Lol my friend and I were dickering about discussing health, exercise and fitness and I think I made the random statement “I’m hopeless at doing things for myself, I wish organizing my own fitness was more like raid leading as I am much better sorting things if it is on behalf of other people” and she said “Raid lead me to fitness Raid lead me to fitness” and I said “… Oh … okay I’ll give it a shot. Don’t hate me, you’ve been warned”

Well that was the gist of it anyway.

Now the real reason I am so slack on the fitness front is I have no real investment in the outcome (being determinedly single with cat in hand – muwahahaha) and oh I’ve always been bad at looking after myself as a priority.  My health issues are like me average, no red flags to motivate me into pulling the finger out and I do enough to make me feel like I am “giving it a go”  A home packed lunch every workday and hour at the gym every morning before work where I stagger along in a daze on the treadmill and then I walk the dog on the weekend. Com’on what else has a girl got to do, that enough to be fit right? (Probably stop eating all the M&Ms the boss gives me I suppose /sigh.) Still I have thyroid issues (underactive) and a slow metabolism and I live off mugs of coffee like some sort of sedentary computer junkie … which except for the whole “Hey! Ima Librarian” thing is pretty much the case. So there’s a lot I can work on.

Now I tell friend #2 (who actually plays computer games and dabbles as a lvl 14 hunter in wow purely to tame pets of all varieties… companion battle and hunter pets are fair game) about the project and her response was “So you’re going to watch videos on youtube and tell people what to do over vent?”

No.

Well yes.

But there’s more!

First you work out what the aim/goal of the activity is:

• Get friend #1 fit.
• Maybe get fit in the process

Then you employ “Research” which can often involve youtube or any other credible sources for the information you are after, make sure you cross reference sites to weed out any trolls you are trying to “lead you down a garden path”:

So according to research people giving up on their exercise goals etc well thats more about motivation killers than a lack of desire for the goal. So people are apparently far more likely to stick to exercise and weight loss if they both log (like raiding combat log only as food diaries) and are responsible to a community (so a group of people involved in similar activities, preferably RL not just online sites).

1. Create a local group of ‘exercise peeps” like a raid team only without tanks and healers – easy! Meet with these people regularly! Do activities together, talk that sort of thing.
2. Log it like combat logging… so things like:

• A Food diary (I found a smart phone app for that, fantastic!)
• Weekly weigh ins (at the gym = same scale and it makes you go to the gym)
• Monthly tape measure measure in
• calorie count if you are so inclined… many peeps apparently find this really helpful (frankly i think i would rather stab myself in the face /sigh)

So once you have done your research and you have the accountability covered with your community and the logging you need to put some thought into psychology:

• Goals – okay so you want to lose weight, that’s not the goal you should be setting in the short term that’s more like the overarching “I want to see all the content, wear purples and be a leet raider” goal of all raiders. It’ll come what you need is some small positive thing that you can work on for 1-2 months, something you can achieve, something you can measure. This is more like the I want to increase my ilvl to 500 or 510 to fall in line with the other raiders, or I want to reach a DPS out put of over 80k, we will fucking down that damn horrible dinosaur this week etc etc. In this case I pushed my friend to agree to something very simple… 5mins of stretching a day (each day of the week a different muscle area so: core, arms, legs, butt etc). Humm and I told her to tie it in with a trigger activity… that is something she already does daily such as teeth brushing. This is playing to patterns. People are animals of condition really. So you log into wow on Sat at a certain time to queue up your LFR and get some daily quests out of the way… you may hate it but its probably a part of your regular game playing by now? Thats what we are aiming for here… conditioned exercise period… tied to a trigger pattern. We will extend the length of time later.
• Affirmations – meh its very “fitness and wellness” flavoured but never underestimate the power of telling yourself something over and over. My friend is too overweight to safely fall pregnant at the moment, but she just got married and wants to have children. Lol her cause is far more relevant than mine … I just want to wear skinny jeans rather than curve embracers pffft. So as affirmations have to be positive and present tense if you don’t want to risk warping yourself something like “I am being fit and healthy to raise a happy family” would work well for her. The raiders equivalent is fairly common and well known among any raid group: “I am fucking fantastic DPS” or in my case “Mitigate all the things. Mitigate all the things”. Last night our druid tank ranked on WoL doing aoe DPS on the Tortos bats and I am pretty sure I could hear him humming the “I’m so OP” song over vent /sigh. Avoid anything negative “Everyone else is Fail” is a shit affirmation that does nothing but abuse the people around… equally bad something like “Geeze I’m fat I need to work out” is just going to increase bad self esteem and encourage you to wallow in front of the telly with something coated in chocolate pleasure (pull your minds out of the gutter I was thinking peanut M&Ms pffft).
• Vision Boards – pffft sounds religious doesn’t it. Personally that list of gear we encourage all raiders to prepare before they hit raid content so that we don’t have to waste time with unorganised loot dickering and indecision. That’s a vision board. Its is a visual reminder of stuff that you want, rewards that you are working hard for. So make a vision board… personally I think it is a bit trite to put it on the fridge or the bedroom wall… but you know whats modern and has a phone app? PinInterest… or hell even tumblr. Social media websites for the win… and trust me there are fuckloads of people out there who are interested in whatever weird hobby you have be it raiding, making bento lunches or trying to get fit connect get all the cool pictures, they will excite your brain and keep you interested and invested. Also look at all the really hot butts its not even porn.
• Rewards –  well its the least likly to keep you coming back if you can’t pin the other motivations down like logging, community and accountability but why not have some rewards for all your hard work. Even raid guilds dish out the Dragon Kill Points so that you are assured a nice juicy piece of loot. We try to have some guild competitions and awesome activities to reward people for sticking with the guild. My friend doesn’t like cash prizes so heres so we are trialing with this group “Gift to future self” – if you keep your monthly goal you get to open that envelope where you promised your self a reward… you will make sure you do the reward activity and report back to the group. (Facial, outfits, dinner out its all fair game.) The Pamper raffle – stick some pamper activity in the hat (have a cheap alternative for the broke peeps so home made facial etc). Draw a random pamper reward from the hat and enact the “fun thing” tell us how it went next meeting.

