On a recent trip to Jersey Gardens, Biggie and I wandered over to the E-cigarette booth.  I’d read articles about the wonders of e-cigarettes before (plus my preferred brand is now $10.50 a pack in New York City), so we were excited to see the thing in action.  Unfortunately, the salesperson was spectacularly uninterested in selling his product, and his marketing efforts were limited to monosyllabic answers to our inquiries.  We walked away supremely underwhelmed and none the wiser about the product.

“Wow, he was unhelpful.”
“Yeah!  He was, like, all burnt out…”
“Yeah…”
“You’d think he’d have lit up at seeing potential customers…”
“…Yeah.”
“Where was his burning drive to make a sale?”
“…Mm.”
“There was no spark of enthusiasm!”
“Are you done?”
“Maybe.”
“Okay-”
“Most salesmen puff up at seeing a potential customer!”
“…”
“…Yeah I’m done.”
“Thank you for that. Okay now-”
“He was a real jack-ash, wasn’t he.”

Sorry.  I know it hurts, butt it’s like a bad habit.  I’m addicted.  If my puns tarnish his brain, he’ll just have to try to filter it out of his hearing.

Y’all take care now.

Q: What did Magtheridon say when his Earthquake killed the raid?
A: “It’s not my fault!”

Mmm I could hear the internet groan as I typed that.  Little cyber beeps and buzzes of pain, music to my ears.

So!  I, er, hit Level 73.  Woo… hoo…  My professions are at 376 & 380, respectively.  I half-heartedly attempted to acquire Wrath gems to resocket my once-proud, now-pitifully defunct BC gear, but logged off in a fit of ADD.  I can barely recall the sound of Babyfresh’s squeaky little voice coming through my headset.  I do not recognize more than half the names in my mysteriously expanded guild.  Increasingly sparse text messages of “Yo we need healz” no longer fill me with a sense of I-must-rush-home urgency.  In short, I have become… de-WoWified.  Black is the day… I have become a “casual” gamer.

On other fronts, YO what do I get Biggie for Christmas???  I went ahead & ordered a Logitech G9 mouse, because his mouse is crappy and buggy and a million years old, and by all technophile standards the G9 is by far the most superior gaming mouse out there.  Price kinda stings, but what stung even more is how Amazon DROPPED THE PRICE the day after I ordered it.  I predict further droppage next week.  Bastards.  YOU ARE PROMOTING PROCRASTINATING BEHAVIOR!!!  Anyway, I worry that it’s not enough of a gift.  What else should I get him? 

That’s all, I’m signing off now.  But, just to keep up pretenses that this blog does, in fact, have a smidgen of drewed stuff, here’s an old cute sketch of mine I’d like to share:

What did 0 say to 8?
“Nice belt.”
LOL.

Okay sooo… Now I’m starting to feel like one of those e-hoes people complain about who take advantage of their X chromosome LOL. Yesterday was my birthday; I have a couple of real-life friends in the guild, namely Biggie, whose new alias is gonna be Bigmouth btw, who made sure to mention it several times to everybody. So last night I found a lot of goodies waiting for me in my mailbox… Most of it was silly stuff, like a new Prairie Dog pet from Mom, a Rabbit’s Foot and assorted Soap on a Rope-type novelties from guildies.

The real shock was what I got from Tangent Boy… Well, first some backstory:

A few weeks ago I’d bought a Steamy Romance Novel and enjoyed the two pages of seriously titillating romance so much that I’d mailed it over to Tangent Boy with the express message that I was only letting him borrow it and that he was to send it straight back to me after reading. I was outraged to learn that he’d DESTROYED IT WITHOUT READING IT!! Of all the unappreciative, crude, barbaric things to do! Book-burner! Cretin! Farenheit 411! I sulked at him for a while, only half-kidding because I really did like my book!, and also because I’d only sent it to him because out of all my friends, I thought he’d be the one most likely to enjoy it as much as I did. Little did I know!!!! He rofled at my burning wrathful indignance, then said:

“This is gonna cost me a Gigantique Bag to get off your ignore list, isn’t it?”

