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WRUP: Situations in which we may in fact be royals edition
I think it's a little presumptuous to say that we'll never be royals. For starters, have you seen the succession lists for the British throne? Those are crazy long. All you really need to do is be on the list right where it would otherwise stop, also known as the King Ralph effect. Assuming that doesn't come to pass, there are still more possibilities. For instance, you could come across a royal in the woods with a thorn in his or her foot, as I assume royalty works much like lions in fables and requires the aid of random strangers in the woods for thorn removal. Plus, you might happen to meet a member of the royal family and marry him. That's worked well for a few people. Speaking of horrible segues, it's time for this week's installment of WRUP, in which the Massively staff shares our plans for the weekend. Let us know what you'll be up to in the comments!
WRUP: Five seven five edition
Haiku as a form of poetry is taught to students as five syllables, followed by seven syllables, followed by another five syllables. The problem is that this isn't quite accurate. The Japanese poem does use a five-seven-five structure, but what we count as syllables are not analogous to the Japanese context. Despite this, the five-seven-five structure remains widely accepted, partly due to custom and partly because it's a reasonable approximation of the overall cadence. Why do I bring this up? Because I told the entire Massively team to write their WRUP entries in Haiku this week, and for some reason the majority of the team actually complied with that request. Despite this oddity, the article past the break still contains a good shot of what the team will be up to this weekend. Let us know what you're going to be doing down in the comments, and if you can do so in haiku, so much the better.
WRUP: Exciting new Pokémon features edition
So it looks as if I'm actually going to be picking up the new Pokémon game on launch, which will have already happened by the time you read this. What can I say? I'm kind of interested in the new features that are being added to the game, like the fact that you can actually customize your character (insofar as you can be "pale" or "slightly not so pale"). Beyond that, it's the first game in the series with 3-D renderings of these creatures as long as you ignore all of the other spin-offs that did the same thing. And not only do you start with one of the three ubiquitous new starter types, you can also pick up a second starter type later on so that you have two special critters sitting in your bank unused! What was I talking about? Oh right -- it's WRUP time again. You can check out our play plans past the break and let us know yours in the comments. (Seriously, I will be playing Pokémon.)
WRUP: Wombats are the last acceptable topic edition
With the news of the past week or two, I had a lot of potential topics for WRUP this week. However, I was quickly handed a list of stipulations that I had to adhere to. No political jokes, but I expected that. No jokes about Warhammer Online, which is fair. No jokes about "that stupid giant robot film." No jokes about my wife's new haircut. Absolutely no jokes about traffic court. Point is, the list went on, and I was down to wombats. I don't know anything about wombats. Perhaps a zoologist or an Australian can enlighten me in the comments real quick-like. Oh, I do also have the usual WRUP entries past the break so that everyone can see what the Massively staffers are up to over the weekend. That's not really wombat-based. Tune in next week when I can joke about... wait, no, I can't preview that joke as it involves key lime pie. Oh well.
WRUP: Grand Theft Auto V does exist edition
So, Grand Theft Auto V. It's a thing. You can ride bikes and shoot at people, you can cause mayhem, there's criminal stuff going on. I guess that's a thing? I mean, the gameplay is more refined than ever, but I've been pulling people out of cars and then driving those cars on the sidewalk since back in 2001. People love it and I don't know how to muster much more than shrugging acknowledgement. Maybe Saints Row IV spoiled me on the promise of mayhem without a dubstep gun and superpowers, I don't know. Statistically speaking, you are probably playing Grand Theft Auto V right now, so you probably don't care what I have to say. That's fine; WRUP is about the entire staff of Massively and what we're playing for the weekend. Check it out past the break, and let us know what you'll be up to down in the comments.
WRUP: Learn to cheese edition
All right, people, it's time for you to learn how to cheese. We're starting with the basics. That picture up there is brie, and it is delicious. It is a soft milky wonder of a cheese. That having been said, if you are eating it without the rind, you are not cheesing properly. The rind is half of the flavor. You need that rind, people. Also worth considering are gruyere and camembert. If you read that and wondered why I didn't mention ricotta, you've unfortunately confused "cheese" with "testament to the sins of Man." Ricotta is horrible. Learn to cheese. Now, let's talk about WRUP. That's all about what the Massively staff is up to this weekend. Very little cheese is involved. If your world has been rocked by the idea of cheese, it will be a breath of fresh air. But seriously, please, learn to cheese. This is important to me.
