It’s been a funny weekend, all things considered. A weekend worth a rambling, stupid, tired Bearwall.

It started out with a rather unexpected bonus, and then kinda drifted from there.

I’ve been playing on lower level characters for weeks now, having fun on the Warrior here, the Paladin there, just messing about. It’s been fun.

Along the way, the Rogue that I was leveling hit 80, and the “hey, I’m 80, I should get gear” impulse kicked in, starting a frenzy of Heroics.

That started a cascade effect.

Running on the Rogue just reminded me of the good times on my Hunter, who had never quite finished getting geared from Heroics.

Running Heroics on my Hunter just reminded me of the good times on my Paladin, who REALLY had crap gear on his Ret spec. Most of his early emblems went to tanky stuff. Blech.

Once on my Paladin, I was reminded that, hey, I like my Druid too.

That began a weekend long process of flipping back and forth between the two in Heroics.

That brings us to this last Friday.

I hopped on my Druid to tank a quick one, and what should I get but Heroic Pit of Saron, immediately followed by the Battered Hilt dropping, and my winning the roll.

Hurm, as Rorshach might monotone.

What to do, what to do.

The Battered Hilt sells for around 7500g on my server at the moment, so it’s 7500g sitting there… but, I don’t care about gold. If I need it, I sell some of the tons of mats my various crafters collect. Never really had a problem with gold yet. Sure, I can’t just buy a Tundra Mammoth out of pocket, and I don’t have a motorcycle, but that’s okay. If I really wanted either THAT bad, I’d have gotten it already.

I was going to get a motorcycle for my Engineering Hunter, but she won the roll on a VOA Mammoth a long, long time ago, a nice three seater model, and after that, it kinda seemed like a moot point.

Back to the Battered Hilt… if I use it, who to use it on? And what spec?

This was an actual crunch time for me, because it caused me to really think about what I enjoy doing in the game, how I felt about playing the game, and who I wanted to invest in with a big ticket item for the long term.

I thought of my Druid first, of course, but I have the Orca Hunter’s Harpoon on him, and I really like the way it looks. From a pure graphics standpoint, it’s the awesmome. I don’t like what the weapons Feral Druids get from the Battered Hilt look like, despite how awesome all that Expertise is.

But, but… the weapon would have been better! Yeah, but this was the first realisation to come out of my thinking… I really, no I mean really, don’t care about stats beyond Heroics at this point. Faced with the guaranteed big time tasty weapon for someone, I decided against stats…

And went with looks.

My Ret Paladin has the big honking axe from Heroic Pit of Saron. It’s a good axe. Thing is… I don’t like the looks of the axe.

The Tyrannical Beheader is one bitchin’ looking weapon… but meh. My Paladin is SO over axes this season.

But do I really like my Paladin enough to replace a perfectly good, powerful two handed glowey axe with a two handed sword valued at 7500 gold, no matter how smokin’ hawt?

I thought about it a long time, and realized… yes, I guess I do. It’s only money, and screw stats.

Plus, hey, I’ve heard thats a real fun quest chain. That’s a bigger draw than whatever weapon I eventually get.

The second thing I internalized is, I like my Druid for Tanking and Healing. I like my Hunter for ranged DPS. And I like my Paladin for in-your-face melee DPS.

Any other character I play is, inevitably, going to end up being a good time leveling, before being dumped on the trash heap of MMO history.

Oh yeah, and being a Profession bot.

I did the entire Battered Hilt quest chain, and when I finished I had a massive two-handed Quel’Delar with Berserking enchanted on it courtesy of a rather melancholy player. :)

I was, initially, quite pleased.

I was so pleased, so heady with that ‘new gear’ smell, that I dropped the 8 Primordial Saronite I’d been stockpiling to someday craft my Druid a pair of pants to cover my big bear butt, and instead had a pair of stainless steel britches forged instead.

They chafe in places that I shall not mention.

It was quite nice to sit and enjoy the feeling of having significant gear upgrades on a character I used to like to play.

Alas, like any other toy, there’s only so much fun to be had looking at it sitting on the shelf.

I decided to take that new gear out on the road for a spin, see what it could do. Open it up, feel the wind through my fur… um, hair, and glory in ridiculously oversized male compensation, er, I mean brandish my big honking sword, a mighty weapon that requires two hands to lift, no, no, that’s not much better, perhaps I shall leave that line of descriptive narrative, hmmm?

It was at that moment in time when the weekend kinda went downhill. At least it started on a high note.

Now, I’m not going to let this just degenerate into pissing and moaning.

I did some runs using LFD, queuing mostly as melee DPS, and gee whiz, it took a while to get groups.

I’m sure you never expected that.

When I did get groups, there was a pretty even mix of groups that failed due to people way undergeared and not playing well, or people way overgeared and not playing well, and the asshattishness such things see as a result.

When there were no problems, when the runs would go smoothly, which I’d say realistically were about 40% of the time, the accompanying silence and curtness would remind me of playing Unreal Tournament Onslaught in bot mode. Fun group play, but you feel like you’re the only actual person in a field of automatons.

There were about a solid 10% of runs that had friendly people, people who met adversity in some way, rose above it, and became groups that were fun to be a part of, if for no other reason than it was nice to know that for once I was playing with people that seemed friendly and mature.

But the worst of the runs… they do stand out, don’t they? They stand out for what they tell us about ourselves, and what we choose to do.

I’ll grab one example out of the grab bag, because as a proponent of Feral Druid Tanks, this guy just pissed me off.

I happened to pop on my Druid to heal one, since I’ve mostly forgotten what healing is like.

I got a random Heroic Gundrak with a Feral Druid tank. The Feral Druid had over 6k GS, and by the time we were done with the snake boss and hitting the Elemental Boss trash, I had begun to realize that this tank, by my standards, just sucked. Bad.

Why? Because either from lack of skill or lack of give a shit, he wasn’t bothering to actually play as a tank.

