Diablo Sequels. And Stuff.

I’m actually playing a game at the same time as everyone else! Instead of being months behind for once, I’m only days behind.

Disregard the fact that my only experience with the earlier Diablos include, when I was about 12, telling my brothers they were stupid to play such violent games. And also 15 minutes of the first Diablo at Blizzcon. (It’s a vivid memory because I totally panicked after my friends got tired of waiting for me and left.) It’s a very new and exciting feeling. Since I know that any tales of Diablo would be absolutely riveting (and because I’m compelled these days to write about anything but WoW on my WoW blog), I will share the chronicles of my perilous quest to mindless kill stuff to trap demons in a rock to save the world from the forces of evil.

Choosing My Hero

I like to get things right the first time. I read the description of each character, I reflected on their possible lore and personality. Then I looked at the most determining factor: the outfit.

How badass is that?

You can’t imagine my disappointment when, in the next screen, my character was wearing a loincloth.

After playing a lot of Bioware games lately, the lack of customization took me a little by surprise. Not that I minded not feeling compelled to spend a half an hour debating the depth of my hero’s eye sockets. I just didn’t realize they (general “they” of course) still made games where you didn’t spend as much, if not more, time designing your character than actually playing the game.

So my default, loincloth-clad, tiny witch doctor made her way into the world.

The Annoying Friends Thing Everyone’s Talking About

When the concept of Real ID came out, I was a little worried about not being able to hide from my friends when playing alts. Then I discovered that the following conversation doesn’t hurt at all:

Friend: Hi!
Me: Hi! How are you?
Friend: Good, you?
Me: Good! Just raiding/checking out Diablo/trying to dig up that stupid archeology artifact.
Friend: Cool.

It also helps if you choose to only add non-annoying people and utter strangers who’ll never talk to you anyway to your Real ID list.

I haven’t been having trouble with people demanding to play with me. I think having a mildly obsessive compulsive personality is great at keeping overly friendly people away. Playing with me goes kind of like this:

Friend: Where are you going?
Me: Don’t you see that sliver on the other end of the map? It’s still blacked out.
Friend: There’s nothing there, we just didn’t get close enough to that wall for it to show.
Me: I don’t care. It’s blacked out on my map. I want it not blacked out.

Friend: You need to go to town AGAIN?
Me: Bags are full.
Friend: You realize greys only sell for 2g right?
Me: I DONT CARE I’M NOT LEAVING PERFECTLY SELLLEABLE GEAR JUST LYING AROUND.

And if that wasn’t enough of a deterrent, I also have terrible problems concentrating.

Friend: Um…where are you?
*5 min later*
Me: Oh sorry, I alt tabbed out and got distracted by something someone posted on Facebook.
Me:…
Me: Have you seen that video of cats trying to do the YMCA?

Friend: Um…where are you?
*15 min later*
Me: Oh sorry, I got hungry, there was nothing in the fridge so I started making popcorn.

Friend: Um…where are you?
*6 hours later*
Me: Oh sorry! You totally won’t believe this! I fell asleep right with my face on the keyboard and slept thought the night!

Yep, I hardly ever have to turn people down!

More seriously, I’ve taken to hanging out on Mumble with my friends while playing. They’ll play together, I’ll play on my own. That way I’m still hanging out with my fellow D3 players, but I can keep my own pace.

Getting Around

When I first got my town portal, I thought it too good to be true. I expected it to vanish if I spent more of a couple of seconds in town. If I had to leave some stuff on the ground when porting from a dungeon, I didn’t expect it to still be there when I got back.

But it was. It was true. It was good and it was true.

Then I thought it would trivialize the game the way portals trivialize WoW. But if you’re like me and lose sleep over discarded items, and have so little bag space, the portals are necessary to keep you actually playing the game and not spending most of your time running to town. So they feel just right.

Playing with the Mouse

In WoW and SWTOR, I used ESDF as my movements keys. In Mass Effect, I use WASD. Which means that when I play D3 and the fight gets a little intense, and I have to move, my Spell Selection Interface pops up.

Damn you “S” key!

While I’ve got non stressful movement down (maybe a little bit too well…whenever I go back to playing WoW I spend the first minute panicking because no matter how much I click, my character won’t move), I haven’t managed to unlearn using the right mouse button to talk to NPCs. As a result, all the poor vendors and crafters (and my bank stash) have to regularly stand in the graspy hands and icky snakes.

Oops!

Followers

Why do I need multiplayer mode? With my Dogs, my Giant, my Templar and sometimes Leah (and sometimes my chicken shaman – go go chicken shaman!), I have lots of (imaginary) friends. It’s a far cry from Bioware’s companions (wtf why doesn’t my witch doctor get a sex scene with the templar?), but Bioware is Bioware and Diablo is Diablo.

Diablo, I discovered early on, I play to blow stuff up. Barrels? Boom! Crates? Boom! Urns? Boom! Little pesky spiders? BOOM!!

With so much gleeful destruction and massacre, the story and my relationships with my followers take a backseat. The camera angles and voice acting aren’t conducive to good follower-relationship building either. Usually I find myself skipping through the speech and going back to read it after. It also doesn’t help that my followers prefer to start yapping while I’m trying to listen to a lore book snippet.

But I do enjoy the random conversations that occur between my followers and between my followers and my character, granted they occur at the right time. They do keep you company, and, this is one thing Diablo followers have over SWTOR companions: they talk spontaneously and say different things each time (until they run out of things to say and start repeating themselves).

Booming and Smashing and Beyond

I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to keep playing once I finish normal mode. Mostly likely I’ll take a break, play some SWTOR for 2-3 weeks, then come back. (I still have a couple of months left on my SWTOR subscription and I’d kind of like the money to not go to waste.) Maybe dabble with some other classes then start the harder modes.

Right now normal mode is taking forever, but I suspect that the storyline is actually very quick if you don’t obsess over OMG discovering and looting EVERYTHING. So maybe I will get a chance to see all the classes and MAYBE reach Inforno mode. Maybe.

And to answer everyone who’s asked me how I like the game, well, I love blowing shit up. I love not having to think. I love how gorgeous the scenery is. I’m very impressed at the cinematics (the cinematics panel at Blizzcon has been my favorite for the past two years. Last Blizzcon we got to meet the Diablo cinematics team and get a glimpse of their work. It was impressive, but I never in a million years would have guessed that there would be so many and such polished movie scenes. Sometimes you have trouble telling if you’re watching an animation or if you’re watching a live scene. If I ran Blizzard, I’d totally give the cinematics team a well earned bonus!)

Unlike my disgruntled friends, I’ve no cherished memories of early Diablo games clouding my enjoyment. So I’m just sitting back, relaxing, admiring the view and, really, basking in glorious, glorious violence.

For the Undergrads Fans – Followup to the Calgary Convention

Yeah, that’s right, I’m going to not talk about WoW again on my WoW blog. Hey, it’s my blog and I can write about whatever I want.

