by Christopher Kennedy

It was always hard for them to tell

which was foreign and which was domestic.

Also, who should wash the dancers,

who should interrogate the chicken.

Then there was the issue of who should steer

the weasel. He kept giving her directions

to the swimming pool. She argued the size

of his snowshoes. Once they arrived

wherever it was they were going, he would ratchet

the moon from the sky and offer it to her;

she would repair the shriveling skyscape.

They were so much in love with tomorrow, it never came.

And who can endure the litany of now? Return

the moon to its rightful owners. That’s all I’m saying.

(You can buy Christopher Kennedy’s poems here.)

The first thing you’ll notice, and you’re certainly supposed to, is the absurd nonsense words. The snowshoes and the weasel and the dancers are all seemingly random nouns thrown in places that they don’t belong. In the context of the poem, they have no meaning. They can be easily replaced by dishes or clothes or whatever. Kennedy is trying to say that not only do the nouns themselves have no meaning, but also that they have no meaning in the lives of the characters.

The poem paints the familiar picture of everyday life for the generic American. You have to get the kids to soccer practice, have to pick a wine to drink at the dinner (foreign or domestic?), have to steer the car and get wherever it is you’re going to that day. What makes this poem so beautiful is that Kennedy manages to put into words the feeling of doing these menial, banal tasks. It’s almost as reading the first two stanzas is the same as picking up your kid from swim practice.

Then, scene, characters and plot established (and so concisely!) the poem takes the hard turn for the message, the kicker, the moral. There’s a sharp change in tone between the second and third stanzas, almost as if the poem is not fooling around anymore. Shit is serious now. Gone are the nonsense words and down-to-earth feel from the beginning and now the poem resembles more a classical romance sonnet. We see feelings, and caring and emotion enter the picture and the poem wants us to know that we are not messing around with buckling our seatbelts before we go to get milk anymore. That petty nonsense is not on the same level as what happens in the third stanza. Also, ‘shriveling skyscape’ is, for lack of better words, awesomely poetic.

Remember It’s A Wonderful Life when you read the last stanza. When George is giddy with love for his soulmate, Mary, after the school dance, he’s just so unbelievably happy being around her. He babbles out a boast, a question

George Bailey: “What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey. That’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give you the moon, Mary.”

Mary: “I’ll take it. Then what?”

George Bailey: “Well, then you can swallow it, and it’ll all dissolve, see… and the moonbeams would shoot out of your fingers and your toes and the ends of your hair… am I talking too much?”

The next line urges him to kiss her, but before he can, he gets interrupted with news of his father’s death and the play goes on from there. Naturally, you know the story. He gets caught up in ‘the litany of now’ and loses faith and his love. Have George’s situation in mind as you go into the last paragraph.

This part. You remember.

I don’t understand the ending, truly. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it can be interpreted in a number of ways. Probably the best way to see it is, he offers her his love (his life, his everything, something so crazily intangible it’s like asking for the moon). In their love there could be an escape. They could put aside the trivialities and focus on what’s important: each other. But she rejects it and they “endure the litany of now”. If you see it that way, then the last line is a plea from the author to the readers: “Keep dreaming. Give your moon, your love, your everything, to your sweethearts (its rightful owner). Share that and treasure it, and it will save you from washing the dancers or arguing over the size of snowshoes – the litany of now. Be jealous, conceited lovers. It the same plea, same emotion that is expressed in that one Bright Eyes song when Conor sings, “I believe that lovers should be draped in clover//laid entwined together in a bed of clover//left there to sleep//left there to dream//of their happiness”

• Watched a Starcraft 2 tournament on Team Liquid along with 100,000 other people across the world.
• Turned every link purple on Reddit.
• Planned a stellar Baton Pass team using Serebii.net and Bulbapedia (and checked the order status of my 3DS shipment on Amazon).
• Used the hentai on Sailormoon.biz for a Pink Sugar Heart Attack on my Pegasus, ifyouknowhatimean.
• Finished up reading Yuria Type 100 on Mangafox. They also have a mobile site, so it’s very possible to read manga on my Kindle for free.
• Watched “The Trouble with Tribbles” on WatchTrek.com. I’ve gotten through all TNG, but haven’t prioritized TOS. So I just pick the best episodes.
• Watched TotalBiscuit’s latest video in the “WTF is” series.
• Found chords for Rebecca Black’s “Friday”, then preceded to play it on my guitar. Sounded good. Or at least better than her version.
• Did some classwork online.

