20 Days of WoW Blogging: Day 1 - Introduction

Best friends go to Northrend

Hello, my name is Henry. I'm a 25 year old statistician and I play World of Warcraft on the Zangarmarsh Cenarion Circle realm on the Alliance side. I've been playing WoW since summer-ish of 2007, but I've taken a few breaks here and there. My first character to reach the level cap was a draenei shaman. I leveled it with my (now) fiancée, who played a paladin.

When we reached the level cap, we kinda stopped playing. We were too afraid to try and get into the dungeons, so we played around on other characters for a while. Shortly before patch 3.0 we transferred to the server of some local friends and joined their guild. We were among the first to reach level 80 after Wrath came out and grew tired of waiting for everyone else to level. It was then that talk of our guild getting absorbed into a larger guild began.

This was all back before the dungeon finder existed. So we had to find dungeon groups in trade chat and then FLY there (crazy, I know). One fine day we grouped with a prot warrior named Imaownu and a moonkin (I think) druid named Beartank. They were both really good players and we made an excellent group together. As things were back then with good groups, we ran six or so dungeons together. Instead of being absorbed into this larger guild, we decided to join Imaownu and Beartank's guild.

After our first Naxx clear

We raided with Animus all throughout Naxxramas and the first week of Ulduar. We got Flame Leviathan down the first night we tried the raid. But 'real life' got in the way of us raiding because she had just finished college and we were going to move in together. Shortly after that our guild leader was shipped off to Afghanistan and things fell apart.

When we came back, the guild wasn't what it used to be. She and I leveled a bear druid/mage combo and I also leveled a priest. We left the game again from boredom and when we came back the guild was apparently running in pretty full steam. They had even done ToC. We powered up our druid and paladin and started in on ICC (post nerf) with the guild. As a guild we got through Rotface and Festergut. We were casual, as you might expect.

When Cataclysm came out all manner of leveling and dungeon running occurred. But the rest of the guild wasn't quite up to speed. They didn't run dungeons as diligently as they could have and the difficulty of the dungeons caused some of them to refuse to use the dungeon finder. Because raiding was so hard we were only able to down a couple bosses in BWD after 4.1 came out. We never really got Halfus.

Out of frustration, she and I both quit playing the game again. It's only been recently that we've come back to the game, and we don't play nearly as much as we used to. We've both transferred over to Cenarion Circle and are working on getting our characters into good, working order.

From me, you can expect blogging about all sorts of topics. I'm hoping that this blogging challenge will reignite my love for playing World of Warcraft and of blogging about it, too. I'm really excited to see where this goes.

The Graduate Assistants' Office

Graduate school was a very weird time for me. I wasn't really sure if it was what I wanted to be doing, but I didn't really have anywhere else to go. So to grad school I went. I started by going for the Applied Mathematics program but after the first year I changed to Statistics and have not one regretted the decision even once. It was a happy time because I was with Sarah, but also not because I was separated from all my other friends. My friends in college were all either a year ahead of me or a year behind me. My two best high school friends that were in my grade went to different, far away schools. My college didn't have a grad school, so I went elsewhere.


The Door
If you didn't know what it was, you would think it was a closet. A single door between two side hallways that came off of the main hallway, you'd might never consider it as being anything of importance. The door contained no markers to indicate its belonging to the graduate students and no window so that you may peer at its contents. Once inside the locked door, you'd find a narrow, somewhat long room containing eight desks along it's long walls, a whiteboard on the wall facing the hallway, two high, narrow windows on the exterior wall, and shelves of mathematics texts from a time long past. There was also a filing cabinet, a refrigerator that was long overdue for a cleaning, and a single phone.

On each desk was a computer. These computers were the leftovers, the ones cast aside when professors or classrooms received upgrades. Their installations, programs, 'speed', and peripherals varied widely. There were 'good' computers and 'bad' computers, with the designation as to which was which changing as time went on. They were shit to the point of not being usable.

The room was so narrow that if the chairs weren't pushed in to the desks you couldn't traverse it. I surmise it was once a server closet that was re-purposed when the computer science department changed floors when they separated from the mathematics department.

As a graduate assistant who taught classes, I was supposed to keep office hours. I did for a while. After realizing that even if I specifically asked someone to come see me during my office hours they wouldn't come I stopped keeping them. Nobody ever complained about my absence.

