Category Archives: amusing anecdotes

Did I Ever Tell You Guys About How Baby Althalor Is Internet Famous

I can’t remember.  Did I?  Perhaps I did.  It was a long time ago.

Seven years ago, to be precise.

World of Warcraft was still everywhere in those days because there were 12 million subscribers.  It was a pop culture phenomenon.  So it a pretty common thing for comedy articles taking the piss out of it to exist.  Such as this one on Cracked.

cracked 1Oh hey, look, it’s a baby hunter posing with The Rake in Mulgore.  You know, I did that once…

…with a blood elf who looks suspiciously like the one in the picture…

…wait a minute…

AlthalorAndTheRakeYup.

That’s Althalor.

Forever immortalized on the internet at level ten, for better internet connection that will help you improve your online gaming, check now https://cubik.com.tw/vpn/.  Poor guy.

Hey, he’s still got that cat!

WoWScrnShot_090915_093830 (2)

Hello friends!

No real blog post today because I was getting my wisdom teeth removed.  So instead, have some tweets I made about five minutes after waking up from the general anesthetic (start at the bottom and read up)

never forget 2-26

For the record, upon first waking up I “saw” lava everywhere and my addled, drugged mind decided that clearly I was in Blackrock Mountain.

Varian Wrynn is the 1%

So I was running a panda through Westfall the other day– haven’t done it since the Cataclysm redo– and was very amused to do a quest which involved finding pages from the Communist manifesto and also bits of cloth that are colored solidarity red.  Honestly I’m surprised the drifters from Westfall aren’t busy occupying Stormwind.

The Red Army is the strongest

Honestly I was feeling bad because I just had to interrogate all the homeless people for a quest and all I wanted to do was help them out and be on their side.  It made me wish that they were a faction and that I could hang out and help them rebuild Westfall and we’d do all sorts of neat things like own our own means of production.  But alas, it is not to be.

Oh well.  I put everything on the auction house for dirt cheap, and that sort of counts, right?

Just Keep Playing, Just Keep Playing

Cataclysm is really shaping up to be exceeding my expectations. Just playing alts is keeping me more than occupied. I haven’t felt this way since I started playing in ’07. It’s really great.

Both of my high-level hunters are now 81. One is in Hyjal and one is in Vash’jir. I’m keeping them fairly even level-wise and having a lot of fun with it. I did… Blackrock Caverns, I think it’s called? Man. I’m still not sure if I hated or loved that dungeon. It’s sort of a weird mix of both. I hated it because it took about two hours in my PuG group and we wiped more than I have wiped in months. I loved it because the boss mechanics and strats were actually interesting. One of them had beams that you’re supposed to stand in. “Oh, like Netherspite in Kara?” I asked. “Yep,” was the reply. It made me happy. Someone else who had done Kara. Because everyone should do Kara. <3 Speaking of Kara, did you know that Attumen is solo'able by a level 80 resto druid, if you have twenty minutes and a lot of patience?

Now you know!

You can boomkin through the trash with ease, but when you’re tanking both Attumen and Midnight separately at the beginning of the encounter you just end up taking too much damage. Never fear, Tree Tank is here! Waiting around for Innervates was the most time-consuming part.

As always, he failed to drop my necklace, which I will never ever see.

Afterward I switched back to boomkin, charged into that room full of trash and popped Barkskin, Starfall, and Hurricane, and died in a beautiful blaze of glory.

…and speaking of boomkins…

A few months back when I mentioned that I didn’t think I would have money for Cataclysm, you guys really responded. So much, in fact, that not only could I afford Cataclysm, but I could also afford to buy WoW cards for my younger sisters (their accounts were long since canceled due to lack of funds) and also get them Wrath of the Lich King (they were still back in BC-land) and Moonkin Hatchlings. They’re really excited to be back, and the first thing we did was organize a Moonkin Family Reunion, complete with pet biscuits.

