IRL update amidst sparse WoW happenings.

I like pigs. They are cheering. So here are some.

I've been set up at my "sweet" New Jersey pad for a few days now, but as the tier has been winding down, my life has become even more demanding than my garrison. While my places both in and out of game can be described as intermissions, the usual post-progression lull and its lazy farm raids, lack of urgency, and general boredom as one searches for little things to fill in time greatly contrasts with this interim period full of job-hunting, rejection, and self-loathing. Trust me when I say that self-loathing takes up a lot of time.

With patch 6.2 coming up sooner than I expected, it doesn't look like I'm going to have as long of a break to work on my unemployment and neglected local personal relationships before the push happens again. Obviously, it's a busy time even though progression is over, but while I work to rebuild in a new/old location, I can at least take comfort in the fact that I'm closer to a place of happiness. I'm not just referring to proximity to my favorite city either though that's definitely a huge perquisite. This weekend, I'll be heading to Union Square to watch the Manhattanhenge sunset, take stock of my life, possibly shed a tear, and then comfort myself afterwards with a vegan cupcake.

Yes, I have a date with myself.

-Avia.

The birthday girl reports Blackhand progression.

Since I had to raid Thursday night and then catch an early Friday morning flight to LGA, I tried to save time by writing up a blog entry about our Blackhand progression while we were working it. Unfortunately, our performance varied so much over the course of the night, I was having trouble deciding on an angle.

445pm
Today is my birthday, and I couldn't have asked for a better present that my guild's Mythic Blackhand kill.

545pm
It would have been nice if we could have gotten a M Blackhand kill for my birthday, but sadly our progress has been riddled with attendance issues and constant relearning.

630pm
After expecting us to kill Blackhand every raid day for the past two weeks, the boss went down surprisingly easily. I'm now convinced that pep talks are what a guild needs to be successful. Oh wait. Just kidding, because we wiped again.

705pm
Thanks to Blizzard's massive wave of bans in the middle of our M Blackhand progression, we've had to completely reorganize our core team. Oddly enough, we're still failing at the same point we always are in phase 2 even with new people and losing all of our former god comp boomkins and hunters. Is "bring the class, not the player" a myth at a certain level of skill?

830pm
While early kills are all about min/maxing and class comp, relatively later kills like today's is all about not being terrible at this game.

920pm
Omg my flight leaves in a few hours, and we're going over time. I need to pack!!!

955pm
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!! US TOP 100, BABY! CLUTCH STEEZ!

See you soon, NYC!

-Avia.

There's really no pleasing raiders.

Traditionally, the last bosses of WoW raids have always been epically long, multiple-phase, battles for survival. Progression ultimately requires players to suffer through 10+ minutes of Garrosh or Imperator only to get f'd in the a in the last phase and have to go through the entire encounter again. When raid time is limited, it can be fatiguing to repeatedly execute the monotonous yet still punishing beginning parts just to see and learn the all-important and usually most difficult final push. One begins to wish for a shorter fight that compacts our skill and strategy into less time or moves the phase that matters earlier instead of tacked on at the end. With Mythic Blackhand, we get exactly that.

I put on Glyph of Metamorphosis so all the locks look different in demon form.

Yet, M Blackhand only demonstrates what Blizzard already knows of its customers, which is that we can find anything to complain about, because here I am bitching about eight-minute pulls and how equally fatiguing they are. There are no lulls or semi-relaxing intervals of mindless DPS between important mechanics. Downtime between attempts is minimal, and it's a constant res, buff, pull timer cycle. The fight is all about phase 2, and if we could consistently get out of it without any missed balconies, this boss that probably should have already died yesterday would be down. As opposed to perfecting execution of early phases to see the last phase, the encounter is a series of short DPS pushes while trying to mitigate RNG, and the deaths of any of a number of key players leads to a call for a quick wipe and regroup. Four hours and fifty attempts a night of this can be quite taxing.

