The Blackrock Blues

The real question for me lately is whether Azshandra will complete a full Blackrock Depths run or hit L60 first. Given my recent luck in BRD runs, I'm betting on L60.

Oh, it's not that the runs devolved into acrimony or something, it's just that they fall apart.

I had one where we simply ran out of time: people had to go to bed to get up for work the next day. There was another that one person said they only wanted an Angerforge run, and after they left the tank left, and that was that. A third stalled at the mobs near Bael'Gar, and a fourth stalled after a wipe near the entryway to Molten Core. In between, there have been a couple of small runs that I knew going in that were going to end fairly quickly, like the Marshall Windsor quests, but I was fine with that.

And in another recent run we wiped in the gnome area, and during the subsequent runback some people had to split.

But Az did ding L59, so at least there's that.

***

The most memorable run so far has been one that we knew almost immediately that we weren't going to get to the end, but we decided to see how far we were going to get.

You see, the evening began with me wanting to get into a Blackrock Depths run, but the runs that evening only wanted AoE DPS --basically Mages and Warlocks-- so people could farm experience. A single Rogue such as Az was not on people's radar. So, when a Sunken Temple run appeared, I was happy to join.

Once invited to the group, I realized that I'd run with half of the group before*, so I knew this was going to be a solid bunch. We spent a bit of extra time doing a full clear of the entire Sunken Temple complex --as a lot of groups simply skip the sewers portion-- and once done we began to go our separate ways.

However, the healer spoke up about how she wanted to do some more instances tonight, and how does BRD sound?

"That's what I wanted to do this evening," I replied, "but people only wanted Mages in LookingForGroup. So count me in."

One player didn't want to run, so we said goodbye to him and the four of us hearthed out and began the trip to Blackrock Mountain while asking around for a fifth.

A fifth quickly joined us, and it was yet another toon I'd run with before. Surely this meant that the stars were aligning, and I'd finally get that BRD run completed.

Well.....

One of our group disconnected mid-flight.

"Um...." I said.

"Oh, I bet I know what happened," one of the group said. "He said he was going to check his phone, and because of lag he was using it as a hot spot."

It turned out to be the case, because after he rejoined he told us he'd rebooted his phone as it was slow and had completely forgotten about using it as a hotspot.

Well, since he died mid-flight, his corpse was stuck somewhere near Karazhan, so he had to run all the way back to Darkshire to revive. Once there, he picked up some water for the healer (who'd run out and forgotten to get more) and headed out on the flightpoint once more.

While he was en route, the tank yawned and said that she couldn't keep her eyes open, so she was going to have to call it a night. We tried getting a tank, but no dice. There were two or three BRD/UBRS groups vying for tanks at the same time, and while we said "no reserves" in our call outs the other groups were offering gold as bribes. Things kind of degenerated from there into the other groups getting into a fight with some people who "claimed" to be tanks, saying they weren't offering enough incentives to tank

At that point, the healer basically said "screw it" and said that we should just go with the four of us (Druid Healer, Two DPS Warriors, and Az the Rogue) and see how far we get. The four of us were fine with that, so we figured with some luck we could at least get through the Arena portion and up to Angerforge.

We did a lot of line of sight pulls, and the healer did a great job of keeping the designated Warrior tank upright, particularly since she didn't have any tanking gear at all. We only had one stupid wipe at the beginning where we pulled once too many, but we made it to the Arena. "As long as we don't get something like the bats, we should be okay," the tank said.

We got the bats.

We wiped.

As we ran back, we debated strategy on how to take care of them, but it turned out to be for naught as the event had glitched and the bats had vanished. The way forward lay open.

"Let's see if we can take Angerforge out at least," the tank said, and led the way out.

We made it to Angerforge, waited for all of the Healer's cooldowns to finish, and we pulled Angerforge up the stairs and into a side hallway. Given the lack of that fifth person, we did pretty well in getting to within a hit or two of knocking Angerforge off, but we still wiped.

"Okay," I said as we ran back, "We've got this. just one or two more hits and then we'll have taken him out."

"Maybe we should pull him farther back," the healer suggested. "Like around the bend and close to the door leading to this area."

"That's fine. We'll wait there while the tank pulls. If the tank needs an extra heal, you can run forward a bit as needed."

