The Game Dame

Here are the first day’s results for the “How many” shaman poll from yesterday. Click to enlarge.

And, since I’m having so much fun with these polls, if you have a shammy, let’s find out about specs…

[polldaddy poll="963157"]

[polldaddy poll="960526"]

http://flickr.com/photos/pebblechen/

It’s been one year since my first Game Dame post. I originally started this blog when I was studying Game Design.* I started writing with the silly idea that if I blogged good and hard for six months, I might be able to finagle some kind of press credential for the GDC in San Francisco. I got a new job shortly thereafter and it became clear that my employer wasn’t going to give me the time off to attend the conference. Thus, I never ended up going to the GDC.

In the meantime, I noticed that there was a dearth of shaman coverage in the WoW universe so I started writing more about playing an elemental shaman, even though I have never considered myself an expert at either WoW or shamaning. One thing has lead to another and I have had the pleasure of meeting some pretty spectacular people on this-here blogspace. I even got two jobs out of it: at WoW Insider and, most recently, at The Examiner. As an anniversary exercise I thought I would sum up where The Game Dame has gone this past year and where I think it’s going in the future.

Retrospective

• 85,213 total hits
• 13,033 average hits per month (last 4 months)
• Only one regret: a post I wrote about seeing David Cook at a Dodgers game.
• Top posts:
  • How I Won the Stranglethorn Vale Fishing Contest
  • How to Prevent Motion Sickness from Halo 3

Future

Although I’ve really enjoyed writing this blog, there are certainly days where I think about quitting it. Sometimes blogging in general can get you down. Not so much here on my own blog, where I feel pretty safe and generally supported. But when I write for other blogs, sometimes I lose my faith in humanity. I think that the anonymity of the internet brings out the worst in 80% of people. It’s those times where you’ll see me vent here and in my head I threaten to quit blogging altogether. 

But not today. I still have a lot of things to say that can’t be said through my other writing venues. In fact, I’m thinking of writing a book about all of it.

And for those of you who patiently read this entire post, here’s my new picture.

——
*Which I am no longer studying due to financial realities.

Probably on Wednesday, which is the day after my birthday. Time to grow up.

I’m angry and frustrated. Mostly angry and frustrated because I’m not at liberty to discuss why I’m angry and frustrated. So in the meantime, here are some new sites I found.

Kaos War: A new MMORPG now in beta.

Bigstage: Take 3 photos of yourself and make yourself a 3D graphic avatar.

Gametrainer: Pay someone $30/hour to make you a better game player. They promise they won’t laugh. (Seriously, they do.) But they don’t promise to credit that $30 to a fitness trainer to make up for it later.

Pixie: Simple site designer. Not sure if this will work with self-hosted Wordpress blogs or not.

Project Wonderful: Advertise your website or your blog. Wordpress.com blogs not eligible (I tried).

Lush Bath Bombs: This one’s for the ladies out there. These look like so much fun! I want some for my birthday!

Mecanbe: Set your goals and let the world watch you acheive them.

Frick. Last night I slept on my side wrong and re-injured my shoulder from several years back. And guess what? Since my doctor works Saturdays, guess which day he takes off instead? Yep, Thursday. Again I say, “frick.” The pain’s pretty horrible and typing is excrutiating. Don’t be looking for an update again until I can get to the doctor tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed that he has appointments available.

Took the idea from Too Many Annas. This mashup contains the words on the front page of my blog (not including this here post I’m writing). You can make your own here. I wonder how much one should read into these things…

Oh noes…!

‘In a world’ voiceover master dies at 68 – CNN.com

I discovered this meme via one of those random Wordpress links on my own blog post. Forgive me, Labour Party bloggers from whence this came, but in fine American tradition, I’ve de-Brit-ified the list.

September 11 attacks
This is, of course, the big one for our generation — so far. (I wasn’t alive when JFK, RFK, and King were assassinated.) I live on the West Coast so I was sleeping. When the phone rang, I heard my Dad, who lives on the East Coast, talking on the answering machine telling me to call him. Since my Dad always calls at “oh-dark-thirty” to make sure he catches me at home, I rolled over and went back to sleep. (He was calling after the first plane hit.) Fifteen minutes later, he called again. (Second plane.) I couldn’t hear what he’d said so I just rolled my eyes at his determination. Five more minutes and I heard another friend’s voice talking into the answering machine and I thought, “WTF?” When I answered it, my friend said, simply, “Turn on the television. Turn it on right now.” If he elaborated I was too sleepy to understand the magnitude of what he was saying, so I turned on the TV. I had only just gotten my head around what had happened, what I was seeing, while my friend was telling me what he knew, when I interrupted him to say, “One of the buildings is collapsing. One of the towers is completely falling down.” Now it was my friend’s turn to disbelieve.
Read the rest of this entry »