If you tried to do anything with this website in the past day or so, you were probably disappointed to find that it was either 1) broken or 2) nonexistant. The crazy internet people were changing servers, which means they had to unplug my website from one magic box and hook it up to another one. This process involved wires, DNS elves, swordfights and (very likely) time travel. All should be well now, though.
So anyway, here we are in the last year of the aughts. (Well, we’re not, but most people think we are, so we might as well be.) The question that has cropped up is, what will be remembered as the greatest film of the decade? An apt question! I think the ’00s beat the ’90s pretty badly as far as quality films goes, even if you look at it on a one-for-one basis. Gladiator beats Braveheart, Kill Bill beats Pulp Fiction, Finding Nemo and WALL-E beat Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast… heck, Juno single-handedly beats any slice-of-life drama from the 90s you care to name. Our action flicks are better, our slasher flicks are better, even our cheesy comic book movies have grown up.
They made three excellent movies based on Lord of the Rings. There was a time when people said that would be impossible.
Reaching into the bag and picking just one, though, is really difficult. My first instinct is to go with The Dark Knight, but I feel like I should probably disqualify that on the basis that I can’t fairly judge the quality of a Batman movie. (I liked those horrible ones from the 90s too, you see.) I doubt I’d put Iron Man, Spider-Man or Watchmen in the running, but let’s disqualify them too just to be safe.
So what does that leave us with? Kill Bill is definitely one for the ages, but you kind of have to take both movies as a whole, which leaves you with a five hour film. I don’t have any problems with a five hour film, but maybe the people in a 2143 Film Studies course will. (Or maybe they won’t, given how movies are trending longer and longer these days. Maybe by that time four hours will be nothing.) Plus, it’s all violent and they say the F-word a lot. It feels strange saying, “This is the best movie of the decade. Half of the population probably shouldn’t watch it, though.”
Then we have Children of Men, one of the most compelling movies I’ve ever seen. This movie has almost nothing in the way of special effects, but I swear it was filmed by leprechauns. There’s one scene where four people are sitting in a car, and the camera is panning around looking at all of them. No cuts, no splices, just seamless film. Where the heck is the camera? Hyperspace is the only answer. This film is somewhat hard to re-watch, however; sure it’s breathtaking, but it’s very dark and the ending is ambiguous. The point of this movie isn’t to watch it and enjoy it, but rather finish watching it and then contemplate it.
So that leaves us with WALL-E, a movie I’ve only owned for about a week but have watched several times already. Rich characters, incredible use of technology, a film anyone can watch, and a poignant message about excess leading to disaster. That’s a 21st century movie if ever there was one. It’ll be interesting to see whether or not the students in that 2143 film class will watch WALL-E and see cartoonishly fat baby-people, or just cartoonish regular people. I suppose that’s a different topic entirely.
So there we go: the best movie of the 2000’s was WALL-E. Glad we got that taken care of.
From 2005 to 2008 I maintained a blog about my experiences working in the drug test industry. Every Sunday I revive one of those experiences here. The following was originally posted March 22, 2006.
Pissing contests.
I’ve never had the pleasure of having an actual pissing contest with one of my clients, only metaphorical ones. In such contests the donor will try to assert himself as some kind of alpha male, transcendent, lifted above the rules that govern mere mortals. I delight in tormenting such people, especially when it can be done in such a way as to scarcely pay them any attention at all. Observe.
Once a week I have to be at the office earlier than normal in order to accomodate our largest client. At the beginning of each month I get a list of forty or fifty names of employees that have been randomly selected to show up on these pre-determined mornings for testing. So I show up early, do collections for a solid hour or two, and then revert to my typical day of killing time.
The pissing contest is initiated by Mr. Pissy, who is in a bad mood that he has been selected for random testing at all. We get to the part in the sign-in procedure where I need to see Mr. Pissy’s photo ID. Instead of giving it to me, he wants to argue about the process by which names are randomly chosen in his company.
“Sorry sir, that’s something you’d have to ask your supervisors.”
“How do you know who is supposed to be here?”
“I have a list.”
“Can I see the list?”
“No.”
