The Game Dame

You should be able to see it on the front page! But if I miscalculated the time zone, you can find it here.

Please make sure you drop me comments here or on WoW Insider if you have an idea for a post or a bit of breaking news.

I’ve been putting off writing this post because I wanted it to be perfect, but I’ve just procrastinated it way too long. So I’m not even going to try for “adequate” even. (Hey, you get what you pay for, folks.) Here are the newsez.

Kitty’s Healed

The Moo (my kitty) has healed from his surgery fantastically! He no longer wears his red t-shirt. Tomorrow we go to the feline oncologist to see if we need to take any further steps. He seems fine and full of his usual beans.

By the way, for any of you wondering out there, the t-shirt was the PERFECT way to go — instead of the e-collar. Moo is just too high-strung of a guy and he was freaking himself out by banging the collar on every corner and table leg. I was afraid he was going to scare himself into a heart attack. The t-shirt was completely un-traumatic for him and, after cutting it so he wouldn’t get his back legs caught in it, it served its purpose flawlessly.

New Job

I got a job blogging for WoW Insider!!! OMG! Yes, I did, I got the job! I have such a cool feeling about this, even though I’m scared to death of screwing it up. Please look for my first post soon. I’ll let you know when it’s up. In the meantime, if you think of anything you’d like to see me blog about on there, put a comment here or send me a note from the Contact page.

*”News bunny” is what I and my friends call a scoop. Like, when someone famous dies and you try to be the first to tell all your friends. You have a News Bunny and, by the same token, you ARE a News Bunny. It’s best not to ask why. It won’t make any sense anyway.

TJ often shares posts from her RSS feeds via Google Reader. One of my favorites sites that she shares is a site which transcribes overheard conversations in New York. Extremely humorous stuff. In that spirit, I offer a text message exchange between me and my friend (the ironically named) DJ. Backstory: her boyfriend had an accident and she took him to the hospital.

Me: How’s [your boyfriend]?

DJ: 2 broken ribs… and one big asshole.

I am numb right now. Calvin’s biopsy came back as a cancerous growth. We were referred to a veterinary oncologist.

Holy. Moly. HOLY MOLY!

Hunters. Where do I start??

I’m probably going to upset some folks by saying this but OH MY GOSH are hunters overpowered for PvE! I’m still shaking my head because there really is no comparison to shamans at this level. Or for that matter, to any other class I’ve played.

Melee Power

No comparison here: the shaman wins this contest at the lower levels. Even when the hunter gets her pet (and maybe especially then?) up-close fighting is a non-starter for the hunter whereas the shammy can pound some skulls. Now, of course, after level 10, the hunter’s pet can do some melee damage, but it greatly depends on which pet you choose as to whether they lean towards tanking or DPS.

Ranged Attacks

Here I’ll call it a draw. With the shaman’s spell casting and the hunter’s bow/crossbow they are very close to being equal. By the way, can I just say that the crossbow class of weapons is teh awesome?? Wow, how cool — a bow that shoots like a shotgun. Love it!

Defense

Win goes to the shaman in this category. Even though they both wear leather, the shaman’s higher stamina and ability to heal on demand make him much more durable under fire. At level 10, when you add in the a pet that can hold aggro, the hunter’s defense improves. However, if that mob breaks for you, you’d better drop a trap or stun him and then head for the hills!

Questing

It might be a little bit easier to level to 10 as a shaman because of your healing capabilities. But if you’re a Draenei hunter, that difference boils down to the cooldown on Gift of the Naaru. (If you’re another race, you’re pretty much hosed.) After you get your pet — I chose a Nightstalker — questing is a breeze. As Dammerung said, you can actually SOLO the red quests! Then you can skip through the forest and blithely take on mobs that are 3-4 levels higher than you are. My elemental shammy couldn’t do that until… oh… after level 60. (No joke.) The competition goes hands down to the hunter for power leveling.

Ease of Play

I can only speak for myself here, but I believe the hunter is a bit more complicated to play than the shaman. I say this because not only do you have to figure out how to use spells that are both melee and ranged, but you also have to manage your pet and learn to pull or avoid aggro. My second WoW toon was a hunter and I had no clue how to play him so I struggled a lot. I was able to play the class a bit more skillfully this time around because I’ve had two years of watching hunters who grouped with me and reading Big Red Kitty for educational purposes. The shaman is a bit easier to master because the mechanics are simply: cast, whack, and heal. But, admittedly, this is pure opinion.

