Nerd Badges – Blog Azeroth Shared Topic

I’m a few days behind on this, but last week’s shared topic from BlogAzeroth is as follows:

How do you express your geekery? Do you own obvious paraphernalia like a Horde-symbol bumper sticker, in-joke tshirts like the dps/ups pun, or less obviously related items like a gift from a guildie? Rather than physical indicators, do you mix nerd lingo into your everyday speech or talk/post about geekdom in non-nerd spaces? How do you advertise your nerd tendencies? Does it help you to attract new nerd friends?

Well let me assure you, I DO proudly display nerd badges. And yes, it helps attract new nerd friends. Which is a total bonus, but is not the reason why I display my nerdiness. I just figure that it only takes people about 2 minutes of knowing me to realize I’m a total dork so the least I can do is help people realize why I am the way I am. “Aw, the poor dear can’t help but act this way. Just look at her, she’s a total nerd. Bless her little heart.”

My two most recent purchases have already been responsible for starting several random conversations with strangers.
Gas station cashiers, strangers in the breakroom at work, even bank tellers have all commented on my bracelets. It’s been pretty evenly split on which bracelet gets the most comments. I haven’t had them very long, but I love them.

I’m a fat chick, so I don’t really have a lot of nerd t-shirts. One, because no one needs to stare at my fatness to try and read a shirt and two, because it’s just a waste of money since I
won’t look all cute in them. HOWEVER, because I’m a fat chick and Elfi is a night elf druid, I HAD to get this shirt a couple of years ago. It cracks me up every time I wear it.

Another place you can find proof of my nerdiness is on the back of my car where I proudly display the following stickers. (taken in the dark with a cell phone, crappy picture)

And then there’s my desk at work which is really geeked out. It’s not even all pictured here. Of course, working in the IT industry I’m surrounded by people who understand why my desk is decorated the way it is. They can appreciate it.

At home there are WoW plushies and Darth Vader helmets sitting out on display. I am also one of those annoying people who talks in lolspeak quite often, though only to people I know will understand it. I’m quite the oddity in my family of rednecks. My parents and the one brother I was raised with just scratch their heads at me and wonder what the hell I’m talking about. It seems to really cause my mother some serious pain to be out shopping with me and watch her 41 year old daughter buy Star Wars toys and World of Warcraft trading cards. But I can’t help it, I’m a nerd and I’m proud of it.

Elfi Got A Makeover

In an effort to switch things up some I decided to give Elfi a bit of a makeover. I really wish there were some way to change her appearance without paying for it. But you know what they say about wishes … all sort of things. Just pick one.

Anyway, here’s her before pic and her after pic. I like the change. For now, at least.

Before:

After:

Ah Achievements, How I’ve Missed Thee

Last night I spent a couple of hours on Elfi (original Elfi, not evil clone Elfi) just trying to slowly get back into the swing of doing some dailies and remembering what spell does what. After the daily fishing and cooking quests, I went to Hyjal and worked on dailies there. Man, I had not been there in so long. And I don’t mean because I’m playing Star Wars, I mean even months before that. It’s really starting to sink in with me just how much I had not been enjoying myself in Azeroth the last several months I was there. What I still can’t seem to figure out is why. It had nothing to do with my guild, it had nothing to do with me being a healer, I guess it was just burn out? I find that hard to believe since I’ve never been a raider so I wasn’t suffering from weekly wipes or anything like that. Like I said previously, I just felt lost. I don’t think it was with the game specifically, because in 2011 I really started to spend some time rolling new characters on random servers and leveling them all up to around 30 before wandering off to do it again with another new character. So I was still enjoying questing and being logged in. But then while I was on those servers I didn’t have any of my friends around, so I would begin to get bored. Does any of that make any sense?

And what the hell does any of that have to do with the title of this post? See how easily distracted I can get? So back to Hyjal. I’m questing away, beating on some Pyrelords in Sethria’s Roost, I saw a shadow on the ground of something huge and dragon-like flying above me. I looked up and sure enough, it was Andrazor. Since my Pyrelord had just died I shifted into flight form and chased the fiery bird down. Once I was over an area I knew I could land safely, I cast moonfire (it’s so great I can cast this in flight form) and dropped down to a ledge where Andrazor begin attacking me. I had been working on the Protectors of Hyjal quest, so I had my little gang of bad ass druids with me and we start wailing away. But not very far into the fight, he was spraying fire all over me and as I turned to move out of the path of said fire, I fell off the ledge. It was in an area where I could not climb back up to it and I couldn’t mount or shapeshift because I was still in combat. So I just stood there looking up and seeing bits of fire and a few random feet and elbows as the fight continued. Suddenly, I noticed Andrazor’s health was really going down at a pretty good clip. By now my little band of npc’s should have died or Andrazor should have came to find me. But instead, I was somehow still winning the fight. I decided it must be a bug, but I would gladly accept the kill regardless. A couple of minutes later and the fight is over. I fly up and loot the body and I’m celebrating secretly to myself about how the fight bugged out, when I suddenly notice Caligan had said “where are you Elfi?” in guild chat. I said I was in Hyjal doing dailies and he said something about being there too. I don’t remember how the conversation went exactly, but I asked him if he had happened to see my battle with the fire bird. He said something along the lines of “Yep, I was right there.” Then I see he has waved to me. Ah, he must be close. But where?

