I never could get the hang of Thursdays…

Ho-hum, no big deal, right?

Oh, right, there’s that…*waves hand vaguely*…expansion. thingy.

…

Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be in Northrend by now?

Tech Support

On a side note, you know you’ve got the right web hosting company when you put in a ticket about your site being down and the tech that responds asks you why you’re watching your site when you should be out getting the WOTLK expansion!!

*waves to SJ, Tech Support Extraordinaire*

That’s What You Call A Post?

I do not know if there will be a “real” post later today or not. If there is, it may just be a long series of incomprehensible squees and flailing. You know…assuming the servers are up, which is about a fifty/fifty chance at this point, I know. (Edit : Zasp very kindly informed me that the servers are stable and he’s been having a lot of fun playing. *sticks her tongue out at him and blows a raspberry*)

Hopefully I will come home to a shiny, perfectly patched computer with the login screen already up.

Looking Forward

There is a possibility that our guild will be recruiting VERY LIGHTLY moving forward in the expansion. We are a small guild, we will stay a small guild, we are picky, egotistical, demanding, crude, and we’re damn good at what we do. Delicate flowers need not apply. This is NOT a call for applications (because we’re going to be playing the expansion and so should you be!) but it IS a notification that the call may come in the next month or so. Think about whether or not you might be interested. It’s not for everyone - it’s not even for most people.

Still Here?

That probably means you, like me, don’t have the expansion in front of you right now. You have my sympathy.

I thought it’d be fun to have a post where we all come up with our own Achievements, but it looks like Nekkid Cow beat me to it!

If you’ve got a great idea, swarm his blog and spread the love for some great Achievements (and rewards) that you’d love to see implemented in the game!

Nekkid Cow’s “Earned Achievements” Thread

You people write too many awesome blogs.

I’m not even all the way through the comment list, and already my blogroll is dominating my sidebar like a devilsaur with Bestial Wrath and all three stacks of Monstrous Bite. (I’d have used a sports reference there, but the closest thing I get to sports is that old Nintendo basketball game where the announcer screams “He’s on FIRE!“)

But seriously. Chill out on the awesome blogs. I thought for sure I’d be safe. How many AWESOME blogs could there be? Mediocre blogs? Sure. But AWESOME?

The answer is “at least five more than too many”.

I AM working through the list of blog recommendations from way back when. Really and truly, I am. It’s like being given an entire bag of candy corn, though. Sure, it’s awesome, but you can only eat so many pieces before you kinda sorta start wondering whether other flavors exist in this world.

Too much awesome. You’ve been warned. I know people who do things. Nasty things, involving unpleasant stuff.

[This is the part where you imagine me doing that "point at my eyes, point at your eyes" suspicious glare thing. If there's a single word to indicate that series of actions, let me know. Whatever it is, I'm doing it. Right now. To you.]

So I don’t know who kidnapped Thursday and why I didn’t even get a ransom notice, but there was definitely a day missing there somewhere. *shuffles papers* Inexcusable.

I was going to write up a post on the thing I am most excited about with regards to the upcoming expansion, but I feel like I’ve been rolled in cotton balls. Focus is not my friend right now.

So instead, I’m going to link to the definitive guide to the expansion for priests - A Dwarf Priest Wrath Survival Guide.

Bar none the best and most concise guide to damn near everything that I’ve ever read. Awesome read.

Meanwhile, I’m going to concentrate on trying very hard to keep my head from exploding.

Some of you may have noticed a shiny new icon in my sidebar - yup, I’m doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this year. NaNoWriMo is a worldwide event where everyday people stop saying “some day I’ll write a novel” and say “this month, I’m writing a novel” instead. 50,000 words, all done within the confines of a single month, November.

This is my first year participating - I’ve run into roadblocks such as, “I just don’t have time” and “What’s the point of writing in a hurry? I can take that idea and write it slow, and do a good job on it instead”

Ignore the irony there, that I still haven’t done the slow, good job on it.

This year, I decided to just…do it. (No, that doesn’t mean I just bought a new pair of shoes). I pinched my nose shut and dove headfirst. I created a NaNoWriMo account (Whiskerwing, in case anyone’s interested), I put a little icon on my sidebar, and I’m telling everyone I know that I’m doing it. I even put up fliers at work.

Why? So that in Week 2, when I wish I could just forget the whole thing, my shame will keep me going.

That’s the plan, anyway.

THIS year, however, there’s an added hurdle, and goodness, it’s a doozie.

Maybe you’ve heard of it? Little thing called Wrath of the Lich King?

Yeah. Smack dab in the middle of the month I’m supposed to be writing almost two thousand words a day during.

Feel free to mock my foolishness, because I don’t intend to do what so many NaNoWriMo Warcrafters are doing, and wait until December to get the expansion. Oh no, I couldn’t possibly make such a reasonable decision.

