The Urge to Hunt

I love the title of this post.

It's so exciting sounding. What do I have the urge to hunt? Deer? Boar? PEOPLE? 

Of course not. I'm talking about hunting for things, specifically toys of some kind. The Toy Hunt.

The word HUNT makes it sound so interesting and grandiose, like there's some kind of physical exertion or skill involved. In actuality this hunt involves a lot of driving, walking short distances, pacing around a small area and disappointment. 

While I haven't been quite in the hunting zone lately, I've limited myself to 1 trip to Toys R Us per week, there's still quite the strong desire to go and look for something. I don't even know what it is that my crazy brain wants me to find, just some THING. 

I wonder if this is some deep-rooted primordial need that's buried inside me, the desire to bring home the kill, to prove I'm serving a needed function within the tribe. In the past I'd have been putting food on the table or firewood in the stove. Instead I'm putting Minimates on the couch and Transformers in the closet. 

Sometimes I try to think back to the time before I was buying these things, to see when it started, but I'm pretty sure I've been spending my disposable income on useless things for as long as I've been able to. I mean, obviously when you're a kid and you're buying G.I. Joes with your allowance that's expected. Where does it stop being normal in society's eyes and become something worth telling the internet about?

I think the best place to starting tracking is when I got my first full time job at Pet Superstore, despite having no pets myself. I'll have to write about that place in detail at some point and how that began and ended. 

I know most of my money that didn't go to bills was spent on CD's at first. I can still clearly remember buying the first "Godsmack" album and cranking that through the crappy speakers in my Delta 88. As I'm writing this it's becoming clearer where the money was going before the piles of action figures - musical equipment. 

You see, I was in a band throughout the back end of high school and into the first few years of not-high school. Despite being, at best, "Seminary Famous" I still felt the need to upgrade equipment on a weekly basis. Sometimes this would be a distortion pedal or a more expensive speaker cable. Those were the cheap weeks. 

When I got to really worrying about the elusive uber-tone I'd buy a new Amp or, heaven forbid, Guitar. While I'm pretty proud to say that I found some crazy good (likely stolen) deals at the local Pawn Shop, I am 100% certain that my desire for new gear was driven by the same urges that bring me to Toys R Us at 32 years old.

As the band wound down and I became more excited by World of Warcraft and Xbox 360 my superfluous income (ha!) began to reroute itself. Extra instruments, pedals and amps found their way onto craig's list or ebay. It was pretty easy to watch ebay auctions whilst camping a rare-spawn in The Badlands and soon I had packages rolling in on the regular full of old toys I wanted when I was a kid (and apparently still did!) and piles of comics. 

This era wasn't so much driven by a need to hunt but a need to ACQUIRE. While clicking search on ebay can loosely be described as hunting I don't think it's quite the same. 

It became very important to me to complete runs of comic books. I don't think I ever ended up buying any books that were never read but in a lot of cases the desire to own the books was much greater than my interest in the goings on within. When I found out that one could generally buy massive lots of trade paperbacks through ebay for around 50% of the msrp I upgraded from flimsy comics to tpb's and hardcovers. 

This was probably the worst era financially for me looking back.
Practically no one is looking to buy previously loved trade paperbacks for anywhere close to their face value. All of my other phases of collecting have at least remained somewhat desirable to other folks but I still have a money pit of lovely collections of comics on my shelves. It could be worse though, very few of them are unreadable messes!

Unsurprisingly, I've drifted all over the place and am unsure how to wind this post up. Perhaps I'll re-read it at some point and spend a little more time on each era of my buying history. 

Thanks for reading.








   

Interesting Stuff and the Other 14%

I've been posting pretty regularly over at my other blog (stangg.blogspot.com) but there's only so much to say about me playing Magical Cards. 

I've got the itch to write right now and, despite what it might feel like sometimes, Magic isn't 100% of my life. Probably closer to 86% really. My wife would say more I think. 

Of course there's work right there at the top of the heap, occupying the bulk of my waking existence. Work's pretty good. It's challenging at times, entertaining and even hilarious. I know for sure that customer service wasn't even close to my job radar growing up but I enjoy it and I'm even pretty good at it if I may be allowed to brag a little. 

I'm sure I'll talk some more about work in the future, there are always good stories to tell, but for now I kind of want to put forth my manifesto for this blog. 

What I'm into, what I'll be writing about and maybe why you'd want to read about my life. 

I'm 32 for now, I'm married to a wonderful woman and I have 3 Guinea Pigs named mostly after Transformers. We all live in a house that's full of things. Some things we need, some things we absolutely don't and some things that I'm still not sure how we got. 

