Where did Crane go? (Part 4 of 4)

Where did Crane go? - a multipart blog series that will explain how I found 2old2play, why I "left", and why I'm coming back ASAP.
Part 4 of 4 – Why I’m back, and back to stay

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In the past 3 blog entries I covered my “pre-xbox-live” gaming history, how I got into online gaming and became a member of 2old2play, how I was deeply involved in the site for more than a year, and finally why I haven’t been around much lately.  Today I am cranking out the final chapter of what turned out to be a 4 part series, in which I’ll be laying out the reasons for my return to Xbox Live and 2old2play.  But before I get into why I’m coming back, I have to explain how I figured out that I had even left in the first place.

Joni Mitchell was dead-on when she wrote “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone”.  It is one of those universal truths that seems so damned obvious that it is easy to overlook.  Sometimes you actually have to lose something in order to understand how much it meant to you.  And sometimes that loss happens so gradually, so unassumingly, that you don’t even realize it is happening.

I didn’t just decide one day to stop logging in to Xbox Live and 2old2play.  It happened bit by bit.  First I cut back to playing Halo 2 only on Fridays, and then every other Friday, and then once a month, and then… well… hardly ever.  Just check out my profile on Bungie and you can see for yourself how infrequent my game sessions became.  With the decreased game play came decreased site activity.  I stopped checking out as many forums as I used to (Books, Movies, Halo 2, even the Political area sometimes), I didn’t read all of the member generated articles, and eventually I was just coming in once a week or so to check my clan forum and see if any of my buddies had put up a new blog entry.  After a while I wasn’t even doing that.  Whole months would pass without even giving 2old2play a second thought.

How could that have happened?  I’ve got real friends here, as real as any I have in “real life”.  Hell, I DID meet about 100 of these people IN REALLY-REAL REAL LIFE FO’ REALS at the 2006 LAN.  How did I wind up getting so detached?  This wasn’t like “The Sopranos” where I got dicked over with a crappy final episode and then walked away shaking my head and saying “Well, at least that is finally over.”  The people I have met at 2old2play are some of the friendliest and most interesting folks I have met in any venue, so why wasn’t I interested enough to maintain contact?

I think the main reason I got detached is that I stopped contributing.  I went from an avid poster to a lazy reader, and that just wasn’t enough to keep me here.  The various forums and threads are only interesting to me if I get involved in the conversations, and I have no one to blame for my apathy but myself.  Nobody was going to MAKE me post.  And this just sort of snowballed.  The less I posted, the less there was that I wanted to read on the site, and the less I came back, so I posted even less.

I’m not saying that what I posted when I was active was anything profound, but even just putting up a one liner like, “Wally, quit bitching that I haven’t mentioned you in my blog you narcissistic douche-tard.” is enough to make you come back the next day and see if the dim-witted object of your put-down has managed to get his wife to think up a retort for him.  (Yeah Wally, your secret is out.  I know who the smart one is in your marriage.)

I finally realized how much I had been missing when I came back to the site a few weeks ago and saw that DantezInferno’s movie was just about to go public.  I was making one of my once-every-two-months visits and just happened to remember to check out his blog.  Holy CRAP!  I had totally forgotten that he was making a movie!  I had even looked at his YouTube trailers and gotten really fired up about it, but somehow it just slipped my mind and I forgot to come back for updates.  I nearly missed it entirely, and that would have been a damned shame.  (By the way, I picked up a copy of the movie from Amazon.com and watched it and it is AWESOME!  Everybody needs to see this.  I’ll be posting up a review of it next week after I have gotten a chance to watch it a second time and take notes.  Janks is about to blow up big time!)

Then I started wondering “what else have I missed?” and I started going back through my blog links and reading other peoples posts from 3, 4 even 6 months ago.  Jesus-H!  I had completely been out of the loop!  And I didn’t even realize it!  This was inexcusable, and I knew I had to make some changes and get back in the game (no pun intended).  I had lost out on 6 months of fun and camaraderie, and there was no getting that back, but I could make sure that it didn’t happen again.

