“Is that for me?” the son asked his father. “Is what for you?” the father wondered. “The ‘N’ on your shirt,” explained the son. The father looked down at his shirt, full of letters that spelled out the name of a company he used to work at. Sure enough, there was the small, gray letter “N.”

The father quickly told the son, “Why yes, it is for you. In fact, every time I see the letter ‘N,’ I think of you because it’s the first letter of your name.” The son smiled, but the father was forced to ponder again when the son asked, “Is that me on your shirt?” The father hesitated and replied, “I don’t think so.” “But if you say the magic word, then I will be on your shirt,” said the son. Even though the father had a pretty good guess, he asked the son anyway, “What is the magic word?” “Abracadabra!” the son said with excitement.

The father was confused, but willing to play along as any parent with a young child would. The father wanted further clarification and asked, “So, if I say ‘Abracadabra,’ you’ll appear on my shirt?” “Yes,” answered the son.” The son went on to explain what would happen next. “If you say the magic word, I won’t be here anymore because I’ll be on your shirt.” “Oh, so your picture will appear on my shirt?” asked the father. “No, I will be on your shirt. I won’t be your boy anymore.”

Sadness fell over the father, as he wondered if the son was feeling left out with all the recent talk about the upcoming arrival of the son’s little brother. Realizing this as a possibility, the father did not want to take the story any further. “I won’t say the magic word then,” the father stubbornly stated. “But you have to say the magic word so I can be on your shirt,” the son pleaded with disappointment. “I don’t want to say the magic word because you told me that you wouldn’t be here anymore,” said the father. “If you’re not going to be here, who would be my boy?” “The baby can be your boy,” the son quickly answered.

The father knew that he needed to firmly explain to his son what was about to happen in the coming days. “I think that when the baby arrives, both you and the baby can be my boys,” said the father. The son looked at his father with relief and said, “Oh.” The father continued to reassure his son telling him, “I’ll say the magic word so your picture will appear on my shirt, but only if you’ll be here and be my boy.” The son replied, “Okay,” and then asked, “And the baby too?” “Yes, the baby too.” Hopeful that the son understood how the father felt, the father gave the son a reassuring hug and told him, “No matter what, you will always be my boy.”

Posted in Parenting 2 Comments »

Just because I don’t have enough to do in World of Warcraft, I’ve decided to start a new level 19 Horde twink. I’m kidding about not having enough to do, of course. I miss playing Battlegrounds and I figured it would be faster to get a character from 1-10 than play my Shaman, Warlock, or second Paladin to eighty. I’ve converted my banker, a Tauren Hunter, to my PvP twink and am currently level seven. As my banker is firmly planted in Thunder Bluff, she — yes, I said “she” — can easily queue up for Warsong Gulch and watch the auction house for twink gear that non-twink players put up for sale.

My shopping list currently includes all of the following: Sentry Cloak, Forest Leather Bracers, Gloves of the Fang, Scouting Trousers of the Monkey, and Twisted Chanter’s Staff. My Leatherworking Rogue will craft a Deviate Scale Belt, rounding out my bind-on-equip gear.

My current goal is to level her to ten and head to Trisfal Glades outside of Undercity. There, I will tame a Vicious Night Web Spider for their Web ability which “encases the target in sticky webs, preventing movement for 4 seconds.” I predict hijinks ensuing very soon!

Posted in 200 Words, Twinking, World of Warcraft 3 Comments »

“Watchmen” was entertaining and did not disappoint. I was very nervous when the opening credits began and even became sad at one point when I realized that I was about to view someone else’s vision of what I had become very attached to. The opening scenes rolled in with Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” playing in the background. This was one of my favorite parts of the movie and really set the tone for what we were about to witness: a changing of the guard for the Watchmen and society.

I became immersed in the movie right away, but was disrupted several times. The soundtrack was annoying when mainstream songs were forced into the story, attempting to recreate a 1980s feel. Malin Akerman’s acting was awful, and the makeup for President Nixon and Sally Jupiter looked really fake. The action sequences didn’t seem to fit either, but were well done.

I think that someone not familiar with the graphic novel would be confused. Scene transitions seemed hurried at times. This did keep the story moving forward, though, and it didn’t seem as abrupt since I knew what was coming next.

I give it three-and-a-half stars out of five.

