20 Days of WoW Blogging: Day 9 - My First Blog Post

Smile!

Day 9 of the 20 days challenge inquires about my first blog post. Oh lord. I was afraid of this. This was my first actual post on the blog. In it, I was considering watching a very visual anime without any English, as if it were an opera. That's pretty much it. You'll notice that it has absolutely nothing to do with World of Warcraft. It's not even really something that I can imagine someone would want to read. It's devastatingly short, and...I'm ashamed of it. This blog is the first real writing project that I've undertaken, so it's very understandable that the content towards the beginning would be, for the lack of a better word, awful.

My next post was my first WoW post and from the looks of it was about 6 months after that previous post. At the time, my shaman was my only level-capped character and I thought that maybe I could turn this into a shaman blog. So I started what I hoped would be a series of posts on what totems have niche uses in the heroic dungeons that were out at the time. I originally started by doing one dungeon at a time, with The Nexus having the inaugural post.

It's horribly formatted, contains no links to wowhead.com for any of abilities or bosses. It doesn't explain WHY the totems are useful. It's two paragraphs of blech. It contains so little information. Back then I just didn't know how to expand content. Writing papers in school was always tough for me because I couldn't expand the content out. I didn't elaborate on the things I was writing. I was awful. Awful, awful, awful.

The writing got slowly better from there forward. I wrote a 'how to enhancement' post and a few more editions of 'Totems of Note' before I changed to elemental. Later came a post about Shadow of the Colossus and a post about why it's mathematically optimal that the Deeprun Tram not wait for people very long at each of its stations. I'd like to say that I've really come quite a ways from where I was then, and I'm sure I have. I will always write niche content, it's just who I am. I just really need to find a way to frame it so that it's interesting to most people.

I'm really glad to have that stuff behind me. This all brings me to some good questions. What would you all actually like for me to write about? What do you like to read about? Is there anything about my math/statistics/programming background that you would like to hear about or see applied to World of Warcraft?

Random Stuff 2: With Frontalot!

My last post on tattoos left me wondering, "What books should I definitely NOT get tattoos of?" After some quiet deliberation, I decided that Choke would be a bad choice. I can only think of anal beads for that one. I think I could break down all the Tolkien books down. The One Ring for The Hobbit. The Gates of Moria for the Fellowship of the Ring. Helm's Deep for The Two Towers. Sauron's eye for The Return of the King, or the White Tree of Gondor. The Magicians and The Magician King could also be separate, with the button for the first and the seven-pointed star for the second.

I'm definitely open to adding iconic video game symbols too. The Aperture Science aperture is a good one in my mind right now. Other things include, a metroid, an E-Tank, the master sword, an Arwing, a Moogle, a bandana, and many others. Granted, I may not actually get all of this stuff, or any of it, but it's fun to think about.

Blizzard announced an in-game pet for World of Warcraft that is bought with real money, but can be traded in-game. This has been labelled as Blizzard experimenting with real-money transaction. However, unlike the previously released pets, this one doesn't apply to all of your characters. So if you want to have it on all your characters, you'll have to buy it multiple times. This has people upset.

I really don't like it when people to mad about shit like this. You can disagree with it and wish it were another way, but don't get mad. You have to realize that you're getting mad about something that doesn't affect yours or anybody else's gameplay and is completely optional. Blizzard never had to ever even make this stupid pet, and if they hadn't, you would have never known the difference. You lose absolutely nothing by this pet existing. Stop it, stop being mad about it, it's not worth it.

Then again, is me getting mad about other people getting mad about shit that doesn't matter any better? Probably not. Probably not at all. On an unrelated not, I miss Umaro and Gogo. They were the best. I need to beat that game with a party of Umaro, Gogo, Mog and Gau. And Gogo can't use any 'added abilities', just Mimic.

Tattoos

I've been thinking about tattoos for a long time. I've never been able to come up with a design or idea that I thought was great and where to put it.

An idea came to me the other day that I do like. Iconic symbols from my favorite books, each roughly 1 square inch, down the side of my left upper arm. I've already come up with several of them:

The Symbol of the Deathly Hallows from Harry Potter

The Mockingjay from The Hunger Games

The One Ring from The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings

The 7-pointed blue star from The Magician King

I need to really go through all my books to see if there is anything else I would like to do. If the symbol is for a series, I may do a different symbol for each book in the series, depending on the number of books and the strength of the symbol.

I really like this idea because it's expandable, explainable, not trashy, can be done in parts easily and, most importantly, because it's cool.