WRUP: The new Warchief isn't edition
So the big thing this week was talking about the identity of the new Warchief of the Horde in World of Warcraft, which is probably exactly who you expected if you've paid any attention to the game's lore over the past two years. Rather than spoil that reveal right here, I'm going to tell you what the new Warchief isn't. The new Warchief of the Horde is not a basic campfire. The new Warchief is not a piece of furniture, nor is the new Warchief a Sith. The new Warchief is not distributed via flyers to your home, does not go on icy to dull the pain, and should not be applied directly to the forehead. The new Warchief is neither your boyfriend nor your girlfriend. Most importantly, the new Warchief is not WRUP. This is WRUP. It's right here past the cut with some of our staff members discussing what we'll be doing over the weekend. And then let us know what you'll be doing, which hopefully includes just finding this out so we can stop pretending it's a spoiler.
WRUP: I still hate the warehouse map edition
I miss City of Heroes. This is the opposite of news; pretty much everyone who has followed my rantings over the past several years is well aware of how much I liked the game. But even though it's been gone for a while now, let me be completely clear -- I still harbor a great deal of hatred for the warehouse map. Yes, more than the cave cake map. At least that was meant to be interesting. No warehouse maps ever again. Please. Even if the game gets a revival. But that's not what I'm playing this weekend. What am I playing? What are all of the Massively staff members playing? Why don't you find out down in WRUP? And just like every week, you can let us know what you'll be up to in the comments. Or you can just whine about the warehouse map along with me, that's all right too.
WRUP: Bonus goat edition
Thank you for reading this week's installment of WRUP. To show our appreciation, we have given you a goat. It's right inside your home this moment, munching on your shower curtain. Go ahead -- peek in the bathroom. He's not a domestic goat, either, so you get to have an exotic pet! An exotic and wild pet with no respect for the rules of human beings and a history of being both aggressive and stubborn. We hope you enjoy your new goat. Now that goat-related matters are settled, please, settle back and enjoy WRUP, wherein the Massively staff shares its plans for the weekend. You can also let us know what you'll be up to over the weekend, but if your plans involve removing unwanted goats, we'll send you more. Look, we've got several thousand goats and a transportation device that works only on goats. We're doing what we can with the tools we've got.
WRUP: Finally home edition
I've been writing about Final Fantasy XIV since before it launched. I've been playing the game since it did launch. I've weathered the changes, figured things out, roleplayed, laughed, loved, and lost. And I've spent the past nine months waiting for my game to come back, looking to the future, trying to be patient, enjoying the test weekends as best I could while still wanting to have the game back for good. This morning, that wait ends. You can't go home again, but you can move to a new home. So absolutely no one needs to read what my WRUP entry this week looks like. For the rest of the Massively crew, there's more variation, so you can check past the break for all of those plans. Oh, and you can let us know what you'll be up to down in the comments, whether it's as transparent as my own weekend plans or not.
WRUP: Lake taunting edition
Hey there, lake. Yeah, I'm talking to you. Don't act like you don't hear me. You thought you were pretty big, didn't you? Thought you could push me around just because you outmass me by several orders of magnitude? Let me tell you something, lake, you're nothing. You're a place for ducks to fart around. Everybody thinks you look gross and you're full of leeches. They're going to drain you and replace you with a skate park. Oh, are you going to cry now? Feel like crying? Just... tell me what that looks like, I don't know how a lake cries. Baby. As you probably guessed, it's WRUP time yet again, and that means that I get to put together some random nonsense leading into the Massively staff's plans for the weekend. Check that out after the break, and let us know what you're up to down in the comments.
WRUP: Mature science fiction edition
Harold and Dana went for a walk outside. While they were walking, Harold noticed a large number of leaves collected on stone steps which had not been replaced with robotic future ultra-steps, causing him to briefly reflect on the nature of the human experience while surrounded by advanced technology. Later, he would relate this experience to someone while he was in the process of dying to save a spaceship for poorly explained reasons, possibly while making an allusion to poetry from the 19th century. While I wait for my Hugo award, you all can read this week's installment of WRUP just past the break, in which Massively's writers share our plans for the weekend in terms of gaming. Oh, and you can let us know your plans for the weekend down in the comments, too. Please, no musings on the relative scale of individual human beings compared to the entire universe.
WRUP: Month in review edition
Hey, gang! It's August, and that means it's time to take a look back at how we did in July. Overall, Massively did pretty well, with very few people noticing that both Matt and Justin had been replaced by cybernetic kill-droids chained to chairs and forced to write. Our top articles were our two-part feature on the history of beans in video games and that livestream where the feed was accidentally replaced with an episode of Adventure Time. This August we plan to diversify our content with the addition of cooking shows, so please, stick around! Please? On what's presumably a related note, it's time for this week's installment of WRUP, which lists what we're playing over the next couple of days. So by all means, take a look at our plans, and let us know what you plan to get up to in the comments. And you can trust me, it's funny if you get the reference.
