Mauerblümchen: Depression and the Emperor’s New Clothes

This is purely a personal post so feel free to run away now.

There has been a bit of discussion floating around about depression and how it effects us all in one way or another, whether we suffer from it ourselves or are close to someone who does. The reason I chose to throw my hat into the ring on the subject is that I keep seeing people talk about how the anonymity of the internet helps them, makes them feel more confident, happier even. I on the other hand am the complete opposite of that. For those of you who don’t speak German, the first word of the title translates as “wallflower” and that’s how I feel on-line. The girl in the corner, the one no one asks to dance unless it’s a dare.

When I’m down, I have zero self confidence, zero self belief and a whole bunch of self loathing but in the outside world I can fake it. Much of my working life has been spent dealing with upset, stressed and often angry individuals, many of whom were so wrapped up in their own issues (rightly so), that they wouldn’t have noticed if I burst into tears in front of them or danced around dressed as a clown for a bit. I learnt very early on that looks are hugely important (a mother who tells you how ugly you are at very opportunity tends to do that for you) and now, as long as I feel my facade is properly in place, my carefully constructed mask of makeup and expensive clothes I can function reasonably well even though I’m broken inside. Of course, I live in terror that just like the Emperor’s New Clothes, some bright spark will see right through me, will spot the terrified and miserable little girl posing as a professional but to date, no one has yelled “fraud” at me.

Then we come to WoW and twitter and the rest of the internet which should be the perfect hiding place for someone like me but I’m clearly doing it wrong.  I watch twitter scrolling past, wanting to join in but feeling I have nothing to contribute. Even the basics take a huge amount of effort on my part, like responding to a question that I know the answer to because I’m afraid of being laughed at, of having my feelings of worthlessness reinforced. When the people who supposedly love you, criticise your every move, why wouldn’t strangers?

In-game with the exception of pvp, I shy away from contact with other people. I would love to raid in MoP but I know I won’t, the thought of trialling for another guild, of having to prove myself is too much to contemplate. It’s the same with 5 mans and LFR, without someone I know there to make me feel more comfortable, I’m just too insecure to queue up.  It doesn’t matter that I have a whole bunch of hardmode achievements and that a relatively hardcore guild felt that I deserved a legendary, inside I feel a failure. I used to make my husband two man current heroics with me because I couldn’t queue up to do them 5 man. No wonder he doesn’t play tanks any more and yes, it has occurred to me that if you can two man something you could certainly manage with 5 but I still couldn’t make that leap of faith.

Battlegrounds on other hand is a completely different situation, I have no idea why but it’s an environment I’m comfortable in, perhaps because it’s a bit like work. It’s not paranoia, they are out to get you! Also as I said in reply to Navi’s post, I think I focus so much on winning that I tend to forget what’s going on inside my head.

So why the soul searching now? Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about perceptions recently. My Mother thinks the internet is full of monsters because you can’t see who you’re talking to, because everyone wears a mask yet the same is true of the real world. People show us the faces they want us to see, regardless of the space they are in. The face we project often isn’t what we see when we look in the mirror either. I applied for a nice and boring admin job the other week and didn’t get it, instead I got unsolicited advice from the Interviewing board who thought I’d be wasting my time and abilities doing something so mundane. I put the phone down and burst into tears, they wanted to me to apply for a couple of “proper” jobs within the same Department but how can I, someone who has screwed up their own life so much possibly take up a position where I’d get to play God with other people’s lives. Where failure has real and potentially life destroying consequences, not to me but to the people I’m meant to be helping. At times I think people just don’t see what’s right in front of them, how can they miss the rivers of scars on my arms, contours which map out the worst days of my life. How can they miss the tremor in my voice, my pulse hammering away just beneath my skin like a drum. Then I start to wonder if deep down, we’re all the same, it’s all an act for everyone and that inside us all there is this tiny gnomelike creature terrified of discovery.

