Calvin & Hobbes, Warcraft-style

Babyfresh & Me, a la Calvin & Hobbes

 

 

Babyfresh & Me, a la Calvin & Hobbes

So this is my tribute to Bill Watterson, cos I love Calvin & Hobbes!  This is supposed to be me (resto druid) and my gnome warlock pal Babyfresh, who is my favorite person in the guild to tease.  He’s one of our youngest members and his reactions to a little gentle teasing are so cute! xD  We actually had an exchange very similar to this, which made me think of Bill Watterson’s old strip & inspired me to draw it out.

In conclusion:

1. Gnomes are cute.

2. My scanner sucks.

That’s Obscene!

HEEHEE yesterday I opened my mailbox to find a Gold Eternium Band from Tangent Boy.  I think anything ostentatious enough to cost 3000 gold while being absolutely pointless should at least give you a glow when you wear it.  I’ve never even HAD 3000 gold, or 2000 gold for that matter, except when I bought my swift flying skill, and that was largely borrowed/donated money. 

As per Tangent Boy’s instructions, I shall now commence to be insufferably braggy about it for the rest of the week in gchat & to any random strangers who have the misfortune of crossing my path.  “Oh you need a healer?  How about a healer with a Gold Eternium Band?”  “WTB Primal Lifes! For a discount I’ll let you touch my Gold Eternium Band!”  “Sure I’ll join your raid.  Just let me take off my Gold Eternium Band, don’t want it to get dented.”  “Oh you guys are married IRL?  Hm I wonder why he didn’t buy you a Gold Eternium Band yet…”  LOL oh boy.  I’m seriously contemplating throwing a healing enchant on it.  If only it gave a cool glow or something… a spotlight on my head maybe… a trail of pixie dust… C’mon Blizzard, 3k gold deserves some kind of flashy effect!  :D

Moment of Silence for Snuffles & Tangent Boy

mah baby Peanut & Me

This is my cute pet, Peanut, whom I adopted after completing the Children’s Week quest. He’s been my pudgy, adorable little shadow ever since.

Snuffles left the guild, as did Tangent Boy. I’m not devastated, but very dismayed. I liked Snuffles a lot (despite what he did that one day)- he was a capable raid leader and we got along famously. I think I may be even more dismayed by the loss of Tangent Boy though… I haven’t mentioned him before but he’s one of those kooky yet intelligent characters you run into once in a while who have these weird, random, out-of-this-world thought processes and every conversation with them makes you feel like Alice trying to communicate with the Cheshire Cat. For example, the first interaction I had with him was when I needed a jewelcrafter to cut an epic gem. Tangent Boy offered to do it, but only if I could explain to him the process through which yogurt is made. I took up his challenge, being the fount of random Wikipedia knowledge that I am, and the subsequent memorable exchange struck off a bizarre yet highly entertaining relationship. He was definitely one of my favorite people in the guild… I guess I say that about a lot of people, because I fall in like very easily, but he really was especially dear to my heart. I like weirdos, and he was one of the weirdest. Sighh.

So the guild lost one of its most interesting personalities, and an excellent raid leader. Tangent Boy left looking for a PVP guild, and Snuffles… he gave a reason on the guild forum that smelled a little fishy so I sent him a sad little PM, we’ll see if he replies.

On the plus side, we did gain a few promising new members. The 2 female applicants who I’d briefly mentioned earlier got in, and while one of them’s on the quiet side, both are really nice and definitely not one of those girls. Things are going alright!

Did I mention we are now 3 bosses down in SSC? It was great, it was only our third time seeing the place and we had more than a couple SSC-virgins. We one-shot Hydross, 2-shot Lurker (it was only our 2nd time seeing him!), and on our very first glimpse of Tidewalker, got him down in about 4 tries. <:^D Happy… It was just a fun raid; during one trash pull there was a wild mob running around flattening people left & right. Mr. Moderate, in a calm, soothing attempt to keep guild morale up, announced, “It’s okay guys, this is a progression run! This all part of progression!” And after that, every time someone died we would cheerfully announce, “___ has progressed! ___ has been progressed upon!” It kept people in high spirits, I think as long as we have Mr. Moderate around this guild will be in good shape. :)

Archimonde is HARD!!!

Are you shocked? xD Yeah that’s right, I got my first peek into Mount Hyjal last night!  It… wasn’t with my guild.  In fact, our guild-scheduled raid didn’t even pan out, as only 15 people showed up online.  It’s not looking good… Although on a brighter note, despite yet another canceled raid, Biggie and I had the following heartening chat:

“You- you’re not gonna leave?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Because of you!”
“<3!!!!”
“Just kidding.  It’s too much hassle.”