But more importantly, I'm going through consumables like they're mage water! Seriously, every early wipe is a painful stab at my miserly soul, and whoever is selling augment runes and buff food right now is making bank when I'm popping them just to lose them to bad Demolitions in the first phase or having to call a wipe because a siege tank decided to make love to a healer. Every random disconnect makes me groan when I think of the 70g I just spent to buff myself for two minutes when I could have spent it on two hours of game time instead or just held onto it forever like I do with all my gold anyway. Botched attempts hurt me physically, and when our res is down, I stare at the dead tank on my raid frames with the same despondence associated with watching a beautiful stranger on the street walk away and out of one's life forever.

We are so close to a kill now, and my in-game wallet wants it as much as my guild and I do. All I can say is thank Draenor for my treasure hunters carrying back loads of gold from who knows where.

By the way, after a mere five months in Los Angeles, I'm moving back to the East Coast. Sorry, California. You had good vegan food and a much cleaner beach than NYC's, but I must return to the concrete jungle and surrounding suburbs whence I came. No hard feelings, and see you at Blizzcon, maybe?

<3Avia.

RIP and GL with reroll, buddy.

 

Things on Which You Can Blame a Hardcore Death in D3:

 

1. Disconnects/Game lag

2. Public game trolls that purposely try to kill other players

3. Stonesinger reflecting a party member's projectile at you

4. Waller/Arcane Enchanted

5. Your roommate walking near you at the exact time your character dies

That's right, OG Priest.

There's no way you can make it my fault that you died in a high-level GRift just because I happened to karate chop my way to your side of the apartment when you were fighting an elite pack. Blame the maze of arcane lasers that sliced your wizard in half, not the gentle footfalls of a tiny Korean kunoichi leaping with measured grace into your area. How could a sneaky cat like me even have been a distraction? I was practically invisible. Even though I was definitely performing some super sick moves all up in it, there was no way any of that could have contributed to your character exploding when I was the stealthiest ninja the world has ever not seen.

Yea.

Totally not my fault.

-Avia.

I got no love rocket this year, in game or out.

Look who's blogging!

So it was Valentine's Day today as I'm sure anyone that dared to venture out onto the streets had noticed when every restaurant was full and there was an unusually large amount of men carrying someone else's purse. Since I'm currently in a long-distance relationship, I got to celebrate the holiday with my best friend celibacy. For some reason, OG Priest went to spend the evening as the third wheel at his married brother's house, so with the apartment to myself, I decided what better way to devote my solo night than with a take-out container of Thai curry and a two-day free trial of the Sims 4.

Though I had claimed my 48-hours of free Sims 4 access a few weeks ago, with all the raiding and garrison dailies, I hadn't gotten around to playing it until today. I'm only a couple hours of playtime in so far, and despite all of the flaws that players have bitched about and that I also took into consideration when I decided not to buy the game at release, I'm still having a pretty fun time while its free. Just look at how beautiful my Simself turned out; she's an adequately-endowed and clearer-skinned version of me who can walk in heels and wouldn't stop working on her novel unless her house was on fire. The game even had my exact clothes and rather realistic Asian eyes as opposed to what they would look like if I were an anime character.

She even has the smirk I do in pictures because I think my smile looks weird.

This is literally my Mon-Wedn-Fri look.

What I'm really enjoying is the new emotions system, which affects the Sim's behavior and wants and also changes the Sim's character portrait into a caricatural display of how s/he's feeling. Check out my Simself in various emotional states below. "Energized" Avia looks like she's ready to grab a wrench and build a bridge just because she has the impetus, and believe it or not, "Flirty" Avia acquired that emotion by taking a steamy shower... She must have a really nice showerhead in that cheap starter-house. The third image is apparently what "Inspired" Sim Avia looks like though it's pretty much the face I have IRL when I'm trying to figure out what I'm ordering at a coffee shop. "Fine" is what the game calls a neutral emotion state, and I'd say it's pretty accurate since Sim Avia rolled out of bed looking rather attractive and non-murderous in the morning. Yet, I have never felt more connected to my Simself than when she woke up "Sad" on another morning and proceeded to "Cry It Out" under the covers. Seriously uncanny.

