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darkscoots

@darkscoots1

It me, Matt. Here is my blog, I guess? Thanks for stopping by. Have fun and watch out for the Yugioh references.
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thinking about that WoW epidemic

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i was telling my dad, ever the skeptic, about corrupted blood back in March at the start of lockdown, and how the cdc studied it. how it can be used as a model for what to do and how people might act in the event of an unpredicted pandemic, and how people were playing out the same behavior during covid.

he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.

a CNN article recently referenced another “viral” event in world of warcraft: leeroy jenkins facepulling as a metaphor for the expedited reopening of businesses. what it fails to mention however is how the video ends. everyone who charges in with leeroy dies. he wipes the raid.

it really feels like that meme where it’s like “wow, cool video game reference!” and the point soaring over their head says THE DAMAGE WAS IRREVERSIBLE. THE THREAT SPREAD TOO RAPIDLY AND EVERYONE DIED.

weird reframing of the corrupted blood incident to make it seem, for some reason, like it was all selfish actions that people said was unrealistic because real people would help others. in fact its literally the opposite, it was used as real world data specifically because of the player driven efforts to fix it

The reason this plague in the game was a good model is because we had all walks of life type people reacting in different ways.

Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.

The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.

They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.

ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.

However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.

Think about that.

The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?

And we can’t time travel.

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remember that time that all the unova gym leaders gathered to take down team plasma with their pokemon and brycen opted for hand to hand combat instead

I would too if my Pokémon was cryogonal

‘fuck pokemon battles what are YOUR stats’

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this stream was so funny because if im remembering right hbomb was THE ONLY PERSON with the guts to murder a congresswoman

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How could you leave this in the tags?

this is so fucking funny jrbfgjkbjhfbg

I SCREAM

The epitome of men is feeling so absurdly enraged by a woman having opinions about a thing he likes that he makes a near day long video about how mad he is about it.

The time stamp comparison really ties this together

I was exploring in the catacombs and found a ladder going up. I climbed it and found a square door. I pushed open the door and found myself inside a university lecture room at 3 in the morning. 

And you chose to censor your face in the worst way imaginable

Werewolves are stereotyped as ravenous monsters because the transformations burn so many calories that they’re essentially starving afterwords. The more “controlled” werewolves are just the ones who figured this out and loaded up on calories beforehand, whereas the “wild” ones assume it’s part of their wolfish nature to hunt and eat whatever’s nearby.

The transformation back burns calories too, but by that point they’re exhausted from running around in the woods all night, not to mention the physical strain of two transformations. And filthy people showing up at Denny’s in the early morning are assumed to be hungover, so the ravenous beast idea is applied only to the wolf half.

are you suggesting people who eat at denny’s are essentially werewolves

not just essentially 

I’m dying

the things nerds do to avoid awkward conversations…

This reminds me of that one story where this guy ran a marathon and whenever someone would try to talk to him, he would run a little faster to avoid small talk conversation with other competitors and ended up winning the marathon