Day 9 – My first blog post

Last Updated on Thursday, 12 April 2012 03:04 Written by Kadomi Thursday, 12 April 2012 03:00

he first blog post is always the hardest, isn’t it? You start setting out, all excited, and mostly write into this big vacuum. At most, your closest friends know about your blog, if at all, and so it’s all about writing into the void, trying to find your own voice. At least, that’s what it was for me.

I started blogging in June 2008, over at Tank Like A Girl. My very first blog post was a short introductory paragraph stating my plans for the blog, and mostly a justification about why I moved over from Livejournal to my own blogging platform. My first real post was The proud and the few: warriors where I waxed poetic about my love for the WoW warrior class, and how overall they were very unpopular in my guild. Not just that. If you look at it today, you will find a WoW blogosphere dominated by druid, hunter and other healers blogs. Warriors have very little representation, and it’s getting less and less all the time. All the big names from my day, be it Veneretio, Linedan, Ciderhelm, Durnic, they all moved away from warrior blogging or even WoW, as did I.

My first blog in this blog over yonder was A New Road or a Secret Gate, a quote from The Road Goes Ever On by J.R.R. Tolkien. Just like in my WoW blog I tried to make the first post an introduction about what the blog would be about. My love for books, gaming, nerdy things, all combined. I think I have failed in this mission statement, and still do, because it’s mostly turned into a book blog these days. But I am trying, still trying. There are some exciting things in the works, at least something that excites me, and I am working on some drafts that veer away from the book focus. After all, I still game almost every day, and I have a blog challenge to finish.

If you compare both first posts, I feel the second one shows that I was a bit more used to actually writing by the time. Can’t quite believe it’s almost four years of (not very consistent) blogging. My journey from the medium traffic warrior blog to the low traffic nerd blog has taught me the most valuable lesson: blog for yourself, don’t blog for your audience. Write because you want to write. Rejoice when you have readers but don’t be discouraged when you feel no one is reading your stuff. Trust me, someone out there is.

Day 8 – 10 things you don’t know about me

Last Updated on Thursday, 29 March 2012 01:31 Written by Kadomi Thursday, 29 March 2012 03:00

I dropped the ball on the blogging challenge, I know. For a good reason though. Remember the workplace photo? Well, duh, go figure, two days later I got laid off, for economic reasons. They laid off both us web admins so it isn’t a personal defeat but it pretty damn feels like one. It pretty much evaporated my wish to blog for a while. I have taken it slow since then. Trying to get back into a healthy head space, I am taking time off til next week. I enjoyed the lovely weather by sunbathing on our roof terrace, I read a lot, as you can tell from the reviews, and I just chilled. Next week begins the RL grind of trying to find a new job, pronto.

Back to the blogging challenge. I am actually not a very secretive person, and the things I list I might actually have mentioned before, but I’ll try to dig deep. This is a pretty personal subject, so it’ll be a real challenge to bring the nerd into the list.

