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?

20 Days of WoW Blogging: Day 8 - 10 things you don't know about me

Day eight of the 20 days of WoW Blogging challenge requires that it's participants reveal ten things that you don't know about me. So here we go.

10. In college I scored a 27 out of 100 on the Putnam mathematics exam. This actually a very good score. In a similar vein, myself and a teammate (Thomas Przybylinski, great name) won a statewide math competition despite the fact that all the other teams had four people. Enough bragging.... 
9. I just need to code a UI and I'll have a working desktop version of Thrill Digger. 
8. I used to just lay my toys out and look at them. I'm told this is 'sad'.
7. Tremors and The Brave Little Toaster are counted among my favorite movies.
6. I once used a walkie talkie to listen in on a cordless phone conversation. What I heard was my mom talking about how her sons weren't into sports.
5. On my elementary school bus, I was called 'booger boy' by a couple girls older than me.
4. When I worked at a movie theater, I once slapped the manager (male) on the butt. A year later, a coworker (female) pinched my butt several times when I was leaning over the counter to look at the candy display. Also, when the assistant manager commented on how I had made friends with another coworker so quickly, the manager commented that I was "Doing her in the butt." This was not true. #lolbuttslol
3. I took judo one semester in college. It was really fun.
2. I once told a girl at a summer camp that I didn't have a crush on her because I was too anxious about what would happen if I told her I did like her.
1. My freshman year of high school, my parents (read "mom") called the school and asked if the principal would talk to me about why I never have friends over to the house to visit or wanted to go visit friends at their homes. One day, I was called out of math class to the office. I was really confused about what was going on, since I never got into trouble. I went into the principal's office and was greeted by the principal, an aged Monsignor by the name of Father George Tribou. We talked for a while and he asked me about why I never had friends over. I told him that I just never really felt like it and that I was perfectly happy just being at home, doing my home things. I explained that i did have friends at school, but I just kept them there, so to speak. He understood completely and told me that there were tons of other boys just like me and that I wasn't weird at all because of it, that I was perfectly normal. He relayed this information to my parents and we never really talked about. He died later that school year because of complications from a stroke. I've always cherished that talk we had.

Bonus item: Sarah and I have considered dancing to this song at our wedding.