I’m also a bit behind the times on this post (I swear I’ve been working on these short lines for over a week now…the ol’brain just ain’t what it used to be) but I wanted to share a couple of links with my fellow Undergrads fans, and I want to show my support for a potential season 2, should all the stars align.

I swear I am borrowing this picture for a good cause!

So, remember last post about the Calgary Expo? Where I excitedly attended a panel by the writers of the college student and/or former college student must-see show, Undergrads?

And remember how I mentioned that it was a 10 year old show (actually, I suspect it’s a little older than 10 years, since I remember watching the French version of the show in high school, and I graduated in 2001), it aired for one season then got cancelled? And how the panel made a big splash at the Calgary Expo, with all of us fans discovering we are not alone.

The excitement went on after the Expo, even among fans who hadn’t been able to attend the convention, and all the buzz resulted in this portal website (which, I believe, was made by the show writers themselves). That’s right!

- You can catch the videos of Saturday’s panel (here, here and here - and don’t worry about there not being any footage from Sunday’s panel, both days ended up being almost identical. Funny how fans always ask the same questions.)!

- You can join the Undergrad’s Facebook Groupville (group that is actually admined by Williams, Cagan and Rheingold!)

- And! You can check out photos from the Expo on their Flickr page!

I challenge you to find me in the Facebook group!

Later, guy!

Treasured Memories from the Calgary Expo

It was touch and go there for awhile. Will I go? Will I not go? Calgary is quite far and with the tension sky high at work, I didn’t dare ask to adjust the schedule. But I did have Sunday and Monday off. Turned out the boy had those days off too. I asked him if he wanted to come to the Expo with me. He said sure. And thus we found ourselves arriving in Calgary early Sunday morning, tired from the long drive but excited to get our geek on. (It’s times like that I wish I lived within reasonable distance of an airport. My life would be 100% more time efficient if I could just fly places.)

Calgary Expo-what?

What a time was had! The guest lineup was intense. The entire main cast of Star Trek TNG reunited. Stan Lee. Billy West. Adam West. James Marsters. Dave Prowse (also known as Darth Vader). Adam Baldwin. Commander Sheppard Mark Meer. And those were just some of the super famous people present. Yet, for some reason, convention organizers were surprised when more than 50 000 fans from all over the world showed up.

On Saturday, convention goers discovered why most other major conventions have limited tickets. The inside of the convention centre was packed like a Tokyo subway car at rush hour (considering that a lot of geeks get nervous in crowds, I can only imagine how much panicking must have occurred that day) and the outside grounds, crawling with those who’d been locked out, were overrun. Going on Sunday ended up being the best idea ever.

We got there early in the morning and I had pre-bought and printed tickets for the two of us, like the wise convention goer that I am. We had a last minute addition to our party who didn’t have a ticket but, fortunately for her, I was at a pub crawl in Winnipeg about this time last year.

That’s right. While getting drunk in Winnipeg last year I befriended a fellow backpacker. A backpacker from Calgary. Who happened to text me on the way to the Expo, asking if I needed an extra ticket. After I pulled some sophisticated lineup strategy maneuvers, my Calgarian friend found us just as we were reaching the front of the line. We yanked him in, I paid for the ticket and, yep, all 4 of us got our passes. The moral of this story? Never turn down a pub crawl.

The WoW Crowd

The WoW community meetups are often the best part of these big conventions. Vidyala and Vosskah hosted a potluck on Friday night (I couldn’t go, unfortunately, since, well, I was at work 7 hours away) which I heard great things about. I did, however, make it to the supper on Sunday. The early planning went kind of like this:

Vid: Oh you’re coming! We should go for supper!
Me: We should! Can I invite people?
Vid: Um, ok.

A few days later, Vid, Voss, Darthregis, Chawajen, Kalesti, Rades, the Fannon family and the Bossy Pally party found ourselves seated at the downtown Milestones sharing Expo stories, WoW stories and housecleaning stories. Also drowned a donkey and a mermaid in Peach Bellinis. The night was too short, too short, too short. I could spend an entire week with these guys and still want to be around them.

I say I start planning my own conventions, just to draw out awesome WoW friends.

Undergrads

Unlike the rest of my party, I planned ahead. I printed out the panel schedule, studied it, rated the panels based on my interest in them and came up with a plan. One panel title was “How to just barely survive as a Hollywood writer“. It caught my eye. I’ve no ambitions to become any sort of pro writer (if I got offered a paid writing position, I’d turn it down). But while my personal goals aren’t in the field, I love reading or hearing about writers. Oddly, I kind of relate to writers.

So I read the description. Andy Rheingold, Josh A Cagan and Pete Williams. Pete Williams sounded vaguely familiar…

I got to the next line: Undergrads.

OMG Undergrads!!

How many hours did my friend Val and I spend in high school expressing our appreciation for Gimpy? How many times did my brothers and I make each other laugh with Cal imitations? How many family nights did I spend with my siblings, watching Undergrads reruns on Teletoon? How many friends did I force to watch introduce to the show? How many flashbacks have I gotten of Rocko reading Cosmo and saying “I think we’re all feeling a bit… *flips pages* premenstrual“?

I sat up-straight throughout the whole panel, drinking in every word. I squealed when Pete Williams did a Cal line (he sounded way better than my brothers and I ever did due to, you know, being Cal’s actual voice actor). I really, really, really wanted to run up to them after the panel and give them a hug.

Undergrads was one of the rare shows that played a huge part in my young adult life and I never in a millions years expected to meet the writers. Especially not in Calgary, 10 years after the show was cancelled (after 13 episodes). And if the experience was surreal to me, it seemed to be surreal to them too. They made my day when they said (I think it was Josh who said it, but I’m not sure) “It’s like we’re in Sliders, in a parallel universe where people have actually heard of our show.”

Of course, they were bombarded with questions about the eventuality of a season 2. It sounded like they were absolutely ready for season 2 but the usual red tape (show rights and financing) was holding them back. But the attachment they showed toward their show, even 10 years after being forced to move on, made me very happy. It was wonderful to be sitting in that room with about 30-40 other fans (another upside to Sunday! Saturday’s panel apparently packed 250 people in the room and turned 100 away. Much less intimate.) and the 3 main writers, sharing our love of Undergrads.

If only I hadn’t been too shy to go to their booth afterward and talk to them…

Video Game Voice Acting with Mark Meer and Quinton Flynn

Do you know who else is awesome, besides writers? Voice actors. They’re the stars you never get to see, who you don’t often think of. In fact, if the better job they do, the less you recognize them. They don’t get the screaming fans and the big bucks. But when you do meet them in person, you’re quickly smitten, so much their passion and talent is captivating.

Mark Meer, I was familiar with. I’m playing a lot of Mass Effect these days. I didn’t, however, realize he lives and works really close to me and that I could go see him act all the time. Which I totally plan to. He’s hilarious. You know else who is awesome, besides writers and voice actors? Improv actors.

