Mr. Moderate.  The raidleader of that old guild, the first one I ever raided with.  The guy I looked up to as so mature and even-tempered, I’d even blogged about him a few times.  So it turns out he’s in jail… for child pornography/attempting to have sex with an 11-yr-old girl he met on the internet (but thank God it was an undercover cop).  News article here.

Unbelievable!  I was really shocked.  I’d raided with this guy for almost a year.  Enchanted his fucking gear.  Disgusting…

It’s kind of made a real impression on me.  I mean there are predators everywhere & I suppose it could just as well happen in your neighborhood.  But it feels that much more shocking that, you know, I played daily with this guy, thought really well of him, laughed at his jokes.  Now I’m all IT COULD BE ANYONE!  Who can you trust if you can’t trust someone like Mr. Moderate of all people?!

Orgrimmar’s layout is just win.  Having only known city designs of the Alliance persuasion, I was shocked at the simplicity, the purity, the minimalistic brilliance of Orgrimmar’s hut placements.  Stormwind is like a maze with no direct route anywhere.  This is a particular pet peeve of mine because in real life, I have to deal with a patch of foresty grass between my house and the bus stop, through which a lovely cement path is inlaid… at an acute angle leading AWAY from the bus stop.  The grass is so pristine and staked out with signs warning against stepping on it, that I just can’t walk on it.  I have to take the path, which makes me look pretty dumb because I’m walking AWAY from my bus stop.  Then, upon reaching the sidewalk on the other side of the grass, I have to turn almost completely around and walk back in the correct direction.  You know what, I can’t really describe it clearly so I’ll draw it:

How dumb is that?  Look at how many extra steps I have to take!  Think of how many people already waiting at the bus stop titter to themselves watching me take all those unnecessary steps!  The more I think about it, the more I realize how truly indignant I am about this poorly designed, ill-thought-out, completely unnecessary layout.  Every morning taking this path I ball up my fists and pretend like I’m not going to the bus stop at all, and then pretend that I whimsically change my mind.  Why must I go through this subterfuge?  Whoever made this design is adding layers of deceit and charades to my life that I really could have done without.  Thank you.

So yeah I think I have a special case against Stormwind’s layout.  Why the canals?  Why the passageways which are so completely not the shortest possible routes?  Why the forcing of extra steps in wrong directions?  I want to be able to run in diagonals, Blizzard.  I don’t like the twists and turns and ninety degree angles.  How have diagonals ever hurt anybody, is it a human thing?  You think humans don’t like diagonals?

I’m not even gonna get into Darnassus and Exodar layouts.

Ironforge was actually my preferred city as Alliance.  I liked that you could just run in a straight line from the Bank ot the Auction House, that was okay.  I guess my beef with Ironforge would be, you still had to run a long distance.  Porting there from Dalaran, you land in a room that dismounts you.  You run pitter-patter on your feet outside of the room, where you then mount up again.  Then you gallop a long… circular… long… round… long… curving… long way til you finally reach the Auction House.  You check out what the market’s like, run across the bridge to check your mail, run across the bridge to re-post your expired auctions, run across the bridge to get some stuff out of your bank, run across the bridge to pick up some reagents, run across the bridge to repair, and run across the bridge to see if AH prices changed at all.

Ironforge is not bad, I liked it, back when I didn’t know any better.  I thought hey, running in a straight line is good, it’s great, it’s nice and clean, no acute angles leading away from your destination for example, what more can I ask for?  And then I finally discovered Orgrimmar.

Orgrimmar, with its sunbaked dirt paths and big round straw roofs, is the true city of my dreams.  First off, you port mounted and you land mounted.  It’s all open air!  No time wasted running out of a dumb room and re-mounting.  You load and you ride right off.  Second, forget about yearning for diagonal shortcuts, in Orgrimmar you do vertical shortcuts.  You just ride right off the road… onto a roof… onto another roof… and bam! you’re at the bank.  It’s like showing someone who’s trudged long flights of stairs all his life how to just jump cleanly out the window.  I was gonna say take an elevator but it’s faster than that and you do lose some HP upon landing.

In Orgrimmar, the AH and Bank are not only situated extremely close to each other, they each have their OWN mailbox right at their door.  And the bankers/auctioneers can be reached by running in a straight unobstructed line from the entrance, no stupid fences or rope lines to jump over (I guess they were trying to make Stormwind as human as possible… but rope lines really?).  Inn, repairs and reagents are all just a few steps away.