WRUP: Casualness and modes thereof edition
I like Fire Emblem Awakening, but I'd really like to know what bright spark on the localization team decided to call the mode where your characters aren't constantly dying forever "casual mode." Guys, I like your games. I even like the idea that actions have consequences and throwing away three units on your flank to protect your charge might mean they don't get to have dinner tonight. But not wanting to reset the same battle dozens of times because a random generic enemy gets one of the series' trademark instant-kill critical hits out of the blue doesn't mean I'm playing casually, it means that I am a human being whose time on this planet is preciously short. Really, your game is plenty hard even without making every failure an ongoing cascade for the rest of the game. Give it a rest. Not entirely coincidentally, it's time for this week's installment of WRUP, in which the Massively staff members discuss what we'll be playing over the weekend. Check out our plans past the break, and let us know what you'll be up to down in the comments!
WRUP: Temporarily content edition
At the beginning of the year, we talked to you about what we were going to do with WRUP, which consisted of several things you didn't ask for and very few of the things you actually wanted. Now that we've had half of a year to provide you with a rotating schedule of absurd nonsense that doesn't connect with anything else or tie into a larger theme, we've decided that we're tired of your being upset about that. Starting now, we're undergoing a course correction. What does that entail? Well, it means that we'll be providing more topical WRUP headers instead of the usual strings of incoherent nonsense. But don't worry; we'll still have plenty of incoherent nonsense available. So you can feel like there's an impact on a dynamic string of nonsense syllables, as we said we would do back in the beginning of the year. We're still committed to bringing you a weekly update on what the Massively staff is playing, though. Check that out past the break.
WRUP: Giant robots for the win edition
I knew before going to see Pacific Rim that I was going to like it on some level. I love giant robots and kaiju films, so it promised to be good dumb fun. As it turned out, it was excellent fun, without the dumb. This is not a cerebral film, but it's a film filled with love letters to the genres that inspired it, full of homages without ever devolving into mining the past. You can skip on 3D, because it didn't use that to great effect, but if you're even remotely interested in this film, do yourself a favor and see it. It's worth every penny you'll spend and more besides. I can wax poetic about the film here, but WRUP is about what we're playing, not what films we're obsessing over. So past the break you'll find precisely that. You can feel free to let us know what you'll be playing over the weekend down in the comments.
WRUP: Best of WRUP edition
Every so often you realize that you've peaked in a certain direction, and in my case, I have had to acknowledge that I might have written the best animal-picture WRUP introduction back in December of last year. I don't know how I did it; I just know that literally every time I read it, I start laughing. So like any show that has mined its creativity down to a level so low that diamond-tipped drills are necessary to continue digging, I am now shamelessly repeating that. Just click the link and go read that column. It's really funny. Wait! Do that after you read the rest of these instructions, because that WRUP was from last year and thus isn't applicable to what we at Massively will be playing this week. Our plans for this week are past the cut, and you let us know what you'll be doing down in the comments. So now you can go read about kitties and then come back.
WRUP: Ducks cannot do advanced math edition
For the past three weeks, I've been running an experiment to see if ducks can do advanced math. The practice is simple. First, I place several ducklings into a room with a calculus problem worksheet and I tell them to complete the worksheet. Then, I release several angry barking dogs into the room. For a control group, I place several graduate students into a room with the same worksheet, tell them to complete it, then release several angry barking dogs into the room. Thus far, I've discovered that ducks cannot do advanced math, graduate students cannot do advanced math, and blowing most of your research budget on angry barking dogs is a poor investment. None of the Massively staff members is a dog, but several of us are loud and angry. We're also playing video games over the weekend, hence this week's WRUP. See what we're up to past the break, and let us know your own plans down in the comments!
WRUP: Freedom edition
As of yesterday evening, my second job is no longer an issue. I'm free to focus on working on Massively full-time. Three and a half years I've been working most of the day, but now I have time to start new writing projects here, more time to play games and engage with readers, and more time to pursue the career that I love. Also more time to sit in a panic whilst fearing I made a horrible mistake, but I've been struggling to fit that into my schedule anyway. Too personal for you? Then you're going to hate the rest of WRUP, because it's nothing but myself and the other Massively writers discussing our plans for the weekend. Very personal stuff. If you can stomach that, you can check our plans out past the cut, and you can let us know what you'll be up to down in the comments.
WRUP: Addressing concerns regarding Massively One edition
I understand that some of our readers are concerned about some of the details regarding Massively One, so let's clear the air. Yes, in order to use Massively One, you do need to connect to the internet at least once an hour or your house and pets will be set on fire. But you should be online all the time anyway, and it's not as if the infrastructure ever suffers problems you can't foresee. Besides, the connection requirement is only for a small amount of personal data to enable features you don't want and never asked for, like preventing you from owning things you buy. For the record, this is not satire. Satire is subtle. Moving along, it's time for this week's installment of WRUP, which can be found past the cut as usual. As always, we'd love to know what you'll be up to over the weekend, so feel free to leave your own plans down in the comment section.
