WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot

Our friends, Tom and Stella, have recently been blessed with two precious little boys, Tyler and Connor. Tom is a gamer, an RPG player, and all around great guy.  When choosing gifts for his two babies, I had to make sure that they would help send these boys down the nerdly path right from the start.

Now, I love making quilts, especially baby quilts.  In terms of crafts, there’s a pretty good amount of instant gratification involved.  Once everything is cut out, it goes together quickly and pretty soon you have something that looks like you’ve gotten a lot accomplished.  I love that.  Plus, there are so many cute baby and kid fabrics out there that simpler patterns actually work better to accentuate the designs.  If making quilts was a financially viable career, I would do it in a heartbeat (sadly, it isn’t).

I went to the fabric store already knowing one of the fabrics I was going to buy.  It was an all-over castle print with knights and dragons and princesses looking out of windows and standing on walls. I had seen it when putting stuff together for another baby quilt, but it had been a little too “boyish” for little Grace, so I picked pink dragons for her.  I knew, though, that as soon as I had the chance to make one for a little boy nerd, that was going to be my first choice.

Detail of the knight quilt

The backing fabric was amazing too.  The same company puts out a fabric that is a map.  It has the same characters and names of Arthurian places.

The back. I fell in love with this.

I’m really happy with the way this came out in the end.  It was a good size, with some vibrant colors for a little fellow. The pattern that I chose was, as I mentioned, simple.  It’s just center squares with two borders around them and squares at the corners.  The only problem with the pattern was that it was a little older, so rather than coming with instructions on strip piecing for all of these borders, it called for cutting out all the individual squares and rectangles.  Instead of risking a miscalculation on my part, that’s exactly what I did.  Cutting took a bit longer, but everything more or less lined up in the end, so no harm done.

The full knight quilt

Of everyone that I showed these to, this one is pretty universally the favorite.  I’ll admit, that sweet little dragon is hard to resist. For the second quilt, I had been hoping to find something that was all dragons, but there was nothing to be found.  Fortunately, I found an alternative.

Robots!

I fell in love with this fabric set a long time ago.  In fact, I fell in love with the designs when I saw them on scrapbook paper, before they were printed on fabric.  I was going through some of my quilting supplies the other day and found a set of small cuts of all these that I bought over a year ago.  So I guess, in the end, it was an easy choice.  I love that the colors are so different.  They’re vibrant without being primary colors.  Again, there was a fantastic fabric choice for the back.  It’s just a huge field of gears.  The whole quilt really makes an impact and is so different from the knight quilt, even though they are the same pattern.

The completed robot quilt

As much as I love the knight quilt, this one was my favorite.  If I was to make either of them again, the knight one would probably get a couple of fabric tweaks, but this one I would make exactly the same.

There was one more gift that I made for the birth of little Tyler and Connor.  This one was more for Tom, though.  We had been at a party where there were a bunch of babies and small children.  One of the fathers had a Steelers diaper bag.  While there was no accounting for his taste in NFL teams, the bag was really cool.  Tom asked him where he had gotten it, hoping to secure a Patriots one for himself.  The guy informed him that a friend had made it.  I told Tom I’d make him a Patriots bag, and he said it would be “the best gift ever”.  Well, that settled it.

Yeah, dude. Patriots.

I was really happy to find this fabric.  A lot of the sports fabrics are a little lackluster, probably because the licensing costs for the logos and team names are so high, they don’t want to go covering them up or going though the effort of designing something interesting.  They’re usually just the logos spread on a field of solid color.  I found the pattern for the biggest diaper bag with the most pockets.  It’s really a good size, and should be enough for the twins.  I enjoyed making it (other than the part where I put the zipper on upside down) and Tom really loved it.

I adore doing these sorts of projects.  I feel I have to do my part to make sure that the next generation of nerds are getting off on the right foot.

I’ve had a few internet names over the years, and most of them have been based around my interests at the time and abandoned as soon as those interests changed.  I have finally settled into my more or less permanent internet persona of Daniora (pronounced dan-YOUR-ah).  It’s the name I go by pretty much everywhere, and it adds a consistency to my internet presence that I’ve never had before.

