That's right, I just picked up my copy of World of Warcraft! Now to wait for the servers to come up...

I keep getting a feeling something's killed Magic: the Gathering for me. I like to consider myself a Johnny player and I've always been a Johnny. But recently I keep thinking things like "no, this card sucks, it's too expensive; the effect is really cool, I love it, but it won't fit in my mana curve" or "this card penalizes my tempo too much", and I can't help but feel I'm losing out on exactly the kind of cool interactions that made me like Magic to begin with. What's worse, I'm actually considering the metagame, and that's a bad sign if ther ever was one.

I blame not having anyone to play with, which in turn brings me to IRC channels, which puts that competitive pressure on me. Bloody pro tour players.

Warriors in World of Warcraft have an ability called Charge. What it does is, well, charge against an opponent, briefly stunning them and giving you some Rage points. The range is fairly short, and what you do is basically just run towards your opponent really really fast and hit them. Now, under normal conditions there's nothing between you and the opponent at this point; but watch what happens when something is in the way.

How do people ever get anything done? Once you've learned something new (preferably by practicing), you know it and it loses any appeal it might once have had. It's always like that; whenever you've spent a reasonable time learning how to do something, trying it out, you become so disinterested in it you never really want to have anything more to do with it. It goes for everything I can think of; programming (learning a new technique), art (trying out a new style), writing (exploring a particular theme)...

In all of these, the time it takes to learn something is always much shorter than the time it would take to finish the piece in question. So how do people ever get anything done? Once you're halfway done, you know what the rest of the work is going to be like, and who wants to do it then? Worse yet, what's the result of all this? That all products we have are made by people learning, with the experts not wanting to do anything simply because of the inexorable dullness and repetitiveness of it all?

Also, for those who haven't noticed, we'd like to remind that we have a forum now.