A warlock. /shudder

And a holy pally! /cheer

Yup, Aetherial Circle is need of a raiding warlock and holy paladin. Warlock-spec is irrelevant, as long as it’s raid-based, not personal-DPS based. If you’re a warlock and have a fire-resist set, you’re cooking with even more grease, but not a requirement.

Full Tier 4 or equivalent, no pre-Kara or mostly-Kara. You’re going to get in on Vashj and Kael and Mount Hyjal.

Must have a stable Internet connection. Must be able to achieve double-digit frame rates in a 25-person raid. Must know the difference between a Guardian and a Battle elixir. Must not be a loot-whore, dingleberry, or drama-mama. Cannot be on more than three mood-altering medications.

Not much to ask, is it?

Send your application email to recruitment@aetherialcircle.com

If you could please include:

- Your Armory link.
- Your gear list (in case you logged out in like, farming gear).
- A paragraph about yourself and your raiding experience.

Letrz rittn lik ths will not be taken as seriously as those that aren’t.

Thank you to everybody for their condolences and donations, your kindness is an inspiration. We’re leaving the donation button on the blog through the Running of Da Bulls.

/moo

Random Non-Wow Thought Of The Day: One knows one lives in Florida when one is driving to work and hears, “Watch out for smoke on the highway; the marsh is still on fire.”

The PTR: Everybody has read about how a hunter pet’s Growl is no longer going to scale with the pet’s attack power, yes? Perhaps you’ve also seen where Blizz is instead going to have Growl scale with the hunter’s attack power, but only when the hunter’s RAP is above a certain level? Well, yes, that sounds pretty nice, but as with all things on the PTR, we prefer to remain silent until the stuff goes live. We dislike freaking out or singing the praises of stuff that may not even be a factor in a week.

Is the Running of Da Bulls really just one week away? Holy cow, it is! Next Saturday, 7pm EDT (11PM GMT) on Cenarion Circle!

We’re going back to Kara tonight for the first time in months. Why? Because we don’t need the Shattered Sun dailies anymore, we have broken the 5000 gold mental-barrier again so we’ve lost the need to farm, BRKTestBed is level 40 and has a mount, and we haven’t got the energy to roll a female gnome warrior.

If we couldn’t be a hunter, we’d be a female, gnome, fury warrior. Red-head, not pink.

The only class we’ve never tried is a warlock. You may read into that what you may.

Aetherial Circle cleared ZA, unfortunately we weren’t there. Grats folks, glad that’s finally done. /wipes hands clean

OH!! After we took down Al’ar the other day, our graphics got totally messed up. Our camera was “fixed” in that we could rotate our toon but the camera didn’t follow. It was awesome; we’ve been trying to figure out how to do just that for years!

But then we couldn’t get it to return to the normal state, and we had to exit the game to restore the camera to nominal condition. How the heck did we do that? And don’t say, “It’s one of those camera-settings, noob!” because it’s NOT one of those camera-settings, we’ve tried them all, hundreds of times.

Would it be wrong to publish on our blog the IP addresses of the two people we banned? Their comments have been purged, their IPs smacked with the BRK Ban Hammer, that’s probably enough.

Listen to us now and believe us later. If you’re a leatherworker, start stock piling the mats for Riding Crops. If the PTR change about Riding Crops becoming more like an enchant and no longer a trinket goes live, people are going to be buying the new Riding Crops for their epic ground mount. Don’t make the Riding Crops now, just in case that change doesn’t get implemented, but have the mats for the Riding Crops ready to go. There will be a limited-time to make mondo-gold on this change, so don’t dilly-dally.

New iMacs next Tuesday, foshizzle. Let’s see if we get a better video card in the next revision. We needz a new rig, pronto!

Our family has suffered a great tragedy. One of the sweetest and kindest people we know, Sharvan, passed away.

Sharvan was a founding member of Aetherial Circle, she’s been with Cay and Fio for much longer that we have been. Aside from the fact that she was smart and funny, anybody who knew her knew her great love… was cows. Especially “moo”.

