Blizzcon Feels

Blizzard has announced the dates for this year’s Blizzcon: November 8-9. What does this mean? It means that this year there will be a Blizzcon in Anaheim where hopefully we will get all sorts of new info about the next expansion for WoW/Starcraft/Diablo/Lost Vikings. I have always wanted to go to Blizzcon and see all the cool stuff in person but logistics have made it extremely difficult. However this year is different. I turn 30 this year(I know I’m a baby to some and old to others) and my lady love asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate and I told her I wanted to go to Blizzcon. She has agreed to make it happen for us so if we can get tickets we will be at Blizzcon in November!! We booked a room and once the tickets go on sale we will be camping out in the online queue to get tickets.

Of course immediately after reserving the hotel room I looked at twitter to see who was planning on going to Blizzcon. There were several people made the decision to go and there were some on the fence about whether they could go or not. Sadly there were a few people who either couldn’t make it or were choosing to not attempt to go. I was excited about the prospect of meeting some of the people who were going to try and go to Blizzcon when suddenly my brain decided to be a scumbag.

For those of you who are new around these parts, I have made mention before that I am an introvert (shocking I know) and while I tend to have a few extrovert tendencies I tend to have social anxiety hit me often. It’s why I have been on twitter for 2 years now and I barely have 5000 tweets compared to people who have been on for a quarter of that time and have triple the amount of tweets. I tend to spend most of my time watching the conversations going on between people and often I don’t see any place where I can join the conversation. Most times I see an opening I the conversation where I can join in, I stop and think about what I’m about to say and over think it. What if what I say isn’t relevant? What if they hate what I said? What if they just keep on talking and ignore what I said?

Well I started thinking about Blizzcon and possibly meeting some of the people I interact with on twitter and the social anxiety started kicking in.

It honestly reminded me of a scene from the movie “How the Grinch stole Christmas” when the Grinch is debating showing up to the Whoville Whobilation:

Grinch: (after standing grumpily with his arms crossed) All right. I'll swing by for a minute, allow them to envy me, grab a handful of popcorn shrimp and blow outta there. (heads for the door, then stops abruptly and returns nervously) But what if it's a cruel prank? What if it's a cash bar?! How dare they! (scowls, then calms down) All right, I'll go. But I shall be fashionably late. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes! (groans in frustration) Definitely not. (firmly, heading for the door with his hand behind his back) All right! I've made my decision. I'm going, And that's that! (shows his hand) Ah! Had my fingers crossed.

My brain started asking me similar questions. What if people don’t want to meet up? What if I meet them and they hate me? What if I make an ass of myself? What if I do or say something that causes a large number of people to unfollow me on twitter or stop reading my blog or listening to my podcast? Damn it brain why can’t you just let me be happy????? My brain had me thinking that maybe I might have made a huge mistake in wanting to go to Blizzcon.

Thankfully the awesomeness of actually being at Blizzcon outweighed all the things my brain thought up. I will be at Blizzcon and I will see all the cool panels in person and just maybe I might even participate in a lore question thing or a contest or something. I will be at Blizzcon! If any of my readers are going to be going as well and want to meet up and hang out at the bar, let me know! I plan on having a great time and if I can meet people that’ll be awesome but if I don’t, I’ll still have a great time.

Third times a charm

Apparently I am rather bad at remembering to check my calendar because my third blogaversary was on January 25^th and here I am almost a week later and just now getting around to writing a post for it. What can I say, I’m a horrible slacker and you should all stop reading whatever inane crap I write. Now for some reason, some of you are still reading this so I suppose I should continue this post. I have repeatedly mentioned that I started this blog because I had a lot of time in between courses so I decided to start blogging to keep me from being bored to tears. I have somehow managed to keep writing because it’s an outlet for my thoughts on WoW/leadership/finance/robots. I know my wife is happy that I write this blog because that way I don’t drive her crazy with all the stuff running through my head.

Well anyway, it’s been 3 years. I’ve had a lot of visitors come to my blog and some have even been nice enough to leave me comments. The past year has definitely been a busy one for me; I started a podcast, designed some cool shirts, wrote a short story involving my mage, wrote a class guidefor the best mage spec, and of course wrote blog posts that some of you read.

