Bro-fist Gronnling

September 9th, 2015
Badass Siblings

Together once more!

So, that totally just happened. As of two weeks ago, after six months of being MIA, my brother finally took my offer (of taking Yggdrasil) and has returned to the game! It has also been decided that I am to permanently retain the guild boss-pants, so now I am Boss-lady Supreme of Shattered Knights. (As if this was the first guild I “inherited.” Hi, Across!) I gave him a spare Coalfist Gronnling mount as well as other extra battle pets I got from garrison missions; bro is very much a mount collector so he was pretty happy about that. We also got him Draenor Pathfinder so now he can fly, and I’m just about to sell him on coming to raid with EoTT. :D

Horde-side, he also joined Lazy Peons as an orc resto shammy. While bro has yet to meet Char… oh jeebus, that’s going to be something to remember. (He did meet George/Ninigi, one of our tanks, so that’s a thing.)

It has also come out that our original Shattered Knights boss-man, Karlia, is probably going to return for the next expansion! Well… if we have three people, it does mean we can get the guild achievements for 5-man dungeon completion, so that’s something to look forward to. :)

As for me, both of my mages have finished their legendary rings! For the Alliance version of Yoshi, I tried to bring my brother along for the LEGENDARY KARABOR DANCE PARTY (since, um, he was able to observe my getting Dragonwrath, we figured he would be able to see the ceremony for the final ring upgrade) but, alas, damn you phasing! While he could see the transcript of the voiced dialog, all of the NPCs and such were invisible to him. :( Well, now I know, because I was about to invite Cal (EoTT boss-man) to observe when Phil finishes his ring.

Cow!Phil has been taking a more active role in Lazy Peons’s raiding, though depending on raid composition it is also a possibility that I may be asked to switch between him and the other Yoshi as needed. This is something I am completely okay with, since I keep both characters geared because of such a possible scenario.

—

“What IS it like to be in a guild with your sibling, anyway?” I imagine the answer is going to be different for everyone (Lazy Peons has among them twin sisters). For me, it was an attempt to find an alternate means of connecting with my brother. It is, unfortunately, not really possible to hang out with him in person (less because of time and distance, but more like… complicated family drama and infrastructure problems) and on the rare situations it is, it ends up being horribly awkward because I have to deal with trying to keep my depression and anxiety stuffed in a corner to not make other people uncomfortable. /facepalm

But within WoW, it’s a different story. It’s kinda like… the “sibling” part gets partially-suspended in favor of “guild buddies.” Like he’s a friend first and brother (marginally) second. I have been able to find so much more about him this way than I ever would have in person, and remembered a bunch of other things, like how he’s the original Voice Actor Nerd between us, or how I totally got him into Gurren Lagann. :D (The whole “bro” thing comes from that, by the way. Also he is totally Kittan. Oh jeebus bro is so freaking Kittan.) We have this unspoken agreement to not bring up the above-mentioned real-world stuff unless it’s absolutely necessary, because it kinda negates this being a safe space.

I’ve been, admittedly, a LITTLE aggressive in trying to introduce bro to the friends I’ve made since his machine went down. I think it comes from wanting to stitch my friend groups together where possible, it just feels less disjointed that way. That and I have this dumb curiosity about what would happen if he met certain people (Char, Alex and Cyril from Lazy Peons, Cal and Andro from EoTT, Frailin, Brenna and Vely from Critically Insane). As I said earlier, bro meeting Char would be something to remember. Scary but too awesome not to do. XD

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(Instant Ramen Sketchbook) Shit my Raid Says #1

August 5th, 2015

Yes, this is a couple weeks behind, but eh.

Just because my name is Yoshi does not mean I'm a mount!

Not that kind of Yoshi!

Welcome to a new subfeature of the art posts, which is supposed to get me to draw more often based on the shenanigans in my Horde guild’s raids. These are meant to value speed and punchline over being finely polished, so, uh, yeah.