Shar would greet us with an exhuberant MOO!! every time we’d log in. A “Moo back atchyou!” was our typical reply. She had moo-toys. She had moo-clothing.

We named our wind serpent DrMooPhD just for her and she loved it.

Sharvan passed today. Aetherical Circle is reeling from the shock and loss of one of the best people in our guild. If the good die young, He got the Best.

Aetherial Circle and the entire BigRedKitty family extend our most heartfelt condolences to Sharvan’s parents and family. God Bless you all, and may you find comfort and peace in the days ahead.

Sharvan had already created her character for the Running of Da Bulls. And while she will not be able to run with us, we shall run for her, and carry her memory with us:

The Running of Da Bulls for Sharvan

It shall be neither canceled nor delayed. There will be a voluntary 500 Moo Salute before the start of the race, for she would’ve loved that. You honestly have no idea how much she would’ve laughed at the idea, and we cannot help but hope she’ll get to see it somehow.

Goodbye Sharvan. We’re going to miss you.

Mrs BRK worked for a doctor. The problem with doctors is that just because they know medicine, they think they understand everything: personal electronics, cars, the opposite gender, and money.

From our personal experience with PhDs and MDs, once you venture from their singular area of expertise, they basically become monkeys with no particular talents outside of grunting and picking small bugs from each others hair.

We knew a PhD who could design data-interchange hardware in his sleep, but who couldn’t use a microwave oven.

We knew a PhD who could code Ada in his mind and write it all down, ready to be compiled, but who would frequently forget to wear pants.

And now we know an MD who doesn’t understand that the purpose of owning a business is to make money.

Mrs BRKs previous employer is one of the most brilliant and talented surgeons in the United States, and he hasn’t a clue about running a business. Mrs BRK was in charge of selling medical procedures for what most medical insurance plans considered cosmetic surgery. She was able to convince insurance companies to pay for the procedures, and also find ways to help people self-pay when the insurance companies decided to say no. She is good at this, very good. So good that she personally raised the company’s income by 300% last year.

Now while she made good commissions on her sales, the doctor continued to receive his “salary” from his company. His company made a lot of money, but his salary didn’t change. Thus, Mrs BRK made more in commission than the doctor paid himself. This didn’t go over well, and his solution was to cut Mrs BRK’s commission by 66% and cap the amount of commission she could earn.

You read that right; you may /boggle.

So yesterday, Mrs BRK found a new job and told the doctor what he could do with his commission-cap. She took today off to get a Swedish massage, buy some new shoes, and get in the proper state of mind to begin her new job on Monday.

Some chicks just know how to live, yes?

What does all this have to do with WoW? Guild-poaching, foshizzle.

Guilds are Businesses. Guilds are in the business of pleasing their members. Whether it is raiding or PvP or just goofing around, if the guild isn’t providing the services its members need, those members are going to be up-for-grabs by other guilds. Guilds who allow their members to become unsatisfied cannot be surprised when their top-end people choose to leave for a guild that can give them what they need.

Is your guild stuck in Kara and not advancing to Gruuls? Guess what! Your healers and tanks are going to be lured by the promises of another guild to get up, get out, and see 25-man content. AC recently snagged a Holy Pally from another guild on another server during our last recruitment drive. Why? Because he wanted to see SSC and his guild wouldn’t get out of Kara and find a way to get into Gruul’s Lair. He was dissatisfied with his company, and AC promised to fulfill his needs.

Mrs BRK liked the company, the patients, and the compensation she was receiving at her old job. Then the “GM” of the company gave her a reason to leave by laying the smack-down on her commissions and telling her she’d never see SSC. Another “GM” recognized her extraordinary talents, promised her runs in SSC and TK and a graduated commission plan with no cap, so she gquit and transferred servers. Goodbye Celebration, hello Waterford Lakes.

Has your guild defined its purpose? Are the officers working towards achieving that objective? Does your desire parallel the path your guild is following? If you’re an officer or a GM, are you advertising your agenda so your members know what’s going on?