Some of those things (a lot of those things) are toys that I've bought. I collect toys. Collect, in this case, is accurate by 2 definitions of the word. There are some groups, brands and lines of toys that I seek out and buy in an attempt to get all of them. I've been down that road of collecting with lots of things. He-man and the Masters of the Universe. G.I. Joe, a Real American Hero. Transformers, Robots in Disguise. Mostly those experiences were frustrating ones punctuated with moments of intense excitement that was soon overshadowed by more frustration. There's a fine line between "The Thrill of the Hunt" and "Why in the Bloody Hell Can't I Buy the Sorceress" and as most collectors know you spend a lot more time on the bad side of that line than you'd like. 

Lately I've collected toys more in the way that an unmoved item collects dust. 

Not in the sense that they are unwanted, it's more that I'm not seeking them out but still I find them everywhere I look. 

I still frequent a lot of the stores that I stalked my previous prey in out of habit. It's actually more fun now that there aren't any plastic faces to pine after as I round the corners of the aisles. No feeling of hope/disappointment. Hopesappointment? The only problem is there's still that nagging need to buy something, anything, and I sometimes often usually leave with a trinket anyway. 

Luckily there's a big push lately for relatively cheap toys called "Blind Bags" and I've been able to satiate my rabid inner consumer for under $4 most of the time. I say luckily because it means I'm not spending a ton of money but to be honest there is a down side to these little guys. They are actually available to be bought just about everywhere. Where before it was relatively safe to walk down the toy aisle of Walgreens now I'm liable to crash into a display box of Lego Minifigures. 

You haven't lived until you've spent the better part of an hour feeling Legos through plastic bags in the middle of a drug store. If you've ever seen a bag of Legos that has roughly the texture of stone-washed jeans, well now you know what happened. 

So toys will probably occupy a large part of my posts on this end of the blog. What I bought, what I didn't and what I wish I could've bought. I'll add in pictures too if I can figure out the workings of the internet that'll let me do so. 

I'll also tell you about things my family does, this will include not only my fantastic wife Noelle but our 3 Guinea Pigs: Scrumbles, Ravage and Laserbeak. All 4 of the crazy women in my life make me smile, laugh and cackle on a regular basis and I want to share those experiences with literally the entire planet. And I will. 

I'm sure some Magic talk will creep into my posts, it is after all 93% of my life, but I'll try and keep the confusion to a minimum. Most likely anything Magic related will focus on what happens before and after the actual Magicing. Our little group of Magicians goes to eat, watches movies and generally hams it up in the Muggle world and it's usually a pretty good time. 

I hope to keep up with this thing better than I have before. Realistically I plan to post a couple of times a week whether anything special happens or not. Maybe more but probably less. Any feedback will be gratefully read and responded to, it really is the best reason to do something like this, so please tell me something. Anything.

If you like what I like (and I like a lot of things) then I think you'll like my blog.

11/3 - Firelands Clean-up

We only had 3 bosses left to down on Thursday.

Baleroc

Majordomo Staghelm

Ragnaros

The plan was to get in at 9:00 PM and work on Baleroc Heroic til 11:00 PM when we'd blast through Majordomo Heroic and Ragnaros Regular. 

Unfortunately the other tank, Lexxor , had some real life problems that had to be dealt with and we didn't actually get started until 10:00 PM. We still got in some solid attempts on Baleroc Heroic but there just wasn't enough time or energy to put towards him that night and we ended up steamrolling him on regular mode. 

I'm going to gripe for just a minute about the Tank Shield that Baleroc supposedly drops. Shard of Torment is the only shield available to me in The Firelands and out group hasn't seen it drop even 1 time in all of the months that we have had Baleroc on farm status (easily killable). I understand that Blizzard doesn't want a relatively narrowly useful item like this to drop all the time and I also understand that random loot if random but this is getting ridiculous!

Majordomo and Ragnaros went down without a struggle and we were done for the night.

Patch 4.3 is now on the background downloaders so that means we are less than 2 weeks out from the next raid and for me it can't get here quick enough. I am excited to be able to share our group's experience plowing through normal modes of The Dragon Soul with everyone who reads this blog and I'm hoping it will be infinitely more interesting than what I've had to say so far. 

Thanks for reading and, as always, you can find my on twitter @rexplode to share any thoughts, questions or comments. Please pass the site on to anyone you think may be interested in it!