I think the other part of my issue, is that I feel almost like a fraud for talking about depression because on the surface I have a perfect life. A husband who adores me, a large and complicated family who love me in their own special way, money to buy whatever I want. I have all the trapping which should make me happy, but I’m not. I have dealt with such terrible things at work, victims of torture and abuse which make my abusive ex look like a puppy dog, I feel bad for being miserable, for hating the way I look, for having days when the only thing which made the loathing go way was to drown it out by hurting myself.  I read other people’s accounts of their depression and feel dreadful because even at my darkest moments, when I’ve contemplated dying I still function like a badly programmed robot. On a side note, I think that’s why the idea of Tranquillity in Dragon Age appeals to me, oh to be able to do my job without emotions getting in the way.

Now it’s like a river, there are calms and rapids and rocks lurking just below the surface. For a family who don’t talk about depression and mental illness, we sure have a lot of it. Suicide attempts that aren’t mentioned, Great Aunts locked up in what they used to call asylums, alcoholics too, one of my Great Grandmamma’s lived until she was a 98 and drank a bottle of whiskey a day. So many skeletons lurking in the closet and yet to the outside observer, we’re a perfect family.

In my less depressed periods I’ve always tried to push past my demons. At school I joined the debating team and actually captained the debate team for two years with great success (apart from the time I turned up to a competition too drunk to be coherent but that’s another story). I always wore long skirts so the audience wouldn’t see my knees knocking but I stood up there and did it.  I started blogging as a sort of therapy, I thought trying to write to an admittedly flexible timetable might help keep my mind on the positives of life rather than the negatives. I force myself to comment on other people’s blogs and it takes a while because I delete each comment three or four times before I’m happy with it. Yesterday I queued for Ahune solo, I know it sounds like nothing but to me it was a huge undertaking. I was shaking the entire time, just waiting for something terrible to happen. It didn’t but the Gods of RNG didn’t see fit to reward my courage with a pet or a scythe either.

I accept now that I’ll never be free of this, that it’s always going to be apart of me. The little demon on my shoulder whose face and voice alters to fit the circumstances, worried about your appearance, well then it wears your Mother’s face. Stressed about failure, then it switches to being icy cold, your father telling you no one loves a loser, that daddy’s girl wins whatever the cost. Broken something and oh look, my subconscious has just conjured up my ex like a demon lover, “clumsy girls get hurt, what’s one more bruise when you’re so stupid you can’t walk straight”. The bruises on the outside fade, scars too but inside those wounds remain fresh as the day they were carved into you.

I can’t change the past but I’m not going to give in because if nothing else I’ve learnt that I’m better than them. Better than those petty people who seek only to destroy what they can’t control or understand. I’ve applied for those jobs I was afraid of, because I feel that the very fact that I understand the consequences of not taking enough care means that I will be good at it. That I’ll fight for each and every person as if my own survival depended on it. Bit by bit I’m going to challenge myself into doing the things I want to do, be more vocal, volunteer to help people and perhaps one day, I’ll become the woman I project in public.

To Mate or not Team-mate

This is the post I never intended writing. I’ve never been comfortable exposing my private thoughts or talking about what makes me tick. However a couple of recent posts struck a cord with me and I wondered if seeing my thoughts on “paper” would help me get a better understanding of them.

First though, I want to go back a few years.

When I was little I wanted to be fighter pilot. My parents have pictures I drew as early as four or five of a multi coloured stick person sitting on a rocket which I swore was a realistic rendering of a plane. If anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my reply was always the same, I’m going to fly. Helicopters, planes, it didn’t matter, if they could fly I wanted a ride. That feeling in your stomach as you soar into the clouds, watching the world fall way beneath you, it was like a drug to me. When we flew commercial, in the days before Sept 11th, I’d charm my way into the cockpit so I could see what they saw, watching their hands move across the instruments. I grew up on a series of Air Force bases and my father’s squadrons always had a laid back attitude towards kids so I spent summers hanging out by runways and playing in hangars. I suppose I should have seen it then, the look on their faces when carefree I told them what I wanted to be. Maybe I did and I just ignored it, after all I’d always got my own way on everything else.

