Big day today!!! Bravetank hit 50. I know – most people reading this are probably thinking- is she still only 50! It’s taking her ages. But Terema is 84 and a half so it’s not all bad – I’m just spreading myself too thin that’s all (as the butter said to the toast …totally made that joke up – who says comedy is hard). By the way that 84 and a half thing goes back too my childhood. I used to sign all my poems that way when I was young e.g. “Michelle, Age 9 and a half” etc – I don’t know why I thought future generations would find the age I wrote my poems so important- I think even then I knew I needed an excuse of some sort to explain their standard.
Quick example:-
Autumn (By the way – they always used to make us write about autumn when we were in school- start of the new school term and everyone’s spirits were high. All the teachers thought maybe just maybe they’d have another Dylan Thomas on their hands. And not just in the drinking stakes. I also wrote quite a bit about snow. Did you know it was white? My poems make that point over and over again. And it’s bright. Did you know that too? Helpfully that rhymes with white. The poems used to write themselves. I have no summer poems though. By the time the summer term rolled around the teachers were all fed up and were happy to let us play board games and watch Superman for the hundredth time. Anyway Autumn went as follows:-
“The Autumn leaves are falling/Softly to the ground/The wind blows the leaves /Though they don’t make a sound/Brown leaves, red leaves/They all are falling to the ground/Of all the seasons that we see/Autumn is the best for me.
Hmm. In fairness I think I was about 8. Obviously very obsessed with leaves and rhymes. The last but one line is definitely wrong – all I know is it rhymed with “me”. Husband will moan if I demand we go upstairs to ransack the cupboards to find my old poetry book.
While I’m on a roll – I won a prize for this one:-
Hurray Hurray it’s St David’s Day/Children are dressed in a fine array/Girls wear daffodils, boys wear leeks,/The dragon stands tall on its towery peak./We’re all so excited we shout Hurray/Because you see it’s St David’s Day
It was St David’s Day. In case that bit had escaped you! I was about 8 then too. My dad gave me the towering peak line. I remember him saying it proudly in the kitchen when we were doing the dishes and brainstorming (what rhymes with leek??? meek, streak, PEAK, oh my god we’ve got it!). It was a family affair. I won points for my House. Like in Harry Potter we had school houses. (Are school houses posh by the way? I am from a very working class area so it seems weird to me now that we had Houses – or maybe Harry Potter has just made them seem posh? Like they’ve made magic seem easy & made it so much harder to explain to children that waving a stick at an angry dog and shouting Expecto Patronum is not the best form of defence.)
Anyway where was I? I’m rambling today. It’s the excitement caused by Bravetank hitting 50 that’s done it I’m sure. Plus I’ve had six cups of coffee this morning and 5 chocolates so I’m totally caffeinated and sugared up. I am going to the gym later though so all those keeping a watching brief on my weight can breathe a sigh of relief.
Anyway Bravetank and 50. I did it in a cowardly way I have to confess – I did it by questing. I had a thought last night. My healer husband is constantly complaining that my health goes down too quickly (too quickly because he’s far away looting & can’t run back to me in time but I’m not going there again today). But it suddenly occurred to me that because I pick which dungeons I go in & don’t trust the random finder I don’t get my little satchel, and because I run the same dungeons quite often I don’t get many gear upgrades. This means my gear is not that great. (I know this isn’t rocket science but I’m quite proud I finally figured it out!). So I did a couple of quests today and got upgrades for a few things plus bought myself two imperial plate items and had imperial bracers given to me from very kind guildee Jacqlyn (thank you!!!!!). So I’ve decided to do both questing and dungeons to get the best out of both worlds. Plus it was really relaxing running round the Badlands and Searing Gorge attacking dwarfs, spiders and doing something weird with chickens. Like Saturdays of old – before I got into WoW.
