So yeah, I'm a total slacker. I haven't updated this site in damn near three months.

I started a new job, moved across half the country, and have since been trying to settle into said new job. It's been quite the whirlwind of activity.

In the process of all this nonsense, and don't even get me started on the level of nonsense I've been having to filter... Somehow my set up to auto renew randomramblings.com went wonky and someone else bought it. So now here we are at kiarasramblings.com, which, really is just as appropriate and already feels like home.

My new boss is an evil evil man, in addition to being completely awesome as a boss... Why is he evil if he's so awesome? He's enabling me to drop to all new lows of geekiness and turning me from a normal * cough * person into a full fledged geekette.

How is he doing this? Well beyond the fact that he drives the carpool to work and we talk geeky stuff all the time, he's also setting up and running a pnp D&D game with the new 4th ed.

This will also enable my addiction to dice... They can be shiny and pretty. Trust me, it's in character for me.

Beyond that, once again, he's a pretty awesome boss. He understands and works with my little quirks, one of which is my obsession with owning responsibility for things. So he very kindly spells out for me what is and what isn't mine to freak out about, while letting me freak out when I need to. For someone as ridiculously anal as I am (and no, not in the pervy way...) it's helpful. I've got my little checklists and deadlines and procedures, and so life is very good indeed. Now, if I could win the lottery, things would be almost perfect.

At any rate, I'm back and we'll see how that whole updating thing goes. I've got a few projects that I need to work on now that I've started to get comfortable and develop a routine. Besides that winning the lottery thing, I mean.

People amaze me sometimes.  I often wish I could read minds just to know why they do the things they do.

I have neighbors, as do most of us.  Mine have a small dog.  He's adorable in the extreme.  The chick lives with her boyfriend.  I can sometimes hear him yelling.  He doesn't sound like a nice person.  She seems like a nice person... but I don't know her, so...

They sometimes leave their trash sitting in front of their door.  I do it too, but only when I'm going to be taking it out in the next 30 mins or so.  They leave it out there for days on end.

So they'd had a bag of trash out there over the weekend and monday night when I got home from the movies it was gone.  I went outside the next morning to pull a shirt out of the dryer and guess what was on my porch?  Their bag of trash.

...

what the hell is up with that?  seriously.  what do you have to be thinking to drop your trash on someone else's porch?

i was nice.  i didn't wake them up at 6 am to ask if they'd lost something.  i just put it back down in front of their door and thanked god that i wasn't going to be dealing with it much longer.

but still... really.  what the hell?

This has been a rather hectic week. 

Coming up on the end of the fiscal year at work and mentally scrambling around like mad with the whole looking for a new job thing.

I had something I wanted to write about specifically... but I've forgotten what it was now.

So instead we'll throw out a little bit of humour.

I'm a rather oblivious little monkey most of the time.  I very rarely (alright pretty much never) see or understand that I'm alright on the eyes.  I honestly don't see it myself so it doesn't register.

So there I am the other night minding my business and totally spaced out thinking about job hunting and whatnot and trying to come up with articles for zam (one didn't go up this week due to the busy aspect).

Some random guy comes up to me and starts talking to me.  Right about the time he asked me for contact info so he could "show me around" if I moved out that way, I cottoned on to the fact that I might actually be getting hit on...

It was a little surreal.  I'm just not used to it.  Either that or I don't notice it.  Which is entirely possible, since when I told my best friend about it her comment was something to the effect of:  If you noticed he had to be humping your leg.

...

Which makes me wonder, am I that oblivious when it comes to everything?  I like to think that I am a little on the observant side.  I like to watch people and I like to know the why of things.  So, am I deluding myself and I'm not nearly as in tune as I like to think, or am I only selectively oblivious? 

So I've been busy and my brain has been more than a little fried.

So I took sort of a mini break and only did as much online as I had to for a week.  I spent the rest of the time reading and watching the second season of House.

I also did some pondering about a few things.  One of which is management.  I get to deal with some fun management types in every aspect of my life.  The day job has people that make me wonder how they function, let alone how they do their jobs.

There's a woman with a hinie the size of california who gets paid an atrocious sum of money to be a "manager."  Most of her work gets done by flunkies.  I guess that's okay... after all the mark of a good manager is the ability to delegate.  However, she takes credit for the good work and foists all the blame when something goes south.  That is not good management.  We've also been shifting around offices and giving up some of the space in our suite to reduce our rent (which currently sits at over 600k).  She's got a fragile sort working for her, someone who needs to be handled properly to keep her from overreacting.  So what does our oh so great manager do?  She goes on vacation for a week and doesn't tell the woman anything.  She sends her an email.  And why?  Because she didn't want to have to deal with her being upset by the change.  * boggle *

Seriously, if you're dealing with a woman who takes poorly to change you don't break it to her via email.  You sit her down with the other two people who have to move and explain, answer the questions, let her know she isn't losing her job and that things will be fine and she isn't the only one moving.  There, problem solved and you've shown your employees that you care.