… Well… Well, what was I gonna say, No? Hell yea I jumped on that. But in all honesty, I didn’t think he was serious and I didn’t expect him to do it. I just wanted my book back, that’s all.

Right so yesterday I came upon his birthday mail: a tattered new copy of the Steamy Romance Novel and, yep, an honest-to-goodness Gigantique Bag! The accompanying letter read, “THE REWARD IS NOT NEGOTIABLE! Happy 26.” (he was quoting from the Steamy Romance Novel)

<:^O ! I was touched, and a little bit horrified. In case you don’t know, these 22-slot bags are sold by Haris Pilton for 1200 gold. Definitely felt like an e-hoe. Especially when Snuffles found out & exclaimed, “So that’s why he was doing dailies all the time!” …Nooooo!!! My gosh, what am I? I hate the idea of guys wasting their time and money to pander to flirty girls over the internet! It just went against the grain to accept it all carefree & “thanks! teehee ^_^”, birthday or not.

…

No no I didn’t return it, HAHA what are ya nuts? Avarice, thy name is druidchick. But! I did go grab all my saved-up Badges of Justice and sent Tangent Boy 6 epics gems, a Primal Nether and my old Rabbit’s Foot. I know he’s been trying to gear up his new priest & hopefully the gems’ll help socket his new gear, or he can just sell ‘em, whatever. I didn’t have much time after being pulled into a raid last night, but tonight I’ll armory him and see if he also needs some Golden Spellthread and maybe send him one of those too.

Bleh… I didn’t feel a need to repay him when he sent me that useless Gold Eternium Band, but somehow this feels different. Maybe because I did ask for it this time, no matter how not-serious and totally-kidding I was. So in the future, I’ll watch my words around him since now I see he’ll really do these things.

Although… you know… these bags are not unique-equipped… hahahha TOTALLY KIDDING FOLKS, totally kidding! <:^D Nah I’d go broke trying to assuage my guilty conscience afterwards so yea, no more joking about expensive items from me. Really. xD

How come Attumen does all the talking?
Cos Midnight always feels a bit horse.

HEEHEEEE.

So… *bit bashful* I was made an officer last night.  :^P  Bleh!!  After all that blabbering I did about why I love being a regular member and would never ever choose to be an officer, no sir not me… (-_-)  Well, Mom kept nudging me gently about it & I was starting to feel like a jerk to keep declining.  And Biggie made it all sound so reasonable- he said my only duty would be to run applicants through test heroics, and since I run heroics all the time anyway, I might as well… but of course I know, and they know, and I’m sure you all know, that the job’s not gonna be that simple.  I’m gonna take Auzara’s words to heart though; I figured out after reading her post that my problem as a guildleader in my previous game was that I was one of the too-generous-with-my-time leaders, and it wore me down.  Now that I know my weakness, hopefully I’ll be able to avoid the problems that burned me out last time.

I’ve been trying out new mods.  At the risk of sounding immodest (hehe xD), I think the only healer superior to me in the guild right now is Socrates.  It’s true he has T6 gear, but even if we had the same gear I think he’s got me beat as far as skill and quickness goes.  So far I’ve been using Blizzard’s raid windows with a mouseclick + keypress method for healing, but I know Socrates uses X-Perl and swears by Healbot (which is weird, from all other accounts I’ve heard Healbot isn’t as useful for druids).  Nevertheless, he must be doing something right, right?  So I downloaded both the other night and joined a Gruul raid to test out X-Perl.

Disaster!  Clearly I’m a creature of habit, and I’ll need a lot more practice before getting used to new unitframes.  I had to relog to turn it off before finishing the rest of the run, it was that bad.  It really sucks because configuring that crap was a real kick in the balls, took me 2 hours to get it all set up in a way I thought I could handle.  TOO MANY OPTIONS!  Exactly why I never played Sims 2, I spent about 3 hours just making a satisfactory character, thought about how long it’d take to build & decorate a house, and fled.  I’m a simple-minded person, I just want some simple raidframes… <;^(

Friend’s recommending Grid over X-Perl, so I’ll check that one out tonight.  If it comes down to it though I can’t see that I’m doing so badly using Blizzard’s regular raid frames, so… we shall see.

