Piercing Shots

I've had some experiences in the past couple days that have made me sorely tempted to post spittle-flecked rants that are not at all related to WoW, so you should (all 0 of you) be thankful that I've resisted the urge to do that. I've also sort of considered posting a couple stories from my 2006 deployment to Afghanistan. Or well, less stories and more ruminations. I feel like that's starting to turn into a really unattractive clinging to an increasingly irrelevant past, though. A person is defined in part by their past, sure, but also by their present and future.

VA continues to work on Cho'gall. We've been extending the lockout, but being the guild we are, our weekly raiding time is still pretty limited. I do think I'm pretty settled on the strategy we've chosen to use for him, and I think it will work for our raid, but it's requiring quite a bit of practice. I think that's ok though - we're not really that far out of the norm of what a lot of guilds have had to put in on Choggsington, and apparently once it clicks it's a very repeatable boss. Then we go to work on Nef, and once he's dead we'll clear out Throne of the 4 Winds. There's still no solid date for 4.1 and T11 doesn't became old content until 4.2, so we should be ok to get it all down in time. There may be a couple of holes in the raid's gear in terms of what people would ideally like to have, but in general I think our progress through T12 should be quicker than T11 has been. And hey, it's not as if every guild made the transition from Wrath to Cataclysm as relatively unscathed as we have.

Pradzha is down to three last achievements for her Glory of the Hero drake: Headed South, Vigorous VanCleef Vindicator, and Rotten to the Core. They're probably the trickiest three, but we've also got enough good people (and, you know, raid gear) that we can definitely get them. Thanks especially to Jargon and Crapemyrtle, who are always willing to take a shot at an achievement for me.

That said, the endless quest for achievements is one of the things that causes WoW to be an especially potent timesink. There was a period of almost a month where I didn't log on outside of raids, and in that time I read a few good books, played a Dragon Age Origins game almost up to the final battle, and played some Dawn of Discovery and Sims 3. WoW is in many ways a great game, but there are lots of other great games to play, great books to read, and great movies to watch. I sometimes worry that I'll let it take over all of my leisure time, which would be a huge shame. There are so many people on this planet, making so many wonderful things, that we already won't have enough time in any of our lives to experience all of it. And this is all on top of trying to live a life that is in some way at least a small improvement to the life of our fellow humans and other creatures.

I guess that's not really a challenge unique to any particular hobby, though. We all pretty much just do what we can. And for me, right now, that means posting this and then launching Open Office to try to work on a little bit of fiction.