Wall of Whispers.

All I am going to do here is link you to a tweet.

Dear America (and the World, by Extension),

Now, I don't follow football. Especially where the World Cup is concerned, I think it is a blight, especially for the English, who seem to like to take it as an opportunity to show the hosting nation just how full of pathetic hooligans England is.

However, it is in my best interests that England stay in for as long as possible, since it means that, whenever England are playing a match, I get to socialise with certain people and do certain things with an increased frequency -- plus, everywhere in town is nice and quiet because everyone is in pubs or at home watching the matches.

So if you guys could let us get to the semi-finals, at least, that would be nice. Go on. Do it for your old pal Sinespe. He likes getting tail.

The Huge, Throbbing Stick and the Tiny Carrot

No euphemisms here.

This is what happens when you are useful.

This is what happens when you are useless. (See over the page, too.)

Take your pick, ladies and gents.

Touched by a Troll on YouTube!

http://www.youtube.com/trolltouched

I'm not telling you which voice is mine.

Raid SHeroics

We tried Earth, Wind and Fire tonight.

Dear God it is hard.

We'll get it later in the week.

HTC Bastard.

DISCLAIMER: O2 are awesome people. I am retarded.

For six years, I have had the same phone: my trusty Nokia 7250i. Given that it is now more rusty than trusty, I figured it was time to get a new one.

So, I go to the o2 store. I happened to see the HTC Desire, which was described by one of my friends as, "Like an iPhone, but without the restrictions that come with an apple logo." I had a nice long talk with the trainee who had asked if I needed any help, and he gave me the outline of the pay monthly tariffs (I am currently, and always have been, Pay as You Go, but recently I have found that I am in need of talk-time, owing to being in contact with one of my long-lost school friends, rather than so many hundred free texts per month; calls to other networks being needlessly excessively expensive as they are, I figured I'd go Contract and get some free ones).

I, intelligently, I thought, said that I would go away and think about it for a while before deciding whether I wanted it. Because I really did want it, but I didn't want just to get it on impulse. So I went away, spoke with my mum, outlined what I intended to do (my sister is the complete opposite of this: whenever she gets a new phone or car, mum knows after the event. I figured I could do with a voice of reason, however), and asked her if she thought it was a good idea. She did, so I went back to the store and asked to get it. Here begins my long journey filled with trepidation on the road to entering the 21st century 10 years too late.

Problem 1: Saturday 22nd May: Phone not in stock. This is fine, it's perfectly common. The chap I spoke to was very nice and said that he would take my name and number, and would phone me when they knew that they were getting some more in. This was duly done on Wednesday, and the phonecall detailed that a new delivery of Desires would be in on Thursday and ready by 12 o'clock. Okay, I said, I'll come in after work.

Problem 2: Thursday 27th May, 2.30 p.m.: I don't have my account number to hand. That's fine, I thought, I'll go to my bank and get a statement with it printed on. I'll be back, I said, after a meeting that I had at three o'clock. So, I went to my bank. While I was getting my statement, the cashier asked me if my address was still correct. It had not been correct since I had started going to university, and I thought that now might be a good time to update it. So, I told her my new address, and the system was updated.

Problem 3: Thursday 27th May, 5.10 p.m.: Card declined in O2 store. Wrong address: Because of how banks work, it would take a while for my updated details to be completely fed through the system. As a result, my updated address, for the time-being, would not work for such things as setting up a Direct Debit for a phone contract. I was advised by Fred, the person who has the misfortune of dealing with such an idiot but who is very kind and polite about the whole thing and entirely sees my perspective. He advised that I come back tomorrow and try it again.

Problem 4: Friday 28th May: O2 Exeter's linked computer systems are down. My card is still declining on the non-linked, manual system. I am advised to come back tomorrow.

Someone doesn't want me to get my new phone. I am determined that tomorrow there will be no more hitches and that I will get the arsing thing.

UPDATE 29th May: Still nothing. Apparently it could be a credit issue, which is pretty retarded, so I now have to wait for someone to get back to me on that front.

Tier 10 trinkets

10-man: 1.
25-man: 3.

I hear 25-man raiders have three trinket slots.

Oh wait.

@Nymarie

Re this:

The cloaks aren't really that good for Shadow. Spirit/Crit is pretty suboptimal -- not quite as bad as the stat combination on that god-awful Tier 9 Spirit/Hit helm, but still not fantastic. I'd hold out for Lich Wrappings (Valithria-10). A stop-gap with +hit is Kurisu's Indecision (ToC5N). Where emblems are concerned, I instead recommend investing in 4T10 Shadow if you have not already. Whenever someone decides that they want to develop their shadow gear set, Tier 10 must be the first port of call. It is so powerful that it dwarfs all other Frost Emblems purchases

So, with regards to some gearing suggestions: Tier 10 Gloves, Helm, Shoulders and Chest (In that order) should be considered. Your Tier 10 Disc legs will be just fine until a SP/Crit/Haste alternative comes along. The Tier 10 Shadow legs have too much hit on them. Your Circle of Ossus will also do nicely in Shadow.