Names are particularly important to me.  I’m not entirely sure why.  Any time I have to come up with a name for a character, it takes me ages.  If Brian and I start characters together in WoW, he is almost always level four or five before I’ve even settled on a name.  I don’t have a list of names that I regularly return to.  Each character is named individually, based on their background.  I scour the web looking for names that are from a particular ethnic background that I think fits or that has a meaning that matches some characteristic.  It’s one of my favorite things to do.

Many of you may know Daniora as my Blood Elf Warlock, but that’s not where the name originally came from.  She started life as Zingaran Pirate in the Conan pen and paper RPG.

There she is, 11 wisdom and all.

I hadn’t really intended to play.  I wound up at one session of the game and was suckered into playing an NPC for one part.  After that, the DM, my dear friend Sam, enticed me to stay by saying I could play a pirate.  Well, I figured, what the heck.  I was in.  It was a fabulous excuse to buy more books and hang out with people.  The Zingarans are a gypsy-like people, so those were the names I looked at when choosing one for my character.  I chose the male name “Danior” and added the “a” at the end to make it feminine.  The meaning of “born with teeth” seemed to fit my vicious little pirate.

I loved her.  She was tough, and she had to be; she was the only female in the party and lived in a world where women were more or less just expected to be naked and/or lamenting. Looking back at her sheet, I can’t help but notice that in addition to her high rope and balance skills, she could also play the trumpet.  I seem to remember that being some method of piratical communication, but so far removed from the game, it just looks funny.

It was my first roll playing experience, and I was a bit self conscious about it.  Especially because everyone in the group I was playing with were hardened veterans. My shining moment of roll play came when Daniora had stayed behind to guard a prisoner we had captured while the others went off for something or other.  When they returned, Sam prompted me to describe what they were returning to.  I said, “I’m sitting in a chair drinking from a flagon of wine. The prisoner is huddled in the corner, rocking himself back and forth and muttering softly.” That really did say everything about Daniora and how she operated.

In the end, I didn’t play for long, and never really got to use my pirate skills (we were mostly traveling across the desert.  I tried to get the other players to carry a boat along with me on it so I could get my skill bonuses, but that didn’t go over too well).  It was fun, and Sam is a great DM, but the sessions were a little long for my liking and it was hard to be enthused about spending all day every Saturday engaged in the same activity.

I had played World of Warcraft back when it first came out.  I remember having to buy the discs at the Mac store since all the regular stores were sold out (both Mac and PC were on the same discs). I made myself a human warlock, but back in vanilla, leveling was a grind.  The people I was playing with soon far out-leveled me, and I was left to face the mechanical harvesters of Westfall alone.  I quit after that.

When Burning Crusade was being released, the new group of friends I was hanging with were all getting back into it.  They loved it so much that I thought I’d give it another try.  New account, Horde side (boy, did that make a difference!).   Because the people I was playing with all had other characters, they all decided to level blood elves.  I figured leveling with everyone else would be easier, so I picked a blood elf too.  Besides, say what you will about them, but they are addicted to magic.  That’s pretty awesome.  I remembered really liking the idea of the Warlock class, so that’s what I made.

When it came to a name, Daniora just seemed right.  Really, I probably thought it was a shame to let such a great name go to waste, gathering dust on a lonely character sheet. For a long while, I was the only Daniora on the Armory.  More have cropped up since then, and I wonder how they got to that name. My choosing it seems so random, a masculine gypsy name made feminine, it’s hard for me to imagine how someone else could find it too.

I like this picture because she looks bored. She almost always looks bored.

Daniora and I have been plundering the lands of Azeroth and Outlands together for over three years.  Some players are alt-aholics, I’m a main-aholic.  I’ve tried playing other characters, but I never get very far.  We’ve gotten Loremaster together, ground out a lot of nonsensical reps, scraped together a fair amount of gold.  A lot of people lose interest in WoW because it’s not really story driven, there’s a lot of repetitive questing and the like.  I have stayed rapt because I adore my character.

