Warcraft, Maeviis, and Me

(Stovokor - Sean, Maeviis - Andrea, Alvius - my brother Jon)

Guest Writer: Andrea

Well, my own World of Warcraft story begins with my oldest brother introducing me to this disturbingly addictive game. I’ve been and still am a huge huge fan of computer/video games like Monkey Island, King’s Quest, and Zelda. These games are more about thinking through the situations, with the occasional fight tossed in, and having ridiculously cheesy and awesome graphics and jokes to keep you jovial and peppy while playing. I just don’t particularly enjoy having my hands sweat as I try to navigate through abandoned space stations only armed with guns and grenades and have to avoid getting mounted and sliced by some freakish alien thing around the corner. But I’m a girl, so I’m excused from having to like games like Halo 3 (Seriously, it looks so dull. I don’t even care that I might be the only one that thinks that, which it looks like I am). But back to my Warcraft tale…

I created a female human mage, named her Maeviis (after a favorite Phil Hendrie character Mavis Leonard), and proceeded to enter this goofy yet fun fantasy game. I loved it. It’s a Medieval-style setting, with all different landscapes and inhabitants. I was in awe of how much land there was to explore, and the idea of doing quests to progress in the game was exciting. It felt like playing Zelda, except it was more personalized and you could talk to real people and play along with their characters.

I think one of my favorite aspects of the game is the guild names that are out there. Guilds are really just clubs or teams that one or two people form and name and then try to recruit others to join. Once you join you have that club name under your character name as you run around the cities. I get a kick out of some of the names people come up with, like [Hold My Beer and Watch This], [Set Course For Pie], [My GF Is Letting Me Play]. The one I and my brothers originally joined was [Circus Midget Deathsquad]. Pretty awesome name, no?

It took a few months and way too many vacation days solely spent on this game, but I got my character to the max potential of level 70 by completing quests and killing bears, trolls, and undead. Once you hit the limit that you can do alone, you have two different paths before you, or both depending on how much time you have to waste in the game. The first is Battleground and Arena. Battleground is where you join a queue for a team to do games like Capture the Flag, or where you have to protect your bases and try to capture the other side’s bases. Arena is you create a team, either 2 vs 2, 3 vs 3, or 5 vs 5, and then go in to battle in an arena setting. You gain points from killing the other side and from winning the games, and those points can give you the ability to buy really nice gear that makes you harder to kill. The second route is raiding, which essentially means you needing way more people to kill the mobs and bosses, and the gear that comes from killing these things are superior. This you do mostly with your guild, and the normal size of raid teams are either 10 or 25, depending on which place you’re going to. Since [Circus Midget Deathsquad] was too small of a group for raiding and I didn’t enjoy battleground/arena too much, I decided to join [Eden] (following Sean after he joined), which had a need for my mage at the time. It was a lot of fun for the first few months, and going through these new places and getting pretty gear for Maeviis was completely addicting. I enjoyed learning the little tricks and moves you needed in order to defeat the bosses, and then hoping that certain gear drops.

BUT… when I became one of their permanent raiders, they started requiring me to be there at least 3 of the 4 nights every week, which really is as bad as it sounds. Not to mention the time I had to spend making back gold to pay for repair bills and replace different consumable items that I needed to have Maeviis remain a killing machine. I also had a problem with actually liking the people in the raid. You spend hours and hours with them and most are either creepy, big goofs, or downright dumb. I seriously only liked 2-3 people in the whole current 25-man team. And I don’t really have anything against southerners, but when 40% of the team’s voices are a southern drawl and it’s beat into your brain for hours and hours, there weren’t very many happy moments. I would take my headset off to play in silence and just guess at what the team was saying rather than suffer through that garble. Throw on top that I was in school with projects, tests and a grad school application to worry about, and I was quick to whip out that mean and wilting sarcasm on them. When it got to the point where I had to leave from social gatherings early or couldn’t go out to eat on a Sunday afternoon because I had stupid raid to attend, I knew that this had become too ridiculous. So I quit the permanent raiding team and in the process gained some sanity back. I still play, albeit much less now, but it’s gone back to being pleasurable.

