Questes: Well, that about sums it up.

I finally completed my compendium of the most fabulous and endangered quests in all of WoW; so now I urge you to complete them, post-haste, before they are swept away. Below I have them listed in the order which I feel they are best completed, based upon precise calculations, balancing time and scope versus endangerment and epicness:

The Battle For Darrowshire

In Dreams

You are Rakh'likh, Demon

Class Quests

The Lady's Necklace

The Glowing Shard

The Shady Rest Inn

The Sprite Darter

The Master's Key

Only One May Rise

I'd be happy to explain my rationale if anyone has the will to wonder - but if not, just accept it as a universal truth and move along.

Questes: Only One May Rise

Alright, I know it's been a while (I have excuses abound, I promise!) but I figured, with Cataclysm looming, I figured it was about time to wrap up this bloody series. Also, I'm just starting this last quest chain and hope to finish it before Cataclysm, as it is one of the most epic quest chains everto have existed; and most certainly the most epic pre-BC. The Quest I refer to is, of course, The Scepter of the Shifting Sands.

The Scarab Gong, courtesy of Wowwiki.com

Who can do this?

First, you need to be level 60 or above - but only a level sixty full of ambition, and an even fuller friends list of 80's, will ever get this done.

Second, you'll need time, as portions of this quest can revolve around ten-hour grinds or multiple runs of weekly lockouts. You really only need to run every particular dungeon once, but it's a lengthy grind nonetheless.

Where do I begin?

The first quest of the arching chain begins with What Tomorrow Brings..., given by one Baristolth of the Shifting Sands in Cenarion Hold, Silithus.

How does this one work?

This questis NOT simple. It requires a boatload of different interlocking, interweaving, and generally crazy quest chains that are hard to follow. As usual, Wowwiki has a wonderful guide; looking at Hoddie's comments on Wowhead are quite helpful too.

Oh, and remember - vigilance is key. If you want to obtain, well, what you see in the section below, there is no way but to persist. Good luck!

And finally, what do I get?

Well, first off, if you were the first person on your server to complete the quest (or completed it within ten hours of said person) you would get the fantastic title 'Scarab Lord' and Feat of Strength, and the unique one-of-a-kind Legendary mount Black Qiraji Resonating Crystal, which has a unique history you can go read about on Wowwiki. Unfortunately, these are no longer attainable, so if you are reading this, tough luck.

Increases in the numbers...

At the very least, Neutral with the Brood of Nodzormu +4365 reputation.

+1000 rep with Gadgetzan

+1525 Reputation with the Cenarion Circle

And a smattering of XP to be made into golds. And some more golds.

Then, the epics themselves. First you'll get whatever you pick up in your BWL, Onyxia, MC, and quite probably AQ runs. You'll get the achievements for each of those, and then the achievement for the level 60 Onyxia feat of strength too, as an added bonus.

Then, in the chain, you are awarded...

First off, the repeatables for Brood of Nozdormu rep give you Proxies of Nozdormu, which help alleviate some of the grind by allowing you to grant other players the ability to get stuff for you to turn in.

You get the choice between a Drake Tooth Necklace, a caster dps neck with Nature resist, and Drudge Boots, leather melee feet with nature resist too.

You get a choice between the Amulet of Shadow Shielding, a Stam/spirit shadow protection neck, and Onyx Embedded Leggings, shammy mail pants with some shadow resist too.

You get 3 Major Rejuvination Potions. Whoop-de-doo!

You get the one-of-a-kind, epic recipe (which is still highly coveted to this day) Dirge's Kickin' Chimaerok Chops, which is BoE if you want to sell it for a profitable sum to recipe collectors. You also get 20 of said chops, which were the best food around back in the day.

You also get the super awesome silence-limiting Gnomish Turban of Psychic Might, a cloth caster head.

You get to choose between the Band of Icy Depths, a underwater breathing ring, and Darkwater Robes, a Fire Resisting cloth chest.

You get The Scepter of Shifting Sands, a now-useless white BoE which was used to bang the gong back at the release in order to get the title and the mount, but still a cool keepsake.

Lastly you get your pick from four weapons: The Fang of Korialstrasz, a caster dps dagger; Shadowsong's Sorrow, a melee dps dagger; Runesword of the Red, a caster dps sword; and Ravencrest's Legacy, a tanking mainhand.

What did I just do?

You just completed the pinnacle of WoW Vanilla questing. You saw some of lore's most major characters come into play; you fought your way through multiple vanilla raids and world raids, events and grinds, to obtain the scepter of the shifting sands. And, if it is any indication from the cataclysm beta, you will be one of the last to do so, as in the Beta right now, the quest has been removed. Now is the time to strike, now is the time to take action and complete what may be the most grand, time intensive, satisfying and exclusive of questing accomplishments in all of the World of Warcraft!

Questes : The Lady's Necklace

Look at that, twice in two days! I'm on a roll. Also, this is the second-to-last one of Questes, so let's make it count with the flat out coolest piece of audio work in the game.