Well, now that I have my character set up and working an impossibly high-paying job to afford my laughably small bills and spend the balance on things like cupcake machines, I might as well try to make sure at least Sim Avia gets some Valentine's Day action.

Swiggity swooty!

Don't look so eager, bitch! /facepalm

-Avia.

Watch a Mythic Imperator video and just don't give a crap about what's happening in it.

While I recover from a hangover, I will review how our M Imperator progress is going.

Very very slowly.

We are currently at the point in progression where we spend nine minutes executing the fight near perfectly only to have everything fall apart immediately once we hit phase 3. Such is the nature of multiple-phase, battle-for-survival final bosses, but I always wish Blizz would just drop us into the fight when it mattered with the healers at half mana so we wouldn't have to do the same beginning part over and over. It's like doing 80% of a jigsaw puzzle, and every time I try to put two pieces together that don't fit, I have to take apart the entire puzzle and restart from scratch. Or an NES game with no save points, and it takes forever to get back to Bowser where I ran out of lives, and no one misses that about early video games.

However, after 170 pulls, I finally noticed something that I was previously too occupied with not popping runes, avoiding chaos orbs, and running through force novas to see: all of those runes, orbs, and novas are super pretty. Perhaps their instant deadliness was always distracting me from how graphically stunning the mechanics of this fight are. After all, the ultimate directive is to dodge, which makes me automatically treat those arrangements of pixels in an avoidant way and always recoil from them as dangerous and generally negative. I am predisposed to viewing them in an unflattering light.

This is a pretty funny video.

But when I'm already dead on the floor and not focusing on avoiding that one chaos orb that is making its way into my area, I can take a look at how all of the orbs look when they explode out of the marked tank, and it is a freaking beautiful divergence of glowing fluorescent balls of lightning spreading across the room. Force novas make shimmering waves over the entire fight space, but I'm too concentrated on my health level versus an oncoming horizon of potential death to appreciate the display. And those dreaded runes, the most important things to avoid in this encounter, spawn as intricately designed circles, change appearance as they activate, and shoot gleaming spirals of brilliant light as they replicate. And everything has different colors!

I wonder how many other visually outstanding encounters there have been in my raiding career during which I missed out on a sense of amazement because of being too focused on my job as DPS and mechanics responsibilities. I imagine it's similar to the how often I've failed to be amazed by the world around me while focusing too much on the generally negative mechanics of life.

-Avia.

IRL News Day: Avia rhymes with Moldavia is moving to Cali!

Guess what, everyone? I'm moving! In a few weeks, I will be leaving Myrtle Beach and relocating to the Los Angeles area. Not quite the NYC that I miss every day, but at least it's not the middle of nowhere in South Carolina. I'm sure many people would argue that Myrtle Beach, as a major city, is not quite the "middle of nowhere." However, as someone who has spent most of her adult life in a metropolis, any place that requires a driver's license to navigate it might as well be the tiniest island in an archipelago where all of the stores, cultural centers, and people are only accessible by a boat that I'm not allowed to operate. Everyone with a boat gets to go places and have fun, and I could get a boat, but I'm smart enough to know that if I learned to ride one and then moved off the archipelago like I am now, I would just end up with a useless boating license. Look who wins at life now. The answer is me.

Home is where your mission table is.

Speaking of relocation, while Lunarfall is essentially a bachelor pad of a fortress with a single hero in charge of his/her own interior design, its location within Draenor and role as a central base has made it a zone that has the feeling of home for players. Compared to Sunsong Ranch, the sheer expanse of the garrison is so immersive that it feels like a true living space where I can relax, hang out with my followers, invite people over to selfishly take advantage of my property, and return at the end of the day without feeling like I'm a vagrant putting up for the night in the Stormwind City inn. And yet, it's not entirely cozy because, while it is my own personal house, it's also located in a heavily-populated area, and Trade chat keeps butting itself into my goddamn living room.