When I started getting into Twitter and posting on forums, I wanted a name that I could use for all of them.  At first, I had a lot of trouble finding a name that wasn’t taken.  I had my distaste for reusing names to contend with, but Daniora tends to be odd enough that it’s available everywhere.  Besides, most of the places I was posting were WoW related, so one could do worse than be associated with their main character.  In the end, I could have done worse than pick the name “Born With Teeth” to stand between me and the internet.

PAX East has been over for two months now, and I never did get around to writing about it.  I had started a blow-by-blow post of the whole weekend, but it was rapidly becoming rather long and rambling.  So I’ll skip that in favor of documenting the most important occurrence at PAX: When I met Wil Wheaton.

Me, dorking out next to Wil Wheaton. Yes, I am wearing my +5 to Sexterity shirt.

This was my first Con and I don’t know that I knew what to expect.  I should, by all rights, have had a terrible time.  I spent most of my time waiting in lines and sitting on concrete floors which left my back and hips extremely sore.  I didn’t get to play any game demos, and I missed all the panels I wanted to see except for the keynote.  Sounds like a pretty terrible time, right?

The thing is, I loved it.  I had a fantastic time and all thoughts of the event, even during and after the line sitting, are of pure joy.  I blame this on two things.  One is getting to spend three days with “my people”.  This is common at any gathering of geeks, nerds, dweebs, and other outcasts.  When we’re together, everything is a little bit better.  I made “line friends” who told me about boardgames I had to buy and swapped RPG stories.  The second factor leading to my phenomenal time is The Great Wil Wheaton Adventure.

It’s probably a good thing that I’ve waited so long to write about this.  I’ve had time to go through all the phases of acceptance: dorking out, embarrassment, and finally joyful acceptance.  I’ve shared this story with a few people now, and while it is universally accepted as completely nerdy, it’s also supremely cool.

I had no idea that Wil Wheaton would be sitting at a table signing autographs.  That fact totally escaped me. I knew he was giving the keynote speech and I had my copy of Just A Geek with me in case I found myself across a game table from him or something.  However, when we went looking for Scott Kurtz so I could procure my Skull plushie, there he was, Wil Wheaton with the longest line ever. (Actually, it was the longest line ever… until his line the following day, which was much longer.) Brian and I parted ways, he headed for Jonathan Coulton’s line, I for Wil’s.

A note about Star Trek: TNG and my family.  I was six when the show first went on the air and thirteen when it ended.  These were formative years and the show was always appointment television for my family.  We had big Bose speakers hooked up to our tv, which we didn’t use all the time.  We did, however, always use them for Star Trek so we could hear the rumble of the engines.  It was awesome.  I was also, of course, at the perfect age to adore Wil Wheaton.  I mean, who wouldn’t?

I digress.  So here I am, in line, talking to my line friends about board games.   I see that he has two of his books that I don’t own, and his Wheaton’s Law t-shirt.  I intend to purchase all three.  I get to the front of the line and forget all of this.  I shall now document the exact dialogue exchange as it happened.

Me: Hi.

WW: Hi.

Me: If eight-year-old me knew I was talking to you right now, she’d lose it.  I mean, you are pretty much the first man I ever really loved.

WW: Awww.  I’m glad we finally met.

Me: Yeah, it’s been really hard on our relationship.

WW: Well, you grew up as beautifully as I knew you would.

Me: (blushing profusely) You too.

And then he asked my name and signed my book.  I know, I’m a total dork, but it was the coolest thing that’s happened to me in a while. It was definitely the event that saved PAX.  I can’t really imagine having as much fun without it.

I less-than-three you, too, Wil Wheaton.

With the guys getting back into Warhammer and me playing LOTS of Dawn of War 2, I’ve had the itch to get back into painting.

It's shooty and stabby.

