Folks constantly say that grammar doesn’t matter. This rings pretty hollow, of course, when someone in World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online is asking for help with a quest, and their grammar is so poor that I realize they could be asking any of three valid questions regarding that quest, and I can’t for the life of me tell which one. Apparently neither can other folks, since often they’ll get conflicting answers that answer different versions of the question. Spelling is a similar matter; sometimes you can tell what someone means, but sometimes you can’t. Homonyms (words that sound alike but are spelled differently, like there and their) make spelling particularly important. Capitalization might seem like the last bastion of “it doesn’t matter,” and yet it can make a huge difference as well. I saw someone post the following example on a WoW chat channel once, so I can’t properly attribute it; yes, it’s crude, but that makes it memorable:

Capitalization is the difference between “I helped my Uncle Jack off a horse” and “I helped my uncle jack off a horse.”

Punctuation has a similar argument going for it that capitalization does, and in fact punctuation could also greatly clear up that last sentence: “I helped my uncle, Jack, off a horse.”

I don’t tend to berate folks for their spelling or grammar the way some people do; I don’t see the point. It doesn’t accomplish anything except to make people angry, and it would be pretty hypocritical since I know my grammar isn’t perfect either. I only have a few circumstances under which I’ll say something:

• Someone makes a really obvious mistake of their own while they’re pompously correcting someone else’s grammar or spelling. I mean, come on. Don’t go around correcting everyone else when you can’t even do it right yourself; that’s truly obnoxious. (I’m mostly likely to do this if someone’s obviously correcting someone else in order to be a jerk.)
• Someone makes a mistake that creates an unintentionally funny statement. What can I say; I love word-play and unintentional humor. Even when I see that I don’t correct their grammar or spelling, however; I just can’t help pointing out the humor in what they’re saying.
• I hit the boiling point, usually due to an unusually large number of people making really stupid mistakes and being very snotty about it.

Right now I’m mostly posting this because I must pass on my current favorite example of why such things matter:

(”Don’t kill your wife with work! Let electricity do it!”)

If you can’t see the humor in this sign then trust me, you really really need to improve your grammar.

Speaking of which, our latest review is of Lara M. Robbins’s Grammar & Style at Your Fingertips. Oddly enough, that actually is a coincidence.

Now, like I said, I know my grammar isn’t perfect, and I decided to take a little online meme quiz in that area:

Your English Skills:

Punctuation: 100% Vocabulary: 100% Grammar: 80% Spelling: 80%

It uses a pretty small cross-section of examples to test you, of course, so it’s of dubious accuracy. The only part that bugs me is that I used to be MUCH better at spelling. I’m also much better at spelling a word when you ask me to spell it cold rather than showing me two different possible spellings; something about the latter situation makes it much harder for me to judge. I start second-guessing myself.

I don’t normally link to artwork here; I secretly use Stumbleupon to fulfill my photography and art needs, and most of my favorite picks come from photo.net and deviant art. Unbeknownst to anyone except, perhaps, my husband, I have an enduring fetish for both photos and art. I prefer items awash with saturated colors; serene, empty, stony beaches at sunrise or sunset; the unusual and the unexpected; and, of course, cats, big and small. There is no one style I favor, although there are some I tend to avoid unless I find a specimen that moves me in unusual ways. Skill and talent matter more to me than milieu. The other day I found something particularly unusual; it has some of those saturated colors I mentioned, but it’s the content that particularly struck me. I think a true artist is someone who can look at something ordinary and see—and communicate—something extraordinary in turn. When I look at a turnip I see a turnip, or maybe roasted vegetables or a soup or stew. An artist, however, might see a naked mole rat and a bloody landscape:

Naked Mole Rat Dreams by *ursulav on deviantART

Okay, so as you can see I sometimes have strange tastes!

The other day I found an interesting post on the art of bloodletters called Hack Yourself. It’s all about changing your life to make it what you want of it, and deciding to give up the pastime of assigning blame to others for what’s wrong in your life. I do firmly believe there’s value trying to figure out the causes of your behavior from your past, but I also believe you need to use that information to move past the events and into a solution. The point of figuring out that you do X because you’re unconsciously copying your parents’ behaviors isn’t so you can blame your parents for the fact that you do X—it’s so that you can become more aware of that behavior, understand that there isn’t a good reason why you’re engaging in it, and work to change it. It’s also so that you can then look at the rest of your behaviors, hold them up next to those of your parents, and figure out what else you’re doing that you don’t like and didn’t realize you were doing, then change that too.