With the decentralization of players away from major cities and a shift towards sitting alone in our garrisons, it only makes sense to link Lunarfall/Frostwall with Trade chat access, but I sure as hell already unlinked mine. With my history of strategically hanging out in spots just outside of the range of trolls and closed-minded morons, I don't need to see the constant stream of people arguing about politics, accusing each other of being either children or middle-aged basement dwellers, and the occasional person actually selling something while I'm just trying to have coffee with Ziri'ak in my inn. At the same time, I'm preparing to leave my barren but admittedly quiet island in Myrtle Beach to move back to civilization once more. As thrilled as I am to have access to a metropolitan area again, there are people out there, and over the past year, I had become rather adept at avoiding them. It seems Blizzcon was a proving ground for my social skills, and I'll have to start employing them more liberally soon enough in an environment where /ignore doesn't always provide the perfect solution.

I kind of insulted Myrtle Beach multiple times in this post, and to any South Carolinians reading this, I'm kind of sorry. <3

-Avia.

This post kind of makes me seem like an asshole, but I'm really just awkward.

Compared to IRL, my rules for socializing within my guild are quite different, especially when it comes to fellow raiders and especially in a 25-man guild. When I'm out at a club or a party or even just standing outside of a building having a cigarette, I'll interact. I'll talk to people and find out what they're about. If someone turns out to be a douchebag, I can give the polite smile and incrementally edge away. But if we have similar interests and a good rapport, we can totally be facebook friends.

OMG FRIENDS WITH AVIA?!

However, when it comes to guildies, I've always kept a policy that I like to call the "office cleaning lady." That is, I'm my usual amount of friendly to anyone who wants to speak with me, and for anyone who does not, I'm just a person they see every day and that's it. It's not to be an anti-social jerk or because I particularly hate people. Rather, it's a strategy I utilize to minimize the situations in which I end up realizing that I spend almost twenty hours a week with someone I probably couldn't stand in real life. Sure, that happens outside of gaming too, and working anywhere inevitably involves being courteous to people one wouldn't necessarily invite to a birthday party. But in WoW, it's highly more likely that I could run into someone who thinks "God hates gays" or asks stupid questions like "If plants had feelings, would you still be vegetarian?" than I ever would in the protective bubble that I've created by living in NYC for years and then never leaving my apartment after moving away. Somehow, the raid environment feels more volatile than the real-life workplace, and every personal relationship or spat of drama has the potential to create toxic tension that makes raiding unbearably uncomfortable or to even dismantle the entire team.

That's not to say I don't develop and value friendships in game, because I definitely do. However, after years of semi-success as an office cleaning lady who manages to befriend one or two of the pencil pushers and trades a "good morning" and a "good night" with several others, I've somehow found myself willingly attending a convention at which almost thirty of my guildies from all over the continent are gathering and sharing the same house...

It's time to pull out my rusty social skills and polish them with some alcohol. I'll be back with some Blizzcon swag, embarrassing photos, and of course all the big convention news because RP Your Life! is heading to California this weekend.

-Avia.

State of Mind Status Report: NG

Over the past few years, I have worked to be actively involved in gamer culture through WoW raiding, frequenting forums, and, of course, writing this blog. While I haven't developed the same presence as successful streamers and respected community figures, I definitely feel like I am part of the in-group when people talk about gamers, and the struggles of the gaming industry and how they affect its customers automatically feel like my struggles. When YouTube was originally set to buy out Twitch, that was news that affected me and everyone around me. When the last of PopCap's founding members left the team, I stopped to consider to the ramifications for the company and for the fans of its games. Despite its recent land-grab-esque growth and inherent focus on the fictional, gaming is a business that revolves around people, and it's a large amount of them. Whether or not they consider themselves "gamers," over a billion people worldwide technically are.

Not actually me.

