What I am thankful for

Just like last year, I missed posting last Friday due to Thanksgiving taking up most of my time and thoughts. I was going to write a post about the things I'm thankful for, but visiting with family and friends just took too much of my time. As such, in a bit of late celebration of the holiday, that is the post I will write today.

WoW-related things I am thankful for:

I'm thankful for the automatic conversion of base weapon DPS to feral attack power. There was once a time when the only weapons feral druids could use were the ones that were specifically designed for us, which had feral attack power as one of their stats (with lowered base DPS to make up for it; we didn't need that base DPS, after all). This lead to us having one or two (if we were lucky) weapons available to us in every tier of content, weapons which were useless to everyone else. Now that base-DPS automatically converts to feral attack power, a whole new world of weapons has been opened up to us: staves, two-hand maces, polearms (which were added to our repertoire the day the automatic feral attack power conversion was added); we can use any of them that we like, and for that, I am thankful.

I'm thankful for the ability to track multiple things at once. Sure, I might not be as thankful as my hunter breathren, but as someone who once had a well-worn macro which, when activated, would cause me to switch between Find Fish and Find Herbs, so that I could go out and fish in pools while still collecting herbs, I still appreciate this change. My combined efforts made the activity quite profitable, but needing to use the macro to switch between my two tracking abilities was quite tedious. Now, it is no longer necessary, and for that, I am thankful.

I'm thankful for Leader of the Pack, specifically the self-healing aspect of the talent. The feral druid has always been a great soloing class due to the fact that it can heal itself and that its healing spells depend upon a different resource (mana) than the resource it uses to attack (rage/energy). We became even better, however, when Burning Crusade came around we got some passive self-healing in the form of Improved Lead of the Pack, an effect now baked into the main talent itself. The passive self-healing afforded by this talent makes solo-ing as a druid even better because it reduces the frequency with which we need to switch out of our forms and heal ourselves. In fact, I often find that when fighting enemies that don't pose much of a challenge to me, I don't need to shift out to heal at all; Leader of the Pack does it for me, and for that, I am thankful.

I'm thankful for Netherwing. That faction gave me some of my best memories of WoW: some of the best daily quests in the entire game, an island that was beautifully designed, the ability to walk around as a fel orc, and a mount which continues to be my favorite to this very day. That content was a great reward for buying epic flying (as if epic flying itself weren't its own reward), back when 5000 gold was serious money and having epic flying was a real accomplishment. Netherwing is part of the reason the Burning Crusade was my favorite expansion pack to experience, and for that, I am thankful.

I'm thankful for this blog (hey, without WoW, it couldn't have happened). It has helped me discover my love for typing, it has gotten me involved in a great community (the WoW blogging community), it has encouraged me to think about the game in ways I might not have considered before, and by writing these posts, I can continually create something I can be proud of.

I'm thankful for the Shattering. Because old-world Azeroth needed the reboot.

Non-WoW-related things I am thankful for:

I'll spare you the usual things like my family, my friends, my health, etc., and skip right to the things I am thankful for that might be somewhat unique to me.

I am thankful for music. It helps to quiet my ever-active mind, it keeps me focused when I need to do mindless tasks, it helps me work through my emotions from time to time, and it is generally amazing in every way. Listening to music has been one of the few things that has consistently helped me throughout my entire life. Through all of the bad spots, whatever their nature, music could either pull me through or, at the very least, speak to me in a way that validated what I was going through. And through the good times, music has been there to make them even better. Music rocks; that's all there is too it.

I am thankful for the internet. Neo-Luddite that I am, I still can't deny the great things this technology has done for me. The internet puts a wide array of information at my fingertips, information I can access with but a few clicks and empower myself in the way that only information allows me. The internet is a great melting-pot of ideas, which has opened my mind to possibilities that might have never been revealed to me otherwise. The internet makes accessing the music that I love so much even easier by making more of it available to me and giving me more means to listen to it. The internet allows me to stay connected with friends I never get to see face-to-face anymore thanks to social networking sites. The internet made this blog possible. Though it may waste more of my time than I wish it did, the internet has doubtlessly improved my life in many ways, ways far too numerous for me to list here.

I am thankful for the people in my life who put up no façade about who they really are, the people who really do act like themselves in all parts of their life, and the example they serve for me. They inspire me to do the same thing myself, and while it isn't always easy, I'm getting much better at it, with them serving as my inspiration to keep up at it.

I am thankful that this blog is as successful as it is. When I got into blogging, I didn't have big aspirations to become the next big thing in the blogosphere; I just wanted a place where I could write a lot, and perhaps someone would read it. Sometimes I go to the stats tab in Blogger's editor and am amazed at just how many hits my blog gets in a day. The most amazing thing to me is that I got this far on my own merit. I never asked other bloggers to link to me, I never shamelessly advertised myself, and I never asked my friends to read what I wrote. I just started writing without any fanfare, and over the years (year and a half, specifically), people started reading me. Not because I asked them to, not because I tried any devious schemes to draw them in, but because they liked what they saw.

Which brings me to the final thing I am thankful for: you. I am thankful that my blog has readers and that my posts get comments with a fair amount of frequency. Knowing that people read my posts has caused me to be more mindful of their quality, and practicing writing with quality in mind has made my writing better in all parts of my life. But most of all, it makes me happy to know that people enjoy what I write (or else they wouldn't read it, would they?), so to all those people who deemed my posts worth their time, thank you.