Now, I consumed a lot of content via the internet in one day. At the end of the 14 hours of nothing time, I found that I had exausted my internet feed-bag. I had run out of internet to consume. So my question is… What in the cyber-world do I have left? What could I possibly waste my time on? I think I’ve covered most all of my interests.

I’m at a loss. Maybe 14 hours is too much time to kill solely by being online. Next Sunday I’ll go exercise or something.

Thank you and best wishes,

Kai Andersen

So then I thought, well how dirty are my genitals?

I just showered this morning. The only thing my penis has touched since being vigorously scoured at 8 am has been my clean underwear. I haven’t even masturbated today. I mean, I’m pretty damn proficient at urinating. I’ve had 21 years of practice. I haven’t spilled all over myself since I was like 19. My dick is immaculate, even after urinating.

But my hands! In 20 minutes, my hands have been exposed to more gross things than a 36 year-old crack whore who just got finished a marathon of 2girls1cup and goatse.cx viewing. I think I have enough bacteria on them right now to distill alcoholic yogurt from my sweat. Wait, yup. There they go. Lemme get a towel.

Conclusion: I’m endagering my penile cleanliness by touching it after urinating. Options:

1. No hands. I particularly like the little clean up shake you’re forced to do to finish. Like I’m 3 years old or molly-whopping someone. Extra props for hands on the hips.
2. Wash hands BEFORE engaging private parts. Egregious and unnecessary. Almost like the words ‘egregious’ and ‘unnecessary’ describing the same thing. That’s irony, folks.
3. Wash private parts after engaging hands. I like this. The people in the public restroom using the sink after me might not.
4. Start underground movement to change public opinion on hand washing. Spread the word, internet!

I choose numbers one and four. Get out there and denounce the evils of holding and shaking (your penis)!

Let’s assume that this is the highest healing bandage in the game for Cataclysm, even though the post clearly says 3 badge types; it also says it takes three embersilk cloth to create. So we go way out on a limb (there’s much worse conclusion-jumping later on in the post, fyi) and say that the first bandage will take one cloth and heal for less, the second one will take two cloth and heal for a moderate amount, and the Dense Embersilk will be the high end consumable bandage.

Now, we can compare today’s Heavy Frostweave and BC’s Heavy Netherweave bandages with today’s and yesterday’s health pools and extrapolate the kind of health bars we’ll likely be seeing in Cataclysm.

In BC, a plate wearing class could hope to have somewhere around 9-10k health in assorted blue gear, and a fresh 80 in WotLK blues would be sitting somewhere around 16-17k health, or about 22k in the first blue pvp honor/crafted set. Because Blizzard has stated that all classes will have the same (plate) health pool in Cata, we can go with these numbers for everyone.

So Heavy Netherweave Bandages heal for 3400 over 8 seconds and the starting health was 10k. That’s 1/3 the total health.

Heavy Frostweave Bandages heal for 5800 over 8 seconds and the starting health was 16k-22k. That’s 1/3 for pve and 1/4 for pvp.

Dense Embersilk Bandages will heal for 34,800 over 8 seconds, meaning the average starting health pool in Cataclysm blues for non-tanks and non-pvpers will be around 105,000. The first pvp gear will boost your health to the 140,000 range. For everyone. Expect tanks to have more than that.

But the real fun comes at the end of the expansion. Using the gear from 3.3, a 50k health tank right now is equivalent to a 300,000 health tank in Cataclysm. Yeesh.

It is doubtful that damage and healing will increase by similar amounts, and in fact Blizzard is trying hard to keep them down. So maybe your 12k chain heals and 20k greater heals still only heal for 18k or 25k, respectively. And the tanks have 200k health. Wooooo it’s gonna be fun times ahead.

My favorite of these is a little program called Cleverbot. I’ve spent a few hours ‘chatting’ with a machine and come up with some awesome things. The best, however, is this little snippet that combines my love of TNG with internet insults. The black is me. The blue is Cleverbot.

