Re-Animator

A good friend of mine is a big zombie movie enthusiast, and whenever we meet we end up looking at a bunch of zombie movies, to my delight. Even though I might not be as enthusiastic about zombies as he is, I am still a big fan. I'm not sure where it all started, I want to say that it was with George A Romeros "Night of the Living Dead" from 1968, although I am pretty sure I must've seen zombie movies before that. I am sure however, that it was that movie that first made me realize that zombies are pretty dang scary. More so than other creepy things. There is something certain about zombies in particular that make them so much more scary than most other "monsters". You've got the "killers" (Halloween, The Shining), the vampires (which have been made completely unscary thanks to Twilight), werewolfs (American Werewolf in Paris, Wolf), random gene modified/experiment gone wrong (Killer Tomatos, The Blob), ghosts (House on Haunted Hill, Ringu), demons (The Exorcist, Rosemarys Baby, It), witches (Suspiria), aliens/parasites (The Faculty) and I am quite sure I have forgotten about one or two. Out of all these I personally only think that ghosts come close to zombies in scaryness. And then only asian ghosts.

What makes zombies and certain ghosts so creepy is that they are unrelenting, unwaivering, set out to kill you. Unlike all of the other monsters mentioned above they don't have a certain agenda, they don't have any forgiving traits. Vampires have to feed of humans, werewolfs are turned into beasts whether they like it or not. Aliens might be mean, but so are we to "lesser beings". Movies like Killer Tomatos or other movies like it are usually more fun than scary. Movies with "killers" are similar to zombies in that characters like Mike Myers and Jason are unrelenting, only after killing people and pretty dang difficult to kill. But they're only one, and the zombies are usually thousands or more. There is just something slightly more scary about humanity being screwed, rather than just some poor group of friends camping in the woods.

A great example of how this can turn out is Ringu vs the american remake of Ringu. Sure, the remake is creepy in that it throws scary things in your face in a typically american oogah-boogah way to scare (like Dead Space or Fear), but the original is alot more creepy in that Sadako is completely unforgiving. In the remake she is portraited as a misunderstood and abused little girl, seeking revenge. In the original she is pure evil, who will exact death on your whether you're nice or not. We don't need to feel pity or shock, just regular nervous stress is alot scarier in my opinion, and this is a subject I could expand alot more on in a post on it's own. I probably will some day (here's for promising ponies).

Another thing that makes me enjoy zombie movies so much is that to date I haven't seen a single zombie movie that wasn't entertaining, except perhaps House of the Dead by Uwe Boll (surprise, surprise). But there are of course a couple of zombie movies that are better than others, rarely because of the story or effects, more often because it includes a couple of characters that are just awesome. One such movie, or series rather, is the Re-Animator series.

It is very loosely based on Re-Animator written by H.P Lovecraft, where the only resemblance really is the names and the fact that they re-animate dead people. It's difficult to say what exactly is so good about the re-animator series. The characters, as mentioned probably the most important part of a good zombie-movie, are great. Jeffrey Combs does a surperb Herbert West, and there are usually a couple of interesting zombies as well. Combs manages to portrait a scientist who puts himself in really shitty situations, but loves it because he is so fascinated with being able to bring dead people back to life. He has a casual disregard for the danger and crazyness he is putting others and himself into. He never loses confidence in his work, never finds himself in a situation he can't handle (even when he is in situations he shouldn't be able to handle) and has an arrogant attitude towards everything and everyone that is just lovely. He is the epitome of the crazy scientist in that he gives you the illusion that he is sane, but he clearly can't be. It is without a doubt he who carries the biggest load of awesome in the Re-Animator series.

The movies also mixes humor and horror in a way that few other movies succeed with. Another good example would be Evil Dead 3, but that movie has alot more humor than it has horror. Although the Re-Animator series aren't scary, there is a suspense of danger in the air at all times since West handles the zombies so carelessly. You never really know who and what will die, or where it will happen, it seems like West has a zombie tucked up his sleeve at any moment. The feeling that there could be a zombie under any sofa and in any closet puts you on edge throughout the movie, and the comic relief never takes that away or becomes "too much". Nonetheless, Re-Animator doesn't take zombies very seriously, which generally has been the case with more recent zombie movies like Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, the Tv-series Walking Dead and so on. Although I enjoy those movies alot too (I really liked the Dawn of the Dead remake for instance), I do feel like the non-serious zombie movies are they're own genre, and should be treated that way.





