Its the weekend!

The weekend is here!
I bet you're wondering what I do on the weekends, eh?
Okay, probably not. But since this is my blog, I'm going to tell you anyway.

I game. I relax. I work.

I game.
I often play a game called WoW. WoW stands for World of Warcraft. I play this 3D game with a bunch of friends, most of whom I've never met in person. Yes, I've met some of them in person - some before I played the game, some I met after I already knew them in-game. About 60 of us all get together in the game and do things almost nightly. What's better than spending time with friends, right? :)

So what do we DO? We group up together and go accomplish in-game goals. We chat both through text and through a voice-chat program. We joke around. We exchange recipes. We talk about sports and news and love and life and sex and kids and just about anything you'd talk about with your best friends. We wish each other happy birthday. We congratulate each other on special events like getting jobs and having babies. We post pictures of ourselves and our loved ones so we know what each other looks like.

Some people ask me, isn't it just a bunch of teenage boys that play? NO! In fact, the average target audiences for these type of games are:
#1 White Males ages 25-45
#2 White Females ages 25-45
#3 White Males ages 15-24

From there the numbers convolute a bit between several different groups depending on which study you look at. Most of the people I converse with are in my "guild." A guild is simply an in-game mechanism where you evaluate players and then if you like them you join them into your group. Guilds have their own chat channel and often guilds complete in-game objectives only with their guildmates as opposed to people not in the guild. I've been in guilds that have 500 members. The one I'm in now has on average about 20 - 50 people online at any given time of the day or night. Remember, people all over the world play this game and therefore are in different time zones. If I had to guess at the AVERAGE age of the guild, I'd say it is somewhere in the range of 35-39.

I relax.
Yeah, its the weekend and I deserve to relax some. I watch some television on rare occasion. I sit outside and look at the trees. I play my game to relax. I play with my dog (He's an AWEsome dog!!). I play cards with friends. Every now and then I'll go out of town for a day-trip, or eat at a restaurant, or I'll watch a movie. I love movies - both on the big screen and on DVD. On rare occasion I might even drink a few beers with my neighbor.

I work.
Sometimes on weekends I do work like mowing the grass or planting a bush or some flowers. Often I do work from, yes,... sad to say,... work. I can't help it. Its a necessity pretty often. But I don't let it get me down that I have to work on weekends unless it isn't my own fault I'm doing it. If students cause me extra work because they were dumb or they procrastinated then it pisses me off. But if I do work because I assigned something then I'm okay with it. Either way I temper my work with a lot of the above relaxation and gaming and everything seems to turn out alright. :)