Video time!

Okay I've been busy being social on WoW and in real life with lots of nice events with friends. I had some time tonight that I took off from grinding - I'll explain tomorrow if I can - to check out some videos on you tube. I found an amusing WoW one that goes over the classes. It was mad pre-BC (burning crusade for those of you lacking knowledge)and covers things fairly well as far as how the class's seem to be. The only thing thats changed since the video was made is Mages are stupid broken and poor Shammies are limping along. I play one so I know, but do enjoy the video for some snickers.

I am still in hiding...

Nothing against you - my valued readers(if any). I've been sick and busy dealing with other stuff that involves actually being paid monies. So here is the new Watchmen trailer to make up some for it. It actually gives people who've not read the graphic novel a bit more insight in to the plot of the movie. As well as builds on the pure music trailer put out back in July.

I'll be back on Monday with an actual blog as I plan to cave to the curiosity by picking up my game and a time card. Cause I really should talk to my friends there again. Have a good weekend folks!

WotlK but no game time and prviate servers

I admit it. I've gotten lazy. Actually scared it more like it, with the Wrath of Lich King to be released at midnight tonight I can only imagine how things will be. Spend an hour to two hours to get my copy that I paid for. Spend another two hours updating my system and downloading the new expansion to it. Only to.. wait what? A QUEUE?!

Yep. Something I exspect to see on many EST servers ( with others to follow suit respectively as it becomes 12 am their time) due to the people who left WoW (for 50 assorted reasons) only to return with WotLK. Causing servers that were low population when they left to surge up to high or even locked status in many cases (Like with my own. -.-) I wouldn't be surprised to see a number of realms to actually crash due to the overwhelming resurgence of players returning with the expansion as curiosity of the new is always a deal breaker when you swear something off.


So whats a girl to do? Thank her Lazy nature for a change. I forgot to get a new subscription card for my account and my game time expired yesterday actually. Now it won't top me from doing a one time charge to one of my cards should the urge push me, but I already know what its going to be like. Not to add I've avoided WoW the past week due to Guild Drama I seen coming a mile away thanks to a friends forewarning. So I've not gotten any recent game time really.

But bearing in mind I already roam a regular Medium to High Population server I can only wonder what tonight would bring if I did attempt to log on after updating with WotLK. More like I wonder how long my Queue is going to be really. I tried to get a bit of game time in on one of the private servers I frequent only they are still on patch 2.4.3 and I've already gotten the 3.0.3 patch - I could downgrade but that means having to install the Echos of Doom patch along with the correction patches. So I've attempted to locate a diffrent private server in which to game on that is up to patch 3.0.3. Not much luck really.

The few I found when I attempted to access their server lists via the WoW launch screen I was told my account - which should have been active by now didn't exist and I should contact Blizzard for help. It made me giggle and sad at the same time. The Private servers supporting 3.0.3 don't offer a forum or area where I could ask why I was unable to access the realm lists for their servers. Given I had changed what I needed to in order to get on but with no luck and no help. Whats this teach us kids? Find a friend with a private server you can play on. Seriously.

Some things are just not right.. This happens to be one of them!!

So I admit I am something of a blog troll. I have the blogs I read daily, the ones I wait till the end of the week to entertain me when I'm at work late at night and then those that are observed more casually. Well its one of my casual observation's that had something that amused me.. some what.

What if you read a blog regularly but couldn't tell the gender of the blogger? What if for the curious nature all humans have had gotten to you when it came to this blogger? Have no fear! The GenderAnalyzer is here to save your day! Almost. See the way the program works is over a set amount of time data was imputed from bloggers here on Blogger.Com where their gender was already known for a set amount of blogs. I smell creative failure in the making, but hey I'm an open minded girl! Lets give it a try. I tested it with my blog - anyone care to take a guess at the gender it asumed for me?

-- Jeperdy theme --

If you guess Male, you'd get a cookie. If I had any. I'm not surprised really as my blog is about things guys often talk about after all. Moving on, the other blogger that wrote this artical on this page on did a randomized test in which they either knew the gender of the blogger before hand or (in the case of the New York Times ) it wouldn't take much to figure out. Some information on the blog - its HeartlessDoll.Com, a pop Culture blog of sorts writen by a few women. Its entertaining often and has some good articals. I don't always aggree but the girls make good points that I can see so it keeps me coming back.