But I am taking my life into my own hands questing as Bravetank because I’m on an RPPvP server. That means at every corner I run the risk of someone emoting something dramatic or a sharp blow to the head – both equally unpleasant. Not sure why I picked an RPPvP server originally. That was back in the day when Bravetank was Sparci and I fully intended her to be ret. Then I had my Road to Damascus moment (or Road to Duskwood in my case), decided I wanted to be in a tank, got a shield, went in the Stockades, caused a wipe at Hogger & then fled. A legend was born. But before that I think I just wanted to try a bit of world PvP. Still sort of excited at the chance it could happen. But nervous too (in fact from now on just assume I’m nervous about everything – much much easier. I’ll report differently by exception.). But so far I’ve hardly seen anyone around. The Cauldron in Searing Gorge is not the hip swinging place it used to be. I did bump into one scary horde person when I was suffering from resurrection sickness (too lazy to corpse run) but he left me alone because I wasn’t worth any honour I assume. But it was tense for awhile and I think I showed myself up a bit by trying to hide behind a questgiver. But that’s been it so far. And role play has been even less. I’ve seen a bit of it happening in Stormwind but not that much. Not sure how you can join in anyway. What’s the protocol? Do you whisper someone OOC (see I know the lingo) & say what’s the story, can I play please? Or do you keep everything IC (you’re all impressed now aren’t you – actually I looked that one up- I typed IIC and then couldn’t work out what the second “I” was for!) and start talking and hope they all play along or is that frowned on? I’ve not even got a backstory for Bravetank yet. I know all the cliches you’re meant to avoid so that’s no problem (no love child of Jaina and Thrall here though they are trying to adopt me). As my poems above show original is my middle name…. Actually that’s given me an idea. Maybe Bravetank could be a frustrated poet or something, forced to run dungeons to get enough money for a quill, ink and parchment. Maybe she could emote totally in poetic form….?! Yes. Perfect! And happily enough it’s still Autumn so I have my opening lines sorted. And soon it’ll be winter. Azeroth needs to know that “snow is sparkling and white/ and in the sun is very bright.” Dylan Thomas eat your heart out!
Grats on 50 Bravetank, the new voice of Azeroth at least in the autumn and winter!
Thank you! I’m so pleased that she’s finally out of her 40s!
Grats in dingage!
Perhaps you can start commissioning poems for us all! (I like spring.)
Good idea. Now what rhymes with spring….!
Grats, girl! And I must say, your posts never fail to put a smile on my face. Keep it up.
Aww thank you! Glad you like them! I’m,always so happy when I read comments like that (I open every comment up terrified in case it’s something scathing!)
Funny post, as always! I should note that my first thought when I read “Big day today!!! Bravetank hit 50. ” was that 50 was an age, not level. Lol!
Regarding roleplaying, I believe a lot of roleplayers use addons like:
My Roleplay: http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/my-role-play
FlagRSP2: http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/flag-rsp2
Basically they let you input an RP description for your character (ex. A slender woman with quiet eyes and a curiously rusty blade, Braveheart walks with a swagger and….) and everyone with the addon will see yours, and you can read theirs! It’s quite a lot of fun reading people’s descriptions, actually. You wouldn’t believe how many long-lost princesses and dragons in disguise there are.
(You can only read the MyRoleplay descriptions of people with that MyRoleplay, and the same for FlagRSP2, so I recommend using both and just pasting your descrip into both. That way you have 2x as many people to interact with!)
Fantastic! Thank you. Will download them both and get working on my description – trying to avoid all the cliches of course! Unless I do a tongue in cheek cliche filled one! But then I’ll probably get some abuse!!!
Grats on 50 !
I generally just barge in when I see an RPing group. Usually with a lame excuse – asking for directions or buying the pretty Blood Elf a drink, etc. As long as you do it In Character, people generally won’t mind, because it gives them another “RP hook” to react to. In this case, they might throw you out In Character (“Get out, this is a private guild meeting”) or call you out for eavesdropping on their conversation, but the stage is set.
If they throw you out IC, that’s too bad and you should probably find another set of people to RP with, if not – you’re RPing !