The Winner

For these first 19 levels, the hunter class wins for speed of leveling and solo capability — as long as you put some study into handling a pet.

The e-collar didn’t work for the Moo. He wigged out all last night because he kept bumping into things. He even pooped on the carpet, which he’s never done before. Poor guy! So I ran to Target when it opened at 8am today to grab him some t-shirts. (Vet approved this idea!) I measured him and he wears a toddler’s size 2T – ha! I can’t believe they make sleeveless “muscle” tees for toddlers! These were only $2.99USD. Here’s a shot of him a lot more relaxed now. He looks tuff!

I’m working on real WoW-related posts for later today! Vote for the one I should post first:

1. Shaman vs. Rogue (Level 1-19)
2. Shaman vs. Hunter (Level 1-19)
3. Elemental Shaman PWNS Hellfire Peninsula (with pictures!)

My 15 year old cat, Calvin (who prefers to be called The Moo), had surgery to remove a growth today. He is NOT a happy boy with the e-collar on. The incision is about as long as my index finger, but the growth was a little smaller than the size of a US quarter coin. He’s got to wear this collar for 10-14 days. Poor doodle! We get the biopsy results later in the week.

NOTE: The incision picture on the right is not for the squeamish!

In case you’re wondering, Moo is a 17.7 lb cat! He’s a mutt, but we think he’s got some Maine Coon and some Norwegian Forest Cat in him. When he stands on his hind legs, his paws can reach the kitchen counter!

So my friend Karl emails me this morning with news that a sinkhole has appeared near his neighborhood. This immediately sent chills up my spine.

For, you see, I have a sinkhole story.

For a good portion of my childhood I lived in Florida. That was back when alligators were endangered and roamed the streets where I lived and also when sinkholes were making a lot of news on TV.

At the time of this story, I lived in a very rural part of the state. And when I say “rural,” don’t be thinking about suburbs. We lived near marshes and swampland while still being only 15 minutes from the beach. We had rattlesnakes in the back yard and we lived on a dirt road. We did not even have “city” water; we had an electric water pump and a well in the back yard. When the electricity went out, as it often did during hurricane season, we also had no water. “Don’t flush the toilets, kids! We don’t know when the power will come back on.” Good times. Our address didn’t even have a street name. It had a route number. “Route 4 Box 257V.” As a kid, I learned to say my address for clarity: “routefourboxtwofivesevenveeasinvictor.” Oh yeah, baby!

Floridian kids are taught in school about the aquifer that underlies the state and brings us all our water. I was even such a nerdy kid that when I saw the news stories about sinkholes, I used the old (hardcopy) Encyclopedia Brittanica to look up what caused sinkholes. Bad idea.

See, what happens with sinkholes is this: Where there’s soft rock like limestone (nearly everything under Florida is limestone), water circulates and erodes it away. The erosion causes underground caves. When the hollowed out spots get too big to support the ground above, it caves in.

I understood this to mean that the ground beneath my feet was not to be trusted. I could crack the earth’s thin crust and fall into a hole in the great void like an impertinent skater on thin ice. I walked around on some days with a feeling of doom under my feet. A truck rumbling past my school would send my heart racing until I saw the actual truck and was convinced it was not the sound of the earth giving way.

Yeah, I was one of those kids.

One night, I woke up from a bad dream, as I often did. (This one was probably about everyone on the earth being killed by a virus except me. That was a common theme.) At these times, I usually headed to the kitchen to eat a whole dill pickle to get my mind off things and then go back to bed. After eating the pickle, I went to the bathroom to wash the brine off my hands. Instead of getting water when turned on the faucets, there was a loud POPPING noise, a mini-explosion, like the pipes had coughed and then a hiss of air. I jumped back from the sink in surprise at the noise. No water. Not one drop was coming out of the faucet. Odd, I thought.