I didn’t know the name of Quinton Flynn, but the second he started talking and doing impersonations…oh yeah! As my friend Skip puts it, Flynn is “one of those 12 voice actors who are in everything“. It was just incredible to listen to him. From his normal speaking voice, you wouldn’t guess that he was a voice actor, but the second he slips into a character…wow! Suddenly you’re sitting in front of Timon (I totally watched Timon & Pumbaa as a kid!) or Raiden or Axel or Johnny Quest.

In was interesting having them give the panel side by side since they both have very different careers. Meer does a lot of impov and theatre acting, as well as consultation work on designing voices, while Flynn has been voice acting for cartoons and video games since I was a kid, and has a lifetime of experience. They had different elements to bring to the table and it made for a very enriching panel. But like all panels, it was way too short.

And again, I wish I had had the guts to go up to their booths after and ask for an autograph and a hug.

Moments of Awesome

Vid called me while I was hanging out by some booths. “Can you pick up Volumes 1&2 of Questionable Content for me? I didn’t think to get extras for my brother.“

“Sure!” I said.

I was familiar with the name. But not being a fan of webcomics, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. A few moments later, I’m standing in front of Jeph Jacques (I totally interrupted his lunch too), knowing that I’m in the presence of someone amazing, but not knowing exactly the extent. He was super nice to me, autographed the books while I felt like a total poser.

I flipped through the books a bit before I turned them over to Vid. Definitely looked like something I’d enjoy. I was half tempted to keep them…

I’m now hooked. Questionable Content has a new fan. And that’s what conventions are all about.

Asked Vid and Rades if From Draenor with Love was going to have a booth next year. Conventions are about that too.

As the day was drawing to a close, a girl, maybe a few years younger than me, walked by, excitedly yelling on her cell phone: “I got hugged by the voice of Axel! You know! The voice of Axel! He gave me a hug!“

Conventions are definitely all about that.

Not necessarily about getting hugs (since I was too shy to ask for any), but about getting excited with other people, notably strangers and celebrities, about things you’re not usually allowed to be excited about in public. I can’t wait until next time!

Introducing *Paranoid*’s US Sister Guild, *Swords for Everyone*

Some of you may remember a post from awhile back, about a guild named Paranoid.

Originally written by D­öra

Paranoid is a guild for the socially awkward, the shy, the people who’d like to raid, but get a headache just thinking about all the things they could screw up. The people who type a message to someone who’s LFM in trade, then backspace, then type, backspace, type, stare at what they’ve written, backspace again and go quest on their own. And if they do press enter, they’re relieved if they get the reply: “Sorry, full.”

It’s been about a year, and I hear that Paranoid is still going strong, which makes me very happy.

I was also very happy to receive an email Paranoid’s GM, Mer, who had fantastic news for those of us socially anxious (and fabulous!) WoW players who live on the US side of the big pond: someone had taken the initiative to start an equivalent guild, on a US server!

Swords For Everyone was founded last week by Cantafrond on Wyrmrest Accord-US. In his words (taken from his recruitment post on MMO-Champion):

Anyone who has social anxiety (or a similar social disorder) who wants an understanding community to play WoW with. If you’re someone who:

– is terrified of public chat channels, including Vent (Mumble, Teamspeak, etc.)
– starts hyperventilating when a dungeon or BG queue pops
– has avoided large chunks of game content because of other players
– immediately logs off for the rest of the day (or week) after a wipe because you fear that it was your fault
– is nervous and sweaty just thinking about applying to this guild
– experiences any other irrational (but entirely understandable) anxiety because of interactions with other players

then you’re probably a perfect fit. There are no specific requirements to join, aside from a completed application.

I don’t play WoW much these days – with my real life, the rest of my gaming and my crazy work schedule, I barely manage my 7 hours of raiding a week, but I am really tempted to level an alt with them, if they’ll let me, if only for a little while.

Best wishes to Cantafrond and the rest of the crew at Swords for Everyone! It’s a wonderful to have a haven like that in our community, where everyone understands what it’s like. And from the enthusiastic chatter in the WoW forums recruitment thread, it seems like SfE is off to a great start!

If you’d like to join, you can post an application on the guild website or contact Cantafrond in game on Wyrmrest Accord.

If you live in the EU and would like to join Paranoid, you can do so via their guild website.

Hope to see many of you there!

Anonymity on the Internet…Is it Your Anonymity or the Audience’s that Brings Out the Fuckwad?

I’ve spent a lot of time on the internet. I mean a lot. If I were to write my autobiography, it would be called “Growing up on the Internet” and it would be a documentary for internet-virgin parents trying to understand what their connected 24/7 teenagers are experiencing.

So yeah, I’ve witnessed a lot of “fuckwads”. Ordinary people who, when getting online and finding an audience, lose all their social skills (/euphemism).

Penny Arcade’s “John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” definitely strikes a chord with me (as well as with anyone who’s ever come within smelling distance of the bowels of the internet). It’s also struck a chord with John Suler, an American psychologist who’s written about what he calls (unfortunately scientists and cartoonists aren’t allowed to share vocabulary) the “Online Disinhibition Effect“.

But while it struck a chord, I’ve always felt that something wasn’t quite right. I thought and thought and thought about it. After some discussion in the comment section of a past post of mine (which I would link to if I had the motivation to scan through all my posts until I find it, but I don’t), it dawned on me: the Audience is anonymous too.

Now, I’m not refuting any theories here. Especially not the one written by the guy who actually did research and who uses much fancier words than me. I’ve got no data more scientific than my own observations. All I’m bringing here is a dimension that seems to have been left out from (or at least, not highlighted enough in) the theories and their subsequent discussions.

Lord of the Flies

The Fuckwad Theory and Online Disinhibition Effect both suggest a very Lord of the Flies view of the Internet Nation.

“No, no“, you say, “the theories specify Normal Person.”

Normal person. Thing is, to me, if you don’t care about the effects your actions have on others, then you don’t care about the effects your actions have on others. It doesn’t matter if others know who you are, or if you’ll be punished. You won’t act if you can be punished, but what’s holding you back is the effect your actions have on you, not the effect they have on others.

And thus, the “normal person” in the theory is actually always an asshole and the lack of sanctions on the internet simply removes the chains.

I know I probably have too much of an idealistic view of the world, but it seems that the Lord of the Flies theory takes it too far. Yeah, there are a lot of horrible people in the world (What are the statistics for sexual assault again? It makes me nauseous just to think about how many animals who parade as humans are among us.), but is every douchebag on the internet a sociopathic monster?

What if some of these rotten apples of the internet are capable of empathy, but don’t sense the effect of their behaviours because they can’t grasp the reality of the audience?

If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.

The feedback given by an internet audience is always a reaction. Sometimes a good reaction, sometimes a bad reaction. But an ethereal crowd expressing offense and hurt doesn’t transmit the same poignant message as the human face on the human being in front of you.

Taking into consideration the anonymity of the audience thus encompasses “normal person” to not only total empathy lacking sociopaths, but also more average individuals who simply don’t anticipate the effects of their actions when there’s no clear feedback.

You’re Not Anonymous on the Internet, but Everyone Else Is

Sometimes you’re a little anonymous. When you first join a group or community, you can pick whatever name you want and make up whatever story you want about yourself.