So we set ourselves up, with Az (me) and the healer near the door, the other DPS Warrior hanging around by some cannons at the end of the hallway, and the tank ran past him and got ready to pull Angerforge.

"Okay, pulling," she called.

Suddenly the healer and I were surrounded by eight fire elementals, who quickly blew us apart.

"AAAAAAAAAHHH!!!" The Warrior DPS yelled.

"What the holy hell was that?" the healer asked.

The tank dropped the pull and ran back to see the fire elementals vanish.

"I was just standing here on the cannons, looking at the two of you, and you were both engulfed by those fire elementals. It was terrifying!"

The healer and I started laughing.

"It had to be triggered by my pull," the tank said. "You screamed as soon as I pulled."

"I'd have given a lot to have seen the look on your face, man," I said as the healer and I started a runback.

"I'd rather have a video of the view he had," the healer added. "It must have been some sight."

"It was, and I don't want to see it again."

During the runback we decided that this was likely a built-in protection that Blizz had to keep a Hunter from kiting Angerforge all the way and past the hallway. "Because Hunters," the healer added.

"Well, we can't kite that far," the tank replied, "so let's redo this and make sure people use their Chained Essence of Eranikus when each mob appears."**

"And if we kill Angerforge, make sure to click on him so we can at least loot him when we run back."

Our strategy in place, and everybody's abilities now completely off cooldown, we tried once more to kill of General Angerforge. And this time, we killed him before his second mob wiped us.

That had to be the happiest bunch of dead people running back to revive in an instance.

We mutually agreed that we weren't going any farther with just the four of us, so we decided to regroup some time later, get a real tank, and finish the instance.

So while Az didn't get that BRD run she wanted, what she got was a totally memorable run nevertheless.

#Blapril2020




*I had already friended them, which I typically do for players who not only do a good job but also make grouping enjoyable. Basically, they're the people I'd not mind having as guildies.

**The idea was to use one Chained Essence on the first mob, and the other one on the second. I, being a "nice guy", had given up my Chained Essence because I that's not how I roll.

Ya Gotta Have That Something, Kid

When we first started blogging here on PC, Soul performed some outreach to several bloggers that he followed to help us get connected into the WoW blogoverse. We picked up a few views that way, and were added to a few blogs, but that outreach never really amounted to much.

I should also mention that this outreach happened before Twitter blew up and became the Twitter that we all love and hate today, so if you thought Twitter is shouting into the void now, then you haven't seen the "before times".

But what I discovered that in those first few years of blogging was that it wasn't active promotion that garnered regular readers but rather the organic work of reading and responding on other people's blogs. If I had something interesting to say on other blogger's comment sections, people would follow my link back and check out PC. That's how we ended up on what was --at the time-- two of the most important WoW blog sites' blogrolls: Righteous Orbs and the Pink Pigtail Inn.

Times have changed quite a bit, given the rise of Twitter and the fine tuning of self-promotion to an art form. However, one thing that remains is the basic premise that you have to have something interesting to say if you want to keep readers. Being hip or edgy is not required. And all the self-promotion in the world won't keep readers if you don't have that interesting angle.

#Blapril2020

Have We a Dynamic and Creative Office Environment Yet?

"Tell him sorry but no. Homer, Virgil, and Milton all did it in 12. Big Dave don't break no rules."
--David Eddings, responding to an editor on a fan's request for more books set in the Belgariad universe, after he'd written a dozen books. (Possibly apocryphal)


I am, at heart, an introvert.

That shouldn't be a surprise to people who know me, and that my limit to social media is blogging* fits in with that background.

Of course, you can sit there and point out that I play MMOs, which pretty much require interaction if you want to engage with a decent amount of the content, and I'd agree that yes, you'd think that if I can play MMOs I can handle other things, such as Twitter or Discord.**

But I don't use other forms of social media, and I'm fine with that.

Twitter is too immediate and driven by emotion and the hive mind for me to utilize it well. As I've said before on numerous occasions --both in and outside PC-- Twitter would feed into my worst instincts by allowing me to shoot off a reply without thinking through it first. Whether or not you think positively of my opinions, my posts on PC aren't fired simply off-the-cuff. I write something, set it aside for an hour or more, and then come back and re-read it. I typically make some major changes, because my training and expertise do not lie in writing and grammar, and I also edit the content once my emotions have gotten back into a better state.*** With Twitter, that review period gets thrown out the window and it pretty much becomes "anything goes".