11/1 - Firelands

We schedule raids from 9 PM to Midnight on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Usually Tuesday is when we work on new stuff and then we just blaze through everything on EZ MODE Thursday so we can all get some sleep.

Yesterday we piled in on time and cleared trash, something that has gotten a lot easier as we've all become more comfortable with the raid. The first few weeks clearing trash was extremely time consuming and didn't leave much room for error, thank goodness Blizzard removed some of the more aggravating groups of enemies!

A couple of folks were running late and so we didn't actually kill the first boss until around 45 minutes in but both Shannox and Lord Ryolith went down easily on heroic mode. I was pretty excited to finally get my Best in Slot Belt from Shannox, I won't have to replace it until well into the next raid!

The rest of the night we spent working on Baleroc Heroic, he's one that we haven't been able to clear just yet and I think we may be reaching a point where too many of us are too bored with this boss to put in the effort required. We had some pretty good attempts but a combination of different screw ups left us never getting him below 35% health.

We cleared Alysrazor and Beth'tilac quickly and then called it for the night. Beth'tilac was kind enough to drop a pair of fancy new boots for me to wear when I'm forced to DPS so that was another highlight.


I'm getting to the point where I am far past being interested in killing these bosses, no matter what items they may drop, and I am only showing up to the raid because of the fun I get to have with the friends I get to play with. While it's definitely a good thing that I like the members of the group it is a bad thing that I am having so little fun playing the game itself!

Thursday night we plan to down Baleroc on Heroic so hopefully I'll have some good news for you then!

My Name is Jonathan and I'm a Goblin Warrior

I've been playing World of Warcraft off and on now for going on 4 years. 

I don't have the actual start date right here in front of me but I know that's pretty close.

My first character was a Troll Shaman name Rexplode. I named him after one of my favorite comic book characters (Robert Kirkman's Rex-Splode, my misspelling) and I leveled furiously to try and get to the max level which was 60 at the time. 

I played Rex for what seems like years, through the end of The Burning Crusade which was the first expansion for WoW. I healed for the most part and dealt damage(dps'd) when I was allowed to but I was never really very good at the actual theory or math behind the game. I mashed buttons and things didn't die (healing) or they did die (dps). 

At the end of the expansion, just a little while before The Wrath of the Lich King, I started to learn to tank.

Tanking usually involves rounding up all of the enemies and convincing them to hit you instead of your friends and that's a play style that really appealed to me.

I dug right in to the mechanics, I read helpful websites like Elitist Jerks and Tankspot and I ran any instance got a chance to as the tank. I got really good, really quickly, and next thing you know I was the main tank of the guild I had been in since the beginning. 

I'm going to fast forward ahead to now because this is getting a big long but I'll be happy to run through my experiences in more detail in future posts. I want to get the point so you'll know what to expect from this blog in the future.

Currently I'm in a guild called Reign , I play a Goblin Warrior named Slugfest and we raid 2 nights a week on average. We've been pretty successful considering our time invested, we've got 3 bosses down on hard mode and the rest easily defeated on normal. I'm proud to say that we killed Ragnaros, the final boss in The Firelands, a week before he was weakened significantly (nerfed). 

I'm one of 2 Main Tanks for the 10 man group and I have a lot of fun killing digital monsters with these folks. I've gotten to know all of them well and my goal on this site is to share with you guys, whether you play WoW or not, some of the good and bad times I share with these friends. 

I hope you'll have fun reading along as we work on hard mode bosses in The Firelands but I'm really excited about the new raid, The Dragon Soul, that's set to come out in the next month or so. 

A New, Nerdier Direction!

I haven't been very good about posting  for quite a while now and I want that to change.

From here on out I'm going to be keeping two blogs, one for each of my nerdy hobbies.

This blog, Rexplosions , will be about my experience in World of Warcraft as the main tank for a 10 man raiding guild . I'll update it at least 2 times a week following each raid. I'm hoping it'll be as much fun to read about as it is to be a part of. I'm also hoping Blizzard will release a new raid soon because I am tired of killing Ragnaros and his wimpy buddies every week.

My other blog, Stangg's Twin ,is going to follow me as I attempt to play Magic: The Gathering competitively after being out of the CCG scene for several years. I'm hoping to update that a lot more often as I stick my toes in to Magic Online and eventually jump in to the deep end of actual, real life tournaments. I'm going to try and be honest about how much money I sink in to this hobby in the hopes that shame will prevent overspending.

As always you can follow me on twitter @rexplode for all the updates and yes, I do realize this may be one of the nerdiest single blog posts in the history of the internet.

Pub Zero