Thankfully, the Warcraft overload hasn’t killed my love for adventure games. I still salivate when I look at the Zelda website, a game of Rollercoaster Tycoon still makes me happy, and I continue to troll the Internet hoping to find some news about a new Monkey Island game that might possibly be in the works. As long as Nintendo lives, I will support.
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My absolutely biggest complaint about Warcraft (I have many, and boy does Sean know), is how many people with kids and a wife or husband play this game. Sure, casual play is cool, sort of, in strong moderation. But these people are the ones that are playing 5-6 days a week for hours on end. I’ve heard kids crying in the background, a player needing to take a 5-minute break to go change a diaper, or needing to tuck the kid in to bed. Seriously, what the hell? Why are you wasting your time on this game when you have a family that should take priority over a bunch of lame strangers in a guild? These players that are 30 years old and older make me sad. I’m 22 and I feel like a schmuck for playing. If I was married and my husband suddenly developed an obsession with a game, I wouldn’t hesitate to seduce him away from the game console or computer and then when he wasn’t looking just destroy the demonic thing. That’s how I roll.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

my pumpkin.

so evil

=sean

Woah.

O baby, needing you has proven to me,

to be my greatest dream.




Al Green is the man!

+Sean

Fox, CNN, MSNBC, FAIL O

California, Killafornia.

This whole situation with the fires in California has me concerned. Yes, I have friends out there who it might involve, and that is primary, and I worry for them daily.

My issue.

However you look at it, to the American media this is the year’s disaster and is quickly shaping up to be the next big sensationalized event. Not to say that it isn’t already, but watching it today it bugged me to see. Surely there’s a tremendous amount of loss occurring both financially, naturally and emotionally but there’s such a scramble to get the top scoop on the fire that it’s just making the coverage seem ponderous. I don’t need to know that when the wind blows it lowers the moisture value in a specific California hill grass by 22% per 10mph. frankly… fire is going to burn anything, we’re human and I’m willing to throw it out there and give the benefit of the doubt.

Disaster sensationalizing is wrong, cut it out.

Fire burns stuff. Dur hur hur…

Who knew? Right? I don’t know to whom they are attempting to appeal, but an overflow of information is like I said before PONDEROUS. It doesn’t accomplish anything but clutter my screen with pie charts, two live feeds and a ticker bar. So many colors in motion that it’s downright epileptic; it would run any anime into the ground. It’s stacked on top of the soothing voice of Lou Dobbs.

Media: Give us the information, remove the machine. Stop trying so hard, no one cares about production. We’re here for the story and the people, not your pretty face.

=Sean

The world sucks again.

"Dumbledore gay and proud of it. JK Rowling has confirmed Albus Dumbledore gay! Now that we know the Dumbledore gay thing is true will the people start changing the color of his clothes in the book, or maybe should the digitize the movie and change all his clothes to something should we say more flamboyant."





No he freaking is Not!

Douchebag.

Go DIE in a fire Rowling.

=Sean

Albuquerque.

The biggest city with nothing entertaining to do in America, an entire city built on Illegal workers. What a miserable time I had there. Taken from a relatively comfortable lifestyle, living on my own in a spacious pre-furnished apartment and thrown into a single shared bathroom billet for 6 months. Stack that on top of constantly needing to study, a new super stressful airframe and knowing no one, you have my time in Albuquerque.

I’m glad I went, for sure… I would have never met certain people and traveled to certain places. But gosh darn it, it was bad.

The other much better story,

Chino Hills, what a great place… The landscape is eh-ish, being mostly scrub and brown but it’s made up for with the views. Anyways, the airport in Ontario, CA is regional and is sufficiently small- while not being small. It’s California small, if that makes any sense. Does to me, whatever. So I arrived, and wandered a short walk down to the baggage claim, waited for the bag and got my flurry of texts from Andrea attempting to figure out where I am. We eventually decided that just calling for 10 seconds was faster than texting.