Discord --and related chat/video apps-- are not my friend. I look on the chat apps, including Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business****, as necessary evils in today's world. My actual job requires me to be available 24x7, which means that I have to respond to any texts or other alerts at any time of day or night. And because of that, the dreaded 3 AM text is a part of my life.

I've been on emergency work calls using Skype for Business that lasted 10-12 hours (don't ask), and I've been woken up at 3 AM for an emergency that required me to write code on the fly to fix a problem that was seen once about 10 years ago. So yeah, I tend to associate voice apps with work to an absurd degree.

But on top of that, I dread putting myself out there in an open Discord chat channel. It sounds silly, but I really do get a knot in my stomach when I have to get on Discord (or, in the old days, Ventrillo) for some reason or another. An MMO's party chat doesn't have my Spring sinuses clearly audible*****, and while I can't type as fast as I'd like during an instance, I don't mind that. After all, I'm supposed to be focusing on the task at hand rather than making some random quip after Archaedas says "Who dares the wrath of the Makers??!!" with "Oh, not me. I'll go see myself out now."

***

I realize that the entire point of the Blapril Discord channel is to provide a fertile breeding ground for creative synergies with fellow content creators, but for me that sounds too much like work. Especially for an introvert.

Besides, I've never promoted PC, and I certainly don't intend to start doing so now.

So, being both the introvert and the contrarian, I'm going to take a pass on joining the Blapril Discord channel. Sure, going outside of my comfort zone can be good in the long term, but I'm not going to break my internal rules concerning voice apps. For the time being, at least.

#Blapril2020




*And some obligatory Facebook.

**Or guilds in general, for that matter.

***Okay, confession time. I had a really hard time writing certain portions of One Final Lesson because of the emotions I got while writing. This extended into the review/editing period, when I try really hard to step back and properly edit the work for clarity and conciseness. On more than one occasion I said out loud (to an empty house) "This is nuts; I wrote this, dammit! Get a hold of yourself!"

****Teams is, for those who remember it, the Lotus Notes of 2020. Both Teams and Skype for Business, along with other old apps such as Sametime, are the bane of the modern office. I've been working from home for at least 17 years, and I really despise these apps because they frequently get in the way of work and collaboration rather than enhance them. And for people who opine that working in an office enhances collaboration, that only works if your coworkers are also in the same office. In a modern company where people may be located all over the globe, forcing people to come into an office just to then use Teams or Skype is silly, particularly when you can get distracted all the time in an actual office by just casual chatting with coworkers. (See: Office Space.) And on top of it, some companies use these tools to determine if you're slacking off or not, which will only get worse as the shelter-in-place directives spread over the globe.

*****The first time I got on a chat app for WoW, Soul asked me "what's up with your breathing?" And here I thought I sounded normal, until I realized that the microphone will pick up crap like my sinuses because it's a helluva lot closer to my schnoz than another person's ears.

The KISS Principle at Work

For someone who has tinkered with electronics and computers since the early 80s, I'm a bit of a low tech guy when it comes to blogging.

The Blogger suite is one that worked just fine a decade ago, but Google has pretty much abandoned it for no good reason (or at least one that I've heard), so the toolset is --to put it charitably-- lacking in modern conveniences.

You'd think that a company that owns both Blogger and YouTube would find a way to seamlessly integrate YouTube channels into a Blogger Widget so that you can see the latest entry in each channel, but that isn't the case. You don't even have much of an option to easily tinker with designs the way you can with Wordpress; if I'm going to study code at home, it's not going to be to customize my own blog but focus on enhancing my work skillset.

But I will say that Blogger is much more customizable than LiveJournal (or Dreamwidth, which is largely the successor to LJ), so it's not exactly the bottom of the barrel as blogging platforms go.