I was fifteen years old and sitting in the cockpit of a Tornado. I was joking around with one of the engineers about how the plane could have been designed for me . Just enough leg room for my legs, perfect width for my shoulders. He grinned and said “pity you’re a girl otherwise it could have been yours in a few years time”. I guess he saw the look on my face because he added “they call it a cockpit for a reason” loud enough for it to echo around the hangar.  Everyone else laughed and I could feel my anger starting to tick over like an engine. Someone added “Besides, you’d only want to paint it pink, girls have no place in the military”. Overcoming the urge to kill the lot of them, I got out of that plane so fast, I tore a strip of skin from my thigh, my world crashing and burning around me.

That was lesson one. It didn’t matter how much I knew about the planes, it didn’t matter that I could have probably put one together again in my sleep because I’d studied the manuals over and over again at home. It didn’t matter what I was like inside, they only saw the exterior, they saw a female and that’s where it stopped. I hated myself for a while after that.

Lesson two came after I left University. My first “proper” job involved interviewing foreign nationals for a Government department. A lot of the men who came through the door of the interview room couldn’t believe that “this slip of a girl with a voice like a whore” had any official power over them (and yes that’s a direct quote). Sometimes even before I got to open my mouth, they had made up their mind about me because of my gender. I shouldn’t be there, I was taking the job of a man, I was clearly deviant (because I wasn’t wearing a wedding ring). Every other day, there was some guy attempting to come on to me or calling me names or quite often doing both at the same time.

Again, people were only seeing what was on the outside. Only seeing the fact that I was a woman and judging me wanting because of that.

Which brings me to WoW. One of the things I love about Azeroth is the anonymity. The randoms I play with have no idea of whether I’m a sixteen year old boy, a highly evolved cat smugly bouncing on the keyboard or a woman. They have to judge me solely on one thing, my ability to play and that’s all that matters. Can I stay out of the fire, can I keep people alive under pressure, can I keep myself alive with four dpsers trying to squish my gnome into little pieces. The rest is irrelevant.

I don’t hide my gender, I make no secret of being female here in my own personal space. There is even a picture of me somewhere on the blog. Whenever I join a “new” guild though, I don’t broadcast the fact until I’m comfortable being there. Until people know me as a good player first and foremost. Given the “voice like a whore” I really do try and not speak on vent unless pushed because I hate the combination of my accent and the huskiness of my voice. I also hate speaking on the phone at work for the same reason.

Anyway, this is where it gets weird.

I was in Isle of Conquest. It was one of those games, the long drawn out ones where everyone is on defence. We’d just cleared the Horde out of our Keep courtyard when I spotted a lone warrior going 1 v 3 outside. Now being a “team player”, I popped outside and helped him which is where the trouble began. In battleground chat, the warrior said “Thanks Sprout”, to which I replied with  a quick “Np” and returned to victimising a passing Goblin hunter I’d found. The warrior (clearly the politest WoW player out there), added an extra “thanks mate” and that’s where things went downhill fast in a rather surreal fashion.

Someone I vaguely know from the PvP forums launched into what can be best described as a “rant” aimed at both me and the warrior. By not correcting his/her “mate” I was letting every other woman who plays WoW down. I should have been yelling my gender from the rooftops because this was an opportunity to prove to all these male troglodytes out there that women can play. I was so stunned my goblin prey almost managed to escape alive.

The warrior drew their ire because he or she had assumed I was male (due to their usage of “mate”). Now I played hockey at school and my friends and I called each other “mate” all the time. It was short for “team-mate” and based on that, the warrior was perfectly right to call me that. I was a team-mate, the only one who came to help in fact.

Of course battleground chat devolved at this point with the “troglodytes” revealing themselves. In fact we lost because people were so busy arguing about whether women could play or not, they didn’t notice the Horde knocking down the gate and killing the boss. Later on, standing in Stormwind I was rather bemused by the whole thing. Experience has taught me that revealing my gender tends to come with negatives, people hitting on you, people making assumptions about you and I hate that. I am so much more than the sum of my parts but am I doing it wrong?

