liebenstraum zwei

As it turns out, I was also tagged for the Leibster meme by Chatmay — thanks!

1) How long have you been blogging? Why did you decide to start a WOW blog?
I began keeping a LiveJournal sometime in late 2001 or early 2002 to participate in the Harry Potter fandom. I began reading WoW fansites and blogs sometime around late 2009, when my Druid was reaching level 80 and I wanted to learn more about how to play the class well at the level cap. In early 2010, a healing survey was going around the blogs I was reading, and I wanted to participate. I was also, by that point, starting to have more to say about WoW myself than was reasonable to put in comments on other folks’ blogs.

2) What has been the highlight of your blogging career?
Running the Great Noblegarden Egg Hunt in 2011 and 2012, and having my “What My Characters are Wearing with their Shado-Pan Helmets” article featured on WoW Insider.

3) What games do you play besides WOW?
I don’t play any other computer games, though I am now quite tempted to ask for an iPad for Christmas so that I can use it to play Hearthstone! 😛
I enjoy most table games, though I’m terrible at trivia games and don’t like Monopoly very much.
BTH, on the other hand, plays lots of other computer games. He enjoyed Skyrim so much that he jumped into the Elder Scrolls Online during the early access period and will be letting his WoW account lapse until patch 6.0.

4) What hobby do you spend the most time on besides gaming?
I used to spend a great deal of time crocheting afghans, most of which I made as wedding or baby shower gifts, but it’s been quite awhile now since any siblings or friends got married or had their first babies. More recently, I made dragons. I’m currently working on another WoW-themed sewing project that I’ll reveal when it’s finished.
Every few months, I treat myself to a book binge — I check out a pile of books from the library and mostly ignore WoW for a week or two until I’ve read them all.
I also enjoy baking and cooking. Borrowing an idea from my Mum, sometimes I check out a cookbook from the library, then photocopy out recipes that I tried and liked or recipes that looked interesting to try later.

5) What kinds of foods do you like and when do you snack the most?
I have a raging sweet tooth. I love chocolate, ice cream, cookies, pie, yogurt, fresh fruit, cake. I like fruit pies best — especially for breakfast! I tend to think of bread as a platform for butter, honey, and cinnamon — it’s a great snack!
I snack the most at the computer, when I am playing WoW. It’s a very bad habit that I have been trying to break.

6) What period of time/expansion have you enjoyed the most in WOW and why?
I began playing during Burning Crusade, so I’m rather fond of it. I’ve actually quite enjoyed Mists; deciding to drop out of guild raiding and just do LFR suited me and my altoholic playstyle really well.

7) What is your favorite profession in WOW? What is the rarest pattern you have made in a profession?
My favorite profession has been, at various times, herbalism, fishing, and archaeology. I’m not quite sure what it is right at the moment.
Probably the rarest pattern I own is the Black Belt of Knowledge; I saw it on the Winterhoof AH not too long ago and the price was low enough that I could actually afford it, so I snapped it up. I haven’t actually made one yet, though…

8) How often do you twitter about WOW? In one day?
Well, I don’t even have a Twitter account to begin with, so… never.

9) Do you attend any conventions for comics, anime, WOW, gaming, etc.?
I went to a couple of Harry Potter release parties — one for the Prisoner of Azkaban movie and one for the Half-Blood Prince book — but those were relatively small gatherings of a close-knit circle of LJ/fansite friends. Other than that, I haven’t been to any cons.