Other people used the office, of course, so it was never lonely. Yet these were people I hardly knew at all, and scarcely associated with. We were on polite terms at the best. Most of them hailed from foreign countries, and their English, while serviceable, was flawed. They clung to each other, strangers in a strange land, which made me the outcast.

That single room was like a distillation of much that I felt while I was there. It was a place, with things, but being of incredibly little worth. I hated being there and felt like I didn't belong. Really, I shouldn't have been there. I should have been somewhere better, but due to my own inaction (my greatest flaw) I was there. In retrospect, though, I'm glad I was where I was. It seems unlikely I would still be with Sarah had I not gone there.

Fun fact: part of the reason that I decided to change to statistics was because of a response Ghostcrawler had to a hunter forum thread. He talked about the analysis they did when balancing classes. It really struck me. I'm very thankful for that thread to this day. Also, Vi Hart is super cool. Watch this:

I don't want to tank or Getting back into WoW

I want to tank. Tanking is my most preferred role in a group. If you'll pardon my bragging, I think I'm a fantastic tank. And yet, as I stated above, I don't want to tank. When I tank, I get fully wrapped up in what's going on. I keep an eye of everything that's going on. It's my element. I put the weight of the group on my shoulders and carry them as best as I can, so everything goes as smoothly as possible for them.

Yet I'm not playing my tank right now. I transferred my priest over to Cenarion Circle to play there. I've done 2 dungeon finder groups since I got there: one just myself and one with my fiancée. It's been horrible not tanking. I've seen all the mistakes that tanks can make in a group. I've seen running into a boss before the healer has mana, running in when the healer is far out of range, running in before the dungeon finder has given us a replacement DPS, ignoring boss mechanics with fatal consequences, failure to mark targets, skipping pats/groups only to be bitten by it later, failure to drag a pull away from a pat's path, failure to call for CC, and I suspect a lack of defensive cooldown usage. This was in Zul'Aman and Grim Batol, not even the new dungeons.

"I can't go back man. Go on without me."

It's been hell for me. I feel powerless from the healer position, like I don't have enough control over the group. I can't shore up their weaknesses. As the tank, I can direct the DPS, assist healers by taking less damage, and control the position of the pull. As a healer it's much more difficult for me to do those things.

But I don't want to go back to tanking. There have been several times in my life where I've played WoW too much. I don't want to go back to those times. I'm afraid that if I go back into tanking I'll fall back into my old pattern: playing too much, working too hard to help others, and neglecting my personal life and the things I have to do in it.

The last time I really played WoW I was running dungeons (the Troll ones had just come out), trying to help guildies get through the new dungeons, researching raid tactics, trying to dissect what could be impairing others' performance in raids, coming up with things I could do to make things smoother, worrying about raid scheduling, and being frustrated when literally zero bosses would go down. I can't go back to doing that, and I'm afraid that if I go back to tanking I'll be tempted to do that kind of stuff again, worrying about things that aren't my own.

I would love to go back to my tank. But I need to know that I can do that from a place of control. The frustration from not tanking will help keep me from playing too much. Although it may be a source of new frustration.

Shadowform makes for really great screenshots, doesn't it? SimCity 3000's music was great too. I absolutely love it. It's on my list with Starcraft's Terran themes for "Most Nostalgia Inducing PC Game Music." Enjoy Some!

Don't read this, it's boring and stupid.

Oh, so you actually came in. Well, here it is.

Have you ever wondered why the two parties are split so evenly? In America we have the Democratic and the Republican parties and they are so evenly balanced. It seems bizarre almost that it should work out to be so close. There's a good reason it does, we want it to be.

There are a couple things in place that ensure that the two parties stay balanced.

The Middle of the Road
Despite what it may seem like, they are a very significant number of people whose political beliefs are a mixed bag of things from both 'Democratic' and 'Republican' beliefs. There are plenty of people who are fiscally liberal and morally conservative, people who are fiscally conservative and morally liberal, or so many other things.

These people are the key group in what keeps the parties balanced.