Nope, not this girl.

However, something DOES have to give. A little here, a little there (sadly, the boss won’t give me paid time off. Aw, shucks).

As a result, Ego may not be quite as regular as I would like for the month of November. It’s not that I don’t love you - all my other hobbies are going to be taking far more severe hits.

I’m trying to spend extra time NOW to make posts I can just slap up, but I can’t guarantee anything.

Bre over at Gun Lovin’ Dwarf Chick is joining me in this insanity, along with everyone’s favorite caustic wit, Hannelore. At Bre’s suggestion, we’ve created a Ning group for all the Warcraft fans doing the NaNoWriMo crazy dance - World of Wordcraft. Membership’s open to anyone who loves warcraft and writing, whether you’re planning on joining NaNoWriMo or just want to observe the effects of stress and caffeine on the amateur novel author.

Sometimes, as a blogger, it’s easy to focus on the negative comments that I get and allow them to affect my mood, or throw me off.

When you blog without material gain - you do it because you enjoy it, and because you want to help people - it can be disheartening to have someone throw what you’ve said back in your face.  I’m not talking about disagreement and discussion - nobody’s perfect, and I’m so far from it I couldn’t even pick it out of a lineup. Discussion is the lifeblood of any community, and blind agreement doesn’t facilitate learning.

But sometimes the feeling of “why even bother” can make you seriously consider just shutting down the site. Stopping the blog, letting the other very capable blogs out there grow to fill the niche you’ve created.

And then you get an email that makes you laugh, or makes you cry. Makes you feel like maybe people out there are listening, and actually do care about what you’re doing.

And then you open your eyes and see that one bad comment is surrounded by support and incredibly awesome people.

I’ve been struggling with writing this post for the past couple of months. I keep putting it off, and then toying with the idea of posting it. It’s not been a single comment or event that sparked it, so if you think you know what comment exactly that I’m talking about, you probably only know one piece of it.

This isn’t intended to be a finger-pointing exercise. I wrote this one very important reason.

I’m human. Me. I’m not pixels, I’m not a draenei priest, I’m a person, and I want all of you to know that every single one of your comments affects me in some way.

Those (very very few) of you who watch my blog and are asshats and trolls, I hope you stop and think about the comments you leave. Not just here, but on every single website you visit. Every blog, every forum. Those are REAL people that you’re affecting, insulting. And no, I will not be ashamed of the fact that they bother me. No, I do not think you should only blog if you have rhino-like hide enough to withstand the barbs.

Bloggers are people, and so few of us make enough money at this to even cover the cost of hosting. We’re not in this to become rich and famous. Why should we pretend that we don’t care when you rattle our cages, that it doesn’t affect us because we’re somehow less human just because we blog?

The rest of you, the bright, supportive masses - you are the reason these blogs and forums exist in the first place. Thank you. Thank you for the emails, which I am sometimes too embarrassed to respond to. Thank you for the comments, correcting and extrapolating, taking what I’ve said and moving it on to the next level. Turning a simple thought into a discussion, and somehow managing to avoid turning it into a shark tank or argument.

Thank you for disagreeing with me, thank you for helping each other, and thank you for making this blog somewhere that people feel comfortable commenting. Somewhere that people feel welcome.

I need your help.

My Blogroll is pitiful. It’s based on the blogging community nearly a year ago, and doesn’t reflect the current warcraft blogging community at all.

I’ve tried to come up with ways to keep it trim and useful, and I’ve failed every time. I joined the Blog Azeroth forums, but I didn’t have the time needed to stick with it (even though it is an incredible community). I’ve tried following links for people who comment here and on other blogs, and I keep forgetting to save the link, or I slap it in my feed reader and forget to add it to my blogroll.

So, since you guys were so awesomely forthcoming in my “help, I need podcasts” post, I figure you know what you like to read. You are, in fact, experts in the WoW Blogosphere.

What I’m looking for

Any blog that spends at least 75% of its time being :

• Educational. I want blogs that help readers become better players. Resto4Life, for example.
• Entertaining. I want blogs that are not just well-written, but exceptionally well written. I don’t care how educational it is, as long as it’s fun. Need More Rage, for example. An RP story blog that is engaging, easy to follow, and keeps my attention is JUST as important to me as one that breaks down hunter shot rotations. If anything, I tend to like those more than the Educational blogs.
• Grammar. I’m not going to be a huge stickler on this one, but I’m going to be honest and say that any blog more than seasoned with leet speak and flagrant misspellings is unlikely to make the cut. I’m old-fashioned that way. Perhaps that means I miss out on excellent advice and helpful entries, but if my brain starts hemmoraging because I spent too long trying to decipher your crazy moon language, I doubt you’re going to pay my medical bills.