“I’m not giving you my ID until I see the list.”
Okay, suit yourself. I tell Mr. Pissy that if he should have a seat until I have a chance to help the three men waiting behind him. He sits there fuming while I conduct these three collections. During the elapsed 20 minutes three more men have come in behind him. After the third collection is done he approaches once again, this time with his ID in his hand. I go to take it.
“Not so fast, I want to see this list.”
“I’m not authorized to show the list to anyone.”
He throws his ID on the counter, muttering something about how this is all ridiculous. I fill in his name, birthdate and phone number. I’m halfway through writing his social security number (which is on my list) when he tries to stop me.
“You’re not allowed to put my social on there.”
“Of course I am. All federal drug tests require it.”
“Not if I say you can’t.”
“Well then,” I shrug, “you’ll just have to have a seat and wait for the gentlemen who don’t say I can’t.”
I proceed to take the next three men ahead of him. Two of them hand me their social security cards, which is a nice but unnecessary gesture. I get the impression that these guys are going out of their way to make a statement to Mr. Pissy about how not ridiculous the process is if you don’t act like a child.
The office empty once again, I ask Mr. Pissy if he’s ready to continue. He doesn’t protest the use of his social security number again.
I take him back and ask him to empty his pockets. He puts his ID and sunglasses on the counter and holds his hand out, expecting me to hand him the sample cup.
“Everything out of all your pockets, please,” I tell him.
He places a wad of tissue and his keys on the counter and then holds his hand out again.
“That includes your wallet, radio, cell phone, and your knife case, please.”
“You’re not getting my wallet.”
“I’ll lock it up for you if you want but–”
“You’re not getting my wallet.”
Okay, suit yourself. I throw the sample cup away and head out to the lobby where a few more people have started emerging. It’s now past the time I’d normally be open. Mr. Pissy has been here over 40 minutes.
I help a couple young ladies get a job at a call center somewhere before Mr. Pissy speaks up again. “Look, are we gonna do this or not?”
“Depends on whether or not you want to cooperate.”
“This is ridiculous. I’m out of here.”
I inform Mr. Pissy that if he leaves I have to record his paperwork as having refused to test.
“That’s idiotic! Are you saying I can’t leave?”
“I’m saying you shouldn’t.”
“I’m calling my boss to report you. You can’t be doing this stuff to people.”
I have his supervisor on my speed dial. By the time he’s whipped out his cell phone I’m already talking to his boss. “Good morning, it’s Richard. Oh, pretty good. Listen, I have one of your guys here, says he wants to talk to you. Okay, hold on.”
I hand Mr. Pissy the phone. He doesn’t believe what he’s seing. Of course he had no intention of calling anyone at all; he was bluffing in order to scare me. I know from experience that employers (and this employer especially) don’t like to hear about people having problems with their drug tests.
Mr. Pissy stammers something out to his boss. Suddenly he’s a little lamb. “No, sir, he did– he didn’t tell me about the social thing. I didn’t know about that. No, he didn’t say nothing about having a box to put my stuff in. Yeah I’ve been here for like 45… well almost an hour. Yes sir. Yeah, okay.”
He hands my phone back to me. “He wants to talk to you again.”
I have a pre-existing arrangement with this employer. Usually I stack up their copies of the paperwork, and once a week they send a guy around to pick them up. For this man, though, The Bossman wants Mr. Pissy to deliver the company’s copy to him personally. I can only imagine there’s going to be an interesting conversation there.
Mr. Pissy’s collection goes off without a hitch after that. Suddenly all the little roadblocks don’t seem to bother him.
I cross him off the list. Despite being the first from his company to show up today, he’s the last one finished. He turned what should have been a five-minute collection into a fifty-five minute pissing contest, in which he scored zero points. I call The Bossman back and tell him that Mr. Pissy is on the way with his form.
Then, my busiest, earliest morning behind me, I sit down to get back into my book.
This story is actually a month old. Mr. Pissy showed up on his company list again this month. Today he didn’t seem to mind drug testing at all. Go figure.