... Although, having said all that, hit rating on 25-man Icecrown gear seems to be focused in the neck, one ring (Valanar's. Don't get the Crit/Hit one unless it is a stop-gap for the Haste/hit) and ... that's pretty much it for optimal slots, annoyingly. You don't want the Chest, Gloves or Shoulders because they're all tier slots. That's incredibly short-sighted, I think.

But let's have a play, shall we? We've identified this, this, this and this. 194 Hit. 95 short. Let's get these. 31 to go. These. Done.

Alternative: Tier 10 Shadow legs instead of Tier 10 Shadow chest (+80) and a Rigid gem in the cloak (+24).

(I know that you have the +hit offhand, but you'll want to get rid of that as soon as you win Dying Light. Dying Light is wonderful for Shadow.)

Obviously these are all optimal selections rather than necessarily what you'll be able to get your hands on at first. I tend to do that.

And now I must go out, so I'll have to cut short my advice for the time-being.

Bad Priest #243

That's a random number, of course.

Sinespe versus Blendia.

Just look at those delicious Haste/Spirit gems socketed everywhere in that Priest's bloody gear. Funnily enough, despite his over-zealous hasty behaviour, he almost has less haste than I do.

But look at that spellpower. 3150 without Inner Fire. Not even my Draenei has that much. Full 251 and 264 epics. A challenge, surely, in spite of the terrible gemming choices.

The boss? Toravon the Ice Watcher.

The result? An obliteration.

5.8k? Seriously? Full bloody buffs, right down to an unholy death knight for the extra disease damage, and you pull 5.8k? You're about 3k below what you should be capable of doing with that gear. Full bloody Tier 10, and all.

Want to know the kicker? Tier 10 legs dropped. Now, I already have these, and I will only be using them for a very short period of time while I accumulate enough emblems to have four pieces of tier 10 without relying on something with a severe problem in the hit department.

This guy, on the other hand, already has four pieces of tier 10, and Leggings of Woven Death. That's pretty much Best in Slot without access to anything above ICC25-N content.

He rolled on the legs.

I died a little inside.

Why I love being British

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/7746090/Cream-teas-battle-rages-between-Devon-and-Cornwall.html

That is all.

Americanisms.

The ones that make no sense and which make me cringe whenever I read them.

Language is important. Thinking about language is even more important. If you use a word without knowing what it means, you have a high probability of being ousted for attempting to embellish the expanse of your vocabulary by the use of oddities of verbosity.

Text-speak, it has been claimed, uses an altogether different part of the brain from the one devoted to language and communication: it cuts out that part of our brain which is designed to think, carefully, about whether we are using words appropriately, aptly and correctly. Instead of thinking how to express an idea in 140 characters using full words and sentences, text-speak is a convenient circumnavigation past the necessity of considering and weighing up each word. The counter-argument is that considering and weighing each word could take longer than just writing in a sentence composed of half-words, and that text-speak is used for its expediency, which makes it appropriate to the medium of communication in which it is deployed -- text messages themselves designed to be a quick way of telling something to someone.

This argument falls apart, however, when one considers the simple adage, "Practice makes perfect." The same argument is applied to using text-speak on-line: it is claimed that the fractions of seconds saved by missing out characters can make all the difference on, to take a WoW example, a message typed in the middle of a boss-fight, where time is at a premium for communication owing to being completely disabled while typing. But consider this: what if one actually practises typing full words from the start? They'll type quicker as they learn the positions of the keys. Text-speak is a whole other language with its own alphabet -- pseudo-Oriental in its use of certain characters to represent whole words (compare Japanese or Chinese Kanji with "4" as a substitute for the combination of phonics producing the sound "for").
To become fluent in any language, you have to think in that language. That's what fluency means: you spend no time at all consciously thinking about what you want to say -- the words enter your speech centres directly from your subconscious and go straight out; and, conversely, words of others in the same language flow into your brain and are immediately understood. A scholar of Latin could stare at a complex sentence for many minutes to work out its full meaning; show it to a Roman and he'll react to it instantly.
Where typing is concerned, the same logic applies, but rather than your brain being the key motivator, it is a combination of your brain and muscles. Muscle memory is used to remember the position of the keys. Assuming one has one's hands anchored at the same location on the keyboard, one's muscles learn exactly how far to move in order to press down on a particular key. Combine that with fluency in the language, and you have the phenomenon touch-typing.
So, learning fluency in English, rather than in text-speak, means that the two are apples and oranges. Those who claim that the amount of time saved by cutting out characters make such a claim from the position of typing proper English really slowly. I would type text-speak as slowly as they would type English.

