Not just one Overton window
7 hours ago
If you’re reading this, it probably means you are stuck at work on New Year’s Eve, and for that, you have my deepest condolences. Hopefully you can get away with surfing the internet all day, so I invite you to sit back with your coffee, and travel through the past year with Miss Medicina.
In 2009, my personal life was a bit crazy. I gained a fiancé, but I lost a beloved dog. My father went into remission from Leukemia, and I stormed out of another grad school program in frustration and fury. I argued with academics, slept on couches in the grad student room, and commuted 4 hours a day for six months. I called my sister a shrew (oops), my brother a redneck (true), and never got a chance to build a snowman. I started playing D&D for the first time. I became closer to my fiance’s friends, and decided that they were awesome enough to make up for his gastro-intestinal mischief. I got a wand as a remote for Christmas, teaspoons for my birthday, and an engagement ring for Cinco de Mayo. I gained far too much weight, and lost way too much patience. I gave a one hour presentation in a seminar that was supposed to last ten minutes, and burst into tears at the end. I fainted in the middle of a downtown street, and a homeless man I’d said hello to everyday for the last 6 months kept me from injuring myself.
I also started blogging, and in doing so, I met people like Tamarind, Larisa, Ophelie, Codi, Matticus, BobTurkey, and even got a comment from the Triple B, which left me squealing in excitement.
Now, this isn’t really the ideal list, since I have only been blogging since May of this year, but I’m going to somehow pick out my personal favorite post from each month, link you to it, and share why it mattered to me.
It all began in May, after forming a somewhat unhealthy attachment to a blog written by two very dear friends of mine, who just happen to be Fulguralis and Fuubaar…
May
Cur Medicinae Percurant – (“Why Healers Heal” roughly) Oh yes. When I started this whole thing, I had this weird little tweak where I wanted to title all my posts in Latin, just to get some sort of use out of those seven years of hardship. As you can see, that goal lasted all of… one post. It’s not the best post, but it’s the first. I was not only a new blogger, but I was also completely new to even reading anything in the blogosphere… the column I refer to in this post is one chosen at World of Matticus for his Best of ’09 as well. I never did go back and add the link to Lodur's "5 Archetypes of the Healer", because now I kinda want to maintain the ignorance of my first post. I didn’t even know who any of you people were… not even Matticus or Lodur.
June
Looking back through my posts from June, this is where some of my favorites reside, so it’s hard to pick just one. I probably had all of three readers, and to be quite honest, sometimes there’s a certain freedom in that. Sometimes I wrote things just to vent. This was the one month in which I actually attempted to write RP posts. If you want to read my RP stylings, here’s where you’ll find them… but you’ll probably also discover soon enough why I stopped doing them. I can write stories about characters, and get into them, sure… but my toons in WoW were never intended for RP activities, or I would have designed them differently.
Regardless, my favorite post from June was Summer Blues and the One Man Raid. As were all my early posts, it’s long (even for me) – but it’s one of the most emotional posts I’ve written, though you may not know it by reading it. It’s about how easy it is, in a raid, to lose sight of the individual – and the importance of balancing between the beauty of each individual personality and the needs of a group of players.
July
Whereas June was ripe with lots of content I personally enjoyed, July was a desert due to a long visit with my family in Texas. There are few posts, and none of them really standout, so instead of giving you WoW goodness from July I direct you to Half Blood Prince hotness. Because Harry Potter fanart by Makani cannot be ignored, people.
August
August is when I started to write various guides for Priests, in addition to the coverage of Blizzcon and the Priest Q&A, so it was a busy month! Despite the plethora of good posts from this month, I will send you on over to the Friday Drinking Games, wherein Miss Medicina attempts to start another regular Friday column after giving up on RP posts, and manages to (yet again) only ever post one episode in the series.
Why do I like this post so much? It was a perfect example of the sort of sloppy things many of us began to do when we had Naxx on farm, and nothing else to hit up. Yes, I know Ulduar was available for many, but sadly my raiding alliance was slow on the uptake… so we were still stuck in Naxx long after Ulduar was released! Fuu and I began to develop our own alcoholic methods for keeping the raiding game interesting…
September
There’s no competition here. Miss Medicina’s Manifesto stands strong as one of my favorite posts of all time, and it’s one of those pieces that I invite anyone who has become a regular to read, because it’s the backbone of my gaming philosophy, and therefore is better than any silly “About Me” page for this blog. I know that I give off a “group hippie hug everyone is great learns at their own place and is always welcome here!” attitude around this place, but I have my reasons why, and my Manifesto explains most of it. The guys over at Save or Die radio even invited me to join them on one of their podcast sessions after posting it, and I think it may even be the last column I wrote for their site (whoops… need to get on that…).
If it’s the only thing from my blog you go back and read, I will be satisfied.