Parties don't like to be losing
Nobody likes to be the inferior party. So when a party finds itself to be the losing party, they adjust their stance on issues to reclaim people they lost and gain new followers they never had. They find an issue that they're really losing people on and swap their stance on it. It's very easy to do. Since a party is comprised of it's elected officials (or campaigning individuals), they just swap their stances over the course of an election season and the zeitgeist that comes out the other side is the new party stance. TADA!

This is what we call progress.

Of Crendors and Whores

This is my 200th blog post. I'd say that it's atypical of the types of thing that I'd normally post, but that doesn't make me less proud of posting it. I had a couple of choices with what to pick for my 200th post: this, the mathematics of party representation, a retrospective. I'm glad I get to do this one. Yes, I know that video has nothing to do with this, but the videos I post almost never do.

Yesterday Crendor (@wowcrendor) made a tweet to the effect of "Tip to girls: if you dress like a whore, you'll get treated like one. #commonsense" The original tweet has been deleted, but that's the message. This sparked a big twitter controversy wherein many people didn't get what was wrong with it.

The sexism that runs through our culture these days isn't the same sexism that there used to be. We aren't dealing with Mad Men'esque type sexism here, it's far more subtle. Thoughts and tweets like his and the subsequent ones he used to defend himself place the responsibility for the actions of others on the victim. It's saying that guy's can't be held accountable for their actions so if you're treated poorly it's because you baited them.

And you know what, people make mistakes like this all the time because they don't even realize that what they're saying is wrong. You could ask someone "Do you feel men and women are equals and should be treated as such?" and damn near everybody will say yes and damn near all of them aren't lying. The problem is that they don't realize that the things that they say don't actually follow through with that belief.

Here's why it's all wrong.

Of Oceans and Arcades: a punishment gone too far

This Paul Christoforo/Avenger controller/Penny Arcade/Ocean Marketing business has really left a sour taste in my mouth. Paul Christoforo definitely should not have been the asshole that he was, but this is all too much. He definitely deserved to be fired. Nobody should ever act that way in a professional capacity, especially when that capacity is public relations. It doesn't matter what your excuse is or how much you apologize, his responses to Dave's concerns were inexcusable.

But Mike Krahulik did the wrong thing. He could have gotten Paul fired and banned from PAX all without turning him over to the internet. 'Gabe' holds the key to the cage for a beast which he is not powerful enough to control. He unleashed that monster upon Paul without regard for the consequences and delighted in its wrath. He knows full and well that when the internet--and especially the gaming-oriented internet--gets its sight on a target, they don't focus on it alone. From Paul's pleas to Mike:

"I have not slept yet dealing with all the spam and personal information intrusion as well as my family being smeared on the internet."

"If you can please accept my apology and anything you can do to help if not me my son and wife please do." -Paul Christofolo

A man prostrate before his torturer, given no mercy.

Callousness

Nemesis may be for retribution,
 but she's ultimately about balance

When the dickwolf controversy was going full tilt, Mike called for a truce because his family had been threatened. He had finally reached his limit. And yet, here we are, somebody else's family is harassed and Mike cares not. It took a day after publicly posting the emails containing those pleas before Mike asked people to leave the family alone. He also doubted their existence in the same sentence. When someone claims that their family is being attacked, you probably shouldn't doubt them. I think there are other situations where you shouldn't doubt someone unless you have very good reason too.

Surprisingly, all this comes from one of the founders of the Child's Play charity, which provides games for children who are in the hospital. You'd think he'd show more concern for the son of the man he attacked, especially considering that he too is a father. It becomes less surprising when you consider that Child's Play wasn't born out of an inherent need to do good, it was born out of a desire to prove that gamers weren't all bad people. I guess he kinda destroyed that idea, huh.

On bullies
"I have a real problem with bullies."

"Someday every bully meets and even bigger bully and maybe that’s me in this case."
-Mike Krahulik

There's a disturbing inconsistency there in that he has no problem with his actions.

Maybe that first statement lies at the core of this. Maybe when Mike sicced the internet upon Paul, he wasn't just attacking a bully. Maybe he was attacking all bullies. Years of pent up rage over being teased as a child and teen let out. Perhaps Mike should consider something when he does this. I know his son is growing up in a time that is more kind to those who'd rather spend their time inside than his father did, but all children are teased. What kind of example does he want to set for his son? Does he want a son who, when teased, responds by beating the teaser over the head with a chair?