This is a large diversion from the point I want to make, which is the following: once you are fluent in a language, you can devote more time to analysing it instead of spending time making sure that what you are saying it grammatically accurate. You can analyse the differences in meaning between "drenched" and "damp"; both mean "wet" but have differing levels of wetness associated with them. This varying scale can be applied to other, more subtle examples: Greed vs. Gluttony, Tautology vs. Redundancy. By such analysis, one starts to use more precise language; one becomes more efficient, in a way that text-speak, by its very nature as an invention of convenience thought up in but a moment compared to the millennial evolution of English, cannot hope to achieve. In that previous sentence, I could have said "the evolution of English over thousands of years"; but "millennial" is more succint and conveys the exact same meaning.

So. Americanisms. Why am I annoyed at their use of language today? Well, it isn't the spelling, for once. At least, not really. Instead, my problem is that some of our English idioms have been corrupted by our Free cousins, in ways that do not make sense; ways that show, clearly, a disregard for actual thought: text-speak evolutions, done in haste, mistranslation or for convenience.

Some examples for you:

Correct idiom: "I couldn't care less." Meaning of idiom: "I don't care." Americanised idiom: "I could care less."
Why the Americanism is wrong: Just think about it for a moment. If you use a conditional sentence indicating that you could care less about something, you are saying that the current reality is that you do care to an extent -- that it would be possible for you in another circumstance to care to a lesser extent than you currently do. But the meaning is supposed to be "I do not care one little bit. It is impossible for my care level to be lower: My level of care is 0 on the scale from 0 to infinity. I could not care less."

Correct idiom "There is still a way to go." Meaning of idiom: "Progress is still to be made before we can consider this deed accomplished." Americanism: "There is still a ways to go."
Why the Americanism is wrong: a way. A: singular, impersonal pronoun. Singular. It is a singular, non-collective noun. Change it for any similar word: "We have been travelling on this path for a mile, but we are only half way along it. There is still a mile to go." Not "A miles", "a mile".

Now, by the sounds of things, I am late to the party on this one, because Webster has prepared a defence: it insists that idioms are not defined by their grammatical structure, and that, by their nature, require foundational knowledge of the culture in which they are used if they are to be understood. I do not consider this argument remotely adequate: There is no cultural difference between "A way to go" and "A ways to go". They convey the exact same thing. The only difference is that one of them is wrong. Furthermore, "I could/couldn't care less" is not the same as the difference between, for instance, "He kicked the bucket," in English and ,"He broke his pipe," in French -- in the latter idiomatic construct, and others of its kind, the thought being conveyed is completely based in imagery and metaphor. "I couldn't care less", however, is entirely linguistic. Calling these literal expressions "Idioms" is therefore something of a misnomer: They are commonly used expressions specific to a particular language, and they are expressed as self-contained units in the same way that individual words are, but their grammar should nevertheless be correct. There is no reason why someone from another culture should not be able to understand the meaning expressed by "I couldn't care less" simply by reading the sentence.

I will come up with more examples and lengthen this treatise, but I should really do the heroic daily and stuff.

SHeroics.

Meet the Fungineers:
Sinespe, Hand of A'dal: Undead Shadow Priest
Isolde the Patient: Undead Discipline Priest
Fermy of the Nightfall: Blood Elf Holy Paladin (And Kartok the Patient: Blood Elf Beast Mastery Hunter)
Twilight Vanquisher Zorzil: Troll Protection Warrior
Starcaller Drenera: Undead Arcane Mage (And Cherana: Blood Elf Protection Paladin)

Together, we are Touched by a Troll. We intend to be a 10-man raiding guild in Cataclysm. We are transferring to Stormrage, where there are actually good people. (Cyclone-EU is a fantastic battlegroup. Frenzy, on the other hand, has Magtheridon in it. Oh dear.)

To tide us over until Cataclysm actually gets launched, we intend to get a decent raiding base together and clear some ICC content. And, while we wait for that, to get us noticed, we are doing SHeroics.

"SHeroics" is a term we coined from calling what we were doing in Heroics "Shenanigans". "Heroic Shenanigans" became "SHeroics". SHeroics are Heroic Hard Modes. "But, Chris, 'Heroic' means 'Hard mode' already!" Well, yes, but have you seen Wrath 5-man Heroics? They're a joke. You can't really call them "Hard".

So, what are Heroic Hard Modes? Simple, really: engaging multiple bosses at the same time, and killing them one-by-one.

