Two year blogday

I've been having a terrible time trying to write a blogday post. Somehow I get anxiety about the most trivial of tasks. Shouldn't this just be a quick post of I started writing on such and such day because I wanted to say this or that and since then I've written ten thousand posts and I have a million viewers per day and thank you so very much, readers? Maybe throw in a screenshot of google analytics, some funny search terms, compare my posting style.

But that would be really fucking boring. I avoid writing posts that I wouldn't want to read.

So I did what anyone else would do: sent a sad email to a friend. I batted around some ideas and came up with a few. They were terrible.

Back in the day
My very first introduction to blogging was terribly boring; writing about some Shakespeare character in high school. Blogging sounded stupid. Perhaps the assignment really was. Somehow I moved past that.

There have been times that I had more fun writing about WoW than actually playing it. I'd get bored or burnt out, and I'd keep writing. I learned to love writing. It makes me laugh when I think of high school and especially junior high when I hated writing. Now it's one of thing activities I enjoy the most. Some weeks I've been frustrated at the lack of days in the week, since I had more to say but I didn't want to start randomly having multiple posts a day. Poor Gnomeaggedon can't even keep up as is.

Rockstars
I was thinking about those terrible local bands in high school and college. You know, teenagers in their garages with modest musical talent, terrible writing, and immature voices with a propensity for screaming. Awful. But so necessary. What band is formed by perfectly talented musicians in their 20s or 30s? Not many. A few, but they tended to come from previously-created and failed groups.

Us bloggers are all those terrible bands. Some get better and get noticed and go big; I think this is Matticus or maybe Tobold. Some get better and stay local, but are significant in their area and influence the sound of the area; such as Larisa or some of the class-based bloggers. Then there are the ones that keep going and aren't that amazing. But they're part of the music and are as necessary as the world-famous bands, because they are the base at which all start. I guess that's me.

As I think more about the idea of local bands, I'm struck by how strange it is to think of an online neighborhood. I am reluctant to say community, because I feel that it's not just social connection, but that our webs of links create almost a physical area which we inhabit. I actually feel like you're a neighbor, like I can walk across the lawn and there's your front door. I feel as if the blogs I read, the neighborhood which I live in, has its own style. There are many others, places I could move to, but I don't want to. I like my home.

Editing is srs bns
It may not be apparent, but my posts are often heavily edited. You see, at the first draft they are often completely unintelligible. As proof, I offer the upcoming Sunday post.

I usually write posts days before and schedule them. This gives me more time to look over them and notice terrible grammar, missing words, or just plain not making any sense. This often happens when I write semi-late at night. There is a time at which I achieve a sort of half-dream state in which words flow freely, perhaps because I skip every other word and don't notice. It's the most fun time to blog. It's also the least effective time.

The downside of scheduling is that I sometimes feel like I want to say something right now, but I have to admit, breaking pattern feels risky, that I might say "oh well I wrote one last night so I can skip the morning" and next thing I've not written anything in days. It makes posts less spontaneous. I cool down after nerd-raging in-game. Sometimes. And then the extremes tend to vanish, dulling everything. That's not good, but I know that if I don't say to myself "you will write in time for the schedule tomorrow", I just might not write. This doesn't mean I have to force myself to write, but it's so much easier to queue for another heroic and check that alt's mailbox and oh what's that on google news?

Thank you
I have three big thanks I want to give. The first is to all you readers. Without you I'd just be some nerd shouting opinions into the void. Thanks to you I'm some nerd shouting opinions at people. Your comments give me ideas for more posts or show me a different perspective. Sometimes I agree with you, sometimes I don't. I think it's most important when I don't, because then there's something to think about.

Fellow bloggers, I want to thank you for making the blogosphere. You've given me ideas and you've taken my ideas and made something more of them. You've given me something to read and think about every day. I want to apologize for the times when I didn't comment even when you wrote a great post. It feels weird to just say "great post" or to response with what could only ruin an otherwise perfect post; except the zero comments might be worse than a thousand trolls and halfwits. You send people to my blog through blogrolls and occasionally link love and I try to send them back. Without you this blog wouldn't be much of anything, just shouting in a dark corner.

