[1.Local]: Gigantic

This list is the reason why we couldn't have "guild talents" and why we get all of them instead.

Any hardcore PVE or PVP guild that doesn't have either the Honor point or the Hero point gain talent is not going to be competitive. A lot of more casual guilds could've easily picked them both up, but when you're in a hardcore guild striving for world/realm firsts or whatever the equivalent is for PVP you're going to go for the most effective point distribution, forcing players who do both (like me) or who are in a primarily PVE guild and mostly PVP and vice versa to leave their friends and find other guilds just to stay competitive.

All that whining about Guild Talents was pointless.

I think this WoW-themed health column is kind of neat. As someone who is both an avid gamer, and fairly health-conscious, I can attest that there's no reason the two need to be mutually exclusive, even when your free time is limited.

Like you say in this article, there are a lot of ways to work around the cooking time issue: prepping larger meals once in a while so you can reheat leftovers for a quick meal later, making healthy snack packs, learning some quick and healthy recipes, etc.

However, I think a lot of people who are in my position end up stumped on the exercise issue. How do you motivate yourself to use your precious limited free time to exercise after a long day of work, when you'd really rather be using that time to do something fun like play WoW?

The answer is you do both at the same time!

While wracking my brain on how to motivate myself to exercise (I admittedly find it boring) I thought to myself, "Gee, if only I could find a way to motivate myself to exercise the way I'm motivated to play WoW." And then I figured out how to do just that.

Step 1: Buy a stationary bike. They're actually pretty affordable, and for me, it was a better option than buying a gym membership that I knew I'd never use.

Step 2: Buy a laptop caddy. Something like this.

That was the complicated part. I had to measure my stationary bike's dimensions and find a caddy that adjusted to fit comfortably over the bike while still leaving room to pedal.

Step 3: Set up the caddy over your stationary bike. Put your laptop on said caddy. Sit down, open WoW, start pedaling.

And there you have your very own WoW exercise machine! It's amazing how much easier it is to motivate yourself to exercise when you can also do something you consider fun at the same time. :)
That and you can tell people you lost 20 lbs playing WoW, which always evokes some amusing reactions. ;)

While I am guessing that most of these racists are children or young teenagers who are just trying to get attention, I do see a bigger problem here. The problem is that everywhere we look we can find "racism". There are OBVIOUS signs of racism, like the racial slurs, which are COMPLETELY and TOTALLY uncalled for in both the game and society as a whole. However, there are other things that people get over-sensitive about, like the "white healer" thing. This is almost as absurd as the story out of Los Angeles last week when the NAACP made a big stink over the word "black hole" on a greeting card, and a city councilman did the same thing a few weeks before that, when one of his white colleagues said "the money seems to be disappearing down a black hole". People need to grow a bit thicker skin and realize that not everything is race-related just because it MAY sound that way.

As far as I'm concerned, all these cries of racism both in game and in society in general are actually doing more to keep the various races from getting along than anything else. It's to the point of insanity. If we cannot DISCUSS race in an honest manner, how can we ever solve the problems between the races? We can't! If a minority speaks about race, nobody bats an eye. If a white person speaks about race, it's automatically racist, even if the comment is positive, or is not meant to be slanderous. This is one of the biggest problems facing America today, and WoW is NOT immune.

There are differences between the races, that's a fact. We should be celebrating and embracing those differences instead of forcing them down into the depths of our brain. Each and every race has something they can provide to others. Until people realize that and they begin to address in a honest manner, there will be no end to malicious racism. That being said, I see VERY little actual malicious racism coming from the white community these days, unless it's from children who are trying to get attention or just be a pain in the rear. I can't even remember the last time I heard an adult say something blatantly racist to hurt the feelings of a minority.

As always, I believe "racism" is blown WAY out of proportion in the USA and in other countries around the world. If the lunacy continues, it will hurt race relations more than it will help it. Those people who say that "black hole" is racist are hurting the relationship between whites and blacks just as much, if not more than, anyone else. The same could be said of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who would be out of a job if they didn't promote strife between the races. We need to remove ALL of the people who drive a wedge between whites and blacks, whether that person is white OR black. Until we do, there will be no peace between majority and minority, of that I am CERTAIN.