive than drawing paper. You will need to consult some good books with period examples of various scripts. You will need something to carry your supplies in. If you go really crazy, you will want a light table and a drafting table, and various implements to square your work and measure your lines.
Then there are the embellishments to your garb, or to make jewelry: wire, beads, metalworking tools, needles, cord, hoops. And something to carry your supplies in.
And since most of our SCA lives revolve around events that we stay at for two nights to two weeks, camping, you need a period tent and chairs and bedding and rugs and floor pillows and feast gear and a brazier and lanterns/oil lamps/candles and a way to clean things and dispose of refuse and store food/drink.
Now, mind you, we had already accrued much of this stuff over the past several years. We already had the basics. And you might point out, and rightfully so, that perhaps it would be less expensive to just have ONE craft. The problem is that whatever it is you do in the SCA, and wherever you enter the great wheel, eventually that thing will lead you to another thing. Archery leads to combat archery which leads to heavy combat which leads to being recruited to fight in wars which leads to travel costs, for example. People end up with trebuchets in their back yard, and they had no intention of ever having such a thing. I am not joking about this. I once saw a post from a person needing to sell his TWO trebuchets, because he was moving and would no longer have a place to keep them.
My goal is now to discover ways to keep my medieval avocations, but also keep them within a budget and not drive my mundane self into the poorhouse. Several months ago, I thought about a new direction for this blog, which started out as a response to the overheated bubble market in Sacramento area real estate from the perspective of a renter who hoped to buy soon. That ship has sailed, and several blogs cover those issues much better than I ever could, like Average Buyer and Sacramento Land(ing) . Many of those blogs came about because their creators were trying to cope with their own fears and frustrations over housing. And it strikes me that if I'm stressed out about losing my sense of community and my social outlet because it revolves around what can be expensive avocations, others probably are, too. A lot of people didn't just use their HELOC to buy a Hummer, or go on a cruise. Some of us used them to buy pavillions, armor and trucks/trailers to haul this elaborate stuff around. And we're just as tapped out as the mundane folks, and probably just as stressed about lifestyle issues. I wish I could say that I'm going to use my medieval life as a work in progress on living the Dream on Le$$, and that is my goal, but I suspect that I am going to fall short.

My Birthday

Today is my birthday (go, me!!) and I thought I'd post an update on where things stand currently.

The Housing obsession has now melded itself to some other themes of the past year or so in my life; namely, the search for sustainable community and our nerdy avocations. One of the reasons that I've given up haunting the local housing blogs (instead of several times a day, I now check in one or two times a week -- and some weeks, none) is that I'm not seeing much downward pricing in houses that I'm interested in. The houses in areas that no one in their right mind should ever have believed they could flip for a profit are dropping like rocks in price. But in safe, quiet, attractive areas the houses are not affordable to me.
And my demands have only gone up, which doesn't make it any easier to find one. My demands have gone up because the community that we have long sought and found so elusive, we have evidently found in the charming denizens of The Shire of Mountain's Gate. Since our first tentative shire meeting in November, we feel we have finally found our SCA home. We have gone from no involvement and lapsed memberships, to meetings several times a month and sometimes multiple times a week. My sewing machine has showed up again on the dining room table, and I'm still making atrociously poor tunics for family members, but I'm counting on some monthly sewing circles to help me improve. I've discovered beading, which I am not too bad at. I'm going to give embroidery another shot this weekend, while giving inspiration and moral support to the Sig as he embarks on his own journey to hone his medieval martial arts skills. The armor that we had sitting in boxes has been "rigged" with the help of our Shire Seneshal, Geoffrey of Clan Fergus. He has also fitted a very impressive helm for Sig. With the armor and the helm, Sig looks very scarey for his 5'6". We will be attempting to put up our period pavillion for the second time this weekend at the Cynagua Coronet. Sig is in the early fermentation stages of a strawberry mead, and I've got a kegged blackberry cream ale. The herbs have arrived from Wildweeds and all I'm lacking now is the juniper berries in order to make a pretty darned good stab at a very early period gruit ale.
Most of this stuff: armor, brewing equipment, archery gear, pavillion tent, garb; we've had for years gathering dust in our little storage barn. Now, it's out and working. Which is why the criteria for housing has significantly changed. Simply put, we now need room to work on our projects. It doesn't have to be fancy. But we need the usual 3 bedrooms/2 baths plus a larger kitchen, and some room that can be used as a project room (a formal dining room or den would be fine) and storage space. Oh, and a place for the small utility trailer.
The rental house is a very functional base of operations right now. It works well for most of our needs, but there are some problems that frankly, having our own house would solve. It's just that we can't find anything like the rental for sale at a price that would keep our mortgage payment at the same level as our rent. If we could, and if we could get the loan that we could easily have gotten back in 2006, we'd buy. If this were my house, instead of a rental, I'd feel free to get the ductwork permanently repaired, put in solar power and hot water, buy that damn hot tub that I so desperately need but refuse to buy until I have my own house. I'd get rid of the puzzling raised beds in the total shade, and put some raised beds where they could get some light. I'd have the dead chestnut tree removed, and some gentle pruning done on dead limbs on the magnificent old oak. But it's not my house, and the landlord seems to be ok with it just slowly deteriorating. The frustration with the slow deterioration of the house, coupled with the low-level anxiety of renting (you never know when they might sell, or raise the rent, or decide one of their kids needs the house) inclines me strongly towards trying to buy, but there are really no viable options out there and I'm not going to spend 100k to 200k more than I'd spend in another two to four years. At some point, this will balance out, but the scales are tipped too far in favor of renting currently, and I don't think that will change in the next 6 months. I'm hoping it will change in the next year, just as I was last year, and the year before that. But it's obvious that this is such a slow moving train wreck in housing that I don't really need to monitor the market even on a weekly basis, and it's just wasting my time to do so.

