As usual, the first day was topped off with a costume contest, a dance contest, and a voice contest (sound-alike, this year). They are always a lot of fun, and I’m always amazed at the amount of really, really good costumes. The winner this year did an incredible job! Here’s a photo, from WoW.com:

You can’t see it very well from this picture, but her teeth are wicked–super long and sharp. It really had a dramatic effect on the costume.

Tonight, of course, is the Ozzy concert! Should be a lot of fun. I also plan on playing some Diablo III and my friend wants to try out the new races’ starter zones, so we’ll probably do that as well.

So far, tons of fun. Time to go to the convention center!

Related posts:

1. Blizzcon 2009: Day 0
2. BlizzCon: Day 1
3. Blizzcon 2009 Tickets Available Soon
4. BlizzCon, Here We Come!
5. BlizzCon: Day 0

Related posts:

1. BlizzCon: Day 0
2. Blizzcon 2009: Day 1
3. I Can Haz BlizzCon!
4. BlizzCon, Here We Come!
5. Blizzcon 2009 Tickets Available Soon

Related posts:

1. Most Incredible Machinima Ever
2. Letter from War: The Plaguelands
3. Weekly WoW Bash: How to Spot a Noob
4. Into the Beta
5. Letter from War: A New Threat

Sometimes it’s fun to visualize websites as being actual places you can walk in. I like to think of the WoW forums as a sprawling building with wings, courtyards, and meeting rooms for example.

General Forums: A room filled with picketers and angry protesters. A handful of people are desperately raising their hands and telling everyone to remain calm as the Blizzard gods have not forsaken them. A troll jumps in and yells “Blood Elves rule!” and a violent riot erupts. The people who actually enjoy the game step in then immediately turn around, desperate to hop on the next boat back to Azeroth.

WoW Getting Started: A shining and grand hall. Bright-eyed innocent new players step in and are greeted by smiling veterans, covered in armor more wild and fantastic than the naïve newcomers’ wildest dreams. Envision the jedi academy and Hogwarts combined.

Guild Relations and Recruitment: A big job fair. Numerous new lowbie guilds have small booths with free pens that nobody seems to pay notice to. The big raiding guilds have bouncers outside their exhibitions which tell people in tier 6 that they’re not on the list. There’s a bar and free shrimp.

PVP: You open the door and an axe flies out followed by sounds of crashing and fighting. You slam the door shut and back away.

Suggestions: A courtyard where one can see throngs of people standing on boxes and preaching such mad things as “crabs as a playable race!”. Onlookers crowd among these boxes with keen interest. Several cry “heresy!” at the preachers and throw fruit.

Tech Support: An infirmary filled with sick patients. Doctors dressed in blue scrubs rush about trying to assign treatment. A person donning a t-shirt marked “Linux” sits patiently while his doctor looks sadly at another physician and whispers, “There’s nothing we can do for him…prescribe morphine.”

World’s End Tavern: Pretty much as it sounds: A smoky, ale-laden tavern in the middle of the woods, filled with adventurers of all sorts looking to share stories and learn of the land’s lore. Every so often a naked mad man wearing nothing but a playstation 3 t-shirt jumps in and calls everyone freaks.

Class Forums: A series of adjacent rooms with different groups meeting in each. As you pass by the paladin room, you see a guest speaker discussing his latest book, “Seriously, We’re Pretty Friggin’ Awesome.” A Death Knight cuts a warrior at the vending machine line.

Off-Topic: There is a large heavy steel door at the far end of the hall. You push its icy surface open slowly and peer into the quite dark void. You take a step in and hear the moaning and screaming of the forsaken souls banished to this dark realm. Before you can run away, the floor collapses into a writhing mass of outstretched arms and hands that begin pulling you under. As the darkness surrounds your vision, you swear you can hear Cher playing in the background…

Of course I’m exaggerating some stuff here for the sake of humor. If anything the forums are fun and diverse webpages to visit and I enjoy posting and reading within them. Let’s just hope for the love of physical safety that it never becomes realized as an actual physical domain

Related posts:

1. Moving Forward
2. Patch 2.4: People are Far Too Optimistic
3. Arena PTR Open
4. These are the People in your Raid
5. Role Consolidation, or “Great, Now I’m Useless”

For putting up with all of this garbage, you’re dedicated man. My hat is off to you

Re: GC I’m going to send you a Gallon of Gin by Ghostcrawler

Nice. I’m going to have a sweet weekend.

Quote:
But how do crabs reproduce?

Arthropods generally lay eggs. If you mean how do the eggs get fertilized, the same way they usually do. One catch with big crustaceans is that they can only mate following a molt. Males of some crabs will literally keep a claw on a female who is about to molt until she’ sheds her skin. Molted crabs are soft, which is where softshell crabs come from. However because their mouthparts are also soft, they don’t eat for awhile following a molt. This can make them difficult to catch say blue crabs (Callinectes spp.)through conventional methods, which use bait. Many crustaceans carry the eggs until they hatch. Larval crustaceans are very small and are carried through the water column as plankton. Insects by contrast tend to have a mobile adult form and a relatively immobile larval form (think butterfly v. caterpillar). Crustaceans have a mobile larva and adults that don’t travel great distances (or in the case of barnacles, not at all).

This oceanographic moment has been brought to you by Blizzard Entertainment.

Re: GC I’m going to send you a Gallon of Gin by Ghostcrawler

Quote:
Ghostcrawler, are Malacostraca the class of crustaceans or a sub-class? Aren’t crustaceans themselves just a sub-phylum of Arthropoda?

There are more types of Arthropods that any other multicellular lifeform, so the taxonomy gets pretty complex. For example, there are probably 300,000 species of beetles. There may be 50,000 species of crustaceans, but crustaceans are vastly understudied compared to insects — something to do with the difficulty of sampling.

