Getaway

My chest is heavy with an upheaval of worry and disappointment, some self-berating swirling, aerating the mixture. I pace in circles, mentally trying to untwine this procedure of figuring out who is the person to prod to action. I'm referring to my high school reunion which is just...something, I cannot even think of the word. This mystery word inspires the want for a catartic release: soothing tears (temporary) or scarring myself (permanent). I think I should go with the tears.

There is so much I want to write but this duty is clouding my vision.

Illidan

I haven't been writing in Tankspot because I'm bored. I have plenty of projects to do and plenty of work but... I can't see the point anymore. I'm at a dreaded block, chipping away at the wall with fingernails.

So I'll write about Illidan. Last night, my guild made our first attempt where we got him to the last phase, finishing at 21% which was pretty breath-taking. I tanked one Flame of Azzinoth.

But earlier in the day, I rushed terribly to get to 260 Fire Resistence. I had naively thought that I was set with all the badge gear, not realizing that so many other materials were necessary to get to a set number. The generosity of a rogue with his leg enchant (I had collected all the mats before I was just about to head out to Dire Maul) and crafting my Flame kits, a mage who helped me with tremendous patience through my OCD tendencies to loot everything for a very long quest chain and a shaman who helped me finish off the elite boss. To think I panicked that I wouldn't be able to get anything done, especially with my mother visiting for the weekend. I'm just really glad that I know some really cool people.

I keep getting distracted! Drawing little sketches, checking wowinsider for Blizzcon updates, thinking of this website where they post funny tells from wow...

I must have a crush. Oy. I really want to ask this fellow out but, when I look at it honestly, I realize we don't even have a foundation of friendship to build on...only a mutual grinding of personalities where I enrage and he...enjoys the raging. I fantasize about pinning him down and making him endure a stream of bad grammar, just something to make him NOT right. Sigh, I'm twisted. At least almost everyone in guild knows and accepts this...even a raid leader made a crack of something S&M related...wish I remembered what! Anyways, I want to be friends with a guy I'm interested in, not just sex buddies.

Speaking of sex buddies, I truly don't know what to do about finding a committed relationship and playing around. I don't believe it has to be either/or but it's hard to find an open-minded fellow who can wrap their heads around it. I mean on Saturday, I had the opportunity to meet with two lovely men who were in a relationship and get simulateously stimulated with groping and having my hair pulled. My fine behind, washed with his perpetual hardon as his boyfriend lovingly gazes at both of us and kissing his other with a hard passion, nuzzling above the crowd as they grow heated with the beat of the music. My fingers teasing his ass, marveling how beautiful they look, especially giggling to myself of how "frat boy" they look with their flannel/jeans/baseball cap combos. How can I ever pass up that? Would I ever want to?

That night did come with a price of a very swollen foot that is recovering for a large, broken blister and ringing in my ears. We'll have to see in a few days whether dancing for 5 hours straight was worth it. But as a friend said, ears and feet heal, memories last forever...or something like that. :)

I should write more about Illidan and the crappy happy adds which are a pain to tank but it's time for me to limp home.

Temptation, thou sprout from the tongue and languish in dreams.

What I learned when I was young:

Attraction isn't sexual euphoria and vice versa.
Sexual euphoria doesn't fade over time.
Attraction will hold you until you can't deal with it anymore.
Love has nothing to do with these two physical states of being.
However, love enhances them like $500 an ounce truffles.

I am shamefully thrilled to receive such consideration of my abilites.

Him: I'm booking my travel to *** a few weeks from now. But I'm finding it's like grocery shopping when you're hungry. Because I shamefully keep wondering whether I should take the ***->NYC flight with the 2.5 hour layover.

I am a bad man.

And I respond accordingly.

Him: No no no! Your line is "that's a great daydream, but of course you know it can't happen, I can't take a full day off of work to be with you, people would find out, etc., etc." Not "ooh that makes me horny, when can you be here"

Me: *clears throat*
no no no!
How was that?

Him: Unconvincing.

Me: Yep I'm grinning the entire time I wrote that

Him: I read that as "No, no, no, why would I take a full day of work to have you trapped in my place tied to my bed where I could tickle your balls with my tongue and rub your head on the back of my throat until you were delirious"
which, as I said, is very unconvincing.

Gathering thoughts on Black Temple

I'm trying to write notes for the third guild podcast and I find it impossible to concentrate on the flow of text that I must write. I have plenty to say but hardly have the patience to figure out how to structure it so I write in this blog to let it come out without self-censorship of my vocal/mental voice.

It's been a pretty good July.