So yeah I suppose I’m a raid leader. I research on youtube and I tell you what to do.

But.

But there’s a fair bit of negotiation, a lot of background organisation. Someone had to book a room for the weekly meetings. Someone has to arrange the transport for the gym weigh ins and a place to meet. Someone organises to have a scale brought by a team member and a tape measure by another.  Someone has to coordinate and form the “fitness group” out of local people resources. Someone will be encouraging (not enforcing) logging. Some one will be looking in each week to see if goals are being met, see if support is needed, see if anyone is showing up to “events”.

And thats what officers do in the background, in those secret chat channels it will be things like “good feeling in raid tonight” or “such-and-such seems stressed does any one know why?” “whats happened to regular shower #6 has he/she touched base lately as they haven’t logged in for a month” “We should organise a guild meeting to make sure people are happy with the raid direction” etc etc.

Its fun… but it is an unpaid job. Lol and sometimes you really wish you were just a regular joe turning up for a three hour event with the privilege of just doing your assigned roles for the evening … maybe bring a feast to help ut

2 Min Cardio Motivation – warning dicks fall off – hahahaha

Oi like bento for lunch its fun… and healthier than eating a coke and a freddo frog O-o

http://www.wowhead.com/news=212609/updated-5-3-ptr-patch-notes-may-7th

Pfffft!

1. I have no internet at home (still);Telstra, when asked, tell my flat-mates that in fact more than 2000 people in our small country town are in the same boat so we should shutupa our faces and stop whining at them. No net and no phone service for more than 2 weeks for more than 2000 people in one small town… Why you would admit to this I don’t know O-oA friend jokes that perhaps 2000 is the good number and in fact there are actually far more people who have been disrupted by the NBN lines being laid out around town. Sigh in any case it means no net outside of my workplace and my smart phone … (oh so deprived pfffft… may my life always be so harsh eh?)

   So no blogging really outside of work hours and that’s a little against my work ethic… staying at work till 9pm however is possible and blogging etc usually happens in the hours of 6pm-9pm at work. I am so tired, why I am more tired for conducting my usual net habits at work though instead of at home I don’t know.

   WoW time itself has also been limited despite camping at fellow guildies house for raiding and what not.. can’t really stick around after 11pm or raid end to do questing and such /sigh.

1. The guild website went down and my fellow warlock officer and I have been madly moving things to a new site.This is the real reason… deciding to archive parts of the old website and bring them over into the new is actually labor intensive because my fall back programs like HTTTrack which can rip entire websites to mirror folders on a desktop do not succeed when half your webpages are returning the “server is smoking” error.We plumbed the brains of some IT types down this way and apparently the sort of errors we are seeing are likely caused by server failure where the website data is kept across a number of server harddrives and some are dead – it would explain why the guildzilla website was so slow to load before the big burn out too come to think of it. As it stands you can view our old forums but any updates and changes don’t take at all.

   Our guild officer team have chosen to go with guildlaunch for a working site that accepts updates and changes, the decision was made mostly because of the ‘free 90-day paid access’ vouchers that guildlaunch were handing out on forums where peeps were discussing the guildzilla problem… many thanks guildlaunch! That saved our bacon in the officer team because it gave us an easy solution and helped us dive into providing the guildies with a fast solution.