On the one hand I feel that by mentioning my gender, whether it’s to say “Look didn’t I do awesome and btw I’m a girl” or to taunt the bad tempered lv 1 who just got his or her ass kicked in PvP that I’m diminishing women even further. Guys don’t bring up the fact that they are guys so why should women do it? I know plenty of females who play computer games, it’s  not as if we’re mysterious and special snowflakes. I am good at the game, I know that and I feel that adding “and I’m a girl” as my acquaintance wanted me to only encourages people to think that I feel gender is important in a game of all places and worse, that I performed well despite my gender. WoW is an equal playing field, my husband is bigger and stronger than me but I can still kick his ass in a duel because his size and strength doesn’t matter. Also to reverse it, anyone saying “you played well, for a girl” is definitely being insulting but yet she was asking me to insult my gender under the guise of standing up for it, by saying basically “I did well even though my gender is subpar”.

On the other, posts like O’s, Navi’s and of course pretty much everything Apple Cider writes makes me wonder if I am doing it wrong. If by ignoring or trying to sideline a part of who I am because of all my negative experiences, I’m subconsciously encouraging the cycle of abuse.

I excused my silence on the grounds that one voice won’t make a difference. That even if I manage to convince one guy that women can play computer games, drive cars and do all the other things we get accused of being bad at, they won’t see that as being all women. As someone said to me recently, “you’re just the exception which proves the rule”. Then I realised something when I was writing this post, something so fundamental I’m not sure how I missed it the first time around. It’s not just about being one voice in the darkness because when we compare experiences, most of us tell the same story. Different voices, different accents, different languages but the words are the same.

Will I be telling random people randomly that I’m female, no (because that’s just weird) but I am going to stand up for myself more. If people have a problem with women, that’s not my problem, it’s theirs.

20 Days of Blogging: 10 things you didn’t know about me (Day 8)

Joining in on Saga’s 20 days of Blogging Challenge was always something I intended doing but just never got around to. So better late than never, I thought I’d start by picking a random number.

Day 8 – 10 things you didn’t know about me!

I. I hate lifts. I’d rather walk up twenty flights of stairs than set foot inside a lift because they are demonic creatures likely to turn on you the second you show weakness. When I was eleven or so, I lived on the 4th floor of an apartment building. Normally I’d always use the stairs, better exercise and I was unlikely to get stuck. However this one particularly day, a friend and I had been roller-skating and rather than take our skates off, we decided to be lazy. We had however forgotten one highly important factor, the lift always jerks slightly when moving off. Now whilst this is fine when you’re stood up, it’s not so good when you’re on wheels. So one minute we were standing there chatting, next, we were on the floor in considerable pain. To add insult to injury, at school we had to wear gym knickers (for those of you who never had the “pleasure”, think very short hotpants) for games, which did not come close to covering my rather extensive bruising. To this day, I know my teachers didn’t believe my “the lift beat me” story. They looked oddly at my father for many parent’s evenings to come. Now I’m sure most logical minds would apportion blame to the roller-skates and continue using lifts, but I swear that evil mechanical construct saw it’s chance and took it. I’ll stick to the stairs thanks.

2. I have a birthmark in the shape of a Space Invader on my stomach.

3. I once drove across Mexico, coast to coast and back in a car with no number plates. This is an “awesome” way of meeting local law enforcement. I still hear people yelling “sin placa” in my sleep. Much to our surprise, even when we were speeding, they were mostly all polite and friendly. We got told off a few times but that was it, they were more interested in where we came from and what we thought of their country than anything else.

4. I’ve been fascinated with crocodiles, dinosaurs and sharks ever since I can remember.

Look at their “hands”!

5. My nick name at University was Scarlet. You may use your imaginations to decide why. I might even award a cookie to anyone who guesses correctly in the comments.

6. My perfect meal would be Sopa de Lima, Jägerschnitzel and my Great Grandmamma’s Apple Doughnuts. If you’ve never tried the first two, shame on you! If you have tried the third, then we’re probably related… hmm this is awkward.