Two brooms decide to get married.  On the morning of the wedding, the bride broom says to the groom broom, “Honey, I’m pregnant!”  The groom broom is shocked!  “B-but,” he sputters, “How is that possible?  We haven’t even swept together!!”

:^D  That’s one of my favorites. 

So over the weekend while I was having a blast at Otakon, drama was stirring in the guild.  Two people left, including one prominent officer, and a couple of people were booted.  Now we’ve only got one officer (Socrates) and the three GMs (Talky, Mom & Mr. Moderate).  Talky has been inactive recently, which is probably a good thing since, honestly, he was the cause of a lot of discontent among the members.

So!  Last night!  Mom & Mr. Moderate pulled me into a private vent channel and invited me to be an officer!  I… said no.  Told them I’d be their biggest supporter, a super-duper regular member, but no officership thanks.

Before WoW, I was hooked on another MMO.  In that game, I’d created my own guild & it prospered, became one of the most popular leading guilds on that server.  In the beginning, it was awesome and I really enjoyed it.  The guild was respected, I had a lot of friends, it felt really good to have a lot of influence and rep.  However… when it started getting really huge, I started to feel desperate.  Obviously in a group of over 100 people, there will inevitably be personality conflicts and drama.  Not everyone is going to get along.  As the guild leader, any time someone had a problem with someone else or were unhappy about something in the guild, they’d come straight to me.  I’d picked pretty awesome officers, but everybody still preferred to come directly to me since I went out of my way to make myself very approachable.  I had to make some judgment calls that were personally painful, and sometimes was forced to choose between fairness and friendship.  I had to steel myself enough to be firm with people, and do things for the greater good of the whole guild instead of acceding to the wishes of individual close friends, which sometimes they couldn’t understand and got upset with me for.  

It got pretty bad; I had to simultaneously be arbitrator, entertainer, counselor, general and diplomat.  To everybody.  I really stretched myself thin trying to be everything to everybody, lost a lot of sleep because everybody wanted some of my time.  The game became less and less fun, more and more stressful until the day finally came that I dreaded logging on.  I felt horribly guilty at first, but it became easier & easier to stay away, harder & harder to think of logging back on.  That’s when I turned to WoW for the first time.

Man, what a blessing!  It felt SO FREEING to be able to just play around in a game without dealing with so many people’s problems, have a bunch of people waiting on my every move, to be able to log off whenever I wanted without feeling guilty, or log on whenever I wanted without having a hundred messages immediately bombard me.  Being a regular member is something I have learned to really, really appreciate, and I try my best to be the best, least problematic, most helpful regular member to the officers that I can.

So I declined the officer position, but I think it’s really better this way for the leaders also.  As “one of the mob”, I’m in a good position to, ahem, sway the mood of the rabble without it looking like I’m doing an official duty.  Mom & Mr. Mod understood, I was really happy to hear Mr. Moderate say, “Okay that’s fine, just whatever you do, don’t leave us!“  <:^D  They do care!  Heehee.  I won’t leave as long as Mr. Moderate & Mom are there.  <3  <:^)

U kno why the herbalist sent the alchemist flowers?
Cos he took a lichen to her.

Heehee.

Okay so… Golf Guy & I decided to call it quits.  Or so I thought.  Our last date included meeting a couple of his friends & I thought the night made it momentously clear that we don’t click.  Basically what happened was, either his friends and I got into animated discussion completely excluding him, or he & his friends got into animated discussion completely excluding me.  Neither exclusions were intentional, we just had absolutely nothing to input on conversations that excited the other.  It was so obvious that we didn’t click that by the end of the night his friends were giving me sympathetic winks each time he misunderstood something sarcastic or jokey I said.