The punishment did not fit the crime, and his actions caused innocent people to be dragged into all of this. The worst part, I don't think he gives a shit. If you're wondering which side I'm on, it's neither, they both acted out of line.

Playing with fire

"I will personally burn everything I’ve made to the fucking ground if I think I can catch them in the flames." -Mike Krahulik

But Mike did not make Penny Arcade alone, and the damage he does to it does not only affect him. Fire is dangerous and difficult to control, that's a lesson we've all learned from Avatar: The Last Airbender. What if he did something that did actually ruin Penny Arcade? How many jobs would be lost? How many children would have unemployed parents? How many people have already suffered from the flames he unleashed. One wife and one son so far. How many more?

Reading everything he wrote yesterday and what appeared in the comic today, I lost any respect I had for him. The principal of my high school during my freshman year, Monsignor George Tribou, was often attributed as saying "The measure of a man is how well he controls the animal within." It is here that I think Mike Krahulik truly failed.

-Henry out

Percy Jackson Review

Percy Jackson and the Olypians is a fun series of books that base themselves around Greek mythology. The premise for the stories is that the Greek gods are real and their society and locations have been following western society as it has moved and are now located in the United States. For example, Olympus is now situated above New York City and is attached to the Empire State Building (floor 600).

The story revolves around a group of children of the gods who spend their summers at Camp Half-Blood, where they are protected and learn to harness their gifts and how to fight monsters. Camp Half-Blood has 12 cabins for each of the major gods who have a throne on Olympus. The gods maintain the laissez-faire attitude they've typically had towards their children, believing that maintaining a distance is better for them.

Thrill Digger: My New Obsession

Mole Mitts by ShadowBoyRyu

It's like this, but different.

Thrill Digger is a minigame included in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. It is a minesweeper-esque game in that there are hazards scattered around a grid and the spots in the grid that don't contain a hazard give a clue as to how many hazards surround that spot on the grid. In minesweeper, there are bombs and numbers. A number tells you how many bombs are in the eight squares around the number. The board starts off with none of the squares revealed. Each click reveals a square's contents. Clicking on a bomb ends the game with a loss. To win the game you must reveal every non-bomb square. Versions of the game allow you to plant a flag on spots to mark them as containing a bomb so you don't make a mistake later.

Thrill Digger operates slightly differently. There are a couple different classifications of object:

• Hazards
• Bombs - When you dig up a bomb, the game ends and you take a heart of damage
• Rupoors - A black rupee. You lose 20 rupees. These do not end the game.
• Rupees - These indicate how many bombs surround that square and give you rupees.
• Green - Indicates there are zero hazards in the surrounding squares and gives you 1 rupee.
• Blue -  Indicates there are one or two hazards in the surrounding squares and gives you 5 rupees.
• Red -  Indicates there are three or four hazards in the surrounding squares and gives you 20 rupees.
• Silver -  Indicates there are five or six hazards in the surrounding squares and gives you 100 rupees.
• Gold -  Indicates there are seven or eight hazards in the surrounding squares and gives you 300 rupees.

The goal is to collect as many rupees before you hit a bomb. In this game it is very hard to complete a board, and you aren't necessarily supposed to. The reason that it's so hard is because the rupees don't tell you exactly how many hazards surround them. That uncertainty greatly increases the difficulty. If you do manage to complete a board, you're rewarded with a high-quality crafting material. 

There are three difficulties. Beginner costs 30 rupees to play. It is a 4x5 grid with 4 bombs and no rupoors. Intermediate costs 50 rupees and is 6x5 with 4 bombs and 4 rupoors. Expert costs 70 rupees is 8x5 with 8 bombs and 8 rupoors. So a particular play is a win if you dig up more rupees than you put into the game. I personally find intermediate to be the easiest to complete. There's a very good reason for this. Consider this chart.

Summary information for the difficulties

Difficulty	Width	Height	#Squares	#Bombs	#Rupoors	%Bombs	%Hazards
Beginner	5	4	20	4	0	20%	20%
Intermediate	6	5	30	4	4	13.3%	26.7%
Expert	8	5	40	8	8	20%	40%

Intermediate is the easiest to complete for me because it has the lowest percentage of bombs. There are more hazards overall, but they're less likely to end the game.