This post is a trial-run of the formula I will be using on our guild site, which will hopefully have a blogging section. There will be Youtube videos of the kills when my lovely companions have worked out how video editing works. We have already done one SHeroic -- Nexus -- and we have been experimenting with Utgarde Pinnacle. So, without further ado:

SHeroic Nexus
Bosses engaged: Ormorok --> Anomalous --> Telestra.
Kill order decided: Anomalous --> Telestra --> Ormorok
Toons used: Sinespe, Isolde, Cherana, Zorzil, Fermy.

After some experimentation, we found that the only way this was going to work was to clear all trash and pull backwards through the instance from Ormorok. We had accidentally killed the Alliance captain during trash clearing, so killing all four bosses will have to wait for another time.

So, we pulled Ormorok, then worked our way back through a sea of respawned mini-lashers (The Aura of Regeneration mobs) to get to Anomalous. Cherana and Fermy went with Ormorok towards Telestra. Zorzil, Issy and I ran up to Anomalous to pull him. While on the move towards Telestra, I was killing the Chaotic Rifts to limit the adds we had. Upon reaching Telestra, our priority was to kill Anomalous first, since the number of adds was ludicrous. The combination of Telestra's AoE "freeze" stuns and Ormorok's Crystal Spikes was brutal, as was all the damage from Chaotic Rifts, adds, and Telestra's Blizzards, fire bombs and Gravity Wells. I died at around 30% of Anomalous' health, but that was the majority of the challenge: identifying which of his Chaotic Rifts was generating his immunity shield. Once that was overcome, the rest was relatively straightforward.

Attempts required: 2. (1 wipe, 1 kill).
Achievement name: "There's Plenty of Them to Go Around. [10]" Sequential achievement. Next achievements in sequence: "There's Even More of Them to Go Around. [25]" (O->A->AC->T Kill A Kill T Kill AC Kill O); "Chaos: It's Not Just a Theory. [40]" (Overview: " Pull O Pull A Pull AC Pull T Kill A Kill T Kite to K Kill O Pull K Kill K Kill AC".)

The beauty of SHeroics is in inventing these achievements. You can come up with various ways to pull, deal with and kill bosses, and the combinations you come up with will have varying levels of difficulty.

So watch this space for more Heroic Shenanigans.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Link.

The first of the refinements being made is that we're combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout.

SUCK IT. SUCK IT HARD.

About fucking time.

This is the appropriate form of greeting when someone takes an extra five minutes to log in, owing to the Cyclone battlegroup's login servers playing up,which they had been doing for days. Such was the level of playing-up of the login servers that it had been well documented on the official board for Cyclone over the past three days from when the problem started and, thus, should be at least partially expected and wholly sympathised with.

That is, of course, if you are more concerned about doing SRSBSNSS 5v5 than concerned about the actual "friends" (I use the term incredibly loosely, because I don't think it's appropriate at all -- it's more an aspiration) with whom you're doing said 5v5. Speaking of which, by the way, our 5s started out as just a way to get points and was never, and will never, be srsbsnss. 1950 does not make us awesome. Nor is it worth being so fucking acerbic, obsessed, and haranguing about.

It very quickly becomes suffocating to know that whenever I log into my toon I'm going to get people interrogating me on why I've not been online (Note, not "asking"; "interrogating". Asking is nice -- especially if it shows a regard for how I am. Interrogating doesn't care about how I am, it cares about the use of my toon for the sake of 5v5). I wonder what the chances are that that suffocation explains why, even when I do have free time lately, I'm more likely to log on to my Horde priest with other friends who don't have these scheduling expectations of me. Pretty high, I'd say.

My apologies to Elanie and Sane, who did nothing to piss me off and who, I hope, care more that I'm using my energy to immerse myself in the working world, and thus increase my employability, and that this is leaving me very tired at the end of the day, and in very little mood to deal with any other crap (that I already had done on Tuesday and had had quite enough of) such that I am in no mood to have sarcastic snipes thrown at me by the other two thanks to their complete selfishness and single-mindedness. "Just an excuse for taking so long".

Rad Nauseam

I have a job.

I start on Monday.

More 25-man exclusive crap

Grats Shadowmourners.

I will spare you all a 1.5k-word rant this time. You all know how much bullshit that is.

Tier 10 Healing.

Get it changed; and tell them to talk to us.

Because, right now, they're not discussing it with us at all.

Hell, if you're on the US forums, copy it over to them.

Want me in your guild?

Then don't advertise yourselves like this:

[14:25:04] [W From] [Bien]: Hey mate, you need a new guild ? :) we are a newly formed guild, gonna be a good raiding guild, and we would like to have you in :)
[14:25:09] [80:Bien]: Level 80 Human Paladin [Shadow Raiders] - The Forge of Souls

Because it translates as "You have awesome gear and I want you to carry people I already have in the guild who think they're a lot better than they are, and think that if they get four pieces of tier 10 like you they will, magically, know their class inside-out and pull the DPS you can."

