Mania’s Arcania

I’m not done with the Cataclysm Safari by any means, but I’ve delayed the next … section? episode? chapter? … for a moment while I concentrate on getting basic Cataclysm information up on Petopia.

As galling as it sometimes is, many more people read Petopia than this little blog – by many orders of magnitude! – and so sharing information there is, well, more effective. At least when we’re talking about pretty tables, like what pets live in the new Cataclysm zones or what new looks may be available.

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The past two weeks have been pretty rough for me. My husband and I were crunching on a contract until Wednesday morning, working 14 hours a day on it. (Aside: I can work 10-12 hours a day, five days a week, for months — and I have — but 14 hours a day for 10 days straight does me in.)

This was frustrating enough with a shiny new beta to obsess over … but then we got the news about Blizzard extending RealID to the WoW forums.

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It’s been quiet around here lately for a whole bunch of reasons.

One of the reasons is that I’ve been sick a lot: repeated colds, sinus infections, and my first ever asthma attack. (Woo hoo? I’ve had allergies for awhile, especially to our two adorable pet rats, but I’ve mostly ignored it — which according to my doctor is why my symptoms have advanced from sniffles to raised welts to an inability to breathe. So let that be a lesson for you! Take your allergy meds before you get to the point where you can’t breathe!) I’ve also been struggling with my mental health. (My husband says I shouldn’t tell you that, and perhaps he’s right. But I like to explain why I sometimes disappear for weeks on end, and that’s a big part of it.) And lastly, I’ve been trying to drum up new contracts so my husband and I don’t go broke in a month or two. Anyway, I’m not looking for sympathy or making excuses; I just want to let you know where we are.

As you may have noticed, I’ve moved most of the ‘newsy’ stuff off of this blog and over to the new WoW Petopia Community forums. This way, when I am unavoidably detained, community members who are more on the ball than I am can post any news that happens, and my loyal staff of moderator (hi, Vephriel!) can make sure it shows up in the news feed. I’ve added a display of the most recent news items from the community to the top of the front page here, or you can subscribe to the news feed and cut out the … err … middle-blog.

So what’s going to go here, on Arcania? Well hopefully I’ll get back to some more sort-of-in-depth-but-not-necessarily-literature-for-the-ages type posts, like (and these are just examples): “How Many Spirit Beasts Do We Have Now Anyway?”, “Best-Looking Pets for a Goblin”, and “15 Unusual Pet Choices”. I’d also still like to highlight interesting stuff from other hunter blogs … if I ever get caught up with the 1000+ unread posts I have on Google Reader. (Amusingly, I first typed that as ‘undead posts’, which is also appropriate.) And if I ever get back to actually playing WoW, I’d like to talk about that as well.

(I have been futzing around in WoW a bit, via the US branch of the forum-based Petopians guild. Of course, being the difficult person I am, I had to start a druid for this hunter-oriented guild. But on the good side, my druid appears to be stuck at level 7. I also started some new hunters there but so far haven’t progressed beyond level 10. And Mania (the main character, not the writer of this post) hasn’t been any further than the auction house in weeks. Once Blizzard gets the armory-based auction house functuionality out, I won’t need to log her in at all! *sigh*)

And of course Cataclysm is coming up — sooner or later! — and what is Arcania without incoherent, stream-of-conscious live-blogging? (In fact, I’m somewhat glad that I’m not playing too much right now. I just hope that my disinterested phase lasts until I can get into the beta so I don’t wear myself out too early.)

So that’s Mania’s State of the Blog address and Five Year Plan all rolled up in one.

I have, against all odds, agreed to crunch as part of my current contract. Yup, crunch time — working so many hours so close together that you can’t possibly do a good job. Just like a real game developer!

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Allow me to introduce my newest character.

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(Sometimes when I am killing Chillmaw for my Argent Tournament dailies, I send my slime after the dragon and shout, “Slime … A-WAY!” It amuses me to no end.)

Ironically, I am leaving in just a few hours (early early Sunday morning) to fly to California — two days late for BlizzCon but just in time to ramp up for a major new contract my husband and I are taking. And we’re headed to San Francisco anyway, not Orange County, but it’s still ironic.

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[Editor's note: This has nothing to do with hunters or pets. Feel free to skip it.]

I’ve been trying to write this post for some time, but it keeps coming out wrong. You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting as much here lately — where ‘lately’ can mean anything up to and including all the way back to the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, depending on what you mean by ‘much’.

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This is just a quick note to my poor abused readers to say, “Happy New Year!” and give you a quick status update. Feel free to skip this post if you’re more interested in hunter pets than in the rest of my life. (Goodness knows I am.)

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I’m going to be spending the next several days with family and friends, so I probably won’t be posting again until sometime next week … unless something interesting happens or I get the urge to say something. *grin*

In the meantime, I hope that all of you enjoy whatever holidays you celebrate to the utmost.

Today is my birthday. I am 35 years old. If I were a tree I’d have many, many rings!

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