May 1st Free Comic Book Day

Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day! You can find more information on the website. There is a store locator and if you live outside the United States there is an International Store Locator.

I will be visiting Matt’s Store... Officially known as Comics Toons 'n' Toys in Tustin, California. He always has good selection of back issues. A few years back he expanded his store to the space next to his original store. The new area is entirely filled with manga and trade paper backs. He even added a room in the back for card tournaments which is extremely nice.

In the San Diego area our friend Jamie will be hosting a big event at his store Southern California Comics. He has a great selection of Golden Age and will be displaying copies of Action Comics #1!! How often do you get a chance to check out the first appearance of the Man of Steel?

If you don’t get a chance to go to a store then READ something on PAPER. Remember your local library lets you borrow books free every day.

Spontaneous Achievement

I wrote this about a year ago, somewhere before you could turn off experience for twinks and just after Wrath was released. . I found it while going though my blog stuff. I don’t think I ever post it for you. … Why? I have no idea. Sadly my friend has transferred but I still have the memory.

I was thinking of my favorite achievement I have ever earned.

I have Horde friends in the Emberstorm battlegroup. On Aurum I always had the habit of checking the teams. I look to see if there are potential premades or a disproportion of one class. This lets me prep my own strategies.

On Hydra not so much…

After 3.0 came out I was doing some level 70 Alterac Valley. I would wait until it was the PvP daily and complete it for the extra honor.

I left the Alliance cave and charged to Tower Point. I just passed Belinda’s building and before me Horde and Alliance decided to engage. I was quickly dragged off my mount.

Amazingly in this little skirmish the Alliance had the upper hand. I would like to say it was because I was there… so I will. I start dotting, then I targeted a Blood Elf Pally (yummy pally flavor).

It is him!

I started chattering on vent how cool it was that my friend was in AV with me. He runs twinks on another server and our mains were having a face off in AV.

As any good friend... I kill him. Selecting his corpse I type /hug because he is my friend and I just killed him.

Make Love, Not Warcraft

I admit that I started excitingly ramble on vent (they didn’t care). I checked the BG roster and sure enough it was him.

A little bit later he returned the favor with a /hug and got the same achievement on me!!

Complete surprise and a lot of fun.

Happy Up Here

This is one of my favorite WoW Music Machinimas. It was created by Baron Soosdon. He has some other great movies so go check them out.

First it stars Gnomes. Which we all know is the best and sexiest race in the game. His portrayal of female gnomes is fantastic. It takes creativity and guts to clearly portray gnomes to all their glory.

Plus there is nothing like a good party.

Skelly Dragon FINALLY Died

We have been beating our heads against Sindragosa for MONTHS on 25s. We started bashing our heads on her before we were getting the ICC percentage buffs. It took us all the way to 15% percent yesterday to finally kill her.

First, it was healing. Next, it was tanking. Then, it was dps. Then, it was movement. Then, it was healers again. Then, with loss of a tank it was tanking again. Then, it was movement again. After that, it was not the right people showing up. Finally, She died.

I thought it would be interesting to show you my kill shot verses Husband’s kill shot.

Here I am. I am itty bitty on my screen on this fight. I like to scroll out so I can see the entirety of the room to LOS (line of sight) the frost bombs on the air phase. I do not have to swing my camera angle so much. Allowing me to concentrate on my debuffs more.
Ignore the fact that Husband died. He got Ice Tombed and then killed by it, something about running out of health in there. Healers got all frantic at the end and HOTs on those with Ice Tomb were starting to get sketchy. It is kinda cool to see that Haunt in Husbands screen and seeing in mine that my Addon, Scrolling Combat Text, was telling me I got a self heal of 4303 from Sindragosa.

Off to kill Arthas!

Please, please, pretty please with epics and frost lotus on top, will we please not take three more months for us to kill The Lich King.

Blue Ribbon

I have been totally behind in keeping you updated. If you noticed there were a lot of silences the last few months. That does not mean I don’t have things to TELL you. I think of things all the time… just don’t get a chance to write it to you. I have no plans on making that better.

