A Neat Honor

I've been avoiding this for the past two weeks, but I think I can't hide any longer.

A long time friend and fellow blogger, Navimie of The Daily Frostwolf - Druid Edition, nominated me for a Real Neat Blog Award. I've been nominated for similar awards before, and they all follow a similar pattern: a shout out to the nominator, answer some questions, and pay it forward by nominating more bloggers and ask them questions.

For me, the easy part is the thanking and nominating. The hard part is answering the questions.

I have a problem where I can sit there and think up multiple answers to a question, and in my own mind find them all equally valid. I was the kid who'd raise his hand during a test and ask the teacher "which are you looking for, the answer "xxx", or the answer "yyy", since you could argue that "yyy" is correct from this angle but "xxx" from another angle.* And if you give me an open ended question...

Yeah, answering questions is my Waterloo.

So here are the three things to do as part of the award:

1. Thank and link the person who nominated you.
2. Answer the seven questions your nominator has provided.
3. Nominate seven other bloggers and create seven questions for them.

I covered item #1 with a reference to Navimie above (/waves).

***

Here are my seven questions (for item #2):

1. What would constitute a perfect day to you?
2. Which super villain (if any) do you secretly admire or feel sorry for?
3. If you had to recommend one book to read, what would it be?
4. What is something you wish you could do but you can't (eg draw, sing)?
5. If you could play with someone in World of Warcraft, who would you play with and what would you do with them?
6. What was the kindest thing anyone has done for you in a computer game?
7. If you could choose your spirit animal, what would it be?

Okay, here goes:

1. What would constitute a perfect day to you?

I'm a parent and at work I'm on call 24x7. What a perfect day for me is a day of undisturbed peace and solitude, highlighted by a good nap and a hike in the woods followed with some time by a lit fireplace.

I'm not saying I'm not happily married nor happy to be a parent, but a completely stress free day without worrying about this or that would be great.

2. Which super villain (if any) do you secretly admire or feel sorry for?

Most super villains aren't people that you can empathize with. Such charming people as The Joker or the Purple Man tend to bring out the reactions my family has when interacting with a centipede.** The sadist, the merciless crime boss, the purely insane, and the power hungry are all part of the pantheon of super villains.

And several superheroes started out originally as villains and morphed over time into ne'er do well superheroes in their own right, such as Luke Cage, Deadpool, Catwoman, Emma Frost, and Harley Quinn.

But of the major pantheon of super villains, there is one that even in his old villain mode I had a great deal of respect for: Magneto.***

For those who know their history, X-Men was born in the 60s, and provided a mirror to the times.**** Fear of "The Other" --particularly the immigrant and minority communities-- was reflected in humanity's reaction to the mutants. And the mutants themselves were a reflection of the Civil Rights movement, with their two factions' leaders representing opposing viewpoints: Professor X as Martin Luther King and Magneto as Malcolm X.

The X-Men movies enhanced Magneto's stature, emphasizing his response to the anti-mutant sentiment as a Holocaust survivor, with his determination to not have a mutant Holocaust happen again by any means necessary. He is a sympathetic figure, and you can understand his motivations even though you disagree with his actions.

3.If you had to recommend one book to read, what would it be?

Hoo boy.

If you'd have asked me this about 25 years ago, I'd not have hesitated in recommending Lord of the Rings. But over the intervening time, the movies came out and I stepped back from being a rabid Tolkien fan. I figure that people want to read LotR have already done so, as well as Harry Potter, A Game of Thrones, and other series have captured fans.

And really, I've learned from recommending books to my wife that you have to tailor your book recommendations to what people like to read. In her case, just about all SF&F books I've recommended have fallen flat, so I've given up trying. However, there has been one Fantasy series that she really did like, and that was Kristen Britain's Green Rider series. I've only read the first three, because when I read the third I stayed up until 4:30 AM to finish reading it, and I really really don't want to deal with that again for a while.

So I'd have to go with Green Rider, which got someone who prefers non-fiction and literary fiction to read something genre related.

A close second would be Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death series, Mystery novels set in the Henry II's England with the hero a Sicilian woman trained in the medical arts and very much a fish out of water in backwards England.

4. What is something you wish you could do but can't (eg draw, sing)?

Given that I'm the only non-musician in the house, you'd think that this answer would be to play an instrument. But I'm actually fine with not being able to play, because I know my mind works in an analytic fashion that tends to clash with creative things such as improvisation.

But what I'd really like to be able to do is just simply "wing it" and be improvisational, whether it is in a meeting, DMing an RPG campaign, or writing. I'm one of those people who have to have all the angles worked out ahead of time, so I wouldn't be stuck saying "Uh....." in front of a crowd. And yes, that has happened to me, back in my college days when I was in Model UN.

I'm simply unable to effectively improvise something, and I'd love to be able to pull that sort of thing off. It would really help in my (feeble) attempts at writing fiction, working on our landscape, or even decorating around the house.*****

5. If you could play with someone in World of Warcraft, who would you play with and what would you do with them?

Back in the days before cross server grouping was allowed, Tam of Righteous Orbs had orchestrated a "bloggers guild" on one of the EU servers. The idea was that WoW bloggers could hang out and play the game with their "virtual kin". In an apt metaphor of blogging everywhere, the guild started out great and then petered out as time went on.

