For some reason that I can’t explain, The Penguin on the Telly is one of my favorite Monty Python skits. There is just something about the absurdity of it all that cracks me up every time I watch it. For more reasons that I can’t explain, that skit the first thing that came to my mind when I was trying to think of a title for this sort of catch all post that I’m about to write. So, enjoy the Penguin on the Telly.

Adventures at PAX Prime

Brade and I once again went to PAX Prime. Being local, it’s kind of neat because I never feel rushed to see all of the things and I just kind of show up and do the things I want whenever I want and have the rest of my weekend to do whatever else I feel like. This year I actually attended more days that I had any of the other years that I went. I think the highlight of my weekend was probably dinner with a lot of WoW/Twitter folk. We had a great time, and it’s definitely something I’d do again!

So, you probably want to know what it is that I do at PAX while I’m there. I’ll tell you. I play lots of board games. No, really! I play lots and lots of board games. It’s actually very cool because many of the game companies have representatives and volunteers that sit down and teach you how to play games, so it’s a really great opportunity to see if you enjoy a game or ask questions for a game with a more complex rule set (or really crappy instruction booklet). I thought I’d tell you a little bit about what we played!

With my sincerest apologizes to Dr. Seuss.
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At the far end of town, where the fool’s cap grows and the wind smells slow and sour and no bugs ever sing excepting old Klaxxi is the street of the lifted Lorax. And deep in the fool’s cap, some people say, if you look deep enough you can still see, today, where the lorax once stood just as long as it could, before someone lifted the Lorax away.

What was the Lorax? And why was it there? And why was it lifted and taken somewhere from the far end of town where the fool’s cap all grows? Ghostcrawler still lives here. Ask him. He knows.

You won’t see Ghostcrawler. Don’t knock at his door. He stays in his tree, planted in his grove. He lurks in the branches where the leaves have all fallen, and he makes his own clothes from mushrooms and rejuvenallen. And on special dank midnights in November, he peeks out of the shutters and sometimes he speaks and tells how the Lorax was lifted away.

He’ll tell you perhaps…if you’re willing to pay.

On the end of a line he lets down a tin pail and you have to toss in the cap of three mushrooms and a snail. Then he pulls up the pail, makes a most careful count to see if you’ve paid him the proper amount. Then he hides what you paid him away in the claws, his secret strange hole in his gruvvulous paws. Then he grunts, “I will call you by crab-a-phone, for the secrets I tell you are for your ears alone”.

Down inches the crab-a-phone until it reaches your ear and the old crab’s whispers are not very clear.

“Now I’ll tell you,” he says, with his claws sounding gray, “how the Lorax got lifted away”.

It all started way back, such a long time ago, in the days when the fool’s cap did not grow. When the trees all had branches, leaves rustling in the wind. Before mushrooms bloomed, and dangers loomed, I came to this glorious place. At first I saw the trees! The glorious happy trees, with bright colored branches and heals that didn’t sneeze! Their leaves, oh their leaves! All dancing in the breeze!

And under the trees, I saw brown guardians frisking in their big bear butt suits as they played in the shade and were healed by the trees. From the rippulous pond came the comfortable sound of the orcas all humming while splashing around. But those trees! Those trees! Those healing trees! All my life I’ve been searching for trees such as these! The touch of their rejuvs, the tickle of growth, warmed my injured heart like butterfly milk. I felt a great leaping of joy in my heart, I knew just what I’d do and I unloaded my crab cart!

I no time at all, I realized they needed a change. So I sat in my shop and pondered giving them the chop. With all my great skill, and with my great crab speed, I realized I knew just what they need! I planted my mushrooms and awaited fungal explosion, my claws were crackling with the thought of implosion! The instant I’d finished, I heard a ga-Zump! I looked, I saw something pop out of a stump! It was a sort of man.

Describe him? That’s hard. I don’t know if I can.

He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And Mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy! “Mister!” he said with a fungal born sneeze, “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues. And I’m asking you sir, at the top of my lungs!”. He was very upset as he shouted and puffed. “What’s that thing you’ve made from my trees tuft!”.

“Look, Lorax” the crab said “There’s no cause for alarm. The Mushrooms will heal and I’m doing no harm. I’m being quite useful, in offering this tool, mushrooms are something that all people need! They plant, they heal, they have other uses! They aren’t rotational, but druids will love them and sing of them like muses!”.

The Lorax said, “Sir! You are crazy, my friend. There is no one on earth who will use them in the end!”.

