guild wars

For the past few weeks I’ve been playing Guild Wars a lot. If you don’t know what it is, Guild Wars is an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) with, at last count, about 2 million active players. But it’s different from most MMORPGs out there, like World of Warcraft. For one thing, there are no monthly fees you pay in order to play the game: you buy the software and create your account and that’s all the money you’ll ever have to plunk down. It’s not an entirely game-wide “persistent” world though: you can meet other players from around the world in places like cities and outposts, but once you leave those the game is an “instance” created just for you and your party of fellow players (if you want to play alone though you can hire “henchmen” from the cities to follow along and help you). It’s also ...

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Story at MSNBC about soldiers returning to Iraq after considerably shorter respites than is sought by military policy. Some brigades are being sent back into the combat zone after being home only 7 months, when there’s supposed to be one year’s rest after each year deployed.

Why are the soldiers being sent back so quickly? Because there’s not enough military personnel to fully accommodate our presence in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. If this administration decides it wants to go to war with Iran, it will get even worse for our men and women in the armed forces.

Just one more indication that our armed forces have become spread too thin through the worst mismanagement of military resources in American history....

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