Back when I played World of Warcraft I used to keep a blog for my adorable gnome warlock. Every Saturday I share another of her adventures here. The following was originally posted April 12, 2007
Should you grind Sporeggar rep?
I don’t know or much care about rep, but I’m here to tell you that after a spring feast at Uncle Sideburns’s place I am a firm believer in grinding up the Sporregar themselves. Observe:
Instructions: Set a large pot of salted water to boil, and preheat oven to 375°. Pureé cottage cheese, ricotta, egg whites and Garadar sharp. Blend chives, parsley and pepper into the cheese mixture. Add the pasta to the water and boil on high for about ten minutes. The noodles should be tender but not mushy. Using a slotted spoon, dip the cooked noodles into cold water and lay them out flat on clean linen cloth. Simmer onions in Brightsong wine in a covered skillet for about five minutes. Stir frequently. Onions should be very soft. Add ground sporelings and zucchini, cook about five additional minutes (until soft). Drain the sporeling mixture, and set 1/4 cup aside for later. Combine cheese mixture and sporeling mixture. Spread 2 cups marinara into the bottom of a 9×14 baking pan. Add alternating layers of pasta and cheese until pasta is gone. Cover with remaining sauce and spread reserved spporeling mixture over top. Cover and bake for 1 hour. Let cool for ten minutes before cutting. Serves 9 humans, 14 gnomes, or 1 gluttonous dwarf.
There you have it: a purely vegetarian dish where you still get all the fun of murdering something. Genocide never tasted so good.
Now that we have all but the finale of Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, here are some of my thoughts on each chapter. It’s kind of bizarre how all-over-the-map the quality is on these, but if you love FF4 anywhere near as much as I do you shouldn’t have any trouble getting through any of them. Even the ones that suck.
Ceodore/Kain
This is the longest chapter, and it’s pretty disjointed because it tries to mash Ceodore and Kain’s story together. It doesn’t work very well from a storytelling perspective, and it can be downright hilarious at times. For example, at one point Kain has to traverse the same dungeon Ceodore did earlier in the chapter, and all the treasure boxes are back. If the two chapters were separate this would make sense (since each chapter would be independent), but as it is it just looks sloppy.
Ceodore is kind of a whiny brat and for most of the chapter he is accompanied by a boring character simply called Hooded Man. There’s a great scene at the very end, and Rosa and Cid hop into the party for the clear save (so you can use them in the challenge dungeon), but a lot of what you do in this chapter involves hammering Attack. The chapter is a pretty good mix of old areas and new ones, including a couple new twists on old areas.
I wish they’d given Ceodore’s team a little more variety. He desperately needed a black mage. The clear save gives you three white magic users, which is interesting from a strategic perspective, I guess.
Rydia/Luca I really enjoyed this chapter. Rydia and Luca get some good dialogue and you have full run of the Underworld for most of the chapter. No one else gets that kind of freedom. (You’re kind of stuck in one spot on the clear save, though.) Rydia loses her Summon magic as part of the plot, which I think works pretty well because it means you have to rely on black magic instead. I don’t think I’ve ever had her use black magic in the original. I mean, why bother?
Luca is a fun character. She has Cid’s Analyze ability plus an attack ability that… doesn’t really do anything her regular attack can’t. Of course “Attack” and “Special” are affected by different phases of the moon, so if one of her moves is red she can just fall back on the other.
Luca’s dolls Calca and Brina are party members for the first half of the chapter. There’s a subquest involving super-rare monster drops that, rumor has it, will allow you to use them in the upcoming finale as well. GameFAQs has information on how to game the system and guarantee the drops, so I’ll probably do that. It involves running the challenge dungeon quite a bit, but the dungeon is short and pretty easy.
Yang/Ursula This chapter was a stinker. It has two new dungeons, one of which is incredibly long and dull. Outside of that you’re just rehashing the Fabul scenario of FF4, right down to defending the castle against waves of monsters. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out they were the same monsters.
Ursula is just like Yang except she gets a critical hit ability… but she doesn’t get it until the very end of the chapter. Maybe I’ll get to play around with it some in the challenge dungeon. There’s a lot of time dedicated to Ursula’s backstory, but it isn’t very interesting so you can feel free to just ignore it.