The crab laughed at the Lorax, “You poor stupid guy! You will use them, and like it, or just manage to get by”.

“I repeat,” cried the Lorax, “I speak for the trees!”

“I’m busy,” I told him. “Shut up, if you please”. I rushed to the phone to put in a quick call, I called all my brothers and uncles and devs and I said, “Listen here! Here’s a wonderful chance to plant with mushrooms and watch them explode! Get over here fast! Take the road to the Steppes and turn south at the wastes”. And, in no time at all, in the grove that I built the who crab family was working full tilt. We were all planting mushrooms just as busy as bees, to the crying sound of all of the trees.

We were planting mushrooms as fast as before, and that Lorax? Well, he didn’t show up anymore.

But the next week he knocked on my new office door. He snapped “I’m the Lorax, who speaks for the trees, who you seems to be stifling as fast as you please. But I’m also in charge of the guardian bears who played and received heals in their big bear butt suits. NOW…thanks to your mushrooms there aren’t enough heals for the trees to toss around. And my poor guardians are all getting the crummies because they have mushrooms rotting their tummies! They loved living here, but I can’t let them stay. They’ll have to find heals, and I hope that they may.” And then the Lorax sent them away.

I, the crab, felt sad as I watched them all go. BUT…Mushrooms are Mushrooms, and they must grow, regardless of crummies in tummies you know. I meant no harm, I truly did not. But I was sold on three mushrooms, so a planting I got. I planted them here, I planted them there, I advocated their usefulness everywhere. I went right on planting my mushrooms, and I didn’t worry about the healing, which the trees didn’t need.

Then again he came back! I was trying new shrooms when that old nuisance Lorax came back with more gripes!

“I am the Lorax,” he coughed and whiffed. “Crab!” he cried with a croak “Crab! You’re making such your making the blooming broke”. My poor moonkin, why they can’t starfall a single star! No one can with no healing to keep them afloat! And so”, said the Lorax, “please pardon my fear, but they cannot leave here. So I’m sending them off.”

“Where will they go?” I don’t hopefully know. Somewhere with rain and mists I imagine. To escape from the mushrooms you’ve planted here. “What’s more,” snapped the Lorax (His dander was up) “your mushrooms are send the trees into a gloom.”

And then I got mad. I got terribly mad. I yelled at the Lorax, “Now listen here, Dad! All you do is yap-yap and say BAD BAD BAD! Well, I have my thoughts and I’m telling you I intend on doing just what I do! And, for your information, you Lorax, I’m figgering on keeping mushrooms without biggering! Because mushrooms are the answer that EVERYONE needs!”.

And at that very moment, we heard a loud whack. From outside in the grove came a sickening smack.

We look out the window to see the last tree had fallen. Their spirit crushed and their branches swaying. The trees walked away, the grove left decaying. The devs looked around me, and started to pack up, with no trees there was no back up. Now all that was left ‘neath the mushroom covered sky was my big empty grove…the Lorax…and I.

The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance…just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance…as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants. And I’ll never forget the grim look on his face when he heisted himself and took leave of this place. Through a hole in the mushrooms, without leaving a trace. And all the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with one word….”UNLESS”.

Through the expansion, as my mushrooms have fallen apart, I’ve worried about the trees with all of my heart. “But now,” says the crab, “Now that you’re here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not. SO…Catch!” calls the crab and he lets something fall. “It’s a mushroom spore, the last one of all! You’re in charge of the fate of the trees, and trees are really what everyone needs. Plant a new thought, treat it with care. Give it clean water and feed it fresh air. Grow a forest, make it big and strong. Protect it from Mushrooms, and sing it a song. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.”

You may, or may not, know that I’m an avid non-combat pet collector. I have 203 different unique pets. Since the patch hit, you have been able to name your pets. When I’ve had down time, I’ve been slowly working through some of them and assigning names. I’ve been having a ridiculous amount of fun picking names for them. As such, I thought I’d share a few of the names I’ve come up with! (What else you may, or may not, know is that I’m also a Disney fanatic….but that will become clear soon!).

Ok, this post likely isn’t going to have one thousand words, but it does have a picture!

