"Hey Druid..."

It was my first proper interaction with a Level 80.

It was actually kind of weird being addressed directly. Partly because I was just outside the Inn at Kargath and there are quite a few NPCs chatting amongst themselves around there. So that was my first thought: quest encounter.

The other thing is that Endgamers are, to be blunt, kinda funny looking. They've got all this mad gear and this one was on a tricked-out cat mount of some sort. So I found it difficult to figure out where to look to make “eye-contact”.

So when I realised that it was a player talking. I did a classic double-take; checking to see if there was somebody else he could be talking too. If had a macro to point at myself and say “Who? Me?” it would have gone off automatically.

He wanted to know if I could cure poison. Which, of course, I could. I don't think there was any real threat involved but he'd picked up something called Mother's Milk which lasts a while and was probably just annoying.

I tried cure poison. Didn't work. I assumed it was just my level and the Level 80 was pretty sanguine about it, too. But I knew I had another poison thingy that I hadn't put on a taskbar so I had a little look in my spellbook.

Abolish poison, that was it.

He was chatting away that he'd tried some sort of rune and that hadn't worked either. I tried abolish. It seemed to work. My patient was too busy assuring me that it was no problem to notice that it worked.

Then the penny dropped. He managed to shout “Yay! You got it! Thanks!” and hug me in the time it took me to type “Abolish” because I thought he'd want to know for future reference.

And then he was gone in a cloud of dust.

It wasn't technically RP. It was something better than that. I was there, with my skill set, helping out as a Druid.

And, damn, it felt good to have been useful.

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I suffer for my art; you have to.
I've been sticking my foolish Tauren nose-ring into all sorts of unsafe and unsavory places in order to collect the screen shots for this blog.
Today's piece is entitled Magic Seafood.

The suffering came because that was the last of 10 such clams I was supposed to be collecting and I got jumped by multiple nasty ocean-going things while I was taking the snap.

Now, when I'm taking a shot I turn off the interface and zoom in to first-person perspective. In this case I was also in underwater travel form so I was even more exposed than usual. (That's a photographic term meaning 'gankable')

I've learnt to be pretty quick getting all that back to normal in an emergency. And now that I'm leveling in the early 30s it seems as though I have a lot more scope for group combat. Basically early battles that didn't go well were over before I could do very much. Now I can fight and heal and even throw in a little crowd control if I'm not too panicky.

But there were three of them so they got me.

Then when I returned resurrected they attacked me again. This time I was ready but as the fight went on another different kind of crab thing came and ate the bloody clam.
Aargh!

So I made them very sorry.
Here they are in the contrite pose of the dead lobster.

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The inestimable Dan Savage held forth on his podcast for last week about the dangers of Centaur porn. In particular he was referring to a current Old Spice commercial.

Now anyone with even a cursory awareness of Mr Savage knows he is very much in favour of sexiness as a general rule and people getting their rocks off however they may like to in particular. However, in this case he suggests that there is a real and present danger of creating centaur fetishists.
The tragedy of this being that someone with a special place in their gonads for centaurs would never be able to truly fulfill their kink.

By extrapolation there's all sorts of possible harm that Warcraft could be doing.
I guess it is by definition a fantasy realm so the exoticism and body-perfection is kind of inevitable.

Also it is almost certainly going to be a reference point for the cyber-sex fantasy holo-deck thing that will eventually absorb us so that Blizzard can use us as batteries to run their post-apocalypse server engines.

edit:

In the interests of fairness I would like to point out that as a Sagittarius my views on the subject are inherently biased and unreliable. I would like to apologize and state furthermore that I welcome our New Blizzard Overlords.

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I decided to go back and get a picture of Gordo and it gave me an idea.Here he is in all his glory with a passing Warlock called Hozay for scale.

I've been kinda wondering what this blog was going to be all about. Particularly when time spent blogging is time not spent playing. The original impulse was a desire to document my own descent into the madness and to record what it's like for me now coming to the World of Warcraft for the first time.
I haven't found any other blogs that do this; most people decide to blog their WoW once they've gotten pretty high up and established.

And there are plenty of people making hints/tips/strategy guides and what-have-you. And bless 'em because they've saved me all manner of disasters already.

But I quite liked my screen-grab of Gordo and I thought I might have a crack at being a Warcraft photo-journalist.

So here's another... Gotta love Zeppelins!


Also I enjoyed this story about a long time player's emotional response to changing servers.

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