And so, here I am, back in the fray and determined not to fade away again.  There are too many quality members of this site for me to ignore what 2old2play has done for me, and I’m coming back for the ones I already know, as well as the ones I haven’t yet met.  So here is my short list of “shout-outs” to some of the folks that are responsible for my return.  If you don’t like the fact that I’m back, feel free to blame them, because “Every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in.”  (Alright, that is cheese-ball right there, but come on, it fits.)

WallyBR – I refer to Wally as a douchebag all the time, because he is one, but he also knows a lot about home theater, so he is a good douchebag to take advantage of… I mean, ask for advice.  If it weren’t for Wally I’m pretty sure that I either wouldn’t have a home theater in my basement, or that I would have electrocuted myself while trying to assemble it.  At the very least, I would have spent more money than I needed to.  A year and a half after I first put it together, my projector, sound system and stadium seating continue to fulfill all of my movie and gaming entertainment needs.  Thanks for all your help Wally.  But you are still a douche.  Wally and I also started a “fitness challenge” a while back, and at last tally I think I was kicking his ass.  I’m down from 195 to 174, big fella.  What are you at now?  315, 325, what?  Let’s finish this thing man.  You set the time and the place and we will have a final showdown to decide which of us is a real man, and which one is a pudgy bag o’ douche.  More than anyone else, Wally is to blame for me coming back.  He pestered me with e-mails occasionally during my hiatus, begging me to come back and heap insults on him.  Wally is kindof a sadist that way.  And foolishly, I keep trying to challenge him on the virtual battlefield and get teabagged in at least a 10:1 ratio versus what I can dish out.  Truly, to paraphrase from “The Princess Bride”, I am no match for his gaming skills and he is no match for my brains.  Frankly, I’m fine with that.

DantezInferno – When I met Dantez at last year’s LAN I don’t think I had gamed with him much, though I had heard that he is a terror in the over 40 tourney’s.  I had breakfast with him one morning and we talked some about the filming he was doing at the LAN and his background in the music industry.  I left breakfast thinking, “Man, we are lucky to have such a talented guy doing all this work for free.  He could just be here hanging out and enjoying the party like the rest of us, but instead he is taking time to record the event so we can all have something nice to remember the LAN.”  And then when I actually saw the video he made… HOLY S#IT!  Dantez has mad editing room skills.  I’ve seen stuff on ESPN that wasn’t as well done.  I can’t imagine how long it took him to put that together.  And then when he mentioned in his blog that he was going to start working on his own movie, I just couldn’t wait.  Now that the movie is out, I can’t wait to see how far it will go.  It seems like every week it just gets bigger.  More great reviews, wider exposure in more media outlets, and now he is going to be on frickin’ CSPAN this weekend!  If you have seen his film you will understand why it is picking up steam.  If you haven’t seen his film, then your life is incomplete and you need to rectify that situation ASAP.

All of my peeps in OMM, Profanity and ATeamRBN – I am now affiliated in one way or another with 3 different site clans.  I was an OMMer to begin with, and I always will be, regardless of what my profile on Bungie might say.  I’ve still got the hat and the jersey, and I wouldn’t change those “Old Man Mafia” patches out for anything.  I’ve got too much history with that clan, and it’s members have shown me far too much collective awesomeness to ever walk out on them.  Profanity picked me up and took me in even after I had acted like a moron, and in fact, I think they may have liked me better for it.  (Where clan Profanity is concerned, “Suck it” is really more of a way of life than just a slogan.  The honest-to-god do not give a f#ck, and I really dig that.)  And now I’m hitting up the ATeamRBN forum and talking smack with old buddies like I never even left.  Hell, two of my best friends from college are in there, how could I NOT join up with that crew?  Of course, I’m always happy to game with anyone from 2old2play who likes to have a good time and doesn’t mind the fact that I have no skillz, but the folks in these 3 clans are the top of the heap as far as I’m concerned.  Knowing this many quality people is the main reason that I find a 100 person friends list to be horribly inadequate.  I never used to understand why some folks had 3 or 4 gamertags and clan affiliations, but now I get it.  There are just too many good people on this site that are fun to game with.  I’m not sure I could talk my wife into letting me spend another $50 per year to pick up another Live account, but there is no harm in trying.

