The Accidental Hipster

I was on early yesterday, before work, and people were eagerly counting down the time before the extended Wrath Classic pre-patch.

Rather than living in the moment, I couldn't help but think that in a year from now people will be similarly eager, talking about the upcoming Cataclysm Classic, because of course they will. After all, we're way ahead of schedule for following the original TBC timeline, so why not the same for Wrath Classic? And I'm sure the apologists will be out for Cataclysm Classic too, because "Cataclysm: It Wasn't as Bad as People Thought" is likely to be a headline from a site such as Massively OP or Blizzard Watch.

But that's not what I mean when I said I was an accidental hipster; that's just being a cynic. 

Chris Knight, don't ever change.
From getyarn.com.

Last afternoon, after I got off a late call with a coworker, I noticed that the servers were now up. An actual extended downtime from Blizz for a prepatch that ended right on time? Amazing! So I looked at Discord and found an absolute ton of people on, even those I'd not seen online in months, all with "Playing World of Warcraft Classic" as their status. 

I switched to Battle.net, and found a metric ton of people with "Wrath of the Lich King Classic" as their status as well.

And... I just went and zapped Battle.net for the day and played a little Stardew Valley instead before hitting the hay early. 

***

If that were all I did that'd be one thing, and I'd write it off to merely an aversion to being around whatever the popular crowd is doing. After all, this is kind of my jam; back in the 80s, I used to like bands such as Toto, and then when Toto IV came out and they simply exploded in popularity I dropped them like a hot potato. Another band that followed a similar trajectory was Bon Jovi. I'd been a fan of their first two albums and liked their third --Slippery When Wet-- but when they suddenly became the most popular band in school* I stopped listening to them. 

If Simon and Garfunkel suddenly rocket

up the charts, I'll drop them too, I suppose.

If I'd have been exposed to punk back then, I'd have likely been heavily into punk until Nirvana came along and made punk inspired Grunge a thing. Instead, part of my 90s was spent exploring Jazz and Celtic music --until Riverdance came along, that is-- so I missed out on the worst excesses of the Boy Bands as well as some of the best of the Grunge bands.

And so it goes.

But for some reason, instead of simply not logging in and zigging when everybody else zagged, I just had to turn myself visible on Discord for a little while so that if anybody was actually looking they'd see that I was most definitely not in WoW Classic that evening.

It was the sort of behavior that was absolutely not necessary, and something I very rarely do, but I did it anyway.

After all, people likely didn't give two shits about what I was doing, since they were all focused on things in Wrath Classic anyway.

***

I guess you could say that this tendency not to do what everybody else is doing is part of the reason why I did Blaugust the way I have. 

Here I am, on August 31st, the last day, and I've written a post for 31 days straight.** I swore I would stop posting if the stress got to me, but... I haven't felt any stress at all. If anything it's been relaxing, knowing that I'm under absolutely no pressure to post and keep up appearances. I didn't sign up for Blaugust because I didn't want to toot my horn and wave a flag shouting "LOOK AT ME!", which is quite ironic since this is what I'm doing in this post right now. The thing is, I'm writing this post with the knowledge that only a handful of people will ever see it, so I don't really care. 

Even if I did sign up for Blaugust, I'd be only one of 68 blogs, which is miniscule compared to the entirety of the internet, but it would be also more than twice the core readership of this particular blog. We'd be back to territory PC hasn't seen since Righteous Orbs and the Pink Pigtail Inn were active. But it would also mean that I'd have to make a decision about what I want to do with PC, given that back then there were two of us writing and Soul was actively trying to grow the blog's readership.***

If I truly wanted to market PC, I suppose I could have done so by getting on Twitter and engaging with the community more. Or commenting on more sites and blogs. Or something more than what I've been doing (which is nothing). There's no guarantee that any marketing will bring eyeballs here to the blog --or any blog-- but it is certainly better than simply not doing anything at all. What might have happened, knowing me, is that I probably wouldn't have kept at blogging for this long if I felt like I had to keep posting. Without any pressure, I can post what I want when I want to, and the schedule is my own to keep. 

In a world where it feels like everything is dictated by someone else, having complete control over something is a rare luxury.****

***

If there's one thing that I don't like, it is the concept of the hipster as tastemaker and critic. Even though I only rarely engaged with the hipster crowd, I always felt that the things I liked --and by extension myself-- were considered "less than" by them as a way to make themselves feel superior. 

And now, here I am behaving in a similar fashion to them, and if I looked deep into my own soul I have those same feelings of superiority that they do. I'm not too proud to realize that likely they, like me, are probably nursing a severe case of insecurity that is actively masked by this behavior. This does not excuse such behavior, but I do understand some of the reasons why. 

There's more to it than that, of course. There's a certain level of resentment for all of those people who have no qualms about dropping subscriptions and restarting them on a whim, because Blizz has tailored Retail around spikes in subscriptions every time there's a content patch to the point where the grindy daily systems designed to keep you logging in --and subscribed-- became the raison d'etre for how Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands were designed, even more so than the tailoring of the expac toward the highest end raiders/Mythic+ participation. 

This spiking, the ebb and flow of an expac, isn't exactly unusual. I knew people back in the 90s who would change long distance carriers at the drop of a hat if another carrier came along with a slightly better deal. Hell, people even in our neighborhood changed trash removal companies if they saved about $5 a month. (Yes, that happened.) So this is not new, but knowing that companies such as wireless carriers today still tend to prioritize --and give better deals to-- new customers over existing ones leads to a certain level of behavior among the general populace.***** 

I realize that I'm old, and that I value loyalty to my detriment, but this behavior creates additional resentment in me because these spikes in subscriptions and activity also drive the desire by the Classic Team to push content harder and faster, to keep the subs up and to get to what? Potentially Cataclysm Classic and oblivion, I suppose. If anything, I'd prefer that the Classic team slow it down, because I know the end is coming next year, and I'd like to enjoy the ride as long as I can. 

***

But I need to do better. I need to stop being small minded and resentful when I should celebrate that so many people came back. Their fun doesn't directly impact me at all --well, considering the way I play it doesn't-- so I need to stop being an accidental hipster and instead enjoy the ride. 

This isn't how I expected to end a series of Blaugust posts, because nobody likes to be a downer, but I guess the prepatch brought up some thoughts that I needed to address sooner or later, such as the impending demise of WoW Classic next year (or very early 2024).

#Blaugust2022

*That was when Bon Jovi became known as "the 'metal band' your girlfriend likes".

**Well, I have, assuming my sudden aversion to actually posting this last post and completing things doesn't override my desire to just simply get it over with. 

***I took the more cautious approach of trying to write well and actively comment on posts that interested me. By engaging people that way, I developed friendships that have lasted until this day. "Hi, Gang!!"

****If anybody wants to take a lesson from this post --aside from "don't be a hipster"-- create a blog because you have complete control over it. People can try to tell you what to do, but in the end you have control. Absolute control. 

*****AT&T was heavily promoting their change in policy last year that they would give the same deals to existing customers that they gave to new customers because it was such a departure from the norm. And before you think I approve of AT&T over other carriers, I don't. I only use AT&T because my employer pays for my service; if it were up to me, I'd use another carrier because AT&T has several dead zones less than 2 miles from my home that they are quite well aware of but have done nothing to alleviate over the past 15 years. And for the record, I most definitely do NOT live in the boonies.

EtA: Fixed grammatical issues.