My efforts to shake my gaming addiction were going well. But recently I’ve started seeing Diablo everywhere. No matter where I look, it’s always there: in the smile of a child, in the subtle interplay of light on water, on the website called diablofans.com that I’ve just spent six hours browsing; truly nowhere is safe.

And Diablofans has made me indignant – nay, ANGRY. This thread, “600 signs you’re addicted to Diablo 2“, promises to be something great, something profound, and yet in the end it comes across as nothing more than a bunch of funny stuff some schoolkids thought up during Chemistry.

The whole thing just reeks of immaturity. By entry 100, gone are the perceptive musings about wool sweaters (they’re actually a kind of aura) and shrimp (they are all thralls of the Dark Lord Duriel), and each entry becomes more and more logically inconsistent, with spelling quality crumbling to some kind of pre-mental cavetard level.

Well, I’m going to make a little list of my own. These are the entries that I find the most egregiously offensive, together with point-by-point rebuttals of their many flaws. When this list is finished, I am going to email it to every single person who contributed a sub-standard submission, in the hope that they will feel really shitty about themselves and their choices in life.

All entries are reprinted verbatim.

You know you’re addicted to Diablo when…

74. You put on various old sweatshirts, hoping one of them will be enigma.

Oh dear. We’re not off to a good start. For people who haven’t played Diablo, Enigma is a special type of armour which has runes stuck to it. Magical runes. Therefore, in real life, you wouldn’t try on a sweatshirt expecting it to be Enigma unless you could very clearly see a bunch of runes sewn into it. Wouldn’t a much more plausible entry be “you ask your mother to sew runes into your favourite sweatshirt”? Or is that too gay?

Grow up.

82. When your mom tells you to clean your room you put it all in your stash

Listen. For starters, I am thirty years old, and unlike you, I am a normal, tidy person who has no problem cleaning his room three times a night and then scrubbing himself until he bleeds. Secondly, the “stash” you mention may be a tardis-like cavern in Diablo, but that little box at the end of your bed is barely big enough to hold your stolen porn magazines and Popeye Y-fronts, never mind the entire contents of your room.

This entry is blatantly fallacious and I move to have it stricken from the list.

116: when you buy items from ebay

Oh come on. At least put some thought into the wording of your submissions rather than dashing them out mid-wank. A little more consideration would have shown you the total ambiguity of this sentence. You’re a Diablo addict because you buy stuff from eBay? What, like combs? Posters of Che Guevara with Kermit The Frog’s face? Awkward cardboard boxes full of staircase banisters? THINK. If you had simply included the word “Diablo” in that sentence, people would have been chuckling ironically to themselves and sighing “yeeaaahhh”. Instead, you have merely filled people’s minds with confusion and a deep sense of ennui.

You are a failure at life.

123. You raise bullies you have beaten to a crap from the dead and they become all black

Bizarre racist overtones aside, the most disturbing thing about this entry is the writer’s clear desperation regarding his bullying problem. Punished daily for his Gollum-esque frailty and substandard personal hygiene, this wretched child tragically dreams of exacting revenge using the powers from his favourite game. But it will never happen. He will continue to be bullied in school; he will be bullied at the office, and he will be bullied by his shrewish wife who regrets the day she ever let him touch her Joyous Cleft. And when this meek, richly-odoured lamb finally makes it to heaven, he will doubtless have his pants wedgied by Jesus while the angels stand around hi-fiving each other.

This entry is too close to home. I read this list to be amused, not to be reminded of what a worthless little crap-cannon I am.

I hate you all.

157. You get a hard on while the game loads.

Ok. No problem with this one.

160. You own Diablo 2 boxers.

Factually impossible, because there are no official Diablo boxers available for purchase. Search as hard as you like. Of course, if you’re enough of a sad loser you can try to make them yourself, but it’s probably impossible to draw a convincing hellbeast with a magic marker; and besides, you’ll end up getting a big black stain on your glans which took fucking months to go away.

161. You write songs about diablo. i did this. i wrote it to the tune of weird al’s parody the saga begins. i also did another one. yea

OH WHERE ARE THESE AURAL DELIGHTS I SIMPLY MUST HEAR THEM

168. You gamble $10,000 at a casino, and you get Ancient Armor

This is so ridiculous that it is making me salivate with disbelief.

In Diablo, you can gamble money in the hope of winning good items, such as the aforementioned armour. However, if you gamble money in real life, all you win is more money. You show me a casino in the real world that gives you ancient armour when you score at roulette, and I will show you a casino that is completely full of shit. Also, you do not have $10,000, because you spend your entire life playing a computer game.