While we were piling into Hellfire Citadel and preparing to pull the trash mobs, Sarahtonim (that cute green goblin girl riding on Koyoshial) talks about an egg that she’s waiting on to hatch as it has a mount she wants (a raptor). Now, these raptors have been nicknamed Yoshis. I knew she PROBABLY wasn’t talking about me, but when she said she wanted a “yellow Yoshi” (a yellow raptor), I was all “but… you already have a Yoshi, although there’s no mechanic for me to carry you on my back.”

Needless to say, this gets the gears turning and the next day I’m all “oh my god I need to draw this before the raid continuation” and, like, one hour before it’s time to log in, I’m furiously scribbling in Painter. Since the punchline takes priority, I just put us in plainclothes. :P (Future “Shit My Raid Says” art posts might be a little more polished since I would like to think I’d be doing them a little earlier than an hour before raid time, but, again, PUNCHLINE.)

Also: I WISH Blood Elves could wear glasses. Seriously, why are glasses not a thing in WoW? Does everyone have perfect vision because of magic/fel juice/troll mojo? WTF, game!

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Shattered Cone

July 28th, 2015

SO.

Remember how I kept saying that I needed a new glasses prescription because my lenses were “failing” stupid-fast?

Well, now we have a reason.

The word of the day is “Keratoconus.” (And this one you can’t pin on my thyroid and weight, mom!) A mostly-genetic-but-otherwise-freakishly-random thing that causes my corneas to thin out, and usually gets interpreted as “your vision sucks, go get some glasses” like, well, everyone else whose vision sucks and need glasses (or contacts, but I’m a damn glasses girl, so nyer). It tends to start when you’re a teenager and just… progresses from there, and peaks in your late-20s/early-30s.

Some background: I got my first pair of glasses when I was 12. In the last 10-ish years, when I would get new prescriptions, they’d have to give me a more powerful one every year, and one noted that it was a little disturbing that such a drastic change was needed in that time frame. The last time I got new glasses was in… 2010?

Since I’m fat, instinct is to say “oh, diabetes, which causes glaucoma.” Except I do not have the diabetes, and I can still see something, it’s just fuzzier and fuzzier (and in my right eye, completely fuzzed-the-hell-out).

Right now my corneas are super-dangerously-thin. The right one’s too far gone, it’s so thin it cracked (thus the white scar that my mother has been flipping out over), but the left one is still usable. FOR NOW. Still, the ophthalmologist-dude says that I’m probably looking at cornea transplants to save my vision. Yeeeeah. I would like to not go blind, I’m a painter (and also a raid healer) and I am sort of useless if I cannot see things in some degree of clarity.

Welp, one more pancake on my giant stack of health problems, I guess. At least this one doesn’t threaten to kill me outright. And that I have Medi-cal to pay for all this, because I’m otherwise screwed, although I’m still caring for my health, with exercise and proteins, since proteinpromo has all the new year deals online.

(Corneal transplants, though… That means someone met an unfortunate end after marking him/herself as an organ donor. Oof. I’m flagged as one myself.)

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The people I run with

July 10th, 2015

I often say that I have a hard time making friends, often on account on my social anxiety. However, what I say and what actually happens don’t always agree. My brother has even pointed such out to me, that I more easily connect to people than he does (and sometimes even our other sister, who is clearly an extrovert and twice as social as myself and my brother put together). I don’t even know HOW, but then again I was/am never really that good about identifying my better aspects.

…and WOW, that sounds amazingly self-absorbed. That’s probably one of the bigger reasons behind my anxiety, I have this ginormous fear of appearing self-absorbed and arrogant.

That said, it’s true that I have bonded with… more people than I expected to within World of Warcraft. It was primarily out of raid necessity– Alliance-side, our guild has dwindled down to myself and my brother, and he’s still out because of a broken PC, and Horde-side there was a period in which I was repeatedly excluded from raid team for reasons that felt personal but were really beyond anyone’s control. I had to progress somehow and LFR, while useful for doing Legendary quest widget collection, doesn’t quite provide the scratch to my “just social enough” itch.