Posted in 200 Words, Movies 2 Comments »

BC seems to be having a good time with his well written and entertaining “200 Words” blog. It’s got me flashing back to our days with the OPK and how we used to post a write-up on the SoW/PAG/OPK forums the next day to much /loling. As anyone who got to participate can attest, we had a lot of fun even though we were chronic wipers (see what I did there BC?). Most of the wiping was my fault for sure, but what’s because I was afk a lot to refill my drink. Who plays WoW sober anyway?

While BC is off having new glory days running Naxx, me and the local boys on Ursin are having our own brand of fun. We started by /gkicking anybody who had a problem with failure. That left us with a 6 member guild and one ready alternate who refuses to have a guild tag but who is happy to run with us whenever. We have other local friends on Ursin, but they don’t much like chain wiping so we had to let them go.

When I started playing on Ursin again and noticed that we had just enough folks to start running instances, I talked everyone into trying some. Noone in our little group had yet to set foot in a single WoTLK instance so everyone was excited to have an opportunity to give it a shot. We started with regular UK since everyone (including our one level 80) had the quest for it, and off we went. We blew through it like 18 year old bullies picking fights with 3rd graders. I read up on the tricks of each boss fight and let everyone know what to do, but it didn’t matter. With 3 DK’s all pulling aggro off each other, me on heals and an enhancement shammy on “more dps”, we were an inelegant hammer crushing any content Blizzard could throw our way. Occassionally someone died, but that was because they didn’t realize they were standing in one of the many “circles o’ doom” Blizzard has implemented to keep people from going afk during boss fights.

We continued in this manner for three weeks (we just started last month), and saw almost all of WoTLK’s dungeons on regular mode, experiencing the same thing time again: 1) See boss; 2) Beat him down; 3) Loot! I think we felt pretty invincible.

Last night we stepped into our first heroic. We went back to were we started, UK, thinking we had better do something we are familiar with and low on the totem pole as a warm up to heroics. I told everyone what to look out for, to be careful with aggro now and watch positioning.

Nobody listened.

We blew through the first room as we always did, with everyone going willy-nilly and aggro jumping around between the DK’s. I was starting to notice that when our one blood DK got aggro, it was all I could do to keep him alive on trash. He would start at 28K health, but would drop to around 3k in a matter of 2-3 seconds if he pulled aggro. This wasn’t a problem on our MT who was wearing his tank gear. He had 24k health but 540 defense and he was a piece of cake to keep healed. I warned everyone to try not to pull aggro from the MT, and they said they would.

In the second room – the one with the protodragons, our blood DK grabbed aggro again and BAM! He was on his face kissing the floor. We recovered, I rezed him, and we moved on. On the last pull in the room it happened again and he went down, followed quickly by everyone else – our first wipe. Oh noes!

He died on a couple of more pulls as we worked on our pulling strategy (our “run in and kill stuff” strategy having failed so far). We ended up getting to the Prince with only one more near wipe which ended with our Unholy DK main tank being able to re-establish aggro after everyone else but me and he had died, and I just kept him up until he killed everything. We talked about what to do on the prince, and I reminded everyone to watch out for the frost tombs and the adds.

Now, on regular difficulty, we never paid attention to the frost tombs. I would just put a hot on the tombed person and he would get an 8 second break to get a new beer.

Here’s Steakum’s Tip O’ The Day: This does not work on heroics.

You have to (at least at our gear level) deal with the frost tombs as there is too much healing needed on the MT to also try and keep the entombed alive at the same time. Plus it hurts dps and add-management too much. We wiped twice before we got the hang of it, but it was a good lessoned learned. Everyone was much more on the ball after that.

We proceeded to own the instance after that. No fight was as difficult as the Prince fight and it was all free loot and badges afterwards, although we proceeded with much more caution and our dps-crazy blood DK did die on each boss fight in spite of my very best efforts to keep him up.

When it was over we were all happy and a little proud to have overcome our first heroic. We learned something very important: Don’t be suckered into thinking that owning the super-easy regular content means you’re any good. On heroics you have to use all the same tried and true skills we learned coming up in vanilla and BC. Our blood DK (who is a really great guy by the way and not a bad player at all – I hope I didn’t make him sound like one) said he would work on getting his defense up to help for the next time… and to keep from having a 20g repair bill – ouch!