The second thing we did was get onto the boat to go to Borean Tundra. Or, we would have, if the boat didn’t glitch and strand a poor level 70, without Cataclysm, in Vashj’ir. Yeah I can’t put my finger on that one either…

Fortunately I went and rescued her. She promptly set her hearthstone to that boat as a joke, which made me panic until she pointed out that she can teleport to Moonglade. Ohhh yeah, I forgot druids could do that.

tl;dr: Alts are fun, dungeons are fun-strating (my new portmanteau of fun and frustrating), Karazhan is still the best raid and boats are glitchy.

Hey guys, did I ever tell you this one?

Dietary Supplements can be beneficial to your health — but taking supplements can also involve health risks. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not have the authority to review dietary supplement products for safety and effectiveness before they are marketed.

You’ve heard about them, may have used them, and may have even recommended them to friends or family. While some dietary supplements like Kratom capsules are well understood and established, others need further study. Read on for important information for you and your family about dietary supplements. Check out the latest glucofort reviews.

Before making decisions about whether to take a supplement, talk to your healthcare provider. They can help you achieve a balance between the foods and nutrients you personally need. If you’re suffering from chronic pain, get redirected here for treatment options.

What are dietary supplements?

Dietary supplements include such ingredients as vitamins, minerals, herbs, amino acids, and enzymes. Dietary supplements are marketed in forms such as tablets, capsules, softgels, gelcaps, powders, and liquids.

What are the benefits of dietary supplements?

Some supplements can help assure that you get enough of the vital substances the body needs to function; others may help reduce the risk of disease. But supplements should not replace complete meals which are necessary for a healthful diet – so, be sure you eat a variety of foods as well.

Unlike drugs, supplements are not permitted to be marketed for the purpose of treating, diagnosing, preventing, or curing diseases. That means supplements should not make disease claims, such as “lowers high cholesterol” or “treats heart disease.” Claims like these cannot be legitimately made for dietary supplements. For more accurate information visit Observer.com.

Are there any risks in taking supplements?

Yes. Many supplements contain active ingredients that have strong biological effects in the body. This could make them unsafe in some situations and hurt or complicate your health. For example, the following actions could lead to harmful – even life-threatening – consequences.

  • Combining supplements
  • Using supplements with medicines (whether prescription or over-the-counter)
  • Substituting supplements for prescription medicines
  • Taking too much of some supplements, such as vitamin A, vitamin D, or iron
    Some supplements can also have unwanted effects before, during, and after surgery. So, be sure to inform your healthcare provider, including your pharmacist about any supplements you are taking.

Some Common Dietary Supplements

  • Calcium
  • Echinacea
  • Fish Oil
  • Ginseng
  • Glucosamine and/or
  • Chondroitin Sulphate
  • Garlic
  • Vitamin D
  • St. John’s Wort
  • Saw Palmetto
  • Ginkgo
  • Green Tea

Tawyn Is The Champion My Friends…

ChampionOfTheFrozenWastes

…toldya I’d get Malygos before Oculus. >.>

Funny story behind this whole thing actually; I’ve been sitting around needing EoE and Oculus for a really long time now. However, I haven’t had much good luck with groups.

Enter my new guild, which– have I mentioned recently that they are all exceptionally nice?– has been really itching to figure out a way to get me into some raids since my schedule does not coincide with their current progression schedule very nicely.

And so, one night when I was actually online (as opposed to mornings, when I am usually online), the guild pulled together a Malygos run… pretty much just for me, and for some guildies’ alts who also wanted the title.

Now enter the funny story. They wanted me to use Ventrilo, which is fair; I typically use Ventrilo for any raid that isn’t OS/VoA. Ventrilo doesn’t work for me on Linux so I told my guild it would be a moment while I hopped partitions over to Windows.

…guess who hasn’t used Windows since the patch? Guess what needed to download? Oh, and then guess who ran out of space on her Windows partition and had to rearrange everything?

Needless to say it was about an hour before I was actually back in game. My addons were completely borked, but at that point I figured screw it, I’d already left my poor guild waiting so long.