I hate the phone. Humans need to just be telepaths.

Anyways, she apparently ended up orbiting 3-4 times before finally finding me. Maybe it didn’t help that I forgot what kind of car she drove. (fail) So she arrived, I finally noticed and was wowed, the woman is gorgeous, it’s stupid… hanging out with a scrub like me. (hehe) Anyways, we shortly piled into the car and hauled off to In-N-Out Burger which had about a quarter million people flooding through, I guess that is normal. The burger was pretty darn good, thanks again to Andrea for coaching me on proper ordering techniques… even though she ordered for me. The fries were meh, maybe they need to be fresh and these weren’t I don’t know.

We drove out and ended up at Casa Bean’, which is amazing by the way. Got the short tour, and only confirmed the amazing verdict. I met the siblings too, all of which are super cool. Heavyweights; a child’s movie-ish. I made my top 10 being so completely fun and absurd. I loved it. The hype was for once totally worth it. Thank goodness… after was Kung Fu, then sleep after wandering the dark parts of town looking for a hotel that Google said was there, and was not.

The next day started early with lunch and a day of movies. All so much fun.

Sunday started much the same with food- which was again good, we traveled to the beach and sat out mocking a poor bird being attacked by the waves and being contemplative. I really truly enjoyed myself out there. THEN! Raiding. Raiding is always meh, so we attacked the tedium by switching characters for the pulls. Even that was a little tedious, it mostly got us killed. Star Wars and spaghetti/salad followed.

I sat up for the rest of the night watching South Park because my flight left VERY early in the morning and would have been worse off sleeping.

I we traveled shortly back to the airport laughing to Hendrie all of the way. Exchanged a hug filled goodbye; I decided to snatch a kiss too. ß-whore.

Overall, the whole thing was a great adventure and I haven’t had that much fun in a long time, even if it was just stuffing myself with food and watching movies. Company can make or break a trip and the company was amazing.

I look forward to doing it again sometime.

=Sean

wut?

"I heard a thousand blended notes while in a grove I sat reclined In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind. -Wordsworth"

Um.

Today I offer little, that’s again par for the course. I might bring myself to updating this thing more frequently now. I do fiddle with these amazing blog posts daily, but never find that they are good enough. Surely if I am not entertained you lot would never be, right!? Who knows…? The world is a confusing place. I think I have a life element figured out, and then I get a man named reality, now at first glance reality is not a big man, he is just a fairly unassuming amicable fellow. Then you notice that he is inching up on you, just a little. Every time you look up from your computer, your book, your television, there he is being unassuming, but doing it closer. Then you look up again, and he is peering over the top of your book/computer/television at you and saying something. You can’t quite hear it, but now you are interested… so you inch closer. He smiles, and kicks you right in the junk, laughing as he walks away.

Life can be a real ball buster sometimes… jerk.

On with the story,

And from the flames as chance would have it, I have returned home. A drive so uneventful it’s not even worth commenting on in great detail. New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida. I think Mobile Alabama was the funfest of the lot because it had a tunnel, a short one.

How dull.

Get something fun you states. I almost passed out at the wheel, if it weren’t for the horrible vision blocking rainstorms that hit from Shreveport and on all the way to home I might have. The downright epic eye watering sulfur smell crossing the Mississippi river didn’t help either. Or truckers being complete and utter douche-holes and cutting me off.

Hour upon hour of Hendrie made it all ok… Thanks to Andrea for that.

Here I am, sleeping on the floor and enjoying my home. It’s full of food, music and my garbage. But damn it all, it’s mine and I’ll do what I like with it.

Love,

=Sean

Next is a summary of my visit to Southern California and crashing the Hills of Chino.