Most of those I play with have no issue with gold.Husband has some funny ideas about Warlocks.I always thought kilts were shorter. If you don’t know the reference here is a WoW adaptation. I like to point out with my “less” gear I can out dps the other lock at times because I can get bored in raid and he is funny.It is not so easy to solo a boss that calls adds and likes to ice tomb somebody. But I wanted the black roses!!
This has to be the funniest thing ever in raid chat. The guild is called Night Shift for a reason. I call this bit “Gear Porn”.I love arena ties. Watching that mage crit me was only as sweet as all my dots going off at once.A month later it is still not a dress.Sometimes you need to ask an accuser to clarify. I get away with a lot of things but there is so much to choose from he needs to be specific.
I like this boss view of Hydra’s shadow bolt. So you should like it too, ‘cause I said too.A friend closed account got hacked into a few months ago. Of course they took everything. I forgot his DK was in my horde guild with guild bank access. So here is "everything":
Arcane Crystal x4
Gold Ore x10
Heavy Stone x60
Mithril Ore x60
Silver Ore x16
Star Ruby x2
Truesilver Ore x4

… but left the linen cloth and solid stone. They didn’t think it was worth anything either.

She moved to NC

A long time girlfriend of mine moved. Jenn went from Southern California to North Carolina. Before she left I insisted she blog about what was going on. She is doing it!!

Divine Finds in Western NC

Jenn, husband, and her baby girl are exploring the fresh food and beautiful land around them. She has got some of the essentials started like coffee, chocolate, and soap. If you know someplace she MUST check out please let her know. She has even put a wish list on her sidebar looking for help in some areas.

Go say “Hi” and as Husband tells me all the time “Be nice!”

Your Exit Strategy

A good friend of mine left the game. He had transferred servers last year. I was able to play with him occasionally on my hunter. Unfortunately I have not been on my hunter all that much the last month or so.

I was told how he left the game. He gave away all his gold. Which since he was someone I talked to about gold making, I am sure it was 60-80 thousand gold. He deleted every single one of his toons, all of his 80s and all alts. Then created level 1s of his main toons, thinking then they could not restore his original 80s.

Random note before I continue…
I have told you I cry at Hallmark commercials, random things, and at happy kitty stories… but I am not normally emotional… I have "moments". With that said… I am pregnant. I should spawn at the end of September. This totally messes with my attendance to Blizzcon 2010, and has increased my tendency to have "moments".

Husband and I were at the Costco food court and talking about Warcraft and stuff. I asked him what his WoW Exit Strategy would be. He had no idea what I was talking about.

I started telling him mine.

[Hydra] I would put on Hydra’s full fishing gear.
*Hydra’s eyes start to collect water*
[Hydra] I would go to a lake… Maybe by some hills, like in Grizzly Hills.
*Hydra fails at holding back tears*
[Husband] Are you okay? *with initial concern*
*Hydra starts blubbering and laughing. Trying to stop. But there IS NO STOPPING THE CRYING OVER LONELY HYDRA ON THE BANK OF A FINE FISHING STREAM ON A SUNNY BANK WITH BIRDS IN THE TREES AND A COOL BREEZE THROUGH HER HAIR!!!*
[Hydra] I don’t know which minion would be at her side. *tries to use laughter to stop the blubbering looking like an insane person*
[Husband] Umm. Okay. So you want to head to Best Buy now?
[Hydra] I cannot stop crying!! Make it stop. Who brought up this stupid topic anyway?

*cough*

No one should worry that I am leaving WoW anytime soon.

I am such a believer of people should figure out how to make their own gold, I don’t know if I would give any of mine away. I may give my gold to my guilds. I cannot imagine giving it away to individuals.

We never got to Husbands ideas on this topic. But I have watched him place his characters in a bed at an inn. Every time he logs out it is like they are calling it a night. I am sure he may have some idea for his main toons.

What are yours if you leave Warcraft for a time? Delete everyone? A favorite spot? Make someone rich?

Beta is Not Here Yet

You may have noticed that I have not posted anything about all the “fabulous” news about the upcoming changes in Cataclysm. Nibbles over at Mystic Chicanery put together her thoughts on the proposed lock changes, PLUS she linked to a bunch of other locks and their views.

Cataclysm is changing both my raiding classes (Lock and Hunter) so much that it is a waste of my time to study it all until an actual beta comes out.

There I said it. Right now… I don’t care.

If I get a chance to run around in the beta I will worry about it then. If I don’t get into the beta I will worry about it when the beta build gets close to launch. Truthfully all the bitching or rejoicing will not matter if I don’t have a realistic way to communicate them to the developers. I have no plans on wasting your time or mine.

What I am doing for Cata is helping friends get there gold together. I am yelling at my Mom-in-law to sell EVERYTHING. Heck, yelling at myself to clear out everything. I am going through my emblems to sell things at their optimal price now. They will be worthless in a few months.

I love our lock community so much. Some of the smartest players I have ever met were locks. For lock related blue posts and news check out The Warlocks Den forum.