   I am actually impressed with guildlaunch – it appears to have all the same widgets that we could get on guildzilla and the admin interface is much more modern and versatile. If I can transfer enough of horizons guild history before everything dies I will be very happy. 

What is it? Well its something Dachicki and I gave to our guild leader as a gift last Horizcon. Basically we took some Reaper miniature models (that would be me the easy job), and painted them to look like the GL & her MT hubby’s characters (that would be Dachicki… the hard job there.)

Of course I promptly dropped the whole package on the ground when i was trying to hand it over on the day, making Dachicki go a pasty white colour O-o

Here’s wishing the GL luck and happiness this week

Peace out peeps.

Panda-glam

Had a spell, thought it was grand
Cast my POM, to find out first hand
went well for a tick or two
then it all came unglued

My tracker tracks it to the hunters pet
startin’ to notice I’m a water-ele vet
Prayer of Mending H-P-S
wasted on a companion pest

Blizz fucking hates me
thats a wolf
They fucking hate me
la la la not a tank
I tried too hard
tracked my POM n’ crushed my ego like I had none
Pets took my POM away

POM was queen for about an hour
after that T-fifteen got sour
the pets took all the heals I had
no sign of guilt
no feeling of bad, no

My tracker tracks it to the hunters pet
startin’ to notice I’m a lock-imp vet
Prayer of mending H-P-S
wasted on the companion pests

Blizz fucking hates me
thats a felhound
They fucking hate me
la la la not a raider
I tried too hard
tracked my POM n’ it blew my ego like I had none
Pets ripped my POM away

that’s my story, so you see
I’m a priest in misery
the pets hog my POM and I’m so sad
’cause I’m a fool for all I’m mad

Blizz fucking hates me
Is that a ghoul?
They fucking hate me
la la la well its not a tank
I tried too hard
tracked my POM n’ crushed my ego like I had none
Pets took my POM away

la la la la la la la la la Track-it
Thats an imp
la la la la la la la la la not even DPS
Fricken Tahli, Kit!
I tracked my POM n’ bruised my ego like I had none
Blizz fucking hates me

Sing it to She Fucking Hates Me by Puddle of Mudd:

So my flatmates and I watched the Ditch-Witch (that’s council ditch digging machinery that is going around our town to install super fast optic fiber cables for super fast internets) go past our house with glee a fortnight ago. Then days later our phone and internet cuts out… right near-on (I speak some good Australian don’t I? … yeah-nah?) ANZAC day, distracting us from the small scandal across the road of the church billboard vs the local war Vets.

Turns out, according to the Telstra boy who came to our house today, the Ditch-Witch ran over the regular phone lines … or something. I think it is a conspiracy. They send the machine past the house that is installing the new faster government sponsored fiber optic NBN internet and it runs over your regular old shoes phoneline and ADSL – completely taking out any potential competition. Conspiracy I say.

In any case my landlord (played a pally healer in burning crusade) gave the phone company what for via mobile phone call while my other flatmate (cough toy-boy druid) contemplated piggy backing his smart phone to the computer to use the 3G internet. Ex-pally-heals got us a faster line fix (thus Telstra boy is in our house today and not on the 7th of May like first promised) and a couple hundred off the next phone bill… never underestimate the determination of a paladin healer I guess.

I myself was reduced to moving my computer box to fellow guildies house where I could set up for raiding. Our Guild Leader being in hospital birthing a bouncing baby this week, it is kinda all hands on deck to keep the ship rolling. So after taking measures to make sure I would be able to raid (and honestly having to go home and thus away from game at some point),  I returned home and surfed the internet on the smart phone myself.

What a loss though, four day long weekend when I could have been playing GW2 or WoW all weekend and I had no net for games. Oh well, I had lots of coffee dates, a hair appointment.. and volunteered to work two days for extra cash, as without net I had nothing better to do.

Still bless our pocket civilization tools O_o I’ve manage to do banking and find phone numbers, post codes, opening hours etc etc all on the phone. Boy have I had a crash course in how much I use the internet for small things though.

Back to the tale of small woes; when the Telstra lad turned up and left a weird orange thing attached to our phone today while he ran off to poke a telegraph pole the ex-pally-heals had to be restrained by the toy-boy-druid from kicking the “probably worth thousands” weird orange thing. Take note: long term internet outage can cause extreme stress in the average net addicted female.

I suppose it was a little evil on my end to use Telstra boy as a prop for teaching the wolf-dog to bark on command for cheese (though honestly I think he was more amused then afeared by our mad lounge room antics with the cheese.) The wolf-dog and I have been endeavoring to learn to bark on command for three days now… this too is what happen when you take the internet away.

