Happy

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you must have seen my post on my Stalker Days.

Well, recently I was going through my Google Analytics for this site and was surprised to see that I had a few incoming links from dixiechicksfans.net.

Intrigued, I desperately hunted down where exactly on that site I could possibly be linked from. Afterall, I don’t even go by the same ‘call sign’ as I did back then, and I wandered away from the Dixie Chicks online community some time ago.

After a modest amount of searching, I found this thread which is posted by someone who stumbled across my Stalker Days post and connected the dots.

Not a lot of responses to the thread, but it totally stoked me to find out that people remembered me fondly from those days.

I registered on the site, but have thus far not been approved to post.

If I’m understanding correctly, the webmaster of the site is the same who started “Emily Robison, You Rock!” in the same spirit as my own “Natalie Maines, Will You Marry Me?” so we have some history.

Anyway, this tie back to my past has encouraged me to do something I’ve considered doing before.

I’ve migrated the entire NMWYMM site over to my domain here and put it up at http://natalie.lykaon.com. I’ve made a few changes to some broken links and updated the contact information as well.

This will make sure I never lose the site and can keep it tied in with my online web presence.

Many may ask why I would want to, but despite the zany name of the site, I maintain that it was a successful foray into online fandom that I should be proud of.

Surprisingly, my wife has encouraged me to update the site with a Web 2.0 sensibility and add some features to draw in new crowds (such as the awesome idea of an Adrian Pasdar interactive voodoo doll).

Although the Chicks have fallen out of grace with country radio, and I even have my own differing opinion from Natalie these days, I’ll always miss those days when it was just me, the Internet, and my love for Natalie Maines.

I’m supposed to be writing a cryptid corner, but I’m fresh out of cryptids.

Well that’s not entirely true. I think we’re never fresh out of cryptids. I’m just out of compelling cryptids that I want to write about right now.

So instead, I’m posting an lolcat because lolcats are always good for a laugh and this one is Warcraft related.

For those that don’t know, /afk means “Away from Keyboard.” In WoW, it’s an easy way to let others know that although you are still logged into the game, you aren’t at the computer.

It’s taken on a life of it’s own though when related to the PVP elements of the game where people go AFK and just let others earn them a bunch of honor.

This led Blizz to make it such that if you go AFK while in a battleground, you immediately exit the battleground.

So then that led to creative uses of things such as the Logitech G15 Keyboard to make the game think you aren’t AFK when you really are.

And now there’s going to be a new feature in which people can ‘report’ people as AFK in a battleground, causing them to get no honor if enough people agree that said person is AFK.

Sounds like a good way to grief someone to me, but we’ll see how it goes.

The topic of going AFK and letting others do the dirty work is a long standing problem with WoW that the developers may never fully tackle.

EDIT: Lest you think that I think WoW invented AFK, I only say this picture is related to Warcraft because that’s Warcraft on the screen in the background.  It’s a warlock to be exact. /shudder

So for anyone who reads CNN it won’t come as any surprise that they are the masters of running really stupid headlines.

Sometimes they don’t make sense, sometimes they are wholly misleading, and other times they are laughably obvious.

This morning, I’d like to share some headlines that are on the front page at this very moment to illustrate this point.

China denies hacking into Pentagon

Shocking. I really thought China would just own up to that one.

Men want hot women, study confirms

Surely there are better things to focus our collective scientific eye on than this. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that guys want hotties (my site statistics prove it — hot girls = jump in visits).

What’s worse is that if you read the article you’ll find that said study consisted of a whopping 46 people. Really? I could have that study done by the end of the day using coworkers alone.

‘I was always a pretty bad celebrity’

What kind of headline is this?! I feel like CNN is trying to set me up here. Besides, what celebrity isn’t a pretty bad celebrity?

Scientists working on faster wireless

Huh. I really thought we were done with that. Who needs faster? I’m still miffed that we’re moving faster than 14.4Kbps myself.

So I was a tad late for work this morning because of my warchief.

I was in Nagrand, helping the Mag’har tribe save their dead ancestors from being possessed by demons. It seemed like a the honorable (read: greedy) thing for a Blood Knight such as myself to do.

After I finished up that slightly messy task with the help of my wife and her pet velociraptor, I went to hang out with Greatmother Geyah and let her know that she owed me some bucks.

She went on about how the leader of their tribe, Garrosh Hellscream, was all down on himself because his daddy had drank the blood of a demon and doomed them all to be bloodthirsty buttheads.

“Waahh,” Garrosh says, “My daddy left me a rotten legacy. Wo is me!”

Then the name clicked. Hellscream…Hellscream…Where have I heard that name before? Oh right… etched right here on my axe:

“The axe of Grom Hellscream has sown terror across hundreds of battlefields.”

So it turns out that the Greatmother is the grandmother of Thrall, son of Durotan. I’d run into Thrall before, always trying to make him understand that we Blood Elves aren’t all that bad.

Thing is, Thrall didn’t know his Grandmother was alive. His dad had died when he was young, yada yada. Thrall was good friends with Grom Hellscream, though, even though Garrosh had never known his daddy.

So basically I decided to help the deranged family out.

“Look, granny, I’ll go tell Thrall that his grandmama is out here with his best friend’s son and I’m sure he’ll come set you all straight on the sitch,” I told her.

So I went to Orgrimmar and walked right into Thrall’s throne room. He has an open-door policy cuz he’s cool like that.

Thrall was like, “Granny’s alive!”

I’m like, “Yah. I took her gold.”

So Thrall tells me to go tell granny that he’s on his way. And sure enough, shortly after I get there he comes strolling into Garadar like he owns the place. A few minutes of hob-knobbing with his biggest fans, and Thrall wanders in to see granny.

Luckily they aren’t the private type, so I got to watch the whole thing. Granny’s all concerned the Mag’har are going to pot because Garrosh is a big emo sissy, always whining about how his daddy was a loser.

So Thrall never being one to let an Orc be emo, finds Garrosh and explains that although his daddy did drink demon blood and turn them all into buttheads, he also freed them from the same curse by defending the other orcs and defeating said demon with his trusty axe (that must have then gotten lost, because I totally have it strapped to my back).

Suddenly, Garrosh is all like, “I’m the son of a hero! Kneel before me, suckers!”

And that’s why I was late for work. I had to sort out the issues of my warchief’s family and friends. Being a Blood Knight is a tough job, but someone has to do it.

Best Warcraft quest line ever.