The end of the blog

This is my last post. After today, I will be writing no more posts for WoW Philosophized, because I have canceled my subscription to World of Warcraft. I have written a farewell letter to my guildmaster, removed my authenticator, uninstalled WoW on my laptop, removed all WoW-related bookmarks from Firefox, and now, only this last goodbye remains: the farewell post. Oh god, this is going to be difficult.

I could have put this off. I spent a lot of time in the latter days of Wrath of the Lich King not playing at all, yet still blogging consistently, relying on other WoW websites for sources of inspiration when the game could give me none. Had I so desired, I could have done the same thing for a few months, possibly even longer, before anyone caught on that I wasn't basing my posts on any in-game experience. It's a tempting thing to do, too, because I really do enjoy blogging about WoW, possibly more than playing it. But I have decided to quit WoW cold turkey by dissociating myself with everything regarding the game, short of my faded druid t-shit I still have in my bureau. As part of doing that, I won't be reading any WoW blogs now that I have stopped playing, and I certainly can't write about it. So I am bringing this blog down with my account, as I think it will help prevent me from regretting this decision.

I could turn this post into an excuse to complain about everything I think is wrong with the game, but I'm not quitting because I believe WoW has become a subpar game. I may be a vanilla baby (though the fact that I really came of age as a player during Burning Crusade probably makes me more of Burning Crusade teenager than a vanilla baby), but I was never the type to claim the game had been "ruined forever" by any change that was made to it. I have stayed with WoW as it has evolved through its various phases, and though I enjoyed some more than others, the fact that I have stuck with this game for five and a half years is testament to how much I enjoyed it. WoW has been a major part of my gaming hobby ever since I began playing it, and I do not leave now because I have suddenly gone from liking the game to thinking it is awful.

No, my reason for quitting now is because, thanks in no small part to the introspection brought about by writing for this blog, I have realized that WoW is just no longer made for players like me: the loners, the soloists, the people who play WoW as a largely solo venture because its solo content is (or was) good enough to keep us entertained. You would think that I would have taken the hint from the fact that it is an MMORPG, but the gameplay was enough to draw me in and bait me into playing a game that I didn't fully realized when I started playing that I was expected to play with others. And I tried to like this game, I really did. I tried battlegrounds, heroics, raids, auction house PvP, but nothing other than the solo content could keep my interest. And now, though I enjoyed Cataclysm's 80-85 quests thoroughly, having finished those and moved back to the "daily grind", I've realized that I just can't bring myself to keep playing WoW's solo content anymore. I used to enjoy the daily quests. Outland had some of the best dailies WoW has ever seen, but they have become less and less inspired with each expansion pack. And I finally realized that I was only doing the Cataclysm dailies for the prospect of gear. Yep, I had fallen into the trap of playing for the objective rewards, but the fact that I had managed to switch out of that mode of play not long before made it easy to find my way out.

I'm reminded of what Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation said in his review of Cataclysm, when commenting about player's motivation for doing end-game content.

I asked someone who raids, "Why do you raid?" "To get the best items," they said. "What do you use the best items for?" I asked, to which they could only answer "To raid with." But it's not about items, is it? You don't honestly care if your new Crystal Nethersword is going to clash with your elite boss clogs. It's about the numbers. You want the items with the best numbers so you can use your numbers to decrease the enemy numbers until your numbers are the best in the land and all the other guilds flock to regard your numbers with jealous awe. And before you argue that lots of games are about numbers when you get down to it, no one ever ruined their lives to get 100% items in Super Metroid!

The whole review made me realize that there was less to my enjoyment of WoW than I had initially believed, but that particular passage made me really realize that it really was about the numbers. I was trying to get better gear (numbers) so that I could go into heroics with a bit of a buffer, but why was I trying to go into heroics in the first place? Yes, I enjoy taking, as doing the Crucible of Carnage reminded me, but if I only did heroics for their own sake, I would probably grow tired of them as quickly as I grew tired of daily quests (which means I would have grown tired of them after about two weeks, maybe a month because of the added group dynamic... no, the group dynamic would probably bring it down to a day). So what's left to sustain my interest in heroics after I have stopped enjoying running them? Why, the gear (numbers), of course! Yeah, sorry, I can't do it anymore.