Sometimes you feel a little anonymous. I’m just as shy on the internet as I am in real life, but I’ve been told by real-life bashful friends that they’re more outgoing on the internet because no one knows who they are.

But if you’re around the same group long enough, you’ll build an identity for yourself. While this identity might be real or fake, you still have it. The local assholes are known as the local assholes.

You can build a fake identity for yourself in real life too. I could join, say, a yoga group in the city, and pretend to be, um, a musician from, I dunno, Hawaii. The internet allows wackier identities, but it isn’t all that more anonymous than in real life.

The people around you though, you don’t know who they are. Pretty much all of Suler’s factor’s come into play. “Invisibility“, because it’s easy to assume that everyone around you is lying about who they are, or “Solipsistic Introjection” because you can make assumptions about then using your imagination, “Minimizing Authority” because social ranks are attributed differently on the internet.

And thus, I find that the anonymity of the audience is just as important (if not more) than the anonymity of the person when it comes to explaining bizarre internet behaviors.

Facebook

There’s an old episode of the Instance where Randy points out that the meanest behaviour he’d witnessed actually took place on Facebook. Facebook. The place on the internet where you’re given the least privacy.

So I went and checked it out for myself. Followed a few fan pages, read some discussions. Yep, a lot of trolls. You’d think the trolls would be the ones with pseudonyms and cartoon pictures, but no. Everything seems genuine. Interestingly, the meanest people I encountered on Facebook (though that might just have to do with the type of pages I was looking at) were middle aged women. I could click on their profiles, see where they work, look at pictures of their kids and check their friends lists. Not so anonymous. However, they have no clue who’s reading their messages and being creepy. Generally, their hate was directed at celebrities. Celebrities who probably never read their fan pages. Celebrities whom we don’t know personally. Celebrities who are too busy making money and being flattered in award ceremonies to be touched by what idiots on the internet are writing. In other words, celebrities who are kind of anonymous.

Again, it’s all about the anonymity of the audience.

One on One VS One on Many

In my early internet days, one of the phenomenons I found most remarkable was that our resident message board douchebags were usually super nice when you talked to them privately.

Penny Arcade’s theory highlights the need for there to be an audience present for the fuckwad to be released and, clearly, the audience of a whole forum is far more exciting than the audience of a single person. But I think it goes beyond that. The single person audience is far less anonymous than the mass of 1000 message board posters. When talking to me, our trolls were speaking to someone they perceived as a real person, with real feelings and a real life. When talking in front of the forum, they weren’t addressing anyone in particular, just throwing out whatever words would give them the most amusing reaction from the ethereal masses.

Kind of like actors, comedians and singers who are real goofballs on stage (where the audience is vague, nondescript) but admit to actually being quite shy when not in the spotlight, I think a lot of net nerds use the anonymous audience to enjoy attention they normally couldn’t handle. Except that, unlike talent artists, most internet trolls aren’t very entertaining and don’t have the social skills to realize it (or, at least, care).

Conclusion: Don’t Underestimate the Anonymity of the Audience

I don’t discredit personal anonymity on the internet, however I find that in discussions about inappropriate or bizarre internet behaviour, the role of the anonymous audience is neglected. Yet, if those trying to make the internet a better place want to succeed, taking away the anonymity of the audience is what will make a difference.

This why sensitization discussions do have some effect. Take attacks on the unemployed, for example. I once witnessed a thread of complaints and mockery of unemployed gamers. Someone started another thread, explaining that she was an unemployed gamer who, yes, lived with her parents. She hadn’t always been in the situation and she was making concrete actions toward getting herself out the situation.

By making that post, she took away the anonymity of the audience. The sociopaths still laughed. I won’t deny that punishment-free environments allow those who live a Lord-of-the-Flies life to harm others on a whim. But those in the middle, who were cruel because they didn’t anticipate that their words would touch real people, once they decided that she was being sincere (note that it’s very easy to assume that someone is lying or exaggerating on the internet) they moved on to being idiots about something else.

Frames Layout, Bossy Pally style

I have good news! My badass, sex fiend of a Sith Warrior finally proved herself to the Dark Council and earned her Darth title! (And because her timing is always impeccable, the second she returned to the ship, the companion she’d been hitting on the whole game decided at last to put out. She was getting a little worried there, after choking him then hooking up with another companion…but it all worked out. She had a great night. I’m happy for her. Really, I am.) What all that means is I can go back to living a normal life. Normal life which includes vacuuming popcorn off the carpet, washing away the orange stuff that oozes through my bathroom walls when I take showers and updating the blog.

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat to write and had to think “um, what should I write about?” The hesitation I have about writing pally posts these days is that I really don’t want to spend 6-8 hours writing something that will be totally outdated in a couple of months. Then I got an idea. Lately, I’ve been exchanging some emails with a fantastic leveling holy paladin (also resto shaman). We got onto the topic of raid frames and buff/debuff tracking and she raised a lot of excellent points. Plus, raid frames is a fairly timeless topic. And thus, you’re now reading (or quickly scrolling through) a post about my sexy (IMO) raid frames.

Raid Frames

Raid frames are a totally personal thing and I don’t push any addon in particular. I say go with what your friends are using. It’s easier to get help that way. Buff/debuff tracking is also a personal thing and I’m not here to force my frames layout down anyone’s throat. But if you’re looking for ideas, then this post is for you.

I use Grid (or more specifically, Grid 2), but I have played around with the other addons (Vuhdo and Healbot) and I recall being able to configure them similarly.

In a 25 raid, my frames look kinda like the shot I posted above. It dates back to ICC, in Wrath (and most of these characters don’t exist anymore/have changed names, so don’t even TRY to stalk my ex-guildies!), but my (timeless!) frames still have the same features:

- Vertical groups (arranged by party)
- Pets on the far right
- Horizontal health bars
- Colours according to class

Here’s snapshot of a single box, with a bunch of things on it:

Lets break it down!

How I’ve got tracking set up

You’ve got a lot more possibilities when it comes to where you want your shiny colours or icons to appear, but this image shows the spots I use.

And now I’ll entertain you all by listing what goes where, as well as what kind of indicator I use. (In order words, whether I use an icon, a colourful square or text.)

Top Left: My Beacon of Light (icon)
Top Center: Other Beacons of Light (or as I say it, Beacon of Lights – icon)
Top Right: My Holy Radiance (icon), any Hand (Sacrifice, Protection, Freedom – icon)
Center Left: Raid markers (icon)
Center Text: Offline status, Death, Names
Health Bars: Health (by class colour), Out of range (fades out at 40 yards)
Center (Extra Large!) Icons: Awaiting resurrection, Any important buffs or debuffs that I need to pay special attention to in a fight, Dispellable debuffs (magic, poison, disease)
Bottom Left: My Judgement of the Pure (icon)
Bottom Right: Forbearance (red square), Other Holy Radiances (yellow square), Low Mana (blue square), Undispellable debuffs (curse – purple square)
Border: Aggro

Notes and Points of Interest

1)My spells vs Others’ spells: The feature’s been around in Grid for as long as I can remember, but I only started using it recently. I love it! It really comes in handy when you have other holy paladins in the raid. I was having troubles with my Beacon falling off due to being buried under other Beacon indicators. But no more! I also use the split for Holy Radiance. And I only track my own Judgement of the Pure since I’m not a raid leader and really don’t care if other pallies have their Judgement of Pure up.