7. My first crush was on a guy who had the Grim Reaper tattoo’d on one arm and a naked lady on the other. He was a soldier and my Dad was his boss, he also got to babysit for me and boy, did I learn a lot from him. Including the fact that should I ever have kids, I won’t be letting a 20 year old soldier with a large porn collection and no sense of responsibility look after them. He also taught me to swear in multiple languages (handy for swearing in front of your parents when they don’t speak said languages), how to shoot and how to put my hair in a French plait, all of which are useful life skills.

8. Scooby Doo and the Headless Horseman terrified me for years. I’d just got over that when I watched Sleepy Hollow and promptly got scared again.

9. Scottish Country Dancing almost killed me and I have the scar to prove it! (I treat it with the same caution I show to lifts these days).

10. I can get lost anywhere, supermarkets, barrow dens in WoW, cities laid out on grids. Doesn’t matter how simple it may seem to most people, I can still manage to get misplaced. It annoys my husband considerably since I don’t think he’s ever been lost in his life (at least not that he’d admit to). In fact I think he’d like to keep me on one of these.

The resolutions – One month in.

Well so far so good, I haven’t managed to out right break any yet.

In-game

The alt levelling, encouraged by the 2012 in 2012 project is coming on a pace. Much to my surprise I’ve fallen in love with what was meant as a sort of joke “lets see Gilneas” character, my Worgen Hunter. If I could go back to the beginning, I probably wouldn’t have picked Twiceshy as a name but I hate Gilneas so much that going back to the start just isn’t an option.

Playing her and my Mage, Ellora the would be Loremaster has really opened to my eyes to the revamped quest chains and I take back some of the things I said about hating them all. I just finished Southern Barrens today and Goblins.. I hope you’re proud of yourselves, you hateful Dwarf killers. I will wreck vengeance upon you in battlegrounds for ever more, especially you Goblin Hunters with pet monkeys.

Having discovered Raimondas the Insane through Twitter, I’ve also decided that I’m going to spice up my 2012 in 2012 by pushing for the Insane on one character, probably my Dwarf Warlock (she looks slightly mad already). That will also give me a reason to level my Rogue, which I need as other than pickpocketing junk from unsuspecting NPCs, I hate playing Rogues.

Havisham the Shadow Priest has escaped Gilneas (Yay!) and I’m never ever levelling another Worgen from scratch again. I really hope the Panda experience isn’t quite as painful as Gilneas.

The hks too are adding up, Sprout has managed to slaughter five thousand Horde this month, give or take a few (obviously by slaughter I mean stand behind the guy with the big sword, healing him as he kills stuff). She is now 10k off her target of 50 000, which if I keep up the good work, means she will hit the target in two months time.

As for the Seapony, this coming Darkmoon Faire, I’m going to find a nice spot to fish and stay there until I find one.

Blog-related

So far so good for the two posts per week and I still have a bunch which are either close to finished or at least started. I just need to add pictures and a few final words to them.

The My Characters page is still a work in progress but at least now it has some pictures in it.

The commenting on other people’s blogs is still a bit piecemeal, I started great but it’s definitely tailed off towards the end of the month. I also have a bunch of new blogs that I’ve only recently discovered and never commented on, so I need to fix that.

In General

The cook one new thing a week is going great. I’m finally working through all my cookery books and making the things I’d marked as “must try”. In fact I’ve got to the stage of making a list on Sunday of what I want to cook for the week and going shopping and buying only those ingredients. I barely recognise myself.

I’m slightly behind on the Good Reads challenge, however work is lightening up so that should fix itself.

The working out is better but not good enough. Once it starts getting lighter earlier, I want to go running and I need to start swimming again.

All in all, though I’m happy with the way that January went.

Through your UI – day 3 (15 days of screenshots)

This is Day 3 of Serenity Saz’s screenshot challenge.

Representing You
Show us an image that represents who you are, either in Azeroth/Outland or in real life.