1. My middle name is Hannelore. 99% of all English-speaking friends of mine find this is a ridiculously charming name. We even had a DotH guild member with that name who loved to tease me about it. Thank goodness the name was not based on me but a character from the web comic Questionable Content. I really adore my godmother but I wish she had a more hip name. This is as old-fashioned a name as you can get in German, and I was tormented about throughout all of my childhood.
2. I used to be a world traveler. Back when I still went to university, I backpacked every year, thanks to having a boyfriend later husband with a travel bug. The major highlights of our travels were four weeks of US west coast sights, two trips backpacking through Thailand, two trips to Singapore, a beach vacation on Bali in Indonesia and a safari in the Masai Mara NP in Kenya. I have been all over western Europe (England, Scotland, France, all Benelux states, Austria, Switzerland, Italy) and roamed through Germany from north to south. I wish I could still travel the way I used to, but it’s a helluva lot easier when you’re still at university. And yet, I miss it. My next real travel goal is to travel to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean before they completely drown under the sea. Hope to get there within a year or two.
3. I am a divorced. My first marriage was the poster child for abusive and dysfunctional relationships, but ultimately I think it turned me into a better person.
4. The first computer game I ever legally bought was Ultima V for the C64. You simply didn’t buy computer games back then. I have no idea how game publishers actually financed their titles. You exchanged first tapes then floppy disks in the school yard, that’s how you got games. I liked to roam around the computer aisles in the department stores, especially around such mythical titles as the old Infocom games because those were really hard to get traded. They were all in English, and all text, so not very popular. Ultima IV changed how I looked at RPGs on the computer. Go figure, all these little stick figures and the limited text painted such an intriguing world to me. I never completed the game, but I loved it fiercely. When Ultima V was released, I knew I had to have it. It was released in 1988, and it cost me a pretty penny. At 17 I worked as a paper delivery girl, for very little money. 80 DM was a hefty price tag. Yet I didn’t care. It was worth every Pfennig, everything I had hoped it would be. The Ultima series influenced me so much that the first thing I did when discovering the Internet was to join the Ultima Dragons, a fan club of the series. Their website is like a moongate back in time, heh.
5. I once applied for a WoW GM position and was ready and willing to move to France for it, when Blizzard Europe had their HQ near Paris. I never heard from them, and was fine with that. One of my former co-workers is now a GM in Cork, Ireland. I wouldn’t be willing to move to another country for a job anymore, mostly because my wife is very happy with her job here.
6. I used to be a wizard on FiranMUX, one of the bigger MUXes then. It’s still alive and kicking. I guess admining there is like being an MMO GM. You get to witness the depths of human souls and what they’re willing to game and break to meet their goals. I think wizarding there was the first step to turn me into the somewhat bitter, jaded gamer that I am today.
7. I am a terrible gamer. I used to have a history of never actually completing games. I probably played them to around 75% and then piddled out. This applies to classics like Ultima IV and V, both Baldur’s Gate games, even Planescape: Torment! I can’t wait for the enhanced editions of Baldur’s Gate. I have the complete Black Isle collection, but I find I cannot stand going back to older games. I am a spoiled girl. I really should try digging deeper into Planescape: Torment again, I know it’s worth it.
8. I am committing the sin of being secretly addicted to one Zynga game at a time. I used to love Frontierville, then switched to CityVille, now I am addicted to CastleVille. Which is slightly jumping the shark for me now, because it’s freakishly using Martha Steward for their Easter Event. Really, Zynga? I actually enjoy playing on zynga.com, because it gives you only the game streams and zFriends that you can play with, without any Facebook strings attached. Yeah, you can mock me all you want now, but I enjoy CastleVille’s crafting system and over-the-top fantasy characters.
9. I have no game console. Yeah, what kind of gamer am I? This is mostly because I…don’t actually own a TV. Our last TV was tiny and smashed by one of our cats, and we never bought a new one. Nowadays, I actually do want a TV, but my wife is adamant that television is terrible and makes dumber. She probably has a point but still. I gave up making a case for a TV because a) I am unemployed, we have other worries and b) I’d rather buy a Squeezebox first.
10. Despite having no television, I am addicted to reality shows on Bravo. Well, some of them, no housewives please. We love Top Chef, Top Chef: Desserts and Tabatha Takes Over. Just love them. Love to talk about them too. I mean, seriously, the insane grooming shop owner from Tabatha two weeks ago? HILARIOUS!

I am sure there’s more stuff you don’t know about me, but probably for a reason. I hope I was able to surprise a bit, at least.

Day 7 – The reason behind my blog’s name

Last Updated on Wednesday, 14 March 2012 04:32 Written by Kadomi Wednesday, 14 March 2012 04:23

hen I started blogging, I thought about my options for a while. I wanted to go self-hosted, simply because I felt I would have more flexibility with whatever blogging software I would use. So I started thinking about domain names. I wanted to dedicate the blog to prot warrior tanking, and I wanted that reflected in the name. I mentioned it to one of my guildies, and she jokingly suggested that I tank like a girl. It’s a play on ‘you fight like a girl’ and I thought it was funny and witty. And thus, the name was born.

Later on, I regretted my choice of name. The tanking reference really shoehorned me into the tanking world, even when my interest shifted to healing. I had a specific audience and never felt comfortable to write much about my healing endeavors as raiding resto shaman, and later holy paladin.

I also butted heads with some bloggers who felt that putting the focus on being a girl or grrrrrl or chick or whatever was undignified and uncalled for. I don’t know, maybe it was, but I never actually wrote about being a female tank. I am a feminist, but that was never the point of my writing. I wrote about tanking in general. When I came up with the name, I wanted it to be amusing, but I also wanted to break the stereotype that girls will only play healers. I think women are more comfortable in support roles, but I wanted to demonstrate that female tanks existed. It’s kinda painful to see my former guild Daughters of the Horde struggle so much with raiding content in Cataclysm because they have few tanks. There’s definitely a lack of tanks in that guild, and so I can draw the conclusion that girls do indeed not enjoy tanking as much as the other two roles in the trinity. But those who do enjoy tanking are some of the best players I know.

When it came to naming this blog, I decided I would continue on my current domain and set the new blog up as a subdomain install. Btw, once you set it up, multisite subdomain installs of WordPress are amazing! Setting up a new blog in under a minute is amazing! Ahem. Live like a Nerd was to be a play on Tank Like a Girl, because it’s a blog more about me as a person with all my geeky pursuits. I fully qualify as a nerd based on this comparison chart of nerds vs geeks, it’s my license plate, and I am proud to be a nerd. This blog is more about that than my tanking blog was ever about being a girl.

And that’s my story about the blog names.