The response to, “How do you keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris?” is not “Erect a giant, impassable wall between the farm and Paris,” it’s, “Make the farm more attractive.”

~ Sleutel, wow.com

In this dream, among other things, Yunaris invited me into an Ulduar 10 PUG.

Tiinalria had to say about this, “Behave well, and you’ll dream that he invited you into a TOTC 25 PUG!”

“Everyone knows” that female characters in WoW are constantly /kissed, /flirted and otherwise hit on by male characters. Right?

Depends — and I’ve seen that kind of separation noted by at least two testimonies, one of which I’m quoting below.

I’m a female who plays mostly female characters. Whether or not you get attention from male players who want to shower you with “gifts” depends, like rl, on if you act like a tramp or not. The sexier, flirtier, more helpless you act, the more you will attract that sort of organ-driven male player to give you things. I’ve been gaming since the early days of table-top and at 44 have been, or am in, almost every major game in the market and its the same in each and every single one.

Playing a female who does not need to be rescued, does not flirt, does not act all coquettish gets you precisely nothing and thats fine with me. So before you assume that every female character gets more stuff because of the sex of the character, know that it has nothing to do with the sexual representation of the toon, but on the flirty, slutty way males play those females.

I will also tell you that most women can tell which females are being played by males after hanging out with them even a short time because they play women the way their little pubescent little dreams WANT their women to act. Most women, women of any quality at all, do not act in RL the way most males play their female characters.

Source

From the Stormwind Book of Laws:

§15: Being a pillock.

Watchmans discretion. Appropriate punishment, which may involve the watch simply ignoring the presence of the citizen in question.

In retrospect, putting a link here from the Watch Records site was a mistake (although it’s not like this site is secret anyway). I’ve removed it.

Just be warned that it contains some pretty disturbing personal stuff, which might semi-consciously affect your perception of my character even if you don’t want it. If this warning doesn’t stop you, then sure, go ahead.

I can recall scenes from video games, but when I try to imagine myself as my WoW character, my mind immediately starts filling in graphic details that weren’t there, without any conscious intervention.

For example, one day my character was sitting on a bench in the Cathedral Square, and nothing interesting was going on. I felt bored and sleepy, so I closed my eyes and tried to draw the scene in my mind casting myself as the character. And then, even though I only “fed” my imagination the basic picture, it went more vivid. The bench itself is basically a glorified grey cuboid in the game, but in my mind it became more realistic, with random irregularities on the surface, litter thrown around, and I even imagined what it felt like to touch it. The same occurred with other details of the scene I focused on, although the “big picture” was blurry.

Two parts.

In the first one, I was playing a deep immersion game based on Darths & Droids, which was apparently mixed in my mind with Dmitry Puchkov’s Storm in the Glass — to the point that, when we got to a point when Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan reached a hangar resembling that in Enter the Matrix (?!), Puchkov could not continue writing for the game until David Morgan-Mar and company produced more material for the comic.

The second part re-enacted the east coast of Eastern Plaguelands, as it appears in the non-instanced zone: the Ruins of the Scarlet Enclave, with Acherus hanging above it in the sky. I do not remember what I was doing there, though.

To no surprise, it had two settings blended into one.

The dream was basically a modernized “retelling” of certain parts of the biblical Book of Genesis, most notably the creation of the world in six days. However, it was also intermixed with the death knight starting area, complete with Acherus-style teleporters that I kept using, and pleasant seaside scenery — a coast with a cliff, seagulls (if I remember correctly), for some reason a playground, and one of the aforementioned teleporters. Much like the Havenshire coast — before the destruction, that is.

There was something earlier that was related to “my gender thing” (as Madclaw called it). From what I remember, I was in that scene in female mode, and it also included Niobe from The Matrix in her usual red outfit. (Best thing of all? I know why!)

In the main (WoW) part, which imprinted in my memory, consisted of me clearing an instance with Sephi and some other guildmates. I say “an instance” but it was clearly Zul’Farrak, it was just never referred to by name in the dream. And it mirrored the actual memory of us doing so yesterday.

We traveled to my grandfather’s home, and I engaged in my usual lament about having nothing to do there.

Somehow, I kept switching between that apartment and an environment much like WoW (apparently Tanaris), where, however, I was physically present. I was to retrieve a hidden stash by distracting Horde guards from it.

The stash, and everything that followed, was related to the history of the French Revolution and especially the demise of King Louis XVI. I replayed that information in my head as I was making a picture collection of sorts, representing various stages of the revolution up until the Reign of Terror.

I was playing WoW almost the entire dream. I believe Nyoma was in it and took her part in something important that happened before I briefly woke up. I should have written that down immediately, and it feels like the information is there and just needs a small nudge to come up.

Among the last scenes was an assessment on my sexuality, which was, however, inconclusive.

I finally downloaded and installed the thing — hopefully it will stop dreams about it.

On to level 55.

Having nothing to do, I went to bed earlier than usual — at 23:28. I spent that time on another WILD attempt, which I can now call semi-successful.

I started with the usual full-body relaxation, from the toes to the head, and as soon as I reached my eyes, I concentrated on the visions and stopped paying attention to both my body and external distractions. Eventually, after some hypnagogic imagery, there was a very short blackout that I don’t remember, after which I ended up not feeling anything, just moving along the road from the Gorodok shop to the Trade Center as a kind of disembodied observer.

And then TWANG! I dropped out, and suddenly weird but pleasant feelings of “electrification” started running through my entire body. I waited until they calmed down a bit, then recalled (with effort) the scene I dropped out of and continued to induce the vision. To avoid thinking about my limbs, I just imagined floating in the air on the street and pushing myself forward with force of will.

