Late Night Visitations From The Very Agitated Ghost Of J Dilla

Have a soundtrack.


I, no more WoW currently. Which was my plan all this time, I just assumed that I wouldn't have any time to fritter away and now that classes are starting and I am driven to socialization and it is all coming true, those things, future headache moving pictures.

So I got this new videogame, thanks to Caleb.
It is called Heroes of Newerth and I am in the BETA. TESTING.
It is a complete intentional revamp and copy of the WCIII DotA mod.

I guess I'm a little late in the game, since DotA came out in 2003 and has been played steadily by Koreans since then. I have never played it. The french twins would sit, shirtless, in their house and play DotA. The Allens play it still.
My roommate at UW played it constantly, and I developed a deep deep hatred for it.

A completely pointless hatred for it, since it turns out those darn Koreans know their shit and it's a fantastically fun game.

Or at least, HoN is. And it's literally identical, they just updated the graphics and adapted the gameplay and renamed the items.
Which is fine, they asked the modders who made DotA, "Can we do this? You cool with us doing this?" and they gave the all clear.

It is pretty. DotA was permanently stuck in 2002 Warcraft III graphics. HoN has distinct animations, sounds, when the Legion conquer the Hellborn a massive tree root wraps out of the cracked earth and forms a new World Tree. And when the Hellborn win, an equally impressive tree is split in two to form a new sacrificial demon altar!

It is a good videogame. It has many of the characteristics that first sucked me into WoW so many years ago: It's engaging, interesting, continually changing and updating, pretty, and most importantly, it has that WoW feel.

That is to say, it has a complicated jargon/technical side that you can study and get good at, and theorize about when you aren't playing. It is faceted.

Now, the part where it gets neat is that it's running off of a previous game, the DotA framework. All the items are the same, but they've got two sets of names, so everyone calls stuff by their old names, and new players (me) have no idea whats going on, but the point is that it SOUNDS REALLY COOL.

Like there's this item, called a Wingbow, only in DotA it was a knife called The Butterfly. And it's base components are soooort of similar, and they serve the same purpose, and so forth.

What's even more interesting is the Hero conversion. In DotA there was at least a vague mod backstory of the Scourge attacking the Night Elves, and these heroes were from the Warcraft universe.

In HoN it's a completely different lore, that they just had to adapt! So this Dwarven character, Lord of Olympia, who threw lightning around, became this Ape-Man Shaman character, Thunderbringer! And everyone refers to him as Zeus from DotA.
The Moon Rider Night Elf got changed to the Moon Queen insect-ruler woman, and everyone calls her Luna.
It's all fabulously, unnecessarily complex and possessing of a steep learning curve, which all come together to make me like it a lot. DotA, I forgive you. Or at least I like your hotter, younger sister.
But I wouldn't have gotten to know her if I hadn't met you first!


I have been so very busy these last few days. Busy being unproductive and lazy in an entirely different way, a group way, a public way. Interactive inactivity. Socialization via being lazy bastards.
I am sure it will change now that school is starting up again.

I am glad to have the ability to close my door and go batshit again, after a week and a half of meeting new people, doing the College with my Dad, and spending three hours in a Target.

I appreciate alone time again, after a year of forced solitude.

That makes sense.