Three nameless monks join the party for much of the chapter, which is infuriating because at any given time you have to have at least two of them on the back line where they can’t do much of anything.
Palom/Leonora Great chapter, one of my favorites so far. Palom and Leonora have an even better rapport than Rydia and Luca do. Much of the chapter is spent in a new area that is structured to teach Leonora black magic, which she learns one spell at a time. The way she has to learn a weaksauce version of each spell before mastering it is cute, and of course Palom already has the -ra versions of those same spells.
Palom-as-teacher works really well. He’s actually developed quite a bit as a character; he’s not a punk kid anymore, but an arrogant and slightly jaded young adult. The twist at the end of the chapter is pretty sappy, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
The game puts a fresh spin on the Magnetic Cave; since both your characters are mages, you get to explore it without working against a penalty. I thought that was cool. When I get to this challenge dungeon I’ll need to save up 50,000 gil for a super-secret Troia pass, which I’m certain won’t be disappointing in the slightest. Nope.
Edge’s Ninjatastic Spy Brigade I really enjoyed this one as well. The chapter begins with Edge sending four of his ninjas on solo spy missions, which basically means they each get to explore a dungeon. (One is an old FF4 dungeon, one is a brand new dungeon, one is revisiting a new dungeon from Yang’s chapter, and one is a new area of a dungeon visited in Palom’s chapter.) Then they all converge to take on the Tower of Babil.
Edge’s ninja team consists of Japanish Name, Japanish Name, Japanish Name and Japanish Name. I’ll never be able to keep them straight (and neither will you), but they are unique. Edge is the strongest, of course, and still has his Steal/Throw/Ninjutsu abilities. Each member of Ninja Team Alpha is a bit more specialized; they each learn only one type of Ninjutsu magic and each get one special ability. (One can Steal, one can confuse enemies, one gets Kain’s Jump and the last one can Throw.)
There are a lot of cool Bands in this chapter; it’s worth hitting a Bands FAQ to find them all. Also worth noting: if a ninja dies on his mission, he’s gone for good. I only had difficulty on one of the four missions, and ended up doing a bit of farming around a save point, but it wasn’t too bad. This is the only chapter where you get a party of five unique characters. I look forward to the challenge dungeon.
Porom Porom’s chapter is unique in that most of it is played in flashbacks. Flashbacks in TAY use the old character sprites, so the early parts of the chapter are the Porom and Palom you remember, running around and getting into trouble. I enjoyed this part even though it mostly involved re-treading old territory.
The second half of the chapter overlaps with Kain’s quite a bit, and ends without you learning anything new. That was disappointing. Porom’s only new companions are a pair of generic mages; that was disappointing too. It almost feels like they didn’t really know what to do with this chapter… it’s just kind of there.
Edward/Harley Another stinker. Well, not entirely. Edward and Harley are both fairly weak, so they get three generic guards in the team with them. Harley is Edward’s no-nonsense secretery and most of their will they/won’t they relationship is pretty painful to witness. Harley has the Gil Toss ability, but I didn’t find any use for it yet. Maybe in the challenge dungeon.
Edward gets to travel through the Waterway dungeon three times. Two of those must be done alone. The game gives you a nice shortcut for one of those trips, but really, it would have been better to just give me the frickin’ Hoovercraft instead. Remember, guys? Edward has a Hoovercraft? It’s like Damcyan’s secret treasure or whatever? Heck, tell me It was parked over by Kaipo if you want, just to force me through the Waterway once. I can buy that.
The chapter rehashes not one, not two, but three plot points from the original game, word for word. I rolled my eyes at all three. You will too. There’s a little bit of overlap with Yang’s chapter. Maybe these two were done on a severe deadline.
Interestingly, Edward and Harley each start with a unique accessory: Edward gets one that increases the gil monsters drop, and Harley gets one that doubles the effectiveness of items. I immediately swapped these so Edward’s Salve ability would be amazing. I wonder if there will be more accessories like this in the finale.