On the general economic front, as you can imagine, increased avocations and the SCA in addition to the increased cost of food and fuel have impacted my finances. We did have the basics purchased already, but we have honestly way overspent in the last few weeks on brewing gear, fabric, beads and tools. We've also had to have repairs done to the two older vehicles. My job has been notifying us of some pretty scarey budget problems, and they are not hiring any employees to replace those which have left. This is rather remarkable, as I work in healthcare. It has really brought home to me the realization that when the economy goes sour, no field is really safe from the effects of it. It's rather ironic. During the late bubble, I was a miser and we didn't really go anywhere or do much of anything, because we were waiting for it all to come crashing down. And now that it has, and costs are increasing and my job is flashing yellow and traveling is twice as expensive as it was -- well, of course, now we're going to resume our expensive medievalist hobby.
But hey, I'm not getting any younger!

On Change and Inevitability

Let me state up front that I support Barack Obama's bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Philosophically, I wish he were more in the Kusinich and Edwards vein, and I was really torn in the California primary over who to vote for. Ultimately, I voted for Obama, because I trust him. Which is just ridiculous, but there it is. I trust him. I believe that he loves our country, and that he understands the concerns of middle and working class Americans. I also believe that he will people his cabinet with those who deeply understand the course ahead.

I'm a real sucker for idealism. I get teary-eyed reading the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and I'm not kidding. I carried a copy of them around with me for years, during my tenure in social services. I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution as a worker in the old VISTA program, and as far as I'm concerned, that oath is good for the rest of my life. I deplore people who wrap themselves in the flag, but I mist up when I say the Pledge of Allegiance.

And coming from an economically-depressed downstate Illinois city that saw its strong union job base rapidly decline in the Reagan years, I have a love of my own class. The working class. The blue collar class. One of the biggest frustrations of my life has been that my kind of people can't see that they are often played for fools by preachers and politicians.

I'm one of those people, because I believed in Bill Clinton. I cried, and I mean sobbed, when he won the election. And as time went on, even though I was uneasy about NAFTA and some of the social program changes he advocated, I continued to support him. Through budget deadlocks and shutdowns of Congress and Contracts with America and Monica-gate, I was there.
Prior to Clinton, I would vote for Republicans at times. I believed myself to be a moderate and largely non-partisan. I could not see what the Republicans were howling about, and my opinion of them became more and more negative, especially if anyone quoted Rush Limbaugh, who I thought was a self-serving buffoon.
Let's just skip ahead through the past 8 years. Suffice it to say that I moved from shocked numbness, through apathy and withdrawel, to shame and accountability and a re-engagement with the political process.