To make an already long story a little less longer… or something, Cal had been fighting the damn bird the whole time. He was standing right behind me on the ledge as I looted. I have no idea where he came into the fight, he obviously spotted me and came over to help and I had no idea. It was him on the ledge killing the elite that I was so proud of. Lol. When I got knocked off he didn’t know where I was. Since I thought I was there alone, I wasn’t updating anyone on what was going on. So I had a good laugh at my stupidity and the fact that I’m so unobservant. And he likely had a good eye-roll about the same things. But then he spotted Fah Jarakk standing right below us so he suggested we group up and kill that guy too. We requested the help of a guildie to come bear tank for us and we killed that dude dead. Can you guess what happened next? No, you’re wrong. What happened next was we looked up and Searris was standing just right over yonder. So we ran right over and killed that dude dead too. I finally got the achievement for The Fiery Lords of Sehria’s Roost. Woot. I don’t recall off the top of my head how long achievements have been in the game now, but I still love seeing those damn things pop up. I also still love my multishot add-on that automatically takes screenshots of achievements, because I forgot to.

And then? Then as we were headed back out of Sethria’s Roost, Cal spotted the fire dog, Kelbnar, which he still needed to get his achievement. We swooped down and beat that puppy worse than Michael … nevemind. It really was amazing to have them all spawned right there at the same time. In 15 minutes we had killed all 4 required for this achievement. It was a lot of fun and I appreciate the help I got from my guildies.

So This Just Happened

Elfindale, the Night Elf Druid, now has an evil twin. With the exact same name. Which makes her more of an evil clone than a twin. Because most people don’t name their twins the exact same name. But I digress. Meet Elfindale, the Blood Elf Mage.

Let me try to explain a few things. My break from WoW would have happened regardless of SWTOR, and SWTOR did not cause me to need a break. There was something just not sitting right with me. Elfindale is my one true love, my only level 85. I have a handful of alts, but never stuck with them long because I just always wanted to be logged into Elfi. But she became useless. She was/is a casual healer in a raiding guild with more than enough healers to go around. I have spent so much of my time in Cata simply farming herbs and playing the Auction House. I rarely even did any 5 mans because somewhere along the way (before moving to the raiding guild) I lost confidence in my healing. It’s all I ever wanted to do but I became too afraid to do it. So I decided to just switch to laser chicken and no big deal. Except then I really lost interest in everything. SWTOR is amazing and I’m loving it and trust me, it’s filling up my time and then some. But I do still WANT to play WoW.

So over the past week, I’ve started dipping my toes back into the pool. And I’ve dipped some new toes into new pools. I’ve created and deleted a couple of toons this week as I’ve tried new races and new classes and spent 7 or 8 levels deciding how they felt. An Orc hunter, a Troll rogue, a Gnome warrior. Nothing really felt right. I missed Elfi and yet cannot bear to play her. I thought briefly of deleting her and starting over, but she’s the first ever character I ever rolled and I just could never do that. Too many memories tied up with her. I thought briefly about unexpectedly gquiting and server transferring her, but it’s not about my guild or my server at all. I like people there and they have nothing to do with Elfi feeling useless to me. No matter what server she was on she would still feel the same to me.

That’s when it finally hit me that maybe I should just recreate her differently. I’m playing caster dps in SWTOR and really enjoying it, so let’s try that out in WoW with a race I’ve never played before. I’m still in the starting area, and it’s not like it’s going to be a fast process because I am concentrating on getting two characters raid ready in SWTOR, but so far this alternative Elfi feels good. And there’s the added bonus that I don’t have to change the name of my blog if I want to talk about her. WIN!

The One Where I Haven’t Forgotten My Promise

A little over a month ago I told you a few important things, the most important of which was that I was going to be playing Star Wars: The Old Republic and things would slow down for me with WoW temporarily. In that same post I promised that I would not let this blog just fade away with no one having any real clue as to why. That is still true. I realize I’m not posting here regularly at all and that’s likely messing up your feed reader with wasted space, but I did want to stop by and assure you that while I am completely addicted to SW:TOR and having a total blast blogging about it, I have not quit this place.

It’s true that I haven’t logged into WoW for more than 30 minutes since I got early access on December 13th, and it’s probably true that won’t improve any time soon. But I just can’t say I’m done with it. And honestly, that has more to do with this blog and my identity as Elfi than it does about the game itself. Sadly, there are no elves in space so I have adopted a new identity. But I still think of myself as Elfi and luckily, I have a lot of friends who still call me that.

So this is the official word that Elfi’s World is not finished yet. I’ve missed being here and I’ve missed my faithful readers. The SW:TOR blogging community is growing and I’m proud to be a part of it, but I also am proud to be part of the WoW community and I just can’t give that up yet. I will continue to post here. Just this morning I logged in and checked my mail, did a couple of dailies, transmuted something and actually queued up for a quick Arathi Basin PvP battle. That’s something I never really did much of before, but maybe I’ll give it another chance as a way to spend a few hours a week logged in. We’ll see. If I do, I’ll be sure and keep you updated on how much I hate a fucking Blood Elf Rogue.