20 Days of WoW Blogging: Day 10 - My favorite Blogs and Sites

Edit: WHAT THE ASS? I'll just have to upload this to YouTube instead of my G+. Will be fixed at some point. Ass.

This is my cat, Fred. This is what he does when I try to play the piano. He is a butt. Also, Google Video? This came in from my Google Plus account and whatttttttt? There is some outdated code out there.

I'll admit, I'm only starting to get into the extended WoW blogging community. For years I've read WoWInsider and I have followed it from its journey from wowinsider.com to wow.com to wow.joystiq.com. But I'm starting to gather a collection of WoW blogs and blogs of WoW'ers:

• The Guardian Tank: Eldoric over here is a fantastic guy who loves to tank. He runs a podcast out of there that I've actually been on twice. 
• Apple Cider Mage: Come here for talk about mages and feminism.
• The Border House: The Border House is a place for those who belong to marginalized groups and their allies. They have truly excellent articles that you won't find anywhere else.
• A Sunnier Bear: I love bears. Bears Bears Bears Bears Bears.
• And more: like I said, I'm just getting into the WoW blogging community, so if you don't see something here, it's either that I haven't gotten around to it, or I'm horrible at remembering things.

I also love twitter. I follow lots of people on twitter, all of whom I think are awesome. Some of those people have started blogging recently (or will), here are the spaces that I'm watching out for:

• Corgi Island: This new blog comes from Elizabeth NOPE.JPG on twitter and is off to a great start.
• Very Lemonade: From Kickflip Feminism on twitter. This blog currently has no entries, but if her twitter is any indication, I expect to enjoy what I will be reading here.

When it comes to non-gaming/non-WoW  blogging, there are several things that I love to read. You should check these out as well:

• Animals Being Dicks: Hilarious GIFs of animals. What more do you want?
• Nedroid Picture Diary: Comics featuring a bear and a bird. Cute and hilarious.
• Emmy Cicierega: She makes some of the cutest drawings...ever.
• Chester 5000 XYV: Sexy comics. Victorian and has a sex robot but I wouldn't call it steampunk. Lots of boners. NSFW. 
• Oglaf: Hilarious and often pornographic. Raunchy fantasy humor. 
• My Milk Toof: This is so cute. Photocomics. Infrequent posting, but always worth the wait.

I like other things, of course, but I felt like I'd keep it to the lesser known stuff. Check all that stuff out, it's really great. 

What other things should I check out? What am I missing out on? Let me know in the comments.

Rant: Skyward Sword's Right-Handed Bias

Oh god her elbow!

When Twilight Princess came out for the Wii, I was disappointed that they changed Link to be right-handed for the game. I understood the decision, more people are right-handed, and I understood that since Twilight Princess was a late-game addition to the Wii's lineup that left-handed support (in the form of a left-handed Link) would probably have been a difficult addition. Quite frankly, many other people felt the same way.

You'd think that since Skyward Sword was built from the ground up as a Wii game, and because of the knowledge that many people wanted a left-handed mode for Twilight Princess that such a mode would have been included for Skyward Sword. This is unfortunately not the case. I'm really disappointed by this.

Why am I so disappointed by this? It reflects a lack of caring on Nintendo's part. I know that it's not a big deal for to include left-handed support because left-handed people can still play the game just fine. It would have been a really nice gesture toward left-handed players, however.

Link had, until Twilight Princess, been left-handed. It had actually been an error, at first, but Nintendo rolled with it and kept him left-handed for all subsequent releases. I have always loved Zelda games and when I realized that Link was left-handed like me I only felt more attached to him. Then I realized that we were born at nearly the same time, so to speak.

I was born at 6:00 AM on February 20, 1986. When you account for the time difference between America and Japan, it was 8:00 PM on February 20, 1986. The Legend of Zelda was released four hours later in Japan, in February 21. This proximity of births made me feel even closer to Link.

What's funny is that normally, languages have a built in bias against leftness. 'Right' implies correctness, freedom, moral goodness, and immediacy. 'Left' is also the past tense of 'to leave'. In other languages it's worse. In French, 'adroit' means right and skillful whereas 'gauche' means left and clumsy. In Latin, 'dexter' means right and skillful whereas 'sinister' means left and unskillful or even harmful. In English, 'sinister' means evil.

When I played Twilight Princess, I stubbornly played it with the remote in my left hand. The hardest part was actually learning how to use an analog stick to move with my right hand. I will continue this tradition forward into Skyward Sword. Quite frankly, if I'm impaired by this in some way, such as a left-to-right swing functioning differently from a right-to-left swing, I might just stop playing.

In German, 'links' means left. If only he would have stayed that way.