Regardless, the blog hasn't exactly changed much in terms of design since Cataclysm came out*, and every time I've tinkered with something --such as replacing the leading graphic with a GIF-- I discover that I have to pay in order to get the kind of GIF design I really want.**

Writing for PC is straightforward, too: I utilize the Blogger post page and just write when I can. I used to use Word and then transfer it over the old fashioned way (by cut and paste), but I'd found that Office was a huge resource hog on my laptop and just writing in Blogger itself was simpler. I have occasionally tried scheduling a post, but for some reason that never seems to work properly for me, so I decided that I'll post when I post. And yes, that means I'm really awake on those oddball middle-of-the-night posting times.

Why? Because that's when I get most of my writing done.

***

Like I mentioned on the 10 year blogoversary post for PC, I prefer to write at night when there's a lot of solitude. I'm a night owl, and doing things when the sun goes down appeals to me, whether it's gaming, writing, or tinkering with various other hobbies.*** A writer acquaintance of mine used to set a timer over his lunch hour at his work and try to see just how many words he could cram into a single session. And there are other writer friends who have chat sessions going through the day --the War Room, they call it-- and set up 5-10 minute challenges to see just how many words they can put onto (virtual) paper during those times.

So my writing approach is threefold: write what you want, when you want to, and edit/publish when you feel like it.

Not a bad gig overall, as long as you keep up with posting.

#Blapril2020





*Did the graphic give it away?

**The free ones simply don't cut it. There's a specific time limit, and the more images you select the less time those images spend on-screen. And, to be honest, the images would need editing and whatnot, and that inevitably means using Photoshop or one of its competitors/relatives to get what I want.

***I used to work on homework sets while I attended UD during the late evening and overnight hours. I got to know the overnight DJs of the Dayton area radio stations quite well, whether they were a national feed (Peter Van de Graaf for WDPR) or totally local (the DJs for WTUE, WAZU, and WOXY). I always meant to call WTUE up at 3 AM and ask for something obnoxious to keep me awake while doing homework, but when 3 AM hit I was far more interested in just finishing the damn stuff up so I could go to sleep.

Being a Short Order Cook Blogger

You know one thing I kind of dislike about this urge to post lots of things, Blapril or not?

The sheer volume of unfinished drafts sitting in the "post" section of Blogger.

Not counting any fiction I'm working on, there's at least 5 articles from the recent couple of months still in draft form that I intend to publish. It's just that I look at what I'm working on, whether it makes sense to finish it now, and deciding that I'd be better off leaving them unfinished for now.

It's not like there aren't unfinished drafts in the blog's Post section; over the years we've accumulated quite a few of them.* A lot of those I started, got partway through, and decided to either table it for another time (that never came) or that it wasn't working and decided to abandon it. But now, with too many things to say but being uncertain in which order to say them, I have a lot of mostly finished posts that just need to be put in some semblance of order.

***

When I started blogging, I didn't expect this would be a problem. I thought that you'd write something, post it, and maybe you get some commentary from it, and that'd be the extent of my involvement in PC. However, with the dawn of the modern influencer movement has come the expansion of brand promotion, data analytics, and all sorts of other "non-content related" activities with running a blog.

Which, on the face of it, seems silly for a blog that is largely about a gaming movement that is long past its heyday.

Even if you discard --like I do-- a lot of the analytics, brand promotion, and other traditional "influencer" activities, you still have content that needs to be presented in a coherent way. And that's where my dilemma is.

When I have one major idea at a time, it's not a difficult matter to write, edit, and post. But if I get a lot of ideas at once --hey, my brain does kick in every once in a while-- sorting them out takes a few days. Or a week. Or two weeks.

But I guess the entire point of this massive jumble is that it's a good thing to have so much to say, but making sense of it all requires an understanding of blogging meta-issues that, to be honest, are not why you got into blogging in the first place.

***

Perhaps a better analogy is comparing blogging to cooking.

Both can be fun activities, and there are times when both feel a lot like work. With both you can take the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach and just make something with whatever you've got on-hand at the moment, whether it be a specific topic (blogging) or whatever is in your pantry (cooking). However, once you get into planning things out, you can then anticipate with regularity when you'll need to focus on different things. For example, some people do the "Taco Tuesday" or "Wine Wednesday" where they make meals that fit into a theme. Converting that into a blog, you can have a "WoW Wednesday" or a "Miscellaneous Monday" where a regular topic means you have a ready made posting direction.