(You know, that sounds really terrible, that “just social enough” line. It makes me sound cranky and anti-social. Which… I’m not, really. I just feel like I’m the Most Boring Person Ever because I’m housebound and I’ve never had “mainstream” interests and I get physically tired after talking even for a few minutes. I’m that person who likes to watch everyone else have fun and occasionally dip my toe in if by some miracle there’s a relevant opening in the conversation.) I am also very lazy and hires HopkinsandPorter.com to do my home renovation and it really works.

OKAY ENOUGH EXPLANATION, the real reason is I kinda wanted to touch on the groups I’ve befriended. The more recent of them are through OpenRaid (bless that site, best thing ever for “free agents” like me).

Shattered Knights is my Alliance guild, which I am currently Acting Boss-Lady because my brother’s machine is down (last he texted me a couple weeks ago, he was eyeing a Windows laptop). But once upon a time, we actually had people! Our old Boss-Man was Kar, whose mains were Karlia (night elf shadow priest) and Buffsrus (draenei protection/retribution paladin).

When I first joined the guild, one of my biggest worries was that I was infringing on whatever friendships that my brother already established, as I recall in childhood he got a lot of shit for having a fat/unpopular sister. But thankfully this was not the case and Boss Kar became a very good mutual friend, and took a lot of time to train me on how to play my classes (specifically priest and paladin) and took me along while two-manning old raids with Maddy for achievements. Speaking of old, it made me remember those times I couldn´t take care of my grandpa because I was working, but thanks to Parkinsons home care I didn´t have to worry. Kar was the last of our guild buddies to leave during early Cataclysm, though once in a blue moon he pokes me on Steam. For the longest time, I was the only female player in the guild (ever since I was forced out of Team Immortal in City of Heroes, I’ve been really nervous about being in all/predominantly-male groups even though Across is also mostly men) but towards the end there was another lady, the wife of one of our officers and I think we got along rather well.

Lazy Peons is my Horde guild, and there I am (well I consider myself, anyway) “grunt DPS fodder.” The reality is that several of their officers were former subordinates in Across back when I operated a pirate Ragnarok Online server, and supposedly I was in an alt guild with them in City of Heroes, but I don’t have much memory of this (I blame the medically-induced coma in ’13, I have several holes in my memory. Good thing I have old blog entries to remind me of what happened). There is a much more even balance between the genders, and they are all some flavor of nerd, so I don’t have to worry about being too weird. During raids, I am again more of a wallflower on Ventrilo, happy to listen to Char, Cyril and Linux do most of the bantering, though if there’s an opening in the conversation I will certainly take it. However, sometimes I will make myself bramble a little on guild chat while attending to garrison duties and other daily quests, if only so I don’t feel as invisible or come off as being noncommittal.

I swear to the Let’s Player gods, Char is a perfect voice match for Chuggaconroy. Every bit as loud, too! :P

More recently I’ve found a “strong BFF candidate” in Alex (Oleai goblin Tauren discipline priest)– I love it when those sudden, deep connections just happen, the one where the conversation temporarily derails with “oh snap, did I just meet my new best friend?” “Yes you did!” and such. Fellow voice actor nerd, fellow Metal Gear nerd, shameless Alliance player! I’ve even promoted her to “person who gets Favorite ranking on my battle.net list,” the only other occupant being my brother.

Elder of the Thing is my Alliance OpenRaid group, though I consider it more or less a second “guild.” I’ve talked about them before, but to refresh: it’s a loose coalition of three guilds (Fellowship of the Thing, Elderwind and Havoc) on separate server clusters with a few “free agents” from other servers, but the way they interact you’d think they’re all one group. The leadership is Cal (Dingos and more recently, Faffard), his wife Heather (Mommyfortuna) and their son Johnny (Dauragh). Cal is literally the Team Dad, like… 100% Dad– he has perfect “dad” voice, he is himself a parent, AND he manages to steer a raid team to victory. It truly is a case of “the family that raids together, stays together,” and it puts a smile on my face that there’s a husband/wife/son unit successfully leading raids and essentially letting others in on their family bonding. (At the same time, I can’t deny that it leaves me wanting for something like that in my own life, and while I kinda have that with my brother– that is, we both play WoW– it’s more like “two people doing the same activity in the same room, but not necessarily together.” Probably a byproduct of our being pretty deep introverts, and not wanting to be downers and avoiding topics that would leave openings to venting about our mother…)