But the biggest reason that I have given up on WoW (that's really a more accurate description than "quitting") is because I have realized that the only reason I continued playing was out of familiarity. The game was familiar to me, and having tried unsuccessfully to get into other RPGs (Fallout 3 and Fable 2, to be exact), I resigned myself to continue playing WoW to get my fantasy RPG fix. The fact that I had already accomplished so much also motivated me to stick with the game rather than trying something new, perhaps out of a hobby-related version of the sunk cost fallacy. But once I stopped valuing the objective rewards I had already obtained and started to value the process of obtaining those rewards more than the rewards themselves, I realized that I just didn't enjoy the game much anymore, in spite of all of the things I had earned (lesson learned: "things" will not make you happy). I have now realized that WoW and I are like a brontosaurus: recognized as a mistaken combination long ago, lingering only out of misplaced affection for an imagined past.

Well, that affection just isn't enough to sustain my playing anymore. My enjoyment of the game isn't going through a burn-out phase, it's passed on. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to motivate me to play other games. It is a late enjoyment. It's a stiff. Bereft of exuberance, it rests in peace. If I hadn't insisted on continuing to play, my WoW folder would have been in my computer's trash can. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-WoW-player.

And this is an ex-WoW-blogger, as well. But will the blogging itch strike me again? It very well might, and I very well might start blogging about something else on a different blog. But if I do, I will do it the same way I started this blog: I will start from nothing and earn my readership again. Whatever my new blog--if, indeed, I do start blogging again, which isn't a guarantee--is about, it will likely have nothing to do with WoW, so though I may be tempted to say, "Hey guys, come check out my new blog!", I won't do that unless someone likes my writing enough to ask me to keep them updated if I decide to write again. And as for this blog, I will leave it up as long as blogger decides its worth keeping up, and since I have it set to e-mail when I get a comment, I will still respond to any comments I get that I feel are worth as response. However, the "wowphilosophized.com" domain name will likely expire at some point, at which point you'll need to go back to typing in "wowphilosophized.blogspot.com" if you're still coming back for some reason.

So there it is. This is the end of my time as a WoW player, and there are no hard feelings on my part. This game has given me an amazing five and a half years, as well as an amazing year and a half of writing this blog. I never thought this blog would get as far as it has, and it's something that has made my time spent playing WoW better in many ways. I've had the opportunity to communicate with some truly wonderful individuals as a result of this blog, as well as be a part of the larger WoW community (the online part of which really isn't so bad), and without it, I might not have realized just how much I like writing. Thanks for reading; it has truly been a blast.

Adieu, adiue; parting is such sweet sorrow.

And yes, I'm still bitter over the removal of Tree of Life as a permanent form.

Disabling Real ID for great justice

While this post started as a philosophy post, the direction it took as I was writing it resulted in it being more of an advice post. Considering it is scheduled for Wednesday, I am quite content to leave it in that form and ruminate on the subject more on Friday. Also, because All Your Base Are Belong To Us is apparently an endangered meme, I would just like to add that the title of this post was indeed a reference to All Your Base.

I know I have discussed the Real ID issue already, and the entire blogosphere has discussed it ad nauseam, but with the dust finally starting to settle from this frenzy over the announcement that Real ID would be integrated with the forums, it's time we finally reach a middleground in our reaction. The past week has seen us, the WoW community, go from frenetic opposition and rage to jubilant elation and relief in the span of a few days. With those two extremes out of the way, it's time we look at this event critically and consider what it means for us and the future of WoW.

I was planning on writing this post by examining the various possibilities of whether Blizzard actually thought this through and really doesn't care about our privacy or whether this was just a one-time big mistake on their part. However, rumination may not be necessary, as a post on the official forums that was since deleted but reposted on Team Liquid may give us the answer to that question. Now, this is hardly direct information. This is a page on a community site linking to a supposedly since-deleted post on the official forums written by someone retelling something he supposedly heard from an ex-roommate who's sister supposedly works as a GM at Blizzard. That makes this fourth-hand information, so take it for what you will. Here's the post in question, in case you haven't read it yet:

Nachtjäger, Suramar, 59 Night Elf Death Knight (post 35821 in epic thread) wrote

Got in touch with my ex-flatmate, whose sister works as a GM for Blizzard, to see what the internal buzz on this was. Apparently, at the moment the employees are largely as pissed as the players, and she stated that despite attempts to keep it hushed, it has become known that the big creative players within Blizzard are pretty much as unhappy about this as we are. Everybody has been told they are not free to comment on this situation outside of specially prepared statements.