Feedback and consideration are some of the best tools a manager has at their disposal.  Being straight with your employees and giving them honest feedback will win you a hell of a lot more loyalty than double dealing and game playing.  Why is this such a hard concept for people to grasp?

This has been foremost on my mind lately for a couple of reasons.  One, because it's happening right now in the office and as hard as I try to avoid the drama, it's impossible not to know it's happening.  Two, because I have a job interview tomorrow.  It's only a preliminary, but if I am dazzlingly amazing and all that kind of good stuff I might earn myself a face to face interview and maybe even a job...  So naturally I've been examining myself and my philosophies about management in general and specifically community management and hoping that what I've learned over the last four years has been enough to get me into a position to learn more...

Other than the typical nausea that accompanies any situation that I can't assure myself of my own perfection, I've decided that I don't really suck all that much.  I'm fairly certain that my ideas on gaming communities, while maybe not perfect, are a good foundation.  I really hope that I can get this job.  I know I'll learn a lot and it's my dream job.

It could be bunnies...

Oh wait.  Sorry.  Wrong show!

For the whole four people who read this (thanks btw) you are now going to be subjected to my rambling thoughts on the cyclical nature of... well basically everything but specifically gaming/society.  The three of you who aren't Radar can go ahead and run away now, I'll understand.  Radar has to read the whole damn thing though, because it's his fault I'm writing it.

As a rule I don't involve myself in politics and whatnot.  However I do have a few very politically savvy friends and relatives and tend to just sort of soak up the information they shove at me on a regular basis.  I learn a lot this way.  One of the things I've learned is that politics goes in cycles.  For a while we're very conservative.  Then things swing in the other direction, until those policies no longer work for society and things swing right on back the other way.

Whilst I don't study politics, I do tend to study people.  Fascinating animals, we are.  And I've noticed that just as with politics, society tends to swing from one extreme to another.  If you've ever been to a science museum and seen the giant pendulums that swing super slow but you can see that they do tend to move over time, you should understand.

Everything tends to end up coming full circle in the end.  That isn't to say that everything always ends up staying the same.  But the patterns tend to return after a while.  How the hell does this apply to gaming?

Believe it or not it does.  While we've evolved in the gaming world, we still tend to return to the same patterns.  We started out as kids playing cowboys and indians or whatever sort of FPSish game we played when we ran around til we passed out.  We got older and started playing arcade games like Pac-Man and Galaga and the fighting games (Mortal Kombat ftw!).  Then we started gaming on PCs.  Hello Doom and Quake and Unreal etc etc.  From there we moved to MMOs.  Now, even our MMOs are shifting back towards FPSishness.  Only now they're somewhat evolved FPS games and our deathmatches have matured.

There's also a cyclical pattern to the way that people seem to play online games. 

My personal example.  EverQuest and EverQuest II tend to be my base games.  Touchstones that I always play.  When I played EQ, I'd stray now and then and play something new when it came out (Dark Age of Camelot!) but I'd return and apologize for having been an MMOslut and promised to once again be monogamous.

I quit EQ when I had a kid cause I spent all my time playing with him and sleeping.  Then I found out that EQ2 was coming.  WOOHOO!  I dove back in (i cut out sleeping, cause really who needs to sleep?) and learned everything I could and eagerly waited for the beta.  I even jumped back into EQ for a while to enjoy the nostalgia. 

With EQ2 there also came an explosion of other MMOs (I missed SWG pre-cu and I'm terribly bitter about this!).  WoW, DDO, LoTRO, TR, etc.  I've tried darn near all of them at one point or another.  I've missed a few here and there, whether from lack of time or money for yet another game. 

The point though is that all the sampling of other games aside, I keep coming back to EQ2.  Someday a game will come along that will woo me away (I know, how fickle, right?) but that is going to take a hell of a game.

There's all this speculation right now about how Age of Conan and Warhammer are going to spell the death knell of EQ2.  That's a crock of shit.  I fail to comprehend how people can honestly believe this.  Vanguard was supposed to be the death of EQ2.  And while it did have a ton of potential, it was released unfinished.  It could have been a great game.  But that's neither here nor there.  Would it have killed EQ2?  Not a chance.  Because every game appeals for different reasons.  That's why people keep coming back.  Just like they keep going back to WoW or any of the other games on the market.

A game doesn't need ZOMGZ 10 MILLION!!!!one11eleventy subscriptions to be a success.  Having a player base that can't stay away and speaking to people on a level that keeps them playing through all the growing pains and shinie new games is what makes it a success.  Yeah, people will leave EQ2 for a while to try the new games.  And they'll be back.  Then it'll start over again with the next round of releases.