AAAArrrhhh – no no no … me hartie lets NOT be too hasty! Put your weapon BACK in your pants I say.

Arrrhhh – arrrrgghhhhhaaaaa ow, ow, ow – You son of  a Scurvy dog you!

…yeah maybe it was a bad idea for them to park the talk like a pirate achievement right next to the horde flight path eh. Oh these PVP servers.

(NB: I am finding it a little hard to post at the moment, bit of a lack of quality blogging time available but I am sure it will pick up )

I obviously have a filthy filthy mind… but that lance is pretty damn phallic eh?

Well before I disappeared from the nether I was really getting into the tournament quests – before they overwhelmed me with the daily grind. As the last little snapshot of my achievements will show.

I didn’t find the lancing all that difficult, trained myself out of keyboard turning years ago so the NPCs were easy targets after I got the hang of the defence/attack cycle.

However sometimes I wonder if the AT grind was what contributed to me suddenly not wanting to go near northrend … too many ‘responsibilities’ once I hit the level cap– you know need to gear up, should do more instances, have to max blah rep, should grind for heirloom gear and so on.

Is it bad to see this as a good sign?

I mean think about it – if hackers are still trying their little hacker’y dance of lies and tricks, then even though I’m finding things super quiet in the areas I am hanging out in, it does indicate that the gold selling and account hacking industry is still alive and kicking… which in turn indicates there is still the market out there and thus the interest O_O

Duffer could have at least used correct grammar though… heh.

Well, it seems battlegrounds are actually worth wasting time on now that I can queue up while out on the quest and I also manage to pick up a little exp while whiling away my hours getting beat on by guys at least 7 levels higher than me.

Random thoughts about the new battleground queuing system (which I love by-the-by):

It is really really weird to stick my furry tauren nose into the valley of honor, duck in to pick up the BG daily (if it’s there for the lowbie battlegrounds), and notice that there is no one loitering around with the battlemasters, no one fishing outside, heck no one’s even practicing on the dummies near the hunter trainer these days… maybe there are more attractive dummies in other areas these days …. *chirp chirp*

Apparently signing up for a battleground busts your ninja stealth – yup. Note to self: avoid doing this ever again near zerging aggroing mobs that hate me *ouch*

Having a battleground I have been waiting for an hour to pop, then pop right in the middle of a quest with a time limit… kinda makes me want to cry.

While coming out of a BG back onto a flight path doesn’t send me hurtling towards the ground – yeah like I thought it would, because I got this lovely little scene when I entered the battleground where my flightpath mount disappeared out from under me and my little tauren druid dropped towards the ground with his hoofs paddling and his arms waving… only for me to get the BG loading screen! Yeah anyway while coming out onto a flight path doesn’t kill me, apparently it will occasionally drop me at the nearest flight master, kinda like I logged in the middle of the trip. This is bad if it dumps you in the crossroads in the middle of epic crossroads raids. (Hmmm on the other hand: PEOPLE! Real live people who are not NPCs)

You know my thought for the day?
The world is less lonely with the battleground queuing system.

Reasoning:
No matter where I go I have all these alliance peeps running towards me in a huddle wanting to hug me… well hug my prone immobile corpse really – but it still makes me feel loved. Cause you know they want me bad O_O (wanna make a little fur rug outa my sexy flag carrying druid hide mmm-ha *insert a little tauren shuffle dance right here*)

Burgle.

I
Am
Still
Alive.

Sorta – walked 10kms in RL for charity the ‘other’ yesterday in rainy winter’ish weather… you know just think muddy rain slicked dirt roads, up and down mountainous goat tracks @_@. On the up side they did feed me damper and honey, and the damper was made on a real fire (god knows how they got that going in that weather) and rocked socks – those rotary guys are epic outdoor bakers apparently.

So where have I been the last few month?

