April showers bring...Einherjar and..."lol your a idiot"

Generally speaking, Tuesdays are a pretty quiet day for me game-wise now. The only event that happens for me is Einherjar with Obsidian. Up until about 2 weeks ago, I would make a mad dash from Einherjar to do Salvage with {Nice to Meet You} :)™'s group, but as she and Blaize have deservingly retired from running Salvage runs, Einherjar is now the only thing I do on Tuesdays.

Obsidian has been doing Einherjar since the beginning of August last year. I've been the one primarily organizing the runs since we started it and I've somehow managed to maintain perfect attendance since we started it. The organizational routine that I put myself in involves:

- Being in front of my PC 2 hours before the run starts to field various bits of info from the forums or from /tells or to prepare myself with who has what feathers from the main roster that I can potentially replace from the waiting list in order to make sure everyone possible has a shot at getting the 3 feathers they need for Odin.

- Making sure parties are posted at least 1-1.5 hours before run starts to give our members ample time to change jobs in the event they need to.

- Pick up Lamp.

- Finding replacements for people who have last minute things come up or simply forget there's an event that day. Replacements generally come from the wait list, but from time to time, I have to yell at the Cuban to come take a spot or send tells to other people in Obsidian who might not have signed up due to the length of the waiting list.

- Collect money.

What's perplexed me the most about organizing runs like these is that it takes FAR more effort and time on my part to keep these things on track than the dynamis counter-part. We've done dynamis for so long, we can literally show up 30 minutes before a run starts and pretty much have all the admin things done within 10 minutes. Since Einherjar isn't as cut and dry as Dynamis though, it takes a lot more effort. It's amazed me that SE has managed to pack so much variety into a 30 minute event.

What's amazed me even more the past couple of months are the lengths that our membership has gone to in order to ensure our runs are timely. Every single run, various members of our group like Ring, Jess, Runestar, Andiara and others are offering up Chester the Molester™ coat warps to Nashmau. We've had party leaders actually being party leaders by tracking down their missing members and keeping me up to date. To some other end-game shells, this may seem like something that should be done anyway. Obsidian isn't an end-game shell though. It's a collection of mostly casual players and various members of other end-game communities. Walking into an Obsidian event, you're not likely to see a ton of salvage gear, kings gear, etc, so expecting every one of these guys to understand concepts that come second nature to a lot of end-game linkshell members will just set yourself up for frustration.

This was a lesson I had to learn the hard way a couple years ago. I had always told myself that "If I refuse to teach, then I have no room to bitch.", but I had never applied it to a lot of my interactions in Obsidian. I'm not saying my expectations were too high for these guys since I still carry the same expectations of them today that I did then, but knowing what I have in this linkshell now vs. assuming what I had back then has made me a lot more patient with people. I would "teach" back then, but it was in the form of bitching at someone until they understood.

Einherjar brought these realizations to the forefront in a drastic fashion when we started doing these runs. Dynamis is cut and dry and most mistakes can be covered up by sheer numbers or go undetected altogether. Mistakes generally do not cost us runs. Mistakes in Einherjar lead to losses. I knew we weren't going to see Odin for at least 2-3 months after we started. All of my research had led me to believe that I needed to figure what we had in a group and develop a strategy based on a combination of that and other sound ideals. It took a lot of tweaking, xp loss, frustration and time, but the past couple of months, I really could not have asked for anything better than what we've had present in the shell. I'll take credit where credit is due, but those giving me credit for building this thing up need to understand one critical piece of information:

I'm nothing w/o people sharing the same goals and ideals.

Last night's Einherjar was a testament to this. Some days, the team trips up and feels very sluggish to respond to commands given over the linkshell. A day like this was last night. People were distracted before the run (including myself), not being super quick moving from mob to mob. Pulls were kind of slow, but this had a legit reason and I only mention it to add to the overall sluggish feel of the run. We still won though and this was due to other members stepping up trying to get everyone on the ball again. It's nights like these where I feel like that even on our worst days, we still manage to pull a win out with a pretty significant chunk of time to spare and makes me realize just how far we've come collectively as a group.

Now to the drama portion of today's post:

I'm not going to name the names of the actual members involved in this, but I will name the mule that managed to irritate me last night.

Xxshadowangelxx.

While trying to organize the run, I ran into one of our new members in Whitegate and figured while I was there, I'd give her a linkpearl. We'll call her "NewMember". (Yeah yeah...original). I completed the trade with NewMember, welcomed her and then ran off for the boat to Nashmau.

A short while later, Tentacle sends me a tell asking about a PM I had sent to NewMember.

Uh...PM? I haven't sent a PM in 2-3 days.

NewMember then sends me a tell asking about the PM I had sent to her. She's rather distraught as the contents of this PM were as follows:

"I hope you're clean now. If I'm sticking my neck out for you in this manner w/o ever having talked to you since you were banned, realize that you've got the benefit of the doubt despite sneaking back in the way that you did"

Now anyone receiving that PM would probably be pissed off. Especially a new member. Putting this bit of information in it's correct context would be as follows:

I sent this PM to Fireballx's new account "Oskilfai" after he managed to bot his way to banishment. He somehow snuck back into Obsidian using Oskilfai's original account information and posing as him. His return created some drama on the forums and the reason I, along with other sacks, gave him a second chance was we believed he learned his lesson. We certainly didn't appreciate how he returned to Obsidian though, so that was what prompted me to send him that PM.

