I love this job sometimes.

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The downside to raiding with bloggers…

On the realm where I was born
Lived a gnome who sailed to sea
And he told us of his raids
In the land of submarines

So we sailed on to Vashj’ir
’til we found a naga queen
And we raided ‘neath the waves
In our yellow submarine

We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine

And our guild is all aboard
Many other guilds are just next door
And over Vent, we start to chat

(trumpets play over Vent chatter)

We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine

(Full speed ahead, Mr. Copperpot! Full speed ahead!)
(Full speed over here, sir!
… At least you nearly got my name right that time,
Captain Cloudkicker…)

As we swim in epic seas (epic seas),
Every one of us (every one) has all we need (has all we need!)
Replacing blues (lousy blues), and sharding greens (so many greens!)
In our yellow (yellow raiding!) submarine (submarine, haha!)

We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine

(fading)

We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine

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Raiding in a yellow submarine

We join the Christmas pantomime* The Stoppable Farce in mid flow…

Enter stage left Stop Stoppingtonforce, the affable Death Knight, and his Vanity Pet Cat. He’s carrying Haris Pilton’s Hole on the end of a large weapon slung over his shoulder.

Stop: Oh, puss, oh, sweet charming puss, with three main animations and no visible purpose, shall we ever reach Dalaran and find the streets paved with gold?

Puss: *does a cute idle animation and fails to respond*

Stop: oh, Pussy, I do love you so, but you are completely useless… Wait, what’s that ahead?

Enter stage right, two large, angry looking mobs (crowds, not quest cannon fodder…), gesticulating at each other on the road ahead. As the cacophony begins to wind down, we realise both groups are shouting insults at each other; more – it’s the same insult!

All: "You’re ruining the game! You’re ruining the game!"

Puss chases an invisible butterfly, while Stop looks on in horror.

Four individuals step forward, two from each side. They are all played by over-weight, middle-aged men in drag, with excessive make-up and bad wigs. Both pairs of outfits are identical, with slightly different colouring. Let’s call then, randomly (ahem) Casuals One and Two and Raiders One and Two.

Casual One: Them! They’re ruining the game! All that elitism and epeen!

Raider One: Them! They’re ruining the game with their sense of entitlement and welfare epics!

Raider One turns to look at the audience, cocks an eyebrow, and raises his skirt to reveal a large, comedy ePeen** below…

Casuals One and Two make comic expressions of shock. Suddenly, Casual Two turns as if hearing a distant voice.

Casual One: FTW! A healer! Now to chain random heroics and get my last piece of Tier 9!

Casual One fades away.

Raiders One and Two: They’re welfare Tier gear!

Audience and Casual Two: Oh no they’re not!

Raiders One and Two: Oh yes, they are!

Audience and Casual Two: Oh no they’re not!

(repeat until the audience show signs of suicidal boredom or playing Warhammer)

Then…
Raider Two fades away.

Stop (desperately): See, you are running 5 mans, too! Really, we’re all one big happy family!

Raider One: She’s just quit to play Dragon Age, you fool.

Casual Two: Oh no, she hasn’t!

Raider One punches Casual Two in the face, while Stop legs it away

After a few seconds, Stop crashes unexpectedly into the Narrator.

Stop: Oh, narrator, there you are. When can we expect Act Two to begin?

Narrator: Signs indicate that the door to Act Two will finally fall in 365 days.

Stop: Oh, bother.

To be continued… (possibly)

*Pantomime is (apparently) a very British Christmas theatre tradition, in which children’s fairy tales, or historical legends are played out with arch-villains, brave heroes (often played by very attractive young women playing handsome men – in tights), audience participation, and middle-aged men in extravagant and over-the-top drag making heavy sexual innuendo. This is, clearly, suitable Christmas entertainment for children and good, clean family fun. I have no idea why foreigners think Brits are sexually odd.

**Please find a way of making this acceptable to children while still being funny and lewd for adults. kthnxbai!

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Behold! A guest post from the inimitable Leafshine

I’m sure this has nothing to do with a guildie whose Scion had $500 $2800 worth of damage done to its bumper by hitting a raccoon… only to be informed he needed to get his car def capped if it couldn’t even tank a raccoon.

The Sidhe Devils Night Crew is a bit wacky.

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Because BBB asked for it

Spoiler alert for anyone thinking about it: Acer Aspire One AOD-150 + Kubuntu + Wine + WoW = a non-working WoW setup.

