Geeky Heroes, Villians, & Comics: August 2004 Archives

So I'm standing around Paragon City last night and who wanders by but these two hunka pixels, Leather Bear on the right and Bear Doc on the left (Me, The Yellow Hanky (!!!), is in the middle). Did a fucking leather bar just let out that I didn't know about? We ended up teaming up as a group and I can tell you, heads were turning. Some chick even had the gall to make a comment about the amount of latency in the game. "Latency, Ha!" I said. How latent are three guy's avatar's dressed up like a Saturday night out at the Eagle?

I'm playing CoH the other day on a stress-break from class-work (which, in and of itself, is a whole, long, whiny post about my complete and utter lack of understanding marketing, its significance, or its validity) and round-about got hooked up with another online homo hero. I knew it was a homo-esque meeting because the other hero was be-decked in a cool rainbow-smeared unitard and had sparkling lights dancing around him. That, and he was fighting homophobia where ever it appeared in Paragon City, according to his bio. As I was playing my Castro Clone character, all shirtless, buff, mutton-chopped and harnessed, we hit it off and teamed up to spank the villains skulking around in the sewers of the city.

At a break in the play and some time later, he left and returned asking if I my name was Beau. I was stunned. In this particular game, there is no personal identification associated with characters so I literally had no idea how he could possibly know who I was so I admitted I was and asked how he could possibly know that. He said while we were playing, a friend of his called and in the conversation, he told him about the character he was playing with in the game and the friend knew who I was, because…wait for it: the friend reads my blog. It's one thing to get recognized on the street or some other public venue from a blog as so many have experienced (or more swanky, to get recognized after a steamy steam-room encounter like a very A-list blogger experienced a while back), but it adds a whole level of geeky nerd-dom to get recognized in a virtual multi-player environment using a character with no obvious connection to me or the blog.

Honestly, after the shock of it, I figured it was cool enough to make up for the multiple times I've been dropped out of a super-hero team in the game because the people I was playing with ended up being jerked off their computers by their pesky parents who were forcing them to go do their homework, or, as happened a few weeks ago, being forced to go down and eat their breakfast. That's seriously fucked up.