2)Priorities: I think this may be a newer feature, but it’s lovely if you limit the number of indicator locations on your frames. When I listed my indicators above, I went in order of priority. So if someone had Forbearance and Low Mana, I would see the Forbearance square, not the Low Mana one. The places in my settings where priority is a concern are Center Text, Center Icons and Bottom Right.

3)Buffs/Debuffs in the middle: I find that I don’t act quickly on special statuses if they’re not obvious. I experimented with a few locations and eventually settled with big, obnoxious icons in the middle. In a raid environment, you rarely have to deal with more than 1 or 2 debuffs or statuses per fight, so it works perfectly. However, this setup is probably not ideal in pvp or even 5 man dungeons.

And there you have it

That’s how I big brother the raid. I’m often looking for new ideas and layouts, myself, but at the same time, it’s also good to limit what you track to what’s really useful. Too much noise in your frames will draw your attention away from the important elements.

And, if you were wondering, yes, I genuinely screwed up that image because I don’t know my left from my right. Don’t laugh.

Making the Jump from 10s Casual to 25s Progressive

My silence about transitioning to a new guild wasn’t exactly intentional. I’ve written a few drafts, but can’t get them sounding the way I want. I tweak them until I get angry and have to go for walks to calm down. I get a lot of exercise, but no post about guild searching and guild joining.

I do love the new guild. The raids are fun, the environment is motivating and the officers do an amazing job of making sure everything runs smoothly and yet still found time to go out of their way to make me feel at home.

What I want to talk about, though, is my performance and the adjustments I made in transitioning from Teamsport, a 10s casual guild, to this team, a 25s hard mode guild.

It’s been over a month now. I wish I could say I’m awesome and the transition was easy and that I got 25s heroic healing mastered on the first click. Well, I guess I could say it, but I’d be lying. It took me several raids and a lot of advice from my heals lead as well as the other holy pally in the guild before I could perform at the same level as the other healers. And, over a month later, there are still fights where my logs are totally embarrassing.

A 10s casual group and a 25s progressive group have different needs and call for a style of healing that is unique to them. I hate the terms “harder” and “easier” because I don’t find one style inherently harder or easier than the other. 10s casual demand you compensate for the weaknesses or indifference of others if you expect to kill anything, 25s progressive require that you push to take your place or else you’ll find yourself carried for a short while and eventually dropped.

Let’s define “Casual” and “Progressive”

It’s like philosophy class! “To each essay, each word’s meaning“

“Casual” and “progressive”, in the raiding sense, have very relative meanings.

When I think “casual” I think of this: teammates show up and play well, but most don’t go out of their way to review logs, talk strat, minmax. Raids are less time efficient with waits between pulls and random afks. Fights are done on normal mode with maybe one or two heroic kills at the very end of the tier. Motivations are mostly social, with some loot bonuses.

“Progressive”, to me, means that every individual on the team has kills as their top priority. (They can have secondary priorities too, of course.) Motivation is mostly kills, with some loot bonuses. Teammates do go out of their way to enhance their performance and the pace between pulls is more, lets say, dynamic.

Casual to progressive (or hardcore) is a spectrum with a handful of guilds on each end and most somewhere in the middle. What I’m doing, and what I’m talking about, is moving along the spectrum from a position leaning more toward casual, to a position leaning more toward progressive.

Your job and how it changes

No matter which environment you’re playing in, your job as a healer is this: first keep your assignment alive and secondly, when you can, help others keep their assignment alive.

How this translates into practice depends on the environment you’re playing in. In a less focused team, you’ll be dealing with a lot of extra damage due to mistakes, slow reaction time and, if you’re unlucky, a tank (or fellow healer) who went to the bathroom during the fight and didn’t tell anyone. In a team aiming for progression, there’s less damage going around, and if you falter, other healers will jump to back you up. However, if you falter and are covered for often, you will quickly find yourself expelled from the team for not doing your part.

Then, in 10s, you’re dealing with limited bodies. If your fellow healer goes down (or to the bathroom), you’re on your own. In a 10 man group, you need to be able to work well as a team, but you also need to know how to cover the entire raid should you find yourself in the, very likely, position of single healing. In a 25 man group, you’ll rarely be on your own, so developing team skills tops the to-do list.

Communication, the key to all relationships

During my first raid with Teamsport my tank died.

“He got out of range and no one covered for me.” I complained.

The reply I got?

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

I came to Teamsport from a 25s progression guild. I was used to having people automatically jump in when they saw a need. Eventually I learned to speak up again (and my fellow healers in Teamsport did get better at reading healthbars). When I went back to 25s progression raiding, I was delighted to have people jumping in when they saw a need again, before I had to say anything.

Don’t get me wrong, communication is always important. But in 25s, voice chat gets overwhelmed quickly, so you have to prioritize. Do this absolutely need to be said out loud or is there another way I can communicate this? Can it be typed in healer chat after this fight?

In 25s, you communicate a lot via raid frames. I can tell if fellow pally is having trouble healing her tank by how he’s gone a few seconds without being topped off. I can tell fellow healer is out of mana because the blue light on her healthbar came on. I know who the Beacon targets are in the raid, because my little Beacon icon is showing. Since you can’t afford for everyone to crowd vent with details of their situations, we can rely on addons (and macros, which I need to get working on, myself) to communicate for us, leaving us with only select information to share via voice chat.

Cooldowns

On my application I wrote “one thing that I’m very proud of is that I use my cooldowns on, well, cooldown.“

After my first raid with the guild, the majority of the feedback I received was that I needed to improve my cooldown usage.

No, I didn’t lie on my app. What happened, and this took me by surprise, is that with Teamsport, I used my cooldowns based on need. So whenever I sensed my fellow healers falter, whenever I felt the tank slacking on his cooldown usage, whenever there was a potential for extra damage, the cooldown buttons were pressed. This happened so often that my cooldowns were getting used as soon as they came up.

With the new guild, that sense of urgency never came (my first few raids with them were 10s alt runs, so this is a casual vs progressive thing, not a 10s vs 25s) and thus I had to make a mental effort to use them.

The key in 25s progressive is to get the cooldowns going early on to boost healing and save mana and, most importantly, ensure they’ll come up again before the end of the fight so you can use them more than once. Lay on Hand, I save for OMG moments and Aura Mastery, I make sure not to use within the 2 minutes before I’m called upon to pop it, but everything else now gets pumped out as early as possible, and again as soon as it’s ready.

Last week I won an award for “best use of healer cooldown” (which was an awesome surprise!) so it seems that the mental effort is paying off, but I still have to actively think about cooldown usage.

Single targeting vs HOLY RADIANCE LOVE BAYBEE!