Twice along the way, I started feeling my imaginary arms — dream arms, if you will — going a bit back and forward while I could still feel lying in my bed. And both times, it once again ended in a TWANG! and weird cessation of the sensations that vocabulary lacks the words to describe. Also, there were three cases of “near-blackouts” when for a split second I thought I was about to lose my consciousness — before, that feeling rarely occurred when I was feeling sleepy after not getting enough sleep.

After that, I looked at the clock and saw that it was 00:14, and decided to just fall asleep as usual. I remember enough of the dream that followed to write it down. Which I’ll do in the next post.

First, I accidentally saw some Russian TV series (of the usual variety with boring camera shots and wooden acting) that used the opening music from Stargate Atlantis overlaid onto an original video sequence. Needless to say, I was enraged.

Later, I was wandering around the microdistrict looking for a place where I could buy the European WOTLK. (Because — and that’s a real life fact here — only the Russian version is present in retail stores. Mind you — now this is from the dream once again — I checked an Internet shop before, but its delivery time was listed as one to two weeks, and I was understandably unimpressed.) I found it in a fictional location that has already been present in one dream before that — in that one, it was the site of a WoW-ish battle between some dwarves and… a different clan of dwarves, I think, although I don’t remember.

In both dreams, that fictional building displaced the square with my former school and the nearby hospital and kindergarten. This may be another emerging stock location. Its distinctive feature is a white hallway with windows at one side and doors at the other, resembling the school and hospital from Evangelion, as well as the actual school that the building replaces.

In this particular dream, one of the rooms behind the doors was a medical-looking office, in which I bought a WOTLK box using my Visa Electron. Incidentally, along with it, I also took another card out of my pocket: the white keycard I use to open the door at work. They commented on that.

And once again, I found myself unwilling to wake up because it would mean losing the newly-acquired game. In all seriousness, this has to stop. Today I’ll go to the nearest academ.org office, buy a WebMoney card, and just buy the bloody key online. Screw the box, and screw Blizzard retailers.

Added: While I could find neither the means to buy WebMoney cards nor the means to transfer from a Visa to a WebMoney account, amazingly enough, Blizzard made it possible to upgrade the account online. At long last… Now I’m looking at the download screen instead of playing the game for the 3 hours remaining before I sleep because I can’t play the TBC client with a WOTLK account. “Thanks”, Blizzard.

Sephi mentioned offhand in guild chat that she would like to marry a “pretty draenei male” in-game.

But in all seriousness… “pretty, draenei, male” is like “cheap, fast, high-quality”. It’s a “pick any two” thing.

And once again it’s related to my activities in WoW just before going to sleep. It’s seriously getting irritating.

Helik (I think it was Helik) wanted to hold this week’s guild meeting in Un’Goro instead of the traditional Forest Song, so, while hopping through Un’Goro, I pointed out that many guild members will be too low-level to get there safely.

Occurred almost entirely in WoW, in my traditional deep immersion gaming fashion.

Erales lamented my inability to follow him to Northrend, so, eventually, I gave up and upgraded my account to WOTLK just to be able to visit Northrend, even though I was too low-level for it. After that, as we were standing in Stormwind Harbor, it turned out he didn’t like the zone where the ship went — so I teleported us both to Menethil (simply by thinking about it!) to board the ship bound for the other zone.

However, before we could, I noticed that my character was somehow level 64 (so far, only 48 in reality), which meant I was eligible for a death knight. I went to the character creation screen and started creating a draenei DK — fortunately, the random appearance that was there from the start more or less matched the one I wanted to play.

As I was waking up, I found myself unwilling to, on the grounds that all that would cease to exist and I would find myself once again with a TBC account and no death knight.

Shattrath is empty. It’s actually weird, after all the time it took me to grow accustomed to the Terrace of Lag. Everyone is in Northrend now — I’m only level 48 so I don’t care about the expansion much for now, but I can only imagine how lagadelic it is at the moment.

Well, at least it means that I can lead friends to Shattrath and roleplay there relatively uninterrupted now.

The old world is flooding with death knights. Stormwind, as the de facto RP hub of Argent Dawn, has suffered particularly. I’ve already met several stereotypical ones, one Mary Sue description, and roleplayed with one “nice” DK. I’m tempted to walk to a random draenei DK and ask how the heck this race-class combination makes sense.

And why did everyone decide they’re all undead, anyway? What are undead DKs, then — doubly undead?

Consider the below post as coming out. My insecurities have simply been boiling too much to keep private anymore. (And no, I’m not going to change my beliefs just because some LiveJournal moderator said so.) You can imagine how desperate I was to blurt everything out when I did it in private OOC conversations to a random (and surprisingly mature, as in non-childish) 25-year-old female roleplayer in World of Warcraft.

She treated my confessions, which were even more numerous (and disgusting to most) than what I wrote on this site, with surprising interest and understanding. Since then, we’ve been freely talking in private about our respective anatomies and experiences with them. I listen to her with great interest as well, because most of what she says is something I’ll never be able to experience — yet I want to know what various things feel like for females, if only for the purposes of fiction (but seriously, who am I kidding here?).

For the skeptics out there, I doubt it would be humanly possible to make up all that. And if you think there’s no such thing as female roleplayer in World of Warcraft, go douse yourself in cold water right now, especially if your name is Ranma Saotome.

WoW was my second major experience in roleplaying in general. I only started on Argent Dawn in September, but I’ve already become attached to the character beyond what can be considered healthy. Blizzard summed it best with their loading screen tips: “Remember to keep all things in moderation, even World of Warcraft“. I actually found myself looking in a mirror more since I started actively roleplaying, just to avoid mentally associating myself with the character’s appearance stronger than my own (which I also became more concerned with lately).

Regarding the Kreia quote itself, I think TVTropes said basically the same thing even more succintly: Poor Communication Kills.