Heartless Doll: written by a woman.
NYTimes.com: written by a man.
Jezebel: written by a woman.
Salon's Broadsheet: written by a man.
Heroine Sheik (my own blog): written by a man.

As you can see, there are some problems right off the bat. 1) NYTimes.com is not written exclusively by men. 2) Broadsheet is written by women. 3) I am not a man.

The break down of the way the program processes data shows that obviously the developers of this "Gender finder" really need to expand their testing ground and take blogs where their may be multiple posters in to consideration for the data used. My understanding of the way it works is much like a search bot on any webpage, crawling a site to hit on keywords basicly. Right?

Says Kagstrom, the developer, "I think the reason for the somewhat low accuracy is because we have biased training data (only collected from blogspot)." Yeah, Blogspot isn't necessarily the height of cultural nuance, but it is interesting to see what stereotypes get dredged up by using blogs like that to determine how men and women write. Check out some example of how Gender Analyzer thinks the following words break down, and you'll see what I mean:

Technology: 99.3% male
Love: 89.9% female
Sex: 56.6% male, 43.4% female.

So, if I follow this blog up with one where I typed Love a good twenty or thrity times - it MIGHT get my gender right. And the point of this silly program again is?

About GenderAnalyzer (BETA)

We created Genderanalyzer out of curiosity and fun. It uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman. Behind the scene, a text classifier hosted over at uClassify.com has been trained on 2000 blogs written by men and women. In our lab it seems to works pretty well, we want to see how it performs on the web! We hope you like it!

Uhm. Yeah.

Just something cool..

I go to a special page every day because of the random things I find on it, yesterday I tracked across this and thought it was interesting enough to share.


The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

Its a demo for a game that looks like it could be interesting and entertaining given you have to figure out your way around in a WHOLE new way. I look forward to seeing this move from Tech Demo to game demos soon.

The Blogger.. Part 2

So picking up where I paused at the other night. My gaming education then shifted gears as I got in to RTS and MUDs online. Now by this time I was in High School and my gaming for consoles was a observation through one cousin who was still gaming strong.

Time drags on.

I started dating and a few boyfriends in I find one in to gaming on consoles. And fearing to be rusty as he's on a PS2, I'm more curious to watch and observe over his shoulder then jump in to gaming. At one point a friend of his finds out about this and attempts to convince him to marry me as soon as he can. I find the humor in it of course, but whats even funnier is I'm still with him to this day. Gaming away, but I'm getting a head of my self.

Creepy mofo you really wana keep the camera on.

It is with the PS2 I find New additions to the Silent Hill and RE families. A few sleepless weekends later of gaming at his place I add these to my happy memory box. I soon discover Fatal Frame. It was like the rush when I discovered Silent Hill. The game play was new and unusual - if a bit frustrating at times with the restrictions to camera movements but the game didn't lose its hold on me. I soon added it to my list of games to play till the disk broke.

I get in to playing with him in Slayers and other fighting games. You win some and lose some. Then one day when we were hanging out I wander in to the game room to find him playing a curious game on the PC. I'd never seen it before, it looked like some card game but not with playing cards. So in my usual way, I sat and watched. It was a couple days till I got the urge to ask him to play my self. He sat by my side and helped walk me through my new addiction - Magic the Gathering. The game, now seriously out dated, was a PC version in which you played a Plains Walker trying to save a world from being taken over. It was amusing, but he soon told me that it wasn't just a PC game. WHAT? I had to see this.

So we dug around in a closet in his room to find a moving box full of MtG cards. I dove in reading what I could get my hands on. It wasn't long till he was helping me build a Green deck. And he found his old decks for us to play with. It became something fun for us to do when we just wanted to sit and spend time together. Playing with the cards, making new decks or looking at what was coming out.

Another skip in years, we move (as in him and I) and the addiction keeps going. We find places to play against others. We become regulars and get better at our skills and game styles - he's more aggressive while I play on strategy. After some time of learning rules and getting better I take over running the weekly events for a friend at his Comic and Gaming Shop. I get to be a bigger geek by picking up my comics on top of gaming. Go me.

It gets better though, as my friend loses his shop help he asks me to take his place in helping him run the shop. I gladly agree to it, while working with my boyfriend to get him in place to run the FNM when I wasn't able to. Now at the shop we cover all types of gaming, table top, console, LAN gaming and miniatures. So now on a daily bases I get a great big helping of other types of gaming. This is where I get an exposure to WoW. At first I giggle and mock it, amused by it in truth. Months though in what is really a far more stressful job then some might think, I cave and make a trial account to vent some stress. It was better then I expected and far more entertaining.

