Reflections From The Pond

Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

A Happy Winter Veil to you all!

Candy, the shadow priest (mostly) of Bible of Dreams came up with this meme and tagged me a while ago. She managed to hit the busiest time of the year for me, and what time I’ve had to spare has been mostly spent playing the game or sleeping, so I am very late in answering this. But hey, better late than never, right? :-)

So thanks Candy for being interested in how I think about my year in WoW and here we go:

My Warcraft Year in Review

1) What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you’d never done before?

I joined a guild which focuses on raiding and actually calls itself a raid guild – not a casual raid guild or a casual guild that raids or any of those fuzzy labels that can mean just about anything, but a raid guild.  And I like it!

2) What was your favorite new place that you visited?

Since I have been so slow in replying to this patch 3.3 have been released and I get to answer: Icecrown Citadel! 

Probably due to the fact that it is new and fresh and I have so far only seen the first wing of it, but how can you not love a place where you get to fight like a pirate and board ships? 

Had I been quicker to respond I would probably have said Ulduar due to the epic beauty and grandeur of that place.

And I really like the woods of Grizzly Hills.

3) What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

This is a hard one, since I really don’t feel I’ve lacked that much in 2009.

I’ve had fun, progress, achievements, I’ve made lots of new friends and met old ones again, I’ve had a little drama but things have worked out fine in the end.

So, 2010, surprise me!

4) What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Sadly, I don’t have any major milestones either.

I got three chars to 80 (my warlock, druid and priest, the shammy dinged 80 in 2008), I made a DK, I’ve seen all dungeons and raid instances on one difficulty level or another, I have explored the world, I’ve done a lot of fun things that all are achievements of one kind or another, but nothing outstanding!

5) What was your biggest failure?

Probably getting extremely bored with holiday dailies and stopping working towards the proto-drake. But hey, it’s a game right? I was a bit disappointed with myself for letting it go but also a bit proud that I didn’t kept doing something I found frustrating and extremely boring for days on end just to get me a new shiny set of pixels to ride on.

On a related note, not getting the Raven Mount to drop for my druid after 30+ of Sethekk Halls solo runs also feels a bit like a failure although I know the droprate for that mount is abysmal.

6) What did you get really, really, really excited about?

I see a pattern emerging… I got excited about a great many things, I got really excited about many many things and I actually got really really really excited about quite a few things as well…

Things like tanking Naxx10 the minute I hit 80 with my druid and pulling it off with her still wearing half her lvl 70 raid gear, doing Flame Leviathan on the day Ulduar was released, doing Flame Leviathan with all four towers up months later, all of the Ulduar hard modes, running the Northrend instances with my shammy without a clue what to do but still working our way through them and having so much fun!

In general, my biggest thrills over the year was from doing things, not by getting things.

7) What do you wish you’d done less of?

Ambling around really bored in-game not knowing what to do but still not logging out to take a walk in the woods or go to the gym or read a book or anything really except that mindless staring at the screen. Didn’t happen often but too often for me to feel comfortable with it.

8) What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?

I didn’t listen to any WoW podcast and my favourite blogs are all linked on my blogroll. I really do wish I had time to read more blogs more often.

9) Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009.

I didn’t learn it per se but was often reminded that in WoW as in life it is not worth it to get annoyed or irritated at people, that you will feel better yourself if you try to see people in a benign light and always interpret things for the better. The many pugs of different varieties I’ve been in (5mans, 10mans and 25mans) have had ample opportunities to get irritated and annoyed at people, but life (and WoW) gets better if you just don’t let it get to you.

Smile, and they will smile at you, and if they don’t, well, at least you are smiling yourself :-)

10) Folks I’m tagging to Complete this Meme

I am not one to tag folks but if my blogging guildies Jacx, Zetter, Larísa and Bouncy Gnome would like to complete it I’d be most interested to hear what they think about their WoW years of 2009. And of course if anyone who reads this is interested too please fill it out, and please make a comment on Candy’s blog where she started the meme when you do!

Today I celebrate my second blogging anniversary.

I have been blogging about WoW for two years! Two years!

I can’t really believe that, it seems to have passed so quickly. And somehow, so much has happened during these years. I’ve had so much fun and the odd piece of heartache and pain as well, and this blog has served me well throughout it all as an outlet for my feelings and my wandering interests in the WoW world.