First example? I spent most of the first boss with 4+ snakes on me because he went after the boss rather than clear the trash first.

Apparently, holding aggro is for lesser geared tanks that actually give a shit. I spent the entire short time healing myself and everyone else while the other DPS shot things off of me, bless them. The tank, of course, was busy being a 6k GS rockstar out front.

All the snake adds that came in after the boss aggroed? On me as well. 

Really? Just, really?

So yeah, I’m thinking to myself, self, what are the chances that this guy just happened to get so many prime pieces of feral tanking loot in high end raids that he’s an (actually 6.1k GS) rockstar, but he doesn’t know how to tank his raid groups? What are the odds he’s really normally kitty DPS and just stupid at tanking?

Maybe 50/50, I guess.

Either way, he sucks, and it’s irritating.

But here is realization #3; the runs I have with people possessing a gearscore of over 4800 are far worse than those with people in 4000 to 4400. They are more painful, there are more deaths, there is a lot more bitchiness and general pissyness, and people display a complete and utter lack of skill at the most amazing times.

Cassie, having long ago decided the same thing, tells me that I need to start queueing with my weapons and shoulders unequipped, cutting down on my apparent gearscore, so I’ll have a better chance at running with lower ranked players.

Why is that? Because she thinks, and I’m starting to agree, that one of the biggest irritants we see is that people with high raiding gearscores are arrogant, think they are ‘the shit’, feel like they are too good for Heroics with ‘the scum’, and yet do it to get their two Frost emblems each day anyway.

So, they’re slumming, resentful of it, and phone it in, playing with their heads up their ass, and frankly sucking at it. Gear does not equal skill, and I have seen countless 4400 GS tanks do a mind-blowingly superior job tanking compared to the 5.5k GS idiots I see more often.

I agree with her… I’d rather play with people that are still cautious and trying to play with skill because they think their gear sucks and are trying their best so as to, ugh, not offend the high gearscores that are deigning to carry them.

You think I’m kidding?

Let me finish talking about that one Gundrak example.

We are just hitting the trash in the room outside boss numero two, the purple goo elemental that inhabits the stone statue, when our masterful Feral Druid tank decides, after a run of dead silence, that he has wisdom he’d like to share with the class.

Specifically, he starts talking shit about the Warlock in the group. Just, out of nowhere.

First, he announces, “Mr Warlock. Stop using Rain of Fire. It sucks. Only Seed of Corruption.”

Now, before anyone has a chance to respond to these words of Heroic Gundrak wisdom, while still sucking as a tank and I’m healing everyone frantically while the Death Knight is pulling one of the mobs the tank ignored off of me, he continues, with the flat announcement ”crap DPS pisses me off.”

What, crap DPS pisses him off? Well, eating mobs in my branches pisses me off, bad tanking pisses me off, bad FERAL DRUID tanking freaking enrages me, and I’m not pissing and moaning about it in group, now am I?

And then, right on the heels of that stunning bit of personal sharing, he announces that “I’m sick of playing with crap DPS.”

Now, I’m pretty confused. I hadn’t noticed anything wrong with  the run so far except really crappy tanking, to be honest. Stuff is dying mighty fast, ain’t that what DPS is supposed to do? They’re even grabbing the mobs off me that the tank is ignoring, I’d rate them as a bunch of fine chaps, they’re all right in my book.

I glance at the DPS Meter, maybe there is someone that ain’t pulling their weight.

I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one, since I had JUST been in a Heroic Halls of Reflection where a Warrior gleefully announced he was still leveling his weapon skill… he was at 320 at the time. During most of that HHoR run, the warrior averaged 352 DPS, so yeah… I could understand a little aggravation if we had another one of those types of situations.

Oh, that HHoR run? Nervous Tank with 4400 GS, Healer with about the same, my Paladin, a Mage and the aforementioned Warrior… it was one of the smoothest HHoR runs I’ve ever been on, thank you very much. Not a single 5k+ GS to be seen (except me), and yet us poor little peons managed to do JUST fine… unlike the runs in HHoR I had later in the weekend with the 5500 GS tank and healer combo that couldn’t make it past the first boss.

That’s not evidence of anything, by the way, unless you want to think of it as my experiences in reinforcing why I increasingly don’t want to play with strangers in Heroics with really high gear.

now, after that build up, where do you think that Warlock came out on the DPS meters?

He was indeed at the bottom, with a measly 3000 DPS.

You know and I know that 3000 DPS isn’t exactly rocking the ICC hard mode charts, right?

But this isn’t ICC. This is Heroic Gundrak. Heroic GUNDRAK.

It’s not even ToC, FoS, PoS or HoR. The four instances where gear over iLevel 200 drop.

It’s Heroic Gundrak.

I don’t care how you measure it, 3k DPS as the lowest on the chart doesn’t suck.

A couple of the other players, not even the Warlock, talk for the first time in the run, one saying that he wouldn’t exactly call 3000 DPS “crap”, and the other saying “asking a Warlock not to use Rain of Fire is like asking a Hunter not to use Volley, lol” which I thought was pretty damn funny. 

I was initially busy, because you know… getting eaten and having to heal frantically and all.

But I find the manual dexterity to chime in with, “The only problem I’ve seen so far is you aren’t bothering to tank, unless I’m supposed to be tanking all these mobs as part of your master plan.”

The tank, without a further word, runs forward, pulls the boss, hits it once and drops group.

Well, that’s show us, won’t it! That certainly put us in our place.

Without a break in stride, the Death Knight went all out while the Warlock sicced his pet on the boss, we easily killed the thing, and there were no deaths, thank you very much.

Then we requeue for a tank, and laugh at his idiot fail butt. He couldn’t even handle a proper seeing to!

We wait for about 30 seconds before I say “I can switch to my tank spec”, at the same time as the Death Knight says HE can switch to tank… and we get a new tank anyway.

30 whole seconds.