In between all of this insanity - I get in to Anime. LORD do I get in to it, Cosplaying and all. My best friend took me to my first AnimeCon. BEST TIME EVER. Anyway I can sum this part up in one word - Otaku. Tyvm. My mom also raised me on Star Wars, Star Trek and M*A*S*H. So yeah I'm just all over the f*king place really.

Currently I still work for this shop, I'm still with the boyfriend and I'm a big geek. As it stands my Boss got in to Warhammer and 40k. I'm currently looking at building my own army, as well as my boyfriend. I still play Magic, if anything to appease the guys surprised to hear a girl plays. I play WoW.. and consoles.. and more then I really have money for. God Help me.

But hey... I'm a Gamer.

I'm taking a break...Sorta

Two days of coding, recoding and photo shop. My mind needs a break.. Enjoy this LOLcat in place of a actual blog post!

The Blogger.. Part 1

Not really sure how to start this honestly. I mean, how do you really talk about your self? I suppose its something that may come through more as I blog and you read. But I think some background information helps.

I come from a mostly female family. I was raised by my grandmother and mother. I only have a sister and a few cousins I consider siblings because they spent so much time in my house or I in their. SO there goes any talk of me getting in to games because of a Brother. ^_^ Kinda makes me proud I guess.

Sexy NES

Our very first system was a classic NES. I loved Duck Hunt, though I did try to shoot the dog a few times due to his mockery. My sister liked Mario. I remember we got it for Christmas along with a TV for us to play it on. My mom I think did it to keep us busy so she could watch TV in the Living room, but as she listened to us play she got in to playing her self.

It became a family thing to play Duck Hunt or Super Mario. It was fun times for us really, my grama even got in to playing as well. Something that continued in to our next system - the Sega Genesis. While I don't remember what other games we had for the NES, we had tons for the Sega. As well as having the system for a rather long time. My grandma and my sister got in to playing Toe Jam and Earl. It was there way of spending time together, mostly impart due to as my sister got older the more her and my grandma seemed to clash.

We had Sonic and a few 2-d side scrollers, as well as Street Fighter II. Mortal Kombat was one of my favorites. The list is gets kinda endless here. Life moved on and we changed consoles agian. This time upgrading to the snazzy Play Station.

We all ooh'd and Ahh'd over it as we all tried to find games we could get in too. Mom and Grama found Casino style games they liked to play on it, while my sister found racing games and Crash Bandicoot were her flavor. I struggled to get in to them, the casino ones were alright and racing was sorta fun - unless my sister picked a track she knew and I didn't.

Creepiest Mofo EVER!

This though would be where I found a genera where my addiction would really begin. Silent Hill. Creepy, nerve wracking and SO GOD DAMN COOL. I played through it over and over again till I had each portion of the game nearly memorized. Beautiful graphics compared to so many of the time, a life all its own. I was amazed. My passion for this style of games still flourishes today. I love a game that can pull you in by the collar and hold you there till your gasping for air. I followed it with Resident Evil and anything that seemed close to the style of either.

This is however where my console journey with my family ends though. Times changed, people changed. We ended up getting a computer at some point, and I got in to playing (For some reason) the silly little games it came with. They kept me busy, but as I figured out the functions of a pc I moved along in gaming. I got my first taste of a RTS with Cesar. It was a great game I loved to play, addictive really. I actually have a current version of the game to play, but with the updated graphics and snazzy new features to actually go in the houses of the people in your town - I still love the very first.

Part 2 to come...

Female Gamer Vs. Gamer girls

I found this article while surfing google in my hunt for a decent Gamer Girl Blog, it makes valid points because we all know a few of both types of girls described in the article. I see it at work and I am a female gamer to the core. But I thought this would help those who lack the foresight to see what they are dealing with in truth sometimes.

Its a topic I'm sure will be a main stay as some people think chicks don't game, or at lest truly game. Not just try to own someone in Halo or Counter-strike. I mean is the one pushing for late night D&D cause her level 12 Elf/Human Rogue is going to kick some level 11 Gnomes Warrior's ass in some all out battle for gold. Because there is more then FPS's out there. And we ARE there.