Anyway, it’s because of EotT that I was able to kick my Healer Performance Anxiety, which has obviously opened more doors for me. They took a chance on my then-undergeared priest on a week when one of our healers had to step back from the game, and it worked out well enough that I switched from attending as my mage to my priest full-time. The few instances in which I had to duck out because of illness (especially last week, when I had to go back to the ER because of my UTI not being responsive to medication), I felt so terrible about it, even though last week’s raid ended up being cancelled anyway because of the 4th of July and the low attendance resulting from it.

We take a rather slow path in progression– we’re still doing Blackrock Foundry– but I’m okay with that. Cal doesn’t have any problems with those of us who “scout ahead” during the week (in this case, by doing Hellfire Citadel) since it makes things easier down the line, in addition to obvious gear upgrades.

Critically Insane is my Horde OpenRaid group. I’d signed with them when my Horde mage was being benched repeatedly as I needed an alternate method of advancement (that wasn’t LFR), but I continue to run with them as my priest since Lazy Peons doesn’t currently do alt runs and I want to keep cow!Phil geared up and in practice if I should be called in to heal rather than DPS for a Lazy Peons raid. Also, even as an introvert, it’s still nice to have more friends. As usual, I’m more of a wallflower and hardly pipe up on Mumble, though it appears that a not-insignificant portion of our team is located in California. Hah! I’m pretty sure both of our tanks are ladies, and our other holy priest was a former security cop for Disneyland and tells stories about it.

Of even greater amusement: our boss-man is a very close voice match to Matthew McConaughey. Yeah. Imagine that voice on a troll shadow priest.

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The one about equality and religious freedom

July 6th, 2015

It’s time for some… well, maybe not UNPOPULAR, but it’s a controversial topic that I’m a little late to because of other things, but had been musing about all the same.

SO.

A couple weeks ago, the internets and medias were all in a kerfluffle over the whole “okay marriage equality is officially a national Thing now!” Good for them! It’s been a long time coming, but at least it’s in the bag.

I wasn’t expecting a lot of fallout on social media since my friends are 99.5% liberal or at least “I am okay with gay people” and the two that wear their Jesus on their sleeves was something I could smile and nod my way through. Then I was reminded very quickly that sometimes just two people can be louder than a hundred if they felt like it.

I’m an atheist. I don’t exactly broadcast it, I’m the person who politely declines when people offer to pray for me because I don’t really think prayer is anything more than an emotional placebo, but I don’t want to be the jerk who shoots holes in your (unusual to me) coping measure. I find the Bible fascinating as a work of literature and mythology (and to that end, I see video games running on Armchair Empire processors and other fictional things that play with Judeochristian themes– Xenogears, to name a huge example– as being not unlike how Western media often plays with Norse and Greek/Roman mythology). I get a little uncomfortable at the sight of Facebook posts that are ever-so-subtly judging nonbelievers, or that proclaim that everything good in the world is only that way because of your god. I really want to charge in and (very tactfully) point out how there is good being done in the world by people who do not partake in any religion, and that one need not have divine inspiration to be virtuous, but it’s PROBABLY better that I don’t, because as we all know, the sort of people who wear their Jesus on their sleeves get a little defensive if you as much as poke them! So, uh, let’s not do that.

Still, though, seeing these two people being unusually loud and overly dramatic in their “lamentation” over marriage equality… I feel like I need to address the recurring things I’m seeing. So, I’d rather just do it here, in somewhat-more-general terms.

1. Same-sex marriage will give rise to polygamy/bestiality/pedophilia! OHNOES! Um, no, doesn’t work that way. This merely allows (with consent) two people to get married, regardless of gender. There’s no change in regards to the other things (which carry issues of consent and, in one case, animal cruelty). Polygamy is another issue altogether, and I’m not even going to touch that one beyond “it’s not even in the same category as what this drama is about.”