So, Sam messaged me the other day and asked if there was any way I could dig out the looted Ork tank that I had been working on for him.  This was just the excuse I needed.  So I finished it up and took some pictures.  I forgot how much I loved this tank.  I can’t wait to get back into painting my own army.  I’ve got a lot of mans that need a lot of work.

I'm not sure what that stuff is, but it can't be good.

It was really fun being able to put the little Grots in the little tank doors.  If they had been plastic instead of metal, they would have been easier to manipulate and there probably would have been far more of them all over the tank.

Both sides of the tank, now suitably Orky.

This was a really freeing model to work on.  Instead of having to worry about every little piece being put together just right, I got to make it look like Orks had put it together.  The doors hang off the hinges, the edges are all scuffed up, and the painting is messy.  I love it.  Hopefully I’ll be able to find a bit more time to work on this stuff soon.

A note on the term “mans-ing”.  When we all started getting into Warhammer, we would refer to our armies as mans.  Therefore, the process of putting together and painting them became mans-ing. I know, it’s silly.  But that’s how we nerds roll.

Last night I achieved. I achieved hard.

That’s right, Loremaster.  It took several months of dedicated work and a lot of help from the internet. I had been rather enamored with the random dungeon finder, but as a DPS, I usually have a little wait.  I started working on Loremaster mostly as something to do while I was waiting for my turn in the queue.  Working through the lower level zones in Azeroth will really give you a sense of acomplishment, and that was when it started to look like a far less daunting task than I had originally anticipated. I also figured that if I was going to do it, I should probably get it done before Cataclysm.  There’s no telling what changes are coming down the line for that.  I already got Master of Arms and Did Somebody Order a Knuckle Sandwich since those will definitely be becoming Feats of Strength.  So, it was headfirst into Kalimdor.

Kalimdor sucked.  That’s all there is to it.  For being a Horde dominated continent, it sure is hard to reach that quest count.  I think Silithus was the biggest problem.  There were a fair number of quests that I was holding on since they required stupid amounts of work (Kill a million guys to get their outfits.  Use 5 outfits to get one crystal, use 10 crystals to get this other thing).  I knew from all the research I’d done that this was going to be the hardest part, so I got it over with first.  The rest really was a piece of cake.

I tried out a bunch of addons that were reported to at least help with the finding of missing quests.  The one that finally did it for me was the Wowhead Profiler.  This combined with their client made finding missing quests much easier.  I think that what they’ve done is that in order to get more people using their client to record drops etc, they’ve added the quest tracking functionality as an incentive.  Well, lemme tell you, it works fantastically.  Granted, WoW itself doesn’t always record that you’ve completed a quest when you have, so that information isn’t being reported to the Wowhead client.  For the most part, though, if there’s a quest on your unfinished quest list that you’ve done before, it may look familiar.  I used the list of quests mostly to located quest givers that I hadn’t yet visited.  Because the quests are in alphabetical order by quest title, it can be hard to locate the first quest in a chain that you still have to complete.

While I was working through all the zones, I also had the Seeker achievement tracking up.  It’s strange to note the differences between which quests count for Loremaster and which count for Seeker.  In the end, I wound up getting Seeker with four quests left for Loremaster.  I know other people have gotten Seeker well before that.  For a while, I was on track to get Loremaster first.  I’m not entirely sure what’s going on there, but I’d be interested to know if anyone else is noticing the same thing.

Now, however, it’s on to some rep grinding for us.  We need some rep reward mounts to fill out the stables. I also want to make sure that I hit up all the old world dungeons before the big boom.

Daniora and Thoothun hangin' in Dalaran.

Now that these have been sent off and received by their intended target, I can make a post about the projects that have been keeping me busy for a while now.

I need to preface this story with a little background information.  For those of you who don’t know, Scott Johnson is a very talented comic artist and podcaster.  His shows are always of the highest quality and unbelievably entertaining.  I’ve been listening to all of his stuff for a while now.  He plays World of Warcraft, and his main is an Orc hunter named Gerp whose favorite pet is a tiger named Henry.  This has spawned all sorts of things, like the Obey Henry movement.  I’m a huge fan of Scott’s, which is where this crazy story begins.