Yet, while I feel generally proud to include myself in the more "hardcore" demographic of online gamer, there are times when I just hate it. No, I am not a self-loathing gamer who is ashamed of what I do for fun, and no, I don't think gaming is an idiotic waste of time. The problem is the community, which can range from the dregs of the anonymous internet to the supportive and intelligent debaters of (some) forums. As much effort as companies put into making their social environments hate-free and promoting camaraderie, either it's not enough to keep the racist/sexist/oppressive attitudes from invading our virtual worlds or it just hits the all-destroying event horizon of the internet and the work becomes all for naught. When I see the "douchenozzle backlash," which is what I call the gamer version of "conservative backlash," to women branching out in the industry or hearing highly racist comments that are written off as jokes in voice chat, it makes me wonder over and over if this community is even capable of reform. It's enough to make me want to back away, not giving up gaming altogether, but rather focusing my creative efforts on another area like music or fiction, where the emphasis is on creation instead of competition.

Unfortunately, this isn't a qualm that I solely associate with the gaming subculture or the internet. In fact, I'm becoming rather disenchanted with the world at large: the constant struggle against conservative backlash, not just minorities but also the general public losing rights it thought it already had, and in the end, nothing progressive ever getting accomplished and everyone living oppressed and in fear. There's no way to back away from all of this, and more and more the fight seems futile. Someone please tell me that we've even achieved anything that hasn't been taken right back by the status quo, and maybe I can still have faith that the gaming community and this planet have chances at becoming decent places.

-Avia.

I went to my sister's wedding and came back with a new phone.

To my loyal fans who have been wondering where I've been, I apologize for the sudden M.I.A. Last week, my mother called to give me a week's notice for my sister's wedding back home, so I had to fly out to where there is no WoW or even a computer capable of running Neopets flash games without lagging. I was hoping to find some free time to blog while I was up there, but it turned out that weddings are quite a bit of work, and the only thing I managed to fit in between dress fittings and raiding crafts stores was letting my wrist recover from playing too much D3. I supposed I should thank my sister for being the reason there's no longer a radiating pain in my right wrist despite the fact that going to a doctor would have been a lot cheaper than plane tickets and a dress.

Dr. Know-It-All says, "You could just take a break from gaming."

In other good news, I managed to upgrade my phone over the weekend, and now that I've turned off all of its amazing new features that sound pretty cool but drain the battery mad hard, it's time to do some serious decision making about what games to put on it. After all, the games on my phone are going to be responsible for keeping me fully entertained whether I'm on an hour-long bus ride or waiting two minutes on a grocery store checkout line. It needs to keep me engaged and yet not distract me so much that I'm unaware of my surroundings. There can't be too much loading time or aimless RPG-style wandering, but if my non-existent boss calls on me, I must have the freedom to put it on pause or just set it down without ruining my score. Also, it needs to have enough content to be worth the three or so dollars that I've allocated for it in my yearly budget.

By personal preference, I've already eliminated any games like Angry Birds or Bejeweled where one can ignore the instructions in lieu of swiping angrily all over the screen. There's nothing wrong with playing these games; I just don't like my gaming to start off with a delusion of strategy that then quickly devolves into frustrated button mashing to get to the next level. I'm also not a fan of anything that I suck at and thus makes me feel stupid, so that gets rid of things like Sudoku and, oddly enough, Peggle. While I love Cut the Rope and similar physics games, it ends up embarrassing in public because I always find myself leaning to one side or the other like tilting my phone or even my entire body will help that little ball get to where it's supposed to go. Finally, even though word puzzles are my favorite type, waiting eight hours for someone to make a move in Words with Friends kind of ruins the point of why I personally play a phone game, which is to fill in a window of boredom. If I'm already at home and playing D3 by the time they get back to me, they're going to have to wait eight hours for my turn too. It's a vicious cycle.

After much thought and research, I've come to a final decision about what game to put on my precious new phone, to entertain and to engage, to educate and to uplift, to amuse and to soothe my world-weary soul.
 


-Avia.

If real life were a video game, I'd still be broke.

While I'm not quite the 1% currency-wise in any of the games that I play, I'd say that compared to the Rockefellers bidding max on BMAH mounts and the few people I know who wouldn't be able to raid if their guilds weren't paying for repairs, I'm pretty middle-class. That's not to say "middle class" in a video game translates to "middle class" IRL, for it's so much easier to make money in WoW that not being ridiculously wealthy in it is actually a failure. Honestly, even with as much gold as I have, translated into the real world, I would be just as upper-middle-lower-class as I am in real life, and my in-game tactics for making money are just as inadequate as they are outside.