It's still going ahead, however (and here's where in-house rumours and hearsay really start coming into play): from what they've picked up, the Blizzard leads have been told in no uncertain terms that the non-gameplay-related direction of the game is working to a different blueprint now. GC and company are free to play with shiny new talent trees all they like, for example, but for the first time the decisions regarding Battle.net implementation, Real ID, and plans for the general acquisition of new players for the business are no longer in Blizzard's own hands, and that's not going down too well.

If this is true, then to all those who cried foul when Blizzard and Activision merged (assuming that, if the direction that Real ID is taking is out of Blizzard's hands, it must be in Activision's) who were subsequently dismissed by the larger community, we owe you a massive apology. To all those who cried foul when Real ID was first implemented in the game and were dismissed by people who said that it wasn't a mandatory feature, we also owe you a massive apology. It looks like we brought this on ourselves by not catching the warning signs earlier, and now the past nay-sayers can sit back and chuckle as they play the world's tiniest open-source violin as background to our complaints.

But how to put a stop to it? When it comes to big business, money is everything, so they only way to discourage Activision from forcing Blizzard to take the Real ID system in a direction Blizzard and the players don't like is for us players to hit Activision where it hurts (their wallets) without hitting Blizzard where it hurts (their wallets). How to do this? Well, if Real ID is out of Blizzard's hands, but the rest of WoW is still in their control, then the best way to target Activision is to stop supporting Real ID while still supporting WoW. I have already disabled Real ID on my account as a show of opposition against the direction the system seems to be taking, and I encourage you to do the same, unless you use it extensively in-game, and even if you do use it in game, you should consider the disabling it anyways for the sake of your privacy. (If you don't know how to disable Real ID, WoW.com has a good write-up about how to do so here.) As Greedy goblin says, whining is useless to make Activision change their minds; "If people turn Real ID off in masses, Blizzard will see it. If using RealID becomes "n00b" thing, if people with voice and with respect (like top players) refuse to use it, RealID will die."

Now, whether it should die is another matter, one I will consider in my next post. However, if you don't want Real ID to die, keep in mind that there is always the possibility that Activision will reconfigure it to not be such a threat to our privacy so that more players feel comfortable turning it back on.

Advice on blogging

Though I haven't been blogging as long as some of the more established bloggers here in the WoW blagoblag, I have been blogging long enough to learn my fair share of lessons about blogging. Blogging is an interesting hobby, and a fun one for those who enjoy writing and want to be read without the usual pressures of writing for a commercial outlet. Though there are certainly other great articles out there on the interwebs with advice on blogging, it never hurts to put one's own wisdom out there as well, and that's exactly what I intend to do here.

1. If you want to blog, you better enjoy writing.

I'll be honest; I put this rule here more to discuss it than to just state it. I say that because, before I started blogging, I thought I didn't enjoy writing. However, that was mostly because the extent of my writing had been academic writing, hardly a fun form of it. The few times that I wrote of my own volition, I did enjoy it, but I was never able to stick with any one project because I simply had no motivation to stick with it. Blogging was my savior in that it gave me the perfect medium to exercise my writing muscles. Blogging is a good outlet for writers who enjoy writing but can't stick with any one piece for very long. The fact that most posts are self-contained entities means that you don't need a long attention span to blog successfully, since posts don't take a long time to write (compared to writing short stories or novels). The prospect of being read is also good motivation to stick with it, but even that will only take you so far.

Here is where I would say that if you don't enjoy writing, you shouldn't blog, but what I will instead say is this: if you feel that blogging itch, then even if you think you don't enjoy writing, give blogging a chance. It may be the outlet you were looking for to start writing consistently. If you don't want to make the commitment of starting a blog, then try just writing some entries in a Word document for a week or so. That way, if you do start blogging, you'll have some starter material to work with, and if you find out you don't like writing in a blog-like format, no harm done.

That said, you'll figure out pretty quickly whether or not you enjoy writing. To paraphrase WoW.com, unless you already have a reputation for thoughtful commentary, useful advice, or for being entertaining (if Alamo had a blog, I would read it), you'll be starting from scratch. If any of those cases apply to you, then you probably enjoy writing already, since you probably had to write a lot to build up such a reputation (unless you had one funny post that made you infamous for life). If that's not the case, you'll need to build a reputation of some kind if you want to be read, but that takes time. Until that happens, you'll be writing for the sake of writing. Some can do that, as I did for my first five months of blogging. Some, however, will find that, without anything tangible motivating them to write, they just can't do it, and there's nothing wrong with that. Blogging is a hobby, and if you don't enjoy it, you shouldn't force yourself to do it.