Just before Christmas, I was working on some gifts with fleece.  I got this crazy idea in my head that I could make a pretty good Orc hat.  Oddly enough, that’s a perfectly reasonable thought for me to have on any given day.  Then I thought of doing a tiger scarf rather in the style of the old fox stoles.  You know the kind.  The ones with the feet that dangle off the end and such.  Now, I have ideas like this all the time.  Projects that I could do tend to flit in and out of my mind while I’m working on other things.  This one was different.  This one stuck.  I found myself thinking through the construction problems and details that would need to be worked out. I imagined what it would look like finished.

I got a basic hat pattern so that I wouldn’t be working completely blind.  I chose one with a band at the bottom that would serve as the separation where his mouth would be.  I got myself some screenshots of Gerp off of the Armory (which was much easier now that it’s new-and-improved with 3D goodness) and got to work.  The braid was pretty easy, the ears were a challenge.  I got plastic doll eyes and gave him eyelids (which I thought was rather brilliant, if I do say so myself).  All in all, other than a few snags, it came together pretty smoothly.

The finished product.

He’s even got the sweet braid down the back.

Sweet braid!

Alright, hat done.  The scarf proved to be much simpler. They tell me that tiger striped fleece exists.  It does not exist at any of the area Joann’s Fabrics, so I was unable to acquire it.  Besides, it was not quite the right colors for Henry.  I cut a big long piece of fleece and sewed all the triangle strips along it.  I made the little feet to hang off the ends.  To keep the scarf from getting too bulky, I opted to do a flat head and tail with only the ears sticking up.  Sadly, my pictures of the scarf aren’t quite as good as I would have hoped, but you’ll get the idea.

The scarf in all it's glory.

His face turned out a little sweeter than I expected, but I think it’s a little bit precious.

So sweet!

On one of the episodes of The Instance (Scott’s World of Warcraft podcast), he mentioned that he wished there was a Henry plushie.  This was right after the Blizzard release of their new plush line.  Since Brian gave me a book on making fleece animals, I thought I’d try my hand at a tiger.  Now, again, I didn’t have any tiger print fleece, which is what they used in the book, so I had to improvise and add the stripes to the fabric pieces as I went along.  There are a few spots where they’re a little strange, but I think it turned out pretty well in the end.  I even printed out a custom “Obey Henry” tag.

And he's extra cuddly!

I had an absolutely fabulous time working on all these projects.  It was great to have a focused outlet for my creativity and something to fill the time.  And it was all worth it knowing that I was sending it to someone I knew would appreciate them.  Along the way, I figured out that the only possible fate for these items was for me to send them to Scott himself.  He got them today, and I’m really excited that he liked them so much.

He wears it well.

I’ve put up a flickr album with all the pictures of this stuff.  I’m excited to move on to the next big thing.

Hello. My name is Daniora and I am a demonology warlock.

Saying that always sounds like I should be standing in front of a support group for people who don’t know any better.

Some people are alt-aholics, I’m a main-aholic.  When I decided to make a character on Earthen Ring to join AIE, I made another warlock.  I had contemplated several other options, but I shuddered at the thought of leveling all the way to 80 with any of them (and I hate playing Death Knights, so that wasn’t really an option). So, my warlocks and I are pretty close.  We’ve been through some hard times together.  We’ve been called “Failock” in pugs.  We’ve heard “If you respec’d this way, you’d have a much better spell rotation for maximum dps.” We’ve been laughed at in battlegrounds. In spite of it all, we soldier on.

I leveled from 1 to 80 doing two and a half instances at level.  I’ve never been one for dungeon running. I wasn’t concerned with getting the best gear or having the highest dps.  It’s been a long time since BC, though, and I had to find something to keep me busy.  I did a bit of research and found information on stats that was easy enough for someone who couldn’t be bothered to do the math to understand and started suiting up my lock. Courtesy of the random dungeon tool, I’ve got myself geared up pretty well now.  I hold my own in DPS in heroics.  But here’s the thing.  Being spec’d out the way I am now, I could never raid. The same thing goes for beast mastery hunters.  In both cases, these specs are not viable for end game, certainly not if you want to be taken seriously.