The Blog

My first post was spawned after having read on WoWInsider about druid blogger, BigBearButt was there and Phaelia and some others I sadly can’t remember anymore. I liked reading their posts and I though, hey, I want to blog too!

I spent some time thinking about a good name, and finally I settled on Reflections From The Pond.

I started out at Blogspot, and I had been blogging there for almost a year to the day, when something horrible happened. The horribleness was sorted eventually, but the entire thing had seriously dented my faith in Blogspot, and in January 2009 I moved to this self-hosted Wordpress site, where I have been hanging out since.

My focus for the blog is and have always been the World of Warcraft, but often I found fiddling with the blog’s appearance and different widgets as fun as actually playing, so I have actually learned a bit about html and php without actually intending too.

In these two years I have published 163 posts (164 with this one), and I have 79 drafts not yet published. Some of those are unpublished because I lost interest for the topic, some because I ended up rambling in circles and not getting anything said, some are unposted because I wrote them when I was seriously upset but calmed down during the writing and left them in the drafts drawer because they were mean or evil or plain down whining.

The posts have spanned a variety of subjects, from detailed class reviews to macro and addons guides to more general silliness and tearful drama, and I have not yet managed to stick to a publishing schedule of any kind.

My favourite post are the silly ones, like  Star Wars Spirit of Redemption and Where does the druid’s gear go? and Mae WoW, or the slightly wistful ones like Through the Dark Portal or Life After WoW.

The most popular one, or at least the one with most hits, is the one about Vareesa’s Copper Coin, which also was a fun one to research and write (which reminds me, I still have a few posts left to do in that coin series – might get an energy injection for that now that my shammy’s levelling fishing).

All in all, it has been a long strange trip for me these last two years, and I plan to reminisce a little about this and what has made the journey worthwile in a few coming posts, but for now I will just say:

Happy Second Anniversary Blog!

Like the title says.

Many of my favourite bloggers have stopped blogging!

I have to find some new ones, asap!

Luckily there is a whole list of WoW-blogs over at the Twisted Nether Wiki, and I guess I will have to work my way through it.

So what do I look for in a blog?

Well, I don’t have very high requirements for what I want to read, I want it to be fun, well-written and informative.

Possibly an odd twist of mine is that I have problems looking beyond the layout and the graphic elements of the blog, so no matter how much and how good the  above requirements are met, if they are being presented in small fonts, blurry pages, bad color combinations, with too much information surrounding the text, I will skip it.

So, since I am at an all-time low when it comes to blogging inspirations, I will look through the wiki list and update my blogroll instead!

Maybe I will find my muse again, and certainly I will find some new and interesting reads!

You know that feeling you get when someone does something nice to you, something they didn’t have to do but chose to do because they wanted to. Something you didn’t expect but lightened up your day. 

Could be small things like holding the elevator door for you when you get to work, or helping you with the baby stroller on the bus, or noticing that you got a new haircut (and complimenting you on it for extra sunshine).

Could be bigger things like getting a MVP award from your guild or being listed by another blogger as someone they enjoy reading.

This last happened to me today – and it happened twice!! Two people, two bloggers in the WoW-blogosphere actually listed me as a worthy and enjoyable read!

Elleiras at Fel Fire and Daria at Pixels - A Gaming Blog both listed me for the Honest Scrap Award, a meme that is floating around in the blogosphere.

Being a curious and nosy person, I backtracked this award for a long time and many clicks today, going through blog after blog of the most varying denominations, WoW blogs, family blogs, mom blogs, religious blogs, sober alcoholic blogs, make-up blogs, fashion blogs, history blogs and many many other kinds of blogs.

It was interesting and enlightening to see the immense amount of blogs there are out there, and it was also pretty vexing to see how many of these were shoddily kept. Links going to the root page of the blog and not to the post where the award was given had me searching many of those blogs for the back link to the previous award giver. You know how many blogs don’t have a search function? Many! You know how many blogs don’t have working achives? Too many. You know how many blogs didn’t even link to the award-giver but just named them? Quite a few.

I got as far back in time as november 2008, but there I got lost on both my backtracking threads, once because the blog in question was temporarily disabled and once because that blogger had the most complex and incomprehensible blog structure I have ever seen! Don’t all bloggers want visitors to be able to navigate their site rather easily? Or do they rely on friends and family so much that they don’t bother trying to make a visitor-friendly site?

