Chase is an ass, but John Landis’s Safety record really did need to be mocked. The man should be in prison for what he did.
The TLDR is that Landis broke a shitload of laws that were set up to specifically stop the tragedy that unfolded. Landis was a dictator style director, his word on set was law, nothing happened without his say so. Then at the trial, he basically said that he had zero control and blamed the pilot of the helicopter. Somehow he got off.
The simple facts,
A, Landis hired the preteen children for his movie without the required permits.
B, Children have strict working hours when they are allowed on set. Landis didn't want to shoot a daytime scene, so he ignored that law.
C, Pyrotechnics have some laws about use around children, Landis ignored them, and even hid the children from the fire warden.
D, It was technically not illegal to fly a helicopter through pyrotechnics the way Landis ordered, but it was for fixed wing craft.
As someone who grew up in the '80s, when I heard Swatch I immediately thought of those inexpensive wrist watches that had wildly colorful designs and interchangeable wristbands. They were hugely popular and if you didn’t have 40 bucks to spend on one, you were not with the “in” crowd, mainly dominated by yuppies.
Wow. Nearly 4000 words and I never felt like stopping reading. Well written. Eye opening, even if I already knew he was considered an ass. Thanks for reposting. I hadn’t seen this before. Points for attribution, too. That’s a classy move.
I love watches but have a hard limit at about $200-300. I live in Japan and you can get extraordinarily good quality mechanical (i.e. “real”) watches that are made domestically for that price or even less from great brands like Seiko and Orient.
Anything beyond that is IMO just pretentious and tacky in the sense that you’re kind of just flaunting your wealth.
My point is that yeah watch fandom kind of really sucks, I unsubbed from r/Watches and never looked back.
This was, and remains the most well-known event from Vanilla WoW, and for good reason. The date was 3 January 2006, and Blizzard were releasing the much-anticipated patch 1.9.0. Food buffs would no longer stack, shard bags were introduced, and the Ahn’Qiraj world event would begin. It would affect every one of WoW’s six million (at the time) players.
Ahn’Qiraj is a huge complex of insect-strewn architecture in the south-western corner of Kalimdor, crowned by impenetrable mountains and only possible to enter through a monumental, hexagon-shaped gate in Silithus, to the north. Ahn Qiraj contained two raids, the Ruins and the Temple. But rather than simply throw open the gates to all and sundry, Blizzard created an event designed to unite entire servers around the goal of getting in. What followed was a clusterfuck of such enormity that it made headlines even outside of the gaming sphere.
Firstly, players on both factions would work for weeks to collect resources – hundreds of millions of them. Food, bandages, metals, herbs. Everyone chipped in. The economies across every server collapsed as resources were siphoned away to open the gates. Prices shot through the ceiling.
This part of the process could last from several weeks to half a year. Since each faction had a separate shopping list, it was meant to become a race to see who could get there first. However most servers had/have a major faction population imbalance, and so one finished drastically quicker and ended up waiting in frustration.
Then came a set of extremely long and challenging quests, which only the best guilds could even think of tackling. The reward was a legendary item – the Scepter of the Shifting Sands. To be the holder of the Scepter was a magnificent honour, with much political backstabbing and conspiracy to ensure it fell into the right hands. Only that person with the Sceptre could ring the Scarab Gong and open the gates (and once they did, they would gain a legendary mount to ride around on).
(Gong Ringer’s Name), Champion of the Bronze Dragonflight, has rung the Scarab Gong. The ancient gates of Ahn’Qiraj open, revealing the horrors of a forgotten war…
With the gates open, the real battle would begin. Obelisks appeared throughout the world, floating ominously in the sky. For ten hours, ultra powerful enemies flowed out out, swarming players and killing them off in droves. But the enemies dropped valuable loot, so thousands of players flooded Silithus to get a piece of the action. Many thousands. Too many, in fact.
More than had ever assembled in one spot, and it was enough to break the game. Servers saw rolling crashes and such colossal lag that players began to flee the battle ground in the vain hope that it might make the game more stable. Boats glitched out and disappeared with the players still on them, reappearing in a ghostly nonexistent space beneath the world, dead players got transported to cemetaries on another continent - it was utter chaos.
The server to open the gates first was Medivh, on the 23rd January (still an effort lasting twenty days), but others took months. Aside from the greater drama of the event itself, there were many smaller stories taking place within the insanity. Major guilds coveted the wealth of Ahn’Qiraj for themselves, and went to great lengths to get it.