When was the last time you got burned this bad by a computer? Never. I’ve always thought that the HIGHEST form of intelligence and uniqueness is quoting early nineties TV shows. I don’t know what to think anymore.

I saw the best totems of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the Orgrimmar streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,

This post is dedicated to the memories of Cleansing and Sentry totems. Goodnight, sweet princes, and may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

I like to classify the experience of playing restoration shamans right now as 80/20. What this means is that for PvP you generally spend 80 percent of your time running around in Ghost wolf form like a chicken with his head cut off and 20 percent spamming Lesser Healing Wave. On the flip side in PvE, you spend 80% of your time spamming Chain Heal and 20% using Riptide while you move back and forth out of the fires. Now this is an improvement from BC where you spent 100% of your PvE time spamming Chain Heal and 100% of your PvP time dying. Perhaps your experience has been different, but that’s what I’ve seen so far in WotLK.

If we take these truths to be self-evident (humor me), then we have a lens for viewing the woamg wtfpwntang changes for Cataclysm. Here’s the big points.

• Every two minutes, you can cast while moving for 10 seconds.

Go ahead and read that again. I’ll wait.

Now if you’re elemental, I’ll wait for you to change your underwear.

Okay ready to find out why it sucks for resto? Good.

For PvE, nobody cares. Sure it’s a nice boost, but nobody is going to die because you could use Chain Heal while moving out of the fire instead of Riptide. A dps spec with little insta-casts like ele cares much, much more about being able to move and fire than a healer. Frankly, I make it a practice to jump about on my holy priest some times during raids, just because I enjoy the female belf twirl. And now the shaman discussion continues over here ->

“But,” you say. “That’s an amazing ability in PvP! Mages would kill for that!” Right you are! But here’s why it won’t help resto any: Ghost wolf. The only way I ever move in Arena, or with any dps attacking me, is by first shifting into Ghost wolf and running away at 100% speed, with them slowed by Earthbind or my teammates. Go ahead and try to do it otherwise. I have. It was called Burning Crusade. See the intro to figure out how that ended.

You can’t cast in Ghost wolf! You can’t run without it! Go ahead and cast your Healing Wave with your Spirit Walker’s Grace with a dps on you. You’ll be interrupted more than someone being interviewed by a radio talk show host. And yes, that was the best analogy I have. If you’re looking for good writing, BSG is out on DVD.

Bottom line: This spell is not going to save you from the big, scary warrior.

• Chocolate Rain – Ten second, Area-selected, AoE hot on a two second cast and ten second cooldown.

OH LOOK. It’s what Lightwell should have been for the past three years. /nerdrage. Irregardless, this spell sounds _awesome_ to the max. For PvE, it would appear that our casts are going to go from 80/20 to 60/20/20. I’m all for diversity. Awesome idea, awesome implementation, and it better have an awesome animation. Awesome.

This spell, combined with mana mattering again, is going to separate the good shamans from the great shamans. It’s one of those abilities that is trash if you use it wrong, but becomes the best heal spell in the game if you do it right. Groundbreaking (no pun, Earthquake. This is a resto column) and class defining. I could see elemental and enhancement using this. Speaking of class/spec defining, here’s a bomb that you might have missed.

• Spirit Link will likely be worked back into deep Restoration in some form.

For those of you unfamiliar, Spirit Link was the 51 point resto talent in the beta for WotLK and the 3.0 PTR. It split all damage taken by the target with his two closest allies. It was deemed (rightfully so) completely overpowered for both PvE (halving tank damage) and PvP (making an entire team immune to blind/sheep/incapacitate) and was removed.

Now I tried out Spirit Link on the PTR and it was scary. I kept a ret pally alive with five players beating on him, simply by linking him to the nearby prot warrior and throwing some major Chain Heal bombs. However, the ability was fun to use and unlike anything else in the game. How could this effect be worked back in without being grossly overpowered again?

Picture this: Deep resto talent that makes your Chain Heal have a 33/66/100% chance to link the targets you just healed. They then split incoming damage equally, up to the amount healed. So you Chain Heal the tank for 10k, and it jumps to 4 other melee. Now, when the boss hits the tank for 10k, it instead hits the tank for 2.5k, the offtank for 2.5k, the dps warrior for 2.5k and the kitty druid for 2.5k. Attacks over the limit break the effect, and it’s dispellable. Maybe put a cooldown on the talent to prevent it from being overpowered.