Googling Honest Scrap Award didn’t help much either, and wikipedia was so far totally ignorant about the meme, so I will have to settle for not knowing the origin of this Award :-(

But, I digress, the blogs that listed me are very visitor-friendly and well-written and I am very honored and happy to have been included in their Award Lists! Thank you!

The Honest Scrap Award itself goes like this:

This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant. 

There are some additional rules when accepting this auspicious award it seems;

You must write a post bragging about it! – check!

You must include the name of the misguided soul(s) who thinks you deserve such acclaim and link back to said person(s) so everyone knows he/she/they are real – check! (althought I would not label either Elleiras or Daria misguided, on the contrary they seem to be on top of things most of the time!)

You must list ten honest things about yourself!

1. I am nosy and curious and love solving riddles (thus my brief obsession with the origin of this Award).
2. I spent my formative years reading science fiction and fantasy and I dreamed of becoming an astronaut. I still read sf and fantasy but only very sporadically wish I had pursued that astronaut career a bit more.
3. These days I dream of getting me a sail yacht and make a living as a novelist/journalist while I sail around the world.
4. I am six feet tall and really skinny, thus I am always dressed in thick sweaters and socks to stave off that shivering chilliness. WTB hot climate.
5. I work as an engineer at the local power plant.
6. I have played WoW since early 2006 and have no plans to quit just yet.
7. I prefer wine to beer.
8. I love skydiving but I would be terrified to jump off a mountain for this.
9. I have some budgies and a parakeet and would gladly trade them for a dog and sell the dog on their screechiest days. This goes for the kids as well.
10. Although I would like to view myself as cool and cynical I am usually a wet hen and get soppy over things like roses and raindrops and whiskers on kittens.

So, check that too!

The last (but not the least) requirement for this award is to choose a minimum of seven blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have seven friends. Show the seven random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog. Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.   

I don’t read that many blogs regularly since I am often a bit limited for time (only 24 hours in a day!) and I am simply going to list 7 of those blogs I enjoy reading. I guess most of them have already been tagged but I’ll say like Elleiras, don’t feel obligated to participate (if you don’t want to, that is; if you want to, go for it!), but know that you are read and appreciated.

Jac over at Jaxperience. I met Jac for the first time when I transferred to Aerie Peak and Ascendo Tuum and we spent many raids in TBC healing together with our priests. We also spent a lot of time trying to two-man (or one-man-one-woman) the old world dragons with his warrior and my priest, and then we basically levelled together through all the Northrend dungeons with my shaman and his warrior, imba healer-tank team. Jac was a frequent visitor on my blog and then he took the plunge and started one of his own.

Aleathea at Hearthstone, a new aquaintance of mine. She writes intriguing stories and articles about role-playing, guild life and raid leading.

Big Bear Butt, one of the biggest WoW blogs out there with a focus on feral druids but he and his wife writes about pretty much anything. He was also one of my inspirations when I started blogging and although I have drifted a bit away from the feral druiding I often stop by his site for an interesting read anyways.

Batgrl at Warcraft and Other Hooha, who has a knack of finding those odd places and funny things in WoW.

Flintlocke’s Guide To Azeroth and its sequels by Fargo is the most brilliant WoW comic I have ever seen and I have laughed so much at it, so it definitely deserves a spot here on my list.

Although they have already been listed and awarded by other bloggers, I would like to include Larísa at the Pink Pigtail Inn, Oriniwen at Artisan Level and Vonya at the Egotistical Priest as well in this list of mine.

Alert readers will see that the blogs I list are also the ones found in my blogroll to the right. (What can I say, I am a shy one and have few friends :-)

I know there are many more awesome blogs out there, and I wish I could find the time to go visit them all.

One of my all-time favourite bloggers, Phaelia of Resto4Life, recently announced the wonderful news that she and Mr Phae was gonna have a baby!

Resto4Life was one of the blogs I stumbled upon a slow day at work in november 2007, and it inspired me to start this blog of my own. Now, while I most amble along and write odd pieces of whatever I have on my mind at the moment, Phaelia had a beautiful blog running with a lot of news and theorycrafting and it was one of the prime sources of resto druiding out there on the ‘net.