The intro of the movies are splendid in themselves, although the intro song is basically a complete rip-off hommage to the Psycho intro. The intro promises alot, and I think Re-Animator really delivers. True to myself I love the theme-variance of the sequels as much, if not more as the one for the first movie. Especially the Bride of the Re-Animator theme is great.

Bride of Re-Animator at You Tube.



If you're looking for a good couple of zombie movies to watch I couldn't recommend this series more.

April's Fool - Taking Blizzard Seriously

I really loved the april fools jokes from Blizzard. Although I don't take any of them seriously, and I hope no one else does either, what really made them so funny was the underlying tone of seriousness. Jokes are always best when you can relate to them right? Blizzard showed alot of self irony in these jokes, and some of them were funny simply because they weren't completely untrue. Let's look a little closer at some of them and see how we can relate them to reality.


Death Knight
First out, the Death Knight hero improvements. I won't link anyone in particular, because it was the overall point that stood out as funny. People have always been bothered about Dks being Op and the special pet of Blizzard, even when that hasn't been the case. I think Dks were branded because they really were OP when they were first launched. They never really managed to get rid of that brand. I remember when my friend, who mains a dk, proudly told me about some feat he had done, I always answered with a "well, you're a dk. Sorry, but not impressed. Do that with a [random badderer class] and I'll applaud you". And I really believed it. Poor guy. The notion that Dks are treated specially has stuck with me, although I think they had a dip towards the end of Wrath. Right now, in all honesty, I have to say that they seem to be pretty much in the middle. They're not the best at what they do, and not the worst. Although I know there is alot of skill in playing a dk good, I can only imagine the frustration to always have your feats ascribed to the class, and not the skills.

Druids

Aquatic and Travel Form were causing too much of a performance hit and have been replaced with lower poly models.

It always amused me - in the way in which you find something kind of sad and therefor funny because you're not the one affected - that druids had to spend 90% of their time watching a model which consisted of less polygons than the hand of a blood elf. Looking back on the old bear and cat models they really looked like shite, and that is not by comparison - druids always thought they looked like shite. Getting updated bear and cat models were to druids what an oasis is to a desert traveller. At first recognized only as a mirage, never going to happen, only to barely believe it when they finally have it in their hands.

Hunters

Hunters now earn Valor Points when they are effectively Vote Kicked from a Dungeon Finder group.

This one made me laugh out loud. The idea that hunters are mainly played by people who can't tell up from down and who randomly shoots everything, need rolling on everything (hunter weapon lol!) and making life miserable for everyone involved has stuck since Vanilla. The thing about hunters, and I notice that especially when doing lowbie instances, is that not only can you manage to level from 1-85 without basically learning anything about the class or how to play generally (this is true for more classes than just hunters), they can be a real pest in instances in a way that most other classes can't. Because their main attacks are instant and ranged, they really manage to do some amazing feats of sheer horror, ninja pulling things I didn't even thought was possible. Their pet can also create awesome moments of wipe. The only class that comes close are frost mages with their instant ice lances and Water Elemental, but as a tank you can at least oom the mage, giving you a window of opportunity when he can't cast spells in which you can do your job at your own pace without having to run around like a maniac trying to salvage a catastrophe. This will never happen with hunters, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if hunters were the most kicked class in pugs.

Mages

All Frost mages now receive a complementary personal Arena rating of 2200 upon reaching level 85.
Frost mages have been given one additional snare effect, so that they will be brought up to the level of other classes (combined).

I don't pvp, but as I understood it there has always been two things that have annoyed pvpers more than other things - the cc-cability and mobility of a class. A frost mage has plenty of both. All since Vanilla, mages have been able to pull off eye bleeding stunts which made people throw their keyboards around, not so much because of their damage or survivability (unlike warriors), but because of their cc-capabilites and mobility. My brother, who mainly pvpd when he still played WoW, could use long chains of curse words when fighting mages, especially when double ice block was still possible.

Paladin

The sound of most Retribution abilities has been redesigned to produce a more audible clunk when used. The rotation should now feel clunkier overall.