So after that night, we didn’t have further contact with each other.  He’s always been the one to initiate contact, so when a couple of weeks went by with no calls or emails, I thought maybe his friends had had a chat with him and made it clear he should seek other pastures more compatible with him.  Either that or he was testing me LOL, waiting to see if I’d be the one to call him for once.  Either way, with silence from both sides I thought it’d be a good way to quietly, undramatically go our separate ways, peacefully fade away from each other’s lives without any awkward “breakup” discussions, I hate those.

Well… I guess that’s not a smart way to “break up”.  Got an email today titled “Hey babe” & it’s as if the month of silence never happened. 

Mm… I guess one of my biggest personality flaws is my inability to tackle something difficult directly.  I’m a wishy-washy person!  Well not wishy-washy, I mean I know what I want & what I don’t want, but when it’s a very very difficult problem, when the other person’s stubbornness exceeds my initial burst of effort, I get sullenly passive and let life take me where it will. 

“NO!  I said NO!!!  Oh God, fine, okay.” <– it was exactly this attitude that got me running Gnomeregan all night last night for my lowbie friends when I reeeeeally didn’t want to.  -_-  I don’t mind running them thru stuff, regularly volunteer for it in fact, but I have a burning hatred for Gnomer & told them I’d run anything & everything but that.  I took em thru VC a dozen times, Stocks half a dozen times and Lo, here rolls around Gnomer… I begged, I pleaded, I flat-out refused, but was overruled in the end and spent the whole night in those damn tunnels.  I couldn’t argue against, “It’s not really the run we want, we just want to play with you.”  Damn your eyes.  I guess it’s basically the same situation with Golf Guy, except he’s much less fun to play with than those lowbie pals.  xD

Welpz, I’m getting out of work early so cuttin it short.  Peace in da Middle East.

What do you call 2 hardcore gamers who live in constant fear of being ganked?
Pair o’nerd. LOL.

So yesterday I hung out with Snuffles some, he’s joined a new guild where he hates the guild leader. (-_-) Discontentment with guild leadership is the reason why he left our guild also. I think he oughta just make his own guild and be done with it. Like I’ve always said, I like Snuffles a lot…. But. I wish he’d stop making fun of my guild now that he’s left it. Sure we have our problems, especially with our raid progression (going nowhere- last night’s SSC was canceled once again due to lack of attendance), but it’s still my guild & I like it.

I think the progression problem is getting dire, though. Biggie told me recently that our guild raids “suck the fun outta the game” for him, and he was very happy that it got canceled last night. It’s because we’ve been losing good seasoned raiders and gaining new recruits who are…. well, not the best listeners. So it’s wipe-wipe-wipe on bosses we should have on farm by now. The guild leaders are getting more & more short-tempered, even Mr. Moderate!!! It was kinda-sorta the worst raiding night of my life when Mr. Moderate got so frustrated that he, probably unaware that his mic was still on, let out this huge demented scream in vent… Mr. Moderate always had this Atticus Finch, Morgan Freeman, Moses-like image in my head, and to hear him scream like a certain Angry German Kid kinda hurt something deep inside me.  Kinda like seeing your dad go berserker insane.  (._.) LOL… sighhhhhhh. I mean I guess it’s funny in perspective… but… felt so sad.

I wanna progress! I wanna stay with my friends!! If I had Ultimate Power I would make a few prompt /gkicks & coax Snuffles & Tangent Boy to come back & promote certain people & demote a certain person & things would be swell. But I don’t so I can’t so they’re not. Nnnnngrrraaaw (<– Mr. Moderate impression… LOL… sighhhh).

Whatever, life goes on.

p.s. A BULLDOZER.

What country is the Lurker from?
Finland.

LOL I made that up on the spot as we were waiting for our fishermen to bring up the Lurker. I still deny any culpability for that wipe though… If we cod have just flexed our brain mussels, I’m sardine we wouldn’t have floundered like that.

Well I’m really psyched for Otakon next weekend!! I will, in fact, be cosplaying this year! I’ll be going as Nana Osaki, punk rocker extraordinaire & one of the main characters of the titular manga series & live-action movie, “Nana”. Pictures may be forthcoming.

No time, gotta run. Or as I like to log off with, I’m gonna “make like a resto druid & leave”. :D /wave

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!

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~