Yesterday on my Friends log, Jay's friend icon rolled over to "Offline for 12 months" so I'd better get posting my memorial posts.
I would like to have an in-game memorial for Vier on Aug. 26, one year after she died. This will be the longest of three posts.
1. This post: Backstory of Jenn's WoW history, Blog Review "My Mom Plays WoW", some other memories.
2. Vier and Taxi. The story [as I know it], my wish for an in-game memorial.
3. Memorial Invite and Requests.
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Jennifer has been playing computer games since she was 18 months old. We have some video of her loading a pinball game from a huge old floppy disk and playing pinball when she had to stand on the chair to reach the keyboard.
Himself [Jay's Father/Hubby-of-Mine] also played computer games and one of his early favourites was Warcraft.
I hated the original game and decreed that
"I don't ever want to see you playing that violent game in front of the baby again". In our world of a double-shift-worker-family, and our tag-team parenting, the critical phrase
"I don't want to see" was upheld to the letter. I never
saw him playing the game in front of the baby.
What I also
didn't see was Kidlet reading the manual to Warcraft II for her father, helping him set it up, and then play. What I also
didn't see was her having the game memorized by the time she was about nine.
I don't know for sure when Jay started to play WoW online, but I'm pretty sure she played Vanilla. I remember her un-subbing for final exam time in high school so she wouldn't be tempted. I remember Thursdays and Sundays were Raid Nights and she hogged the family computer.
Jenn had bugged me for
YEARS to play WoW with her. I always had great excuses. "I don't play computer games."
(Seriously, I played a pinball game once when I was training for my job in the early '80s. I may have sat at a Ms. PacMan console in a bar once. I deleted the Solitaire game off all my early computers) "I'm too busy with work and the farm" "I'm too sick"
But, on Black Friday 2013, I had run out of excuses. I was retired, my chronic illness was managed, ... "fine, I'll play BUT, ... You Have To Help Me." I am sure she regretted doing this many times but ... in the beginning, during a fit of laughter she remarked "this is just too funny to keep to myself" and she started blogging about us on Tumblr. A format that I have never been able to figure out. I convinced her to switch to blogger and thus the journey documentation began.
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From the beginning,
the first post.
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The Cloak -
Day Six
I was mulling over the quest rewards, Vier
[im]patiently waiting for me to make my decision.
Nor - "I want to pick the cloak, right?"
Vier - ‘That’s right, but why do you want to pick the cloak?’
Nor - ”To keep me warm and hide me?”
I remember this so vividly.
Jay lost her shit. She couldn't stop talking about my very wrong answer for days and brought it up many times in years to come.
For non-WoW players, the answer she was hoping for was that I recognized the correct item to match my class and was an upgrade to my ilvl. Instead, I was thinking about the elvish invisibility cloak from the LOTR movies that Frodo and Sam used to hide from Orcs. This was also one of the first times that she rolled her eyes at my role-playing tendencies.
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My
love/hate relationship with Striders begins and my darling, favourite daughter lets a little of her sarcasm into the blog.
"Noritam smacks a Tallstrider - right in the face!
Protecting Azeroth from certain doom."
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It's been
a glum week here in My Mom Plays WoW world. Vier, in what's becoming a terrible, terrible annual event, had the hunky paramedics come to her house and whisk her away to the hospital again. Between that and the creepy-ness that is Bloodmyst Isle ... ugh. Not a good way to start the New Year.
*Unfortunately Vier maintained that New Year trend for several more years.
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"
Overflying the Howling Fjord, Vier spotted something she had never seen before. Lucky for me, she was eager to investigate. ... It was
High -- Lair -- Eee -- Us! ... ... A Turtle Boat!
A boat structure built on the shell of a turtle, propelled by dangling some carrots in front of the turtle's nose. Literally!"
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"In-game,
Vier is my mentor, my hero, my rescue-er, our mother-daughter roles fall away, we're just characters in the game.
Which gives license to:
- ... trying to set me on fire,
- ... affixing me with the Mask of Shame,
- ... doing 360's on her fishing raft and interfering with my fishing casts,
- ... generally being a high-energy, dexterous, brat!
In the shot below, the fire on the right is one I set out to do some cooking. The one in the water is the one Vier tried to set on top of me!"
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Undercurrent of Cruel
"This next shot is indicative of the undercurrent of cruel that lives in Vier's heart.
I had been riding on Vier as her Obsidian Nightwing, we were taking a boat from Stormwind to I-don't-remember-where.
She landed on the sticky-outy thing on the front of the boat, morphed back to herself as a night elf, walked off the long sticky-outy thing, leaving me there.
Casually saying "Don't fall off" as she walked back onto the boat.
I promptly withdrew my hands from my mouse and keyboard, pushed my chair back and just watched. "
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Booty Bay and The Story of the Widowed Strand Crab
I may have
accidentally killed a Strand Crab.
As if I didn't feel bad enough, Miss Vier had to go on and on about the poor Strand Crab, ... and his wife and children left waiting at home for Dad to return, and he never would. ... And putting the Mask of Shame on me. ... And telling Mrs. Strand Crab, who arrived to discover the corpse of her mate, how cruelly I had killed him.