Who can do this?

This is a horde-specific questline, but don't let it discourage you - it only requires level 15 to do, so you might as well level up some race/class combination you haven't done yet (easiest is BE or Undead, location-wise) and you can do both WC for The Glowing Shard and then this in one demonic, or even fel, swoop.

All Credit to http://www.wowhead.com/item=22597#screenshots:id=55354

Where do I begin?

It can be annoying, or it can be easy. I've never had an issue with getting the item that starts the quests - The Lady's Necklace, dropped off of Fallen Rangers and Deatholme Acolytes at Windrunner Spire in SW Ghostlands. However, a select few have just very poor luck and end up farming for a while before it drops. It's just the luck of the RNG, but it's always dropped within 3 or 4 kills for me.

How does mine necklace?

Seriously? This is like the simplest quest in the history of simple quests. Just read the bloiting quest text. I'm not even linking to wowhead here, it's just that easy.

And now, the loot.

You guessed it! Loot.

First off, you get 100,000 rep with Tranquillien, and 250 with Undercity. Toss on a sprinkling of gold and xp, and it's not a bad quest in and of itself. After the completion event, you also get a book, if you talk to the nearby question-markless Ambassador Sunsorrow. More on this later.

That's it, though - there's not much here. Of course, as we know, the journey is the worthier part.

All credit to WoW.com this time.

So... What's the point?

If you've done it by now, you know the point. At the end of the quest chain... *SPOILERS*... Deathwing appears and blows up the Undercity! Haha... see, now, the people who haven't done it are now going to go and complete it before actually having it spoiled. What really happens is that Sylvanas and a few of her banshees sing an epic and stunning song named 'Lament of the Highborne', all in Thalassian. I doubt that something of this quality will disappear in Cataclysm, but it very well could disappear, at least in its current incarnation - as Undercity and the entirety of Northern Lordaeron is getting hit by the renovate-bat, who knows.

For those allies in the crowd who can't be bothered to level up a measly level 15, I mean, seriously, you could just make a death knight for A'Dal's sake, you can type

/script PlaySoundFile("Sound\\Music\\GlueScreenMusic\\BCCredits_Lament_of_the_Highborne.mp3")

into the text window to hear the song, or watch a video on youtube. There is, however, nothing quite like walking up to the throne room and seeing it live. This is one of the truely amazing artistic feats in WoW - and something not to be missed.

It's simple.

Whew. Back again. It's been a busy couple of months, so it's nice to finally be able to type something up.

During that time, I had the delight of experiencing two unrelated yet simultaneously very very closely related endeavors - one, I watched the entire 3 seasons of Avatar, The Last Airbender (delightfully entertaining series) for the first time. Also, I listened to a large number of 3-minute protests - informing, convincing, and venting, all mixed together, in such a short period promotes very interesting topics and thoughts to be brought forth. One which struck me as particularly cool was protesting clapping directly after a performance - that brief, 2-second interlude between conclusion and applause is a sacred and necessary moment that must be always held dear. However, I am not here to talk about the importance of postconclusory peace - I am here to talk about racism.

One of these protest speeches was on the racism in the casting of 'The Last Airbender', the live-action movie based on the aforementioned television series. I had heard about the movie before, but had not watched the show nor had I heard about the controversy. It was only after watching the show and watching a few trailers that I really understood what was going on - and after all this, hearing the speech made the subject all the more interesting. (The same person that wrote the speech drew up the above poster.) I'll summarize the argument below.

Essentially, what it boils down to is this:

1: Every single character in Avatar is not white. The main characters are Asian and Inuit, and a select few are based off of other cultures. This was intended, as the creators of the show to create an entirely eastern-based fantasy world.

2: Every single actor that was cast was white. However, when enough people protested through letters and the internet, they responded by casting the villains as Asian, Middle-eastern, or Latino. Also, because Hollywood is traditionally anti-Asian American, there a huge numbers of Asian actors very willing to play the parts. It is not a matter of acting skill.

3: This sends a very wrong message for kids, at whom the T.V. series and Movie is aimed; the heroes are white, while the villains are of different races, leading to more intolerance and inacceptance.

4: The awful irony is that the show preaches acceptance, the writers for the show promoted acceptance, the T.V. series was voiced by Asian actors which led to more successful careers in a traditionally anti Asian-American Hollywood, while the movie - a trilogy that could quite possibly be very influential - is anything but.

So, the speech went on to say, what can you do about it? Boycott the movie. Do not show up, do not give them your money, show them that racism is not ok.

(Also, they cut Sokka's humor. WTF?)

Update: There's a site full of more information, if you're interested, at http://www.racebending.com/v3/.

P.R.I.D.E: Movie-Based Video Games

Now, there is no reason to RANT if you don't follow up on it, so I have begun the "Post-RANT Idealistically Determined Exposition", or PRIDE. Essentially, I will look back on my R.A.N.T. post and either take a more explanatory/realistic view on things, or one that is far more radical if I felt I was out of line.

