I was having a talk about what I do for work last night and it was a sudden, positive talk that’s still lingering with me as I go throughout my work day. It made me realize that a lot of my friends have no idea what I actually do for work. I’m “that Wowhead chick” (or LolKing, if they’re of the Summoner’s Rift variety).

It also made me realize I have no idea how I ended up here.

When I was younger, my dream job was operating a cash register. No, I’m not joking, it really was. I owned a real cash register stuffed full of real change and fake bills. I loved playing store. I owned fake fruit and flowers. Sometimes I would take the cans down from our shelves in the kitchen and pretend to ring them up then put them in paper bags we kept around the house. I printed receipts, my mom gave me old Visa cards to slide through my fake credit card swipe, and I would “sell” dry goods and fake food for hours. I kept inventory, I wrote receipts, and I even made gift certificates. Office Depot and Office Max made hundreds of dollars from me and my love of carbon copy papers.

Then I decided by age nine that I was going to be a teacher instead of a cashier. Our first computer, back in 1995, was a goldmine for creativity: it came with Microsoft Access, which meant it had thousands of potential databases I could make. I made a fake school with dozens of fake students; I made tests, report cards, and grade books; and I even wrote answer keys. I would get the test questions from the variety of books around the house, like my “How do Castles Work” book, and then I would get a variety of pens and fill them all out in different handwriting styles and colors. I’d put different answers for each student, adopting a persona. And finally I’d grade them, load up my Access database, and print out their report cards.

At age twelve, I discovered HTML. I loved HTML and I ended up loving Photoshop even more. I made so many websites and I learned so much. A fansite to a Resident Evil character, a layout based off Cowboy Bebop, a mixtape exchange site. Eventually I even made websites for my school–from my debate club to the environmental committee at one of my colleges. Then I even made websites like Girls Don’t Game or Hellmode, moderately popular blogs to showcase my writing.

But throughout all of this, I was pretty deadset on being a lawyer. I still felt I had to do that life path and I worked for it to some degree; I took the right classes, I volunteered for the Coalition Against Domestic Violence where I got valuable work experience, and I wrote countless essays about war, famine, and political regimes.

Until one day I woke up and I didn’t want to do it anymore. At all. The internships I was applying for seemed pointless, the TA position I nearly got frustratingly political, and the idea of spending that much time in school daunting. When a friend got me a job in the video game industry so I wasn’t unemployed at twenty (love you Suzie!) she inadvertently gave me something I was naturally good at and had been practicing for years.

She inadvertently gave me keys to an entire kingdom I was too afraid to access: a job where my sole job was to help make a game and market it, to create its manual and pitch it to companies to publish it. Within a year, I helped get that game on Steam and Direct2Drive as well as Stardock. I wrote comparisons, I researched social games, and I took to the entire process like a fish to water.

I had a job where suddenly my time spent on de_dust mattered. My knowledge about Steam’s early years paid off. Where knowing what a hundred different game manuals look like helped me build our own in my own style.

Think about it: I used to make databases, edit code, and write. A lot. Not only that, I spent my teen years crawling around on the internet and building websites plus fostering communities. I also have put in tens of thousands of hours of gaming–from Counter-strike to Final Fantasy VII, I’ve played it all.

I was basically made to manage a community, to create and cultivate sites–especially those pertaining to video games. It was a huge passion of mine and I never knew it until then. The years I spent in my other job and the time spent here at ZAM taught me that there’s nothing else I’d rather do.

I have this pretty vivid memory of my childhood. We just bought Warcraft II and I was enamored with its manual. You know, video game manuals back then were gorgeous. Drawings of Orcs and Trolls everywhere. I remember reading it, I remember carrying it in my bag to school and opening its wrinkled pages during my history class. That manual and me were totally in a loving, exclusive relationship for at least a year.

But most importantly, I remember opening the manual one day, and saying I wanted to do that for a living. I pointed to a little blurb about what an Orc was. I wanted to write about Orcs and Humans and I wanted it to pay my bills. I wanted nothing more than to be paid to celebrate Warcraft’s existence.