______

Someone commented about me being in Inglourious Gankers. I am, as a pink pony-tailed gnome rogue. Levelling is very slow -- but I'll get my scalps in due course.

______

Account is due to expire in one month. Just before you start thinking I'm back. Oh, and I am deliberately being more of a jerk and caring less about being such. Retarded blog posts, which have their justification sounding very much like "Balance", are not softening my edges. "These people are clearly morons of the highest order [...] 'Everyone's opinion is equally valid', my arse!"

______

I am on Twitter now, for some reason.

______

"Lay" still takes a direct object.

Gambler's Fallacy

I have made it my business not to be kicked from any guild I join, nor have a guild application refused, nor be involved or be a party to pointless, destructive arguments through any medium. My luck on all fronts however has changed and it is time to assess where I stand.

Much like the gambler coin-tossing away his savings, I can rationalise that this is a downturn that will improve, or I can cut my losses and get out before I go insane. Having never been one to subscribe to fallacies against statistics, and being quite fond of what little sanity I have, guess which option I'm taking.

(Note: At this point I just start rambling, so the TL;DR is "To keep a long story short ... The End.")

WoW loses one shadow priest with an ego doing nothing but crowding up server space. One slightly louder voice in ~7 million. There was a post I was going to make at the turn of the decade pointing out that Anathema is nothing special, in response in part to someone on Wowhead's forums saying that they "couldn't do what I do": all I do is write into an easy-to-read form what is readily available for anyone to find out if they have a spare 20 minutes; and where my character is concerned all I do is press buttons in a certain way. As with quite a few of the unfinished posts in my Dashboard, I started to write it but then lost my flow and didn't return to it. I could say to myself that people will notice the void left by my departure, but that'd be a lie.

Funnily enough, I knew there was a reason why I wasn't interested in WoW when it first came out, despite having been quite fond of WCII and WCIII. I think I need to get back into that mentality which takes a while to react to anything, instead of jumping on anything new and exciting. There's probably quite a lot to be said for taking everything slowly. It's more biological -- I won't necessarily say "natural", because "nature" within humans isn't the same as with any other animal given our self-awareness -- it adds a layer.

You might've figured out by now that I'm just rambling and not really wanting to press "publish" on something quite so short. Rambling is something I'm rather good at. One of my favourite things to do in the company of someone else is just to wind through long, tangential discussions -- no central point, just jumping opportunistically from one subject to another. I don't do it enough with the people with whom I'd get the most out of it -- I'm too comfortable with my default position of silence. (I know, right? For someone who types such long stuff you'd probably expect me to talk a lot. Not so. I don't necessarily prefer silence; my brain just shuts off when it feels it isn't needed, expected or wanted.) On Thursday I move into a house whose occupants are 5 people I've never met -- hopefully at least one of them will encourage me to ramble speakily, and perhaps even to get back into coining odd words like "speakily". My imagination has been rather stunted over the past few years; it's not a good thing to lose so easily -- it's one of the things we should long to hold on to from our childhoods for as long as we can; not necessarily out of any sense of staving off the inevitable, but just because it's enjoyable to imagine.

So ... yeah. Sorry if this is sudden, or whatever. You can all go back now to your respective comings-from with whatever opinion you like of me, of shadow priests, of maths, of "being emo" as I believe kids like to call it these days, of anything. Hopefully I won't be around to hear it.

Hide Helm.

I have raided with Fancy Hat Club for 8 months. Over those months, I have found a home -- after almost three years of playing the game. A place in which I feel comfortable raiding, and don't feel the need to reach through my monitor and throttle the other 9-24 people with whom I'm wiping on bosses. The 6-hour-per-week structure was perfect for a 10-man guild: Not as many nights as would be needed for Icecrown Hard modes -- so, when they come around, raid extension lockouts will likely be needed so that time isn't spent clearing normal mode bosses first off -- but enough to clear each wing of Icecrown before the new one had been released, and more than sufficient competency to form a solid basis for defeating Arthas.

Apparently, though, I missed the point completely. Today I was kicked out, after assisting with killing Putricide and Lanathel (Shadow and Discipline, respectively, and damn hard roles they are to fill successfully) and assisting with the acquisition of Proto-Drakes and Tribute to Insanity. -- Apparently, even that sentence misses the point completely.

The reason why I've been rejected after an 8-month trial period (Because that's effectively what has happened: I've never been a member; just a very very long-standing, very valuable triallist who has now gotten on the members' nerves to the point where they would rather I leave) is something I'm still struggling actually to find, but I think the best summation of it is: "Some of the core of the guild decided on my behalf and without consulting me that I was not happy where I was, and mistook other 10-man raiding guilds on the same server or on other servers as more suited to my needs, and so have given me a push in that direction."

Yeah. I know. This is going to be a long one.