The last is aimed specifically aimed at Larisa. She writes a great blog, which I've drawn some inspiration and topics from. I've been influenced a lot by reading her blog and commenting on it and I really do think that if I'd not found the Pink Pigtail Inn, then I might have ended up writing little more than rants and boring posts about my paladin.

I wonder if I'll still be writing in another year. I don't see why not. What will I write about when WoW ends? Who knows. Maybe I'll be totally lost and have to resort to being a paladin in real life. If so, I'm sure you'll hear about some demon getting a mace in the face and his wallet and suit stolen. The vendor price on that stuff is pretty nice.

What do you think?
What do you like or dislike about this blog? Have any favorite, or most hated, posts? While I may appear to be an elitist tank jerk who orders people around and ignores the wishes of others, that's not true. Okay maybe kinda. All I'm saying is, stop standing in the fire and don't pull. Where was I? Oh yes, comments. Talk to me.

Quickly staying the same
These were going to be near the start of the post, but they took up a lot of space, so I moved them to this appendix of sorts.

Looking back, I'm amused at how little some things have changed, how many things sound like something I'd say now.

Easy Leveling is like Easy Credit

The easier it is to level a class, the worse they will end up. Take hunters for example. Ignore all the crap about noobs being attracted to the cute pets or pretending to be Legolas. Overall I doubt the average hunter is significantly stupider than the other classes, or at least not enough to account for impressions of them. The problem is that hunters are absurdly easy to level and offer little challenge to the player, so they never learn. It isn't that the player is stupid, it's that he's uneducated.

That's right, noob might not be a personality type or some birth defect; it might just be lack of necessity. Or it's just a game and some people care way less. Damn casuals.

Madness begins...

I realized today that my paladin has the weapon token from AQ20. I don't think it will be too hard to get the other pieces to go with it. All I need is exalted and I can get a really, really bad sword.

And so it was that I began collecting bad swords. This doesn't include my old-school Quel'serrar.

Welcome Home, to Hell

There's something about taking my paladin to Stratholme that just feels right. I suppose it is perfectly designed for us: huge groups of undead and plenty of corners to LoS casters. There's a high from pulling 6 groups at once and killing them all.

The force reactive disks help. Yea, that was plural. I carry three of them plus a sporeggar shield and my normal tanking shield. A single pull can wipe out half a disk. But hey, they cost almost nothing to repair (I forgot exactly, but it's less than 2g at zero durability). Bag space is an issue. I can easily make 30 slots no longer empty by picking up drops off mobs.

Engineering: Better crusading through advanced technology.

And then there's this post that cracks me up looking back at it:
Communism has finally come to WoW

No, it's not welfare epics. They aren't even like welfare, but I've already gone over this. It's not guild banks or 10-man raids.

It is the hybrids. We have seized the means of production and can finally be free of the bourgeois pure classes. We are all equal DPS. Somewhat.

Lolret will be over. "We need CC" is a thing of the past.

TBC was the end of serfdom and slavery, the end of healing. WotLK is the end of the capitalists, the end of the pure DPS.

Coincidentally, just as we reach the end of history, we are also closing in on what will most likely be the last expansion.

I'm not sure why I suggested that WotLK would be the last, but what made me laugh was how hybrids finally got damage, and then suddenly it was tanking and healing that mattered and here we are with the hybrids on top.

Oh, and I knew it all along:
I Hate Oculus

It's a cool place. I like the drake idea. It just doesn't work.

The last boss doesn't seem especially hard to me, but there's no way to compensate for noobs through either gear, CC, or picking up slack. This means that either everyone plays properly (good luck with a PUG) or you fail over and over until the trash repops and everyone leaves.

I sure talked about goblins a lot in the past year.