I never thought I’d like Orgrimmar, the first time I saw it raiding as Alliance.  It was too primitive and Earthy-looking, what a bunch of savages right?  But seriously, it’s made me realize that simple is best sometimes.  People tend to overcomplicate things as they try to advance, try to make things look more planned out and just totally make it a fancy-looking headache.  Too much planning can lead to rope lines and acute-angle paths.  Sometimes, people just want to jump off roofs you know?

I can’t say I don’t have pangs of wistfulness sometimes, when I look at my Tauren’s filthy matted hair and beady eyes.  Especially when I think about how they’re taking away Tree form and I’m going to be stuck looking at this hulking beast all the time.  But all things considered I’m really happy I switched to Horde; funny how important the smaller conveniences turn out to be.

I don’t really have a particular accent when I speak, but I can affect one really well when I want to.  Specifically, a New York accent… or even more specifically, a Staten Island one.  They are very unmistakable, those Staten Island accents.  Very similar to the Jersey Shore sound but with its own special twang.

For some reason I randomly decided to slip into one the other day when I spoke to my brother.

“Wut?  Iono wut ya tawkin’ abowt.  Stawp wut?  This’s just how I tawk.  Why you gawta hate foah?”

He looked at me for a second in frustration, and then opened his mouth.

“OH YEAH? THEN I’LL USE MY OLD JEWISH GUY ACCENT.”  It was the loudest, nasallest, most obnoxious screech I’ve ever heard.  As I gaped in horror, he goes into a random monologue.  “IF YA GONNA USE THE TOILET, PLEASE REMEMBA TA FLUSH TWICE. ONCE FUH THA BULK AND AGAIN FUH THA REMAINDA.”

Later he revealed that he was doing Mort from the Family Guy (I don’t watch much TV so I didn’t recognize it).  But seriously, I’ve never been quite so appalled.  It was awesome!  I’ve been trying to pull it off ever since but I don’t think it sounds quite the same.

************************

In the wonderful world of warcraft, we’ve re-formed a new guild.  Me, Nerdboy, Supertank and The Godfather.  And things are crazy.

The Godfather is actually this girl who has a cult following and far-reaching connections on all different servers.  It’s really weird, she’s got a network of brainwashed players who will follow her every command.  Really very much like The Godfather of WoW, you don’t want to get on her bad side.  She’s nice, practical and likeable on the surface, but SOMEHOW gets into a lot of drama although it’s never her fault, IF YANNO WUDDAMEAN.

Nerdboy is going to be our new raidleader & he’s already chafing under The Godfather’s rule.  Supertank’s a nice guy & the best tank I’ve ever seen, but he’s very much The Godfather’s stooge.  I can definitely foretell some tension in the future because Nerdboy is a strong-minded guy with a lot of opinions and I’m a pretty independent thinker myself.  We both found out very quickly that when sharing leadership with The Godfather, there will never be any disagreements between us even when we strongly disagree.  If you get my drift.

This all probably sounds silly and exaggerated, but trust me… it’s EERY.  I’ve never seen anything like this in the game.  People are people, charisma is charisma, popular girls are popular girls, but I always thought players, especially good players, are able to think for themselves & have their own opinions no matter how much you like someone.  I disagree and argue with my friends all the time!  When we think the other’s wrong, nothing holds us back from saying so.  With The Godfather’s mafia however, it’s seriously like a bunch of Stepford raiders.  You wouldn’t believe the crazy stuff I witnessed… Supertank for example spent two hours ranting about how much he despised this one player, and then the next day performed a 180 and lavished praise on the same guy acting as if he had always thought well of him, all because The Godfather decreed we were going to accept him.  And he’s genuine about it, as if his memories were erased or his personality re-programmed.  It’s uncanny and makes no sense at all, but I see the same phenomenon in all of her people. And very much in the Stepfordian fashion, I find myself pretending I’m as brainwashed as all of them because if someone ever voices any hint of criticism or rebellion, she WILL hear about it and her followers WILL crucify you.  I used to like her very much until I realized this was not a normal popular-chick-has-a-lot-of-influence type of thing.  Influence means you’re still allowed to disagree/have your own opinion.  This is not mere influence!  My friends and I were spooked enough by it to make a secret pact NOT to get brainwashed.