RL Guild Meet Up

Our guild leader was heading our way for Disneyland and a visit with the family. A meet-up was planned for all of those in the LA basin.

It is an odd thing to meet people you talk to multiple times a week. I had no idea how many of us lived in the area. A total of 12 showed up to the bar.

It probably would have been advantageous if I viewed the forum thread with people’s pictures in it to SEE what people looked like in person.Husband and I got to the bar and I had to prevent myself from yelling strange things. …
/y Hydra’s in the house.
/y Nox die in the fire yet?!
/y Pull! Wait. Hez is in Dalaran.
/y Night Shift mean anything to anyone that can hear my voice?

My husband was happy that I refrained.

I stood in the middle of the bar, closed my eyes and listened. Weird I know. But it worked. To about 10 o’clock from where I was standing I heard familiar laughter and then a tentative holler of “Hydrar?”

I brought everyone cookies. A good warlock should bring cookies. *grin* I’m not kidding. I made chocolate chip cookies and chocolate-pecan-craisin-oatmeal cookies.

The everything cookies were not suppose to have chocolate in them… but I was listening to an episode of Twisted Nether while baking and… I got carried away. An after thought, if I was really making what I thought lock cookies were, then I should have used green raisins. I like the dried cranberries better so we will survive.

The cookies went into green bags with a tag. The tag said “Cookies! Click and don’t wiggle please.” which is what Hydra emotes when she needs help summoning cookies for the raid. All the cookie bags went into a yellow bag.
Husband rolled his eyes at me in this whole process. I made the straight chocolate chip cookies to appease him. He is not into my everything cookies.

At one point in my planning I had a vision of making a Soulwell box. Where there would be three places people would have to push to activate the pop up top. INSANE. It would not have been that hard to make. A blueprint, a trip or two to Home Depot and some time would have done it. Meh. The bag worked just fine.

Then the night of laughter started.

I’m told I sound in person exactly like I sound in vent. They all are exactly in person like they are on vent.
The smiles all around the table were a treat.

Watching one of my priests talk about healing and how excited he was about making the health bars go up was … warm. You cannot help smiling when someone talks about something they really enjoy doing. He even got more smiley when he talked about his new born. I loved seeing it.

Three out of our four raiding rogues were there. Apparently there was deep discussion of the mutilate spec and rotation. The Pally tank just sat in the middle trying to keep the alcohol pointed in the right direction for the rogues to keep chattering.

One of our priests was beaming when he told us about his bear son getting accepted into a PHD program.
The Hunter and the Tree got to actually meet outside officer chat. The shammie had stories I will not soon forget. A new Moonkin just joined the guild, I thought it was extremely brave of her to meet up with a group of people she has not had a chance to raid with yet.

I did have this moment of déjà vu. It was a moment late that night. We were sitting at the table under the tree with the night sky looking down at us while we talked and laughed. It startled me how familiar that moment seemed.

What a strange thing this MMOPG is we have all found.

I was happy to report back to all the guildies that the guys all had nice asses. (Just because I am married and my husband is sitting next to me does not mean I cannot state the important things. *grin*) I did refrain from going into more detail since the guys seemed to take up the topic from there.Apparently I was being talked about too. Just to you all know Hydra in person is a lot taller then the gnome she plays.

Rusted Proto-Drake is Sexy

We have been doing a never ending Ulduar extend raid ID run. We extended it for 6 weeks.

If the weekly raid quest was Ulduar, we went in and completed it in 25 man. It made it easier to have that option.

We have been going to Ulduar for two hours on Saturdays before people have their ICC 10 mans to go to. Unfortunately it would take one of those hours to get the group together. But once we did we were able to get one or two of the achievements done in that second hour.

We killed The Iron Council.
Then I got myself one shot. Talk about over kill…We went off and fast killed Hodir.One of the things funny about our raids was the proportion of druids that were in the raid.
One of the hardest fights still is Mimiron. Once we got the healing down we got Firefighter too.The last for me was Vezax. I had Yogg before I even had the Flame Leviathan achievement.In my mail was a letter from Brann Bronzebeard.Learning my new mount made it my 25th!

Warlock Sanctified Tier 10 looks good on the Rusted Proto-Drake. A background of the defeated Ulduar was the best setting I could think of to show you my new ride.

Thanks so much to all those that helped. I feel greedy having, not one, but TWO 310% mounts.

I QUIT!!

I do really HATE you. Hate you on all the levels of hating. You are vile and a bane on the very existence of all things in Azeroth.

*Bitch slaps you*

K. Bye. =)