2. If you want to be read, you need to have something to say.

The great thing about blogging is that you can add your own unique voice to whatever you write about. That's why people read more than just two or three blogs: even if people say that same thing, no one says it quite like how another person says it. That's why people want more from your blog than links to other posts. Sure, there's a place for such posts, but that place is as a starting point for your commentary. We have already established that to successfully blog, you need to enjoy writing, so a blog consisting of unoriginal content is really a cop-out of real blogging. If you want people to read your posts, you need to give them a reason to read them, and if you are simply posting things they can find elsewhere, why should they read your post at all?

To put this advice into practical terms, avoid posts that only consist of a brief introduction followed by something you copied and pasted from elsewhere. This means no posts whose only purpose is to contain patch notes, blue posts, other blogger's posts or anything like that. It's far better to post those things and follow them with your own commentary. Even if you feel as if you have nothing to say about it, sometimes the simplest comments are the most effective at getting people thinking and commenting on your post.

3. Be consistent.

When I say be consistent, I mean it in two ways: One, keep your topics consistent. Two, post consistently. People read blogs because they like what they read, so if you want to keep people reading, it helps to stick with a theme. Even if that theme is something simple like stories from when you play, commentary on other posts, a class or two, or anything else, people will come to expect that theme from your blog. Keeping readers happy requires giving them what you have taught them to expect, so don't write posts that are all over the place in terms of topic.

On that note, it helps when your readers know when to expect a new post. Believe it or not, some of us still check blogs manually rather than just subscribing to them and forgetting them until our feed is updated. As such, we like to know when a post will go up so we don't need to check constantly to see if the blog has updated yet. Not seeing a blog update can be disheartening to your readers and make them less motivated to read your blog, but if they know when to expect a post, this will not be an issue. Keep to a schedule, even if it's only a loose one, and let your readers know if that schedule is going to change.

4. Write about what you know and what you enjoy writing about.

I write many of my advice posts about the Druid class because I know a lot about the druid class. I write my philosophy posts because I enjoy philosophy and I enjoy philosophizing about... well, everything, so that includes WoW. As I said earlier, one of most important aspects of blogging is keeping yourself motivated to write. If you write about what you know, then writing will be easier since you'll be able to draw mostly from your own knowledge, rather than needing to research your information, and writing about what you enjoy writing about will certainly make writing more enjoyable, further motivating you to stick with it. Both of these points simply make blogging more fun, and as I have said, if you don't enjoy blogging, why do it?

5. Write down any ideas you have

There have been a few times when I had a great idea for a post and it was never written because I simply forgot it (or maybe they were horrible ideas; we'll never know). If an idea for a post strikes you, write it down or make note of it somehow. Even if you don't use it immediately, it helps to have a reserve of back-up ideas when you want to stay consistent with your posting but can't think of anything to write about. That said, it's also important to write down a bit of exposition about your ideas. I have a few ideas languishing in disuse because I never wrote down any details to them and can't for the life of me figure out where I was planning on going with them. So, when you write down your ideas, think about them for a while and jot down a few notes of where you could go with them.

Where should you jot those ideas down? I personally have a draft post that I have set to be published in the year 2020, and I keep my ideas written down in that post. Why 2020? Because, that way, it's always on the top of my list when I go to the "Edit Posts" page, and if I accidentally hit the Publish button, there's no risk of all of my ideas being open to the world. You can also keep a plain text file on your desktop to hold your ideas, or use the Stickies application if you are on a Mac. Just do whatever works for you.

6. Don't be afraid to evolve, and don't preclude yourself from doing so.

People change; it's a fact of life, and your interests are no exception. You may be a dedicated raider now, but you may one day find more entertainment in PvP. You may be dedicated to one class now and be dedicated to another in the future. You may stop playing casually and get really into theorycraft. If those changes happen, you're blogging habits will likely reflect those changes, and you'll be forced to change the direction and focus of your blog. This is not a bad thing. Writing about a part of the game you no longer enjoy or engage in just makes no sense. As such, don't be afraid of changing the focus of your blog; while you may lose a large part of your readership if they have grown accustomed to one thing and you start writing about something else, there's just no way to avoid that.