October
Oh October. This is always my favorite month – and this year October was the month of the Circle of Healers survey. Many of my readers probably joined around that time but I’ll let you in on a little secret… Circle of Healers was definitely not my favorite post of that month. Sure, it’s a nice ego trip to get some linky love from WoW Insider, with several big name bloggers stopping by the Medica-hut (you know, that just does not roll off the tongue like Pink Pigtail Inn!), but even before Circle of Healers, I wrote A Writer’s Request in response to some scraping that I had been victim to, as well as a few other bloggers. That post is my favorite because it touches on issues that every writer (whether you are a blogger or trying to compose your first novel or your 19th) has had to face. It also might give some insight into why I make it extremely obvious when I’m literally copy and pasting from another source!
November
November marks my first determined respec to Discipline priesting, and I have been rollin’ the bubbles ever since. Lots of posts regarding the lessons I’ve been learning regarding the bubblier side of things, but my favorite post is the goofiest one of all – What does YOUR Divine Hymn Sound Like? I still use this macro, by the way… although I did discover the other day that pushing the Divine Hymn Macro Button in a panic during Halls of Reflection is VERY annoying to other members of my PuG… Which of course means I’m now doing it every time someone says “HEELZ PLS”. Other items of note include my incredibly scientific diagram on Reflex vs Rotation, my uber-Eastern Kingdoms map, Raid for the Cure, and my guide for writing blog posts secretly at work… complete with a screenshot that I was terrified would get me fired.
December
I know the latter end of December has left me a bit more AFK than I would like as I adjust to a new schedule (or rather, having no schedule at all…), but within a month of somewhat fewer posts, so many new and exciting things have been happening in game that there’s bound to be some juicy goodness. The new LFG tool has given all of us bloggers plenty of material to share with our readers… Bad PuG stories never get old. One thing we don’t seem to talk about as much, however, are the awesome PuGs in which we may find ourselves. For that, I gave you my favorite edition of Sunday PuG N’ Pray ever – The Perfectest Pug.
Why is this my favorite post? Aside from the fact that it narrated one of my best ToC runs of all time, it also ended with two lines that share the best WoW related revelation I could have hoped for, and one that I feel bears repeating as it is still a good way to end a great year…
“
At which point I received an error message, saying my friends list was full.
And that was the proudest moment of my 2009 in World of Warcraft.
“
In 2009, my personal life was a bit crazy. I gained a fiancé, but I lost a beloved dog. My father went into remission from Leukemia, and I stormed out of another grad school program in frustration and fury. I argued with academics, slept on couches in the grad student room, and commuted 4 hours a day for six months. I called my sister a shrew (oops), my brother a redneck (true), and never got a chance to build a snowman. I started playing D&D for the first time. I became closer to my fiance’s friends, and decided that they were awesome enough to make up for his gastro-intestinal mischief. I got a wand as a remote for Christmas, teaspoons for my birthday, and an engagement ring for Cinco de Mayo. I gained far too much weight, and lost way too much patience. I gave a one hour presentation in a seminar that was supposed to last ten minutes, and burst into tears at the end. I fainted in the middle of a downtown street, and a homeless man I’d said hello to everyday for the last 6 months kept me from injuring myself.
I also started blogging, and in doing so, I met people like Tamarind, Larisa, Ophelie, Codi, Matticus, BobTurkey, and even got a comment from the Triple B, which left me squealing in excitement.
Now, this isn’t really the ideal list, since I have only been blogging since May of this year, but I’m going to somehow pick out my personal favorite post from each month, link you to it, and share why it mattered to me.
It all began in May, after forming a somewhat unhealthy attachment to a blog written by two very dear friends of mine, who just happen to be Fulguralis and Fuubaar…
May
Cur Medicinae Percurant – (“Why Healers Heal” roughly) Oh yes. When I started this whole thing, I had this weird little tweak where I wanted to title all my posts in Latin, just to get some sort of use out of those seven years of hardship. As you can see, that goal lasted all of… one post. It’s not the best post, but it’s the first. I was not only a new blogger, but I was also completely new to even reading anything in the blogosphere… the column I refer to in this post is one chosen at World of Matticus for his Best of ’09 as well. I never did go back and add the link to Lodur's "5 Archetypes of the Healer", because now I kinda want to maintain the ignorance of my first post. I didn’t even know who any of you people were… not even Matticus or Lodur.
June
Looking back through my posts from June, this is where some of my favorites reside, so it’s hard to pick just one. I probably had all of three readers, and to be quite honest, sometimes there’s a certain freedom in that. Sometimes I wrote things just to vent. This was the one month in which I actually attempted to write RP posts. If you want to read my RP stylings, here’s where you’ll find them… but you’ll probably also discover soon enough why I stopped doing them. I can write stories about characters, and get into them, sure… but my toons in WoW were never intended for RP activities, or I would have designed them differently.
Regardless, my favorite post from June was Summer Blues and the One Man Raid. As were all my early posts, it’s long (even for me) – but it’s one of the most emotional posts I’ve written, though you may not know it by reading it. It’s about how easy it is, in a raid, to lose sight of the individual – and the importance of balancing between the beauty of each individual personality and the needs of a group of players.