Mother Sharaz
From the beginning, getting the equipment together was akin to a frentic backstage fashion show where there's a mad rush to get to the specialists with all the elements in its proper place. The trash was unique which made many cynical raiders glad as they were sick of the same old, same old. We had issues with the Mother Sharaz addon which worked out once Thursley figured out that the announce function was off. We still need to work out how the addon works but once people got the hang of the teleportation and moving in the proper direction, Mother Sharaz was down within 4 tries. My role as a tank was to spam holy shield, judge wisdom and auto-swing, exorcise and consecrate when I can and watch the main tank to pop the Lay of Hands when appropriate.

Illidari Council
Illidari Council is down, despite the odds that it shouldn't have worked with my pally shield being up. Last night, the raid leader tested out it on some mobs...it shouldn't have worked as well as it did but somehow we succeeded by pure conviction. It's High King Maulgar 2.0...the pull and getting away from the Area of Effect abilities was what made this fight. I have to say it was a personal challenge for myself to use my abilities within a merciless period of time. Creating specific macros and focus targets helped my pull. It took multiple attempts, quite a few elixirs, excellent healing and vocal communication to make it work.

Today
I'm not sure why but I feel shaken to my core. Like I could physically fall apart if someone should touch me even with a slight touch. I feel like a mesh of spider silk, easily whisked aside, my feelings fragmented into nothingness. I feel the need to be mute, to not interact with other people. Even meeting my girlfriend for our usual lunch date took a lot out of me.

Interpersonal Relations
I'm having a problem with a player. I realized that he pushes my buttons and I with my insufferable rage, respond accordingly. It reminds me of this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html with his attitude. Does my distress really amuse him so? Or is this what he's used to?

Leadership Article

Revenge of the gamers: World of Warcraft is honing tomorrow's leaders

Why play games?
Byron Reeves and his co-authors contend that massively multiplayer online role-playing games -- MMORPGs -- can be useful simulators for modern business training. Here are a few of the reasons:
Pace: Leaders often have to make hundreds of strategic decisions during an hour of game play.
Risk: The relatively mild consequences of failure allow players to test a variety of strategies.
Revolving leadership: The temporary nature of many leadership roles allows people who tend to be real-world followers to try leadership opportunities and those who tend to be real-world leaders to get experience as followers.
Scope: One World of Warcraft game leader, a former
U.S. Army officer with a master's degree in human resource management, likened the leadership of an 80-person raiding guild to managing a midsize business.

May 12, 2008 (Computerworld) MMORPGs -- massively multiplayer online role-playing games -- like World of Warcraft, Eve and EverQuest may be the best simulators
of tomorrow's business environment. So say Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone and Tony O'Driscoll in this month's Harvard Business Review. The authors found that these games closely mirror the evolving world of business: distributed decision-making, rapid response, ad hoc teams, and leadership through collaboration rather than authority. Reeves, the Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication at Stanford University and a co-founder of Seriosity Inc., a company that develops enterprise software inspired by online games, told Kathleen Melymuka that smart companies should be playing.
Tell me about the Seriosity study commissioned by IBM. They asked us to study collaboration and leadership in these [game] guilds. Moreover, these games are getting popular enough that, even if we don't want to take lessons from them, the people we're hiring are steeped in them, so we need to at least know what's shaping their lives and contributing to their expectations for software when they get to work.

What were some of the study's conclusions? The most interesting one is that leadership in these
games has less to do with the special qualities of the person doing the leading than with the environment itself. Tom Malone and I had looked at the leadership literature, and it's very biased toward leadership as a quality of an individual: Leaders are born, and you have to find them and nurture them. Gamers were saying in many ways just the opposite: A lot of people can be leaders when there's an environment that's conducive to making it happen. Maybe they're not the most socially extroverted communicators; maybe they just know what's going on. A lot of gamers told us, "I could [lead in a game], and it wouldn't happen at IBM."

What can you do with what you learned? A lot of information work is dull and boring, and there are productivity and retention problems that come from that. These games are engaging, compelling and just the opposite. So can we marry the juiciness of these experiences with the productivity needs of business contexts and get people more engaged in their work?

A sales team meeting in World of Warcraft is not the first thing that's going to happen. But when you think about it, it's suggestive of how much fun it could be to be a guild in a game with goals and avatars and synthetic currency systems: I'll give you 10 pieces of gold for that PowerPoint I need tomorrow.

How are game players' challenges similar to those of business leaders? Recruiting, evaluating, retaining, persuading, compensating -- all those things are really the same. If you're a guild leader, you're looking for new players; you're looking for the best before you "hire" them; you need to figure out what they want and compensate them in the right way to keep them. And "I know we need 30 players on this raid, but [I] have to go put the kids to bed" -- how do you deal with that?

And in today's work environments, so much is about persuading people to help you rather than having authority over them.