It’s funny how life turns out, isn’t it?

P.S. Sorry for not touching this place for over a month. Worst blogger NA, no problem.

I wanted to post sort of a personal post about what’s been up. A lot of cool things have happened lately work related!

• We launched LolKing and it’s lived up to my wildest dreams in terms of traffic so far. A new site is always daunting because you’re not sure how the public will react–I found the site back in March and we ended up buying it, from that point on I begged to be a part of its development. A lot of the work I did is in the database, so you can go see all the champions if you want to see something I spent hours on. The prettiest part of the site is probably its model viewer which was done by my coworker Alayton. In general it’s been really rewarding helping map out a site from the ground up! The guys who work on the site are also great, both as developers and League of Legends fans, so it’s been pretty awesome to watch them work.
• Part of being site director at Wowhead means I decide really random things and that’s by far my favorite part of the job. I got an email from Zarhym with some beta keys. We gave them away and they went fast: nearly 4k posts in a few hours asking for keys. So I emailed him back and asked for more keys, figuring I could get a little contest going. Turns out he’s a generous guy, so he handed us hundreds more. Then I reached out to ZAM’s marketing team, secured us some A40 Astro headsets, and made a contest from scratch all last minute like. Yes, it created extra work, but we also get to give out free things and interact with the community–it’s really awesome!
• I’ve been playing a lot of Civilization V lately due to its expansion coming out this past week. I really like it, though I don’t really enjoy espionage. I didn’t like it in Civilization IV either. Part of the problem is I don’t play on difficulty levels where the AI has much more tech than I do–they’re usually neck and neck with me, so there’s not much to steal. I love how many female leaders were added, though, especially Boudicca. She’s my favorite Civ IV leader so I was happy to see her back in.
• My cousin’s fundraiser for her diabetic alert dog went pretty well! She’s at $5.5k. The dog unfortunately costs nearly $30k, but thanks to some people on Twitter and Reddit, I was able to bring in over $1k alone and do my part. They wrote a thank you post to everyone over here.

Not much else to really write about. Just trying to eat healthy, work out (I didn’t do anything for all of May because I’m lazy), and playing a lot of League of Legends!

My mom wants to write a children’s book. She read a few books on it recently and they all pretty much told her she wouldn’t make it which really discouraged her. One of them said 7% of people who try to get published actually get published.

“You’re just saying it to encourage me,” she said when I told her I loved her plot.

“You know it’s something I need to do before I die so you’re saying it’s good so I’ll do it,” she said when I told her I loved her plot for the second time.

“It’s hard for you to be unbiased,” she said when I told her I loved her plot for the third time.

I wasn’t. I really liked her plot. It has a twist that I think is adorable and I think it works. If I had kids, I’d read it to them. But I don’t, and that’s probably a good thing that I don’t, so I’ll read it to my cat. She’d like it because she likes to hear me speak. And I’d like it because it’s a clever plot and my mom’s pretty fucking cool for a mom sometimes.

But anyway, that’s not the point. The real point is the world is basically filled with how-to’s and naysayers. Oftentimes they’re the same thing. Look up a resume guide, watch them tell you exactly how to write your resume to get maximum views by recruiters. Then follow that exact template and watch as you get no replies in your inbox because that guide wasn’t completely right and you relied too heavily on it.

The video game industry is really bad at this. I got told so many times my resume was bad by all kinds of people (to be fair, I got told it was good and I got helped by so many others, so this isn’t to say the entire industry is bad or anything). But I got a lot of interviews and callbacks and eventually a great job. I’m thankful for every single callback, too, because they taught me to value my instinct a little more. To believe in myself. That kind of shit.

Anyway, they tell you a lot of times what you can and can’t do. The thing is, you rarely stop and question who they are–and why they’re telling you that you can’t do it. Sometimes it’s just because they like having the power and they would be sad if you got some power too. Other times it’s because they’re negative. And sometimes, very rarely, it is because they’re right but you should never let that discourage you or take their word for it.