After much internal debate, I chose this image because I feel it represents certain things about me, the person behind the computer. First up, I work in a library hence the setting here, surrounded by books. Not only do I work with books, I have a house full of them. At the last count, there are 19 bookcases of varying sizes dotted around the place, all crammed with books. From plays in Germans, poetry in Russian (which was my grandfather’s and one day I’m going to be able to read it properly without the aid of a dictionary) and trashy novels in Spanish (try finding books in English in the rural areas of Mexico), through travel books, chick lit and horror, we have books on pretty much everything weighing the house down.

Next she’s drinking honeymint tea. Now my Mother is English and a firm believer in the best way to deal with a crisis, however big is to put the kettle on. From scrapped knees through broken hearts, she and the teapot were a constant whilst I was growing up. Even now, when I’m stressed or upset, the first thing I do is make myself a cup of tea.

Also I chose my Nightelf for the shot simply because I used to have hair like that and given how annoying it currently is, I wish it was that short at the moment. Unfortunately it’s never been that shade of green though.

To the tune of “O Tannenbaum”

Today I was meant to decorate our Christmas Tree, however I got slightly distracted. Five hours of Downton Abbey later, all I had to show for my time was this:

He’s far from perfect but for a first attempt with scrap material, I’m pretty happy with him. When things calm down after Christmas I want to try making a much bigger and properly 3D version.

The joys of flat pack furniture

My computer is finally installed in its new home, only 3 weeks after we moved in. Which no doubt makes us sound like the most inefficient people in the world. However I do have an excuse. After University we went travelling and packed up the contents of our flat/lives into a series of boxes and divided said boxes between our parents. Once we returned with yet more stuff we moved into a tiny living space and just left all the boxes stored away in other people’s houses. Of course now we have a fairly large house, both sets of parents are jumping for joy at the thought of getting a bedroom each back but the fetching and sorting of stuff is taking a while, a considerable while in fact. The process isn’t helped by the fact that most of my possessions are books which I keep having to read to decide what I should do with them. The fact that I decided to sort all the books alphabetically by author, with fiction downstairs and non fiction/poetry/plays upstairs isn’t exactly helping the process either. I suspect we will be properly and completely moved in around June.

The other factor which has slowed us down somewhat has been my new pet hate, flat pack furniture. Apart from being evil incarnate with rough instructions which look more like the scribbles of a crazed axe murderer than a practical guide to building a bookcase not to mention either too many screws or not enough, words can not describe my loathing. Having played a (minor) part in building 9 bookcases, 3 tables and 2 desks I never ever want to see another box of the stuff. One seemingly obvious word of warning on the subject though, if you decide to make an item in the sitting room even though its designated to live in the office, make sure that once built it will fit through the door and up the stairs. Especially if you have stupid twisty stairs that look awesome until trying to manhandle furniture up them.  Having to make a desk once is bad enough, having to make it twice is ……..

Finally on the subject of WoW. I was woken up this morning by the Gnomeling ranting about a post Ghostcrawler made on the US tanking forums so I suspect I might have to wait until we are completely and tidily moved in before mentioning his subscription and the renewing thereof. So my plan is to rescue one of my old Horde druids lurking safely on a PvE server (when playing solo, I’m a coward) and finish leveling her. I still havent done all the horde WotLK quests yet so that would be a good opportunity to do so before Cataclysm hits. There are also a couple of other things I want to do before the next expansion goes live, reputations on a variety of characters  and a bit more alt leveling so I have more options available.

Reading over my last post, I can’t help wondering who I’m trying to convince though. I  do miss raiding but I’ve missed out on completing the last raid instance of every expansion so I guess it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise this time around. Vanilla, half way through original Naxx our GM/Main Tank who had taken gear priority left us for a marginally better guild which basically was the end of that. The Burning Crusade, I saw one boss in the Sunwell before having enough of the atmosphere of bitter hatred going on and this time I’ve managed one wing..ah well  maybe in Cataclysm.