There are few rotations I've disliked as much as the retridin one throughout the game. Not only is it boring, like the elemental shaman one, but it is also rather weird since it is mainly based on cooldowns. I do like it better now that they implemented Holy Power, but I must admit, it has always been rather "clunky". In Wrath it felt like no matter the way you rolled you face, you did pretty good damage. It made it difficult to distinguish between a bad and a good retridin just by looking at damage done, and that often makes a class more boring to play. You want to have your awesome knowledge and great stunts count for something, and when it doesn't, you'll lose interest. Retridins could really benefit from playing with a sort of focus energy as hunters, rather than the mana they have now.

Some paladin abilities did not contain the words Sanctity, Divine, or Justice. This has been corrected.

Blizzard could've added "some paladin icons didn't include a pair of hands, a sword or a shield. This has now been corrected". I have actually been doing some minor complaining about Blizzards rather uninventive style of naming their skills before, especially when compared to games like Warhammer. People were thrilled when Nom Nom Nom was first announced for Feral Druids, unfortunately it was renamed to the rather boring Blood in the Water, which kind of proves my point. At least Blizzard are aware of it.

The duration and cooldown of Divine Shield have been changed to 15 seconds.
Divine Shield no longer causes Forbearance.

Few skills have been as scorned over the years as the shield. Game design wise it is a rather odd and poorly designed spell, in all honesty. A skill that makes you completely immune to all damage? The fact that paladins are the only class that can pretty much "reset" a fight by pressing their op Lay on Hands and Divine Shield buttons, has always been something that annoyed people, especially back when paladins were hybrid monsters that could heal, take and deal damage awesomely in any spec. There were few things as annoying as having to fight that, nearly win, only to have them use the DS-LoH combo to troll at you.

Priest

Discipline priests we heard you like shields that heal, so we put shield in your shield so you can heal while you heal.

Meme reference ftw!

Four new reactive shields have been added to the Discipline tree. These new spells are called Heal, Greater Heal, Flash Heal, and Prayer of Healing.

I think this wants to reference the people who say that discipline healing is little more than shielding.  Admittedly, it is alot about shielding. But I can understand Blizzards frustraton in trying to get discipline priests to recognize the huge arsenal of other skills they have at their disposal (and to make them good enough for us to want to use them). Maybe if they made our mastery affect heals somehow as well?


Rogue

Due to continual misspellings of the “rogue” class, we have officially changed the name to the easier to type “rouge.”

Like I mentioned the other day, this is one of the most common misspellings in the game. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to just rename the class. Or how about just Rog?

Pick Pocket now works on friendly players, bankers and auctioneer NPCs.

Back in early Vanilla, rogues just to amuse themselves by emoting that they were stealing things from their fellow players - "Backstabberz pickpockets 3g 2s 56c from Palalulz". Since not everyone knew everything about the game back then, plenty of people fell for this trick. I did see a guy go monkey berserk in trade once because a rogue had pick pocketed money from him. It could've been a troll, but then again, it might not have been.

Vanish now has an additional 5% chance to fail for no discernable reason.

There are a couple of things in the game that Blizzard have vowed to fix since the dawn of time (or so it feels) yet they never, ever get it right. Vanish is such a thing. Ever since it was first implemented it has had issues with breaking if you vanished while having a projectile coming at you. 6 years of bug fixing has not changed this - I still have this happen to me when playing my rogue (maybe I just suck at playing my rogue). I'm starting to think Blizzard is keeping this bugg around as some sort of memento. Of something.

All archways, portals, portholes, and doorways now contain locked doors which require a rouge’s Pick Lock skill to open.

Rogues have occasionally (and usually with right) complained about the fact that they have been slightly more obsolete than other classes. The things that made them special like stealthing, pick pocketing and opening locks, just weren't very useful in endgame pve (the latter two not very useful in pvp either). It made Blizzard implement a couple of solutions that basically forced raids to bring rogues, like the gauntlet in BWL. It was bad solutions, and Blizzard acknowledges that with this joke.


Shaman

A healing tree has been added for shaman.

Back in Vanilla, all hybrids were pretty punished for being hybrids. Blizzard really didn't intend shamans, paladins and druids to as good as the other classes in healing, tanking or dealing damage, but instead they would be able to switch between roles! Blizzard had thought the trade off would be worth it, the result showed that it wasn't. It took a while, but the hybrids eventually made it into becoming "normal" classes, where some (paladins) actually became overpowered because they kept all the bonuses of being a hybrid, and got all the bonuses from being a pure. Druids and shamans lagged behind somewhat. Most through Wrath (slightly more unsure about BC) shamans weren't very good damage dealers for instance. Shamans have always been decent healers, but they also have a couple of issues. No real raid cooldown and having to juggle totems were a few, which are being adressed now somewhat. This joke shows that Blizzard are aware of the issue.

