Friday, January 17, 2014

Yeah, I'm Behind the Times

O M G

L O L


Back when I played World of Warcraft, there was a leader of another guild who was friends (possibly in real life, though I'm not 100% sure) with a member of our guild. The other guild was a pretty serious raiding guild, whereas our was not. They did mostly 25-man raids, we did mostly 10-man raids. Still, when his guild had raids 'on farm' (i.e., when they could speed through them almost by rote and complete the whole thing fast), or when he was looking to complete old content for achievements or legendary weapons, he would sometimes fill out his roster with people from different guilds. Because or my guild buddy's relationship to this guy, and because I was able to carry my weight, follow instructions, and not die stupidly, I sometimes got to go with him.

Communication in the raids was accomplished via a voice program called Ventrilo, or 'vent' for short, which was useful so the raid leader could hand out assignments, talk strategy, and review failures, if need be. There was also a lot of idle chatter, because getting 25 people who are scattered all across the world moving together is a lot like herding cats, and there's a lot of down time. During this idle chatter, this raid leader would actually say "O-M-G" and "L-O-L"—just like that, spelled out. Not type it out in the on-screen raid chat, but say it, out loud. I suppose he was being ironic or something, hard to say, I never really got to know him all that well. Personally, as it stands, I tend to steer clear of acronyms like those, even in internet type of communications. When I played WoW and used  guild or party chat (which was on screen), I used full words, proper capitalization, and correct punctuation where ever possible. I will admit to using 'lol' a lot when things were funny, because it turnred out to be the best way to quickly communicate the emotion. But never in spoken speech.

I watched Sharknado Wednesday night.

O. M. G.

L. O. L.

That was the biggest laugh I've had all year, and if ever there was a time to use OMG and lol, that was it. Have a nice weekend, everyone.

7 comments:

  1. Yeah. Isn't that text speech funny. A group of moderators from a Harry Potter forum got to meet up in real life once and we went out to dinner. One of them, who happened to be a radio station producer in real life made reference to DEs (Death Eaters). She paused and her eyes got big. "I can't believe I really just said that out loud. In the world of the forum DD was Dumbledore, LV was Voldemort, COS was Chamber of Secrets. You get my drift. But writing them on the forum and speaking in RL (real life) was another thing. Like the blending of uncrossable lines.

    I haven't seen Sharknado but I've heard people talk about it and seen some pictures. Sounds just like my hubby's kind of movie. Have a good weekend.

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    1. A couple of year's back we had one of our Warcraft guild buddies come for the weekend--it was a little strange, I have to say, but the funny part was how long it took to stop calling each other by our in-game character names.

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  2. My daughter told me she saw WRITTEN on a white board :) instead of an actual smiley face! Have we forgotten what these keyboard shortcuts actually STAND for? I might say "Oh my God," but certainly not "O.M.G." Takes just as much breath to say one as it does to say the other. And why say "L.O.L." instead of just laughing? If you're not laughing, is it really funny? I guess I'm just "old school." Oh heck, I'm just OLD!

    As for Sharknado: I saw about 5 minutes of that movie. That was enough for me.

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    Replies
    1. I think the guy was going for hip irony. Or something. I tended to roll my eyes a lot when he said it.

      Sharknado was surprisingly worth it. I think it was deliberately bad, and succeeded on a massive scale. We laughed a lot.

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  3. Too funny - from the commercials I saw of Sharknado (and the snippets from Alex J Cavanaugh's play by play) it definitely deserved more than a few OMGs!! :)

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    1. You don't know the half of it. A few months ago, I caught about 20 minutes of Stonenado (Yes, it was a real thing) and it was terrible--not even mildly amusing in a campy sort of way.

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  4. Funny - and so is Sharknado. But there are a bunch of funny movies on Scy-fy - intentionally and not. ;)

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