So, here we are again. And the more I hear from Obama, the more I like the guy. And sometimes, in fact a LOT of times, he makes me cry. When you get to be my age, a lot of your hopes and dreams have fallen by the wayside, and you begin to think that things will never change and that you just have to make the best of it and pass it on to the next generation and maybe they will be able to make progress. You settle. You learn to live with the machine and the inevitable. I believed, right up until recently, that Hillary Clinton was the inevitable machine President. Just like Bush in process, if not politics, and just as unlikely to give any credibility to anyone without a few hundred thousand dollars of influence money. I believed her to be benign, but also to feel entitled to the Presidency.
This is a far cry from the Hillary of my youth, a woman who challenged the role of a First Lady and who many of us as women admired (and others felt very threatened by). I admired her stab at healthcare reform, and her strong and outspoken advocacy of her husband's administration.
Maybe she and Bill were always the manipulative double-talkers that the Right was so frothy about, and I just didn't see it. I think to a certain extent that all politicians are manipulative double-talkers, and most of us accept that -- to a certain extent. But I am really beginning to see some truth in some of the obvious vitriol of the Right.
For many of us, one of the saddest casualties of this primary season may be the loss of the Clinton legacy. We've clung to it for 8 years, to this time of relative peace and demonstrable prosperity, when our wages were going up and our deficit was going down. We've looked fondly on Bill's work post-Presidency in the world community. We've mocked the conservatives who seemed to cling to a "Blame Clinton" outlook through the last 8 years of an increasingly incompetent and flawed W presidency. And let me be clear here: I believe that Bush's tax cuts and pandering to corporations, theocrats and Neo-cons has wrecked our economy and catapulted the US far down the road to the inevitable decline of what has been our empire. But the bottom line is that yes, I believe that some of Clinton's economic policies -- just like Reagan's -- have had and continue to have a negative impact on our middle and working class. Bush's policies have gone beyond "negative impact". We are all in for an epic struggle to move this country forward in a new age; one in which we are no longer ascendant. We can do it. We didn't need all those flat screen teevees and Hummers, anyway. We didn't need to live 50 miles from our jobs just so we could have a huge house on a small lot in a sterile "community". Besides, we couldn't really afford it. That's why we're all in such deep debt. Time to grow up.
But it would have been nice for the Clintons to have left us with that memory of good times. Instead, we are now forced to watch Bill live up to every accusation of duplicitous speech that the Right has been screaming about for years, and to watch Hillary skip merrily down the path of the triangulating neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council that believed that the way to beat the Republicans was to be just like them -- only without the bathroom sex and comb-overs and pince nez glasses.
I mean, come on, people!
No one owes you the Presidency, just because your name is Bush or Clinton or Kennedy or Roosevelt. Didn't we found our country on that premise? That "all men are created equal"?
But years of machine politics and Beltway scheming lead people to become out of touch with the electorate that put them in power in the first place. Massive money and generations of political influence can buy you a Supreme Court, but unfortunately the Clintons are a first-generation political dynasty trying to make a horizontal power move vs. the more typical vertical one, and at this point it seems doomed to failure and it's taking their legacy down with it.

My prediction, and I have to admit that a year ago this would have seemed pretty far-fetched, is that Obama will win the nomination and will win the Presidency. Again, I have hope. I believe that the more you see of him, the better you like him. And yes, I realize that he's not all that far left and that we're going to have to help him a lot to get to a solution to healthcare reform and to economic reform. But we'll get there. We have to. We have no choice.
Things won't be easy, but whether you vote for change or not, it is inevitable. Our lives are different from those of our parents and our grandparents. Some of those changes have not been beneficial. We've fallen behind in education, in work ethic, in sense of community and interdependence on one another. To paraphrase Obama, we reach for a video controller instead of a book or a hammer or our neighbor's hand. We WILL change; our choice is whether to embrace the inevitability and move forward, or fight it and let the world move further and further away from us.