So there you have it, the main reason I am coming back to the site is because of all the cool people here.  I’ve made friends with some of them, hung out with dozens more, and some of them are just fun to watch (like monkeys at the zoo).  It would be a real shame if I just walked off and left all that potential fun, kinship and entertainment on the shelf.  It’s not exactly profound, but it’s true, I’m coming back to 2old2play because I miss the people.

Of course, the only way I’m going to be able to stay active on the site is if I ramp back up my gaming as well, and until recently I couldn’t figure out how to make that happen.  I just wasn’t that interested in picking up an Xbox 360, and that seemed to be the only option I had for getting back in to the community.  Nearly all of the people I have met on the site were original Xbox owners, and it seems like most of them have graduated to the 360 now.  But I didn’t want to buy a box that I perceived had a high likelihood of breaking down, especially when I couldn’t think of any games that I thought were worth $60.  Plus, when would I have the time to play the damn thing anyway?

Well, some things have happened in recent months that are pushing me towards making that big purchase.  Let’s make a list shall we?  Excellent.

1. Wife going to work in a library again.  She hasn’t gotten the job officially yet, but she has scored an interview and I feel good about her chances.  Library work will never be a 9-to-5 job, so I will once again find myself with various evenings where I can sneak off to my gaming lair without receiving nasty looks.

2. Not visiting family as frequently.  For the first year after moving to Birmingham we went crazy with visiting family and spent numerous weekends on the road.  That seems to be tapering off to a more reasonable level now, which means more weekends at my house.  I love my family (and my wife’s family) but I HATE roadtrips, and it’s really about time some of these fools started driving in my direction for a change.  I dislike having houseguests less than driving so we have put the word out to the family that the reason we bought a big house and moved closer was so THEY could come to US once in a while.  So we will be having Thanksgiving at our place this year.  Football on the big screen.  Score!

3. Xbox hardware appears to be stabilizing.  They finally added a decent heatsink and soon there will be smaller chips that run cooler.  These things should help to reduce red rings o’ death.  However, so far Microsoft hasn’t given any indication in their packaging that will tell you if you are getting the “good stuff”.  The HDMI thing turns out not to be the sign of the new chipset, so we will have to wait and see if there is some foolproof way to make sure that you get what you are paying for.  If I have waited this long, I can wait a little longer to make sure that I get a better chance at stable hardware.  Of course, there is always the chance that the new chips will have some new sort of problem that makes them even worse than the old chips, but you have to choose sooner or later, and I’m betting on the new stuff.

4. Xbox pricing drop.  Finally.  I thought they were going to hold out until after the Halo 3 launch, but they decided to give us a little bump a couple months in advance.  I still think that $350 is pricy, and the fact that they are charging a huge markup to get only a bigger hard drive with the Elite model is really dickish.  Hard drives are CHEAP.  You should not be charging a $70 mark up to get a 20GB drive, and then another $100 dollars to go up to 120GB and a black casing.  I’ll get the Premium version with the smaller drive, but I won’t be really happy about it.  But now I can at least get a console, a game, an extra controller and add in some tax and still be under $500.  Still a lot of money, but I’ll do it.  For you guys, because you are just so cool to hang out with, I am willing to spend a half a grand.
5. Um.… Halo3?  At first I wasn’t too thrilled when I got to play the Halo 3 beta.  Sure, it looked great and there were some new toys, but that doesn’t really seem worth the price of admission to me.  But now that I have read more about some of the other features, like the videos, co-op play, new ranking system, forging, well, it is getting more and more appealing.  I still have a question mark there though because I just found out about the lack of clan support.  WHAT.  THA.  F#CK?!?!  How can they screw up one of the best features in any game ever made?

So there you go.  I’m coming back, and I’m coming back for good.  I’m going to get all up in the forums and start using my blog the way it was meant to be used.  I’m setting a goal of one rant a week, topic to be determined by whoever/whatever happens to be pissing me off at the moment.  The gloves are coming off, and I’m about to straight up vamp on some fools. 

Now, I just went out and repurchased Halo 2 so I can get my game on tonight without having to wait and get my copy back from RatBastard.  In fact, I will be on Live in about 10 minutes.  Hope to see some of you there.

Except for Wally.

Cause being around that tubby bitch just makes me want to throw up.  J