We get a measly 5500 GS tank, who lols at us for wiping, and when we explain the tank abandoned us in mid pull, he kinda metaphorically shrugged his shoulders, hitched his suspenders and away we went.

The rest of the run went smooth as silk, and hey, nobody said anything the rest of the run. We even ran the extra boss, which is nearly unheard of.

That’s just one example of the kind of thing that’s been eating away at the back of my brain, making me nibble around the edges of realization #4.

It’s not yet a full blown realization, it’s still a burning question. 

Why?

No, really, why do I continue to play this game?

I don’t like other people’s snotty little kids. I just don’t.

I don’t put up with that kind of bullshit in person, so why should I put up with it on the internet? Serious business? Oh, please. Cry more? Yeah, keep talking that brave internet talk.

I keep telling myself that the number of really nice, mature people that play the game are the silent majority, and the asshats just seem more prevalent because they make SURE they make their presence felt.

It’s always a comforting thought to hold dear. Sure, this guy may be an assclown, but most folks in the game are nice, pleasant, mature folks it’d be a pleasure to quaff Guinness with.

But, is that true?

Are most people in the game nice? Or pleasant? Or mature?

Over the weekend, I ran into two players in a run, both from a guild called something similar to “Sofa king reh todd edd”. That one stands out in my mind as almost demanding a bitchslap, but it’s certainly not an isolated incident.

Others I know told me of similar naming delights they experienced in their pugs, but fortunately my memory has blocked it out.

There is something I’ve long held to be true, and I’m starting to wonder how it applies in an MMO.

“You can’t depend on anyone else to make you happy. In a relationship, in life, in a game, whatever, only you can make you happy. Other people can try and bring you up or down, but whether or not you’re happy all comes down to you.”

I get cranky at times, and take a shot at an asshat or two, or wonder at the idiocy I see around me, but when it comes to having fun in the game, I’ve never had a problem finding the fun. If I’m not having fun at the moment… I move my butt until I’m back in the fun. I don’t expect the game to do it for me, to present me with a covered platter, under which there shall be found ‘teh fun’. Nope, if I ain’t having fun, I go looking for it.

I don’t expect other people in the game to make me happy, or be my good time. I expect to have to seek out things that I find fun, and my good mood has to come from my own point of view.

Realization #4 is that I really have to re-examine what I want out of the game, and how I spend my time… because more and more, max level activities with strangers, any strangers, are just NOT it. 

And from that realization comes some corollaries.

For example, if I ain’t gonna play at max level anymore, why bother getting upgrades for level 80 play in the first place?

I have been riding that edge already, spending every Emblem on my toons to get Heirloom gear to make leveling new alts a smooth experience.

But aside from a kick ass weapon… do I really need Heirlooms? What’s the rush to get to 80? All I’ll be doing is putting another character on the shelf and starting another one.

I still really enjoy leveling new character classes, building new adventures around a new persona. That’s still a lot of fun, and nobody talks about how they raped someone else in PvP when you’re soloing in Barrens with all the chat channels turned off.

What I’m thinking, is maybe I should restart on another server entirely, much like Elystia did.

Just pull up stakes, start somewhere new, and if I want to help a poor low level alt out, I can make a Death Knight to go do some quests in Outlands, pull in a few gold.

Make a new character, go out without Heirlooms, and see the World of a different server.

And before I take that first step… shut off every global chat channel in the game. Make it the equivalent of the biggest single player game filled with random bots ever seen.

I’m getting burnt out. Burnt out on playing a game where the misfits are starting to outnumber the people I’d like to hoist a few with.

It’s too bad that Quel’Delar can’t be Bind on Account, and scale in power like an Heirloom.

In fact, it’s too bad all the Legendaries don’t do that. That would make them oh so glorious to have, a true joy to play with rqather than an epeen bragging right on your trophy room wall? If your Legendary scaled and was Bind on Account? That would be just too cool to see on a level 1 in the Exodar.

It’s probably something everybody’s already on top of, but I thought it’d be fun to trade our methods for managing cooldowns and arranging our button bars.

Why? Because it’s something everybody has to do, and some folks might have ways they like that someone else will think is an interesting idea to try.

For example…

I was playing my Warrior the other night (Prot spec while leveling) and noticed I had a neat ability called Concussion Blow on my toolbar.

Okay, so I get a single target stun. That’s cool. My Rogue got a lot of use out of that little button while leveling.

But wait! When I got that ability and stuck it on my button bar, I put it where it’s a little away from my ‘use all the time rotation’ abilities. It’s over in the area of my button bar where special abilities with long cooldowns get placed and saved for rainy days.

See, when I lay out my button bars, I use the default layout… with all ‘extra’ button bars enabled. Left, Right, and both the ones on the side. I do that so on borked/broken addon patch days, I am mostly unaffected. Vanilla WoW cured me of UI changing addons forever.

I arrange the center of the bottom bar with the abilities I use most often, and then radiate outwards from there in both directions for the lesser used abilities. Typically, pulling/initial abilities radiate outwards to the left, while healing or taunting/aggro control abilities move out to the right. I’ll start the pull on the far left, gravitate to the center for the most ufrequently used abilities, and when I need to pop something special dart the mouse to the right. If it’s utility or situational, OR cross-form, then it goes right above. I’m looking at YOU Druid and Priest!

The abilities that complement them, or should be triggered first, or are situational/utility typically go on the bar right above, again starting in the middle for most used/fastest cooldown and working outwards to both sides.

This leaves me with a small area in the middle of the button bar where I’ll be spending most of my time, and a relatively short distance for mouse travel no matter what other ability I need at a moment’s notice.

I did that automatically, because first, I like clicking buttons, and the more alts I make, the more I click buttons. I just don’t use number keys for abilities on all these alts. On my Druid, sure, I use number key shortcuts. But not the alts, thank you very much.