• Deep Healing: Your direct heals will do more healing when the target’s health is lower.

That’s your mastery bonus, and it’s soon to be ignored. I’m sure you can see why. No healer in their right mind would purposefully NOT heal someone to get a bigger heal on their wounded target after their health drops. Even if I’m in danger of running oom, even if bigger health pools make for more time spent at 50% health and even if I like big numbers, I’m going to cast Chain Heal on a tank with full health, just to catch the next swing.

Also, you spend the vast, vast majority of your time in a raid somewhere between 75% and 100% health. So, aside from gimmicky fights like Gluth or Anub’arak, this bonus is going to be fundamentally less useful than say, the Holy priest bonus HoT or the absorption on Disc’s mastery stat. The only way around this is to simply scale it up, so that when those gimmicks do appear, or the tank drops below 50% health, your heals are just so much bigger, it’s impossible to ignore. That road leads to balance problems and sad pandas.

There’s just no way Blizzard can make this an attractive enough stat that resto shamans will seek it out and gear/gem for it over spellpower, intellect or regen in PvE or resilience in PvP. Though it might find some use for being pro and saving people’s lives in PvP. We’ll have to wait and see.

Everything else is situational. Healing Wave is meh, Unleash Weapon (Earthliving) is Riptide Lite and not that exciting.

TL;DR – Resto PvE is going to pin you down and cast Lvl 3 Eroticism on you. You will turn into a real beautiful woman. Raids will be challenging, and the spells will be fun. You’ll feel powerful and the skill cap will be high. However, nothing listed here is going to vault resto shamans ahead of any other healer in PvP, especially the ones that can move while they heal. And avoid interrupts. And now dispel magic And cyclone our warrior so much that we never have Mortal Strike up and can’t break 1800 in 3s. Grrrrr….

That’s an intro cinematic for the new Metroid game to be released on the Wii this summer. “But Kai,” you’re thinking. “That doesn’t look bad at all. In fact it makes every other Wii game look like E.T. for the Atari viewed through a lens made through the most muddy feces while wearing beer goggles. Well, yes it does, thank you for the comment. I’ll excuse your ignorance.

Well, maybe not THAT bad.

For those of you just joining us sometime in the past generation of videogaming because your ‘girlfriend’ bought Wii Fit for ‘exercise’ or because you like to ‘pwn n00bs’ in Halo, let me drop some old-school knowledge on your ass. You don’t get to see Samus’ face. When you do get a glimpse of the Marlyn Monroe of videogaming, you’re certain nothing could ever come close to her, partially because it’s 5 am and you just spent 50 hours getting every last fucking missile upgrade so the stingy bitch (I don’t mean that. I love you, Samus) will let down her hair. Don’t you EVER even THINK about seeing her curves. It’s not gonna happen. Pervert.

So what’s this now? Not only does this cinematic fuck with her ethereal beauty by turning her into an androgynous Final Fantasy character, it destroys the mystique. Unless what they’ve just shown us is the 100% in 30 minutes, full clear cutscene, everyone’s gonna see her as just an average-looking blonde woman, which she is anything but. She’s not a human; she’s a heroin! She’s mother-fucking Joan of Arc, Wonder Woman or River Tam – in space.

Okay, the last one didn't make sense.

We don’t need nor want her to be a real, relatable human being. Frankly, I thought her journal in Metroid Fusion was just plain annoying. I like my heroins aloof and untouchable. I blame Brawl for exposing her to the mainstream videogamer. Before then, if you wanted a picture of Samus sans suit, you’d have to beat a Metroid game very quickly and very thoroughly. Now all you gotta do is pick up a Wii and put in the disk. I miss the good old days.

Do we need a voice over? Do we need a backstory for her? The games have always been spectacular about driving whatever story through scanner-read lore and environments. We didn’t need fucking motivation to get the Spider Ball. We wanted to climb walls. Do we need to see Mario go through pueberty to understand the extent of his relationship with Peach? NO. Do we need to hear Link’s inner monologue telling us that Navi is annoying? NO.  Do we need to see a short-haired, Japanese Samus having relationships with other humans? NO. I need to see her kicking Space Pirate ass with a fucking ice beam and the double jump.

