I’m curious about your thoughts on some of the things I’ve done as special feature kinda stuff, so I put a poll on the left sidebar.

I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know what non-post things I’ve done, if any, you’d like as a regular Friday feature!

Thanks for your time, and have a great day, folks.

I want to give a thanks and shout out to Pugnacious Priest.

I did a little blog hopping from blog link to blog link, and along the way came across Pugnacious Priest for the first time.

Now, I gots me a 64 Shadow Priest, so I like Priest blogs in the first place, but I saw this post about How to make a quick and dirty blog or guild website banner image.

As many of you are aware, when I left Legatum Ignavis and raiding, I decided to remain in and open up the guild that me and my close friends have held for years, Sidhe Devils. It had been where our alts kept their home, it had some guild bank space to stash low level mats and give us a place to park our guys without clogging up ’serious’ guilds, you know. An alt guild.

Well, in opening it up to new members, we knew we needed a nice website, so Cassieann set up a guildportal site. And we would need some voice chat options for 5 mans, so we got a small Ventrilo server. (Thanks for the link to the vent server service, Matticus, I used your website link to go get the server. Their front end and quality seems to rock.)

This morning, I got an email saying that some, currently unknown, benefactor had paid to upgrade the guildportal website to a full feature site. Now, it wasn’t Cassie or I, so we have no idea who did it… but we certainly thank you.

In the process, I put two and two together… new paid-for guild website with forums… a post about how to make a quick and dirty banner image… hmmmm.

So I went and made one, and it took 5 minutes, no Photoshop like I used for my blog back in teh day, and it turned out very nice, IMO.

If you are in the position of wanting to make a banner image with text and borders for your blog or guild website, I heartily urge you to go and read Pugnacious Priests’ post and have fun with it… if I can do it, so can you!

Well, and other stuff too.

If you look over to the sidebar, there’s a link to my new Cafepress store.

The very first image is now up and available on a wide range of stuff.

Personally, I LOVE the image.

So you folks know the direction I’m taking the store, there WILL be nice “Big Bear Butt” logos or images available soon on various stuff, but I intend to do more than just have ‘advertise my blog for me, kthxbye’ stuff.

I mean, I do want to have a Big Bear Butt shirt. Frankly, I want to wear it myself. All the damn time. Everywhere. Okay, except church. Cassie would kill me.

But I also really want to have things in Cafepress that I would love to wear as a Feral Druid, and as a player of World of Warcraft. And maybe when I’m feeling in a catty mood.

So there will eventually be quite a few things on there.

For the first image, the first thing that came to my mind that I wanted to see was a shirt that would proudly proclaim to the whole world…

“I ain’t a tree, and I ain’t a chicken. I’m 100% Feral, baby, and damn proud of it.”

I hope you like it as much as I do, and I promise there will be more. 

But that means that, for a while there, maybe the whole first week, my contact form was live but not actually sending me your messages.

If you sent me a message, and you have not heard back from me, please send me another one. If you didn’t hear from, me it’s not cause I don’t like you. Honest!

I’m sorry for the pain in the big butt this may cause.

This comes out of a discussion I had with Cassie yesterday.

After my WoW Insider article on Threat came out, she read it, as she always does, to be supportive and let me know when I mispelled words or used the wrong phraseology. (I kid! I kid! Love you honey!)

So she read it, and then emailed me at work to let me know that she liked it, and that, even though she doesn’t raid, she understood most of what I was talking about and almost 75% of it made sense.

Which, for me, is a lot.

But it got me to thinking, because I know a lot of folks use the phrase ‘theorycrafter’ to describe what they do. SuraBear calls himself one right on his front page. And it’s a title that is well deserved.

Blizzard rarely, if ever, shares what math they are using internally to do things. Like, almost never. Their revelation of some of the math behind the new skills they announced for the Burning Crusade over a year ago was a marked departure for them.

So a new breed of adventurous investigator was born. A new kind of detective for a new kind of crime; those who test results in game using Combat Logs and repeatable situations to determine on their own the theory behind the math that Blizzard uses, and then share those theories with the rest of us.

Without the Adventurous Theorycrafter, our lives in game would be hell. Even now, people cling to old ideas that what loot drops from a boss is determined by arcane conjunctions of effects, such as what class the raid leader is when the first person zones into the instance, or what classes make up the raid, or other even more esoteric concepts.

I keep waiting for someone to tell me that his Black Swashbucklers’ Shirt is what made the Warrior Tier 4 Helm drop from Prince Malchazaar.

Anyway, the theorycrafters are awesome, and deserve the legends they carve out for themselves.

Me, I don’t think of what I do as theorycrafting. I don’t start off with a clean slate. I research the work of others first. I make assumptions. I hunt out countervailing arguments. I try to see what the thought amongst others is first, and then I lay out things to do in game to test, for myself, whether what I am being told matches what I myself see in game. That ain’t theorycrafting, it’s at best verification.

The special sauce I bring to my approach on these things isn’t a special love of math. I have to use it at work, but that doesn’t mean I want it in my home. Icky maths!

My approach comes from a life long love of playing pen and paper role playing games, and moving around frequently. Often, you are thrown together with new people in the service, and while there are certainly going to be two or three gamers, there will always be two or three folks that have ‘always wanted to play, but never knew anyone that did to get started’.

And it would fall on me, repeatedly, to take a vastly complicated rule system that I knew by heart, and break it down in such a way that I could get the rules across as a cohesive whole that could be comprehended and remembered after about one hour of explanation.

And that is all that I’m doing, except this system I don’t know by heart. So I’m going to a dozen different locations, I’m gathering tons of different opinions, I’m putting it all together to get an idea of how things are supposed to work, and then I go test things out in game. And then I try to write it up as one cohesive little article bringing it all together.

So the actual work is done by theorycrafters. I feel like I am contributing somewhat, in bringing a lot of different published theories and facts together into one place and giving it my testing and then my interpretation. But the hard work has been done before by others, and as has been said by those smarter than I…

I stand on the shoulders of giants.