Exactly. Decentralized work really means that coordinating people is much more important than commanding them. How are the game and business environments different? On the very legitimate issue of the consequences of failure. When something bad happens in a game, you're not taking down millions of people invested in a company. Some of the psychological feelings may be the same, but in terms of the actual stakes, the consequences are broader in business.

What would it feel like in World of Warcraft if the future of the company were on the line? It would feel different. But businesses say they don't want the seriousness of the consequences to be handcuffs for innovation and risk taking. And there are other differences. One is the whole notion of transparency. In games, there's a lot more transparency in the culture as well as the rules. You know a lot in the games. You see what gear people have, what level they've achieved, and you know a lot about their status. You're a priest or a dwarf, and people know what you bring. You can make inferences at work, but there's not as much transparency of expertise. There are laws about transparency in business -- privacy rights.

You note certain distinctive characteristics of leadership in online games that point toward skills tomorrow's leaders will need. Can we discuss speed? Certainly, things can happen more quickly in games. In a game, you might congregate with five people you've just met; you've got one minute to decide who will lead and what the strategy will be, and then the gate opens. So there's a lot more opportunity to do things quickly. Iteration is an important part of this. In business, we're not going to go to Step 2 until we know we won't fail on Step 5. The default strategy in games is, "That's a good idea; let's try that." Then, wham! "All right, we all die. Let's go left instead of right next time." There's a lot of opportunity to try things a lot of times, and there's
value in that: A lot of small failures add up to global success rather than being so careful about each step.

Are gamers less risk-averse in business? Tony O'Driscoll has studied several hundred gamers at IBM. It occurs to a majority of them that things happening in these games are similar to and different from real work and useful to think about in real work. People volunteer that they have made that connection.

Tell me about the honesty that the use of avatars engenders. In games, they are signals of your role and expertise. In respect to representing expertise, the games keep you honest in ways real life doesn't. You can't say you are a Level 50 when you're only 40, whereas you can probably do that at work, where expertise is more objective. That's one reason people like these games: because they're fair. It's not about who you know and how well you do in the hallway conversation; it's what level
you've achieved.

Finally, you note that leadership roles are often temporary in games. To some extent, people with competence rise to the top, but there is a lot of temporary leadership: I've been in this dungeon, so I'll just take over. A corollary is that leaders get experience being followers and that's useful also, because people who know a lot are being directed by people who know less, but for whatever reason, it's their turn to take over.

Getting back to the conclusion that the right environment may matter more than the right leader --
how can companies benefit from that insight? Build better environments, and leadership will emerge. There's a real interest in analytics in business now. You can have a lot of data about how things are going. Dashboard and analytics is a good example. They provide a leader board and a score card like games have, and they're right up there for everybody to see. It's very gamelike.

Watching NBC, I learned of a T-shirt business that supports a camp for traumatized children with their signature theme of "Life is good". What I garner from their mission is the importance of play for children who don't have the processes nor language to communicate their experiences which then they're unable to foster an understanding and remain in a locked fearful stance. Hence play lets them distract, put a story to what they went through and let them see it in a safe environemt.

Breaking fast

I don't mention my personal life as much as I did with previous blogs. I hate to shed those older blogs but it seems like the aim of those blogs evolved into this passion that I have with WoW. Which would be better to nurture: an addiction of WoW or sex? Addiction is a inherently negative word used to describe the overwhelming urges to feed oneself with external stimuli so this is an exaggeration.

I swore off physical indulgence since December and embraced my New Year's Resolution of "No Hookups" until Monday. If you're the kind of person who doesn't wish to read about casual sex, stop now.

I arrive at the hotel, aching for relaxation in the form of a bath. He arrives, startling me by opening up the bathroom door as I'm about to enter the vanilla cupcake bubblebath I prepared. I scream in embarrassment :) How funny of me to react so vocally. The jets create mounds of bubbles and I ease into the floaty sleeping luxury that is being immersed in water. New York City bathtubs should all aspire to be as wonderful. I chat with him, grinning from ear to ear, peering up at him from my very exposed position in the water...most of what I remember visually was a blur. I purr as he rubs my back, as painful as his relaxing touch was on my sore muscles are.

I remember shaking his hand, embracing him in a hug. I remember being pleased by his tongue and fingers and grabbing his hair, raising my hips off the bed. I remember putting him in restraints and tickling him, his writhing body exciting me and pressing up again my pussy.

I remember teasing his cock and after hours of teasing, sucking it into my mouth, eager to feel the length in my throat. I'm out of practice but I remember my techniques: engage the lips, the tongue, keep hydrated. I suck for hours, making up for months and yet my jaw isn't sore.

I remember being amused at his forgetfulness at the wedding band he wears; to mention it would disrupt the mood.