With that stated, you should be proactive and not preclude yourself form making such a change should your interests shift. Don't lock yourself down with a blog name or domain name that is too specific unless you are very sure you won't be deviating from that subject area. I called my blog "WoW Philosophized" because I knew that I love philosophy, a fact that is not likely to change in the future. There is nothing else entailed in that blog title, so it was a good choice. Now, if I called my blog "The Philosophical Tank," that would have made my title a misnomer when I switched to restoration being my main spec or when I went from being a frequent tanker of heroics to being more of an ineffectual loner. Had I called this blog "The Philosophizing Druid," that would have made things sticky when I started focusing more on my Shaman or Priest alt.

I think you see where I am going with this. Though it helps for your blog name to reflect the focus of your blog, don't pick one that locks you into writing about something you may lose interest it. If you give your blog a more general title and use the description to say what your focus will be, you can change the description when your interests change without needing to make a big adjustment to the site, like changing your URL. And hey, if you end up going through your entire blogging career without making any changes to your focus, no harm done.


There's my advice for you start-up bloggers out there. If I were to try to summarize all this advice in one sage tidbit, I wouldn't be able to, but I will leave you with the most important piece of advice I can give any beginning blogger: enjoy it. Blogging, like WoW, is a hobby, something done for pleasure to occupy oneself in one's spare time. As much as some of you may do it for your readers, who may depend on your advice, wisdom, or commentary, if you get nothing out of blogging, it's not worth doing. Keep your blogging experience fun, and you won't regret it.

This post last edited for grammar and spelling issues on 11/1/10, 10:40 PM. No changes to the actual content were made.

WoW Philosophized loves the Discovery Channel

(Inspired by this edition of XKCD.)

I love my druid,











I love the bear form dance











I love my shaman,











I love to spec enhance











I love the whole world








and all its mounts and pets










Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada












Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada











I love the channels,




the places to discuss












I love the emblems






and post-nerf Oculus


















I love the whole world;











Cataclysm will rock






Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada











Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada













I love my dual specs,




I love epic flying;










I love heroics








that don't involve trying













I love the whole world,









though Duskwood kind of sucks











Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada








Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada











Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada

The world (of warcraft) is just awesome.

Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada

A philosophical analysis of the barrel series on XKCD

Edit: Blogger cut off the right edges of the comics. Click them to see the whole thing.

XKCD is one of my favorite web-comics, and though most of them are humorous in nature, some of the early ones seem to be more philosophical. This is particularly true of the barrel series. I recommend you read it and think of your own opinions on it before you read my musings on it so that you may develop your own thoughts rather than simply taking in mine.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Important aside
Part 5

Did you read it? They are all really short, so you may as well. They always confused me a bit, until one of my friends pointed out that they are meant to be meaningful, not funny. Thus I began to think about them, and these are the conclusions I came to. I present them to you strip by strip. Note that these are only my thoughts on these strips, and I do not by any means think that my opinion is the only correct one. Feel free to present your own opinion in the comments.


Thus our nameless protagonist starts on his adventure. The fact that he is never named means he could be anyone, and thus any of the trials he faces in his adventure could be faced by any of us. You will notice that proper capitalization is never used in this first strip. This represents a sort of rejection of society's conventions, or at least those of academia. And yet, after rejecting these conventions, our protagonist finds himself utterly alone in a vast expanse of sea. Perhaps the conventions that he rejected now seem to him to be something that connected him to the people around him. His face shows a lack of emotion, which to me shows that he must be feeling equal parts happiness and sadness. After all, how could someone lost in the ocean in a barrel not be at least nervous? Thus I think that he is happy that he is now free from the conventions that he rejected, but now realizes that they were simply part of the social system he too was a member of. By rejecting this system, he has rejected everyone else in his life.

Our protagonist now has only one option, and that is to abandon his society and wander. Without this familiar world, however, all he can do is wonder where he will float to next. What is interesting is that the panel of him lost in the sea is smaller than the panel of him wondering where he will float next. Perhaps the message in this size inconsistency is that it is more important to wonder where your life is going than it is to actually go there. After all, our protagonist has lost all that he knew with his rejection of society, and this society is now part of his past. He has thus rejected his past, and can now only look to the future. The future, however, is not guaranteed to be any better than his past. This is why his floating is trivialized by the size of the panel; it's not something he should actually look forward to. As we shall discover, the future can be fraught with danger and sadness.


One could interpret this to mean simply that there were no mothers where our protagonist floated, but I see more meaning in that. While he could mean there were no mothers in the places he floated to, I think it means that the places themselves had no mothers. I mean mother in more of the sense of a creator than the sense of a woman with a child. And who supposedly created all the places in the world? God. Thus, our protagonist has rejected not only his society but also his God.