And so, before long I was on Ventrilo, the subject of a rather amusing (and truth be told, ongoing) name debate: TAH-win vs. TAY-win. (It’s TAH-win by the way. >.>)

And Malygos went down quite nicely! I had a screenshot of the achievement but it primarily consists of my broken addons throwing error messages in my face (no, seriously. I named it “What Your Addons See When They Die”), so yeah.

Anyways, a couple days after that, aforementioned Really Nice Guild* went to Oculus with me so I could, finally, become Champion of the Frozen Wastes.

It’s a spiffy title, if a bit long-ish, and since approximately 97.5% of the WoW population is currently using that title, I’ll probably retire it soon until a few expansions from now, when it becomes rare.

But it’s nice to have it! <3 P.S. Guess who signed up for Ulduar this week! /excited dance --- * Really Nice Guild, as it turns out, has a blog. They totally aren’t expecting me to link them, but I’m going to because I’m devious like that. /wicked grin

Don't Panic

I spec’d Survival. For Replenishment. Because I was in a ten-man without any and it was making things annoying.

I liked it better this time than I did in the past (the fact that I remembered to train the higher ranks of Explosive Shot possibly had something to do with it. /nonchalant cough) My DPS was rather variable. For the most part I seemed to be floating a few hundred above what I do as BM, although sometimes I was higher, and sometimes the gap was much closer. (I somehow manage to pull off fairly equal DPS with all the hunter specs right now. I call shenanigans.) My mana issues, however, were nearly non-existent, especially because a ret pally decided to show up too (so much for me thinking we needed replenishment so badly!) and when I did go OOM a few times on Sapphiron tonight, I only had to be in Viper for about six seconds to fill up again.

I had a hard time getting used to the shot rotation because it didn’t really feel like there was any rhythm to it. I tried to set up my SCT-D to flash “ZOMG LOCK AND LOAD OHNOES” or something similar at me when L&L proc’d, and I got it about half working but then I couldn’t get a sound set to it. Still, I tried, though!

I am remaining Survival-spec’d tonight because the patch is tomorrow and we’ll all get a free respec anyway so don’t have a heart attack if you go to my Armory right now. >.> Honestly playing around with all the specs is something I would like to continue to do in the future– I sort of enjoy spec’ing for what the raid needs (I recently also spent a raid night as Marksman, for Trueshot Aura), and I’m making a mother-lode off of herbs lately so I can afford it. /nods

I actually felt like I had a really productive day in WoW today. I healed a Nexus on my druid. One of the group members was a hunter who intrigued me because his spec was almost the exact same as Lunapike’s— a very Pike-approved leveling spec. I complimented him on this. His response?

brkdisciple

Well, that explains that!

Then the boyfriend got on his Baby Holy Paladin, I got on my Baby Prot Paladin, and our friend got on his Baby Priest, and we proceeded to take Deadmines. For the record, this is what happens when we do Deadmines:
deadminesraid1

Yes, and did you know that in our little world, VanCleef possesses the following: void zones, fire that you should not stand in, fire that you should stand in, a stun, Mutating Injection, infernals that can be avoided by being tanked along a certain side of the boat, and a tail swipe?

True story.

You broke my Karazhan!

That’s me. In a raid group with one other person so I could run into Karazhan for two minutes.

And that’s… that’s another raid group in the same instance with me.

After a lot of confusion and pondering over whether we actually could 11-man Karazhan, the one final member of the other raid group realized he couldn’t get into the instance because the “raid was full”. Ah, so that was it. Ten people with the same Raid ID can all get into the same copy of Kara, regardless of groups. That’s how it seems, anyway, because I’d earlier been called in to help on Curator with two of these people a couple days ago… so I was, in fact, sharing a Raid ID.

Still, I can tell you right now, after months of playing this game, it is downright surreal to be in an instance all by yourself and suddenly run into a bunch of other players.

Geek is the New Black

Now I’m not one to hide my nerdiness and all-out geek pride.

But on the other hand, it’s not something I bring up with a whole lot of people. Largely I think it’s just because I assume that not very many people can relate to me if all I ever do is talk about Linux and video games. In order to get to know people, I sort of subconsciously stay on their level of interests, which I’m pretty sure in most cases is not mine.