Golbez/Fusoya This chapter is hard, and not just because it involves some of the endgame dungeons from the original. Golbez only gets black magic, and only a small selection at that. Fusoya gets every white and black magic spell, but has a severe MP handicap. The only recharge point is a long walk from anywhere. One random encounter in particular is almost a total crapshoot; you either get lucky or you die. Maybe I missed something.
Nevermind how silly it is to be affected by moon phases while you’re wandering around on the moon.
Fusoya’s stupid recharge ability is still utterly worthless, and neither of Golbez’s specials (Pressure and Taunt) seemed to do much of anything. The end of the chapter involves Golbez looking back on his FF4 shenanigans in flashback, which is insanely cool. The overall plot (which has been pretty piecemeal until now) really starts to get moving towards the end of this chapter.
On the whole though I did enjoy this chapter quite a bit. I also appreciated how Golbez and Fusoya get to kick the crap out of the invincible bad guy that had been curbstomping all the other characters until now. Not that it helps them much, of course!
The finale…? So the finale comes out next month, meaning I’ll get to import all my stuff over, spend six hours going down the Bands checklist, and finally finding out what the heck is going on in the plot. In the meantime I’m going to spend some time working my way through all the challenge dungeons and hopefully getting a better feel for some of the new characters. The game is structured, I believe, in such a way that every character who comes back for the finale is in someone’s clear save except for Luca’s dolls (if they come back) and Cecil.
The challenge dungeons are unfortunately set up so that you can only get the best stuff out of them by spending hours and hours and hours farming, or hitting a FAQ. Using said FAQ it took me about two hours to get everything I wanted from Ceodore’s dungeon, and Rydia’s is going down in short order. This is pure grind, of course, but hey. It’s FF4. I don’t mind.
I took a drug test today, my first in many years. It felt strange to be on the other side of the coin for once, receiving instructions instead of giving them, filling out different parts of paperwork I know forwards and backwards. And of course the actual “put your weiner in a plastic cup” bit. That was kind of new.
The lady was pretty nice. A lot nicer than I ever was to people. But then again I already knew the rules and was a pretty easy customer. Or maybe I’m just a bastard by nature. That’s always a possibility.
For some reason this company uses a lab that is clear across the country, so two bottles filled with my liquid waste will be zipping off to California this evening. I’ve never understood why this is a good idea when there are so many perfectly good labs located right here in Flaw-da, but then, nobody asked me.
I’m way behind on my RMN stuff, so I’d better get to work on that!
My pal Ben asked me to guest host an episode of his video game review series Video Game Take Out. You can check that out here.
This project took a long time and was about eighty times more work than I was expecting. It was fun to do, though, and I learned a lot from it. It was a much different animal than the Let’s Plays or vlogs I’m used to banging out.
New Let’s Play is finished. This one is sixteen parts, played at normal speed, with live commentary. The whole thing adds up to about two and a half hours. This is a blind play, as in what you see is my very first experience with the game ever. I go into it completely fresh.
One of my favorite gaming sites is the Mega Man Homepage. It’s a ridiculously in-depth repository for information on the Mega Man series… the kind of Web 1.0 fansite only a completely obsessed fangirl could provide. It’s fun to see an insider’s perspective on the Mega Man series a decade after everyone with taste left it behind; she dutifully plays through every single Mega Man release and puts her sincere thoughts and gameplay tips up for the world to see in a very attractive format. You don’t often see that kind of dedication on the internet.
Oh, she also has an entire series of Mega Man fanfiction if you’re into that.
Anyway I mention MMHP because of all the Mega Man games to come out over the years the site boasts MM5 for Game Boy as the absolute best. I’ve always kind of wanted to play it, but never enough to actually hunt down a copy. Now that I’ve played it, I can say with confidence that it’s not the best in the series. It’s about on par with some of the latter NES games. I could see how someone with an incredible amount of emotional investment in the series could fall in love with it, but I’m the type of gamer who doesn’t care that Protoman being able to slide in MM9 goes against series canon.
From 2005 to 2008 I maintained a blog about my experiences working in the drug test industry. Every Sunday I revive one of those experiences here. The following was originally posted March 17, 2006.
Directionless.