10) Tell about a close friend you have had in WOW and whether you are still in touch.
One of my first WoW friends was Kirina, one of the inspirations for me starting my own blog. By coincidence, she was on the same server that I was at the time, so we were able to meet up in-game a time or two. Eventually, we both transferred off that server. Sadly, we’ve lost touch. She stopped blogging sometime in 2012. It must have been before the advent of the battletag, because I don’t have her on my battletag friendslist. She’s still playing, though — I just Armory-stalked her, and she’s wearing a sweet Transmogrification kit that I might just have to borrow…

11) Random WOW fact or adventure you have been on.
Whereas I play WoW as a “breadth” game, BTH plays WoW as a “depth” game. He plays to raid, to defeat the bosses on the hardest possible difficulty settings and get the best possible gear. Thus, he always ends up being one of the best-geared bears on our server. In late Wrath, he decided he wanted to try to duo Naxx. We did pretty well until we got to Construct Quarter; though we squeaked through Patchwerk, we had to call in a couple of guildies to help us down Gluth. Now, of course, we can duo the whole place easily. Recently, we duoed ICC with his bear and my best-geared DPS, my Warrior. We had to bring in my Paladin for Valithria and the Lich King, though.

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Prinnie, finding no-one on her blogroll that was yet untagged, wrote some free-for-all questions.

1) What’s one thing (other than sheer inertia) that could make you stop blogging?
I’m taking “sheer inertia” to mean the kinds of massive lifestyle changes such as getting a demanding new job, getting married, or having a baby that tend to derail playing and blogging about WoW. If I got tired of WoW and wandered off to do something else, that would probably spell the end of this blog, too — but it wouldn’t stop me from blogging in general, because I’d probably revive my LiveJournal to start talking about my interest in whatever that “something else” happened to be.
I try to not get involved in the kinds of controversies that get people flamed so badly that they decide to quit blogging altogether!

2) What’s your favorite word, and why?
I’m exceedingly fond of “miscellaneous” and its derivative “miscellany”. I think it’s a better word to describe a collection of not-necessarily-related items than “random”.
I’ve been fond of “eclectic” to describe my tastes since high school.

3) If you could choose to never ever write about a particular topic again, what would it be?
See above about trying to stay out of controversies as much as possible — but if I never felt like I had to respond in some way to a sexism-in-WoW discussion ever again, that would be wonderful. Preferrably, it would be because Blizzard had stopped even inadvertently giving people reasons to poke the coals.

4) Does your family know about your blog? If so, what do they think of it?
Some of my family know about this blog. I don’t talk about it much with them because they think I play too much WoW anyway and they think that blogging about it is rather silly. And, too be fair, much of the content of my blog is rather silly.

5) What’s the least realistic goal you’ve ever set for yourself?
The ones that seemed utterly realistic at the time, then failed to happen because they relied, in part, on circumstances beyond my control. Like, getting married before I graduated from university when I didn’t even date while I was in high school. I was about halfway through graduate school before BTH finally came along.

6) Have you ever played a game so much your eyes glazed over? What game was it?
When I roll a new alt in WoW, I like to try to play the character all the way through their starting zone in one sitting. Sometimes I stop halfway through, but when I succeed, I always feel pretty glazed-over by the time I’m done!

7) Let’s say I gave you 100 cupcakes that are super delicious. What would you do with them all?
Well, I’m a chemistry teacher, so I’d decorate them all with the symbols of the elements and make a periodic table of cupcakes.

8) Find the closest object to your right that has text on it. Find the third word in the first sentence. Tell us what it is, and then write a new, amazing sentence for it. (If it’s “the,” or something like that, I may cry.)
Immediately to my right is a pile of used computer games that BTH bought a couple of months ago. Looking at the text on the back of the cases, the third word in the first sentence on the top game in the stack is “to”. Boring! The third word in the first sentence on the next game is “Crysis”, the name of the game. No thanks. The third word in the first sentence on the third game in the stack is “legend”. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s look at the last game, just to be sure… “nothing”.
In a time of crisis when nothing is certain, the seeds of legends both good and ill begin to grow.

9) Is a bad idea better than no idea at all? Why?
Yes, because at least then you are doing something, rather than nothing at all.

10) What’s one thing you’d like to write about on your blog, but probably never will?
Though I may occasionally mention it very briefly, in passing, I will probably not ever write much about how after nearly seven years of marriage, BTH and I do not yet have children because I have anovulatory PCOS and can only afford, financially and emotionally, about three months per year of the infertility treatment roller-coaster.