Unsurprisingly, the money-making lessons one can glean from gaming are pretty analogous to what we see outside of it. Sure, there's meritocracy, working hard so one can save and eventually become rich, both feasible and tantalizing mythical in either environment, for then there are the real methods of making gold/Simoleans/Neopoints/money en masse: stealing, cheating, wage slavery, etc. As much gold as one has, it's nothing compared to what Chinese farmers make teleporting to mining nodes and paying teenagers a few dollars a day to spam in trade. Nothing makes more Neopoints than running an auto-buying program, nothing is as quick and easy to earn Simoleans as good old "motherlode," and there's nothing that makes more money in the real world than organized crime, drug trafficking, and sex slavery.

It's a rather negative but realistic sentiment. I'm not promoting the use of bots nor suggesting that everyone smuggle heroin. In fact, the consequences of subversive activity can be just as harsh in-game when one equates the potential real life losses (assets, freedom, life) to the punishments for cheating (inventory, characters, life-long ban), and many people do equate them. However, it doesn't stop tons of players every day from taking those risks to get ahead, accumulate wealth, or pull themselves out of destitute situations, because for better or worse, in-game societies are a reflection of the ones in which we actually live and are full of the same stratification, inflation, and artificial prestige-laden consumerism that we experience in real life.

-Avia.

Avia's Birthcon 2014!

IT'S MY BIRTHDAY TODAY!!!

Yes, it's that time of year when I celebrate my special day by spending an entire week excited about growing older, wiser, and slightly less taut only to be brought crashing back down by some concerned comment from my family about how I'm "already" almost thirty and still gaming.

They must have not gotten the memo, but 50 is the new 40, 40 is the new 25, and your thirties are just your twenties with money, so I'm not sure why the "already" was necessary. They probably didn't get the other memo that everyone is a gamer now, and there's no reason for them to put such a stigmatizing stereotype on it that implies that anyone who plays a video game automatically has nothing else going on in his/her life. No one assumes that people who play golf do nothing but play golf, but a hobby like video gaming instantly evokes the image of a shut-in with no job.

Of course, one can attribute this to the fact that many people who game, or at least the most visible ones to the mainstream, are 20-something noobs at life with no jobs. Yet, when I was fresh out of my first attempt at college, I was a 20-something noob at life who was at parties twice a week, drinking and dancing until the lights came on at 4am, and there was no judgement for that kind of lifestyle; it was deemed normal for someone my age regardless of how unproductive it seemed when looked at in a shallow way. Sure, some gamers end up top-grossing streamers and subculture celebrities, but most don't. And sure, some people in underground EDM end up DJs and promoters, but for all the people who don't, who gives a shit if they spent a few years of their lives enjoying a hobby while they worked on other things?

Anyway, I'm still having a super fucking birthday, not just today but all. damn. week.

-Avia.

Meet me at Blizzcon 2014!

Guess who got her Blizzcon tickets?!

Anaheim better get ready, because the preparations have officially begun for my guild's 2014 invasion. Fill the bang bus with lube, dental dams, and that annoying glitter that you can't get off of your clothes without burning them, because it's going to be a PARTAY!!!

Not exactly the three-way I expected.

Still pending is an important decision: to cosplay or not to cosplay? I've been to plenty of anime conventions, and it's never fun personally unless I'm dressed up with everyone else. However, as a new member of a reasonably competitive guild, perhaps guild decorum is more important than running around the convention roleplaying as a slutty version of my favorite Old God. After all, we're serious raiders socializing with our peers at a national community event. One must behave in a professional manner.

I'll think about it.

-Avia.

Not counting the twelve hours of sleep I get every day.

My Life in Pictures

 

Raid:

 

Now that we're done for the rest of the week, what do I do now?

 Caster melee fight!