Fork in the Road

When I started this blog, I never really intended for it to garner a lot of hits, which it doesn't. It was mostly a way for me to vent about stuff without bogarting someone else's blog. I'm verbose, but I have the good sense to know it and try to control it.
But lately, I'm feeling the urge to take the blog in a new direction. Maybe because I've gotten most of whatever-it-was out of my system. It was mostly a reaction to the housing bubble and frustration at wanting my own house, and to be truthful, if it was just a question of being able to afford to buy, I'd have bought already. Houses are dropping into my range. But it's moved beyond that, and buying a house is no longer as big a priority as it was.
So, this is going to be the transition post, just in case you stumble by. I am going to TRY to steer myself towards posting actually helpful information about simplifying your wants, meeting your needs, and maintaining your humanity.

My Shameful Pastime

That's me sitting in that purple chair. I'm the skinny pink Wookiee, Bowann, a foot soldier for the Rebel Alliance, a Rifleman and a Combat Medic. I'm actually sitting in a player-created shopping mall, on the planet Naboo, on the Bria server of Star Wars Galaxies. The alien creatures behind the counter are the employees of my other character, Bo'Ann the Twi'lek, who was a slightly notorious and wealthy chef, and financier of the Rebel Alliance. I just finished delivering some inventory for her to her shop-keepers, and I'm chilling. I had one other character, Boann Stryker, who was the mayor of a city controlled by the Rebel Alliance. A city built by players, and decorated by players. Boann controlled the layout of the houses and which style houses were allowed, and where the public starport and cantina and shopping centers were, as well as city hall. Oh, and the Rebel base we had until the "Imps" (Imperial players) came and fought us, and eventually took down the base. Star Wars Galaxies circa 2003 to 2005 took up a lot of my free time. The economy was entirely player-based, there was an active and very challenging Galactic Civil War in which some players were Imps and some were Rebels, and there was just a lot of tomfoolery and zaniness, such as scavenger hunts, silly contests (who can run in their underwear and with only a newbie pistol for defense, through the neighboring Imperial controlled player city, and return to the Rebel cantina -- first one gets a force crystal), pub crawling, and everyone's favorite: shopping at the hundreds of player-controlled and staffed malls, shops, cantinas, merchant tents, etc. SWG was the game that had my friends and family very concerned about me, and Sig nearly broke up with me despite the fact that he and I had both started playing the game at the same time. I was the one who lost it over SWG, and blurred the line between life and virtual life.
Sig, on the other hand, did this in EverQuest. He quite often played for over 18 hours a day, following his neck surgery. I also played EQ, and because I was very fond of Sig I played frequently, and enjoyed the game world, but it never took over my life like SWG did.
Other games that Sig and I have played -- because we always play together -- are City of Heroes (Sig loved it, I barely tolerated it), Dark Age of Camelot (we both enjoyed it a great deal), World of Warcraft (we liked it, but honestly couldn't figure out why everyone in the world wanted to play it) and currently we are playing Lord of the Rings Online. Most online role playing games are based loosely on fantasy or myths of Northern Europe. I think that's why Sig liked City of Heroes so much; because it was based on comic book superhero mythology and was in an urban setting. And I liked SWG because it was science fiction mythology, with exotic planetary landscapes and very modern urban settings. You can only be awed by so many dragons and fall in love with so many Elves before it all gets a little stale, if you know what I mean.

Sig and I spent probably 3 years playing EQ, and another 2 years playing SWG, and we played a year here and a year there playing DAoC. WoW, only about 6 months. City of Heroes, about 6 months. Currently, we've been playing LOTRO since it was released in March of 2007. Sig plays more than I do, but overall neither of us plays nearly as much as we used to. It's mildly amusing, and we have a decent group of players that we hang with (mostly from New Zealand), and we really are fond of the LOTR mythology, but again -- can only take so many drunken dwarves and flirtatious elven maidens. In addition, all of the progression of your character on LOTRO is based on completing game story arc quests, of which the most challenging are usually "chapters" which you complete to finish "books". You can go out into the wilderness randomly slaying Orcs and Wargs if you so choose, but you won't get much experience from it and very little gold or silver, either. All of the games we've played, and loved, have eventually been changed beyond recognition by developers who kow-towed to either very inexperienced and whiney players who wanted the game to be easier or very hard-core elite players who wanted more high-level content. Additionally, some games had broken things from the very beginning (many of the quests in EverQuest, as well as the boat-traveling system; the battleground feature in SWG that never worked) that they never bothered to fix, as they kept adding on newer content.