Teehee.  Whatever the reason, I’m really glad he’s staying.  Biggie’s awesome!

Anyway, so after the disappointing cancellation of our guild SSC raid, I was moseying around looking for a ZA pug when I got the sudden whisper from Mr. Moderate- he was going to main tank Hyjal for another guild, did I want to come along? 

I usually prepare for new raids by reading up & making study guides for myself & all that.  Frankly we’ve only gotten past Hydross & Lurker in SSC, so I never even started looking at Hyjal fights yet.  So I was scared about joining this raid completely blind, but of course I wasn’t going to decline!

The first boss (I don’t even know his name) was very easy!  Well, not that easy considering it took us 3 tries to take him down, but compared to Archimonde he was a walk in the park.  There were 4 people from my guild there; unfortunately, one of them was Overhealz & he really did an incomprehensibly poor job.  He was new to Hyjal too, but the biggest problem was that he kept inexplicably throwing Salv on the tanks mid-fight, until the other guild’s people were all yelling at him in Vent.  He was also predictably bottom of the healing list, with 65% overhealing, and died twice to Rain of Fire.  The other guild kicked him from the raid after the first two wipes and brought in another healer, whereupon we completed the first boss.  I think Overhealz probably hasn’t mastered how to use Pally Power yet, but really, throwing Salv on tanks during boss fights is one of those laughable things you only hear about as jokes!!  It was especially bad because all our tanks were warriors, and all the warriors were Prot.  And he did it more than once, and never once Salv’ed the DPS classes who kept repeating requests for it.  I was embarassed for my guild…  D:  But Mr. Moderate was a great Main Tank of course, and the other healer and I topped the charts.  I only made one mistake on the first boss, which was to not run far enough back when I got Doomed, but it wasn’t too bad.

Archimonde, however, is another story.  I was helpless- got Gripped & Airbursted on the first attempt & that was that.  Died in the first 10 seconds!  >.<  2nd attempt I lasted a bit longer, but Mr. Moderate went down & that was that.  The 3rd attempt, I, errrr, didn’t move away from the trail of fire quickly enough, and wasted too much time trying to HoT myself up.  We gave it about 2 more shots then called it a wrap.

Everything happens so faaaast in the Archimonde fight!!  *whine*  I’m scaaaaared, it was so hard to keep up and I had to hotkey the Tear-floaty thing and change my Decurse button and couldnt go tree cos I had to run away from Fire trails and Decurse and, and, and….

So! Much! Fun! <:^D  I hope they invite me again…

Biggie’s Leaving the Guild & I’m Sad

Mahatma Gandhi, as you may well know, was an enigmatic man who walked barefoot all his life, thus developing extremely hard, leathery soles.  He also had a strange diet, which resulted in his becoming extremely frail and also, unfortunately, cursing him with very bad breath.  Due to all these factors, people began to refer to him as…

A super-callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

That would’ve definitely gotten me a blankly furrowed brow from the Golf Guy.

My buddy Biggie let me know recently that he applied to a couple of other guilds.  This saddens me!!!  But I can see where he’s coming from… currently we’re (supposed to be) raiding 2 nights a week, but they usually end up not happening due to lack of attendance.  What’s more, we seem to have come to a complete standstill as far as progression goes, even when we do muster up enough people to go.  Biggie said that only half the raid is progressing and showing signs of improvement, while the other half “should quit forever and delete WoW from their computers.”  Kinda brutal but I have an idea of a couple of the people he’s referring to. 

I’m a healer so naturally I pay more attention to how my fellow healers are doing, and there’s this one holy pally, Overhealz, who is always bottom of the healing charts and top of overheals; as a standard more than 50% of his heals are wasted.  And he’s extremely well-geared!  I kinda wince whenever he gets awarded another piece of super-awesome gear, cos despite numerous attempts to steer him towards play improvement, his performance never changes.  He signs up for everything and often volunteers whenever people need a healer, so his spirit is in the right place, but I think it’s his reactive timing that’s the problem.  Officers have had him download many mods and read many guides, etc., but you can’t really fix the fact that he takes a very long time to process damage, and generally hits people with heals looong after they’re been topped off. 

It’s a delicate balance between having a friendly yet challenging community, and a cold all-about-progression regime, isn’t it?  Sigh.  Can you really cut people who have the right spirit & good punctuality & willingness, yet through no fault of their own just simply lack necessary abilities to play the game well?  Biggie, soft-hearted yet determined to reach high endgame, is choosing the route of finding a new guild altogether rather than hurting Overhealz’s feelings by insisting on changing our raid roster (Overhealz is a grandfather… probably shouldn’t matter to serious raiders but it does to me & Bigs. Respect fo’ yo elderz, if he wants to raid, let him raid!). 