Phylum Arthropoda (armored things)
–Subphylum Crustacea (double legs)
—-Class Malacostraca (antennae, mouthparts, head and thorax)
——Order Decapoda (10 legs)
——–Crabs, shrimp and lobsters are in this group.

Quote:
GC, don’t forget that alot of freshwater insects do move around. Dragonflies, Mayflies, and aquatic beatles come to mind as examples of where the larval form of the insect is much more mobile, and interesting, than the adult stage.

True enough. They aren’t as planktonic (generally at the whim of water currents) as most baby crustaceans though. Interestingly (to me anyway) freshwater crustaceans like crayfish also skip over the planktonic larva. It doesn’t work well for stream-dwelling critters.

Quote:
on a side note, what is the yellow ‘mustard’ part of the crab? thats not crap is it?

It is called the hepatopancreas, and is a digestive organ that does some of the same functions as a vertebrate liver. It only looks that bad because you’re usually looking at the cooked version. Some people like the taste. It isn’t typically dangerous, but can accumulate contaminants depending on where the crab lives. Unless you eat crabs every week, it’s probably not an issue.

Related posts:

1. This Was Interesting, Everyone
2. WotLK Information Released
3. So You’re Off to BT/Hyjal: A Guide by Gragnarth
4. Weekly WoW Bash: Like Playing a Hunter
5. Interesting News Regarding the Next Expansion

No related posts.

Well now that brings back some memories! My WoW life pretty much started like this:

1) Roll a mage on Shadowsong-Alliance. Get him to level 6 and realize you still have no clue what you’re doing.

2) Roll a warlock on Maelstrom-Horde with some friends.

This screenshot is shortly after number two. You can also tell it’s old due to the lack of addons (even the extra action bars are missing!). Simpler times….

Related posts:

1. Standing Room Only
2. Problems with Dual Specs and Action Bars
3. My Day as a Tree
4. New Stuff in Kara
5. Just a Cool Screenshot

Related posts:

1. Weekly WoW Bash: Yes, You Do Need Help
2. Weekly WoW Bash: Girls Have More Mana
3. Weekly WoW Bash: Sounds Like a Raid to Me
4. Weekly WoW Bash: How to Spot a Noob
5. Weekly WoW Bash: Like Playing a Hunter

No related posts.

Related posts:

1. Weekly WoW Bash: Girls Have More Mana
2. 100%!
3. Weekly WoW Bash: Sounds Like a Raid to Me
4. WoW Bash, Why Doest Thou Hatest Me?
5. Weekly WoW Bash: Yes, You Do Need Help

The Craft of War: BLIND is a machinima that was recently featured on WOW Insider. I’m posting it here because, in my opinion, it was one of the most technically-superior and fun-to-watch machinima’s I’ve ever seen–right up there with Tales of the Past III. There is no voice acting, but as Michael put it, it doesn’t need any. The animations are clean and very believable, and overall this movie is a great action flick.

Do yourself a favor, and head over to the Vimeo site and watch this video there, so you get their “HD” feature.

Related posts:

1. Most Incredible Machinima Ever
2. Wowhead gets Dynamic Search
3. NVIDIA’s 3D Glasses Already Work with WoW
4. Greetings
5. Pets Walking into Combat

(Clicky to make bigger!)

That poor Undead guy.

Related posts:

1. Screenshot Six
2. Letter from War: The Plaguelands
3. New StarCraft 2 Cinematic
4. Machinima Feature: Wrought by Legs, Cranius, and Peratus
5. Happy Thanksgiving!

I am so sad.

Related posts:

1. Weekly WoW Bash: Yes, You Do Need Help
2. WoW Bash Lives Again!
3. Weekly WoW Bash: How to Spot a Noob
4. Weekly WoW Bash: No One Listens to That Rule
5. Weekly WoW Bash: Do I Gotta Explain It?

Related posts:

1. Merry Christmas
2. Fun with the WoW Item Creator
3. WotLK Beta: Wrath Gate and the Quality of Quests
4. Standing Room Only
5. 2.4.3

Talk about "open mouth, insert foot."

Related posts:

1. Why Murlocs Suck
2. Heroic/Raid Saves in 3.1
3. Foray into Multiboxing: Introduction
4. My Fun Day at Work
5. 2.4: Looks Like I was Right

Or:

In case you’re wondering, there are TONS of random allusions in WotLK.

Related posts:

1. My Plans for WotLK and Beyond
2. Preparing for WotLK
3. WotLK Information Released
4. WotLK Beta: Wrath Gate and the Quality of Quests
5. World Event for WotLK

Related posts:

1. Why Murlocs Suck
2. Murlocs: The Dissertation
3. Fixing X-Perl 3.0.3c r299 Player Buff/Debuff Problem
4. Machinima Feature: Wrought by Legs, Cranius, and Peratus

Related posts:

1. My Favorite WotLK Change So Far
2. New Stuff in Kara
3. First!
4. Just a Cool Screenshot
5. Another Change due to PvP Balancing

[Edit] His blackjack-wielding “associates” don’t scare me, no they don’t! Also, FIRST! (Wait, I said that already.)

Related posts:

1. Model Viewer + Free Time = New Signature
2. I Spoke Demonic?
3. This Was Interesting, Everyone

“What’s more worrying is that he’s a healer…”

Related posts:

1. Weekly WoW Bash: Yes, You Do Need Help
2. Weekly WoW Bash: Sounds Like a Raid to Me
3. Weekly WoW Bash: How to Spot a Noob
4. Weekly WoW Bash: No One Listens to That Rule
5. Weekly WoW Bash: Do I Gotta Explain It?