Second, when I did a time analysis study on the ‘pick and place’ SMT equipment I used to program, it was very clear that this method was the second most time effective technique in picking and placing surface mount computer components from feed trays.

Lemme ’splain.

In building modern circuit boards, you use what are called surface mount components. Rugged components are still soldered ‘through hole’ style, connectors and toggle switches and big doodads, but the rest are small, flat bottomed components that are shipped in reels. You load these reels up by the hundreds into a pick and place machine, one reel per part. So, you’ve got a long bank of hundreds of reels of computer parts. In the center of the machine is a fixed pick and place head, basically a vacuum system attached to teeny nozzles that can move up and down and rotate, with camera inspection.

The entire rack of parts reels is on moving rails. The pick and place vacuum head is fixed in the center. So, when you program a machine to build a circuit board, you have a list of all the parts that will be populating the board. You have sizes, shapes, part #s, etc. You want to create a build program that will populate a single circuit board in the shortest time possible, because the board is going along on a conveyor one at a time, and the longer you take to place parts per board, the fewer possible boards you can build. It’s a natural choke point.

So, say you’ve got 1200 parts to place on a single circuit board. You’ve got maybe 230 different part numbers. You use 250 of one particular part, 80 of the next, 63 of the next, and so on.

In this second fastest technique, the first thing you do is analyze what the most frequently used parts are. You want to minimize travel time of that big honking rail full of reels of parts. A single parts reel can be from 1 inch to 5 inches across depending on the size of the part in it, and if you’ve got hundreds of reels on a machine, travel time sliding that rail back and forth to get from one reel to the next to present a part under the pick and place head is… slow.

So it’s all about minimizing rail/reel movement as much as possible. Orrr…. minimizing mouse movement as much as possible? Eh?

Now, you might think that the best way to do it is stick all of your most used reels on one end, and slowly work your way down the row.

The problem with that is, when you optimize your pick speed, you find that you have to take ergonomics of rail motion into account… and also the fact that frequently, in order to minimize PCB board travel (that thing you’re sticking the parts on, which itself has to move around for the fixed pick and place head to stick parts down), you’ll start populating one section of the board… then when it’s mostly full, move on to populating another PCB board section.

You end up wanting to come back to those most frequently used parts throughout the course of the board build, not just blow through them all up front. If you stick them all at one end of the reel rail, then after a while you go all the way down one end, get a part, and all the way back to the first, over and over again.

So, when in a situation where you have several parts (buttons), some used more frequently than others, some with longer delays before able to be used again, and some you need to come back to more often than others, it’s more time effective to put your heaviest hitters in the center of the rail (bar), with the lesser used parts (buttons) going further and further out in each direction based on frequency of use, linked part associations and length of cooldown. Err, pick speed.

I’ve done a lot of time studies on programs like that, and it just works real well. So, if you’re, basically, a clicker, it’s a great default system for button placement. :)

Now… when you really crunch the numbers, this is, as I said, the second fastest button clicker technique I know.

You want fast? You take rotation sequence into account, and you streamline those sequences to make the mouse flow smooth across the board, then mirror it for secondary button placement about the bar. I actually did that with my 969 rotation for my Paladin tank button arrangement. Since you’ve got a fixed cooldown sequence for the rotation, it only makes sense to optimize placement based on mouse movement and associate buttons with similar cooldowns.

Anyway, for me, a button clicker with lots of alts, that’s what I do. And a lot more information than you care to know, I’m sure.

Where I am going with this behind the scenes look at the way I setup my button bars/UI, is that I had initially placed Concussion Blow with the ’long cooldown, to be used in tight spots only’ abilities on my bar, up on the top bar and far to the right of bottom center.

Re-familiarizing myself with the abilities caused me to take another look at Concussion Blow.

The cooldown is only 30 seconds.

Well, dip me in mustard and call me a weiner if that wasn’t a bad mistake, pardner.

I typically break cooldown abilities into sub categories.

There is the “this is my oh shit button, to be saved for when it’s REALLY an oh shit situation”, and then there are the “this is pretty good, but the cooldown is long enough to only break it out on boss fights, and trash fights when I can expect the cooldown to be up when the next boss fight done cometh”.

And then there are the cooldowns that go into the sub category of “short enough to pop every bloody fight at least once in the beginning.”

A few examples?

Enhancement Shamans have one of the medium cooldowns, boss fight plus early trash – Shamanistic Rage. Geez, a 1 minute cooldown sounds bad, but it’s up for 15 seconds and gives you just tons of mana on top of the damage reduction. I pop that sucker all the time.

Feral Druids have Survival Instincts, which is great but on a 3 minute cooldown. That’s definitely long enough to make it an “oh shit,” held in reserve button. But, it’s also complementary to another long cooldown, Frenzied Regeneration, which is, hey, on a 3 minute cooldown.

Now, one common method of getting the most out of that 3 minute long cooldown is to only use those two together. You pop Survival Instincts, which raises your maximum health, and then you pop Frenzied Regeneration, which bases healing per point of Rage off of max health AT THE TIME IT’S ACTIVATED. So, SI boosts Healing Per Second/Healing Per Rage of FR when triggered first, for the entire duration of FR.

A few folks I know, during boss fights, actually don’t do this. What they do is stagger the cooldowns. Instead of one really big huge whomping heal with a 3 minute dead time, they space it out, taking the reduced survivability benefits of only having one effect up at a time, in exchange for having them up twice as often. 1.5 minutes and pop, 1.5 minutes and pop… If all you need is a little ‘oomph’ to help your healers out, why drop the big bomb when a well placed single shot will do?

But what about Barkskin? Barkskin is right on the edge, isn’t it? It’s a 1 minute cooldown, so if you’re doing fairly middle of the road content, heroics and easy raids, it’s no problem to incorporate it into a macro that pops it whenever it’s off cooldown. It’s not on the global cooldown, so no worries on working it in. 100% uptime. Doing this means it’s uptime is maximized, so you’re getting it’s benefits and saving your healers’ mana as much as possible for the long term fight over the course of a run.