Firstly, let's look at the guild structure. Or, more to the point, let's look at the perception I had of the guild structure which apparently is not actually how things work at all. At the top of any guild, you have the GM -- in this case, Chayah. Below that, you have the officers. In this case, the officers were the two assistant Raid Leaders: Razzmatazz and Tinytran; with assistance from the Main Tanks -- Finaldo, Lucian, and occasionally Asmodeus (Matsumoto). Below that, you have the raiders.

That's it. That's how a guild works. The GM calls the shots with assistance from his officers. Specifically in this case, there were always two raid leaders in one raid for the purposes of debate and consultation in officer chat -- two out of the three (Chayah, Razzmatazz and Tinytran) were present at all times.

Now I'll explain about myself as a raider: I have a capacity for leadership. I am perceptive, intelligent, and extremely good with language and communication. I can see what goes wrong on a wipe, how to solve it, and how to tell other people how to solve it. That's what you see in a raid with me: I don't pay attention to membership, ranks, or anything like that. If I have something to say which will assist in killing the boss, I will say it in /ra and I will, perfectly justifiably, expect my opinion to be taken note of, because I know what I'm talking about and it will benefit you to listen to it. If you read those last few sentences and thought "What an arrogant jerk", you can click the red X now. No one will judge you. I'll call you an ignorant scrub for thinking that successful raids could operate without people giving their input, but apart from that no one will judge you.

Since I have a capacity for leadership, I understand the importance of a command structure. 10 people with opinions is great; but if no one speaks out to say, "Right, we will take THIS element of this strategy and THAT element from that strategy, because it is most likely to result in success" then a raid will be all theory and no action. Conversely, if everyone says in whispers or in some other chat channel with just a few of their friends what should be done, and doesn't communicate with the whole of the group, bedlam occurs.

FHC has no command structure. Outwardly, it appears that it does, and I truly challenge anyone to come to a different conclusion about the guild's structure when you see three different people rotating who wears the Slightly Darker Text hat, two of them always being present at one raid, and pointing out that "Stuff" is being "Discussed" -- with the rest of the raid listening to what they eventually conclude. I'll let Chayah explain what I mean by that:

You see, I think that your impression of what FHC is is still a bit skewiff. I didn't "found" it, I just "did the paperwork". It was founded by Matsumoto, Finaldo, Lucian, Tuonie, Tinytran, Sinthaya, Clavicus, Maudlin, Riel, Razzmatazz, and myself. I'm not being diplomatic - these are the people who got together, said "hey, we're fed up with 25s and with all the raid group baggage, what if we could do 10s together? as friends instead of as "members"? what would it be like?" I'm GM because they all trust me to manage the guild effectively - I was one of the leaders of the old raid groups that most of them were part of and have been friends with most of them for even longer than that. I'm GM because I'm something that everyone has in common. I'm a unifying factor to the sometimes disparate elements of the group. I'm everybody's friend. I've not got any greater authority or weight than any of the other founders except what they give me because of that friendship. (And I have to be very careful not to abuse that.)

So, underlying the seemingly straightforward nature of GM-->Officer-->Member, what we actually have is a group of friends. This is where problems start.

Count the names, if you would. You'll notice there are 11 people. That's enough for a 10-man guild as it is, and it's a structure that works more than successfully for CakeFM -- a very greatly progressed 10-man guild on the same server who have just that: 11 members, with one of them on near-permanent standby because all of them have 100% attendance to every raid.

The problem comes when not everyone can attend all the time. And this, presumably, is why FHC recruits other people: Not everyone is able to attend every raid, and there are so few raids per week that even dropping one raid reduces that week's productivity by 50%. All it takes is two drop-outs from that 11-man roster -- say, the girlfriend/boyfriend duo in that list of names -- and that's a raiding week gone. There's nothing wrong with that; but if it happens too often then one moves from being a stable raiding guild to a collection of people all of whom log on very occasionally and clear an instance: without the stability, no progression can occur -- and, while progression isn't a focal point of FHC's raiding goals, it factors in at least to the degree that they want to be raiding the current tier of content at any point of time.

So, you recruit extras to fill the gaps. But the extras don't necessarily fit. They might want something slightly different to what you want. In my case -- my "problem", as it were -- the clique (Since that's what it is) seemed to think that I am solely focussed on progression. I must clear hard modes. I must get my proto-drake. I must beat the game. At one point in time, maybe 18 months ago, that may indeed have been my goal: I did beat the game when Illidan was the final boss, and then I burnt out. What I am actually interested in is bringing out the potential of everyone else in the group. As soon as I started raiding Ulduar with FHC, I saw how much potential there was for greatness. Not "Greatness" in terms of a 10-man Strict ranking, or a "Beat everyone else to kill Arthas Heroic", but "greatness" in the sense of the guild fulfilling the latent potential it had in every single one of those incredibly competent 11 people.

