“RealID” is what the name suggests: it displays your real life name to friends once you have accepted their request to be a RealID friend. well, i have no issues with that. people that are my real life friends naturally know my real name and vice versa. however, there is a little twist to RealID: a little feature called “friends of friends” quite similar to Facebook with the most notable difference that Facebook offers several layers of privacy options (ok that is up for debate but still) and you can always just use a nickname or fake name on Facebook. RealID uses naturally the name of the WoW account which usually is the name on your credit card and hence you cannot really change it or billing will be messed up.

as mentioned i have no problem with real life mates knowing my name in a virtual world but i am worried by the fact that my real name is visible to friends of my friends who i may not know at all. the most popular argument in this debate is “oh come on, it’s just your name and not your address or any other personal details”. well, it might be just my name but a simple google search using my real name does come up with things about me (professional things mind you) that i do not want people i play a game with to know. i strongly believe in keeping the professional life and the personal life separated and RealID threatens to break down that separation.

one great aspect of the virtual world is that you can be whoever you want to be, you can create a virtual self that can have as much or little in common with your real self as you want it to. mind you, virtual worlds like WoW are a fantasy after all. it’s not like i have something to hide from my virtual friends but it kinda defies the purpose of a virtual life as outlined by Sherry Turkle in her book “Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet“: virtual worlds offer us the chance to have multiple identities and experiment with them as we form in true postmodern tradition something that can be called “patchwork identity”. i am a female tauren deathknight in WoW and a media scientist in real life and i want to keep it that way.

i strongly hope that Blizzard will add some privacy options to RealID in the future that either offer you to display a nickname or deactivates the “friends of friends” feature. i like RealID but as it is right now it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.

so what does that have to do with chernobyl you may ask? let me explain! those that know me better are well familiar with my interest in everything nuclear; in fact at one stage during school i wanted to study quantum physics and work at a research nuclear reactor. nuclear reactors hold a certain fascination… i can’t exactly pinpoint it, but it’s partly due to the fact you can’t see, hear, smell, taste or feel radiation and yet it can kill you. running a nuclear power plant is like playing with fire: if you aren’t careful enough you can get burned… or burn the whole plant down. and that what happened on april 26, 1986 in the reactor block 4 of the chernobyl nuclear power plant.

what followed is well known (at least i assume) and the impact of the meltdown was underscored by cold war politics and the way communism worked. (in fact, one could easily point out the communist system as one of the culprits that eventually led to the meltdown but that would be too easy. shift changes and less experienced night shift workers were/are also common in western countries.) so reactor block 4 blew up and nobody actually knew the extend of the incident or how to deal with it properly. brave firemen rushed to the site to deal with the fire but eventually that made things worse and the top of the reactor blew off and spew a crazy amount of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. naturally, communist russia didn’t tell anyone in the west about the incident: mind you, cold war times didn’t promote open communication between the east and west at all. only when workers at a swedish nuclear power plant picked up unusual high radiation readings things started to surface… and the nuclear fallout cloud was well on its way to central and western europe.

i do remember quite clearly the day when it was made public in austria: authorities urged everyone to stay inside and discard home grown vegetables and fruits. in school we weren’t allowed to go play outside in the playground in the breaks. but my father, being the man he was, ignored all of that. by the time the fallout cloud reached austria it was raining heavily and hence all the radioactive isotopes came nicely down with the raid. and my father was out in the field all day long, right out there in the radioactive rain… you can’t see or smell radiation so he didn’t believe that it could do any harm to him. he even insisted on eating the home grown salad from our garden, just to prove nothing could happen to him.

well, he clearly was wrong. in november 1991 he was diagnosed with colon cancer… he underwent surgery and one round of chemo but he lost the fight to cancer on june 24, 1992. of course i can’t say with absolute certainty that chernobyl is to blame for him getting cancer. “official” reports say that the overall effect on the health of people in central/western europe is negligible and the fallout cloud did not cause an increase of cancer. anyway, austria got hit by the fallout pretty hard and there is still a lot of cesium 137 in the ground. in fact authorities still issue warnings not to eat large amounts of wild mushrooms.