Rather than slowly contribute to the resource pool, they would privately hoard them until they had enough to open the gates on their own. In some guilds, spies would sell information on when the gates were going to be opened. Players would try to steal the sceptre from other guild-mates.
And it didn’t end here. It needed to be repeated every time Blizzard opened a new WoW server – which they were doing a lot, as the game was leaping from strength to strength. It was only in February 2009 that a patch was implemented so that all new servers would release with the gates already open. Ahn’Qiraj was finally over for good. The world event entered into history.
History became legend.
Legend became myth.
And over many years, the gates passed out of all memory. They were still there, quietly seething in a dark forgotten corner of the world. But to many new players, they were nothing more than window dressing in an old zone that no one wanted to level through anymore.
But they were all of them deceived, for another gate was made. But that story will have to wait until later down our timeline.
This is one of the many strange and curious events that took place in WoW’s early days, back when guilds were more than a place to collect an XP boost. They were closely knit communities who stayed friends for years. These days, when a guild member logs off for the last time, it goes by without notice. But that was not always the case.
Fayejin was a well-loved player on the Illidan PvP server (we’ll get to that), where she played a horde mage. On 28 February 2006, she died of a heart attack. Her guildmates decided to honour her with a digital funeral. Fayejin loved fishing and snow, so they went with one of Vanilla Wow’s most atmospheric zones, Winterspring. It was one of her favourite places in the game.
The funeral was advertised online on all the popular forums of the time, with an open invitation to anyone who wanted to come along. There were dozens of respondents. When the time came, they were summoned to Winterspring. One of Fayejin’s friends was able to get onto her account, and logged on so that other players could say their final goodbyes. It was beautiful.
There were even characters from the Alliance present, in a cross-faction gesture of respect. Rather a lot of them, in fact. And they were all carrying weapons. If that struck anyone as odd, they never had time to contemplate it.
Within minutes, everyone was murdering each other and teabagging the corpses. As is tradition. Black tuxedos don’t do much against knives, and you can’t change your armour when you’re in combat, so the mourners were left defenceless. It was a slaughter.
The raid was the work of the ironically named Serenity Now, and would follow them for years. The organisers insisted that they were honouring Fayejin with one final battle – she was an avid PvP fan, after all. Perhaps the bloody violence that ensued was more fitting than a load of people standing around making sombre emotes at one another. But nonetheless, the forums reacted in anger, though many found it hilarious.
A video of the funeral survives to us from the time thanks to a youtuber named ‘Women Shouldn’t Vote Productions’. Here’s another video about it. And another. It made it to the gaming media, partly because of its climactic ending, partly because of the discourse over whether the raid was acceptable, and partly because nobody had ever held an event quite like it before. On the one hand, it was a funeral, and you can’t just attack a funeral. On the other hand, it was a PvP server and attacking was the whole point of the game. The ethical quandry still divides players today.
Fayejin’s Funeral is referenced in a 2009 academic paper by Stacey Goguen, titled Dual Wielding Morality: World of Warcraft and the Ethics of Ganking and submitted to the ‘Philosophy of Computer Games Conference’ in Oslo.
Regardless of ethics, the raid is what made the funeral famous, and gave Fayejin a place in WoW history. What more could you ask for?
Every zone in WoW has its own regional chat. Opon crossing the border, you will enter that chat and be able to talk to other players in the area. In most cases, these chats are silent and ignored, with one glaring exception.
The Barrens was a large, relatively empty zone where most new Horde players were funnelled after level 10, and where they would remain until level 20. It was a really boring zone, so players chatted to make it go quicker. Barrens chat became infamous for its juvenile and incessant nature, its bizarre conversations and memes, but players would sometimes find themselves talking about philosophy, physics, theoretical science, ethics, law, or whatever subject happened to come up. After out-levelling the Barrens, a lot of players would go back to hang out and make jokes about Chuck Norris.
One of the most popular Barrens memes was Mankrik’s Wife. You see, one quest tasked players with helping an NPC named Mankrik find his lost wife. But since the game didn’t indicate where she was, and there is no NPC called Mankrik’s Wife – she has the unfortunate name ‘Beaten Corpse’ - they often never found her. This all happened in a time before every single answer to every question could be found online. So naturally, newbies would consult the local chat. (LINKS TO REDDIT)
In 2010, the Cataclysm expansion released, and all of the Vanilla zones were revamped, Barrens included. Mankirk’s wife was laid to rest, but her name would live on forever.
Even today, Blizzard sells a shirt that says “I survived Barrens chat.”
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