July
Whereas June was ripe with lots of content I personally enjoyed, July was a desert due to a long visit with my family in Texas. There are few posts, and none of them really standout, so instead of giving you WoW goodness from July I direct you to Half Blood Prince hotness. Because Harry Potter fanart by Makani cannot be ignored, people.
August
August is when I started to write various guides for Priests, in addition to the coverage of Blizzcon and the Priest Q&A, so it was a busy month! Despite the plethora of good posts from this month, I will send you on over to the Friday Drinking Games, wherein Miss Medicina attempts to start another regular Friday column after giving up on RP posts, and manages to (yet again) only ever post one episode in the series.
Why do I like this post so much? It was a perfect example of the sort of sloppy things many of us began to do when we had Naxx on farm, and nothing else to hit up. Yes, I know Ulduar was available for many, but sadly my raiding alliance was slow on the uptake… so we were still stuck in Naxx long after Ulduar was released! Fuu and I began to develop our own alcoholic methods for keeping the raiding game interesting…
September
There’s no competition here. Miss Medicina’s Manifesto stands strong as one of my favorite posts of all time, and it’s one of those pieces that I invite anyone who has become a regular to read, because it’s the backbone of my gaming philosophy, and therefore is better than any silly “About Me” page for this blog. I know that I give off a “group hippie hug everyone is great learns at their own place and is always welcome here!” attitude around this place, but I have my reasons why, and my Manifesto explains most of it. The guys over at Save or Die radio even invited me to join them on one of their podcast sessions after posting it, and I think it may even be the last column I wrote for their site (whoops… need to get on that…).
If it’s the only thing from my blog you go back and read, I will be satisfied.
October
Oh October. This is always my favorite month – and this year October was the month of the Circle of Healers survey. Many of my readers probably joined around that time but I’ll let you in on a little secret… Circle of Healers was definitely not my favorite post of that month. Sure, it’s a nice ego trip to get some linky love from WoW Insider, with several big name bloggers stopping by the Medica-hut (you know, that just does not roll off the tongue like Pink Pigtail Inn!), but even before Circle of Healers, I wrote A Writer’s Request in response to some scraping that I had been victim to, as well as a few other bloggers. That post is my favorite because it touches on issues that every writer (whether you are a blogger or trying to compose your first novel or your 19th) has had to face. It also might give some insight into why I make it extremely obvious when I’m literally copy and pasting from another source!
November
November marks my first determined respec to Discipline priesting, and I have been rollin’ the bubbles ever since. Lots of posts regarding the lessons I’ve been learning regarding the bubblier side of things, but my favorite post is the goofiest one of all – What does YOUR Divine Hymn Sound Like? I still use this macro, by the way… although I did discover the other day that pushing the Divine Hymn Macro Button in a panic during Halls of Reflection is VERY annoying to other members of my PuG… Which of course means I’m now doing it every time someone says “HEELZ PLS”. Other items of note include my incredibly scientific diagram on Reflex vs Rotation, my uber-Eastern Kingdoms map, Raid for the Cure, and my guide for writing blog posts secretly at work… complete with a screenshot that I was terrified would get me fired.
December
I know the latter end of December has left me a bit more AFK than I would like as I adjust to a new schedule (or rather, having no schedule at all…), but within a month of somewhat fewer posts, so many new and exciting things have been happening in game that there’s bound to be some juicy goodness. The new LFG tool has given all of us bloggers plenty of material to share with our readers… Bad PuG stories never get old. One thing we don’t seem to talk about as much, however, are the awesome PuGs in which we may find ourselves. For that, I gave you my favorite edition of Sunday PuG N’ Pray ever – The Perfectest Pug.
Why is this my favorite post? Aside from the fact that it narrated one of my best ToC runs of all time, it also ended with two lines that share the best WoW related revelation I could have hoped for, and one that I feel bears repeating as it is still a good way to end a great year…
“
At which point I received an error message, saying my friends list was full.
And that was the proudest moment of my 2009 in World of Warcraft.
“
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I enjoyed reading this as I am in fact...stuck at work. It prompted me to perhaps do a post of the same-ish.
You're a welcome addition to the blogshpere Miss Medicina. I look forward to your posts in 2010.
Gobble gobble.
Happy New Year - and what a year it's been, by the looks of things. Congratulations on a fantastic run of blogging though :) I am far too lazy to compile anything like this for myself =P
Happy New Year to you as well. I'm glad you posted this highlight. I've known of your blog and remember when you would comment on Fulg and Fuu's blog and Fulg would say you needed to start your own, haha.
I hate to admit I haven't been a very regular reader, but that is mostly due to not working on a healer until recently. When I rolled my new baby holy priest, I knew EXACTLY where to go for helpful guides.
Straight to Miss Medicina. :)
Anywho, what I really wanted to say when I started writing in this comment box was to say I really enjoyed reading through your manifesto.
I've always thought of the "l2play" conundrum for newbies to be a lot like freshly graduated college students. "You need experience to get hired" ... yet how does one get experience if no one will hire?
My baby priest will thank you along her leveling journey as you will be much needed in 2010! :)