But I sort of got tired of it today. Tired of beating around the bush. Tired of going “Um, er, ah…” when people ask me what my hobbies are or what I do in my spare time and I wonder what sort of blank stares I’d get if I told the whole truth.

Somebody asked me today what I’m doing tomorrow. I said “Raiding Karazhan with my guildies in World of Warcraft.” “Oh… okay,” was the semi-stunned response. It was all slightly awkward but I felt good. I’d unabashedly outed myself and it was nice.

In the breakroom at work today somebody came in and sat down across the table from me. We sat there munching on donuts and he asked me what I did last night. I said “I played video games.” “Ooh, what games?” “World of Warcraft.” “Ah yes,” he said. He’d never played it but he knew a lot about it. We talked about XBox 360 games and Starcraft 2 for a while before he finished his donut and made his exit.

Not long after he left, two other people came in. One was a departmental manager and the other guy was someone who started working there not long after I did. They had McDonalds and they came in and sat down at the table and set up their food. Then the manager turned to the other guy and said simply: “I’m telling ya, mining, herbalism, and an epic flying mount, and you’ll be set for life.”

The other guy replied, “Well, I’ve just got mining to supplement my engineering. I finally learned how to make the +10 damage scope for myself yesterday!”

The engineer, as it turns out, began playing five months ago or so and is a level 65 hunter.

I told him if he made Goblin Jumper Cables, people would love him if he feigned death in an instance and could then rez the healer. He was pretty impressed with this idea.

He said he was trying to work on gaining rep with a lot of factions so he would have kind of a headstart when he got to level 70. I told him to start working on his Cenarion Expedition rep so he could nab Glyph of Ferocity.

Then my break was over.

I foresee some more fun chats between the two of us in the future.

Apparently I was underestimating the world’s geek level. And I’m glad to say so.

On a completely different note, my boyfriend, Mr. Pike (though he prefers to be called “LS”), the infamous warlock who little level six Tawyn trekked across the world to find, started his own blog a little while ago and now feels he has enough content to warrant some visits. So go on, head over to Wearing Black in the Back and read what he has to say about roleplaying (both in and out of WoW), warlockery, and a variety of other goodies.

*pushes you over*

Helping Out

The other day I was logged into my Night Elf Tawyn, headed north up the road in Stranglethorn Vale to see if I could finish up a quest when I saw a level 10 Blood Elf ahead of me, running up the road as well. He waved at me, and I, being the sort to return kindness with kindness, reciprocated the gesture.

Not long after that, the poor guy was mauled to death by one of the tigers in the area.

I paused for a bit and sure enough he was back within a few minutes, doggedly continuing on down the road. Of course, it was only a matter of seconds before he was killed again.

A passing troll priest rezzed the guy, and this time I decided to do something myself as well. Namely, I hopped off my horse and began running along the road with the blood elf, pulling aggro off of him and disposing of the many monsters in this area that were eager to pounce on a level 10.

It was a long run, but up we went through Stranglethorn Vale, into Duskwood and through part of Westfall, with my trusty owl Tux and I successfully protecting him from countless deaths. Eventually, after many /thanks and /welcomes and /cheers all around, we got to Elwynn Forest, where he paused by the road and told me to /wait, and logged out.

A few seconds later I received a whisper from a level 65 human mage. He informed me that he was the blood elf, rode up to me and gave me a cash tip of some sixty-odd silver, and then promptly proceeded to pull out the Murky pet, his BlizzCon Murloc costume, and the picnic grill and hold a dance party in the middle of Goldshire, all the while singing “I am Murloc” at the top of his lungs.

Sometimes I love being the silly carebear player that I am!

(P.S. in case anyone was curious, the sole reason he wanted to go to to Elwynn on his Blood Elf was apparently just to amuse Goldshire. That is to say, he’d log into his alliance character, yell “BLOOD ELF!” and then log into the blood elf and run around as a lowbie and bug people. …heehee, yeah.)