Communication isn’t just for raiding. A guild needs short and long-term goals and the commitment to get the word out to its members.

Because Mrs BRK wouldn’t put up with endless runs to Chess, either.

Edit: You know what, we’re gonna say a quick “our bad” for kinda slamming the entire MD/PhD community here. We were a little rough. Perhaps our experience with Mrs BRK’s ex-employer has us a bit perturbed. We’ll exercise a little more editorial and emotional control in the future.

Space Shuttle launched at 2:30am. We got home at 4:30am, so technically, even though we’re watching SportsCenter right now, we’re still sleeping.

But we have some news!

First off, AC downed Solarian last night, our awesome guild is 4/6 in SSC and 2/4 in TK. Grats! But don’t kill anything else without us anymore. So sayeth BRK, so let it be done.

Second, we may be having some new visitors on Friday, thanks to some really cool publicity. We don’t want to jinx it, so we won’t go into more details now. But we’re going to try to get a new movie banged out for Friday, and you all will need to wipe your feet and not leave your empties in the garbage can; the recycle bin is there for a reason, mkay? We want to make a good first impression.

And finally, we have Tuesday off to get some sleep. Probably not going to post again today, but in our semi-comatose state, we can do a very quick…

/daniel mode on

My first non-technical school assignment in the Air Force was at RAF Alconbury, 6952nd Electronic Security Squadron, UK. I was training to maintain the electronic sensor systems on the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and living large driving to Huntingdon and taking the train to London, (where the 2nd of my Dancing Stories is born).

Now one fine afternoon, I was asked to drive the Commander and her entourage in a 9-pack van out to the flightline to watch touch-n-goes. I had a flightline drivers license, was clean and presentable, and had never been in trouble, so I had been “volunteered” to be a driver for the VIPs. Not a big deal, it was better than being “volunteered” to do any of a thousand other things.

A touch-n-go maneuver is a pilot practicing taking off and landing. The U-2 is the hardest to land aircraft in the inventory, so pilots did these all the time to hone their skills. They take off, do a big oval in the sky, then land and, without stopping, take off again.

When a U-2 takes off, it looks like once the jet lifts off the ground, the pilot just keeps pulling back on the yoke until the jet is almost vertical. It’s called a high angle-of-attack takeoff and is done for several reasons, including aerodynamics, handling, and safety. I was an Aerospace Engineer, I had studied the wing design of the U-2 in college and had as good a grasp on the flight characteristics of the plane as any 1st term airman. If you asked me for a technical report on the reasons for that specific takeoff, I could write something up that wouldn’t be pure conjecture or get laughed at.

But when my commander’s friend, a major from some group other than operations or maintenance, asked out loud, “Wow, why do they take off going up like that?” the completely improper answer burst from my lips, before I could stop it.

“Because if it went down, it’d crash.”

Here is a list of some of the more clever guild names we’ve run across in the Emberstorm battlegroup this past weekend.

You guys are nuts, you know that? Totally.

Unfortunately, we’re even crazier.

Ale Swillin Hippies (almost stopped right there, our backup-guild just might be penciled-in)

Thought Criminals (”Convicted Thought Criminals” would’ve gotten more cool points)

The Cake is a Lie (OK, so we finally looked it up)

Fist of the Unicorn (shouldn’t that be Hoof of the Unicorn, or is that the joke?)

Lords of Kobol (Battlestar Galactica reference?)

Totally unrelated, but seriously - can we just have some silence in our outer-space movies someday? 2001 had it right.

Zero Tolerance (”My Mom Says I Should Play Outside”, we just thought of that!)

My Sword is in a Horde (How about Rodney Dangerfield saying, “You scratched my sword!)

Bloodthirsty Canadians (there are other kinds?)

Blackflag (horde motel; they check in, they don’t check out)

Reality Check (”Reality Check Failed”, again, more cool points missed)

Dirty Half Dozen (Dirty Half Bakers-Dozen? The Funky Half Dozen?)