Wednesday night, after fiddling with it and failing pretty much all day, I gave in and finally bought a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium at the reduced education cost – it had been previously running the Windows 7 RC, it needed a legitimate OS anyhow. By midday Thursday I was reinstalling Windows onto my netbook using my mom’s new $700 Pentax camera, plus the 16 GB SDHC card from my DSi, as a cobbled-together USB drive. Oh, and I booted the Win7 DVD using UNetbootin, because my setup wasn’t epic enough yet.

So after maybe an hour or so, I had a fully-functioning netbook with its own proper OS again, and it would’ve been entirely capable of running WoW had I remembered to evacuate my WoW setup from Kubuntu. Whoops.

Oh, hey, no biggie, I’ll watch Persona: Trinity Soul instead. … Wait, you mean I left that on the Kubuntu drive as well? Damn it! Oh well, I can just download them from home.

Wait, what do you mean it’s going to take a bajillion hours to download from home? Oh hell, now I have to find new things to do. Good thing I planned for this eventuality and brought Persona 3 FES and Persona 4 home with me. So I spent pretty much the rest of my vacation playing those two, as indicated on my Backloggery.

Which led to me and Cas discussing Persona 4 on Twitter and concluding that even though she has the best followup in the game, Chie Satonaka cannot Galactic Punt Ameno-sagiri.

No matter what the picture that goes with this post may tell you.

Hope everyone had a good, or at least tolerable, holiday, and it’s good to be back.

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What I do when I’m not playing WoW: an anecdote

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Lil’ K.T. vs. Mr. Bigglesworth

• The Fist of Subtlety from a quest in Zul’drak, which simply reads: “Not at all.” I confess to laughing way too long upon reading this one, and wishing I had a class that could use fist weapons.
• Extinguish All Life, Yogg-Saron’s enrage timer. At 15 minutes, he simply wipes the raid. Not fair at all. However, it does do almost exactly what it says: “Extinguishes all life. Kaput.”
• However, Yoggy pales in comparison to Archimonde, who – if he can’t reach anybody to smack them around – starts giving everyone the finger. Specifically, the Finger of Death, which (in addition to being a nod to D&D) “strikes an enemy with the finger of death, inflicting 20000 shadow damage upon them, their children, and their children’s children.”

Those are just a few of my favorite examples – what’re yours?

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A little flavor

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Friday Flash: Pulp Wave Fiction

I am sure this topic has been covered, but among all my other fails I fail at searching.
I have noticed a string of my recent posts covered how I fail, often epically. I would like to see how others fail.
I think it is very good for newer players to see how those of us make dumb mistakes, even though we have been at this for quite a while.

Never let it be said I’m not a resource to others. Let’s see how badly I’ve failed, shall we?

• After the Great Talent Reset of 3.0, I spent 20 minutes wondering why I couldn’t summon my Felguard. At least I wasn’t alone in the confusion.
• You know, I’m noticing a trend. Just last week I took a long time trying to figure out what was missing from my bars when I respecced Unholy, then once I figured out it was Unholy Blight, I couldn’t figure out where the button was. Did they change it so badly that I needed to return to a trainer? Only after several rounds of the “open spellbook, open talent sheet” dance did I actually mouse over the now-passive talent.
• My ghoul was once a continuous source of fail for me. I used to have a pet attack macroed into most of my strikes. That is, until I figured out that if I didn’t have a target (say, because my current target had died), and I was aimed towards the next pack of trash, my ghoul would promptly leap into the next pack of trash with a sort of glee.
• I also used to do this with my felguard in Kara constantly. I remain amazed that my guild at the time didn’t hunt me down and kill me.
• Speaking of that guild, my recruitment story was a fail. Y’see, leveling up, I had actually completely skipped Hellfire Ramparts (which is really not hard to do at all). So when I got invited to do Heroic Ramparts with the people who would later be my future guildmates, I of course didn’t know about Omor the Unscarred’s Bane of Treachery. So I may have sorta-kinda caused a wipe by getting it cast on me and standing directly in front of the tree druid. To be fair, no one told me not to stand in front of the tree.
• There were also a few times in Kara that I failed to watch where I was going and fell off ledges, usually into the library. Whoops.

However, I never – ever – moved in a Flame Wreath. That, after all, would blow up the raid.

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Shared Topic: Fails

Incidentally, in case you’re wondering if it was a problem with this particular druid, it was not: he tanked two heroics for me later and did a fantastic job – one of the best bear tanks I’ve had the luxury of smacking mobs around with.

Someone should please tell our guild’s co-leader about this new and startling development in what druids can’t do, because apparently he’s been laboring under the mistaken impression that bears can tank. Thank goodness a random person on the internets has corrected us all!

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Durids, apparently, are in fact not 4 fite.