The Difference Between 'Female Gamers' and 'Gamer Girls'

We treat them like a rare species, but really, women who game are not that uncommon. Recent polls have put the figure between 35 and 40 percent of women, a minority but not a scarcity. Negative Gamer's Chelsea — aka Nintendoll — spotted something elsewhere that set her teeth on edge, and she wants to set the record straight about the reasons women and girls game. Because in her view the experience risks getting cliquey and catty, like high school.

Female gamers separate into two groups, Chelsea says, that are pretty easy to understand. "Girl gamers" do it for the attention — "a feeling of security and control from her social circle" — while "female gamers" just want to have friends who share an interest in games. "Since these “gamer girls” get their self-esteem from the praise and adoration of men who play video games, they become dependent on video games as something far more than entertainment."

How does it get to that point?

Well, it’s a problem that many people suffer from that is completely unrelated to gaming: low self-esteem. These girls want to be part of what they see as an exclusive boy’s club. It is true that women are currently a minority in the gaming industry, which is why gaming men find girls who play video games more desirable. Girls who feel the need to be loved try to sneak their way into this “boy’s club” using video games as a pretense to say that they’re a “tomboy” or “just one of the guys.” But the reality is that it is not really for the “equality” that they constantly complain is absent, but for the feeling of superiority over other girls coupled with the adoration of the male gaming community.

And that's where it gets catty.

“Gamer girls” hate on each other because they feel threatened by each other. Another female in this “boy’s club” diffuses the overall attention that a girl will get. Therefore a “gamer girl” will rip into another female gamer to protect her status as the most important girl in this male-dominated social circle. This is not unique to the video game industry, I’ve seen it happen in other predominantly male territories such as tech schools and the local rock climbing gym I used to frequent.

How can dudes help? She doesn't say, and I don't want to get all womyn's-studies on you here. But I'd say that treating everyone who picks up a controller, male or female, like a gamer first is a good start.
Patronizing, condescending or leering behavior would definitely discourages an interest in gaming as a fun activity, and if they continue it'll be for the other reasons Chelsea described — attention seeking, social superiority, etc.

I know I foment a lot of the "OMG hot girls who game" stuff, but when you look at them — Jo Garcia and Grace Kim are demonstrably serious about what they do, and the cosplayers are definitely informed about the games they like. To me, that's even hotter, and you see it when you game with them seriously.

Grand.. Opening sorta..

OKAY! So.. I've gotten it to were I want it. For now. Some more tweaking I'm sure will happen but right now I'm pleased with the look and feel for the most part. Everything is a work in progress though as they say.


So as it stands right now I'm mostly looking to get AdSense up and running. I am also looking for sponsors or people who just want some ad space on my blog. Gaming, geek or nerd related - how ever you like to say it.

Right now my intentions is to just do a blog that isn't just about one thing, but a few things. Cause as a Geek/Gamer I'm in to quite a few things, and I know other gamers that are as well. But I also feel like there is something honestly lacking in the department of a blog from a regular gamer girl.

Sure you can go look at supposed "Hot gamer girls" on hotgamergirls.com - yet I have a very good feeling half those supposed "Gamer girls" wouldn't know a DS from a NES. They only see the attention they get from posing with the xbox controller and figure they should do it more. There are a few places for Gamer girls, but the focus on Video Games. Gamer girls exist in many realms of the world of Games that is owned by men. There is TCG's, Pen and Paper, Board Games and Miniatures.

As well as much as I would love to see these sites flourishing, they seem to be ghost towns. Lacking of a population that actively talks, sparse posts in a starving forum with only a few regular readers and posters that cling to the hope of change.

I don't promise to cover everything. Rather hard, but I will cover what I can, post often and just give my two cents when it matters. Beyond that who knows..

I'm sure your dying for information about me now, but I'll save that for another post as the hour grows late and I really should try to sleep tonight. Hardcore bloggage begins tomorrow. Mark my word.

Testing other things

Yep.. still working...



And I'll be working.. so yeah!

Testing mah settings...

Rawr!! Two days worth of work but I've done it. Still tweaking the code. But its gona be great.. XD

You can ignore most of this stuff cause its seriously bs.. I just need to make sure everything is working correctly and is the way I want it after all.

Shamies will own you all...

Cause lord knows how everything may look if I wasn't diligent enough to make sure it all looked the way I wanted it. Go Go Team Geek.. blaaaaaaaahhhhh

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