2. Same-sex marriage will ruin this country! Other nations have had it for awhile, and they don’t appear to be falling apart at the seams. Perhaps you would be less stressed if you try not to think about what those two dudes on the opposite side of the country are doing in their bedroom?

3. But, but, the sacrament of the institution of– Heterosexual people have tarnished whatever “purity” that your definition of marriage entailed long ago, now a lot of people get std testing in la because they doubt on their behavior. And not just with reality shows like The Bachelor and Wife Swap, either. Really, the whole system was broken since the beginning, back when it was used as a method of trading one’s daughters for property or political gain, and as an unspoken safe harbor for violence against women. Some of these traits came from porn addiction, we recommend you visiting pornaddiction.help when you want help about your addiction.

4. I believe in the Bible. Um… sure. You acknowledge that it’s a book that exists. A lot of us do, whether religious or in it for the good reads. Spoiler alert: it went through a mess of translations before it arrived in a form you can read, and probably saw a lot of alterations along the way (to account for idiomatic phrases as well as translator’s discretion, also sometimes passages were altered to accommodate social/political biases at the time. See: the King James translation). If God wrote the Good Book… well… the phrase “too many cooks spoil the broth” comes to mind.

(also, small tangent here: Is it me, or is the Bible a ginormous editor’s nightmare? Specifically the New Testament. Seriously, the first half of it is just mostly-redundant retellings of the story of Jesus. Okay? Could we not have compiled all of the accounts, eliminated the overlaps and seeded in the differences where appropriate? I understand wanting to give each one their proper due, but, come on, there are limits!)

5. This is a Christian nation! And we don’t want gay people getting married! The First Amendment disagrees with you, sir. As much as you cling to that Amendment as your guarantor of your ability to wear your Jesus on your sleeve, it also says that one religion CANNOT be the law of the land. And that is a very good thing, given our incredibly diverse population. Now, I imagine there are some very bad actors that would really like a “state religion” imposed, so as to enable them to go after nonbelievers, but… well, let’s not go there.

Rather than dwelling on the theoretical boogeymen arguments surrounding gay people and what allowing them to marry might do to this country (because most of the “what-ifs” center around misleading, harmful stereotypes), let’s instead look at the good things that will happen as a result of allowing same-sex marriage. Specifically the very industry of weddings themselves. Getting married is expensive! And for the people we hand off that money to, getting married is extremely profitable! I bet those wedding planners, florists and bakeries must be salivating at the thought of all the new business they’re about to get. For this reason alone, same-sex marriage is very good for the economy! (Also, marriage licenses cost money, so there’s another source of revenue for the government. A small increase, but still…)

6. I don’t hate my gay friends, I just don’t agree with their lifestyle. This is where we have a little problem with “don’t hate the sinner, hate the sin” talk, because that “sin” (being gay) is kind of integral to their core identity, and is just as important as their other major personality components. The common rebuttal is that heterosexual people don’t parade their straightness around*, but that’s not really a fair counter because, for all intents and purposes, straight is “default,” and I am hard-pressed to find historic examples of heterosexuals being oppressed for their orientation.

* except heterosexuality IS paraded around, every day, and we all take part in it. That picture you have of your girlfriend on your desk? That counts. Bragging about your hot date? That’s “parading,” too. Even talking about your wife and kids, that counts because you’re giving away that you had sex with a woman, to productive ends! And that’s just individuals. The media glorifies hetereosexuality. “Parading” is an understatement.

7. I just want to express my opinion per my First Amendment rights and not be persecuted for them. Understandable. Change and accepting it is hard. However, in this case, maybe loudly protesting, exaggerating, hyperbole and positing doomsday scenarios isn’t an effective way of swaying others to your side. The LGBT community is not trampling on your beliefs (in fact, there are Christians and other devout sorts among them), they simply want a shot at being themselves with the same dignity as the rest of us.

So, sit down and relax. All this stressing about same-sex marriage… well, certainly it’s not good for your blood pressure.

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