Yes I can argue IC against being thrown out and build quite a story out of it – probably end up with me in the Stockades!
Originally, I wanted to quote a line in your post (I don’t even remember which one) and say: “See, lines like this one are why I think you’re one of the funniest persons I know!”
Then I found one more and thought: ‘Well, I can fit that in. Simply declinate ‘this’ to ‘these’.’
Then another one. And another one.
At some point, I imagined the length of it all and decided I didn’t want to make a comment longer than the original post. Not again…
A few random observations, though (because I can never focus on a single aspect of anything):
– congratulations on 50. I saw that yesterday evening and nearly dropped from my chair in amazement. I feared your account might have been hacked.
– I smiled into my mirror with recognition (a nice change to the condescension awaiting me normally) that I immediately knew why you would write about daffodils and dragons and what St. David was all about. I’ll have to tell my British cultures prof that I am, contrary to both our beliefs, not a complete failure.
– I didn’t know dwarfs were this common in your parts of the world. But then again, I used to think that pygmies lived in the Pyrenees. I don’t know how I drew that connection, but didn’t include pyromaniacs.
– regarding RP, you might find Anne Stickney’s “All the World’s a Stage” column on WoW Insider mighty helpful. She covers about everything: how to get the backstory of your character right, how to engage in RP, what to say, what not to say, how to strangle a gorilla with your bare hands (everyone tells me I have imagined the last one, but I KNOW WHAT I SAW!)
On a side note completely unrelated to ANYTHING (it especially hasn’t got anything to do with Bravetank hitting 50….50 of what? Dwarfs or chickens?):
The ScaredHealer reached level 59 yesterday. When my mind, numbed by too much sleep over the weekend and hitting the same buttons every 6, 8 and 10 seconds over and over, realized this, I rushed to Stormwind to lock my experience. Now I’m amassing all the gear that I can from Outland and PvP a bit (it’s actually quite fun as soon as you have enough HP that the rogue can’t kill you in a single Ambush; now they need TWO!). So, maybe in two years’ time I’ll finally get to run that dungeon with you. If you like to. If not, I’ll just run naked into the battleground and let the rogues have at me. Maybe THEY will at least like me for that? /sob
Awww you always say such nice things! And then follow them up with such sarcastic things!! – thought my account had been hacked indeed!!!
I’m a levelling maestro right now. Glad you do know all about daffodils & dragons – is there a specific module on that on your course (“Daffodils, Dragonsd & Wales: A study of cultural stereotypes & sheep”)? Well done on 59! Of course I want to run a dungeon with you & I feel terrible you’ve shut your experience off because I’m so slow & nervous! Sorry! Maybe we can do Sunken Temple when I’ve gone up two more levels?? That’s all one level – I don’t know why but that makes me feel better. She’s a tank that doesn’t like stairs 
“Awww you always say such nice things! And then follow them up with such sarcastic things!!”
That’s because I always feel kinda funny (not the hilarious funny, but the strange one) whenever I give people compliments. The sarcastic part is to shake off that strange feeling of being all warm and fuzzy.
Unfortunately, there is no such course. There’s only the “Introduction to British and Irish Studies” course, which must be where I picked it up. Unbeknownst (?) to me, of course; no one ever asked about it.
Through a series of unfortunate events, the shaman is now 60. I wanted to be clever and “unlock” the XP again after I had assembled some good gear. But after a few battlegrounds, I dinged. Stupid experience in battlegrounds…
I wouldn’t like stairs as a tank, either. Firstly, all the healers always complain about you being out of sight, just because you’re standing on the top step; and secondly, and much more importantly, you have to drag all the plate gear and your shield and weapon up. Every. Single. Step.
Well thank you for the nice things you say – and the sarcastic things make me laugh so it’s all good
60 already!! In just one day or something. That’s excellent. I’ll be hitting 60 after Xmas at my rate !
Yes tanks & stairs don’t go together – I’m sure the noise of the shield banging each step also alerts the enemy to your presence. In all ways stairs in dungeons are bad!