BUT… 1 minute is long enough, and Barkskin’s 20% damage reduction is powerful enough, that if you’re raiding something serious you most likely want it OFF a macro so you can pop it in sync with a boss attack, perfectly timing that 20% damage reduction for when it’ll do you the most good. Like, say, when the entire raid is taking massive damage, and you want to give the healer on YOU the chance to ignore you for a few seconds to help keep the squishies alive.

The trade off, of course, is then you’ve got another button to remember to pop during the trash fights, and that might lead to suboptimal usage and reduced overall uptime.

Umm, wah.

Oh, wait.

Anyway, I wanted to bring it up all up to see if I could inspire you to share your own thoughts on how you like to arrange your abilities, what your philosophy behind it may be, maybe even what UI addons you just couldn’t live without, and how you like to control your cooldowns.

And to leave you with this one, key point…

The only truly bad use of a long cooldown ability is when you save it for a rainy day… and then never use it all when it might have saved your butt.

Practise using them! Much better to use them all the time and sometimes have them on cooldown when you’d like them than to never use them at all!

If you use them all the time, and get used to using them, then after a while you can back off and use them more strategically.

But use them!

Last year, on November 14th, quite a few of us within the WoW community took part in what we called the Raid for the Cure.

It was an in-game event for both factions on the Kael’thas-US server intended to increase awareness of the importance of early testing for breast cancer.

A lot of wonderful people, including many of my readers at the time, all got together that Saturday afternoon and took part in the event. It was an amazing experience to be a part of.

All cheesy BS aside, I know that I felt really choked up by how many people came out to take part in the run across the realms, and wore Pink Mageweave shirts and /danced and generally had a great time together.

Several people took the time to whisper me during the event, and email me both before and after the event, to share with me their own personal stories of how breast cancer had touched their lives, and how they were taking part in the run as a way to once again feel closer to the person or in some cases people in their lives that breast cancer had taken from them.

Being a part of something like that, even for just one day, really reminds me why the ”massively multiplayer” part of this game makes such a difference. We do have the power, all of us together, to transcend the programmed intent of the game and make of it something else, something with great personal meaning for each us, if we decide we want to.

And then we go back to the serious business of smacking Arthas upside his head.

I was asked yesterday by Kit in an email if we intended doing another Raid for the Cure again this year, a RftC2.

Sort of, kinda, but not really.

Yes, we do intend to try and organize a charitable event in-game across both factions on the Kael’thas-US server.

What we are not doing is continuing with the Raid for the Cure theme for a second year.

Last year, we had a very personal reason for organizing the Raid for the Cure. Julie’s diagnosis, and her battle with breast cancer, caused within us a desire to show our support for her. It was a personal cause, not a general one.

This year, Cassie and I want to show our support for a different cause, one that has intense personal meaning to our family, one that is really never far from our thoughts.

Our own personal lives have been touched, very deeply, by Heart Disease.

Cassie’s maternal grandmother died of complications arising from her battle with heart disease on June 4, 2007, and within less than three weeks, her father had passed away very suddenly from heart disease as well on June 21st.

Cassie was devastated by this, she was just torn apart. I really don’t have the words to describe how close her relationship was with her father, a wonderful, caring, loving man. He was such an incredibly warm-hearted man, I felt so welcomed by him into his home and the incredibly warm extended family that he had helped nurture, that even within the brief time that I knew him, I have only ever felt pride in choosing to take her family’s name instead of keeping my own when Cassie and I married.

The biggest factor that caused Cassie to begin playing WoW was as an attempt to find a means to distract herself from her grief at her father’s passing, and though several years have passed, it’s been clear to see that her grief remains as fresh today as it was when he passed years ago.

That is why this year we’d like to organize an in-game event meant to heighten awareness of the risks of heart disease, and to be a time of remembrance and celebration of the lives of those of us we loved, and still miss, that have been taken from us by heart disease.

It’s a very personal cause for us, and I know that I would feel joy in thinking that I had done something, however small, in helping to support organizations that are working to find solutions.

What we’d like to do, starting now when there are still months to go before October/November, is to ask for volunteers who would be willing to work with Cassie and I in planning the event, organizing it, and running it when it happens.

The event we will work towards and take part in will be on the Kael’thas-US server, both Alliance and Horde side. If someone likes the idea, and wants to organize one of their own on a European server, I’ll certainly be happy to advertise it on my blog if you let me know the details.

We’ve got some ideas, but now is the time to really get a plan going, and we can’t do it without your support.

This event is going to completely driven by the individuals that want to come forward and take an active part, a true community activity, and everyone that wants to participate in the planning stages or wish to offer their services as event volunteers are not only welcome, but needed!

So if you’re interested in taking part in this with us, with a planned event date somewhere in the end of October, or early November, please email me at tigerlordgm AT yahoo DOT com.

I can tell you one thing… Cassie pointed out that the Red Linen Shirts look quite attractive, and the mats are certainly a lot easier to come by than the Pink Mageweave ones. Cassie told me she could see a vision of the event, and a scene of dozens of players wearing bright red shirts, forming the shape of a big old heart in the middle of Barrens. Is she the only one that sees that vision?

Completely non-WoW post, nothing whatsoever to do with WoW.

A disclaimer, for the short attention span ooh shiny TL;DR audience… in this post, BBB goes bitch, bitch, bitch. I’m still trying to figure out of there was anything of value in this to anyone but me. But what the hell, here goes.

~ o ~

I like reading science fiction, and I like reading fantasy. I also like detective fiction, superhero comics, military adventure, action adventure, dramas, in fact I like books in quite a few different categories.

If you nodded along with that statement and didn’t see anything wrong with it, than it’s probably just me that has this grumpy old man problem with how I look at things. You’re probably going to think I’m insane. That’s okay, I think the same thing often enough.