At some point after they opened level to 87, my resolve not to level and to just wait for level 90 pre-mades eroded. I blame wanting to play around with Symbiosis. Anyhow, resolve gone. So Brade and I have been putzing around a little more on the beta; him because he wants to get a feel for the monk class as he’s thinking about rerolling due to years of frustration with feral druids by the end of each expansion (maybe I’ll get him to do a guest post on that…) and me because, well, symbiosis! Because of some of the bugs with swapping specs currently, I’ve been leaching off of his damage while leveling because I grew tired of having to respec, reglyph and fixing my action bars constantly, which means I’ve been leveling resto (or mostly bouncing around looking at things while aimlessly tossing a rejuv on him and going “OH, SHINY!” as I’m distracted by the beautiful scenery, while he kills shit. Don’t judge! He likes doing that spinning crane kick thingie anyhow, I’M REALLY JUST HELPING HIM DECIDE IF HE LIKES THE CLASS!).

Anyhow, after dinner last night we sat down to play a little bit and decided we might as well do some of the quests (we generally had just been running through the one instance available to us). While doing this, we learned a number of things, the most important of which is that currently no drops are shared between party members – and the new vehicle frame is kind of bad ass. Anyhow, we got to this quest last night that wanted you to go meditate at various shrine things. And so we did. Until we got to the final one and found what you see in the above picture.

Yes, folks, that is a very long line to complete this quest. I felt like I was at the DMV, “take a number, and wait for it to be called, please”. Apparently the quest can only be completed by one person at a time, and is very buggy (welcome to beta, folks!). After standing in this line for about 10 minutes, Brade and I were like “fuck this, let’s queue for that instance again!” and departed. However, I woke up early this morning and rushed through my morning routine so I could log in with the hopes of quickly finishing the quest outside of prime time…and there was still a line!

All I could do was laugh.

I suppose the fact that people were moderately civil enough to form the line to begin with should be appreciated. But good lord! All I could think was “this is like the Vaelstraez of cockblocks for questing!”. I went back and shared with Brade that while the line was appreciably smaller, it did, in fact, still exist and I was out of time and needed to go to work. However, to my surprise, rather than lazing in bed for a bit, he apparently got up, stuck us both in the line, went about his morning routine, and completed the quest so that we could move on (true love right there, folks!). 

This post doesn’t really have a point, it’s just that I have been so amused by this quest, that I thought I would share. 🙂

As a side note for those putzing around in the beta, I found a fairly irritating bug last night while healing a Guardian Druid (aka a bear). Just as a head’s up, and this is only prevalent when healing a bear, your lifebloom does not currently refresh via Healing Touch, Regrowth or Nourish. To keep a three stack up, you must refresh it by adding another lifebloom.

Oh, and for those interested, I parsed a couple of my forays last night (including the one with the bear tank). Feel free to peruse them as you will.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/ydbz1n0ed2qu10k0/
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/0a8un41u1tiphen6/

This past weekend I did something that I’ve not done in quite some time. I played WoW. Lots of WoW, in fact. Not only did I play WoW, but I craved playing when I was doing other things over the weekend. I was somewhat surprised by this strange desire, as it’s not something that I’d experienced for many months. I’m sure there are a number of reasons that I could list off that lead to my disenchantment with the game, but I’m not really here to talk about that. Rather, I wanted to share the unexpected enjoyment that I found from a fairly unexpected source.

The Scroll of Resurrection

I know that there have been a lot of opinions tossed about regarding this feature, but I wanted to share my experience with it, and tell you how this feature managed to revitalize the game for me. You see, on Thursday night I decided that I wanted the stupid spectral mount. I had an inactive account that I had created for the RAF promotion and that I suspected would be eligible – but I had recruited a friend to accept a scroll in the event that my “master plan” was faulty and wouldn’t work. Well, as it turns out, I was able to send a scroll to myself and I resurrected the account and signed up for a subscription so Beru could have her “ooohhhhh shiny”.

But then something clicked in my mind and I thought to myself “Self, what if you could make a level 1 character on this account and boost it to level 80”. I didn’t know if it was possible to do, but I figured “why not!”. I have a good number of friends who play only alliance, and it would be fun to be able to putz around with them when I had the time available without bemoaning the fact that I am HORDE4LIFE. I looked into it to see if you could boost a new level 1 character to level 80, and sure enough, right there on the “redeem your rewards” page it very clearly stated that you could create a new character and utilize the level boost on that toon.

And thus a level 1 worgen druid was born.