As the author of “Hack Yourself” says,

You don’t exist.

You just think you do.

We’re nothing but the stories we tell ourselves. We know in our hearts what kind of people we are, what we’re capable of, because we’ve told ourselves what kind of people we are. You’re a carefully-rehearsed list of weaknesses and strengths you’ve told yourself you have.

(Self-confidence, for example, is a particularly nebulous quality you can easily talk yourself out of having.)

You owe no allegiance to that self-image if it harms you. If you don’t like the story your life has become — tell yourself a better one.

Think about the person you want to be and do what that person would do. Act the way that person would act.

Amazingly enough, once you start acting like that person, people will start treating you like that person.

And you’ll start to believe it. And then it will be true.

Welcome to your new self.

Go there and read the whole piece; it’s a good one. Then pick something you tend to dwell on and resolve to move forward instead of continuing to worry about blame. Is it easy? No. Is it possible? Yes, and entirely worth doing.

In unrelated news, we’ve moved all of the BurningVoid.com website over, and all the redirects are in place! This battlestation is fully operational! Now I just need to go around finding folks who link to us and asking them nicely to update their links. [*falls over exhausted*]

Edited to add: I know I haven’t reviewed much kitchenware lately, but today I reviewed the Rival hot air popcorn popper.

Foton has posted quotes from a great list of Phrases you will never see on the WoW Forums. This originated from a thread on the Warcraft forums themselves, but AFKG is the better bet for being able to find the best ones archived long-term.

My humble submissions:

• “Pallys and Shamen are the best-balanced classes in the game.”
• “Go ahead and take your time rolling out those features, Blizz; it’s more important to get it right than do it fast.”
• “I’d really love to see this feature added, but it isn’t urgent; take care of some other folks’ needs first.”
• “I’m not happy about these changes, but let’s face it, I love Warcraft and it isn’t like they’ll make me quit or anything.”
• “I’d really like to see these changes made, but I know I’m not typical of your userbase, so it isn’t a big deal.”

It’s incredibly unsurprising that virtually every entry plays off of the fact that the loudest forum posters are demanding, whiny and rude–or the fact that no, Blizzard and Warcraft will never reach 100% perfection.

In unrelated news, here’s a new review for you: Tony Ballantyne’s science fiction novel Recursion.

“I’m not lazy, I’m just out of mana”
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I just have to pass on this list of useful military warnings. I think this approach to things is great–a little dry humor is certainly going to make such reading memorable, eh? Here are a couple of my favorites:

“A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what’s left of your unit.”
- Army’s magazine of preventive maintenance.

Understatement is a great tool of communication–except when you’re dealing with extremely literal-minded people.

“It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you just bombed.”
- U.S. Air Force Manual

This is one of those where you just know the dry tone is because the person writing it is thinking, “it’s ridiculous that I even have to SAY this, and yet…”

and,

“When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend.”
- U.S. Army

This one gives me an image of a grenade with a face painted on it.

I’m not often impressed by recipe blogs, but the other day I stumbled across Kalyn’s Kitchen–and the recipes actually made me hungry. Not just one or two of them, either. Here’s a surprising one: roasted radishes with soy sauce and toasted sesame seed. I never would have thought of that (either the roasting of radishes, or the pairing of them with soy sauce and sesame), but it looks absolutely fabulous! Kalyn includes suggestions for recipes to pair it with, as well as notes on which South Beach phases it works with and other blogs’ radish suggestions. Now that’s helpful.

Kinda-sorta in the health vein, last night we were bad and decided to try out a Chinese & Sushi restaurant nearby. The simple fact that it paired Chinese food and Sushi probably should have been warning enough, but oh well. The sashimi was the wrong color and texture, for gods’ sake—raw tuna shouldn’t be grayish. The dried shredded beef dish was way too dry, and the pork in the fried wontons tasted… wrong; anything that can cause me not to eat my fair share of fried wontons is notable indeed (I have a weakness for the things). It was a quiet day and yet the waiter forgot our tea and forgot to wrap our leftovers (not that we’re shedding any tears over that last part). Then I spent an hour and a half in the middle of the night running back and forth to the bathroom, and I don’t think these things are unrelated. We are never going back.