Thanks to Telstra we had actual barks rather than Malamute howls and moans for a change. Pally-heals (who owns the wolf) has threatened to end me if I don’t complete the wolf-dog’s training with the promised complimentary “Be quite” command.

But its finally looking up, fingers crossed I’ll have net tonight and can move my most important belonging back into the house, stop camping on friends carpets and lurking at work, stop burning expensive mobile downloads for kicks, let the pets relax, that sort of thing… because seriously this morning I started trying to train the cat to meow for frozen prawns when I make a quacking duck hand signal at him….

In any case it’s given me another piece of self homework… incoming heals! I know healbot can display these and I even have them activated… but in a very similar colour to existing health… which come to think of it rather does help me minimize my overhealing. Pffft not that a disc priest gets a lot of overhealing outside of spells like prayer of healing and prayer of mending … oh and cascade … it overheals for a crap-load.

But I might change the colour so incoming heals are more obvious … something i can start watching during raid with more awareness… and I may even see if the rest of the healing team has this feature enabled if possible to aid communication.

I am a big big fan of the horizon heal and tank chat channels, the healing one I am pretty sure existed before I joined the guild but I like to think I am an advocator of it heh. The tank one I believe is also needed… so that the raid leader and heal team leader can see any tank discussion or so tanks can easily give feedback after a wipe without us all spamming the raid chat channel which is where the DPS entertain themselves.

Things I have since learnt about Discipline priests that were not obvious to me when I first began playing one:

• When I cast bubble on someone that clock over my head that indicates I have procced Borrowed Time – which means a fast cast on a larger spell such as Greater heal or Prayer of healing.
• There is this thing called rapture which gives cheap bubbles – use an addon to track it and when it is “Ready” cast bubbles = mana efficacy.
• I pretty much almost never use heal… all it is good for is reducing weakened soul on a tank so I can shield them again.
• Prayer of Mending should be, if not cast on cooldown, at least tracked with an addon like POM tracker and cast as soon as you see some hunters pet hogging it.
• The passive part of the smite atonement healing process ‘Evangelism’ is actually a healing/damage buff (duh!) and not just there to give me angel wings later.
• Renew is the shitiest spell ever, the holy priest has no idea how shit it is on this side of the fence… my lord is it shit. Only cast if you are moving and out of options.
• Inner focus may make an annoying noise while it is waiting to be used up … but it should be cast on cooldown – particularly nice with Spirit Shell for prayer of healing casts.
• Void shift …. It’s like a riskier version of a paladin’s Lay on Hands – I have yet to master it but it is on my list.
• Inner Will actually has its place and is not completely useless – great on the Horridon fight if you are decursing lots of things and bubbling peeps (doesn’t help with mass dispel), wouldn’t recommend spending the whole fight in it over Inner Fire, but it is not bad for a quick switch up.

And finally there is this fantastic read over at Life in group 5: Perspective and Optimism in the Face of Class Balance

I concur: we should all enjoy playing to the best of our ability and playing what we love.

It’s true I myself am no natural born wonderful raid healer, I have a lot of flaws and there are all sorts of things I am coming to understand about the Discipline Priest that I honestly completely overlooked when I first picked her up. I learn slowly, like I am re-reading a great novel over and over and finding little things different in the story each time.

Not being a natural genius and being older and little slower in reflexive reaction in game – I have noticed that I improve my play in parallel of improving my understanding of the fight mechanics for a particular boss. In part this is just how discipline priests and healing works in general – healers that know the rhythms of a fight are going to be far more efficient at spell selection to suit incoming damage…. Discipline priests that know the rhythms of a fight can take it one step further and can preempt the damage before it even hits.

There was one amusing incident during last night’s raid where our mage commented while clearing the bridge trash between Jin & the horrible dino in ToT (the nasties we had so much trouble with the week prior that do the healing debuff) – the mage said something along the lines of “What’s going on, have they changed the adds? I took almost no damage my health barely shifted. Was it my distance from the boss?”

Lol – the only difference was in fact that our healers were prepared (well also the tanks and the raid in general), having had a taste of how the adds drop damage on the raid the week before; with a disc priest chaining Candy-Shell > Barrier > Bubbles on the raid while the holy pally and holy priest dishing out their own not insignificant healing and mitigation the raid health was very healthy. So healthy it looked like nothing was happening… and that is the extreme difference between healers being aware and prepared for incoming damage and healers not knowing what they will be dealing with. On one hand no one notices anything interesting and it is business as usual and on the other the entire raid is screaming and running in circles with their hair on fire.

[Watch here at [7:20-8:50] : http://www.twitch.tv/dachicki/b/394227380 … Pffft see before that time for chaos and wiping]