Get bored of D3:

 
This is so much fun for thirty minutes!

Watch ads to earn currency on The Sims microtransaction store:

 

Slim Jim... Made from stuff guys need...

Watch random documentaries on Netflix:

 

The financial plight of the professional athlete is indeed pitiable,

and I definitely have a parasite.

Job hunt:

 

What do you do with a B.A. in English?

-Avia.

No one even says "grats" anymore.

Recently, I found a website (still in development) that tracks your achievements across multiple games in one place and then gives you achievements for them.

They're not very attractive looking badges so far.

... y0, dawg.

For a company, it doesn't sound like a terrible idea, as in no one has claimed it yet and sure it can make money. Yet, I still can't help rolling my eyes just a little bit. It's become an industry standard to include achievements in games that serve a myriad of purposes from increasing longevity of the content to pushing the player to explore the game in ways s/he never would have tried, and no one can resist that feeling of accomplishment when a ceremonious notice pops up accompanied by a cute little picture.

But all of this is getting so meta, I'm not even sure what isn't an achievement anymore. Did my Sim get an achievement for going to the grocery store or did I? Does it even count if only people who play the Sims can see my Sims-related achievements, or do I have to collect all of my Sims/WoW/Cut the Rope achieves in one place to share with the gaming community at large and preserve for posterity? Is there even a purpose to life without achievements? I just earned my bachelor's degree, but I didn't get a pop-up and a cute badge. What was all of that time and effort for?

New business idea: IRL achievement tracking. Look for it.

-Avia.

Initiate Blues

Things To Do While Waiting on the Bench

Read a book.

Read forums.

Cheerlead.

Research your class.

Alt-tab another game.

Play with yourself.

Dance like no one is watching.

Cry for eternity.

-Avia.

Half-Ass the Holidays

Suit it up!

It's the week before Christmas, which means I should probably get to work on all of that holiday crap everyone else has been doing for the past month. Though I might not have any family living in the same state or made any friends since I moved hundreds of miles, I still have plenty of things on my seasonal to-do list, believe you me.

1. Buy gifts... for my in-game friends.

Sure, I only talk to that friend once a month when s/he happens to broadcast something witty that I can say "lol" to, but when I touch base by sending him/her a battle pet or ilvl 476 craftable wrapped in virtual paper, s/he'll know that I'm worth keeping on Battletag.

2. Make a big deal about the one RL gift that I have to buy.

My hairdresser/boss' wife/downstairs neighbor whose name I don't know is going to LOVE this spice rack I found in Bed, Bath, & Beyond. We totally talked about how to add depth to our cooking without adding too many calories when we last saw each other at the 4th of July barbecue.

3. Sign up for an inordinate amount of OpenRaid events.

For many people, Christmas is a multiple-day ordeal involving travel, family meals, and going out for Chinese food. The rest of us, i.e. I, are free to fill up our cancelled progression days by running old content with other raiders who have the same dearth of plans or just ran out of their parents house right after the everyone unwrapped gifts and before getting dragged to the ice skating rink.

4. Put up one decoration.

If I go all out now with strings of lights and window stickers and fake snow, it's only going to be festive for a week and then a constant reminder that I have to clean up for six months. Best to keep it simple.

-Avia.

Computer dead. MoP beta live. Completely unrelated topics.

This week, I woke up early(ish) on my day off to get my 85s valor capped and attempt for the 50th time to acquire a Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps for my pally only to find that my goddamn motherboard had died.

It was like the universe was laughing at me. Or telling me to use my time more wisely during midterms. It's debatable.

In World of Warcraft news, the Mists of Pandaria beta is now live, and anyone who signed up for an annual pass can expect access in the near future as Blizzard sends out invites in waves. For some reason, I also signed up for the annual pass, justifying it in my mind that I get all these super awesome perquisites just by promising to play for as long as I already planned on playing. In actuality, what I received was a mount that I never use, a free copy of Diablo 3 in which I have minimal interest, and access to a beta that I can't even install on my ancient computer with no free disk space or even a working motherboard.