Oh, and I did get a purple feral belt off the last boss, which is awesome considering I’m specced resto.

Next up: WTF is up with WG anyway?

Posted in World of Warcraft 1 Comment »

I was tasked with main-tanking the Loatheb fight in Naxxramas with our second tank – a feral Druid – watching the spores and contributing DPS. I put my recently-upgraded gear to the test, and fine-tuned my spell and attack rotation on the fight. Things got dicey towards the end of the fight when Loatheb’s casts of Inevitable Doom became more frequent. During one of the last Necrotic Aura phases, my health got dangerously low. Our aforementioned feral Druid taunted the boss off me. I panicked, thinking that a spore had struck me, or I somehow wasn’t holding threat. I popped Avenging Wrath and taunted Loatheb. I received two big heals returning me to full health, but half the raid was lost at this point. Those that were left burned all available cooldowns and finished him off.

We then ventured into the Military Quarter and worked our way down to Instructor Razuvious. The other tank and I spent about six attempts learning how to control the Death Knight Understudies. With some macros, a tweak to my Bartender settings, and communication over Ventrilo, we had the fight down pat. Our challenge for next week is to try and clear both quarters in one night.

Posted in 200 Words, World of Warcraft 2 Comments »

Great video games give you a sense of accomplishment. When you can accomplish something with a group of people, though, it’s even more satisfying. Our Naxxramas group started over with the Arachnid Quarter after the weekly reset. We cleared more in one night that we did in two nights last week! The group of people I play with are motivated, quick-learning individuals who like to have fun, but take what they’re doing seriously.

Before the raid began, I spent fifteen Emblems of Heroism on the Libram of Obstruction. This was an excellent upgrade for me since it increases my shield block value on every successful Judgment. I could definitely tell a difference working it in with my 96969 rotation.

We had a few issues starting out with Anub’Rekhan. I was silenced on two attempts because I was too close to him when he cast Plague Swarm. This ended up wiping the raid because I couldn’t control the Crypt Guard. Everything finally came together, though, and we got him down. We went on to one-shot the next four bosses and I picked up two new pieces of tanking gear: Gauntlets of the Master and Cloak of Armed Strife. Now for Loatheb!

Posted in 200 Words, World of Warcraft 2 Comments »

A sports talk radio caller mentioned that his boss says that there are two types of people: simplifiers and complicators. The caller was using these terms to prove a point about the current disarray of some NFL teams, but this classification of people struck a nerve with me. Bob Hoffman credits himself with writing an article about this where he made the point, “there are two kinds of people: people who simplify things and people who complicate them.”

This black-and-white classification simplified my view of people, especially in business. Hoffman defines a simplifier as one who has “the ability to cut down the weeds and clear a path,” while a complicator “cannot distinguish between the pertinent and the irrelevant.” This is not to separate the hard-working from the lazy or incompetent. An assiduous person can be a complicator, and a clueless person can certainly be a simplifier. However, simplifiers will typically be your visionaries, seeing the bigger picture, and helping a project or group thrive during difficult situations. How many complicators entangle a business in a larger mess for job security and to possibly further their own gain? I’ve seen many squeaky-wheel complicators that receive an undeserving share of oil.

Posted in Uncategorized 2 Comments »

I was planning on getting my Warlock to sixty-eight and get him started in Borean Tundra. However, when you play as many alts as I do, things don’t always go as planned. Just as I started in Terokkar Forest, a friend of mine came online and was itching to play his level sixty Death Knight. My Death Knight is sixty-one, so I offered to come help him with some quests. We started off with the Ravager Egg Roundup and made quick work of the ravagers. I hadn’t played my Death Knight (specialized in Unholy) in quite some time, so I had forgotten about what rotation to use. I found a Death Knight site that listed a cast sequence macro for Unholy, and setup the buttons on my action bars to match. After that, I was quickly reminded of how much Death Knights are overpowered.

After slicing through ravagers like two hot knives through butter, we thought we could handle the group quest “Cruel’s Intentions” by ourselves. We got Arazzius down to under ten percent on our first attempt, and wiped quickly on the second try. After finishing our humble pie, I asked a nearby Paladin and Priest to help us.

Posted in 200 Words, World of Warcraft No Comments »