One thing I’m particularly terrible at is giving directions. The main reason for this is because I tend not to leave the fifteen-or-so mile radius around my apartment, so people often ask for directions coming from faraway lands where for all I know they ride magic carpets and slay dragons. Another is that I have a truly pitiful sense of direction myself; I keep a Post-It attached to the wall near my phone to keep me from confusing east with west. A quick look at Google Maps can sometimes clear the matter up, but not always, and on occassion I am forced to simply point out that I have no idea where the person is, and thus can’t give them directions.
I’ve discovered there are lots of ways to give directions. First off you have people like myself, who are address hunters. The way I’ve always done things is to get the address of the place, and then locate it. If i can’t find the exact address I’ll determine whether the numbers are going up or down and then pinpoint the location of the business I want based on the addresses I can see.
Very few people navigate like that, however. Most people use a blend of cross-streets and landmarks to get where they’re going. This is problematic because, for one, I don’t really register landmarks as I drive, so it’s hard for me to determine what, if anything, in my area would make a good landmark to begin with. Secondly, there really aren’t any prominent landmarks in my area. It’s essentially just a series of strip-malls on either side of the road, no one sign really standing above the rest. The few slightly-bigger-than-the-rest signs that are out there have all failed me in the past, and what works fine for one person isn’t going to work for the next.
The best landmark to get you to my office is the apartment complex I sit in front of. That’s right, in front of. Not next to, not near, not across the street from. The apartments sit back from the road far enough for a row of businesses to sit in front of it as a buffer. You actually have to turn in to the apartment complex to get to my parking lot, but even this information fails as often as not because the rows of stores on either side of me use the exact same system.
Giving the name of my business isn’t even helpful in some cases, because not everyone is looking for that name. For one, we have two company names: one for the side of the company that does physicals and what-have-you, and another for the drug testing. All our paperwork has both names on it, but the sign in my window only advertises the drug testing. So even with the correct forms in-hand, people are looking for the wrong sign right out of the gate. To make matters worse we work with two different labs, so a lot of people are sent out looking for the name of the lab instead of the collection site.
Compounding the problem even further is the fact that employers like to give little maps to their new-hires before sending them out, which would be helpful except the maps haven’t been updated since 2000. Hundreds of clients out there each with their own little version of what the area my office sits in used to look like… not very helpful. This usually ends with me getting chewed out by the donor after they’ve driven around for an hour while needing to pee, or with someone barking at me on a cell phone insisting that a sign or business exists where it doesn’t, because after all, that’s what the map says.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t know how anyone could drive by my building and not see my sign. It’s easy to get confused with all these different factors tripping you up at the start, but five phone calls to me later there isn’t much I can help you with. It isn’t uncommon at all to finally get a person into my general area, making U-turns back and forth in front of my office, still completely incapable of locating it. There comes a point where I simply have to tell someone to slow their car down to 20 mph and closely examine every window they see, and turn at the one that matches my company name. Calls from my parking lot are fairly common too: “Okay, I’m in the parking lot… now which door are you?”
I keep hoping one day I’ll stumble across a perfect solution that will solve my direction-giving dilemma once and for all. Until then… well, at least I have my Post-It.
Maybe I could just buy some road flares, and hire a clown to set them off in front of my office. If people miss that, there’s really nothing I can do for them.
Back when I played World of Warcraft I used to keep a blog for my adorable gnome warlock. Every Saturday I share another of her adventures here. The following was originally posted March 31, 2007
Eleven easy ideas on how to be as lovable as I am.
The most frequent question I get asked is, “Crys, would you please take the lid off this cauldron? It’s getting pretty hard to breathe in here.” But a close second would be “Crys, how can I be as lovable as you are?”
So here are a few easy things you can do to make yourself lovable. I hope you find them immensely helpful.
#1) Be a gnome. If you’re already a gnome, good work! You’re well on your way to being pretty dang lovable as-is. If you’re not a gnome, you might be out of luck. Humans might be able to hack their legs off at the knees and pass themselves off as gnomes with freakishly long arms and bad posture, but everyone else is up a creek. The reasoning here is that small = cute, and cute = lovable. Pretty standard logic.