You may think I am reading into this too much, but think about it. The protagonist makes his statement with a lot of certainty. None of the places he floated to had mommies; not a single one. That could not be a coincidence, and thus the only possibility is that there are no mommies in his world. This could also be simply a consequence of his rejection of society, but if this were the case, it would not be as much of a surprise to him, and he wouldn't feel the need to state that there were no mommies where he floated.

Staring into the abyss, our protagonist can see his inevitable demise, and yet he shows no worry; he is simply amazed by what he sees. It is important to realize at this point that our protagonist has abandoned his society and his God. Left floating in an endless sea, he has nothing to live for. My guess is that this is why he finds his doom interesting; if his life isn't worth living, then he may as well simply enjoy whatever it brings to him, even if it it brings him his own demise.

Of course, a maelstrom is no guarantee of death. People have survived them before, if not in reality, at least in fiction. Thus it is also possible that our protagonist is amazed simply because he knows he could survive the experience. And what an experience it would be; I can't even begin to conjecture on what it must be like to be sucked into a whirlpool, but it would certainly make a good story at the very least. If this is the case, then the larger lesson is that we should not fear that which may kill us. We could end up with an amazing story afterwards, or we may just be exaggerating the dangers. And if worst comes to worse, well, you can't really regret anything that kills you, can you?


At this point, the fate of our protagonist is unknown. We are left only with an image of his barrel floating semi-submerged in the water. It will probably sink at some point, disappearing from our protagonist's world forever. If he is still alive, he has now lost his only connection to his former world. In a way, this barrel was his world, and now it is on its way to a watery grave. In my opinion, this is meant to symbolize how when a man is removed from a world he has created, that world falls apart, and he cannot return. If our protagonist had made the ocean itself his home, he would still have a home to return to upon escaping the whirlpool. Instead, he tried to create his own artificial world, even while trying to escape the normal world. Now that he no longer has his barrel, he cannot return to it.

In a way, the barrel is symbolic of everything people try to do to make their lives easier. These include developing a Peter Pan complex, trying to shut out the tragedy in the world by avoiding the news, or using the idea of an afterlife as a way to not fear death. Often people do this because they find reality too difficult to deal with. Like the barrel our protagonist inhabited, these coping mechanisms are unreliable and can't protect people from the harsh realities of the world forever. At some point, these people are going to have to face the reality that they have been so diligently avoiding. And once they have done that, their old world and their old coping mechanisms will be gone. Having abandoned them, these people will now need to find some way to face the realities of existence without getting depressed. Life may be grim, but that doesn't mean that people need to be.


Although this strip is not technically a part of the barrel series, it still plays into the series's conclusion, and thus warrants analysis. We begin with a man who has whimsically put wings on his ferret, but his whimsy is ruined when his friend tells him his ferret could never fly. He is quick to assimilate to his friend's ideas of what is reasonable, not wanting to look silly. What is interesting is that the man's friend dismisses his fantasy and then suggests that they go indulge in a different kind of fantasy, i.e. video games. Perhaps his friend views video games as less silly than imagination because the fantasy is not his own, but someone else's. In other words, this man believes that having your own fantastic ideas is silly, but reveling in someone else's fantasy is perfectly acceptable. Then again, this man could be playing a realistic video game, in which case he simply rejects all forms of fantasy.

In the end, the first man forgoes playing video games in favor of indulging in his own fantasy of seeing his ferret fly over a lake. The proximity of their faces in this final panel suggests a great intimacy between them. Anyone who has ever felt that intimate with anyone, be it a person or an animal, can attest that it is a great feeling. One feels safe, comfortable, and happy when he or she is that close to someone, physically and/or emotionally. It's quite possibly the greatest happiness one can achieve. The message of this intimacy is that there is more happiness to be found in one's own fantasy than the fantasies of someone else.


And so we see our protagonist left drifting on a piece of wood in the vast expanse of ocean. The wood itself is probably of little comfort to him, since he is still submerged in the water. Then in flies our furry little winged friend to save him and they both fly off into the sunset. A touching ending, really. More important is the message of it, and I believe that message is that we can only be saved by our dreams. As we learned in part 4, most coping mechanisms for dealing with life's harsh realities don't work. The problem that these mechanisms have in common is that they all deal with shutting out part of the world. Dreams, on the other hand, deal not with blocking out what is but with imagining what could be. That is why our protagonist is saved by the ferret.