Obviously, looking back now, the rant was not angry enough - I find I actually agree with most of what was said. However, a few footnotes on the post:

First, games like Star Trek Online or any one of hundreds of Star Wars video games jump to mind. They did successfully, so what does this person mean when they slanderize all movie based video games? I think a point of clarification needs to be made: Games based off of IP's, or Worlds, do not fall into that category. Star Wars games produced after a trilogy, or Lord of the Rings games produced not based upon the movie but based on the land of Middle Earth, do not fit the definition.

Perhaps that was the point of the whole thing. Perhaps we can escape the downward spiral of awful. We just need to stop making games based upon all the pieces of the movie - the milieu, the idea, the characters, and the events - but just pick one and build from that. The easiest is obviously the milieu, and if we are to break the spiral then this is the way to do it, because milieu is a constant in both Card's MICE anagram (which could very well apply to movies, with maybe an addition of a Visual category) and my SPAM. But after video game tie-ins are taken seriously, one could retell the events from another point of view, or experience the character's adventures before or after the timeline of the movie. There is a world of possibility out there - all we need is for someone to take it seriously.

R.A.N.T.: Movie-Based Video Games

I have a bunch of spare time right now, so it seems about time to start another category of post. This column I will hereforth label as the "R.A.N.T." : Random Acronymized Nettled Text. Yes, I did just Google an acronym for 'angry' starting with n. So bite me.

We'll kick off this column with something that has really, really irked me. Like, alot. A great deal. This is the Movie-inspired video game. Looking at such classics as E.T., whose 4 million excess copies helped cause the video game crash of 1983 and the majority of which ended up buried under concrete in a New Mexican landfill; or Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, holding one of the worst video game reviews on multiple gaming sites; or even such recent releases as James Cameron's Avatar: The Game, it is obvious that developers do not take these games seriously. If we follow the post 1983-crash trend of gaming, we note that when developers do not take games seriously, players do not take games seriously, and so now even if a really decent game was released under a movie title, nobody would care.

The reason people actually make these games, in what seemingly has been forever, is because you can sell a few games on the wave of hype that follows a successful movie. You can also produce a game before a movie, and use it as a form of advertising - this is risky, however, because usually nobody will buy the game until after. Gamers don't buy movie-based games, and the hype-skateboarders don't have the hype to poon onto. Therefore most... scratch that, ALL, are just rushed drivel.

Why am I ranting about this? Why should I care that this market is so idiotically dull, when it is so easily avoided? BECAUSE THERE IS SO MUCH POTENTIAL. I saw two different movies this last weekend. The one I just saw, literally a few hours ago, was 'How to Train Your Dragon'. Actually a very good movie. I'd recommend it - it's a high quality film, another reason that animation can now be seen as a 'true' movie, not a specific brand. Anyway, they made a game, it was crap like the rest with poor ripped-off fighting mechanics and weak yet highly-toted customization, and I despised them for it. Here they have an epic world, one with huge potential, yet they scrap it for a dead game. GG Activision. GG.

The second, Clash of the Titans, is just a flat-out awful movie. Do not see it. Seriously. However, it got me wondering what it would be like if someone did a movie based upon Ovid's Metamorphoses (basis for most modern Greek myth), or did a full 3D epic... literally... of the Odyssey. If someone took the visual style of a movie like that, did a God of War style action-adventure game with a fairly linear storyline but great game play, it could be a very fun game... and not only would it be fun, but the game would promote the movie and the movie would promote the game. It could be epic. To bad it will never, ever, happen.

Other things I hate about movie based video games: 99.99% of them are catered towards an audience under 12. Seriously. This is because they are more impressionable and much more capable of surfing the hype wave. That means those of us gamers that want to play on Pandora or Berk or wherever are SOL. Also, they are almost always placed exactly where they should not be. A successful video game will draw you into the world - not tell you the storyline of the movie set in the world the game should be about. Why in the world would you stage a game inside of a village that was just saved? Set it in a nearby village. A cut storyline - something the writers wanted to do, thought up doing, but then never got to implement.

A video game is a second chance for writers to tell a story they didn't get to - and a second chance to explain the world through another story. Not a chance to have you run through some muddied maze of puzzles between narrated bit of exposition that tell you about a story that doesn't matter, or a story that you already know.

White Words on a Black Site

Three large cardboard boxes are, at the moment, sitting full of unread books. I intend to change this, whether by burning the boxes, throwing them around, or reading the books. Perhaps all three. However, in order to do such things, I will probably eventually read the majority of them anyway. I have about 25 critically acclaimed Fantasy/SF books now displaced onto a shelf, where I will begin to read them. As a way of making myself read them more/learn more from them, I'll post a short review/synopsis/etc. on the site about each one. Should be fun!