See, I like to READ.

What I’m most comfortable reading are books. Books are portable. They don’t take batteries. If I drop one in a puddle, I’m not out a couple hundred bucks; I’m out a book I can pick up again at a local bookstore. I can take the book with me when I eat lunch, and I can leave it in the front seat of my car in the sure and certain knowledge that 99.999% of thieves will not break the windows of my car to steal it.

There is always that 0.001% chance you get a thief that wants to bring a book home to his/her kids; I’m willing to take those odds.

Sometimes the books have pictures, sometimes not. Sometimes the books are fictional, sometimes not.

Regardless, I like to read. Heinlein once wrote that he had it real bad; he’d read the used newspaper that was used to hold fish and chips if nothing else was available. Yeah, I know EXACTLY what he meant.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve actually become aware that books, those things I enjoy reading, are pre-segregated into categories. Books when they are published are carefully judged by others, and grouped together under category labels.

Sure, that’s obvious. It’s hard to imagine it being any other way. What in the heck can I possibly find in such an innocuous fact to be pissy about?

I’m going to be pissy about categories and segregation in general, but I’m also going to hit up the two biggest boxes that make my flesh writhe.

Science Fiction and Fantasy.

When I was a kid, those were two distinct categories. Science Fiction was one category, and Fantasy was another.

At that point, it was already much too late. The battle, if there ever was one, was long since lost.

What is the Keyser Söze quote? “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” 

Another applicable quote, often attributed to Edmund Burke; “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Well, in my opinion the greatest disservice ever done to open-minded readers was to allow people to create boxes (categories), assign labels to the boxes, and then judge each book for us, slapping a label on it before cramming them in their box and slamming the lid shut. A place for each book, and each book in it’s own proper place.

I say allow… as in, it had to start sometime, and that was the only time people had a chance to stand up and say, NO! It’s either fiction, or it ain’t. Any other category is subjective, judgmental, and in the eye of the beholder.

But it’s been too late for as long as I’ve been alive. It just took me a long, long time to notice the long term effects.

After that fait accompli, getting books categorized, the mopping up operations got under way, and have never stopped… people passing judgment on which book deserves to go where.

“Is this worthy of being in the fiction section, where serious works by important minds are gathered together? No! Into the Science Fiction box it goes with the other fairy tales and flights of fancy. Just keep that trash away from the serious literary works like The Great Gatsby.”

I did my best to make my point there with a sledge hammer. :)

Can you make a point with a blunt object? I’m willing to give it a try. If not, at least I can mangle similes so bad I make ‘em cry.

Here’s where I’m coming from with this, and my attitude incorporates elements of “the times, they are a’changing”, grumpy old man get off my lawn type stuff.

First off, I am the ultimate egalitarian. I believe that there is no such thing as someone that is suitable to decide FOR me what I should or should not be allowed to read and consider.

That belief is burned into my bones and blood, and informs everything else about me. Control of knowledge is, in my opinion, a direct attempt to control not just what people think, but HOW they think. Everyone should have an equal opportunity to read, to learn, to consider, and to decide for themselves what they think about anything under the sun.

If you are of the opinion, as so many folks seem to be, that there are some people that just need to be told what to do, that are good for earning a paycheck and not much else, the great unwashed, the lower or middle classes, the cows requiring shephards to point the way, and that above them are the elite thinkers guiding the engine of progress… if you think of people in terms of how productive they are in serving as fuel for the great engine of progress, and once someone is too old or inform to produce, whay are we still feeding them? Well, you’re not going to like me if you meet me, I’ll leave it at that. You don’t want to have me start looking you up and down and begin questioning publicly your ‘right’ to consider yourself one of the elite, let alone pinning you down as to what you provide to society in general, and humanity in particular, that justifies you getting free oxygen. Trust me. If you can judge others as being beneath you, I feel fine in judging YOU. No worries on my conscience at all for ripping you a new one.

Freedom of choice, freedom to accept responsibility for your actions, and freedom to suffer the consequences are also built into my attitudes as well.

All clear? Let’s go.

When I was a child of elementary age, I had available to me one of the greatest gifts possible. I didn’t know enough then to appreciate it fully, not the way I do now. But I had the gift, thanks to some beautiful tax paying citizens, and I used it just the same.

The public middle school I attended in downtown Miami, Florida had a school library. A large school library. A freaking HUGE school library.

In what way am I measuring size? Why, comparatively, of course, the same time honored technique I trust is still in use by boys in locker rooms everywhere. 

In my case, I’ve toured some schools and seen some of the libraries in the area here in Minnesota, and they are… well, ludicrous. Pathetic. Mediocre. Miniscule. Marginalized.

The school libraries up here are f’ing shameful. They show all the care, thought and consideration you’d give to what trash can to stick in your second spare bathroom.

“Trash can? Got it, check.”

Same apparent care given to the school libraries.

“Does the school have a library? Room with books in, check!”

Not in my middle school as a child.

The middle school I attended, which as I recall was for 6 – 9th grade students, with High School covering grades 10 – 12, was huge. To handle the population of the middle of Miami, it’s probably not surprising. Massive sports fields, basketball courts, gyms and band rooms and just, holy cow. Big. And the High School! Damn.

We didn’t have cliques, we had the kind of gang wars you see in TV shows and laugh at as being impossible. No, they’re not, not when you get big enough class sizes, thank you. You put enough kids in one place with minimal possible adult supervision, and the Lord of the Flies becomes more than a book on a required reading list somewhere.

Well, along with everything else, the library was also super sized. And, believe it or not, the gangs didn’t often venture into it’s cavernous space. Perhaps they were afraid that the concentrated power of so much knowledge would cause their heads to explode.

I often wondered if it would, actually. Kinda like matter and anti-matter colliding. Gang kids and libraries. Boom!

This school library had an immense fiction section, of which I partook the way a starving man might launch himself at a Ritz cracker being carried off by ants.