If today’s raid doesn’t go well, I’m definitely thinking of dropping this place altogether and applying to a guild far away from this crazy twilight-zone stuff, some place where people just care about raiding like normal players instead of this fanatic WoW-goddess cult.

is

weird

sometimes.

After about four months of total silence & a clean break on both parts… um… Biggie logged onto the game the other day.  He sent me some very civilized Hi how are you tells, and went on to say he was quitting for good & sending me all his gold & items.

I didn’t really know how to feel.  It was immensely awkward just seeing him on, my first reaction was to log off!  LOL.  I just didn’t know how to respond… these overtures coming from someone whose last words to me basically amounted to “If you see me walking down the street, you’d better turn around and go the other way.” I told him not to bother, I didn’t want anything, etc., but he did as he pleased.

All I gots to say is… only 10,000 gold?  Pfft.

Maybe I’ll finally purchase that traveler’s mount, the one with the npc vendors.

I dunno.  I got terribly melancholy for a bit.  But only for a little bit.  And no one will ever know.

The weirdest, inexplicable part about this is… I mean Scrooge is the first person to jump on anybody’s mistake and the last to let it go, but…

So we have this boomkin who is That Guy, to the infinityeth degree.  Let’s call him Tiny Tim.  Tiny Tim is not the sharpest tool in the drawer, he’s a dim bulb, he’s… slow. Basically he’s a sweet guy with his heart in the right place; he tries really hard and earnestly, perfect attendance, always flasked… but he is just incredibly, frustratingly, absurdly SLOW.  Slow to understand things, slow to learn, slow to react, slow to obey explicit instructions, just all-around unbelievably sloooooooooow.  A guy who needs BOTH his hands held.  Did I mention he’s slow?

We have geared him up the butt- Tiny Tim’s in the top 5 best-geared moonkins on the server, yet his damage done is consistently barely above the tanks, usually BELOW the feral tank’s.  We literally carry him through most fights, and when I say carry I mean he is dead for 95% of the time. He is a wet smear of feathers on the floor watching the rest of us fight.  If you Armory’ed him, you’d think he’s good because he’s got some fairly hard-to-get Achievements, but the sad truth is he was dead baggage as the rest of the raid 24-manned not some… not most… but ALL of them.  All.  Of.  Them. We handed him his Rusted Proto-drake on a 9-man silver platter.

So here is the burning question the rest of us raiders have:

Are Scrooge and Tiny Tim related?

Because, inexplicably, to the complete bewilderment of us all, Scrooge (an obnoxious prick notorious for mercilessly tormenting good raiders for hours over once-in-a-blue-moon fluke mistakes) is strangely, astoundingly quiet over Tiny Tim’s repeated, constant, spectacular-in-their-stupidity routine mistakes.  And what’s more… he defends him!  He defends him with all that obnoxious, sarcastic aggression he normally reserves for making perfectly competent people feel bad.  It boggles the rest of us.  There is a multi-page thread on the forums about how bad Tiny Tim is and why he’s still in the raid… that thread was started three months ago.  Guess who’s still lying there, a bloody lump discreetly tucked in the corner of the room in all our raids?  I don’t wanna sound elitist but it does make me grumpy to think that this kind of person may have a chance at getting a server first… it’s not right!

I just don’t get it.

Scrooge says stuff about how valuable Tiny Tim’s raid buffs are compared to his personal damage but, as the rest of us point out, his raid buffs don’t count for much when he’s dead 5 seconds into the fight.

Scrooge says the rest of us don’t know how hard Tiny Tim is trying, and how he’s breaking his back at a minimum-wage job so he can save up and buy a new computer and not lag so much.  Nobody responded to this because we just sounded like bullies after a while, but honestly?  It’s a game not a charity.  Not to be heartless but… should that really matter to the rest of the raid?

Anyway, lag is the least of Tiny Tim’s raiding problems.  A laggy computer is not what keeps making him give his innervate to WARLOCKS, or run to the exact frost patch we spent an hour telling people NOT to run to.  About ten people sent me LMFAO OH GOD messages when Tiny Tim was assigned to be a soaker on Twin Val’kyr, and sure enough he lasted all of 10 seconds.  Nobody says anything anymore when Tiny Tim flamboyantly messes up, vent stays eerily silent as we just let the stupidity sink in, and we’re all silently flabbergasted anew at how and why Scrooge can seriously keep his mouth shut about it.  And then we move on, as if we don’t comment on such vulgar things in polite society, just sweep the feathery roadkill under the rug.

