Breakfast Topic: When real life Cataclysms hit
I have to say that the past week has been rather surreal for me. The Philippines was hit by a typhoon that had deceptively weak winds but brought so much rainfall that it brought the country to its knees. Typhoon Ondoy, aka Ketsana, delivered a month's worth of rain in six hours. It flooded areas that normally don't get flooded and submerged entire villages in a matter of hours. Seeing pictures of the devastation was unsettling, and many places that looked familiar were transformed into a montage of water and debris. It's kind of like how the Cataclysm is set to transform Azeroth, except that instead of water and mud, you've got lava cutting black swaths all over the game world. I know, I'm comparing a real life disaster to a game expansion. Like I said, it's been a surreal week.
Anyway, even as I ruminated on the relevance of our favorite game in light of the crazy things that have happened, I still know that it's a fun game and I still want to play it. I mean, bad things happen everywhere all the time. And sometimes, it even touches our lives directly. I guess you could call it our own little cataclysms. From the smallest things that ruin our day to those really earth-shaking ones, we meet all the nasty things life throws at us and we deal with it. Personally, at the end of a few harrowing days, I found playing World of Warcraft even for a few minutes at a time to be familiar and comforting. Even after being away from the game for a while, logging in was moderately cathartic.
Today's Breakfast Topic is a discussion of hope. I know that many of you have had to deal with your own little cataclysms. I want to ask how, if at all, World of Warcraft has figured into that. Some of you might know friends in-game who have suffered through some ordeal, and the game only brought you closer together. Others use it to unwind from a hard day's work. Those count, too. How has the game brought you relief and made you smile in the most awful times? I'm actually really looking forward to kicking Deathwing's fiery butt now and can't wait for the expansion to hit. I mean, because you know, compared to Ondoy, Neltharion's kind of like a pansy.