201. You develop mana so that when you use a blowtorch, it burns with your energy power.

I… I don’t even know

210. When something bad happens, you simply say “ng” and walk away.

This entry is invalid, because I actually do this anyway. This is because I am an emotional man-child unable to deal with the problems of everyday life.

214. You jump off the grand canyon just to see if ull reapeir in town.

Those who haven’t played the game may be thinking “what is this ‘reapeir’? Some kind of spell, probably; Christ these people are geeks”. But you would be wrong, about the spell part anyway, because this person is actually attempting to type the word re-appear.

It actually dumbfounds the mind how it is possible to spell something so wrongly. Has the writer seriously never written either appear or re-appear before? I mean, he spells the rest of his sentence perfectly, other than a slight stumble over you’ll, so he’s not a total idiot. The only answer is that despite being fairly literate, there are people in the world who have never read the word re-appear before in their entire lives.

This is a troubling conundrum which I must contemplate further.

221: you run around in your city like a mad man saying diablo is gonna kill us all like he did in tristram!!

OH MAN YEAH I HAVE SEEN THIS HAPPEN SO MANY TIMES AND YOU’RE CERTAINLY NOT CRIPPLINGLY RETARDED!!

223: You invade a cow farm and kill all the cows thinking there Hell Bovine, then when a bull comes, you make a town portal because you fear that killing the bull will make the farm disappear

I’m starting to get sick of these people’s detachment from reality. Ok, so it’s theoretically possible to murder a bunch of cows, providing you’re a sick little man-monster who will get raped in prison for the rest of his adult life. However, and I must stress this again, MAGIC IS NOT REAL. Once you have concluded your horrid little killfestival, you cannot create a town portal, because town portals do not actually exist in the real world, because (at the risk of pressing a sensitive issue) MAGIC IS NOT COCKTHUMPING REAL HOLY BALLS.

No matter how addicted you are to a game, it does not give you the ability to transmogrify into a warlock. Why don’t you stop lying and go back to killing innocent animals, you sick son of a bastard.

232. Your over 30, single, working at Mc.Donalds, and live with your parents.

That’s… I’m… shut the fuck up. I live with my flatmate.

Who plays World Of Warcraft.

270. You kill yourself hoping your corpse will rise up from the dead and kill humans

Bitch, please. This one is clearly bullshit. If the writer did indeed kill himself, how the hell can he be writing this entry? Or is he just making it up? I’m getting really quite angry at people’s insincerity. Write from the heart or don’t write at all.

233. You create a shrine all about Diablo in your closet or attic or whereever.

This is pathetic. You could at least show a bit of enthusiasm for your own verbal diarrhoea. The other entries may be complete gibberish, but at least they’re spoken with conviction; this one, however, just gives up with a final desultory “wherever” that suggests the writer couldn’t even be bothered to see his own idiocy through to the end. I don’t think this man has created a shrine to Diablo at all.

238. You place remote mines into corpses and you press the detenator when someone walks by, creating a nasty corpse explosion

Where the hell do you live?! Some kind of post-apocalyptic helltown that conveniently still has electricity and a stable internet connection? Oh no, wait. You’re that cow-murdering guy again, aren’t you. And you’re writing this on your prison bunk, enjoying a few scant moments of peace while Burly Bill sleeps, satiated, on top of your corpulent buttocks.

Also, it’s “detonator”. If you’re going to slaughter innocent people and animals, at least have the courtesy to spell their death-weapons correctly.

239: You make folders of diablo and go in the city to spread them around so more people play diablo2!

Yes, that certainly is a way of making games more popular! By making folders of things and then giving them to people in cities!

Apparently by 2018, all forms of advertising will be folder-based.

54. You see evil everywhere.

I live in Salford.

Also, the numbering of this entry does not remotely correspond to its place in the list, suggesting that the writer has a total disregard for order and appropriate behaviour. Therefore, I declare his submission null, void, and stupid.

268. You tape and glue sharp glass to your body so that you can have a thorns effect on your attackers or bullies.

Although this might actually be an attractive way of defending against bullies, I can’t believe that it’s a practical solution. The amount of chafing and self-injury would make it more trouble than it’s worth, especially during gym class, where most of the bullying happens. And in the showers afterwards. Where you’re naked and helpless, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them.

Nothing at all.

I… let’s stop for a while. I need to go and do a little crying and stuff. I’ll continue this list on Thursday.

Filed under: Blog-exclusive humour