Spurred by Biggie’s decision, I checked out a couple of other guild websites myself.  I do want to progress, and Biggie says with my gear & skill I should be in BT (xD yea that made me happy!), but looking at the higher-ranking guilds’ requirements got me a little daunted…  While I like the no-nonsense attitude of “If you’re holding back the raid, you’re out!”, it also makes me wonder if they’ll take the time to discern if it’s a noob with potential or a lost cause.  I do my homework and read up on bosses, watch the vids, but on your actual first time there’s always a good chance of suck.  I don’t think I’m being delusionally braggy when I say I’m a very good healer, better than most others who have equivalent gear.  I’m proud of my performance and people who pug with me invariably look me up for more.  I take constructive criticism as a challenge to knock the critic’s socks off next time with my vast improvement… All in all, I gots da fire!! But in a super-hardcore raiding guild, would I get the second chance to prove that?  Would I get burned out and lose my drive?  Most importantly, would people be people or faceless raid components?

Anyway! This is all hypothetical musing cos I’m a very community-minded person & have already bonded with a lot of my guildies.  Biggie may be ready to cut loose for progression’s sake but I’m pretty firmly entrenched with this guild for the sake of our camaraderie.  If our raid suckage continues, maybe I’ll seriously start considering a move, but I’m pretty sure several friends would come with me, which would probably be a devastating blow to the guild, therefore something I would never do to the guild leaders… unless they came with me too!  xD  But then it would become something like re-making a new guild without all the duds, which would be elitist and asshole-y.  Bleh now I’m just babbling.  I’m staying & that’s all.  The skilled raiders will just have to become extraordinary to cover the gap from the lacking raiders, and that’s not a bad thing, to have incentive to be the best you can be!  If we were all great and didn’t have challenges and breezed through new raids, we’d just become complacently good instead of top-notch ridiculously awesome.

Have a Happy Friday!

The Golf Guy

Why was the Energizer Bunny arrested?
He was charged with battery.

Hope everyone had a happy Fourth of July!

I’ve been casually dating Golf Guy for a month now, but it’s always been pretty clear to me that there’s no future there, considering we have ZERO common interests (he likes golf as much as I like WoW, and dislikes WoW as much as I dislike golf). So, understanding that he is quite seriously looking for a potential wife, I decided to stop wasting both our time & nip things in the bud when we went out on the Fourth, with fireworks in the background as a symbol of the sparks that have never and will never fly between us. :P

He did a lot of things that surprised me, not the least of which included lying down in the wet grass in the balmy rainy night. He’s a starchy-shirt stockbroker, having him suggest stretching out in the middle of a field in the rain totally caught me off-guard. And I really liked it. Reminded me of the Halo 3 trailer where the two kids are lying down looking at the night sky (right before it cuts to modern day extraterrestrial warfare >:^D). I mentioned that trailer, in fact… he hadn’t seen it, of course. I tried pushing my luck a little and went with the opening line from the trailer (one kid asks the other if he ever wonders what’s out there). You know, Golf Guy has a lot of good qualities but he is tragically lacking in imagination. D^:

He doesn’t have much of a sense of humor either. He never makes me laugh, and the few times I get the spirit to crack a few jokes, he gives me a blank look or a hearty fake laugh much too late (I wouldn’t mind a groan or a Shut up! or something, I know my jokes suck… but the fact that kills me is that he doesn’t even get them!). It’d be so easy to end things with such an unfunny, uncreative guy… if only he could also just be a dick! Unfortunately, he’s a total sweetie and oh-so-kind and sincerely says things like “Listen, if you’re happy, then I’m happy”. …Nothing’s ever easy, is it?

Heartlessly, despite the rain & night & grass & trees & his sweetness, I told him anyway, “Y’know, we’ve got nothing in common. No common interests, nothing. I don’t think we’d make a good match.” He’s interested in food- I’m not. I love reading- he doesn’t. He has step-by-step life plans to become a fixed-income investor- I have a vague dream of making a cool comic book. I can spend hours on end on Wikipedia- he has the curiosity of a turtle (a really uncurious turtle). Neither of us can make the other laugh. It’s so clearly wrong!

