Gloria Estefan : Heaven's What I Feel.

Only one other person in this world, would know what this song really means to me.

So let me say for real: Heaven is what I feel when I’m with you

My current music obsession is with Plumb. It's basically just Tiffany Arbuckle singing a variety of interesting songs, with very contrasting styles within the same albums. Her voice and lyrics are strangely compelling, depressing but also bringing a strange sense of healing and peace. My favourite tracks would be Damaged, Here With Me, CandyCoatedWaterDrops, Phobic, Late Great Planet Earth.

CandyCoatedWaterDrops

What is this
Mass confusion
This crazy way we're living
This emptiness we're passing out
Like candycoatedwaterdrops
I'm spilling out my thoughts
You're spilling out your guts

And I can't help but stop and think that

If the world stopped spinning,
If the end was beginning,
Would you even notice, if I wasn't there?
If the world stopped spinning around

All that's worth dying for, is already dead
An empty religion, you've learned to accept
When nothing means everything, your daily routine
You go through the motions, like a helpless machine

When the answers to everything
Are right in your hands,
You lose your conviction
But you can't help standing,
On the one thing that held you
For so many years
You ask for forgiveness
And hold back the tears

--

Damaged

Dreaming comes so easily
Cause it's all that I've known
True love is a fairytale
I'm damaged, so how would I know?

I'm scared and I'm alone
I'm ashamed and I need for you to know

I didn't say all the things that I wanted to say
And you can't take back what you've taken away
Cause I feel you, I feel you near me
I didn't say all the things that I wanted to say
And you can't take back what you've taken away
Cause I feel you, I feel you near me

Healing comes so painfully
And it chills to the bone
Will anyone get close to me
I'm damaged, as I'm sure you know

There's mending for my soul
An ending to this fear
Forgiveness for a man who was stronger
I was just a little girl
but I can't go back

truly amazing

Chris Bliss.

Just omg. No description I can give will do justice to how good this video is. Chriss Bliss just does a juggling act choreographed to a song, but omg! The movements are so perfectly matched to the music, and the level of juggling skill he displays is just boggling. (I've watched this about 5 times so far, never get bored of it).

Life is

about solving one mess after another. Sometimes I feel like I live a charmed life : or maybe a cursed life, depending on which way you look at things.

What do you call someone who narrowly escapes being killed in a car accident? Insanely lucky, or unlucky?

Internet is for Porn - Google Video

Internet is for Porn

(song by Avenue Q -> video clip from wow)

= )

The green dragonflight

Peace is but a fleeting dream... let the Nightmare reign!

Prettiest dragon in the game I think, this is Taerar, one of the 4 dragons from the Emerald Dream. Formerly part of Ysera's green dragonflight, some of her dragons have become corrupted by some mysterious force within the Emerald Dream, and have come through the portals to terrorize the citizens of the world. =p

The dragons always yell when they engage in combat, and everyone in the zone can hear them... inevitably you get people complaining in general chat, omg who is the noob who is annoying the dragon! until they realise we have a full raidgroup of epic geared level players ready to take it down =p Cool to be one of the top guilds in a new server.

I have better equipment right now. I get stares whenever I stand outside the bank in IF. =p

In other news... iPlay apparently did publish the pvp strategy article I wrote for Guild Wars. Now, if only I could get a copy of it... =p

Such is the price of curiousity =p

Why hello there.

I like how many of the bosses in WoW are "technical" encounters, defeated through tactics rather than by brute force. What is cool is trying different tactics, and seeing which ones work. Many encounters require that every single player know exactly what to do, and execute their job.

Seeing 8 healers ready to spam their heals on me as I tank Azuregos makes me feel like a God.

I think it took us several attempts to down Azuregos (pictured above) for the first time with a full team of 40 players. Now we can comfortably do it with around 25 members, without a single casualty, since everyone knows their job, we have so much redundancy. Killing Azuregos is a 20 minute long encounter, a matter of outlasting her and dealing slow steady damage. Everything must run like clockwork -> in these sorts of encounters, a single mistake by a single person can get everyone killed, each person must know their job and execute it precisely. And your "job" in these encounters will be vastly different to your normal duties when playing WoW. For example sometimes Priests are expected to DPS, and are told to heal as little as possible. In some encounters, Warriors are supposed to fire their ranged weapons, and not use their melee weapons. In some encounters, Mages don't fire a single offensive spell, but only use their Decursing spells. Some encounters a Paladins might be asked to be an OOC combat rezzer, just hang around 'outside' the combat zone so they can ressurect players who die. The level of creativity that players have to resort to in making such technical encounters easier is just amazing.

On the other end of the spectrum there are brute force encounters, which are also alot of fun. There's Lord Kazzak, a demon boss which "must" be defeated within 3 minutes, or else he goes into an "ultimate" state and kills everyone. Also doable with around 25 players, but of course it's faster and easier with 40. It's fun once in a while to unleash the full damage potential of your character without having to hold back.

The other type of brute force encounter would be something like Ragnaros. There is a lot of fire damage in this encounter, and melee characters often have to swim through lava to navigate the area. The key to winning? Stock up on large quantities of Greater Fire Protection potions, and obtain the best fire resistance buff by getting your priests to mind-control the spellbinders in Blackrock Spire before the fight... and the fight goes really smoothly as long as everyone stacks on as much fire resistance as they can. I have more than 300 Fire Resist for this fight, and our Main Tank has more then 400.

And some encounters, are obviously a mixture of both, like the Onyxia encounter. Large amounts of fire damage, which must be negated, and lots of AOE fear, which must also be protected against. Yet this is also technically demanding : aggro control is important, everyone has to have a really good grasp of how much threat they're generating, because this boss in particular is immune to taunts from the MT : a single mistake at any point in this 25 minute encounter potentially exposes the raid to a 3600 damage AOE fire attack (sometimes up to 4000 even 5000), which is almost surely fatal to the entire raid.

At the moment, I have 5 epics and have more than half my dkp remaining to be spent, but that's not really the point, the best thing is watching how we get better and work together in defeating the ever trickier encounters in the game.

World of Fellowship of the Ringcraft

World of Fellowship of the Ringcraft is a series of stills from LOTR that only players of World of Warcraft would understand =p This is a really clever view of LOTR from a WoW point of view.