Most online games nowadays have beautiful graphics and very individual and detailed characterization; my Wookiee , Bowann, was recognizable from several meters away and no other female Wook looked like me. My current avatar, Sciath, is a little fat gray-haired female hobbit. You can customize your eyes, ears, mouth, cheekbones, hair and facial hair, color and body build. Most players invest a lot of their own personalities and looks into their avatars. In searching my hard drive for screen shots, I was saddened to realize that I didn't save many for all the time I spent in these various worlds. I had probably dozens of SWG that I erased when I gave up the game, because looking at them only made me melancholy. In gaming, as in real life, you can't return to the good 'ol days -- once they're gone, once the game has been changed and tinkered with by the developers ('nerfed') it is painful to keep trying to recapture whatever it was about the game that you loved. Sometimes, you become so frustrated that you erase all the game files, and you lose forever your shots of Ketzel and his pink light saber or Sig's Fir Bolg warden.

For some reason, admitting to gaming as a hobby is considered very shameful. When you consider that I was a young woman when Pong first came out, and that I graduated from game arcades where you bought a handful of tokens for a few dollars, you begin to realize that computer and video gaming has really been around a long time. Many of us who were young when the first Sega system began selling, are now middle-aged. We literally grew up with a game controller in our hands. And gaming does not have to be some furtive activity that adolescent males do in their basement. My kids and I played, and watched each other play, console games for an hour or two nearly every day when they were growing up, in addition to other more socially acceptable family activities. My eldest and I stayed in contact with one another when she lived in Maine and I lived here in Sacramento by meeting online in The Realm, buying clothes for our avatars, avoiding being "ganked" by the infamous Mech PK ('player killer') gang and drinking grog. Sig and I played EQ together when he was in Boston studying. Sure, we could have just phoned one another -- but online gaming is cheaper than long distance phone calls, plus it gives you something fun to do together while you're talking. And nowadays, with Teamspeak and Ventrillo and Skype, you can actually talk while you game, instead of typing. I'm old-fashioned. I still prefer typing. Without online RPG (role playing games) I would not have gotten the benefit of the opinions of people all over the US as well as countries all over the world about things that the media in the US does not bother to really report on any longer. You know, inconsequential stuff like the Iraq War and US economic and foreign policy. Without the framework of gaming I would have had no opportunity to talk with these people and form online friendships that enriched my own worldview. When was the last time the Bingo crowd or your bowling team had more people who were proud citizens of the UK, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and Korea than Americans? It happens all the time when you are a West Coast gamer. Sig spends a great deal of time discussing movies and viewing movies, and occasionally making movies, with a wide range of people who have created a virtual Hollywood online through their love of The Movies, which is not a traditional online game at all. There are voice actors, producers, directors, writers, musicians and critics who have given their inner muse free reign. There are even "radio shows" devoted to The Movies, taking place on open channels on Skype at the same time every weekend. And let me tell you, some of the movies that this online community from all over the world creates are excellent. They rival anything that has won awards in the actual Hollywood industry. It boggles the mind that the creative talents of so many people are viewed as an adolescent pursuit, simply because the community producing this art is an online community.

You may have heard of Second Life, and you may have the impression that this is what online gaming is. Second Life is not really a game, it is a virtual reality of largely player-based content. There is no story to it, no quests, no goals, no "leveling" of a character. The people who are making money in Second Life are making actual money, selling virtual merchandise and real estate for real cash. Pornography and gambling are huge industries in Second Life. I tried it, and it was interesting to a point, but without the goals and incentives of the gaming environment I tired of it very quickly. There are "gold merchants" and various sordid virtual services in all online RPGs, but they are only ancillary. In Second Life, they are the game, and that is just a little too much like Real Life.
I'll take drunken dwarves, flirtatious elves, and a good dragon raid over that any day.