Not lost, merely misplaced

After a rather hectic Christmas, loads of snow and the fact that we are still in the process of moving house, WoW has been the last thing on my mind. However now the dust is slowly starting to settle, we had a long talk about the game and decided that raiding had pretty much turned into a full time job. So from now on we will be only playing casually. Yes, I’ve  said that before but raiding one night a week usually bled into two, three, four, five and in vanilla even six or seven nights a week and that’s just not going to happen this time. Going to stay away from raiding guilds like they have the plague.

The plan is to create two little druids and have some fun. We’ve always enjoyed the whole questing, sneaking around STV looking for unwary little orcs having picnics and running low level instances either two man or with random people and its certainly a much more relaxing way to play the game. After all, as Cavafy so wonderfully put it,

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

I rather think this sums up the whole game at the moment. The journey to endgame has so much more potential than endgame itself. The continual pattern of buffs and nerfs as classes jockey for position and the way in which content is nerfed so fast so everyone has a chance to see it impacts negatively on gameplay. As a baby druid stalking prey through the jungles of Stranglethorn that will be far from my mind and no doubt I’ll have  a lot more fun than listening to a bunch of people scream at each other because some warlock just cost us our last try at a particular boss.

The Angel of the North

Just  come back from a long weekend trip down south to see family and take them their Christmas presents. Now because sitting in car for 6 hours is nothing but boring we stopped a couple of times. First in Edinburgh for a late breakfast, then in Alnwick for a quick run around the Castle gardens and finally in Newcastle for a closer look at the Angel himself.

Ignoring the fact that the sun setting at 4pm is horrible, I love the fact that this photograph completely manages to hide the fact that a freezing icy wind was blowing straight across the hillside. I have mixed feelings about the statue itself, I can’t help but feel the wings should be more rounded and softer but on the whole, seeing up close with the sun behind it, it was almost beautiful.

Back on WoW, I logged on to find a cute little whelping from Blizzard. The deep breath animation is adorable if somewhat pathetic. Would have been so much more fun if you could incinerate lowbies with it.

Then there is the new Pilgrim’s Bounty festival. Food, a reason to visit old familiar places and more clothes to fill up my bags. The perfect remedy for a spot of WoW grumpiness. Plus, shooting rogues…. how awesome is that.

Happy Hallows End

A warning to trick or treaters

Outside the mist has been drifting up from the sea. We can hardly see the world beyond the garden gate so its perfect Halloween weather. Anything could be lurking in the street beyond the window, ghosts floating, witches cackling and werewolves prowling.

In short, we are all set for a spooky evening with lots of candy, candles and ghost stories but first, before I head off to scare my friends with tales of the unquiet dead, I just want to take a second to celebrate my favourite in game festival, Hallows End.

Blizzard have taken all the great festival ingredients and thrown them in a cauldron, added broomsticks and cats which bring bad luck, mixed them all together with some eye of newt, a horseman missing a head and of course candy. The end result is an excuse to run around the world revisiting old haunts.

Bats in the Belfry?

Darkshire suits the glowing pumpkins and hanging ghosts of Hallows End more than most places. Hallows End gives an excuse to farm bits and pieces for your alts, still haven’t seen the Headless Horseman’s Horse drop though. Even a reason to level long discarded alts for some quick and free experience from flying around eating candy. Who can resist candy, especially the type which gives gold and experience.

I think its one of the better fleshed out holidays, there are things for all level groups, from the daily quest to save the villages and prove yourself a hero to the orphans to the candy buckets to an albeit rather easy boss to kill. This year they even fixed the power of pine, with the addition of the Forsaken Prankster throwing stinkbombs in Southshore which was a nice touch because when NPCs attack, the world feels more real. Then there are the bats fluttering around and the black cats prowling, trying to trick you into killing them and receiving bad luck. The devil is in the detail after all.

Sinister Squashling with a pet gnome

There is something slightly sinister about a pet which is the same size as its owner, especially when that pet is a walking fruit (something I learnt today, always thought Pumpkins were vegetables… turns out they aren’t. Halloween cartoons are educational). A gnome wearing a gnome mask is a little disturbing too.

HAPPY HALLOWS END AND HAPPY HALLOWEEN