If you think I read too deeply into those comics, your probably right. Of course, considering the wealth of philosophical possibility in them, I'd like to imagine that Randall Munroe intended them to be analyzed in this manner.

How to leveling fishing without being bored

I love fishing. I'm not sure why, but something about it just calls to me at my most basic level. And yet, until just after patch 2.4, my fishing was stuck squarely in the journeyman range. It was the new dailies that motivated me to level fishing, and though I now love fishing a lot, I have to say that leveling it was one of the most boring experiences of my WoW career. Leveling cooking along with fishing made it somewhat interesting, but the monotony of sitting in one spot for hours on end making the same motions really grated on me. It was during this time that I developed certain strategies for leveling fishing without going out of my mind with boredom, and I still use these strategies today.

The mechanics of leveling fishing are now a no brainer. Back in the day, you couldn't fish in most areas if your fishing skill wasn't high enough. Also, it was possible that your skill was high enough to fish in an area, but not high enough to be at that magical number where you always caught a fish. This meant you would sometimes catch nothing at all, meaning no reward for all that effort, and no skill up, either. Nowadays, you can fish anywhere. If your skill is lower than a zone's "minimum," you'll only fish up various pieces of grey junk. If you skill is in between a zone's minimum and it's "no junk number," you'll alternate between catching fish and junk. That means no more failed casts and no wasted skill-up opportunities. What this means for you is that the only advice you really need on leveling fishing is advice on the subjective aspects of the experience. That's what I intend to give you: advice to make the process itself more bearable.

The first thing you need to do to make the strategies I am about to present to you work is a bit of preparation. Start by binding fishing to a key on your keyboard (or two). (escape menu -> key bindings) The ideal position for the key that you bind fishing to is one right next to your mouse. That way, you can go from right-clicking the bobber with your middle finger to hitting your "fishing button(s)" with your thumb. If your keyboard and your mouse aren't close to each other, move them. I use the + and - key on the number pad on my keyboard. I picked two keys that were right next to each other so that I had more room for error when I cast fishing. You see, these strategies will require you to cast fishing without being able to look at the keyboard, so it's a good idea to bind fishing to either a very large key, or two keys right next to one another.

I also highly recommend that you turn on auto-loot while fishing. (escape menu -> interface -> combat -> auto loot) It speeds up the process dramatically since you won't need to click on the fish to loot it. Finally, I recommend that you fish with WoW in windowed mode. (control-M for windows, command-M for macs) This will make perfect sense for my second method, but for the first, just remember that it means that you won't need to move the mouse as much to click the bobber.

Now you are ready to multitask, and that is what's at the core of keeping fishing interesting: doing something else while you fish. If you are new to fishing, it may be a bit much to ask of you to do something like that, but if you are at that level of fishing skill, it probably isn't boring for you yet. In that case, you don't need this advice. For the rest of you, here are the very methods I used to level fishing.

Reading while Fishing
While I was leveling fishing, I checked a book out of my local library specifically for the purposes of keeping myself entertained while I did it. Reading was the first kind of multitasking I did while fishing, and it's what got me started on this road. Although almost any book will suffice for this purpose, if you are picking a book specifically to read while leveling fishing, there are a few things to keep in mind. Fishing while reading can be counterproductive if you lose your spot in the book every time you look up, so a book of factoids or a book written in short stanzas is a good choice. These books are set up in such a way that it will be difficult for you to loose your place, with all the line breaks and everything.

Fishing while reading may also help you read the book itself if it is a boring book. I know that I wouldn't have been able to get through the lull in the middle of Crime and Punishment if I hadn't been fishing while reading it. Although fishing while reading can impede your understanding of the book, if you just want to get through the book, fishing will help a lot. Excitement of fishing + dullness of Raskolnikov's inner turmoil = bearable read.

His angst almost turned me off from Russian Literature for good. Thank God for WoW and fishing.

When you are ready to begin, start by placing the book somewhere on your desk where you can hold it down with your left hand. Put your right hand on the mouse with your thumb close to your fishing button(s). The process should go something like this:
1. Cast fishing.
2. Move your cursor over the fishing bobber.
3. Read.
4. Listen for the noise your bobber makes when you catch a fish.
5. Right click.
If you correctly executed step two, you shouldn't need to look up for step five. Assuming all goes well, you should now have a fish in your inventory and a few lines of the book in your head. Now you just need to repeat these five steps. The only point during this process where you will need to look away from your book is step two. Step two may be accomplished any time between steps one and four.

