Rap; random musings...

Don't you hate it when an idea just doesn't pan out?

I was originally going to talk about how I had gotten into rap, talk about the artists that I'm really digging on, quote some choice lines to hopefully open a few minds to the intelligence that I wish was prevalent throughout rap. But then I realized, if you don't care about hip-hop anyway, then you probably won't change your mind. You probably wouldn't click on any links to song lyrics or other points of interest. If you're the sort of person who enjoys the mainstream vapid rap scene, then you probably are more insterested in the beats than in the message... and I'm not in any position to comment on that. Feel free to prove me wrong.

Failing that, however, I will still say a few things.

First off, Black Star is an amazing album. However, it makes me very, very sad. I've seen what hip-hop could have been, had things been a little different six years ago. From what I've read, the album is considered a classic, but it never propelled its creators, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and DJ Hi-Tek into a position to change the face of rap the way they might have. Maybe, just maybe, if black children had role model's who taught things like Knowledge of Self and Determination instead of drugs, rims and jewerly...

Second, Talib Kweli is probably smarter than you. Shit, when I knew he was something else when I actually had to look up the word "Diaspora." Seriously, both Kweli and Mos Def rhyme words at lightning speed that most rappers couldn't even pronounce, let alone define. Do yourself a big favor, and if you have the chance, download the song "Thieves in the Night." Or just read the lyrics. Seriously, just do it.

Okay, I guess that's all on the subject of hip-hop for now. I may do album reviews in the future. They'll probably be very long and possibly quite tedious. Just fair warning.

So what else? I'm finding that World of Warcraft (WoW) is an interesting cross-section of humanity. For those who aren't familiar, World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), which means that people from all over play together in a fictional world. The scope of these games is really quite impressive, as they essentially have interactive economies, politics, and so on. Another thing is that people pay a monthly fee to play these games, as they generally continue to add more and more content to the game as time goes on. What usually actually happens is the game is released before its ready, and by you're more or less paying to get content that was supposed to be in at release. That said, it's still a good investment -- you pay $15 a month and if you really wanted, you could easily play the game a good 25 hours a week (time permitting). That's a lot of bang for your buck.

Anyways, its really interesting how fucking crazy some people are when it comes to World of Warcraft (and any MMOG, I imagine).

For instance, a lot of people have extremely inflated ideas of what their $15 dollars is worth. Blizzard (who makes WoW) runs daily maintence on their servers every Tuesday. One particular Tuesday, Blizzard was upgrading their servers to deal with the large load of players they had acquired (the game was more popular than they had anticipated). As such, servers were down for over half the day. There was a bloody riot in the game's forums. People were screaming bloody murder because they did not get to play. Accusations flew about how Blizzard was "lying" to its customers, that people weren't getting their money's worth, etc., etc. People, it seemed, would literally sit at their computers and continuously try to log in for hours. Instead of just getting and up and, I don't know, doing something else? Whoa.

Funnier still was another day when about half the servers were up. People who could not access their servers (servers store all character data, so people tend to play on the same server and advance one character), would wait in 5-minute queques to login to another random server. They would create new, level 1 characters... and then just sit there. The game's "training areas," where players cut their teeth on the game and begin to advance their characters, were crowded with hundreds of freshly created characters. They weren't actually playing the game. They were just sitting there, as if just being logged into the game was satisfying them. It was disturbing.

Aside from server downtime complaints, people bitch and moan endlessly that the various classes in the game are imbalanced. For the uninitiated, classes are like professions, each of them are good at different things. All games strive for all classes to be balanced, but its really impossible to make 9 complete classes that are both balanced against each other and still unique. Thus, every time a player gets bested by another class of equal level, the players runs to the forums and makes a new post in all caps "OMFG NERF ." The idiocy is rampant, and almost frightening. I sincerely believe that some people spend more time whining about the game than actually playing it.

Many threaten to cancel their subscription if they don't get what they want. Most just stay and continue to whine. It's frustrating, because reason simply cannot win against these people. You can say time and time again, "If the game isn't fun for you, then stop playing." It's an excercise in futility.

I think it comes down to people being spoiled little bitches. They want what they want, and they want it now. It also proves the old adage, "You can't please all of the people all of the time." If servers go down, people whine they can't play. If servers stay up and are lagged due to overpopulation, people whine. If a class gets improved, other complain its too powerful. If a class gets nerfed (slang for weakened), then people in that class claim they are now useless. It never fails, and it never stops.

Worse still, its like a train wreck, and I can't stop reading the forums! It's like how people used to listen to Howard Stern just to see what outrageous thing he'd say... I read the forums to see what sort of BS is being flung around every few minutes.

Anyways, the overall point of this overlong story was that I think that a lot of people are like this in real life, but are too timid to assert themselves. We've been raised in a "me me me, now now now" culture, but one that's constrained by politeness and political correctness. Enter the anonymity provided by our mutual friend, the internet, and voila -- you've got a nation of spoiled pricks who can get away with saying whatever they want.

Or perhaps Something Awful is right, and the Internet Makes You Stupid.