Azeroth Playmates (guild website URL, we demand it!)

Sagacious Noobs (this is all win, totally, but we also like Olde School Noobs)

That’s How I Beat Shaq - If you’re in this guild, or know someone who is, tell them to contact us. We must have an explanation. It’s a moral imperative.

Aetherial Circle is recruiting! We have a very limited opportunity for some high-quality folks to apply to be in our main 25-person SSC/TK raiding schedule.

What do we need?

One Holy Pally and two Resto Shaman.

We haz trees, we has squishie-healz of the priest-sort, that’s all covered.

From the desk of Fio and Cay, the GM Squad:

We’re a friendly bunch of casual raiders, 18+ and maturity is required (though we still manage to have gutter-minded fun)

So on to the technical stuff:

We are 2/6 SSC and 1/4TK, Maggy, [Ed: and Doomwalker!] down. We’re currently working on Leo in SSC so applicants should have Tier 4 and Gruul-level gear and able to perform at that level.

Our 25-man raiding schedule is Sunday, Monday and Wednesday [Ed: possibly moving Wed to Thursday] at 8pm EST. We don’t expect people to make every single run, but missing a raid should be the exception rather than the rule.

If you are interested, please send us an email at recruitment@aetherialcircle.com.

If you could please include thingies like:

- Your Armory link
- Your gear list (in case you logged out in like, farming gear)
- A paragraph about yourself, your raiding experience, and why you’re insane enough… er, I mean, wanting to join up ^.^

We use a zero-sum DKP system called SWAPS. For more details on how this system works, check

http://www.boomchucka.com:8080/Uplink/aboutswaps.jsp

Got an interest in plate/mail healing as we clear Serpentshrine Cavern and The Eye? Send an email and the officers will review your application and, if ya look sweet, schedule a ventrilo-interview.

Book Deal: Fell through, the lawyers and accountants couldn’t agree. We cannot talk about it any more than that just in case that gaggle of goof-offs decide to quit being sober and actually get their acts together. But if anybody knows a publisher who’s looking for an unpublished and untested amateur writer, point them here. We’re free.

WoWInsider: We’ve made a deal with one of the editors there in that he’ll perform a job similar to the one TJ has been providing here. We’ll send him the text of our post, he’ll format it, grab a picture, and schedule it for publication. We should be getting a BRK on WoWInsider post done once per week again, to h3ll with the company’s firewall. /rawr!

Jump Shot Movie: Recorded and in production, bumped ahead of Gruul, a Magtheridon celebration, Lurker, and a PvP movie with which we weren’t very happy anyway. Our movie-making takes a lot of time, time that our PvPing has been consuming.

Guild: We lost our main prot Pally tank as he was unhappy with his perception of the status quo. Luckily we have an “extra” holy pally who just jumped at the chance to tank SSC. The guild is gonna gear him up and slap his little plate butt into the rotation as fast as they can.

Moral of the story is that if you’re unhappy with your role in your guild, tell someone. They might be able to help you, they might not, but at least you might have a place to come back to if you work with your guild leadership and they just cannot make things right. Pull a, “I’m leaving sorry goodbye,” routine, and you just may find your old position unavailable to you in case things in your new guild fall through, and your alts asked to depart with you.

Face: We had our contacts in the wrong eyes for 5 1/2 hours today. Our lenses were wrecking havoc in our sockets and it never even occurred to us that we might have screwed up their order. We are a noob; worn contacts since the 7th grade and we can still screw it up.

Do you know the feeling? You see someone log on, you say hi, they don’t reply. They port to Shat. You see them head to a vendor and start stripping down. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

It sucks.

Yes, AC had another member hacked again. A non-raider but still a good friend who didn’t need this cr@p. Heck, even our enemies don’t deserve their stuff being stolen.

Nope, not even melee hunters.

Secure your stuff, keep your password secret, use a spyware removal tool, don’t click funny links, and pray the hackers get crabs. Or lice.

No, both.