My way of helping this potential to be filled was to contribute quite vastly to the discussions of tactics in /ra and on the forums, to make sure that I was always aware of what I had to do -- and to maintain two gear sets, two specs and five playstyles (I'm not even joking. There's more than one way to play Shadow and more than two ways to play Discipline) for those two specs so that I could contribute as much as I could to the success of the group. But, I'll refer to Chayah again:

People in FHC don't want to wipe, but they want to be allowed to show up to raids after a hard day at uni or the zoo or whatever and not necessarily know everything about every boss, or to be allowed to choose gear based on their own terms rather than on hours of theorycraft, and so on.

I've emboldened two things there, because this kind of hyperbole has always irritated me whenever I've seen it; two different and equally strong arguments can be made against it, which I will come on to after I've explained the context of this quote.

Rarely -- and I do mean rarely; I can count on one hand the times that I did this, and over 8 months that's a very small number of occurrences -- I have questioned people's gear choices or spec choices. Not criticised, not blamed: questioned. The times when I've done this have been when we've been chasing that elusive 1% on Anub'arak -- when I was looking for ways in which we could take him down; looking for ways to improve. (And, yes, before you suggest that I didn't look at myself, I did look at myself; hard.) So, fine, occasionally I have crossed the line with one foot, dipping my toes into unknown waters, and perhaps that generated a negative reaction. That is an excuse for an eight-month campaign not to accept me into the rank and file? Something tells me not. Oh, but, Sinespe, what about your arrogance in correcting people's grammar? Short answer: Again, single-hand counting on how many times this happened, and grow the hell up.

The two arguments against this lazy hyperbole are the following:
1) The reason why there are condensed, and very enjoyable to read, strategies on
the guild forums as opposed just to linking people to Tankspot is because it takes 5 minutes; 10 at most; to read a boss strategy. Combine that with the staggered nature of releases in Icecrown, and you're looking at 10-15 minutes per week of reading forum posts detailing strategies. You can do that while on a break at work, or checking e-mails, or while you eat your breakfast. Same with the theorycrafting: The good sections of Elitist Jerks (Off the top of my head and from experience at the ones I have used, Blood Simple springs to mind) tells you what you need to know in a concise and easy-to-read manner. This does not take hours. It takes the mathematicians and casual theorycrafters hours to come up with numbers and prose that you can devour in ten minutes.

2) Since when does everyone need to know "everything" about a boss strat? When did I even imply that? You couldn't do that in Vanilla WoW, and even in TBC the guilds I was in tended to have separate chat channels for Healing, DPS and Tank roles to be assigned. I like to know everything about a boss fight because I like to be able to analyse for improvement -- but on Blood Prince Council, for instance, I could get by knowing the key points: "DPS the one with the healthbar"; "Throw a SW: D on a Kinetic Bomb if you see it's getting low to the ground"; "Be prepared to run when Taldaram is Empowered"; "Stay away from vortices [not "vortexes", you asshats. I've been drilling that into people since TBC.]".

I have digressed slightly. Back to the guild structure, and recruitment from outside: Sometimes, people won't fit. So, what do you do? You'll find out they don't fit pretty quickly -- so, you could talk to them about it and try to see where they're coming from, or you could silently allow your irritation at them to get worse and worse over an 8-month period, recognising that they're incredibly strong players and very useful to your progression, until you get one of the people from the group who knows the Problem Player well -- the GM, of course, because he's the token Fall Guy (Sorry, C, I meant you're a "Friend to everyone" -- that's the term you used to describe it. I prefer "The mask behind which all the bitching can go on" myself. You say potayto, I say "Get stuffed with this cliquery". I mean ... Potahto.) -- to kick the person out and try to explain the unreasonable in reasonable terms.

The problem with the latter choice is that I've been left feeling like an object. An alien. I knew, when I joined, that I had caused a bit of friction. In the first month, this was, I thought, all smoothed over. Chayah was a constant source of sanity in the madness that appeared to be sheer insanity -- For instance someone reportedly got offended during one Ulduar raid when I said "Be careful of aggro in the first few seconds [on Auriaya's pull]." Really. Someone got offended at that purely neutral, sensible reminder. I persevered, because he reminded me that FHC was about accepting others for their faults. So I accepted others for their faults. Seven months later, the clique decided that they didn't want to accept me for mine. But it has been dressed up to me in a way that makes it seem like it's for my own good. Chayah, once more:

So we revisited all the stuff that we thought makes us us and how you could fit into that. The conclusion reached was that both FHC and you would still need to change significantly before we could be comfortable bedfellows. And - I know it sounds hard to believe when you've just been kicked out - but people were genuinely concerned as to how "fair" it was to you to "require" you to change so they didn't have to. They genuinely think that you'll be better off in another group. I think nobody except myself really realised how much you regarded FHC as your home, which I suppose isn't their fault.