The other VERY critical piece of information about this PM? It was sent to Oskilfai on 12-13-2006. That's 2.5 years ago for those of you following at home yet somehow, NewMember ended up with this PM in their Inbox from me. It wasn't fowarded to her. There was no trace of it in my Sent Items folder. It just simply appeard in her box for reasons I'm still trying to figure out.

About the same time that this is going down, I get a /tell from the aforementioned mule. It simply says "lol your a idiot". Being the practitioner of common sense that I am, there's three things that stand out about this particular line.

1. If you're going to defend your friend from an anon account, try doing it sometime after the drama has settled down. I have a general idea who you are at the moment and as soon as I know for sure, let's just say you better pre-emptively b-list me. You're doing your friend no favors by acting in the moment.

2. Know you facts before you rush to judgement. Xxshadowangelxx's owner decides to cowardly send me a tell from a mule account based on information that was very new and hadn't even been addressed with me yet. Seriously ask yourself the question...Why in the hell would I go give NewMember a linkpearl, then send that PM? Also ask yourself..."Would a PM dated 12-13-2006 actually have ANY relevance to a person that hasn't even been on Odin for a year?

3. If you're going to call someone an idiot, please try not to look like one yourself in doing so. I'm prone to the occasional grammatical slip, but this one line smells of so much idiocy, I can't resist making fun of it. Let's break this down...

"lol your a idiot"

Contractions: a shortened form of a word or group of words, with the omitted letters often replaced in written English by an apostrophe, as e'er for ever, isn't for is not, dep't for department.

Your, You're. It's really simple guys. If YOU'RE unsure of YOUR usage of your or you're, ask yourself if "are" should be present.

"lol your a idiot"

Articles: any member of a small class of words, or, as in Swedish or Romanian, affixes, found in certain languages, as English, French, and Arabic, that are linked to nouns and that typically have a grammatical function identifying the noun as a noun rather than describing it. In English the definite article is the, the indefinite article is a or an, and their force is generally to impart specificity to the noun or to single out the referent from the class named by the noun.

A, An or The. Since "the" isn't in question here, let's focus on the use of "a" and "an".

In first or second grade english class, we learned what articles were and their proper use. "A" is used to precede a noun starting with a consonant. A consonant is generally comprised of 21 of the 26 letters of the alphabet with a few exceptions depending on the word. "An" is used to precede a noun starting with a vowel or a vowel sound. First or second grade english folks. It's not just for rich people.

Bluntly put...

YOU ONLY HAVE TO MEMORIZE FIVE F***ING LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET THAT SHOULD BE PRECEDED WITH "AN". HOW F***ING HARD IS THAT?!??!!? A, E, I, O, U. EASY! THEY'RE EVEN CATEGORIZED AS THEIR OWN SUBGROUP OF THE ALPHABET. SURELY YOU'VE HEARD OF "VOWELS". ON TOP OF THAT HOW HARD IS IT TO ASK YOURSELF IF THE WORD "ARE" SHOULD BE IN YOUR SENTENCE SHOULD YOU DECIDE NOT TO USE A F***ING APOSTROPHE?!?!? I F***ING FAILED HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH MY SENIOR YEAR (cause I hated the books they made us read) AND EVEN I F***ING KNOW THAT SHIT.

IF ENGLISH ISN'T YOUR FIRST LANGUAGE, LEARN THE F***ING LANGUAGE BEFORE YOU TRY TO INSULT PEOPLE. IT GOES A LONG F***ING WAY IN MAKING YOUR POINT WHEN YOUR STATEMENTS ARE GRAMMATICALLY SOUND. IF YOU'RE UNSURE, TRY USING AN ONLINE RESOURCE LIKE DICTIONARY.COM, THESAURUS.COM OR EVEN A F***ING SPELLING/GRAMMAR CHECKER IN SOME WORD PROCESSING SOFTWARE.

Next English lesson: There, Their and They're. Now I just need this "idiot" to send me another tell with that mistake in it.

The last thing I'll say about this Xxshadowangelxx in this post is:

I hate cowards. Logging onto a mule to insult me then logging back to your main before I even know wtf is going on and not having the balls (or vaginal fortitude possibly in this case) to talk to me one on one when clearly there's been some sort of a misunderstanding speaks deafening volumes about your personality in general. Kudos for wanting to defend your friend in the midst of their issues, but cowardice does absolutely nothing for their defense. Step up and be human Xxshadowangelxx.



Anyway, enough old man rantings today. Ending this on a positive note, Imp. Wootz Ingots have dropped by nearly 1/3 of their value since ANNMs were released. Marduk Body may actually happen if they keep dropping in price. :)

Edit: Canuck just reminded me I needed to make fun of him for spending weeks in Gustav tunnel camping Wyvernpoacher only to see me go down there to farm Sacrifice and get an O.Bow on my first kill.