The first time I did Heroic Ultraxion, my numbers were terrible. They were terrible because I was conditioned to thinking “the tank will die if I don’t OMG spam Diving Light on him ALL THE TIME“.

This was another lesson.

Damage in Firelands, at least on 10s, went like this: one person takes damage, then someone else takes damage, then someone else takes damage. My Divine Light finger became twitchy and I came down with a fear of not spamming Divine Light. Dragon Soul is more “everybody taking lots of damage all together, like friends“. Still, in 10s, I concentrated on the tank with the occasional raid heal while my cohealers took care of the non-tanks.

In 25s, though, there is so much splash healing that the tanks rarely need Divine Light spam. Divine Light spammers like me end up with a lot of overheal and very little effective healing.

The key?

Holy Radiance all the time.

Ok, maybe not all the time. Heroic Blackhorn, from the logs I’ve read, is not primarily a Holy Radiance fight. Heroic Ultraxion and Heroic Zon’ozz (two fight where I found myself way below the other healers on the meters) are Holy Radiance fights. I checked my shitty H-Zon’ozz log against another paladin’s awesome H-Zon’ozz log. The major difference? I used Holy Radiance 14 times. The other pally used theirs over 114 times. I think we’ve found a problem!

Mana Management

“114 Holy Radiances“, you say, “but what about the mana?!?!“

Interestingly, I rarely run out of mana anymore, even when overdoing it on the Holy Radiance. And when I do, I can regen it no problem.

I can think of a few reasons for that. First, when you’re running with a progressive group, you’re killing more things, which means you get more gear. I have more mana regen now simply because I’m better geared. The fights are also a lot shorter. Fights that took up to 12 minutes with Teamsport only take 6 minutes with this team.

Then, because in 25s there are at least 4 other healers pumping out awesome heals, there are more opportunities to use cheaper Holy Lights, or melee a bit, or pop Divine Plea, or drink a Concentration Potion.

So while I still shouldn’t be wasteful with mana, I do have more ressources now to really milk the Holy Radiances.

Conclusion

“To each essay, its conclusion.“

There are certainly other differences I’ve adjusted to in transitioning from wiping all night on Zon’ozz to wiping all night on Heroic Zon’ozz (though Heroic Zon’ozz went down pretty fast last week…it seems like my Zon’ozz curse may end!). However, communication, cooldown usage, spell selection and mana regenaration are those that stood out to me and that I constantly think about as I’m raiding.

I still have good fights and bad fights. I still make a lot of mistakes. I even started making mistakes I’d never made before (I had never died to Hour of Twilight until I joined this guild, and now I die at least once a week. How embarrassing!). But I’m determined to push myself as far as I can go, and to eliminate the bad fights.

Holy Radiancing our Heroic Ultraxion kill

Heeding the Call of the 666s

I don’t get tagged in memes often (I was even TOTALLY neglected in the last resurrection of the Circle of Healers questionny thing, over which I STILL cry myself to sleep. I’m a sensitive soul, what can I say?) so I was thrilled when I was tagged by Nymphy and Rivs and Jaedia (<3) in the 666s meme.

The meme was started by our resident trendsetter Gnomeaggedon and is traveling around the blogosphere at an impressive speed (in other words, I’m going to have a rough time tagging people who haven’t already done the meme). In Gnomer’s own words, here are the rules:

Go into your image folder
Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couldn’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).
Challenge six new bloggers.
Link to them.

The internet, I think, will be pretty disappointed to hear that I don’t keep WoW pictures in my pictures folder. My screenshots are kind of all tossed together with a bunch of other crap in my normal documents folders. It’s very out of character for me to not have my WoW pictures optimally organized, but yeah. I’m not one of those people who takes pride in my WoW pictures. Screenshots get taken to colourfy the blog, then get buried and abandoned.

So what is the sixth picture of the sixth subfolder hiding in my pictures folder?

…

Probably not the most exciting picture I’ve ever taken, but, that’s my sixth of the sixth. Athabasca Falls in Jasper National Park. I took my girl Cocoa (who was an SPCA resident at the time, but has been recently adopted to a great forever home) up to Jasper and to the Cadomin ghost town, where I had fun taking some pictures of the scenery.

Cocoa, of course, was very interested in getting her picture taken and showing us her pretty face.

Interestingly, when I open my pictures folder directly from WordPress, my subfolders get messed around, so for your visual pleasure: the sixth picture of my other sixth subfolder.

Kind of had a lighting problem there. Also not the best haircut I’ve ever sported.

In the background, Kelowna, British Columbia. Taken during my BC backpacking trip 2 summers ago.

Because I kind of feel bad for cheaping out of the WoW pictures, here are some sixes from folders that may be hiding WoW photos.

Sixth picture in my default WoW screenshot folder:

Aw, good ol’ days of ICC with Conquest. My UI may look cluttered, but to me, it’s pristine.

Sixth picture in the Sixth Game Stuff folder subfolder:

Ok, I lied. Sixth Gaming folder subfolder only has 5 pictures. This fifth photo was taken special for none other than Gnomeaggedon himself, in honour of the Blog Azeroth Secret Santa of 2009.

Sixth picture of the Game Stuff folder:

YESSS Adrianne Curry playing WoW naked! I borrowed that photo some time back to help me write a post about Valentines day 2 years ago, Love is in Singles Appreciation Day.

Time to tag

THERE YOU GO. If you’re still looking at this post after that display of picture folder exhibitionism, you’ll discover that I’ve tagged the following people:

Bravetank, from Bravetank (I’m sure she’s got good stuff stashed away)
Morrighan, from Caer Morrighan (who never posts pictures)
Saunder, from Non-Squishy Heals (because I haven’t been in touch with him for forever)
Saif, from Raiding After Dark (who is far too quiet)
WJRez, from The Epic Chef’s Hat (my first regular commenter whom I haven’t talked to in awhile)
Either Matt or Dan (whichever one of the two is the most fun) at Nerf-Herders (yay for cross game meme-ing!)

Words Words Words

I try to stay out of these debates in the WoW community because they’re exhausting and (I know this is in direct contradiction of my conclusion!) they lead nowhere. Extremists remain extremists and moderates remain moderates. But, I guess you could call me a philologist. I love words. I find them fascinating. My background in psychology, my passion for travel and my interests in anthropology and linguistics have created a monster: the relationships between language and cultures is something I could discuss for days and days and days. (And days and days.)

I’ll do my best to respect my energy levels and keep this short, though.

I’ll also start off by saying that I’m a moderate and that I’ll be playing with both sides of the discussion. My message in 4 words would be “reflect and be kind“.

“Fat”?

When I was a teenager doing teenager memes on Livejournal, one of the “survey” lines became etched in my memory: “What would you do if your boyfriend called you fat?“

The obvious responses would be to ditch him, to yell at him, to make him apologize. But not me. I’d probably burst out laughing and give him another joke as a response. Why? Because when I was 16 I got sick, my weight dropped and ever since my BMI rarely creeps above 20. As a result, no matter where I go, I get the “oh you’re sooooooo fat” line. My weight isn’t low enough to be worrisome, and though, like anyone, I dislike lumps showing up where they shouldn’t be, I’m not conscious at all about my weight. Putting “fat” and me in the same sentence can only be humorous.