#2) Get a lovable pet. Warlocks have this one nailed, obviously, because who can’t love a scantily-clad demoness or a miniature stegosaurus? Hunters are in decent shape too, I guess, for those who find warp stalkers or giant spiders lovable. Of course, hunters are up the aforementioned creek on the subject of lovableness, since if you’re a hunter, you’re not a gnome. Catch 22. If you’re some other class your only option is to murder some Defias pirates until you find a parrot, then train it to say something cute, such as: “Did I do that?” or “Squawk! I’m all about the bling-bling.”
#3) Learn magic. Warlocks? You guys are aces — magic is your thing and good on ya for it. Mages are in the clear too. Everyone else? Crack a spellbook. You want to know magic because it’s mysterious, colorful and flashy. With a good repertoire of magic under your belt, you can effortlessly enthrall the dimwitted and easily-amused. And, if all else fails, you can just light people on fire. Remember: every person you burn to a crisp evens out the ratio of people who find you lovable to the people who don’t a little bit more, thus making you more lovable by definition.
#4) Be a girl. Guys are hairy and bulky and generally not very lovable in their natural state. Girls, however, are curvy and pouty and smell nice. Also, our voices are higher pitched, and most people find that pretty lovable. If you’re a guy elf, you’re actually not in bad shape — just shave the nappy beard and add a little wiggle to your walk, and nobody else will know the difference. The rest of you cats have a rough decision to make. I know this blood elf in Shattrath who will do a back-alley operation for thirty gold, but that solution is less than ideal, since no matter how lovable you are in that state your days of actually loving are probably over.
#5) Perfect your “tee-hee.” Anyone can do this in a matter of hours. Go nuts, giggle yourself stupid in the mirror until it’s perfected. Once you’ve got it down, be sure you only bust it out when really necessary though. A quick, well-placed giggle will knock ’em over every time, but use it too often and people will just think you’re empty-headed and annoying. And they’ll be right.
#6) Puppy dog eyes. I know, I know. Cheap shot. But it works!
#7) Contract a disease. This will work for anyone, even those who can’t fulfill any of the above. Get a bad disease and play on people’s sympathies. Now, you have to be careful with this one. If the illness isn’t severe enough (say, a sinus infection) people are going to think you’re just an attention whore. And again, they’ll be right. But if it’s too severe (say, leprosy) people won’t come within a furlong of your diseased carcass, and with good reason. Also, try not to get anything icky, because icky things aren’t lovable. This one works pretty well if you decide to fake it, but make absolutely sure you’re capable of pulling off such an elaborate lie. There’s a special place in the Twisting Nether for folks who pull a stunt that low, and there’s nothing lovable about it.
#8) Paint your nose red and get some big floppy shoes. I don’t know how true this is, but they say everyone loves a clown. So if nothing else is working for you, you might as well give it a shot. Nothing to lose but your dignity, and let’s be honest, you didn’t have much to begin with, right?
#9) Quit complaining. Anyone who uses the word “nerf”, in any context, ever, for any reason is automatically unlovable. Nobody wants to listen to you bellyache, so get over it.
#10) Alcoholism. As long as you aren’t the kind of joker who yells and punches people and breaks stuff while under the influence, go ahead and get plastered. Everyone loves a big, silly drunkard. If you’re a dwarf, this is pretty much the only option you have anyway, so go for it.
#11) Pay people. Everyone loves free stuff and, by extension, the giver of free stuff. If it’s absolutely crucial that someone in particular loves you very much in a very short period of time, you could do way way worse than to drop some gold in their lap. Keep in mind, though, that this is a short-term solution at best, and obviously you can’t pay everyone in the world. Only the most absolutely unlovable people around should have to resort to this nonsense.
I think that gives you guys a good start. I can’t give away all my secrets, of course, since I wouldn’t be nearly as lovable as I am without them. Hopefully, we can go ahead and make Azeroth a place filled with lovable people between the Veiled and Forbidding Seas.
Er, except trolls. Nobody, anywhere, loves trolls. Sorry guys.
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