It’s like poker. Flirt, Samus. Don’t lay your hand out for all to see. It devalues and deflates your appeal. To quote boyhood idol Calvin, “one more nostalgic piece of my childhood goes PBBBHHTT.” Oh well. At least I’ll always have Sonic.

Wait... this can't be real... this can't be.... NOOO! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!

That’s not that I’m not gonna buy the game. The more I see about the gameplay, ooooh it looks excellent. It’s got that 3D, but really more 2D look. I dunno how the more action-focused gameplay is gonna work out, but I’m picturing Street Fighter meets Resident Evil 4. In space. If it’s anything like the rest of the series, I’m sure I’ll get over the stupid cutscene. But I won’t be happy about it. And that’s not some real shit.

5) The Rolling Stones – Like a Rolling Stone

Mick has it wrong; song was not written for them. But good grief I love Keith Richard’s guitar.

4) Jerry Garcia – Simple Twist of Fate

That’s how a mellow song should go. Of course, it’s Jerry, so the song is 16 minutes long.

3) Eric Clapton – Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

Why? Because fuck Axl Rose. That’s why. Good God, why is Phil Collins’ head so big?

2) K.T. Tunstall – Tangled Up In Blue

If you wouldn’t tap that, you’re either gay or a music-hater.

1) Jimi Hendrix – All Along the Watchtower

No, yeah, the greatest guitar player ever will take your song from average to one of the best recordings in the history of rock and roll. He does that.

I had the thought to make this a podcast, but that would have taken a shitton of work, and I’m lazy. So here’s a topical summary of the past year for Kai Andersen.

Video Games

Well it starts and ends with World of Warcraft, as always. On March 1st 2009, I was happily engaged in a raiding guild on the Horde side of Lothar as a dps deathknight. Raiding truly is the heart and soul of that game and the reason to play. Well, one ninja’d brestplate in a non-guild run and a week later, I was out of the sweet raiding deal. I wasn’t too bent out of shape about the incident; I had been meaning to take a break and knew I couldn’t play over the summer. So began my 5-month hiatus from WoW, which in turn opened a world of possibilities and a shitload of free time. I went to the gym and caught up on my guitar. Resident Evil 5 helped a bit too.

Summer brought the return of the Xbox 360 and Wii and a copious amount of shooters. My brother and I were on the lookout for games with solid four player modes. The highlight of the summer was my discovery of Dokapon Kingdom for the Wii. I think we sat and played that insipid game for 16 hours straight at one point. At the end of the summer, patch 3.2 in WoW droped, my friend came back to the game and I rerolled on Stormrage.

A return to college later, I transferred my shaman alt from Lothar to Stormrage, but purposefully neglected to get back in the raiding game. Without that, my interest in the MMO waned and I let my subscription expire. I tried out other games in the latter half of 2009, such as Aion (BEAUTIFUL, but far to grindy), Bioshock (too hard but engaging), and Team Fortress 2 (I just said Bioshock was too hard. Imagine me in TF2), but none satisfy. Upon the release of patch 3.3, however, the new LFG interface single-handedly draws me back to WoW. Possibly the best thing since priest T5, I’m now fully geared on Pennilane and engaged in the game. Did help that my friends Will and David are playing again.

Winter break was a blur of Modern Warfare 2 and Borderlands. Also, pug raids are fail. I refuse to reguild myself and make social connections, even via the internet. Finally, Starcraft 2 beta dropped last month and I’ve been furiously watching Lumi’s livestream over at Starcraft Method.

Looking ahead, we’ve got both Cataclysm and SC2 scheduled for release this year. Also, I won’t be living at home during the summer, so more time to play.

Everything Else

What else is there? Syracuse Univiersity is still sexy. I continue to love all my classes. I’m looking for an internship for the summer, but nothing has presented itself yet. I don’t worry about those types of things though. At all costs, I refuse to lifeguard after last year. This summer’s Wilco concert and visit to Pennsylvania to visit the Allens were highlights of the year.

Predictions for 2010

It’s gonna be a good year, Scooter. Videogames look solid, at least from Blizzard. I see much of the same with lifestyle and college. And no bad news is good news, right?

So! If you’ve got something for me to do or somewhere for me to live this summer, holla back!