We generally skip really cheap or terrible looking restaurants, so we rarely have truly negative experiences with them. The worst we tend to get is, “you know, that restaurant just isn’t as good as it used to be; let’s stick to this other one instead.” This does, however, remind me of the Chinese restaurant in Boston where we’d gotten delivery and were pouring some dumpling sauce onto a plate only to have a dead roach float out of it. I wish I could say this was before we’d used the sauce at all.

There are supposedly some good Chinese restaurants in the middle of Annapolis where things tend to be more upscale and—god help us—trendy, so we’ll try those next and skip the stuff on the outskirts from now on.

I don’t watch reality shows. Period. Okay, there was that one short time I don’t like to talk about when I watched a handful of episodes of America’s Next Top Model, but I plead insanity, and it was several years ago. Still, even I caught the YouTube replays of Paul Potts’s performance for “Britain’s Got Talent.” I have no interest in the show, in watching the competition, or any of that, but I had to watch him win:

Why? Because he’s such an ordinary, down-to-earth guy. He’s nice. He doesn’t look like a model; he isn’t wealthy or famous and he doesn’t act like a diva. On top of that he has such an awesome voice and talent for conveying emotion. I don’t normally care for opera, but I’ll admit his performance had me in tears for a moment there. It was a real high to watch the video of his audition where the judges went from expressions of “oh dear lord I hate myself” to “oh my GOD,” and it was even better to watch him win. In a way it’s a victory for everyone who feels ordinary but has a dream to be more. He represents our hopes and our dreams, and I hope he goes far with them.

I decided to try out the ten-day free trial of Dungeons & Dragons Online, because–well, I enjoy D&D and I enjoy online games. Unfortunately it only took two of the ten days for me to decide to uninstall. Sure, that isn’t enough time to give the game as a whole a fair chance. On the other hand, a game needs to be designed to hook people quickly, and if DDO fails in that regard, I can probably expect it to fail in others as well. Certainly after two days I had little interest in logging in again, so I’d rather spend that time on LotRO.

The irony, of course, is that LotRO was put out by the same company–Turbine. You can certainly see hints of it in the design elements here and there. However, the two are extremely different in how they play.

Dungeon Design

I think I get it–Turbine really wanted to capture the canonical D&D “feel.” Unfortunately what they captured was the feel of a stereotypical D&D session, which is not at all the same as a good one or even a normal one. Absolutely everything seems to be dungeon based, at least early on. The narrator/DM’s voice is heavy-handed, constantly dictating your actions, reactions, and discoveries. It gets old very quickly, and gives the game the feel of being a simple boxed game, not something you’d be willing to spend a monthly fee to play.

Delayed Rewards

Getting to level two took forever compared to games like LotRO and WoW (a day or two of off-and-on playing compared to… what, an hour?). One thing those games got right is that it’s really fun to see quick advancement when you’re first playing your character.

Confusion

I’ve never felt lost for long in a game before. At first Orgrimmar or Shattrath drove me nuts, but it didn’t take long to learn my way around and find everything I needed. In Stormreach I kept getting turned around, and even once I thought I knew where most things were, there were still characters and places I couldn’t find for the life of me. The damn place is incredibly three-dimensional, and doors aren’t exactly labeled, so you can easily end up god-knows where. On the plus side, at least when you click on an instance entrance it tells you what level the instance is, how long it’s likely to take, and what quest it’s for, and allows you to choose the difficulty.

Basic things like the auction house also have a lot less functionality. I can tell it’s based on the same interface used in LotRO, but clearly the execution has been improved drastically for that other game.

Extras

I might have simply not run into it since I didn’t play for long, but I didn’t see signs of a crafting system. Usually after two days of play I would have run into that, at least in games like WoW and LotRO. Since crafting is one of my all-time favorite things to pursue in an MMORPG, that’s a big gap for me.

So, yeah, I didn’t give the game much of a chance. But then, it seemed fairly clear to me that while I might always enjoy playing it a little here or there, I’d never find it worth a monthly fee–at least, not unless I had a lot of extra money to throw around!

Varying Viewpoints

To be sure, however, the game does have its fans (as well as other detractors). So, to give you a few contrasting opinions, here are some links for you (I do think it’s telling that I had a much harder time finding DDO links than links for other games):

• DDOCast–an entire podcast site just for the game
• Playability vs. Vision–a wonderful treatise on how important playability is to a game
• (Third link removed because apparently they don’t like finding out people have linked to them, or something.)