In game I’ve been working on gearing for raiding and leveling alts that also need gearing for raiding. Stupid vicious cycle of needing to do stuff to get gear so you can raid and get gear. I’ve been slacking and only have 6 level 90 characters. I know, I know, it’s shameful and I feel all of the shame. I’ve got a mage, pally, monk, rogue, death knight, and another mage. I’m currently working on leveling my gnome priest and horde dk so those two will be my next level capped characters. I am not going to lie, I think I might have a problem.

So the question ahead of me other than what alt I will level after the priest/dk is: what do I do to celebrate 3 years of blogging? I thought about my usual celebration event the gnomish death race but while we had a good turn out last time, I think I need something new and different.  So I thought to myself, why not do something pet battle related? I know I have been spending a lot of time leveling pets to 25 and battling pet tamers across the zones. Maybe some other people have also done the same and would like to do a tournament. So maybe in February I’ll post details about when/where the tournament will be held. The beauty of pet battles is that they are shared across all your characters so you can roll a level one on my server and participate or if you are alliance you can be battle tag friended/invited to my server for some battling! If anyone reading this is interested please let me know, I think if we can get a decent amount of people we can have a great time.

In parting, I leave you with a funny story that happened to me in the olden days of the Burning Crusade expansion. At the time if you were a tank you had to grind rep with the Keepers of Time for their helm enchant. This was a very annoying rep grind because there were only 2 instances that gave KoT rep: Old Hillsbrad and the Black Morass. Sadly each gave crap for rep and took forever to find a group for/do because you had to do a super annoying quest that involved walking around the caverns of time listening to some npc yammer on about the timeways and such. If you’ve ever done the Aldor/Scryer quest when you first enter Shattrath, it’s like that but worse because you are walking in such a large circle and you had no choice but to do it if you wanted to do Old Hillsbrad. More often than not you would get a group, everyone would make their way to the instance and someone would NOT be able to zone in because they had never done the stupid quest and couldn’t be bothered to do it then.

Anyway back to the story, a guildee was leveling his paladin and needed to grind rep with the KoT. He asked me if I had any alts around the level 66 range that I could take to the instance with him. Luckily for him I had a spriest that I was working on and had done the walk around attunement on. The two of us get in vent and we get a healer and dps who were also attuned and head to the instance. My guildee and I were the only ones who had done the instance before so we had to explain what to expect to the dps/healer. My guildee decided that since he needed rep he was going to find every single mob in the instance that gave rep and pull it. We cleared all the mobs in the first area including the mobs in the tower to the left of the main building where Thrall was. The poor pugged people must have been wondering why the instance had so much trash that needed to be cleared. We finish the instance and the dps/healer leave so my guildee pulls in another guildee who had a resto shaman and we clear it again with just the three of us. Since I was the only dps this took longer than a normal run and when we finished we reset the instance and went back in.

The three of us start clearing trash and mount up to run to the next part when suddenly the healer got a bad lag spike that caused him to run forward into several mobs and dc’d him. Of course all the mobs kill him and turn to us. Thankfully the two of us were still mounted and I’m not ashamed to say that we turned around and ran for the entrance. As we were running my guildee tells me in vent “Why are we running? We should just kill them!” I hesitate but he tells me that we can do it so I agree to give it a chance. He tells me “Heal me! We can take them!” as he dismounts and runs into the chasing mobs. I pop out of shadow and toss him a shield and a renew when suddenly he gets blinded and they all turn to me and do unspeakable things to me. As soon as I'm dead they proceed to kill my guildee. At this point I’m yelling at him in vent for getting us killed and all he can say is “I didn’t know they cc’ed! I didn't know they cc'ed!!!” I was laughing so hard at this point that I couldn’t seriously be mad at him but I have yet to let him live it down and this happened 5-6 years ago.

It’s become a running joke in my guild between the two of us to yell out “Heal me! We can take them!” whenever we’re in an instance or questing. So yeah, there’s a story about Jed that hopefully made you laugh a little at my death.

Thank you everyone who reads my blog, retweets my blog post tweets, leaves comments on my blog, and subscribes to my post feed. You are all awesome and I am thankful that you are all reading my blog, even if it is just to laugh at me. Here’s to another year of crazy blogging fun!