Micah Whipple

Building the Ecto-1 Lego set and just had a horrible thought that the new Ghostbusters movie will have a bad cgi Egon ghost.

I had a free ticket to join friends to see RADIOHEAD (Amnesiac tour) and I told them I couldn’t go because I had a work shift which was at MICHAELS ART SUPPLY. I chose the responsibility of well stocked scrapbook paper. I don’t have many life regrets. That was definitely one.https://twitter.com/ThatEricAlper/status/1363133851078426627 …

No, sir, sorry you'll have to leave. The cops are called. Eventually someone overhears him say "The character's name is Butter Ape! That's not bad!" and then "I just didn't put the E!" and Marty giggles a little. We all giggle a little. The cops arrive. Back to work.

He's pleading, he's begging. No, sorry sir, we don't restore them here's our policy and also you can't be here. He's there for hours pacing outside. He had driven from Arizona or something to come talk to someone with his family.

So we all sort of 1 by 1 head out that way pretending to go somewhere so we could try to figure out what was happening. Turns out this guy shows up with his wife, and newborn baby in his arms, to protest his character getting deleted.

So one day we get note of a disturbance in the lobby at work. Before WoW it was rare that someone would show up at the building, but it happened. This was pre-campus, pre-bullet proof glass, pre-security. But this was a bigger ordeal, and this person wasn't leaving.

However, due to the way the database worked there was no changing names. So if you had a bad name, zap, that character was removed. All its items. Gone. So this obviously resulted in tickets as people would spend hundreds of hours on racist character names just to lose it all.

So if you had a character with an inappropriate name, or were duping, etc. Marty was going to shut you down. Or if you got corrupted he'd be the one to restore it when possible. We'd get an email or request in bnet chat and Marty would take care of it.

If you played Diablo II and you had a problem with a character, or were being bad, or got reported, you were at the mercy of Marty. Marty was OG Blizzard, and aside from the Blizzard North engineers, was the only person at Blizzard that knew how the online databases worked.

With the announcement of Diablo II: Resurrected (awesome!!!), here's a Blizzard story of love, and loss. A thread.

Use of "fans" slowly crept back into the Blizzard lexicon after that. You can make up your own moral for that one.

We found out who had imposed this rule (!) that had impacted so much of our writing and speaking for years, and asked them about it. Confused at first, they remembered and were sort of surprised anyone bothered keeping up with it. Then they sort of laughed and walked away.

For over a decade we had to contort our language and dodge around "fan" and use players, or champions!, or viewers, audience members!, supporters, etc. etc. No one knew for sure who came up with it, but it was a steadfast rule. Until one day...

Want to hear a weird Blizzard story? We weren't allowed to refer to players as "fans." An exec had at some point realized fan is short for fanatic, and it had a slightly negative connotation. So that was it. Like a weird Disney-cast-members-can't-point kind of rule. We lived it.

Thrall stopped coloring his hair! Own the gray.https://twitter.com/IGN/status/1361748951481937921 …