So what.

I know there are plenty of you out there who would just say to change specs and move on.  I, however, want to play the game in a manner that I find the most entertaining.  For me, it’s demonology warlocks all the way.  I could move a few points from here to there and dramatically increase my dps.  The downside is that I would no longer be able to transform into a giant purple demon… and that’s just not okay with me.

A warlock that doesn’t take full advantage of the monstrous demonic powers drawn from the void is really not that different from other casters. Having demon pets and strange abilities is what makes them special and sets them apart.  There’s a similar situation with hunters.  I’ve been in a fair number of pugs where the hunter’s pet was just around for buffs and almost never attacked at all. By marginalizing these two specs, Blizzard is taking the thing that makes these two classes unique from any other and making them unsuitable for higher end content.

Now, before I’m attacked by all the destro warlocks and marksman hunters, let me just say that I have no problem with them.  As I have said, I’m all for playing the game in whatever manner you find most entertaining.  I also know that not every spec should be appropriate for every situation.  However, at least in the case of a full metamorphosis demonology warlock, that spec is not really great in any situation. The problem I have is with how Blizzard has taken the two specs that make warlocks and hunters most unique among all the other classes and made them completely nonviable for end game. If you want to a) raid and b) play a demonology warlock you are c) out of luck.

Small side note regarding marksman hunters.  I think it would be awesome if they made a hero class similar to Sylvanas’ dark rangers.  They would be like marksman hunters, but without a pet.  Sort of an Artemis thing. (I’d go so far to say that it should only be open to female toons, but I know that would never fly.)

All I’m asking, Blizzard, is to give those of us who play pet classes the ability to use those pets to our maximum advantage. I want my ability to metamorphosize into a demon to play as awesomely as it looks.  I’m hopeful that Cataclysm will fix a lot of these things with the whole mastery thing, but I truly believe it’s something they should think about.

Alright, so I have way too much to do for the New Year’s Eve party that’s starting in a little over an hour to really do a post of this magnitude any justice, but we’ll hit the highlights, shall we?

• Got engaged.
• Played too much WoW… or maybe not enough.
• Lots of people had lots of precious babies and I love them all.
• Lost my job.
• Several weddings.
• Listened to hundreds of podcasts, most of them involving Scott Johnson.
• Did a bit of artwork, some drawing and a bit of sculpting.

All in all, it was  a pretty great year, aside from the losing my job bit.  Brian is a wonderful partner to have in life and I look forward to spending another year with him.  There’s a lot of big stuff on the way in 2010, and I’m really looking forward to it.

I wish everyone a very happy and healthy 2010!!

Decided to try my hand at designing a pumpkin for the Think Geek contest.

Behold!  The Portal Pumpkin!!

I’ve included two different versions.  One where all the pieces are simply cut out and one with a mixture of cut out and shaving down the skin to make it thin.  For best results, carve it on two different pumpkins and light one with a yellow light and one with a blue light.  I’ll post pictures of my carving as soon as I get it done.

The Instance podcast had a contest this week to make your own FigurePrint.  I had a ton of fun, though there were definitely a few setbacks. Behold, Amelinda the Blood Elf warlock of AIE.

I found out yesterday that the cut off for entries was today.  So it was a long night last night and I wish I’d had a bit more time.  But I’m really pleased with how she turned out.  Because of my issues with indoor lighting, I had planned on taking the photo outside.  I woke up this morning to pouring rain.  Fortunately, rain stopped and the sun was out just long enough for me to get some great shots.  I took a bunch in the garden, but the best ones came from the wall of the cemetery across the street.  Very appropriate, I thought.  I’ve got some in progress shots as well as the finished ones in an album for your enjoyment.  Just click the image above. The in progress ones stop abruptly when I realize I only have one more day to finish.