And why did this happen? Complete lack of communication. Chayah has been my only point of contact -- ever -- for how I have behaved within the guild; and his disposition to be friendly and see everyone's point of view has resulted in my failure to see just how much people apparently hate me. I don't even know who those people are in the list of 11. I suspected that Maudlin might, but apparently he didn't until four or five months into my lack-of-tenure. Did Clavicus hate me? I spent whole evenings talking with him about everything and nothing. Tuonie, I know, did not -- and he reacted with surprise when he discovered that I was no longer in the guild, and the reasoning behind it; so is it the case that some members of that clique were not even present at the decision-making process where what would make me "better off" was decided without my own voice being heard? Same with Lucian: not so often did we speak, but we did speak, and I enjoyed his company immensely; was all that enjoyment one-sided?

It strikes me that I have not been treated as a human being in this. I have been treated as a problem that needs to be solved; a problem that wasn't solved because everyone was too lazy to practice what Chayah was preaching when he told me that everyone accepts everyone else in FHC in spite of their flaws -- if, indeed, this was the philosophy applicable to new members too. The very fact that I've been kicked out is proof that at not one moment did anyone, with the possible exception of those that I have mentioned, consider that I am currently sitting on a chair, looking at a computer screen, and typing on a keyboard: just like they are. I am feeling the pressure of the keys, my heart is pounding in my chest and blood is flowing around my blood vessels. There are people in this world -- outside of this online guise of Sinespe and those who know it -- whom I love: faithfully, passionately, filially, fraternally and sororially. There are passions I follow: my poetry, my archery, my (simple, by comparison) maths, my explorations of philosophy; that none of them know anything about. My fate within this guild has been decided by a group of people who do not know the first thing about me, because I was an outsider and they were determined to keep me that way.

But how could I say they were determined to keep me at arm's length? Simple, really: None of the people who are likely to have been instrumental in my removal from FHC have ever tried to talk to me. They've never tried to get to know me. They've never tried to reconcile what they perceive as differences with me. Throughout, they have not needed me, thus they have chosen to ignore the problem as best they could rather than tackle it. If all goes wrong? Well, doesn't matter, really, does it? They still have enough people to raid with.

And this is the problem with the guild's lack of structure: Letting no one new into the ranks will cause their ranks to stagnate, and eventually they will die off. What's Chayah's reaction to this?

As I said online, the end to an affair is not the end of its meaning: endings complete meaning. They're a necessary component of meaning. Some day, maybe very soon, FHC will end and we'll all move on to other stuff. When that happens I'll still have some very fond (as well as not so fond) memories of FHC and I'll still have things to be pleased about or angry about and to learn from.

Everything ends, therefore we'll just sit back and let it happen. I'll give you my direct response to that:

You may have accepted "One day it will die", but that's laziness, in my opinion. It's a casual, shameful excuse for not wanting to do anything about it. Yes, one day we'll all die. That's why we make an effort to last as long as we fucking can.

This whole situation has been about a lack of effort. Not in whether to approach me or not, but in the very essence of whether it was worth it to try to approach me. It must have been deemed quite early on -- perhaps even from the guild's creation -- that it was better just to keep themselves to themselves. Perhaps it would have been better for them to stick to that model completely, and recruit no-one, instead of selfishly stringing along very good, perfectly legitimate members only to ditch them at a moment's notice later on.

FHC very quickly became my home. The landlords, who are also the tenants, have decided that I'm "too good", under some ludicrous, hashed definition of the word, for FHC -- that I am unhappy where I am. They think I'd be better off in some flying-pink-unicorn guild where I can be myself. They seemed to think that their lack of desire to integrate me into their group was a two-way thing: That just as they didn't want me in, I didn't want to be in.

I did not go into FHC wanting to be myself; I wanted to be a Hatter. And I damn well did try, okay? To say that this is a two-way thing is ludicrous, Chayah. I have reached out to people; and I've been met by the cold silence of a group banding together and deciding that I'm not suitable for that empty chair on your raiding roster. It was a perfectly comfy chair. I don't want a super expensive and technologically advanced massage chair, thanks; I'll quite happily sit in the comfy, old, moth-eaten armchair into which one can sink and from which one never has to rise.

Sinespe will no longer show her helm, as proud of every single one of Blizzard's cloth helm artworks she may be.

(A side note: Coming in at 3,499 words in length, this is longer than any essay I wrote while I was at University.)
(Another, far more bitter side-note: The last person who suggested on my behalf that I was "unhappy" is still working in Tesco without any kind of analytical brain beyond the shallow. Completely unrelated; I just thought I'd throw something very venomous out there while I was in a "Looking at the people in my life who have sucked hard" mood.)