I want to note here; a fiction section. Not a science fiction section, or a fantasy section, or a romance section or military or Judy Bloom style episodic or whatever.

Just fiction. Everything that wasn’t non-fiction went HERE in this big section of stacks.

Omigod, how the hell did anyone ever find something to read? I know, right? It must have been impossible to actually find a book in there!

Amazingly enough, I was able to find books. Granted, I did not know what pre-assigned categories the secret masters of the universe had previously assigned them to; I had to wing it, and pick stuff to read based on how their book jacket blurbs sounded. Sometimes, I went nuts and picked based on cover illustration.

Here’s the crazy part; I found out that there was no direct corrolation between the quality of cover art, and the quality of the written word within the pages. Holy shit, huh? You’da thunk the books with the best art on the cover would be the best, wouldn’t you?

Moving on, I didn’t browse the science fiction section looking for something suitably appropriate for my interests, as predetermined by someone that knows what’s best for me.

I also didn’t read books pre-judged as being suitable for my age.

Everything was there, apparently bought by the pound. Heinlein and Asimov and Bradbury and the masters of the Golden Age of science fiction, shoulder to shoulder with Tolkein and Chandler and Asprin and, oh heck, you name it.

I was a damn kid, I didn’t KNOW what my interests were yet. I just knew I wanted something to READ. And I had this gift given to me… no guidance. No “this is appropriate for your age, try this and see if it’s too difficult”.

Nope, just a big pile o’ books.

I was hunting for something cool and exciting, preferrably, but knowing something new wasn’t to be scoffed at, as long as it wasn’t boring.

I read a ton of stuff. I swept the library, and from there moved on to the public library that DID have sections and categories, but they were very tentative.

At that age I made a horrible mistake that I’ve carried with me the rest of my life. I paid little to no attention to the names of the authors or titles of the books I was reading. I just read everything, voraciously.

This has since bit me on the ass endless times over the decades, as I will see a book, read the cover blurb, think it sounds interesting, and take it home. About halfway through, it will occur to me that this story, these characters, this entire book seems suspiciously familiar.

Deja Vu? No, just a book I’ve read before without noting author or title, and now have read half of again without even bloody knowing it.

During that period in the school library, I found out that I wasn’t a science fiction reader, or a fantasy reader, or a detective fiction reader, or someone who likes westerns, or a historical romance reader, or any other carefully crafted pigeonhole to help the secret masters of the universe put me in my proper place.

Nope! I’m just someone who likes a well written book regardless of where the story may be set.

I didn’t set limits on what I allowed myself to read, and nobody else had set those limits FOR me.

One of the books there was the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, and let me tell you something, if you think that a 12 year old can’t read something meant for adults and get an education, you’re crazy.

For one thing, it actually gave me some idea of how crazy you older idiots were in the sixties. Funny how that stuff kinda got buried and passed over in hostory class, as if the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis and the JFK assassination were the only topics worth knowing, and everyone walked aruond in suit and tie and were sober and sophisticated. Yeah, right!

Stoner hippies were an eye opener. Hi mom! I understand everything a LOT better now, thanks.

I’m going to ramble on further for quite a bit now, but I really wanted to get that point down, because it’s important to me.

I know for a fact that because there WAS no structure or classification to the fiction section of that library, I read and enjoyed books, was deeply enriched by books, and had my horizons expanded by books that I never would have read if there had been a “Science Fiction” section, or a “Fantasy” section, or a “clones of the Lord of the Rings” section.

It was a rude awakening when I went into a public library looking for books, and found out that there was a single ”science fiction/fantasy” section to cram all those books into.

I still remember, and this goes back thirty years now, I remember that moment at ten or eleven when I looked around and thought, “What moron thinks science fiction is the same as fantasy, and lumped them both together like this? Wow, they don’t have a clue.”

It took a long time to really come to grips with the idea that some folks actually feel challenged by having any other style of writing given official recognition. That there is a self-styled elite class of literary snobs out there that want to keep ‘populist trash’ from being classes alongside their favorites.

As I said, egalitarian. Thinking like that doesn’t come naturally. 

There are people out there that know that they know better than you or I. That think that they ARE better than you. Better than me. Better than all of us unwashed swine reading our populist trash.

“Populist trash” does say it all, doesn’t it? The opiate of the masses. Those things we use to distract us from the pathetic meanness of our little lives. The things we read that are barely one step up from TV.

Do I really need to say more?

Categories do serve a purpose… in the exact same way stereotypes do. They allow us to make surface judgments about something without taking the time to THINK, or take a risk and spend some time to find out more for ourselves.

Oh look, a republican, a democrat, a conservative, a liberal, a green energy wacko, an NRA gun nut, a blue collar worker, a politician, an executive, a banker, a high school dropout, a biker, a nerd, a geek, a goth, an emo, a jock, a stoner, a tofu-eating pillow-biting kool-aid drinking Obama supporter.

Labels. Stereotypes. A simple grouping of words meant to take the totality of all that a person is, and dismiss ALL of it in one shot. To dismiss THEM, make them irrelevant, their opinions, their dreams, their hopes and their goals, flush them all and cram them into a box.

Labels. Categories.

It’s the same thing with books. You take a book, slap a “Science Fiction” label on it, and dismiss it. It’s just science fiction, after all. No actual thought went into it. Populist trash.

You think I’m overstating things?

Maybe I am at that.

But I’d like you to take a little time, and think about your own experiences in book stores or libraries.

Have you ever known you liked the writing of a particular author, and went looking for it, only to find it in not one, but multiple areas?

Take John Ringo for example. He wrote some books that were categorised as science fiction. So, they got slapped with the sci fi label and shoved into the sci fi library stacks.

But then he wrote some military adventure fiction. Not a single science fiction aspect to it at all.