I'm completely in love with this game, even though I really don't like how the game doesn't keep a reminder what was dug up in a particular spot. I can't play intermediate or expert for very long without needing graph paper on which to chart my progress. Despite that, I've played it incessantly.

Oh, and by the way, if you think this is all that I have to say about this super awesome minigame, you're wrong. I have much more to come, including strategies and much much more.

The chicken or the egg and the real question at hand

There is the common question of "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" I hear that it's some sort of philosophical question. If you ever get asked this, I can tell you exactly how to ruin the fun to be had by the asker.

Answer with, "The egg." The chicken is not the first egg-laying animal. There were many other birds and reptiles that came before it, and they layed eggs. So there were clearly eggs before there were chickens.

Your questioner may counter with, "Fine. Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?" The proper response to this is, "Define 'chicken egg'." Is a chicken egg and egg that comes from a chicken or is it an egg that produces a chicken. If they come up with a response and actually answer the question, their response directly informs your answer. If they say that a chicken egg comes from a chicken, then the chicken came first. If they say that a chicken egg produces a chicken, then the egg comes first.

I don't really believe the proper response is either though, since those aren't the only two choices. I think we can all say, without doubt, that if an egg both comes from a chicken and produces a chicken then it is a chicken egg. In that case, the chicken must come first. 

But what type of egg comes from something that isn't a chicken and yet produces a chicken? That's the real question.

This has been another entry in Henry's famous "Who gives a fuck?" series. If there is anything that you would never, ever want to read about, just leave a comment below and I'll make sure and spend my time writing about it.

Black Friday 2011: The Quest for the Legend of Zelda

Sarah loves Black Friday. She has fond memories of standing outside a Wal-Mart at ungodly hours in the morning freezing her butt off with her dad and uncle. So when we can, we do Wal-Mart's Black Friday. This year, we mainly had one goal: buy the special edition Skyward Sword. It comes with a Wii Motion Plus Remote and the 25th anniversary edition music CD. All for a reasonable $60. This was especially important since we just had a Wii Remote die on us.

The Black Friday sale started at 10:00 pm Thursday, which really makes it a Black Thursday Night sale, but whatever. We arrived at 8:30 and tried to immediately determine where exactly in the covered videogame racks the game would be. Thanks to some helpful employees I found out exactly where the game would be and began the task of situating myself in the optimal position to grab the game immediately. 

The crowd was still light at this point, but there were a couple people in a single row between me and the game. When the woman in front of me turned to talk to her daughter, I used the opportunity to insinuate myself closer to the rack, placing my leg in a more forward position. Over time, she moved to the left enough that I was able to place myself immediate against the racks. Once there I laid my hand on the tarp as if to say, "This is my spot, and nobody is going to take it from me. No crowd shall create a distance between me and my prize." 

There was still a good hour between that moment and when the clock would strike frenzy. I passed the time by texting Sarah regarding our situation. She initially wanted to get some towels, but they were by the ridiculously cheap sheets and there was no way she could penetrate that crowd so she joined me in the games and DVD section.

Time passed and eventually 10:00 came. The tarps were swiftly removed and my quarry was spotted. I was the second person to grab one of their limited supply. My task was now to escape. The Skyward Sword copies were next to the display that featured games such as Battlefield 3, Madden, and Modern Warfare 3, so the crowd was generally pressing towards me. Escape was a hard fought battle. I pressed against the crowd, away from the shooters and football games towards the aisle. In the process I was squeezed up against all sorts of people. I'm sorry to any ladies which had my groin forced against them. I meant nothing by it, I swear.

In time, with much explaining that I was done and just wanted to escape, I was let out. I passed by a rack of Wii games which had several titles strewn across its top. I got out and called Sarah since I couldn't see her. She had apparently been the one who threw those Wii games on top of the rack to aid the poor mothers forced into this bedlam. She had gone by the DVD section and picked up several seasons of The Big Bang Theory and other shows and we made our way to the checkout. Upon getting there we realized she accidentally got two copies of season 1 and no copy of season 2. She went back to correct the error. 

We paid and were out of the store at 10:13 pm. We essentially kick ass. No wounds suffered. No trampling. No pepper spray burns. It was a pretty good Black Friday experience.