You can pretty much do anything you really want to. Even if you can’t, even if it really is the impossible, I’ll tell you this: if you don’t try, you’ll find yourself regretting it someday.

I sincerely hope my mom writes her book and illustrates her pictures. I hope I get to help her get it published because, like I said: I loved her plot. Her artwork ain’t half bad either.

I wanted to see a new Zelda or a remake of an old Zelda. I wanted to see Ghost Trick 2 or another quirky game in a similar vein. I wanted to see a sequel to Red Dead Redemption. I wanted to see Theme Hospital rise from the ashes as a new project. I wanted to see a new RPG similar to how Dragon Age blew us away a few years back.

I wanted to see something creative, outside the box, and unexpected.

But mostly I really just wanted E3 to contain something I could look forward to. This year’s event seemed old and stale, its actual emphasis more on the living room than video games themselves. Almost everything was already covered, months prior, and none of it looked that interesting. Games I wanted to be excited for troubled me, like Beyond (Heavy Rain was too much of a narrative experience–will Beyond be the same?) and Sim City (the deluxe edition versus standard edition bonuses scare me–will it be just like The Sims 3 and have too much emphasis on expansions and the in-game store?). The Last of Us was the only game I could truly say I was excited for that got significant time at the conference’s press events and that’s largely because I think it will say something new in a genre as overdone as the zombie genre is.

Oh, and Watch Dogs looked interesting I guess.

I still have games I’m looking forward to, like Torchlight 2 or CS:GO or Grand Theft Auto V or Borderlands 2. And I still have Resident Evil 6, which I’ll probably enjoy because I like Leon S. Kennedy a whole bunch. Gaming isn’t dead to me, but maybe large scale press events are–the hype machine certainly is.

It just seems to me like Nintendo and other studios are missing the mark. Nintendo could make a killing with the Zelda franchise if they returned to its roots, but instead we got the third Super Mario remake in the past year. There could have been a new Pokémon announcement that strayed from its template of city to city, gym badge to gym badge, but there wasn’t and there probably won’t be.

And while everyone digs the idea of playing Elder Scrolls with their BFF, perhaps a MMORPG isn’t the solution–I can’t be the only one who thinks Elder Scrolls look generic and tired as a MMO, especially when compared to Skyrim. In fact, maybe co-op in the Skyrim expansion could have gotten our feet wet instead of this MMO business.

Oh well. We’ll see what happens. For now I’ve got League of Legends to play and the Civilization V expansion coming out this month to look forward to. That will have to do.

I had a friend imply I was bad at League of Legends a few weeks ago. They’d just reached 1800 elo and thought they were really good, total pro-gamer status, and in the mood to put someone else down to celebrate their victory.

I haven’t had a good game since.

Almost two years ago, I had a magazine editor contact me to write for her magazine. It was flattering–she said I was truly gifted and my articles were awesome. She accepted two of my pitches. I began to write them, I poured my heart into one of them.

She tore my article to shreds. After rewrite and rewrite–a process that took about a month and countless hours–she told me I wasn’t going to work out and withdrew the article. My style just didn’t fit her magazine, she explained, even though she’d approached me in the first place.

I haven’t written about video games since.

When I was younger, failure really empowered me. I was a tall kid and tall kids can’t typically do gymnastics, but when I was told I couldn’t do the rings or twirl on the bars, I’d try over a thousand times until I finally could. I had something to prove and so I proved it.

And when people said a female couldn’t play Counter-Strike seriously, I 1v1′d on that game until my eyes bled. Until I could do that perfect headshot from around a corner. Until I could carry my weight.

But as I got older, the more people said I couldn’t, the more it’s damaged me and made me unsure. I used to play League of Legends at a pretty high level. My CS was decent, my calls were good, and I rarely missed skillshots like Ahri’s charm or Kog’s ultimate.

Now I’m lucky if I land a single charm all game.