Sure, you can mix and match elements as much as you like to keep things fresh, and gaming news has a way of interfering with the best made plans out there, but sticking to a regular schedule helps a person plan things out and also allows for consistent feedback.**

***

But in the end, whatever works for you is worth it.

If I'm going to meet the Blapril scheduling demands, however, I need to be in more of a planning mode if I'm going to order my unfinished posts properly as well as meet the increased demands of many posts in a month.

(The same goes for cooking, given that we're in lockdown for the foreseeable future.)

Oh, and one more non-blogging tip: despite my skepticism, air fryers work. I didn't ask for one and I had no intention of buying one, but I was given one for the Holidays this past Winter. Once I realized that a so-called "air fryer" is actually a mini convection oven, that opens up all sorts of avenues for cooking that I didn't have before. But yes, you can make killer onion rings in them, too.

#Blapril2020



*I can officially say "we" because Soul has exactly one in there from eons ago. Still, it's a blank entry, so I guess it might not count.

**Sheesh, I sound like a big data miner.

Going in With Eyes Wide Open

I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking, but I signed up for Blapril.

It's not as if I don't have things to do, games to play, work to keep me busy, or family to keep an eye on, but I guess I just wanted to to it.

Well, and looking back on last month I was uncommonly busy, posting-wise.

Even if you take out everything affiliated with One Final Lesson I still posted seven times, which is high for me. I typically try to hit a once/week posting schedule, with a couple of extra posts thrown in every month, so I'll freely admit that March 2020 was definitely unusual from my blogging output.

Of course, March 2020 will be remembered for another particular reason that I need not expand upon here.

***

And now I have to come up with a boatload of topics on an almost daily basis. I realize you're not required to do that in Blapril, but come on. You know what you're getting into when you commit to something like that. And unlike my last several forays into NaNoWriMo, I'm going to try to make this stick.

Why should it be different this time, you might ask? Probably because I actually finished a story.

Sure, it was a "shouting into the void" moment, but once I started writing an "origin story" of sorts for Cardwyn, I simply couldn't stop even if I wanted to. And now that I finished an actual work of fiction, I've found I can't stop. It's like I've been transported back to 2008-9, when I first joined LiveJournal and began to connect with all sorts of aspiring writers. I burned through a lot of virtual ink during that time, writing something that could only be described in hindsight as Mary Sue meets Marty Stu with lots of angst in the way. But being able to step back and realize what was happening, writing wise, meant I could actually write something better the next time around.

And less cringe worthy.

At the same time, I dropped fiction in favor of, well, this blog. I found it sated my need to write while keeping me on a (semi) regular schedule.

To be honest, I even stopped reading or watching fiction, because I felt I couldn't devote the time to it that I felt it deserved. I was happy to see SF/F take a more prominent role in our fictional worlds --written, visual, and virtual-- but I couldn't see myself devoting time to books, movies, or comics because of my completionist tendencies. Well, that and the desire of a lot of content creators to inject a lot of "pathos" into stories just to make the stories feel more "adult". Like I've said many times before, I don't need that in my fiction because if I wanted that I'd just turn on the news.

But you know how to get the fiction you want? You write it yourself.

And you actually finish the damn thing. And post it as proof that you finished it.

***

And now I've come full circle, with an urge to write fiction and devote more time to writing non-fiction as well.

Which includes doing something stupid and signing up for Blapril.

Oh well, I guess you couldn't say that I don't know what I'm getting myself into.

#Blapril2020

Wordpress Doesn't Seem to Like Me

No, really.

I've commented on several Wordpress blogs lately, including The Last Chapter Gaming Blog, Kamalia et Alia and The Ancient Gaming Noob, but the comments never appeared.

My first thought was that I'd somehow screwed up and pushed a Cancel button or something instead of Post Comment, but I've since discovered that there is no Cancel button.

Okay, I thought. Maybe I ended up on a spam list somewhere.

The only issue with that is that I'd assume that if that were the case I couldn't post on Blogger hosted blogs as well, but I have no issues there.

So go figure.

It's not as if this sort of thing hasn't cropped up before. My wife managed to get our main PC infected several years ago, and even after I removed the infection our PC showed up on some block lists that our ISP subscribed to, so I had to wait until our PC vanished from those lists before we could connect to the internet once more.

I'm kind of hoping that's not the case, because removing infections can be a royal PITA.