What I’m NOT looking for

Any blog that spends more than 75% of its time on the following topics :

• Loot that has dropped (without some kind of comparison and explanation of why it was an upgrade)
• What percentage they’ve managed to get X boss to during raiding this week (without some kind of discussion about tactics used)
• A blog that hasn’t been updated in the past month - and rarely before that.
• A blog that is less than one month old (sorry, but newer blogs are more likely to fold, and I don’t want to be pruning my blogroll. Generally, if it’s been a month, the blogger knows whether or not blogging is something they enjoy and will continue. If you’d like to recommend a blog that falls here anyway, make a note in your comment so that I know to go back and check it again later.)
• Non-Warcraft focus. (Individual non-warcraft posts are not only fine, they can be a nice change of pace. But if more than 75% of a blog is non-warcraft, regardless of how entertaining and fabulous it may be, I won’t add it to my blogroll. Otherwise TJ would have been linked a year ago.)

Size Matters

My blogroll will remain small. I’m not looking to beef up my SEO statistics by linking to every WoW blog ever written. I want to link to those blogs that I myself read, or will read. Being on the blogroll of my site is a personal recommendation for anyone who visits, and that’s the way I want to keep it.

I hate visiting a site and seeing a blogroll that would choke a rhino. How do I even know where to begin on those?! I’m lost before I even start.

How to Recommend

Just add a comment with a link or series of links. Some of you may get stuck in the spam filter on this one, I’ll be watching it and unsticking you as soon as I can.

If you feel like adding a one line blurb about the blog, feel free - but it’s not required.

I promise to visit every blog linked here, but I do not promise to blogroll them all. Don’t worry about whether or not your suggestion is “obvious” or whether or not I already have it on my blogroll, or even whether or not someone has already suggested it. A vote is a vote is a vote, and I take five mentions of “Banana Shoulders” to be five votes for that blog. You can bet I’m going to take a long look at the ones mentioned over and over again.

And if you don’t want to find the link but you know the name of the blog, I will attempt a google search to find it. You don’t even have to paste the link as long as you spell the blog name correctly and google knows how to find it.

Pimp your site! Pimp your friends’ sites! Go hog wild

I do try to keep my “What’s Going on in the World of Ego” posts to a minimum. Ego was and is intended to be a place that people (healing priests especially) can come to learn about the class and the game. It’s awfully hard to do that when every other post is talking about a boss we’ve downed or a piece of gear that’s dropped - some of you are past me in progression and some are still in earlier level content. I wanted a blog that appealed to people regardless of their in-game advancement or level.

That being said, sometimes it’s nice to know just what the blogger behind the blog has been up to.

Guild
A bunch of old guildmates and friends from our guild on Kirin Tor got back together to form a new guild, Vanguard. To kill time between now and the expansion, we’ve been doing Karazhan runs for badges and running Zul’Aman as often as we possibly can, trying to get a full set of Amani Warbears for our guildmembers.

Bearwatch 2008
The recent announcement that the expansion is coming in November, and that the pre-expansion patch will spell the death of the Amani Warbears has kicked us into even higher gear. It took two weeks for us to get our ZA runs up to speed (we had some folks who needed gear, and all of us were very very rusty) but ever since then, we’ve been cranking out two bears a week. We’re on bear 6/10, and everyone in the guild is holding their breath, wondering whether we’ll have time to finish before the patch.

I may be one of the only Warcraft players hoping that the expansion gets pushed back just a tiiiiny smidge.

One of our guildmembers (he comments here under the name of “Shatter”) has been creating a lot of movies for us - recording some of our runs, creating some recruitment videos (we aren’t currently recruiting, but they’re a lot of fun anyway) and basically just tickling all of us with his creations. My favorite of the ones he’s done was a monologue by Zul’Jin, inviting us to “play a game”, and complaining about a certain giant-headed, near-sighted gnome.

RavenWatch
Still no Anzu mount for me. We’ve run that blasted thing every day for well over a month now, still no raven mount. When I get that thing, I am going to spend hours, every day, just walking in circles around Shattrath.

Also, whoever made the decision to nerf fear ward because it “won’t be a significant mechanic in BC” can bite me. Anyone who has run heroic Sethekk Halls knows what I’m talking about.

I was going to tame an owl on my hunter, and now I hate the bloody things on sight. One more football rush by one of those birds while I’m in the middle of a critical heal, and I’m going to be chunking bricks at any owl I see in this game.

“What do you mean, you didn’t do anything? Tell that to your cousins in Sethekk!” *waves a brick around menacingly*

Brewfest
Brewfest this year gives Alliance folks one of the very very few chances we ever have to acquire a horde mount - and as a self-proclaimed kodo-hater, I feel it’s significant when I say that the brewfest kodo looks AWESOME.

I prefer my sleek, sporty rides, personally. But if you’re looking for an SUV, there’s nothing hotter than a brewfest kodo.