It didn’t work. In the end I think the atmosphere got to me, it’s hard to be cold to someone when you’re the only two people lying in the grass in the dark night with this great stillness around you, with warm raindrops falling on your face. Really hard. Do you think it’s possible to be with someone, despite complete personality disparities if they’re just willing to support each other? Talking to him is about as much fun as talking to my pillow, less really since I have to suffer so many blank I-don’t-get-it expressions from him. But I know that he’s a good decent guy, a steady guy with a slow-to-nonexistent temper, totally loyal and patient. And I won’t lie, a part of me can’t help but be conscious of the fact that he’s filthy rich. I don’t like thinking about marriage yet but it keeps coming up since it’s all he’s thinking about, so when I think about it, I can see how I could have a totally comfortable life with him. But… he doesn’t get my jokes…

I’m seeing him again on Friday. It’s like his new mission to take me out to all the most expensive and exotic restaurants in New York, which really sucks because (and I told him this!) I couldn’t care less about food. My brother’s a food person, Golf Guy is clearly a food person, but I am about as anti-food as you can get. If I had to eat the exact same meal for the rest of my life I would be quite happy. I mean it’s not horrible really, like Oh noes I’m being forced to eat all these delicious exotic foods!, it’s just I would be just as happy eating McDonald’s and I feel like it’s such a waste of good money and gourmet cuisine which could be better given to a food buff who really would appreciate it. But whatever makes him happy… <:^\

Regarding Snot and Girls and Girls who are Jerks

Haha… Okay this one’s pretty bad, even by my standards: 

What do you call a warlock from Jamaica?
A dreadlock.

Aaanyway…

Long time no see, Internets!  Lots of strange things have happened.  Strangest of them all: seemingly overnight, I’ve come to kind of like Snot.  I dunno, it’s weird, all of a sudden he’s stopped saying nasty accusatory things during raids and become generally helpful in the guild- volunteering to help people trying to level their alts, going out of his way to find jewelcrafters and pot masters for me, etc.  What the heck?  I almost feel like a bad person for thinking so unkindly about him before… but honestly he wasn’t like this then!  It’s all so odd and guilt-inducing.  And no, I never did end up having that chat with him so I can’t take credit for this Dr. Jekyll turnabout.  Is it really Snot, or is it a nice helpful mild-mannered bot?  Hum.  I still tense up when I hear his nasal voice, but it’s not nearly as grating now that he’s saying helpful things rather than insulting people…

We have two new applicants to the guild and La, they’re both female!  I feel hopeful!  Girls really bring guilds to life, IMO.  For a while it’s just been me & Mom (not a real mom) keeping the guild from being a total sausage fest.  Mom, who happens to be one of our three guild masters, has told me more than once that she does not get along with other females very well.  I, on the other hand, usually get along with other females swimmingly (I have, of course, quickly wormed my way past Mom’s prickly defenses with my charmingly wormy ways- poor woman had no chance!).  Girls seem to appreciate my puns more and it just seems easier to talk to another female, maybe cos they’re more receptive to written communication, and I’m naturally a dorky but friendly person…

But you know, I can see where Mom’s coming from.  I don’t know if this is a generally common experience, but most of the girls I’ve met on my server are kind of… I dunno… abrasive.  About 3 out of 4 girls I’ve met on my server are, to be brutally honest, total attention whores/drama queens/nasty-mouthed prima donnas.  It’s like they’re out to prove something, like how they can be ruder & more hardcore than boys, and when they find out there’s another girl around who’s not their brand of biker-chick badgirl, they seem to feel a need to treat me really condescendingly.  <:^( !! Not to mention they love the sound of their own voices on vent…  I once joined a 5-man pug where we were all promptly ordered to join vent, and then it was an hour of this girl going on and on about her chicken pizza getting burned and her laundry being done (detailed descriptions of her cute underwear, naturally)… You get the picture.  And she was not a unique case-  There was another girl who paused a run to tell everyone to look at her Myspace, another girl who spent the whole instance making sexual innuendos in a pseudo-husky voice complete with “My boobs hurt” comments, and yet another girl who, when the raid leader interrupted her soliloquy to try to give raid instructions, talked louder to be heard over his voice… etc.  To date, I can only recall meeting about four other girls on WoW who were nice and friendly and competent without any MeMeMe agendas. 

The fact is, I would love to have more girls in the guild, but if only we could get some nice, decent types!  Raiding & progression are good and all but I think games lose their appeal faster when it’s just about the game.  You need a good community & relationships with other people to really enjoy playing (or at least, I do)!  And the bottom line is that I think girls, being chattier in general, make guilds friendlier & warmer places to be.  Right now I do like our guild, but I have to say we’re still in the friendly-acquaintances phase.  Conversation definitely picks up when Mom or I are online.  Having more girls would bring people closer and speed up the getting-to-know-each-other-better process, IMO.  If only we could get some of the right type of girls!!!  Odds for that aren’t great judging from my personal experience I guess, but I dunno, I’ve been reading a few WoW blogs by girls recently & there’s clear evidence that there are some amazingly cool chick WoWers out there!  Now if only you ladies would come join my guild…  Pleasebemyfriend!  xD 

Okay that’s all.  Here’s one for the road:

-You know why gangstas like me carry umbrellas?
-FA DRIZZLE~