Most of the discussion links I found had something to do with Warcry (which I won’t link to, since as my security software so helpfully pointed out, they use ad servers known to harbor spyware) or were hosted by a gold-seller blog (which I also have no interest in supporting).

Elixir of Coffee
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Usually when I talk about food- and cooking-related things I like them to be on the yummy and/or healthy side. Today I thought I’d delve into so-bad-it’s-awesome territory and link you on over to Craptails: the 10 worst drink concepts of all time. The “VIP Sangria” is fairly mundane, with its mix of crappy soda and expensive wine, but things swiftly become bizarre with such ingredients as used socks (to moderate the foul odor of durian fruit), a power drill, raw bacon, Spam, a whole salmon, and a fried quail egg.

Oh, not all in the same recipe. Sorry for the confusion.

My only sadness is that the post doesn’t include photos for each and every one of these dubious masterpieces:

Oh, and it while it would have been even more cool if these had been real drinks someone came up with (I still remember the Galactica special in which the actress who plays Sharon made her “Cylon Shooter”, which actually looked kinda good, if lethal), it’s still entertaining to have someone craft themed disaster drinks.

In personal blah-blah-ing, I think I’m over one week with a sore throat. I was hoping not to have to go back to the doctor until after I found a new one. And in other oddness, I decided to take the which Heroes character are you? quiz just for fun. There has to be something fairly screwed up about scoring a tie between the series’s most innocent character (Hiro) and its most twisted (Sylar)–yet apparently that’s me. Innocently twisted? Twistedly innocent? Is that a good thing or bad? [Cue melodramatic voice-over:] YOU decide!

Wired has a great little post about how Voice Chat Can Really Kill the Mood on WoW.

There are a lot of folks who swear by Ventrilo, and of course raiding guilds won’t let you in without it. I’ve steadfastly refused to use it, for exactly one of the reasons put forth by the guy writing the article–I’m a woman. When I’m typing in text I find it fairly easy to use language that’s ambiguous in terms of its sexuality; people almost always assume I’m a guy. I like that because I don’t get hit on and I don’t get folks condescending to me just because I’m female. I’m also naturally introverted, and as he pointed out, shy folks tend not to say much on voice chat–which leaves everyone listening to the locker room banter of the raucous teens in most guilds. That’s just never appealed to me; I can’t imagine why.

One of the downsides to the included voice chat in LotRO, I’ve found, is that folks are less tolerant of your not using it even in the simplest of quest fellowships. I’ll have folks making pointed comments about how I really should use it not because we actually need it for anything we’re doing, but because someone in the fellowship doesn’t feel like typing. I’ve taken to telling them my mic is broken. I definitely enjoy the game more when I can’t tell that the bearded dwarf is a 10-year-old, and he can’t tell that my hobbit guardian is a woman old enough to be his mother. Unless I’m getting to be friends with someone on-line I honestly don’t want them to know my gender and age, and if I had a 10-year-old kid playing one of these games I wouldn’t want him chatting away with midde-aged strangers.

I’m glad voice chat is available; I always loved listening in on the snarky jokes when my husband went raiding (he’d leave the output set to speaker so I could listen in). I just think it would be nice if folks would respect the wishes of those who don’t want to broadcast their voice–and their identity–to everyone else. Obviously that isn’t always an option when raiding, but in lesser circumstances it shouldn’t be an issue.

Speaking of raiding, as Foton notes over at AFK Gamer Blizz has started nerfing some of the attunements. It seems they’ve finally realized they’re alienating all but the most hardcore of raiding guilds with much of their complex end-game content and making it hard for even those guilds to bring newer members up to speed. Unfortunately I’ve found I’ve already gotten kind of fed up with the end-game content over there. I want to continue playing, but every time I think about logging in I consider what I could do when I log in and how many times I’ve done it before… and I log in to LotRO instead. Of course, as Van Hemlock notes, there are bunches of other games out there to try too, and his reminder got me to download D&D online last night just for kicks. So far it’s fun but I doubt I’ll want to pay the subscription fee for it. It has the feel of a standard single-player boxed game in which you just happen to run into other people, whereas WoW and LotRO feel as though they’ve taken advantage of the massively multiplayer environment to become another beast entirely. Still, that’s a rather unfair judgment for me to make at such an early stage, so I’ll keep playing it for the rest of the trial period.

Today’s review: Just as a note, today’s book review is The King Arthur Flour Company Whole Grain Baking Book.

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