Pimp'ed my blog!

Dear blog,

My wife suggested that I start every blog post with "Dear Blog". I am doing it this once, to keep the peace at home, but then it stops. It has to.

Speaking of my wife, I asked her THE question the other day and here is how that went:

Me: "Sarah, will you ever play World of Warcraft?"

Sarah: No. Never. Never. I have more interest in cultivating manure for sale than playing World of Warcraft!"

Those were her exact words. I know, because I wrote them down after she said them. A simple "no" would have sufficed.

Anyway, if you have been here before, you will have noticed that I made some changes to the look of this blog. For once, you will now be able to follow me on Twitter and other social stuff like that, but also, I have added a little music player where I have the current version of the beat I am working on. It is still work in progress and I am, what some might consider a beat making novice, but hey, I just wanted to share it and see what you guys think. Maybe I can incorporate some of your suggestions into it. :-)

Also you can now subscribe to this blog via email, so you can always stay on top of new posts. Only if you want to of course.

Overall I am pretty happy with the new look, but I have noticed that the blog can take a long time to load, so I need to look into this. Did some research and it seems that it might just be one of the shortcomings of Google Blogger so I might look into switching to WordPress. Any of you people out there have experience with WordPress?

If any of you have any suggestions on how I could further improve the blog, that would be much appreciated.

In other news, this has been the shittiest spring ever in Stockholm! Well, I've only been here for two springs, but of those two, this one is definitely the worst! It is almost mid-may and it is still freezing cold! The summers here are already so short, and every day that it stays shit is one less nice day. It sucks!

Before I became a dad it wouldn't have bothered me this much since I could just stay inside if I wanted to. But with a daughter that gets bored of her own home within minutes of being awake, I am forced to go outside. I would be so much more motivated if I didn't have to put Olive in a thousand layers (which she hates!) before being able to go outside.

If I had to put how I feel about this weather in one picture, it would look like this:

Yeah, pretty depressing, right?

I took that picture with a cool app for the iphone called "Hipstamatic". It simulates the effect of using different types of lenses, film and flashes with pretty amazing results. 

So, that is it for this post. 

And remember, every person following me, commenting or subscribing will drastically improve the chances of good weather here in Stockholm!

Until next time!

WoW! Just WoW!

Hello you 4 lovely followers of mine! By the way, Sarah has not started following me!!! My own wife! WTF is up with that!? I guess she just reads my blog right after I write it, but she should subscribe anyways, right? 5 just sounds so much better than 4. Looks better too, in my opinion. More curves. :-)

Anyways, today's blog is probably not going to be so interesting for those of you following more for the "Husband.Father." part and not the "Nerd." part, but anyways, you guys knew that the day would come that Mayu would nerd out on his blog. That moment is now. (There is some food for thought further down though, if you manage to get through all the full out nerdom)

So yesterday was one of my game nights (I usually get two a week unless Sarah is in a very giving mood :-)  ) and I am very thankful for them, even though I am in "big trouble" if I come to bed past 23:00. ;-) Anyways, my game night usually consists of me playing World of Warcraft, specifically raiding with the guild I am in, Eradication. "Raiding" in WoW, is when you get together with 9 or 24 other people and try to get through some fairly tough boss encounters. I usually only do the 10-man raids. Anyways, the place we are raiding is called Icecrown Citadel and it has 12 bosses in total, the final one being the Lich King himself. He is eeeviiiil! I mean, just look at him, over there to the right ->

Yeah, evil. Anyways, we have managed to kill 10 of the 12 bosses but are kinda stuck on this giant undead dragon called Sindragosa. She is also evil. Very evil. Here, have a look and judge for yourselves:

Pretty scary, huh? Anyways, we have tried several days, for hours at a time, to kill this damn dragon with no luck. We will get it eventually, and then we will finally get to face the Lick King (that's that evil guy a bit higher up, in case you had forgotten already).

Last night we only got to this boss called Professor Putricide, who is inspired by Professor Farnthworth from Futurama (one of my favorite shows, by the way), but the we started failing on the next boss because one of our main healers has the shittiest internet connection in the world. So we decided to call it a night. Lets see how far we get on Tuesday.

Attention: Food for thought incoming! (mmmm, jummy!)

Sarah and I actually had an interesting discussion last night on whether or not a game like World of Warcraft is social or not. She is of the opinion that it is not social and I think a lot of people would agree with that. Hell, even I agree that it is way less social than going out with friends or hanging out with the family. I do however think that there is a social aspect to games like WoW. The thing is, that it can be as social as you want it to be, really. I mean you could spend all your time in the World of Warcraft without ever interacting with another player or you could be in a super close knit guild that regularly meets in RL (Real Life) and socializes outside of the fantasy world. Back when I was living in Canada I actually met a couple of people from the guild I was in (The Twlight Phoenix) for a couple of beers. The people in that guild are super social and friendly and most of them actually have met in RL at some point. I am actually still in touch with the guild leader, Mona, through Facebook. For me personally WoW would not be as appealing if I wasn't playing with other people that I can relate to. I am still getting to know the folks in the guild I am in now, since I just joined a few weeks ago, but so far it's been a really fun time. :-)

So I think there are good arguments for saying that a game like World of Warcraft can be social, but don't necessarily has to be. And there are many good arguments for saying that games like that are super anti-social. What do you guys think? Are online games social, not at all, or sometimes?

OK. That's it for this super nerdy blog post. I promise I will do more on "La Familia" in my next blog.

Until next time!