This is the most basic kind of fishing multitasking. It takes practice to get good at it, but once you can do it successfully, you'll be able to move the cursor over the bobber in a fraction of a second, meaning more time for reading. That is the most important skill this will help you develop: being able to quickly see where the bobber is and move your mouse over it. This skill becomes even more vital with the next kind of multitasking

Browsing the Internet while Fishing
This is where windowed mode becomes vital, unless you use two computer screens, in which case browsing the internet while fishing is nothing more than high-tech reading. I you can actually set up this kind of thing, then just reffer to the dirrections for reading while fishing. Of course, you probably won't be able to use two screnes, which means you will be cycling between whatever web-site you are looking at and the WoW window itself. For this setup to work, it's important to organize your windows in a way that facilitates easy switching between the two. This isn't an issue if you can tab between your windows. (On a mac, this is accomplished with command-tab. I don't know how it is done on windows, but I assume it's control-tab) If you can't tab between your windows, then I recommend that you use the following setup: have WoW right up against the left side of your screen so that when you move your mouse as far left as you can, it will be over the window for WoW. Then leave about a quarter of an inch of space between the left side of your screen and the left side of your preferred web browser. Also, make sure the window of your web browser is wide enough that it sticks out a good distance from the right side of the WoW window. To sum all that up, make your two windows overlap and have each one stick out on one side.

Like books, it will do you no good to read a website where switching windows will cause you to loose your place. With enough practice, this will become a non-issue. Until then, web-comics are a good choice. Most can be read in the time it takes you to fish up your catch, and the panels help prevent you from losing your place when reading a longer one. I can't give too many recommendations, but I'll try. Cyanide and Happiness is always short, but it may be a bit shocking for some people. XKCD has more high-brow humor, though it is also a bit geeky. As for WoW-related webcomics, I recommend Dark Legacy and NPC. Funny picture sites are also good, since picture don't take your very long to read, and it is thus impossible to lose your place. I recommend lolcats and its affiliated sites. (You can find links to the affiliated sites on top of the home page.)

Or try both at the same time!

One more thing to mention is that, for this to work, you will need to be very quick at seeing the bobber, moving your mouse over it, and clicking it. This is where all that practice from the reading method comes in. If you are good at that, then all you need to do is pick your website. Once you have your website picked, just follow one of the following sets of steps, depending on whether you are alt-tabbing or not.

Alt-tabbing Method:
1. Cast fishing.
2. Alt-tab to your Internet page.
3. Read/look at/view your Internet page.
4. Listen for the noise your bobber makes when you catch a fish.
5. Alt-tab to WoW
6. Right click on the bobber.
And repeat.

Manual Window-Switching Method:
1. Cast fishing.
2. Move your mouse over the right edge of your Internet page and click.
3. Read/look at/view your Internet page.
4. Listen for the noise your bobber makes when you catch a fish.
5. Move your mouse quickly to the left side of the screen and click.
6. Right click on the bobber.
Y repite. This is where you will be glad you moved the WoW window as far left as you could, since you won't need to aim your cursor before you click; you'll only need to jerk your mouse to the left and click.

That's all there is too it. Using either of those methods should make fishing much more enjoyable to level. You can also use them after you have reached 450 fishing to make some gold while reading or browsing the Internet. To do this, I'd recommend you fish is a zone where you won't catch any junk without applying a lure to your fishing pole. That way, you won't need to re-apply your lures every ten minutes. According to El's Extreme Anglin', you only need an effective skill of 475 to fish in Borean Tundra, Dragonblight, Grizzly Hills, and Howling Fjord, which are the only zones worth fishing in, anyways. I recommend the in-land waters of Dragonblight, since you will catch both Musselback Sculpin and Dragonfin Angelfish, both of which sell well on the AH. If you prefer a more tense atmosphere and don't mind applying lures, then Wintergrasp will probably net you more profit per hour, since you will only be catching fish that should sell well. Just park yourself somewhere off to the sides where people aren't likely to go, and keep your wits about you.

Well, there you go! If you have any more ideas for multitasking while leveling fishing, or any ways to make fishing more interesting, feel free to share them in the comment section bellow. Also, those pictures and accompanying comments; yay or nay? I think it added some flair to the wall of text, but I want the opinions of you, dear readers. This blog is for you, after all.

I leave you with this image from GraphJam, one of icanhascheezburger.com's sister sites.

They forgot Chuck Norris jokes, homophobia, people being rude to people who ask legitimate questions... though I suppose all those go under the category of General Douchbaggery.