I just wanna know, why?  Scrooge is just about the least likely person in the world to take on a charity case; he’s the opposite of a carebear officer type; what the heck is going on between him & Tiny Tim?

What the heck is this completely-inappropriate-to-wow-blogging twaddle?

Well I went to church today for the first time in a while & it got me thinking.  I mean here’s a question- so Jesus was the Messiah, and the only way for people to get to heaven is to believe in Him… but then what about all the people who lived & died before He was ever born?  What about the people who lived & died before the Israelites ever left Egypt, before the Ark & the Covenant?  What about the people who lived & died before Moses brought down the Ten Commandments?

Once when I was young, I read something in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series that always stuck with me:

There was a young soldier from an enemy country who basically worshipped Tash (Satan) all his life, but he was a good & honest man, just born in the wrong religion I guess.  When Judgment Day came, he saw Aslan (Jesus) and he knew instantly that he should go to hell for having lived his life following Tash.  But Aslan said, “No, Tash & I are such opposites that any good deed you did in the name of Tash was really in my name.  Any promise you made and kept in Tash’s name was accorded to me, and you wouldn’t have followed Tash so long & faithfully if you weren’t really searching for me.  In the same way, any evil that men do in my name, they are really serving Tash.”

I totally paraphrased that but you get the gist.  I always liked that thought, that in the end we’ll be judged on our merit rather than our different faiths.  I’m not rock steady on where I stand on Christianity yet, but I think that idea’s something I’ll always hold onto…

Pretty random but it was the most interesting thought I had today.

In other news I got Tribute to Insanity (10) today.

Group comp:
2 resto druids (me+Babyfresh)
1 holy priest
1 feral tank
1 warrior tank
1 dps warrior
1 dk
1 hunter
1 warlock
1 enh shaman

Babyfresh is a sweet kid and almost ten years younger than me (my God!  I sound old!) with a cute squeaky voice and he’s a quick learner, great gamer, and very attached to me, much like my own little sidekick, so of course I’d spoil him!  We’ve been playing for about 2-3 years together now, server transferred a few times together, etc.  So of course I like to pamper him & bully other people into being nice to him too.

But I never took into account that in real life he’s the youngest of several siblings… several doting  sisters. With doting parents who just got him a BMW for his 17th birthday.  Aaaaah!!   He’s used to getting spoiled in real life too!  He… kind of expects it!  It’s weird that I never realized until recently.  Because he’s a genuinely sweet, nice kid, not a brat.  So it was kinda hidden, how he kind of expects things to go his way.

In our last guild, we had the same exact too-many-resto-druids situation except the officers favored him.  Babyfresh commiserated with me about being sat out all the time, but he never said anything to the officers or offered to switch.  Whereas now in this guild, I’ve been making heated posts on the forums, arguing spiritedly for hours with the one officer that I have a huge personality conflict with, and switching out the majority of the time, all on Babyfresh’s behalf.  I sit for him because I don’t wanna see him down, but the thought of returning the favor or rejecting my offer rarely crosses his mind. It’s slowly dawning on me that Babyfresh takes all my efforts as his due… Little punk!

It’s hard to stay mad at him for long though, cos he’s a good kid.  I think one good talk with him will be enough to set him straight, cos he’s pretty conscientious.  And also… you know what… he’s kind of like a sponge. He’s so easily impressionable that it’s actually a little alarming- I’m really like his role model.  Like if I get excited about something, he picks it right up & gets all excited too.  If I sneer at someone for being a bad player, ever afterwards he jumps on every opportunity to point out how bad they are.  Every choice I make in game, whether it’s trying a new spec, new meta, different flask, different glyph, whatever it is… he copies it.  I actually suspect he made a resto druid in the first place to be more like me, way back when.  LOL.  Now… I never used to nerdrage, but I confess I’ve been having some bad fits of temper lately (ever since I picked up tanking on my DK- “hey can you guys wait til I get aggro I said WAIT WTF OMG OKAY FINE YOU CAN TANK IT THEN GO AHEAD YOU TANK IT I’M NEVER TANKING FOR YOU GUYS AGAIN.” Heh.  I think I’m not cut out for tanking, who knew I could have such unexpectedly explosive anger problems).  Coincidentally, Babyfresh has also become more volubly prone to nerdraging and emo tantrums as of late too.  So maybe this is all my own doing.  Bad role model!