About a year or so later, Vidyala and Rades (of Manalicious, Orcish Army Knife, and From Draenor with Love) created a guild on Moonrunner (US) to hang with some of their fellow (now no longer active) blogger friends, and my Dwarf Paladin joined their small guild. I'll freely admit that I had more than my share of boneheaded moments, like the time in The Stockade when at the final boss a bunch of trash aggroed on me in the final boss fight and rather running to the tank and letting her take over the pull I got the bright idea that she'd be overwhelmed and decided to lead this trash on a merry chase throughout the already cleared instance. No, it was not my finest moment. At all.

But a few years later, when Blizz began to roll out cross server grouping on a test/pay basis, I got an excited ping from Vidyala:

"Red!"
"Hey Vid!"
"Wait a sec, let me try this...."
[Vidyala has asked you to join a group]
[You have joined the group]
"Woooo!!!!!"
"Yay!!!"
"This is awesome!!"

I'd never been able to group up with Vid on her main and my (then) Alliance main, Tomakan, before that moment. It was an exhilarating thing to be able to group up and run an instance or Alterac Valley with a friend's main from another server.

But if there's one thing I'd love to do in WoW once more, it would be to revive the spirit of those two old guilds and get some of my long time blogger friends together again. If there's one thing I really do miss about WoW, it's the discussions and playing around with some of my blogger friends over those years. Given the spectacular disintegration of my Horde guilds and the bleeding dry of the Alliance guild, I've kept the guild/kinship aspect of MMOs at arm's length while I play. But I still miss the shared camaraderie of my blogger friends, because we have shared the experience of loving something so much that we write about it. And it's not an exclusive club by any means --anybody can create a Twitch stream or start a blog-- but that shared experience means we have a connection that the average MMO player doesn't have.

And those bloggers that have gone silent over the years, I really do still miss.

6. What was the kindest thing anyone has done for you in a computer game?

The kindest thing? There was the time when I was in Desolace (Wrath Era), leveling Quintalan to L80, and a max level toon stopped alongside me, told me he was going to unsubscribe, and proceeded to give me a ton of items he'd stored over the years.

There was also the time when I was on Quintalan in The Hinterlands, and a max level alliance toon appeared right beside me. Being on PvP-Stormscale (US) at the time, I thought I was dead. But the toon basically shook her head no, gave me a thumbs up, and went on her way.

There was the time when a friend, knowing that my Alliance guild was all but dead, offered to have me join her guild instead.

But I think the greatest kindness showed me in game was when Soul and his wife had decided that they wanted to get off Stormscale, and rather than leave me behind they sent me a snail mail. Inside, they wrote what they were going to do and rather than leave me --the newbie-- behind they paid my transfer fee.

7. If you could choose your spirit animal, what would it be?

Heh. The oldest mini-Red has seen this design around and wants one for college:

From teespring.com.

But that's obviously not me.

As for a spirit animal, I'd have to go with a wolf. Not sure why, but a wolf it is.

***

Part #3 requires seven bloggers to be nominated and to create seven questions for them. The list is fairly short, since my blogging list is somewhat small these days (and several people on the list have already been tagged), but the questions....

Blogs:

1. Going Commando (Shintar is also known for Priest with a Cause and Neverwinter Thoughts)
2. Ravalation
3. JVT Workshop
4. Hawtpants of the Old Republic (Njessi is also known for Murloc Parliament)
5. Tome of the Ancient
6. MMO Gypsy (Syl can also be heard as one of the three hosts of the Battle Bards podcast.)
7. Manalicious (I know that Vid has been busy and Manalicious has gone into mothballs, but it's worth a try. She's also known for her artwork on From Draenor With Love and her original blog, Pugging Pally.)

Questions:

1. What attracted you to blogging as opposed to other forms of social media?
2. What are your top five movies of all time?
3. Outside of blogging or gaming, what are you most passionate about?
4. What is something about you that nobody would ever guess?
5. What do you find most engaging about gaming?
6. If you had a chance to go back in time and tell your younger self something, what would you say?
7. What is your favorite band and why?

*I usually got a stare, then a "Redbeard, sit down and answer the question." I learned the hard way to give the teacher what they wanted, answer-wise. I can play that game if that's what they want. But it goes against my firm belief that you should be honest in your dealings with people. Which, I suppose, makes me a lousy Diplomacy player. Or a lousy office politics player, for that matter.

**"Kill it!! Kill it with fire!!!!" is a typical reaction, as is "DAD!!!! KILL THIS!!!!!"

***He now counts --more or less-- as a superhero in the comic, leading a team of X-Men. Don't ask me any more details, because I'm not up on the X-Men comics.

****Marvel has done this before. Spider-man was a reflection of teenage angst, and both a desire to fit in and finding your way in the world, only under the backdrop of having superpowers.

*****It would have also helped in my attempts at talking to girls when I was a teen and a college student. As for my wife, you may ask? She asked me out, not the other way around.


EtA: Added Syl's other work to the MMO Gypsy listing.