Currently, I'm awaiting the delivery of parts and must resort to blogging from my school library's computer lab until a new motherboard arrives on Tuesday. I had to spend all Saturday installing WoW and setting up addons on my dad's computer so I could do an alt raid. For the entire weekend, I was stuck browsing the internet on my phone and watching a hundred channels of cable television rather than sitting alt-tabbed in Stormwind while creeping people on Facebook. I had to make my new boyfriend valor cap for me!

Someone save me from my first world problems, please.

-Avia.

End of expansion blues (or how I quit progression raiding to take a break and still not have a life)

It's the end of an era, friends. After over a year of wipes, kills, and watching people come and go due to RL or ragequits, I officially left my raid team to go casual until Mists of Pandaria.

How I feel right now.

I know. I know. Only baddies are casuals. But in all honesty, this decision was in the best interest of my mental health. For most of the past year, I have always been able to stay unphased by the raid leader with narcissistic personality disorder, an overwhelming majority of the team being so incompetent that they can't be helped, and boss kills that tend to feel more like happy accidents than the products of strategy and hard work. However, as of late, I've found that all of these negative factors have been slowly chipping away at my sanity, and for ten hours a week, I turn into someone so angry that the thought of strangling kittens arises way more frequently than should be considered normal. Yes, we admit that the sassy female raider on vent that calls out people who die stupidly only to make excuses is always a turn-on in that psychosexual way of people who like fiery make-up sex. But when did I become that jerk who calls people out? I'd guess right about the eighth time that hunter died because of her "cat."

Anyway, due to harassment and drama, I went back to my Wrath guild to hang out with my perennial buddies while waiting for pandas. In a totally unrelated mutiny, a large chunk of the old raid team took the opportunity to jump on the /gquit bandwagon and subsequently formed their own guild. Sadly, this means that after I finally freed myself of the necrotic limb that was my old guild, I have all my former raid members badgering me to start progression raiding again in their fabulous new guild with a terrible new name.

Just let me gear my alts in peace!

-Avia.

I'm either really good at bragging or just really bad at flirting.

Besides my widely-popular and world-famous WoW blog that you are reading right now, Ms. rhymes with Moldavia a.k.a. Avia a.k.a. "the lag lock" is also a New York City creative writer who happens to have a reading tomorrow January 20th at Happy Ending Lounge. Yes, it's a bar called Happy Ending in Chinatown. People used to get happy endings there, but now they just get drunk while listening to up-and-coming fiction writers and watching burlesque dancers take their clothes off. That might have been a little redundant, but I wanted to emphasize the fact that if you come to see me read, you will also get a strip tease while drinking in a former massage+ parlor. Details here.

A new officer in my guild is now posting WorldofLogs for us. Admittedly, I never really cared about logs and rankings before since I consider it a job well done if the boss dies and I did an adequate job at dealing damage and staying alive. Don't get me wrong; I'm no casual. I research the theorycrafting as much as the next loser with a skewed conception of priorities, but I'm pretty satisfied with my performance as long as I'm not getting outDPS'd by mages or dying to easysauce mechanics like every tunnel-visioning idiot on Ultraxion. However, our poor performance in Dragon Soul has prompted guild management to perform an audit on all the DPS to ensure we're not doing anything stupid like forgetting cooldowns or using the wrong spells, and it has led to an increase in the already rampant epeen swinging among the classic epeen swingers, the raid DPS.

Apparently, it is necessary after every boss kill for someone to whisper me and talk about how he beat someone else in the meter, to which I casually reply something along the lines of "I don't give a fuck." Except... lately, I'm starting to do the exact same thing. When I'm in the top 3, my usual sense of accomplishment also possesses an inlaid feeling of conquest over others, and when I do terrible damage, I find myself feeling wholly unattractive and inadequate. Somehow, my performance according to Skada has merged itself with my self-concept of sexual prowess to the point where I was on a date this week and I tried to impress the guy by telling him that I was 90th in the world. He was really confused.

Someone save me from my own psyche. Plzkthx.

-Avia.