Well mostly busy RL side:
I graduated my Masters degree (got a High Distinction in that last assignment), just waiting for them to mail me the paper. Currently dealing with Performance Reviews again at work (yuck I hate this time of year.) Been hitting the gym hard core, mostly due to the stress… and this desire to have “buns-of-steel” as the saying goes in my social circle. There has also been excessive amounts of socialization and drinking.
I’ve started the nerdy hobbie of RP all over again and have been rolling character sheets for various games (including the ever so uber-nerd RP called LARP… that’s live action – kinda like drama and table top combined… but they let be wear crazy clothes ^_^)
I fell in with a crowd that likes tea, and I have been having Mad tea parties.
There have also been many books.
Oh.
Yeah and I lived through one family reunion up in Sydney where my sister called my brother a ‘fag-hag’ and he called her a ‘hoochie’ and everything went to the Shite-house. Did get to see an awesome musical though so it all evened out.

WoWwise?
Well apparently I’m not really interested in endgame at the moment… or even northrend – which is odd because northrend has oodles to offer. Most my guild is off elsewhere these days so it’s just me online, all alone. It is awfully tempting to dump my most awesome guild title (see the guild label ‘Booty Dock Saints’ still makes me smile) and try to find a little lowbie guid to hang with because wow is just too lonely these days for someone like me who is a social sort… especially in the lowbie zones where I have been hanging.

*chirp chirp*

I mean the most exciting online conversation I have managed to have the last week or so was in Booty-bay, where, after I watched a fellow hordie actually teabag my quest giver (an NPC! Who tea-bags an NPC? It doesn’t even care that you are parking your butt on its corpse) which he had just killed seconds before my hand in and I was all sitting down to wait for a respawn, he and I talked about how he was going to have Booty-bay on lockdown for the week for the rep…
… oh wait
… that was him talking mostly.

/snap. Yep there’s my problem all round – I just don’t have a lot to say these days.

Hmmm cept I really like druids. Still. More now that I am a pretty-skinned tauren druid, and no longer look like a lion with an angry baboon butt for a face when I play horde side O_o

Been playing the old battlegrounds a lot as a lowbie, and buying gear which I shall no doubt speedily out level…especially with the rate I seem to power though the zones these days feeding off the new steroid-exp, but eh – it reminds me of the good old days. I am loving the time limit on WSG – hell that was needed.  Funny story that goes to show some toons are obviously new to the battleground game, hard as that is to imagine. The last battleground I watched three toons each grab the flag then attempt to mount and lose the flag … only for the next little toon to step up, grab the flag… attempt to mount and then lose the flag. Yup it was a classic stooges scene.

 Mind you, as ever entering battlegrounds on the low end of the level bracket, (you know the shallow end of the dream pool where people not only tea bag on your corpse, they are easily able to yo-yo you around the game map for their own entertainment and THEN three shot you in the back and tea bag on your corpse… sigh) has been teaching me to play the class better.

It did take me oh about two days to get all my alts on all the servers I play on mounted… that was kinda zen-cool as they all trotted, stomped and loped around the screen at a much-desired faster pace. Although some little corner of my head had a little sob for my first toon which scrimped and saved and struggled for the 50 gold of the “first ever mount” purchase… while all these little alts get pocket change from my DK’s and what not to strut around on their fancy steeds. O_O

So I moonlight as Alliance – and I even have a gnome!

A gnome warlock… mostly this little toon wheels and deals in Ironforge… making a sweet buck off my druids inscription abilities and sourcing him herbs for his addiction.

One of the oddities of the Ironforge scene is this other little level two gnome that sits by the mail box.

He is one of our major competitors in the glyph market. The other day I heard the pally (who has also taken to the glyph market after watching me shower money around our lowbies) swearing away in the background about that “bloody Tradling and his helm” … and I was all *What the hell? I know The Pally likes his own gear in the manner of a teenaged glam girl… but I’ve never really seen him take a dislike to other peoples frippery, whats going on?*

So in I log… and I see the oddest sight… a level 2 gnome in a level 76 helm.

