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About the Bloggers: Fox Van Allen
About the Bloggers introduces you to the people behind WoW Insider. Meet other staffers, both past-day and present, in earlier About the Bloggers posts. This week, we meet and shake hands with the extraordinarily popular (Editor's note: Fox wrote that) Fox Van Allen. We then immediately reach for the hand sanitizer, because we have a pretty good idea where his hands have been. What do you do for WoW Insider? Fox Van Allen, a blood elf-esque man who frequently converses about himself in the third person, was officially hired as a contributing editor nearly two years ago. But he's not just a contributor -- he's so much more. Fox is the wit and ego of WoW Insider. Stunningly handsome, incredibly intelligent, and chaotically neutral, Fox is best known for his work as the columnist behind the shadow priest edition of the Spiritual Guidance column. He has also filled in for a number of other columnists, including brief stints working The Queue and Gold Capped columns. He is universally loved by all, even by those who hate him. He also compiles the WRUP (What aRe yoU Playing?) column every Saturday Friday, but he doesn't like to talk about that much. Mostly since it's 90% filler. Entertaining filler, though! You should read it!
About the Bloggers: Tyler Caraway
About the Bloggers introduces you to the people behind WoW Insider. You can find articles on some of our more longstanding staffers in earlier About the Bloggers entries. This week we have one of the newer faces on the block, who wasn't around when the original series ran: Tyler Caraway. What do you do for WoW Insider? I'm one of the contributing editors for the site and primarily focus on writing Blood Pact for warlocks, Shifting Perspectives for balance druids, and Ready Check for your raiding insights. From time to time, though, I've been known to write about a multitude of things ranging from theorycrafting, elemental shaman, death knights, and various other class tidbits. Where I could end up any given week is half the fun of the job.
WRUP: WoW Insider's night at Video Game Orchestra
Just yesterday, yours truly (the incomparable Fox Van Allen) attended a live performance of Video Game Orchestra at Boston's Symphony Hall. The first half of the show dragged on, but once the VGO took over, the event was a home run. It wasn't without incident, though. In fact, dare I say ... it was a day that would change the WoW Insider staff forever.
WRUP: Twitter, sparklelions, and Nutsy Bolts, oh my
Every week, just at the start of the weekend, we catch up with the WoW Insider staff and ask them, "What are you playing this week?" -- otherwise known as: WRUP. Join us to see what we're up to in and out of game -- and catch us in the comments to let us know what you're playing, too! Ever wonder what your favorite WoW Insider writers are up to when they're not writing for WoW Insider? Well, thanks to the technological marvel known as Twitter, you can now e-stalk our writers and absorb our infinite wisdom 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! (That's right, even on Fridays.) What did you miss this week by not following your favorite WoW Insider editors? Well, for starters, yours truly talked about a new Dispersion glitch and lustful cries of "zug zug;" Mat McCurley bragged about his prescience on the Winged Guardian mount and spammed more pictures of his cat; Tyler Caraway (who will heretofore be named "little nugget") surrendered to his crippling devotion to Fox Van Allen and begged to be "taken;" Mike Sacco created a WoW-themed game of Nutsy Bolts and invited all his followers to join in; and Alex Ziebart played some Atari 2600, gave away a loot card, and then freaked the hell out over a bug. All in a week's work for the WoW Insider crew. What will happen next week? You should follow us all and find out. Whatever we say, it's likely to be entertaining, if only because we don't have paid editors on hand in our personal lives to stop us from saying something really, really stupid. But enough shameless plugging of ourselves on Twitter -- it's time to get back to shameless plugging of ourselves on WoW Insider via WRUP. This week's bonus question lands our editors in a bit of déjà-vu-like controversy: "What do you think of the winged lion (Winged Guardian) mount? If you hated the sparklepony, do you hate this? Or have you come to terms with microtransactions?"
Spiritual Guidance: What few shadow priest highlights BlizzCon 2010 could scrape together
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Even weeks when your shadowy messiah, Fox Van Allen, is nursing one heck of a headache -- along with, presumably, everyone else who's still suffering from the non-stop party atmosphere of BlizzCon 2010. Let's start by saying that BlizzCon 2010 was an absolute blast. I met most of the WoW Insider crew, got to smell Mike Sacco's hair yet again, got some amazing swag and got to eat at Jack in the Box no less than five times. The best part, though, was probably meeting Orkchop (pictured above with WoW Insider's moonkin blogger Tyler Caraway, who can only aspire to be as amazing as Orkchop). The dude is an internet celebrity. For real. But enough about how awesome Orkchop is. Let's talk shadow priests, and how awesome they are. Now, I'm not good at sugar-coating things, so I'll just come out with it: BlizzCon 2010 was pretty disappointing in terms of World of Warcraft-related content. The biggest news out of the convention was the new loading screen for Cataclysm. Really. That was the big news. Seriously. And it's just a palette-shifted version of the Sindragosa loading screen. Despite the lack of earth-shattering news, I made sure to take note of all the shadow priest action. There wasn't a heck of a lot of it, but what little ground was covered was hugely important to the future of the spec. The good, the bad and the non-answers -- we'll go over it all after the break.