Or so I’m told, anyhow. Perhaps I tell myself that just to keep me sane. I mean, I have been digging for the crawling claw for quite some time. I had started to believe that it just did not exist, and it was some cruel joke that WoW Devs were playing with me. Let’s face it, I have enough tiny mosaics to cover an entire pyramid. I have enough emerald eyed cats to put Earnest Hemingway to shame. I have enough scimitars to arm an entire army. So there I was on my 238th Tol’vir solve today. Not expecting anything special, perhaps a map, maybe sand castle, and there it was!

I may, or may not, have screamed as if I’d just found Ed McMahon at my front door advising me that I’d just won the publisher’s clearinghouse sweepstakes. It may, or may not, have cause Brade to say “could we stop screaming now” (hey! it’s not my fault he’s a downer!). But there is was. All mine, with only 150 fragments. Unfortunately I had errands to run before the raid, and I went into the raid a mere 19 fragments short of my prize. But don’t worry – I was right back digging in the dirt the second we finished (and the elation when my 150th fragment hit my bags was almost enough to make me forget the pain of our ~30% spine wipe).

And just in case you didn’t already know, the claw is a fun interactive pet as well! Check it out!

Needless to say, I will be taking a break from playing in the dirt for awhile. I wish I could say “forever”, but the truth of the matter is that I will likely torture myself a little more to finish out the achievements in the category. 🙂

It’s been said that laughter is the best medicine. I don’t entirely know that it’s true, but I figured it can’t really hurt to try. Since Brade and I found a few giggles earlier today, I thought I’d share to see if the supposed best cure was contagious or not.

This post is probably really boring.  Just so you know.  You have been warned.  Feel free to pass it right on by…unless you want tips on how to make the most delicious ham in the world.  Then you should probably read it.

I have really been looking forward to this past week and the one that is in front of me.  Mostly because it meant I had some much needed down time.  In fact, I’ve had even more than I expected this week as we were able to do our first set of mount achievements in just one night.  Which subsequently means that we should be able to do our second mount achievements on Sunday in one night as well.  And that means that after this Sunday I won’t have another main raid for a full week.

I strongly suspect that by next Sunday I will be chomping at the bit going “is it time yet?” as I feel the shakes of raiding withdrawal.  But until that time I’ve been taking advantage of the opportunity to step away a bit.

So I have no idea where this picture came from (if you do, let me know, as I’d love to credit it!), but I saw it on Twitter today, and found it amusing. Since things have been a little heavy around here the past few weeks, I thought I’d lighten it up a bit by sharing!

Also, I am still working on the last three parts of my UI project. I had intended to record the next part this past weekend, but somehow managed to catch the plague, and spent the majority of the weekend horizontal on the couch. I should, however, have the next one up this weekend. 🙂

The People

I know that it’s been very quiet here the past week, but there was so much to do at Blizzcon I just didn’t have the time to throw up even the shortest post!  Anyhow, now that I’m back at home with a mostly function brain, I thought that I’d give you some of my thoughts on what we learned and what I did over the weekend.  One thing that I am not going to do in this post, however, is go over what are very early stages of the new druids talents or talk about what Blizzard should, or should not, have done with the next expansion.  To the former, I think it’s far too early to even feel panic.  I’m not thrilled with what I saw in much of the druid tree, but I’m also not going to decide that the world is ending for my class over a five minute mock up that I saw of my new talents.  It just doesn’t seem the best use of my time.

Anyhow, let’s get on to talking a bit about the con, should we?!

Every year one of the best things about Blizzcon is getting to meet new, and old, friends.  Honestly, for me, Blizzcon is more about the people that it is anything else.  They could have announced the Hello Kitty meets Thrall expansion, and I’m not sure it would have changed my Blizzcon in the slightest.  The people are amazing.  I love the meet ups, I love the random runs ins on the street.  I love that the guy where we had dinner the last night came over sporting a Horde Tattoo and thanked us for being awesome.  There is just something magical about the environment in Anaheim that weekend, and 100% of it has to do with the people that are there.

I did not get to run into everyone that I wanted to over the weekend, but I did get the chance to chat with some truly amazing folks.  And of everything else that happened during the con, it was the connections that I got to make that were truly the highlight of my trip!  I got to chat with the Flavor Text ladies, Pewter, Hamlet, Jasyla and the Apotheosis gang, Lissana, Oestrus, Ophelie, Lodur and Tart and the list just goes on and on.  I didn’t even include in there the time I got to spend with my guildmates or other favorites that I have in the community!  If I wasn’t watching a panel I was looking for someone to chat with.  It was truly an amazing experience.