Being a kid, I shrugged off the hand-washing idea and went about using the toilet before going back to bed. I did my little tinkle and pulled the flusher handle. Swirling down went the yellow water, but then that awful hissing noise and no rush of incoming clear water. An empty, dry toilet.

Oh. My. God.

There’s no water that means that the well out back has run dry and it ran dry because we’ve pumped out all of the water beneath the house and the aquifer is dry and now the whole house is sitting on an M&M candy shell that can break at any moment and just like on TV our cars will be sucked down and the house and my parents and my sister and WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Panting and terrified, I ran into my sister’s room. “Kerri, wake up, we’re gonna die!! We’re over a sinkhole! We have to get Mom & Dad out of the house!!!!”

My sister is notoriously hard to wake up and even when you finally get her out of bed she’s groggy for a good while. She mumbled and shambled around her room, looking for slippers in what I thought was MUCH too slow a fashion. She followed me to Mom & Dad’s room.

We tiptoed inside and stared at my sleeping parents. Waking them up was a Big Deal. We had to have a really good reason or we’d have screaming, flaming punishments. (Okay, so we’d be grounded. I was a drama queen, so sue me.) However, I was convinced, based on my extensive research and TV watching, that we were mere moments away from falling into a sinkhole.

“Dad? Dad, can you please wake up?”

Snuffling and grumbling. “What is it, girls?”

Panic was rising in me now. “Dad, there’s no water, nothing but air, and I think we’ve used up all the water under the house and there’s a sinkhole and please don’t let us all die!!!”

Dad rolled over to look at his clock. 3 a.m.

“For chrissakes, girls, the pump is off! We put the electric pump on a timer that turns it off at night so we can save some money.”

Oh.

“Um. So there’s no sinkhole?”

“For peetsake, go back to bed.”

And that’s my sinkhole story.

Wordpress recently introduced a feature that will probably improve your hit count. They are calling it “Possibly Related Posts” and it appears at the bottom of all Wordpress posts automatically. (You have to be looking at the permalink version of your post, not the home page version, in order to see it.) This feature looks for pages on your blog and other people’s blogs that seem to be similar to the post you’re reading. It’s like when YouTube or Amazon offers you recommendations based on what you’ve just viewed. Pretty cool, I think. Not only for bloggers but also for me as a reader — to find new and interesting blogs to read that I normally never would have read!

Here’s what it looks like at the bottom of my Running of Da Bulls post, linking to another post on my blog:

And here’s what one looks like linking to another blog entirely from my Stranglethorn Vale Fishing Contest post:

Cool, huh? Tawk amongst yourselves…

On Sunday I ran in Sharvan’s Running of Da Bulls which both BRK and Ratshag organized. I hung out at the beginning of the race with my Pox Arcanum guildies, Madja. Of course we both changed our Pox names to be a tribute for Sharvan. I’m Amooto and she’s Moodja.

The starting line was chaos.

From above it was just one giant ball of hair.

I have no idea how BRK, Ratshag, and team were able to organize all this. No one seemed to be paying attention — except of course me and Moodja.

And we’re off!

The sea of moooooo….

The lag was so incredibly bad that at one point, it looked like I was all alone out there.

Incredibly, I was actually near the front of the pack!

These dudes are the only ones between me and naked she-cow glory!

Of course, we ARE still in the Barrens… there’s still a long way to go.

As we head into Durotar, I’m still near the lead!

But when I saw the first zeppelin depart from Orgrimmar without me, I knew I was doomed. How right I was to be — in many ways! Here’s a shot of the second zep loading to Undercity. Note the “entertainment cow” dancing on the roof.

Even though I know I can’t catch up to the first zep folks, I decide that I’m going to try to beat everyone from the second zep.

And then came the worgs. They ate me not once, but twice. At least I was one among many. (Everyone in this shot is a ghost.)

After my second death, I decided to follow suit with Moodja and just run to the finish line as a ghost. Thankfully, as a ghost you run a lot faster than everyone else!

Um. What I failed to remember is that when you’re dead you can’t see anyone else — so the finish line at Hammerfall looked like a… well, a ghost town.

I had a lot of fun during this race… thanks very much to BRK and Ratter for doing it. Most of all, here’s sending the Light to Sharvan’s loved ones.