I don’t know what to do about it. I want to succeed. I talk to myself and tell myself to snap out of it as I play poorly, but nothing comes of it. I don’t want to be like this–I mean, I’d love to get back into the game and to play at a high level. I’d love to write again, too. But I crumble under pressure nowadays. Insults from strangers or anonymous figures in the dark don’t matter, but insults from people I respect or personally know do.

When someone I care about says I can’t, I can’t.

And no matter how much someone else says I can, that one person lingers in my head.

How do you get over a psychological break like that? How do you stop one person’s actions from ruining the rest of everyone’s positive energy? How do you not hear them every time you fuck up?

I don’t know.

I kind of hate myself for saying this, but I don’t love Diablo 3.

I mean, I like it. The game is fun. If I gave a review, I’d say that it was worth the wait. I’d say it was a solid 9/10 experience. I’d put some good adjectives to describe my emotions when I looted my first legendary. And the weekend I spent with it, the twenty hour marathon on release I achieved–well, that was fun and memorable enough.

But for whatever reason, D3 didn’t have staying power with me. Ultimately, as I neared the end of Nightmare mode, I lost sight of my will to log back into the game.

It all came down to loot. The loot isn’t as fun as it was in Diablo 2. The system wasn’t as addicting. It felt more spread out than most ARPGs and a lot less satisfying. In addition to scarcity of drops, the legendaries and rares I got were always outclassed by the blues I’d already equipped. This ended up taking a lot of fun out of the never-ending search for loot. There was little incentive to keep grinding because I couldn’t catch a break with the RNG Gods. And because I was so unlucky with gear, I got pushed against a wall during my co-op sessions: mobs grew harder when a friend would join my game, but my Wizard did half the damage she was supposed to, so it was frustrating and I got regulated into a CC bot.

I know I could always keep powering through it. I could turn to the auction house. I could struggle through Hell difficulty, hoping to get my big payout. I could master my Wizard. But I didn’t really want to after a certain point. The break in loot led to a break in the Diablo 3 experience and I saw the game for what it was: an endless and somewhat pointless quest for epics. It’s not really Blizzard’s fault, though some blogs have been quick to analyze D3′s loot–it’s more of my fault.

I mean, I play ARPGs to smash faces and loot a lot of things.

And unfortunately, when neither happen in large quantities, I get bored. But hey, that’s the genre for you–right?

Usually when I go back and play a game from my childhood, it’s nothing like I remembered. The vast forests of The Legend of Zelda and the hordes of zombies from the original Resident Evil don’t really match up to what my young mind imagined them to be.

But there’s always an exception to the rule.

In this case, it’s Bullfrog’s Theme Hospital. Theme Hospital pretty much everything I remembered when I played it at age ten in 1997, off-beat British humor included. It’s easy to play, incredibly hard to master, and very unforgiving. As a hospital director, you run a quirky hospital full of faux diseases and managerial woes. You hire nurses, doctors, receptionists, and handymen with a wide array of personality disorders and demands. You fend off VIPs from touring your hospital, fight epidemics, and handle emergencies with aplomb. You worry about machinees breaking down, researching new cures, and sweeping the tiled corridors–all the while keeping the fiscal year and its deplorable budget in your head.

At my old job, where I worked for three years on an indie game, the developers were mostly smug and full of themselves. There were a few good ones, of course, but if you were a community or administrative person, you were nothing to the majority of the development team. You couldn’t code so you weren’t worth the time of day. Worse, any ideas you had that were actually good were eventually purposed into the developer’s brainchild; reworked so they got credit ultimately. Praise was nonexistent.

It got old pretty quickly.

I wanted the name Ashelia.com since I started using Ashelia as my online handle back in 2006. But, as is the case with any short and memorable domain name, it was taken. It was taken this time by a particularly egregious fellow–he’d bought it to camp the name because it was related to Princess Ashe. He had it functioning as a gallery to Final Fantasy XII for Google keyword traffic and plastered with ads.

It made him some money or so he claimed.