The world is a truly bizarre place sometimes. There are a lot of folks that make up my twitter timeline that I know… but only in a slantwise way. I recognize them, and am even happy to see posts show up as my feed scrolls by, but I really don’t know much about them. ArcaneRatsel is one of those folks, and I largely followed her because she does amazing things for the Warcraft community as a whole. She was part of an expansion of my timeline as I attempted to follow more positive Warcraft folks. For example she did this crazy thing where she essentially created faction logos for anyone who was interested…. and as a result created a truly silly number of them. She is also involved in the Running of the Gnomes that supports Cleveland Clinic, Running of the Trolls that supports the Trevor Project, and now the Icecrown Challenge that supports the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. To say she is a “good egg” is a big understatement… but again this is largely someone I only knew existed in passing and occasionally but rarely ended up in the same conversation with. So yesterday all started with a really simple thing… she said she was passing through my state to visit family. It is not like Oklahoma is a popular destination spot, so generally when I see that I comment and welcome whoever it is to the state.
After a handful of back and forths… the conversation quickly moved to DMs… because in the oddest of coincidences apparently we grew up in the exact same town of 2500 people. There is a little less than a ten year difference between us in ages, so we are for all purposes of different generations. It is not like we should have had a lot of overlap… but we absolutely did. My Mother was a teacher at the High School for decades… and it turns out her Mom was as well. In fact her Mom was my Freshman English teacher, and for a period of time went to the same church as I did. Through either the church thing or the teacher thing… I know I wound up in their home multiple times throughout my “growing up” period, and as we found out last night my dad who was an armchair professional photographer took portrait photos at least once. If you were to do an “as the crow flies” we grew up less than a mile apart, in fact from my house you could look out over the pasture and see hers. Ultimately… the world is a really strange place sometimes and what seems like massive distances can be shortened in an instant. I mean after all my wife and I grew up thirty minutes apart, and were in turn introduced by a mutual friend in Belgium. It is also weird how someone who is a complete and total stranger can suddenly become of much more significance from a single thread of connection.
Now when I first saw the Icecrown Challenge I was thinking… “Bel you should do this thing, because you clear Icecrown weekly anyways”. Now that I have some connection to at least one of the folks responsible for running the event… it was simply something I couldn’t NOT do. So last night I set my stream up and streamed my adventure across Icecrown… with a lot of help from my audience. By help I mean absolutely throwing a monkey wrench in the proceedings. I was all set to try and clear as fast as possible, but things happened along the way. You can watch the entire stream as a Beam VOD, but suffice to say… I am not taking full responsibility for some of the madness. I’ve been interspersing some of the wing boss kill times throughout this post that I lifted from my recording. I am just going to lay them out here to see if you can find the problem…
- Professor Putricide – 11:11
- Blood Queen Lana’thel – 14:46
- Sindragosa – 26:56
It took me 3 minutes and 35 seconds to clear from Putricide to the Blood Queen, and based on some probably wrong math…. 12 minutes and 10 seconds to get to Sindragosa. The majority of that time was spent on attempting to do the Dreamwalker fight. My viewers told me with the utmost confidence that I could absolutely heal the dragon to full with a single bandage, and I am sure that is absolutely the case…. but not on heroic where she is constantly taking damage over time. So I wasted a good ten minutes and a I think eight bandages trying to make this work… only to get instantly interrupted when I started challenging the heal. So essentially all of the time I had made up to this point was completely blown and I ultimately had to jump in a portal to reset the encounter. Now were I choosing to run it on my Paladin, life would have been dandy. I know that I can heal her to full with a few flash of lights and move on with my life. In fact that was a large chunk of the reason why I used to always run this place weekly as a paladin. However last night I had to simply move on with my Warrior.
After the huge ball of frustration that was Dreamwalker… I finally looted Arthas and paused my timer at 31 minutes and 49 seconds. As per are the rules of the Icecrown Challenge… I then turned around and donated $31.49 to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Additionally as part of the rules of the contest… I challenged Mort, Ashgar, and Thalen to also take the contest and make their own donations. The donation drive runs for I believe a month and officially started 12/13. Right now they have roughly $400 in donations and I feel like we can get this higher. Even if you are not directly challenged, you can totally start your own branch of the tree like I did. I would love to see this trickle through all of the little offshoots of the community… because lets face it… running Icecrown is fun. While I might grouse a little bit about losing ten minutes… that “wasted” time just meant I donated a little bit more money towards a really good cause.