I guess really the best way to calm him down would be to calm down myself.

Well if you’re bored you can check out my recent video log of the guild’s 25 firefighter achievement!  Yea I don’t think I’ll really become a regular vlogger, despite recent prolificity, but I do wanna film the cool stuff.  Like if we get server first Anub down!  Crossing fingers…

Things have been going pretty well, WoW-wise.  My new guild is pretty good & I really like & respect most of the people, there’s just this one person (hey if I’m not anonymous anymore should I not gossip/gripe about people anymore, cos their identities may be guessed at?) (nah who would go to the trouble anyway) who I could rant about if I wanted my comeback post to be angry, but let’s save that for a rainy day.

There’s a bigger problem than personality conflicts, anyway!  Such as… We have three core raiding resto druids.   And if I may be so bold, we’re all three very good, top of our game I’d say, and very well-geared.  With perfect attendance.  This used to be okay, but now with more & more healer apps and fights requiring more precise group compositions, we’re all three taking turns sitting much more than we’d like, me moreso because I am way too obliging of Babyfresh’s feelings.  I’ll just say it straight- the officers prefer me & the other druid (who is an officer herself) so Babyfresh is the one most often chosen to sit out, for both 10 mans, 25 mans, and special achievements (like Algalon).  He’s aware of this & has been getting steadily depressed, questioning himself, asking me if he’s not good, etc., and the sad thing is, he IS!  He’s excellent, and in any other guild he’d be a hot commodity.  It’s just really too bad that this guild has all three of us… and all three of us are so dedicated.  The obvious alternatives have been suggested- for one of us to go boomkin, perhaps make another toon our main, etc., but all three of us apparently have the same tastes- we love resto healing the best.

Anyway, in my adopted role of Babyfresh’s older sister (or something), I’ve been switching with him a lot when they try to sit him out.  But a little too much, I think.  Because I’m actually the one sitting out the most now, and it bothers me more than I thought it would.  I thought I could be mature, not whine & question myself & go all emo & threaten to quit the game the way Babyfresh does… and I haven’t been… but it’s getting a little close for comfort now.  I honestly don’t know what kind of good answer there is for this situation… I keep thinking, if only Babyfresh had stuck with his original warlock toon, but I feel guilty for thinking it because he’s absolutely got his heart set on druid healing now, and he really is a great one.  But… I don’t like sitting in Ironforge anymore and… I don’t wanna go boomkin!  :(

To begin with, let’s start off with The Car.

The Car.  How nuts is that?

^Inexplicably, The Car’s license plate is not quite in keeping with The Car’s all-around theme.  Oh well.  Still awesome.

I didn’t dress up this year, all the drama left me no time or energy to cook up a costume, but I saw lots of nice ones.  No one from WoW (boo), but I got a pic with Master Chief:

Obligatory Mario Bros. cosplay, but I liked their poses:

Bill from Left 4 Dead:

LOL he was trying to eat, poor guy, but we just had to bother him for a pic.  So cool.

^The Gender Bender.  Hee.

^Okay, so not the best picture, but oh man this was the cutest aww moment!  I just love it when parents dress up their kids!  This little guy was all confused but excited, running around putting on his helmet backwards and upside down, so darn cute!

The most awe-inducing costume. Luckily the guy was pretty ripped, because that stuff was heavy!  It was so cool, he actually got up on sturdy, expensive-looking stilts.  Then a cast of a half-dozen people, all in their own costumes btw, helped assemble & fit stuff on him.  He had some kind of voice-modifying speaker built into it, & was screeching away in the coolest manner.

Then… the Best Moment?

^A little girl playing Optimus steps out of the crowd.  xD !!!

There were a lot of really awesome Silent Hill cosplays.  My favorites:

Here’s me & a pal with Kool-Aid man!  Oh yeah!

I think next year if I cosplay, I might do the Silent Hill nurse one myself.  Looks easy except the mask, and comfortable.  More comfortable than most of the elaborate cosplays, yet still just as attention-getting.

That’s all!  Bye now!

Heehee.  Inspired by a specific incident when there was only one pally for 25 people who all wouldn’t settle for Kings… and Mr. Obnoxious kept insisting on keeping his pet buffed although it kept dying!  xD