Check it out, I mean have you ever seen the like? I’m thinking it could be a common occurrence and this is just the first time I have run into it myself?

Gundrak is a funny place.

EDIT: Hmmm and I’ll be a little on the quiet side for a couple of weeks – have a big project due in /la sigh

Oh don’t worry after we got the elf out of our system we started drawing Tauren druids… it kinda ended up as a crayon rumble in the middle.

AKA: Dealing with your average fat-arsed Tauren on the fat-arsed mammoth sitting smack on your Dalaran flightmaster

Step One: Go to WoW Wiki and look up Dalaran NPCs (or which ever town you happen to be having the trouble in)

Step Two: Locate the name of the flightmaster (in this case Aludane Whitecloud)

Step Three: hit Ctrl+V so all the little name plates appear

Step Four: chase the one for Aludane Whitecloud around the screen until you can click on it

Step Five: select flight path and get the hell out of dodge 

*mutter mutter giving taurens mammoths what the heck were they thinking mutter mutter*

The 20 dollar question of the day – how does wow impact on your average relationship?
Honestly I have no idea. This post is just an excuse to link to the comic you will find sampled down the bottom of all this text.

But wow certainly does have an impact, well more of an impact then the type of milk you keep in your fridge will in any case. I mean I’ve personally known couples who:

• met on wow
• met on wow and got then married
• male halves (of the relationship… half of the relationship … not some weird half gender or anything) who got their girlfriends into wow
• female halves who hooked their boyfriends on wow
• couples who fight over wow
• couples who backseat drive their partners playing style (its like the sign of an old-married-in-spirit-if-not-by-government-form wow couple)
• couples who break up because one half likes wow more than ‘couple-time’
• friends who broke up over an argument about nerdy wow things like a healer skinning in an instance (with the usual accusations of loot ninjas)

Hell I remember this time when three of the couples who played wow in my social group all lived in the same flat complex and you could wander down the footpath which ran along the front in the evenings and see each couple in their living rooms set up on two computers gaming… it was kinda freaky actually – like watching a gaming cult set up for the evening.

Particularly since I lived a flat or two down that row… and I had a computer in my living room set up for wow gaming… I started playing mornings before work just to be different :p

oh yeah that comic:

Yet Another Excuse to Play

What did I learn from this comic? Well … see post title. *grin*

My computer that is – had a small technical issue which I can sum up as “VIRUS”. /sigh I had to do a clean wipe and lost all my video files, on the upside WoW runs twice as fast and I went out and brought myself a widescreen monitor to ease the pain.

Hmm and in RL news my somewhat-more-sophisticated-than-me sister has found herself a nice young man… apparently he is “a bit of a nerd”… because he is into playing “that wow game”.

So I sent her the following email:
————————————–
Woo a wow player – we will have to get you on then you can tell him that his class sucks since the last nerf and show him how to macro things. Is he an ‘uber’ nerd? Does he have a level 80? Is he a RAIDER? ^_^
————————————–

And I got the reply:
————————————–
Lol that conversation went totally over my head!!
————————————–

I dunno she seems to have the ‘lol’ down pat hmmm.

Which lead to me dishing out some detailed explainations of game terms (more information than she wanted no doubt) and also to a little web surfing which found the following mildly interesting websites:

• The World of Warcraft Slang Translator (couldn’t translate woot – saddness) ..err also has gold ads bleck
• WoW Wiki Game Terms
• World of Warcraft Slang

That last link is made classic by the list of exercises they give you at the end. For example we have:

1/An Orc walks up to you in the rolling plains of the Arathi Highlands, and says “you want buy gold 50 us dollar 1000 gold this server.” What do you call this player, and to whom should you report him? Use language as colorful as you want.

Classic.

So anyway I shall make it my mission to help my sister communicate with her new piece of nerd fluff, an experience I believe she shall find suitably horrifying… so I can probably dub it as a sisterly bonding exercise.