No matter how much I "pet" "hugged" and "loved" the deceased and the widowed, Vier wouldn't let up until I was literally crying from laughing so hard.
The screenshot shows the blue crab corpse [Mr.] with the grayed out name tag, the live red crab [Mrs.] with yellow name tag, the Mask of Shame on the front of my face [again], and in the chat log, the comfort I tried to provide to "Mrs." Strand Crab.
It was only a week later, I realized that the live "Mrs. Strand Crab", was probably the original dead crab, re-spawned.
--rolls eyes --"
[Years later, I've discovered that the
toy "Ken-Ken's Mask" is "The Mask of Shame", which was first granted to me when I got stuck in/behind something like a rock or a tree. I also remember getting stuck behind a hut in the Everbloom in Draenor, so no, I haven't learned.]
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Feb 20, 2014 - I almost quit the game. We had our first mother-daughter spat in-game.
My daughter gave me a pep talk last night. She advised me to go back and read the first post of this blog and realize how far I had come. She told me that on the first day when I was RP walking, she had thought that maybe bringing me into WoW wasn't such a great idea if we were going to have to walk to level ninety! That it took the better part of a year for her to level her first toon to max level and Noritam and Molim are half-way there after two and a half months.
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This post is a perfect example of "
early days with Vier and Nor in WoW"
at this point, in real time, and with hindsight, ya gotta ask yourself, did Vier
really know what she was asking for when she kept asking her mother to come and play World of Warcraft with her? I mean, let's face it, during "the terrible teens", Himself [Vier's father], Himself's favourite daily saying was "OK you two, play nice". Seriously, stereotypical mother/daughter teen-aged crap. ... ... So really, even though we're almost a decade out from that, and lots has changed since then, when it gets in the thick of it, during this --- --vent silence-- --- ya gotta wonder, ... just how good of an idea was this? ... ... just askin'
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Vier is getting impatient whilst I'm reading quest text and lays out a path for me so I don't get lost.
-rolls eyes-
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Why I have a Hunter I can't Play
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Rock Concert & Bar Brawl for Mother's Day
This is one of my favourite WoW stories. Especially, the week after Mother's Day 2014 when my IRL friends asked how my Mother's Day went, I was casually able to say,
"Oh, Jay and her friends took me out to a bar, we got drunk, saw a concert and got in a bar fight".
Of course, not mentioning that this all happened virtually in WoW!
"I started a bar brawl. ... oops! how can I not aggro a bunch of stuff when my screen is all blurry? That's the story I'm stickin' to anyway. I hopped over the bar to escape the uglies and fell into a pit of more uglies!
Kat saved me, Vier ralphed on me, and I made the mistake of asking Vier not to tell her father."
Which is also why every Darkmoon Faire, I must go and watch and dance to The Tauren Chieftains at least once!
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Unless it was for something she wanted [mount, transmog gear]
Vier professed to abhor running old content. Also, two years in, Vier had long since passed into the "be careful what you wish for 'cause you might get it" regret of having her inept Mother playing WoW. She introduced me to Mr. Kitty/Mierlin, who also enjoys doing achievements and doesn't mind babysitting me.
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Just for the
eye-roll inducing pleasure of it all, I wanted to ding 100 as I handed in a Daily at my Fishing Shack. Just because ...
Vier might roll her eyes
so hard they get stuck backwards or pop out of her head!
Vier often got impatient and bored while I was doing stuff she deemed unworthy of her time. Fishing, Achievements, Professions.
This usually resulted in her bouncing around, playing with toys and/or mounts and generally being a pest until I said: "OK, I'll finish this later, let's go do what you want to do".
For Example
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Questing in Telaar - Be Careful What You Wish For!
Jay Bitching to Leah
so i'm typing at her in capslockwhile finishing these few quests faster than ithink i've ever quested in my life "STOP. STOP MOVING. STOP. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.""TURN AROUND. DO NOT GO THERE. YOU ARE GOING THE WRONG WAY""MOTHER.""MOTHER STOP!!!!!!!"oh my god
Nor comment #1
I always know I've done something really stooopid and maybe missed a line or two in the chat window when the CAPS LOCK key comes into play and I see ...
MOTHER!
Nor comment #2
Although, it was fun another time when we were in a group doing some stuff and Vier was being her usual ... how shall I phrase this ... irreverent self. One of the guys was giving an overview of what we were about to face and mentioned we
"shouldn't stand in the purple stuff".
Vier:
"You can't tell me what to do. I'll stand in the purple stuff if I want to. You're not the boss of me. You're not my mother"
I waited for a bit, shrugged my shoulders and thought, why the hell not, so I typed
"Don't stand in the purple stuff".
Kitty, who was the only other person in our group that knew I was, in fact, her mother was ROFLMAO-ing all over the place.
That was fun.
Remember, Vier had been asking me to play WoW with her for, literally, years before I finally acquiesced to her request.
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| "Be careful what you wish for" |
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One of Mr. Kitty's friends did a drawing of Vier for her other blog.
