Inc! A Storm!

About 20 minutes ago, the sky went dark. We went from normal morning light, to dark, like nearly middle of the night dark, dark enough that the light sensitive street lights went on again.

I used to play Everquest, a lot. Everquest is a computer game, a multiplayer, on-line fantasy sort of game. And one of the ways those games work, so that people can mostly do the same thing someone else did, is that the computer generated baddies (called "mobs" in the game) get re-made ("spawned" or "popped") by the program every so often (either a specified time or a variable time) after they've been "killed" in the game.

The reason I'm telling you this is that in Everquest, you'd get a group together often, and hang out in one area of the game, repeatedly killing basically the same spawns for experience points. (Yes, I'm sometimes amazed that I paid good money to do that, but I also mostly had fun.)

Often, if there were several mobs close by, the group would want to fight only one at a time, and so someone would try to get the mob to come closer in one way or another ("pulling"). And often, that person (the "puller") would send a message to the whole group that a specific mob was on its way to the group, or "incoming."

Now, you could type it out, but, of course, no one had time in the game, so you'd set up a preset message that would fill in your "target" for your message. Thus, in a group (where I was mostly not a puller), you'd see in your group chat something like: "Inc, a Orc."

And then, naturally, people would get fancy with these. My favorite was a friend's spam that went something like: "Pop goes Orc! Hop on Pop!"

And sometimes, what you'd see instead of "Orc" was something you were totally unprepared for, and then it could get bad. Like the whole of Chardok would come at once. Or somehow Mraaka would be where I was.

So, as I saw the storm shadow came on, not unlike what you see in the alien movies where suddenly there's the big shadow cast over the city or whatever, I couldn't help thinking, "Inc! A Storm!"

It's weird how something like a game can influence your thinking long after, isn't it?

If I didn't have to teach, I would totally gate.