Vanguard’s been running the BRD alt-swap game since the start of Brewfest, getting as many attempts at the mount as we possibly can. We’ve gotten one ram and four kodos, and enough trinkets to send Ikiss into paroxysms of joy. I hope he chokes on them.

I love this holiday boss idea. Direbrew and the Headless Horseman both take people back to old world locations, and they’re doable by normal groups. I felt that the frost boss was a little too difficult for the average group, but I feel that Direbrew’s fight has a lot of fun and just enough of a challenge to keep it interesting.

Plus, there’s nothing funnier than a beartank druid running around with a giant beer barrel on his head. And any fight which requires players to open their inventory and chug down a mug of beer is aces in my book.

Kudos to Blizz. And Kodos to us. <3

Magister’s Terrace
Oddly enough, despite a TON of heroic Magister’s Terrace runs (everyone in our guild and their alts has the trinkets from there now), we still haven’t gotten another white chocobo or a baby pheonix drop. It’s becoming something of an in-joke - we won’t get any more vanity toys until the raven mount drops for me.

I will say that I hope Blizz takes note of the incredible outcry of disgust at the Delrissa fight in MrT. Any fight THAT incredibly difficult, which can be rendered laughably simple just by bringing a warlock, is stupidly designed. If I wanted to PvP, I would do so. A difficult fight that takes skill to overcome is fabulous. A chaotic fight with no aggro and which requires luck or a specific group makeup to overcome is an insult.

I am both looking forward to and dreading finding out what instances and raids are like in Wrath.

TreeDrood
One of the players that joined us for Vanguard has spent the intervening time leveling up as fast as his little treeDrood heart can possibly level. He’ll be healing Kara with me this week. Wish him luck!

*grins ferally* He’s gonna need it.

Summary
And that’s what we’ve been up to! New guild, Kara badge runs (when we run with ten people instead of seven, it goes much faster), ZA bear runs, heroic farming, Anzu runs, Heroic MrT runs for pets, trinkets, and birdmounts, teasing a tree, and financing a fleet of kodos.

How are YOU spending the time between now and the expansion?

Right, so I find myself in dire need of entertaining podcasts.

I’m a podcast n00b, so be gentle.

As Kwane so perfectly stated, “Podcasts are still like Bigfoot to me, I am sure they are out there, but not sure I want to know about them and they scare me a little.”

I’m looking primarily for entertainment value. It needs to engage my attention from the start, without long lulls of boring in the middle. It doesn’t have to be Warcraft related, but it does have to be easy to add to my iPod - huge preference for freebies I can subscribe to and get via iTunes.

Anything about writing, books, gaming, comedy, movies, cartoons, or just flat out fun stuff to listen to. I have a high swearing tolerance, but would prefer something that included a broader vocabulary than the average street corner conversation.

Hopefully I can find Twisted Nether that way - if not, it’s one of the very few I’m willing to try downloading and getting into my iPod the hard way.

Suggestions?

_Help?

So yesterday, I logged Vonya in for the first time in well over a month.

Did you ever have a really bad breakup? One where you stopped going to the same bars, hanging out with the same friends, eating at the same restaurants, and even listening to the same radio stations, just so you wouldn’t be reminded of what you were so very strongly trying to forget?

That was me.

But I’m back now. And it still gives me a twinge when I hear the wrong song on the radio, and I still can’t order the General’s chicken from our favorite restaurant, but I am hanging out with the mutual friends again and tentatively starting to go back to my old haunts.

I had a brief relationship with another MMO, and it really helped get me back on my feet. The relationship was a short one - City of Villains was a great rebound game, but as time went on, I grew less and less excited to spend time with it. We broke up amicably - we both knew it was a short-lived affair, and there were no tears shed on either side when the breakup was done.

So here I am, back in Azeroth. And I feel like I’ve come home, and maybe some of the furniture’s been moved around a little, but it’s still home.

I healed a regular MrT last night, trying to get some of the rust off. I only wiped half the group once, so I count it as a success. I killed off Kwane and Zasp, and who cares about them anyway, right? =P

Also, Zasp is playing a shadow priest, and doing a hella good job at it. Poke him about it.

Some of our old friends from a previous server are lifting their heads up, having taken similar hiatuses after that old guild broke apart. It sounds like some of them are wanting to guild up with us and rebuild some of what we’d lost.

I think we all needed the time to collect ourselves, but it seems like our return has lit up the sky, much like the Thundercat beacon, and now we’re assembling to kick Mum’ra…err…Outland back into shape.

I think it’d be fun if we could get some bear mounts for people before the expansion comes out and the bear mount is gone for good. That’s a good goal.

I also want a baby phoenix hatchling and Anzu. And I’m not afraid to barter, bribe, and blackmail to make it happen. *cracks knuckles*