You go looking for those books, and half the time you’ll find some are in the science fiction section, because he’s a “science fiction writer”. He was tagged and bagged, and so that’s where his books get shoved. Not all of them, clearly not everyone is with the program.

And that’s what makes it really stand out. It’s not consistent. It’s each book, or each author, getting judged and then dismissed.

Take another example, Dean Koontz.

When Dean Koontz books were first published, they were categorized as “Horror”. Stephen King, too. And Straub, and others.

Dean Koontz is a great example, though, because although his books all hold some element of the fantastic, the amazing, the supernatural, they are a far cry from “Horror”.

Suspenseful, sure. Surprising? Certainly. More fantasy or speculative or thoughtful, in my opinion.

But they’re also one other thing.

Almost all of his books culimate in inspirational endings, as in “leave you feeling good, with thoughts of a positive nature”.

Yes, there may be suspense, surprise and fear along the way, but I’m having a hard damn time thinking of a single Dean Koontz book that had an ‘unhappy’ ending.

Dragon Eyes was one of the most intense books in my opinion, with a truly terrifying opponent, but even that book was a triumph of compassion and order winning over chaos and evil.

But you look in a library and see where Dean Koontz can be found. Some of it is in the fiction section, and some of it is still in horror, if there still IS a horror section. I think that the popularity of Stephen King actually helped to kill the Horror category over the last few decades.

It’s still there to be found, though. “Is my Raymond Chandler book in the mystery section, or the fiction section at this library? What did the judgmental folks decide here?”

Lee Child is another one. Adventure fiction, hugely enjoyable books. I’ve seen them both in fiction, and in mystery. Likewise with Ian Rankin.

Lawrence Block seems to be nailed down in the mystery section, although I’ll be damned if I can understand how his Matthew Scudder books are somehow less ‘fiction’ than Lee Child.

There is one other aspect to categories I swear I’ve noticed, and I really don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg.

When I started reading books that were science fiction, the books were fiction first and foremost, and the science part meant they looked with keen analysis on the world we live in, and took serious looks at the underpinnings of everything.

A book could be considered science fiction if it was about exploring alternate, currently non-existing forms of government. Political science was enough science, when looked at speculatively, to be science fiction. It didn’t have to have rayguns and flying saucers.

Emotions, relationships, alien reproduction as a metaphor for human sexual mores and cultural attitudes, it was all fair game to be written about, and called science fiction.

It almost feels like, at some point writers began writing TO the stereotypes and categories.

As though the success of a series like “The Lord of the Rings” brought respectability, and that encouraged writers to follow in the same mold.

Or “Star Wars” and writers of science fiction.

To what degree does the existence of a category and a stereotype about that category encourage people to write FOR that category, trying to be included?

Do mystery authors try to write in a formulaic way so their book qualifies to be labeled a ‘mystery’?

I told you this was a cranky old man post. I have no wonderful new ideas.

Categories are here to stay. That war was lost before it ever started. Who chooses categories? Who judges books?

I’m sure things have rolled along to through the generation to the point that the original elitist snarks are long gone, and most people who are in the position to make those choices are in that field because they love it, love books, and would never think of having some secret, machiavellian plot in mind to marginalize the books they don’t like by sticking them safely in a category.

It’s just the way it’s done.

I do think about that kid I was, and wonder what my worldview and understanding of things would be like if I’d just been restricted to Judy Blume, the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mysteries, and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.

Hmm, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. Hell, I loved that series, come to think of it. I wonder if I can find that set for Alex to read someday?

I did run out and get Starcraft II on Tuesday night. Kmart has a special this week that if you buy Starcraft II, you get a coupon worth $20 off any video game (PC or otherwise) good until Jan 1 of 2011. The coupon prints at the register when you buy it.

We’ve been talking about buying Mario Galaxy 1 or 2 for the Wii for Alex, so $20 off is pretty sweet.

Of course, if any of you have a free copy of Mario Galaxy sitting on your shelf gathering dust you’d want to mail to me, hey, I won’t whine.

No? Didn’t think so. :)

There has been a general lack of blog posts this week, mostly due to wanting to wait until the hilarious “You might be a bad tank” comments stop. But they don’t stop. They keep coming. When I finally bite the bullet and take all of your submissions and names and roll them out on a blog post, it’s going to be epic.

Getting back to Starcraft II, I’ve played it a little bit on Campaign mode now, the first 5 or 6 missions.

I’m not going to write some kind of walkthrough, or guide. Many folks were in the Beta and probably beat the campaign already, and any one else interested in the game should want a spoiler free discussion, because the first thing I can say up front is, the single player campaign mode is beyond anything I expected. It’s just great.

I have yet to play a single PvP style mission or quick battle. I played through all the mini tutorial missions (that are 100% optional; I just wanted to see how good they were. They were perfect, except I don’t think they ever discussed creating teams of units using Control-1, Control-2, etc. Still, great job.)

I then started the campaign, and it’s been great. Incredible amount of CGI cut scenes, tons of them. Lots of options. Every mission has drop dead mission objectives, and then optional objectives that reward you with potential upgrades to units and stats.

The upgrade tree customization really is VERY rich. You can even choose upgrades from the Laboratory based on mission exploration of optional objectives that give you new units. They also designed the upgrade trees from exploration so that you have to choose between two upgrade options, and whatever you choose locks out the other one forever. The difference between the two options is usually one of your playstyle.

As an example; one option level is, choose between two gathering upgrades – either you gain +25% faster Vespene Gas gathering, OR you can make two SCV gathering units at a time in your queue.

Basically… it’s an RTS game with tons of story, imaginative missions, and above all a great opportunity for making decisions that have an actual impact on your future success, and have long lasting effects on your game.

It’s great.

I did play WoW a bit last night, I’m not trying to burn out or anything. It’s not like I’ve left WoW forever or anything.

But I’ll be honest; Starcraft II is a far, far better game than I would have hoped for. I’m damn glad I bought it.

Have a great weekend!