this all led to me being quite interested in radiation, nuclear fission and the chernobyl accident in general. the internet is a wonderful source for information in this regard… since a year or so you can book guided day trips to the “exclusion zone” (30 km around the power plant) and see the places of the worst man made industrial accident yourself. some people who went there post awesome pictures and reports. it’s both awesome and creepy at the same time. i often say i would like to go on a day trip to the chernobyl nuclear power plant… time stands still there, everything is like it was at the end of april 1986 with all the cold war atmosphere to it. considering the remaining reactor blocks were only shut down back in 2000… it cannot be so dangerous. yet it still has a dangerous aspect to it… step off the road into the vegetation and you are greeted with a hefty dose of radiation… the fascination remains…

ad 2. You gotta stay active. well, i wasn’t very active when i left school to begin with but my activity level dropped almost to zero when i started my studies. at around my 21st birthday i noticed that climbing one flight of stairs makes me breathless and i told myself to do something about it. i got myself a mountainbike and a stationary trainer and that’s where my obsession with cycling started. i think it is very important to maintain a decent level of fitness as you get older.

ad 4. Junk food will come back to bite you in the butt. i think that goes hand in hand with point 2 actually. during the early years of my studies, was not only sedentary but i ate like 5 times per week at McDonalds because it was “fast” food. i simply did not have the time to cook or prepare healthy meals. unfortunately, i did not stop going to fast food joints until i have almost finished my studies. i wish it had occured to me earlier that junk food is simply bad for you. these days i try to make up for it by eating loads of whole grain or organic stuff and being a part time vegetarian (that means i eat chicken and/or fish once or twice a week but no other red meat).

ad 10. Make time to pursue your passion, no matter how busy you are. yep, i am still working on that one. during the last two years of my studies i was so consumed by my work and research that i couldn’t focus on anything else. it wore me down and if i had to do it all over again, i would certainly do it differently. i would set aside some hours per week for stuff i love to do or always wanted to do.

ad 13. All that time you spend watching TV is a huge, huge waste of time. i wish someone would have told me that when i was 15. i watched way too much TV in my late teens and early twenties. luckily, i managed to quit watching TV about eight years ago and i do not regret it. all the junk on TV is just not worth your precious time.

ad 18. Tequila is seriously evil. yep, i could not agree more on this one. maybe i should change it to “Red Bull is seriously evil” though, since i did not drink as much alcohol as guzzled down Red Bull in my early to mid twenties. so for me personally, Red Bull is the drink of the devil.

ad 19. Yes, you can do a marathon. Don’t put this goal off — it’s extremely rewarding. i would rather replace marathon with Ironman but a marathon is alright as a first goal in terms of endurance events. i would love to cross the finish line of a marathon one day. i believe it teaches you an important lesson about yourself: that you can really do stuff that seems impossible to do if you set your mind on it.

maybe it is really just a habit and you can turn every nightowl into a morning person but i doubt it would suit me. nighttime is the most productive time of the entire day for me. i get more done between 8pm and 1am than during daytime.

so here’s a list of potential (new) hobbies:

i have to admit sometimes i am tempted to “push that button” again, but i “wasted” over two years playing that game and it’s not something im proud of. granted, it was partly a worthwhile experience, but when the game takes over it is just too much.

right now im in the middle of “reconstructing” my life, not only as far as furniture and hobbies are concerned, i think i have arrived at a crossroads and i need to decide which way to take. it is one of the “big questions”, namely “what do you want to do with your life?” goes hand in hand with “who are you?” and “what do you want?” but i digress from the issue at hand. i don’t know the answer yet, but i am trying to figure it out.

my final exam came and passed, life moved on but i still was stuck in that virtual world. in fact, that only changed six week ago. i woke up from my World of Warcraft slumber: i cancelled my account and quit playing. a few (unfortunate) events this march really opened my eyes. life is too short to be wasted in an online game and it is not the life i want to live. what happened to my dreams, to my passions? some critical minds picture players of World of Warcraft as mindless zombies who are afraid to deal with their real lives and hence “escape” to a fictional world. World of Warcraft made me numb.

i think you really need a dramatic eye-opener to see what your current life is like and that it’s about time you do something about it and change it. i want to live my life to the fullest, embracing every challenge and cherishing every moment. spending five to six hours every evening with mostly teenagers in fictional virtual world doing the same things over and over again and where at the end nothing really matters is not part of that life. “life” in World of Warcraft it is shallow, requires no intellectual effort and can be easily compared with junk food – it gets its “job” done, but it is not good for you and doesn’t leave a good feeling either. it can also be compared with mental hypothermia. i am really glad i woke up thawed out.