Where I’m going with this is that the word “fat” doesn’t SPECIFICALLY mean the same thing to me as is does to someone who is struggling with their weight. Just like it wouldn’t mean the same thing to someone in a culture where being overweight is a sign of wealth and social status. It has a very personal and a very cultural meaning and person and culture are relative.

Intent and effect

Does that mean it’s ok to insult people’s weight, and when they are hurt, tell them that they should just change their view of the word “fat”?

I hope you find that as ridiculous as I do.

Saying things, KNOWING that you’re upsetting someone (or that you have a very high chance of upsetting someone), is just being a jerk.

We can debate until we’re blue in the face about which words we should ban (why do I always get flashbacks to Harry Potter and He-who-must-not-be-named whenever these “word ban” topics resurface in the blogosphere?). The fact that these discussions get so heated is proof enough that the meanings of these words is indeed dependent on the beholder.

However, you can’t go into the beholder’s head and change their past experiences, their beliefs, their thoughts, their feelings. What you can do, however, is not be a jerk.

But I don’t know what other people don’t like!

What fuels these heated topics is that among English-speaking Westerners (which, I’m guessing, is the general demographic engaged in the debates I witness), there are certain words and topics that are generally demeaning.

We have to differentiate specific meanings from general meanings. Specific meanings are personal, but general meanings are usually pretty constant. Whether you’ve experience homophobia or not, the term “faggot” (when not talking about cigarettes) has a negative connotation. It is the degree of negative connotation that differs from person to person.

Now, the Western world has a painful and not yet completely resolved history of racism, sexism, homophobia and violence.

Thus, when using “rape” out of context, when using racism and sexist terms, you are being disrespectful. There is a high chance that one or more individuals in your audience will feel attacked, or hurt, or disregarded.

Now, I differ from the extremists in that I believe that what you joke about or the vocabulary you choose among close friends where no one else can hear is your own business. However, as soon as you take your words outside and use them in a way that is very likely to bother others, you are being a jerk.

As a side note, there are individuals who have unusual aversions to certain words or topics. I wouldn’t expect anyone to guess that “banana” could trigger an emotional response in another. However, if the aversion is known, I would expect others to respect it.

I’ll insert here that jokes about rape, about suicide, about mental health, etc. are extremely touchy ground. These are very devastating subjects. Joking is a defense mechanism that allows us to avoid feeling something that we have trouble accepting. Joking about rape, about suicide, about mental health happening to others protects us from the pain of empathy. As as painful as it is, empathy is what we need to build a better society. So, in addition to be cruel to the individuals targeted, joking about these topics prevents us from growing as a society.

Note the emphasis on “happening to others”. Sometimes joking about ones own experiences can be a crucial part of the healing process – it offers a distraction and it helps others relate. I wouldn’t have learned to accept myself as I am if I hadn’t written a number of comedy posts about my social anxiety. Joking to heal yourself and joking to avoid feeling empathy are completely different stomping grounds.

Hate and cruelty, it wears on you

I gotta fit WoW in here somewhere!

I don’t have any strong feelings about “slut” plate (I grew up in a very sexually liberated part of the world) but I do have something else to share.

I was in a guild once where the, um, quality of conversation went way downhill. Had I taken a shot every time someone said “fag”, I would have been finished 15 minutes into the raid. And that wasn’t the only hate term that was used abundantly.

No component of the vocabulary hit any nerves on me, personally. So it wasn’t a question of hurt feelings, or fear or anything like that. It wasn’t a question of attributing extreme meanings to words either.

Yet, I got exhausted. Trying to remain positive, cooperative and team-minded while being bombarded with symbols of hate, of violence and of ignorance took a toll on me.

(Not to mention that it all felt very immature. As if my teammates were saying “HEY! LOOK AT ME! I’M USING A BAD WORD! AREN’T I BADASS?” I dunno about you, but if I’m going to babysit 12 year olds, I expect to be paid. In money.)

I understand the need of an outlet for aggression. But I think there has to be a balance between positivity and negativity, there has to be a proper time and place to be aggressive, and there has to be a consideration for those who aren’t currently feeling a need to let out some aggression.

As my grade school moral teachers used to repeat over and over again: “Your freedom ends where someone elses freedom begins.“

Words vs Meanings, Messengers vs Messages

Now that I’ve insisted on “if you knowing hurt people, even with words, you’re a jerk”, I’ll switch over to how I feel about outright banning words.

In her post, Cider Apple Mage uses the following example:

A woman is walking home from work in a big city. A car of young men drives by and shouts “SLUT!” at her. It feels scary.

This is a good springboard for my own thoughts because her and I (though we agree on some points) differ on how we view words.

The above situation has happened to me a lot (I doubt it’s anything personal…it happens even when I’m wearing winter clothes that show no skin at all). It doesn’t scare me, but I do get a little insulted. If I’m feeling sensitive that day, I might even be hurt.

Not from the choice of words. The young men could have easily said “dorkface”, “poopyhead” or something equally ridiculous and have trigger the exact same feeling in me. What bothers me is that strangers went out of their way for no other reason than to attempt to cause me pain. The word “slut” doesn’t faze me. Cruelty, however, saddens me deeply.

I find that in the crusade against words, the very people pushing to ban certain words forget why those words cut in the first place.

Perhaps I’m just a dreamer, but I think words are not the right battle to fight. Words are messengers. Killing the messengers won’t change the message. Ban a word and another will appear. It’s a never ending battle. Whenever I see a statement of “ban words X, Y and Z because I can’t stand them” I imagine that the person making the statement must lead a very draining and painful life. I get heck from my fellow bloggers about this, but I feel that if I burn myself out trying to correct everything others say, then they’ll win. They’re wrong in being jerks, but if I allow myself to be hurt or burned out because they’re jerks, then the person who is punished is me.

However, fight cruelty, fight disrespect, fight ignorance, fight hate – and the words will vanish on their own.

Summing it up

Well, this wasn’t really short, but it could still have been much longer.

I think these discussions are important. Regardless if whether you agree with a text, it’s important to read it, absorb it, criticize it. A part of social consciousness is instinctive (otherwise societies wouldn’t exist) but it needs to be refined through discussion and reflection. There are no black and white answers for what’s “best” and “right”. To build a better society, you have to look at all the angles and make your own personal judgements.

And take action. Discussion is the beginning, but it isn’t the end. Join advocacy groups, volunteer, teach children. Ignorance is fought with knowledge, hate is fought with love, oppression is fought with liberation.

You want to make a difference? Do it through positivity. Make society grow instead of repressing it.

That goes for the hate-speakers and the word-banners and all of us in between.

Remember that one time I BUILT A COMPUTER? – Part 3

Part 3, otherwise known as The Neurotic Pally and the Evil Windows. If you want to get caught up on the earlier parts, the beginning of the story is here and the middle of the story is here.