As she announced the news of her baby, she also retired her blog, finding it impossible to balance all things in her life. She is sorely missed by many many people, but I think she did the right thing. Some things you are better off ending when you are on top.

Now, it seems that a new gear item has turned up on the PTR, a beautiful leather chest perfect for a resto druid. The chest is called Phaelia’s Vestments of the Sprouting Seed.

This actually makes me all teary-eyed. I think she is truly worthy of this recognition from Blizzard, the work she put in for the resto druid in particular and the WoW community in general was simply outstanding and she helped so many people (me included, with some blog-related problems I had) become better players and better bloggers.

I am actually seriously considering respeccing my feral druid to resto just so I can get this chest-piece!

The blogging plague is spreading…

Another guildie has caught it and is now writing about his experiences in the World of  Warcraft over at Jacxperience.

Welcome to the Blogosphere Jac, I trust you will find wow-blogging as fun and rewarding as I do :-)

So I am in the Dragonblight, grinding down the rested bonus of my shaman Larue, taking her a little closer to 76, when I get this whisper from a guildie of mine, a paladin named Faster.

He says he just read on my blog, this blog, that my missing posts are still missing and he wonders how because he can see all of them, clear as day, in his google reader.

I think he must have them locally saved or not marked as read or something, because I’ve been scouring the internet for any possible location where my lost posts might be residing, and I haven’t been able to find them.

I found a few in the public google cache (or whatever you call it) and a few more that I had forgotten to mark as read in my own reader, but that was about it.

I added a google reader subscription to my blog after I’d managed to delete them all, and in that reader I can only see the google cached ones and the new ones I’ve posted.

Faster persists in saying he can see all my posts in his reader, and I am starting to feel a faint glimmer of hope – maybe I can get the texts back from his reader?

And then I try to log out of my usual google account and onto another. I setup a subscription for my blog in the reader and press update.

The post list starts filling up, and filling up, and filling up… All my posts from the very first day I started blogging in november 2007 is in that list! All of them!! Links, images and all!

The only missing things are the comments, but there were not that many of them and although I was very happy whenever I saw that someone had taken the time to leave a comment I think I can live without them.

So, now I am going to copy/paste the posts back to my blog! If I am feeling ambitious enough I may even fix the links and images (they won’t work after the copy paste) but for now I am just so deliriously happy that I have found my rantings and musings again!

Thanks a lot Faster!

(And although I am so very happy now, I am a little questioning as to why can’t the post retrieval be somewhat easier? First of all, having a delete all-option without a confirmation required is downright nasty, and my posts are obviously stored somewhere on the google domain, so why can’t there be a restore all-option as well without having to go through the hell of trying to find someone who can do it for you?)

You know which posts I miss the most from all of the 70-ish or so that’s missing from my year-long blogging?

It’s not all the discussions concerning mana regen and healing tricks and druid tanking and stuff like that – much of that has changed and can be found on other websites as well. It’s not the macros posts – I still have the macros on my chars and can put them out here again if I want.

I miss my personal posts and rantings- the ones about what I had experienced myself in this virtual world – the post about the priest being a Jedi, the one about Daissy’s (then known as Dizzie) first trip through the Dark Portal, the post about my lvl 6 priest Tessytoots participating in taking down the Turpster on Sporeggar, the one complaining about the questionable imagination of Blizz gear designers, my fare-well Vashj-posts and many other topics like these. They were sort of my own WoW-history, and it was fun to occassionally re-read them to see what I was going on about back then.

I’m starting to lose faith in Blogger Support and I doubt I’ll get my missing posts back – it’s been almost a month since that fatal day now.

At least I am backing up my posts now – I have two different feed readers saving the posts, I e-mail them to me as soon as I publish them, and I copy-paste the entire html code into a notepad file that I save on a different hard drive. Only thing I can’t backup are the comments, but I am trying to find a way to do that as well.

Blogger Support seems to be reachable only by a very long and very winding path and a whole lotta luck seems to be required, but I keep trying to get through to them to get my lost posts restored. I feel a bit empty every time I log in here, but hope ain’t lost yet.

Meanhwile, I have managed to salvage some of my old posts from various caches and I will be putting them back here as soon as possible.

I even have some new posts forming in my head now that I have gotten past that initial shock and stun trauma from the severe Total Blog Post Loss.