11) What’s the dumbest question you’ve ever been asked?
I’m sure I’ve gotten some real doozies from my chemistry students, but I guess none of them were so truly inane that they stuck in my mind. The dumbest questions, of course, are the ones that can be answered by pointing to a specific sentence in the lab manual and saying “it’s right here, didn’t you read this before you came to class?”

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Likewise, Martha, finding no-one left to tag, wrote up her own set of free-for-all questions.

1) What is one quest/grind that you never want to do again?
I was so glad when mounts went account-wide so that I’d only have to do the Netherwing and Mag’har grinds once! I’m getting pretty tired of the Argent Tournament and the Shado-Pan by now, too. I’d also like to never do the Aldor/Scryer grinds again, but I’m a cheapskate concerning things that aren’t clothes for Transmogrification and would rather farm the rep tokens than buy them from the AH.

2) What is one quest you wish was repeatable?
I’m not thinking, off the top of my head, of a quest that I really wish was repeatable. I think that Mists did rather well at identifying the quests that people would like enough to want to repeat and turning them into dailies. They even turned some older fun quests into dailies for Mists — Riding the Storm, one of the possible end-quests of the Shan’ze Dao sequence of Shado-Pan dailies, is, at least to me, pretty clearly a reworking of the popular Drakkensryd quest from the Storm Peaks back in Wrath.

3) What is your favorite critter?
the Armadillo Pup, though the Bandicoon/Masked Tanuki (raccoon) is a close second

4) What’s one thing Blizzard could offer a micro-payment for that you’d love to see?
Armor dyes. A permanent version of the Hallow’s End broomstick mount (though I would rather see that be purchasable with the in-game currency from the holiday). The ability to pick which boss of a variable boss encounter such as the Karazhan opera you’d get to fight. The ability for a max-level character to bypass the once-a-day lockout system for Heroics from past expansions — perhaps allowing you to run a given Heroic five times in a day, similar to how you can run five ten Normals within an hour before you hit the “you have entered too many instances recently” wall.

5) Name one blog you read every day (or at least every time they post).
Alt:ernative and The Daily Frostwolf — it continually amazes me how these ladies can make such thoughtful posts every single day

6) If you lost everything and had to start over again, would you keep playing WoW or quit?
I would certainly feel like just quitting at first! But when I was done sulking, maybe after a week or three, I’d probably start playing again.

7) Do you think WoW will exist 5 years from now? How about 10?
Five years from now? Certainly. Ten years from now? Maybe.

8a) For the older crowd: What did you do for fun before video games took off?
Well, I still love to read books and do textiles-related crafty things….

8b) How much money would someone have to pay you to disconnect all internet service (phones web-browsing included) at home?
They couldn’t pay me enough. I don’t have a smart phone, but I need a high-speed internet connection for my computer! Gaming and blogging aside, I value the internet-based services that allow me to stay connected with my family even though we are scattered all across North America. I recently applied for a job at a well-reputed, fully accredited online university, for whom I would work from home over a high-speed internet connection. Also, it’s so very pleasant to watch General Conference from the comfort of my own living room over streaming internet!

9) If you could have any animal as a real-life pet what would it be? How about as a WoW hunter pet?
I had guinea-pigs from relatively early in my childhood until I left home, and I would like to have them again — when I have a lawn to graze them on in the summer months. I’d love to have a guinea-pig battle pet!
I’d also be happy to have a cat or two, after we settle down.
I’ve wished for a long time that my Hunter could tame hooved mammals such as zhevras, giraffes, and the okapi in Sholazar Basin. I’d also like to be able to tame more of the really large animals such as kodos, clefthoofs, elekks, and mushans.

10) What is the weirdest/silliest skill that you have learned while playing WoW?
Recognizing the flight path landing sound effect when I am tabbed out or even, if I have my volume turned up loud enough, AFK

11) If the real-money auction house had actually worked and you could make a living just playing WoW all day -– would you?
No. I don’t have the patience to make in-game gold from playing the AH, so it would be even stupider and more frustrating to me to try to make real money from the game!