I remember his large hands rubbing at my back, his cock rubbing at my ass and I want him to mount me from behind. Seems like Extra Large condoms are never big enough...they're too tight. Or maybe it's been a while since he's used them. Or maybe he's simply afraid of the consequences. Or maybe I'm too small...when he opens me up, I'm afraid for a moment of the jarring tightness. I surely forget when he wakes me up in the middle of the night and I ride him and I don't feel the pains I do with my toys when I rock them as much as I did him. He uses my toy, not to jam it in me like the inexperienced boys I've been with but to play with me and I come for what seems like a very long time non-stop it's pulled out of me with no jarring spikes of lesser or greater pleasure.

I remember how good it is to hear a guy moan uncontrollably when he get to that point where he wants to gush into my mouth. I know the second time he is driven sololy by his cock and the motions I use with my gloved hand and tight lips and fast tongue. I know it because he can't speak and yet is driven to express something with his voice.

I wake up to his fingers brushing my face, hugging him before work and him telling me to not let anyone tell me that I'm not an amazing person. I can't remember his expression as I'm without my glasses and can barely keep my eyes open in the dim light. I am amazed that I do not have the feeling of being abandoned as I did with some previous encounters; I feel content.

I drifted in and out of sleep, starving but not ready to face this strange day where I had no set routine to worry about. It takes me 3 hours to get home and I can feel myself glowing, male eyes being drawn to me. I jump on WoW, play a little, go to my room to unpack and fall asleep at 7 to be woken in the middle of the night by rain.

Figuring out the pull with the Illidari Council

Me:

I cried at my first attempt with the Illidari Council. Tears and snot and the whole god-awful sniffles that make my voice hiccup. It's not necessarily at that I hesitated and wiped the raid; it's the fact that the raid leader expressed something which ultimately wasn't constructive: he was disappointed with the pull. Or with me. Either way, they're the same thing.

Sometimes, I raise my voice in defensiveness. Sometimes, I may bark. But this crying...probably not completely stemming from this encounter. I have an exterior of hardness which keeps me from the brunt of the minor things that any young woman faces in NYC since birth...it's this strength I can draw on to withstand most anything, even the harshest criticism. Yet I'm a sponge, absorbing whatever comes at me.

Aftermath:

Officer:

What you are doing on that pull is dealing with three targets at once; Mage Tank for the BoP, yourself for the shield, and the rogue for your normal pickup moves.

Here's a way you could do that without needing to switch targets:

1. Focus on Mage Tank (/focus while you target Mage Tank), then switch your target to the rogue before the pull. Use a focus macro (/cast [target=focus] Blessing of Protection) to cast BoP on Mage Tank. You are still targeting the rogue.

2. Use a self defense macro to shield yourself going in. (/cast [target=player] Divine Shield). I usually bind this to a mouse button but you may prefer a key press. You will still be targeting the rogue.

3. Run in and judge righteousness on the rogue, or however else you want to pick him up.One thing I was wondering was if it would be better to throw your shield before you run in. Mage Tank's Pyroblast has a six second cast time. Say you have a one second reaction time to see his cast starting and cast BoP: That would leave five seconds. You could throw your shield (1.5 seconds), DS (instant cast) and run in, all before Mage Tank's Pyroblast lands.

Me:

For the first attempt last night, I tried that last suggestion. To attempt it as explained, I'd do this:

1. Focus on mage tank.

2. Target rogue mob.

3. Cast SoR.

4. Bop mage tank.

5. DS myself. (Perhaps make a macro that does both 4+5 with two button pushes)

6. Run to the middle of the stairs and drop a consecrate. Middle of the stairs is because if I run up top, they've already run toward someone else, which misses out on the ticks.

7. Judge on rogue mob.

For 6, I could use Avenger's Shield after Mage Tank's Bop/my DS and drop a consecrate after.

For 7, the rogue offtank (a druid) can grab the rogue to hand it off to me.

Another officer:

In the future I think we're going to be using the mage tank to initiate the pull, in order to prevent issues with Zerevor's random behavior, like running toward the back of the room at the start of the pull. If you run in before mage tank's pyroblast has been cast and the mage runs out of range, it's basically a wipe because mage tank will have no threat and no dampen magic, and you or a healer will be killed by Zerevor as soon as he lands a spell. All it really means, if the situation were otherwise the same, is that instead of running in with divine shield you would just BoP mage tank and then focus on picking up your target after it started moving.

Observations:

Why do I bother consecrating? Why is this method that much more benefitual than having the tanks charge in? It's not High King Maulgar but what's the drawbacks of having the tanks run in? Is the magic damage that extreme? I need to reread this encounter.

Conclusion:

Tanking is stressful. Crying is an outlet for that stress and frustration. Figure out how the fight works and do better.