Software; or How I discovered that I prefer Hard Things

I’m out of pictures, so I’m going to recycle the “Computer is complete and running” photo.

Pretend you haven't seen this before.

Last post we ended with me powering up my computer for the first time, after a smooth hardware assembly process. I’m the queen of hard.

What you want to do as you power up your computer for the first time is access your BIOS. To access your BIOS, you hit “delete” shortly after you turn the computer on.

I give it a try.

I hit “delete”.

Nothing happens and my computer stalls, trying to find an operating system.

I restart my computer.

I hit “delete”.

Nothing happens and my computer stalls, trying to find an operating system.

I restart my computer.

I hit “delete” “delete” “delete” “delete” “delete” “delete” “delete” “delete”.

Nothing happens and my computer stalls, trying to find an operating system.

I’m freaking out here. Panicking, crying, threatening to throw my computer through the wall. I turn to Twitter and 5-6 people scramble to find a solution to my problem.

They link me tech support thread after tech support thread. They share their own computer building problems history. They do everything they can to lend me some insight into what’s going wrong.

It took about an hour of ripping my hair out (hey, I promised hair-pulling drama!) to find the solution. In the end, I found it on my own. Not because I was smart, but rather because of the opposite. No one else thought of the solution because they overestimated me.

Curious?

As I was browsing through a tech support thread (that I pulled up on my own), I came across this: “I’ve tried everything,” the poster wrote, “delete, F12, even escape…“

Escape.

DAMMIT.

ALL THIS TIME I WAS PRESSING ESCAPE INSTEAD OF DELETE.

I blame it on the long day (or if you want some encouragement: if someone who confuses “delete” with “escape” can build a computer, you can build a computer too. If you don’t get the joke, you forgot to read part 1).

More Problems with Going Soft

The next step is installing Windows. I set my BIOS to boot from CD, I pull out my Pirated copy of Windows, plop it in the CD drive, restart my computer. And nothing happens.

Off to Twitter I go.

Fannon gives me a call. “When using a Pirated copy, you need to make an ISO image you can boot from. Copy it onto a DVD and use that as your boot disk.”

I own no blank DVD. It’s 8:45pm. Walmart closes at 9pm. I can totally do this.

I get home with my blank DVDs (after getting pulled over by a cop… he must have sensed I was about to engage in illegal computer activity). I do the disk copying. It doesn’t work. Fannon calls again. After a 50$ conversation (I have a pay-as-you-go phone. Long distance calls are about 6$ a minute), we come to the conclusion that illegal software isn’t for me and that I should go out and buy Real Windows.

Walmart opens again at 9 am. I’m there, ready to purchase my Real Windows.

I plop Real Windows in the CD drive and it all works brilliantly. I’m overjoyed.

Until Windows couldn’t find my hard drive.

Stupid Windows. My hard drive is RIGHT THERE. You know, like, right under my CD/DVD drive. How can you miss it?

I try to fix it on my own. First, I look in the Windows manual.

Have you ever looked in the Windows manual? One would THINK that most of it would be about “How to install Windows“. And it would include a section on “How to install Windows when Windows doesn’t want to be installed“. And it might also have a section about “What to do when Windows is about to cause you to throw your brand new computer out the Window, then rip off all your clothes and run out onto the street screaming.“

But noooooooooo. The Windows manual is all about “Windows is wonderful and lovely. Look at all these happy families sitting together, looking at Windows 7 and its heartwarming new features.”

It’s frustrating that there are so little options when it comes to operating systems. Rich non-gamers can use Mac systems. Programming geeks can use Linux. And for the rest of us, there’s Windows. Windows, which kind of does what it wants, when it wants.

It was someone on Twitter (I can’t remember who for the life of me, which I’m hugely apologetic for because I probably owe them my life) who found the answer for me. I had to do this “part disk” command to make a partition on my hard drive. Now, WHY that’s not in the Windows manual or on the Windows website, I have no stupid idea. But, yeah, “part disk”.

After that, Windows booted up just fine.

No, wait, I lie. Windows found my hard drive, but refused to do anything with my hard drive. I solemnly make my way to the closet and close my hand around the hammer hilt. Thankfully, at that moment, Vosskah calls me on Skype.

Vosskah: Take a deep breath, it’s ok, lets go through it together.
Me: *sob* Ok.
Vosskah: Let start over from the beginning so I know exactly what you’re doing at each step. I don’t want you to feel like I’m underestimating your-
Me: You realize you’re talking to someone who mistook “escape” for “delete” right?
Vosskah: … It, um, happens, now lets take it from the beginning.

Obviously, AS SOON AS I’M ON THE PHONE WITH SOMEONE WHO CAN HELP, Windows works just fine. It installs itself, I can use my computer, I download SWTOR (yay!) and I redo my WOW UI.

Don’t Worry, The Soft Tails Tales Go On

I bet you thought I was home free, you did you did you did!

I did too. Until I turned my computer off for the first time. Ok, no, that’s not true. It turned off just fine. Turning it ON again…

Apparently Windows lost my hard drive again. Desperately wanted to boot from the Windows CD. No matter what I did to my BIOS, it wanted its CD like a baby wants its mommy. Yet, when I gave it what it wanted, it tried to install Windows again.

Install Windows again, AFTER I spend 2 days downloading SWTOR and getting WoW ready?

I think not.

As usual, I turn to Twitter. “Very weird,” the experts tell me.

Some suggest disconnecting my CD/DVD drive, other recommend fiddling with my harddrive connection.

My dad was a computer geek and computer destroyer. After watching him wreck several machines in attempts to “fix them”, I learned that the solution rarely involves disrupting sleeping wires. Deep in my soul, I knew my CD/DVD drive AND my hard drive were fine. Google led me to believe that it was a partition priority problem. However, I did not know what partition priority was, or how to fix it. My thoughts returned to the hammer in the closet.

Before I could destroy my property, it was time for work. I turned off my computer again, and marched out the door.

The End

When I came home from work that day, I tried turning my computer on again. And Windows loaded normally. As if it hadn’t taunted me to destroy it earlier.

I then realized that my computer was male. Because when an inanimate object gives you grief and seems to do what it wants, when it wants, it is a sign. A sign that said object is of the opposing gender.

I don’t usually name things, but I’m thinking of “Joel”. It’s a guy, so it needs a guy name. My latest infatuation is JL – Jaime Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire (most of the crushes I’ve had in my life have been on fictional characters. Fake people are so much more alluring than real ones). JL sounds a little like Joel. So Joel it is. Even if my internet connection thinks the computer is named Eloise, after my WoW mage.

Epilogue

I never got my computer bug free. It still refuses to load sometimes.

But, you know, when it happens, Joel and I sit down and have a talk about our feelings. Usually, all he’s asking for is to be turned off, to be allowed a minute to prepare himself to be turned on again. And I’m ok with that. Our relationship. It isn’t perfect, but it works. I listen to him, and in return he lets me run WoW and SWTOR with the settings on ultra.

I’d say our relationship is pretty healthy, would you not?