WoW: Dancing styles

Have you ever wondered about your character’s way of dancing? Have you asked your psychiatrist how come Michael Jackson has copied your night elf dancing style? This is brilliant stuff, you’re about to find out:

Truth is, the music sucks. But it is very illustrative, isn’t it? 😉

Keep in shape and play World of Warcraft

Combining sport and WoW. Brilliant stuff.

Who said it was not healthy to play WoW? In fact, these two dudes have proven that you can work out while playing your favorite mmorpg game. Forget the gym and start wandering Azeroth… now!!

If you’re raiding in a daily basis, in two weeks you will be the last action hero. Bad side of the story, if you keep raiding, you’ll collapse from a heart attack.

Enjoy!!

World of Warcraft Addiction

World of Warcraft addictions. Brilliant stuff.

This kid will go nuts when trying to level up his new death knight, that is for sure.

Well, again we’re on with this “videogames are the root of all evil” topic. Let’s put it the right way: videogames might be dangerous, so is eating too much or crossing the highway naked and covered in pink cream at rush hour.

If we take it from the theory that society can’t self-regulate, it is indeed a problem, we’re enslaved by external stimuli and certain influences should be strongly regulated, since nobody is responsible for actions unavoidably triggered.

However, this is not true. Or better said: it is half-true. We are dominated by external influences because we are not trained for it, we are not well educated. We can certainly control those influences, we can look for what is best for us, but often we choose the easy way instead. Human nature bends us that way and we have the power to resist. We’re not talking Kirk Cameron stuff here, it’s just called responsibility and self-control..

Of course, this must be learned. I’ve seen it million of times in very different backgrounds: children who are taught to brush their teeth from an early age, keep the habit. It is not a matter of doing what you’re told, but learning how to choose the right path to live, learning to live. This requires intelligent individuals capable of understanding and deciding between the options available.

Difference between the kid in the video and a normal healthy kid is that he’s probably been misguided by their parents, who failed to give him a proper education. Otherwise, he would have picked up that spending 16 hours playing WoW would not do much for his future (professional players get out of my way on this!).

As a World of Warcraft player myself, I know how time consuming it might become. Again, I see how my life goes and when I had to devote some time to my personal projects, I just stopped playing. When I had some time to spare, I enjoyed Azeroth and magic flying carpet mounts as usual.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog

And here we go!!!

Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. Brilliant stuff. The little brother of “The Dark Knight”, this summer.

This is one of those jewels that comes up from time to time, totally unexpected. It blows you away, it has already exploded and its wave is gonna get you, like the maidens, no matter where you are.

Joss Whedon’s idea has been so skillfully settled down that it takes a serious effort to critizice any aspect of it. First off, if you know nothing about Dr. Horrible, let’s say it’s a musical. We’re going to discuss the insights of the story, the real depth of the characters, the TRUTH of it all. Muaha, muahaha… errr… enough.

This takes back the old concept of Darth Vader’s root of all evil in an interesting twist of archetypes. Dr. Horrible is the villain, WANTS to be the villain and puts all his energy into it. Captain Hammer, his acknowledged nemesis, is the hero. The two of them know their role and stick to it… yet the story unfolds itself differently.

We find a deep soul in Dr. Horrible. This is a love story and a tragedy, Dr. Horrible is our Cyrano de Bergerac, he will prove to be caring, light hearted, intelligent and clumsy in the inside of his cloak of evilness. He’s got the talent of a winner but he can’t even manage to talk to the girl of his dreams.

He’s also bitter in his views, this is what makes a real person out of the character, what approaches him to that Vader’s concept we’ve mentioned. He’s a tragic character, and in the end, the story gravitates around the point that he states in the very beginning: “The world is a mess and I just need to rule it”. And that’s his reason for being evil, in which evilness is his way of fighting the world, protecting himself from the pain of living into the mess. In a certain way, he is fighting for the sake of a better world, he does good by being bad.

First song in the second act brings all the matter to the surface. It’s the tragedy unveiled, bitterness at its fullest:

“Because the dark is everywhere and Penny doesn’t seem to care that soon the dark in me is all that will remain”

He fights the dark even when trying to embody it, he’s the evil character because of the circumstances, because there’s no choice. The world has made Dr. Horrible, he’s just played along until it was too late to get back from darkness.

Tragedy lies in the fact that the doctor gets trapped under the weight of living, the weight of the world. And this is no joke, because the worst case scenario of fighting your darkness is believing that darkness is all there is.

Captain Hammer is there to provide a counterpoint to Dr. Horrible, the tragedy of the doctor’s life embodied as the pretended hero. This just helps to frame Neil Patrick Harris’ character by remarking how differently the two characters are treated: all the creative genius on the doctor’s behalf is utterly ignored and the arrogance of the Captain is stressed and rewarded.

Now, Penny might be confused as a romantic figure to complete the story, but she is not. According to the very description of the doctor, she is “the girl of his dreams”. What we see in that character is the twin soul of the doctor, although the path they have chosen differ substantially from each other.

She sees the world as the mess that it is, she sees the darkness. But she has chosen to discredit the belief that there is just darkness in exchange for her efforts, she fights the world by denying the virtual impossibility of changing it, ignoring the voices that scream that you’re going to achieve nothing, because there is nothing to achieve.

Victory of darkness takes place when you’re fooled to believe that there is no change for the better, just surviving. This is the real tragedy behind the brilliant Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.

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