I can't remember lag this bad.  Check that, I can, but it was the AQ40 gate opening and everyone knew it would be a short-lived affair.  At this point, we play through lag on Tuesday through Thursday and hope we can still kill bosses, then leave Monday to hopefully get something done.  The concept of making a bee line for the new boss loses its value when your instant casts on the oldest boss are so slow as to make you feel mentally deficient.  To that end, while it doesn't excuse the incompetence we've demonstrated in the past - threat meters are wonderful things - it certainly adds to the frustration of those involved, myself included.

With that, times are definitely changing.  We've lost some members to a loss of interest, others to a loss of decency.  We've run many a raid undermanned - such is life for many guilds now, from what I observe - and we've figuratively snapped at each other's throats on multiple occasions debating differences between bugs in encounters and flaws in performance; people aren't what they once were, both new and old, and accountability is at best a tenuous prospect.  I can't say it's been enjoyable all the while, but if raiding teaches you one thing, be it in the game or in life, it's that perseverance is a staple to success.  No matter how many times you get the boss to 10% and the server renders its judgment from Hades, no matter how many times people's ISPs cut out, or no matter how many times things just don't go the way you want, you keep pressing on, because the alternative is even less desirable.  Luckily there's some replenishment along the way:



My philosophical rants now aside, Mimiron is dead after far too much effort involved.  If the server cooperates with us at all, it'd be swell to see something new.



I'd congratulate the recipients of loot, but I confess to not recalling its contents.  Thanks instead to those who, in the absence of ostensible motivation, came ready and willing to tackle the challenge of the evening anyways.  Let's hope times start changing again.

I'm sure everyone is experiencing the joy of massive lag in Ulduar.  I can hardly contain my excitement about it.  I mean, having to deal with non-ideal circumstances is a fact of life, but I have a hard time leaving my raiding to the roulette wheel; usually we reserve questions of "what fire?" to incompetence.  The hippie had his own take:



Since there's nothing better to do with 5+ second casting lag than to talk about current events and I always try to pretend I appreciate the sophistication and erudite origin of juvenile memes, I really cut loose after a bit:



There's something to be said of someone with "Dark" in their name telling a guy named "Darkness" about how dark he is.  This is normally where Morlicar would chime in with a particularly off-color pun about "leafing" the ToL druid alone, and I would hold my head in shame for the depravity of the human condition.

But fear not, there's more meaningless drivel!  Not to be outdone, we keep a healthy nutritional regimen here in the guild:



When you measure the probability of a successful encounter not on our familiarity and capacity to execute a given strategy, but rather on the amount of techno music our most tenured hunter is playing silently to himself, the number of fingers a given member may or may not have inadvertently detached the day before, and the amount of timely references to and mockeries of regional vernacular, something is terribly awry.

Not to be forgotten, though, Thorim died too.  We got our share in as well, as there's nothing like an attempt being botched by someone disconnecting on the pull and all of the adds mysteriously running over and over to them.

Three to go, maybe two by tomorrow.  Playing through the pain is oh so much fun.