The Elemental tree is now the Elementary tree, and allows use of new abilities Eat Paste, Nap Time, and the Macaroni and Glitter Totem.

Did I mention the elemental tree was boring? Apparently Blizzard agrees.

Maelstrom Weapon, Unleash Elements, and Spiritwalker’s Grace have been redesigned as Maelstrom Totem, Unleashed Totem, and Spiritwalker’s Totem, respectively.

All totem ranges reduced to 1 yard.

Did I mention totems can become a little too much at times? Sometimes it really does feel like everything we do that matters is based on a totem.


Warlock

Whenever 2 or more warlocks or witches appear in a raid together, the damage dealt by any mages in the raid decreases by 5%. This effect stacks up to 5 times.

In addition to their current talent trees, warlocks and witches can now spend points in any mage talent tree as well.

This is funny because all through Wrath, I thought my warlock had become boring because it was really just a mage in another form. I thought that if I wanted to play a mage, I would play a mage. I had rolled the warlock to be able to use the pet and all the cc abilities. Maybe even get to tank like in BC. Sure there were the Healthstone and Soulstone, but really those only made me feel even more like a mage - a candy dispenser. I'm not sure if that is what Blizzard are getting at with these jokes, or if the tables really have turned on warlocks on mages. From what I can tell from the warlocks and mages in my guild, it overall seems like Warlocks can do everything a mage can do, only more of it and better.

Warrior

Charge has been removed from the game.

Warrior’s base movement speed has been increased by 300%

This is a double pun really. Like I mentioned above, warriors have always been feared in pvp because of their great mobility. Warriors on the other hand have often felt like their mobility really is all they ever had, the only ace they could pull out their sleeve when things got rough. I must admit that being able to charge here, intervene there and intercept back was part of made me enjoy warrior tanking so much. Mobility, I has it! Unfortunately, all the mobility in the world won't do you any good if you can't do something worthwhile when you've reached your target. That is what I feel warrior tanking has become lately, but maybe they're still as good in pvp as they were in Wrath.

Did you find any of the April Fools Jokes especially funny or interesting?

Suddenly I notice things

Being a game designer has to be a pretty ungrateful job at times. I'm not just talking about the effort they put down to make us happy, only to have their forums flooded with whine and everything is wrong no matter what they do. That has to be pretty tough as well, but I'm rather talking about the guys who are busting their ass equally much, but rarely get any recognition, not even whine. People like the music writers and even more often, area and zone designers. This is true for most games, where there are plenty of people who've added their work and soul to some part of the game, going basically unnoticed by the vast majority of players. Alas, that is the fate of many background people, making things work and see the recognition go to someone else.

I do occasionally take a moment to just wander around and enjoy the scenery in WoW. More rarely in other games. Most games have a set pace which is diffuclt to escape from, allowing little time to just run around and explore. Just randomly running around is something people enjoy alot however, I can only imagine that it has to be a big reason that the GTA games are so popular, as one example. "Sandbox" has become for the 00's, what "3D" was for the 90's. For some reason, of which one probably could write a whole lot, we just love to be able to run around and do nothing and everything. In some ways it's quite obvious. Whenever I think about what I would do if I was suddenly the last person on earth, running around and do random crazy stuff comes pretty high on that list.

Still, it amazes me how I can sometimes see something hundreds of times without ever really seeing it. I might notice some special part of a questing area only the 50th time I do it, although I've been through there 49 times before. "There was a house there? Never noticed". Some of these things that I "discover" after a long time are just ridiculous. How could I have missed that all this time? Now that I see it, it seems impossible, yet I am absolutely sure I didn't notice it before. I probably saw it all along, but I just never registered it, if you know what I mean. These things can stretch from the blatantly obvious that stares you in the eye each day, and becomes part of the unnoticed background because of that, to things that aren't noticed because they're not where you usually keep your focus of attention.

Instance interiors are a great example of this. How many times do you look up into the ceiling of the instance you're running? And then suddenly you just happen to turn your camera that way, the 45th time you do the instance and go "Woot, has that thing always been there?". We're so focused on doing our job and keeping the pace, steadily moving along that we miss everything around is. I even regularly miss what's going on in the chat windows, no wonder I miss out on all the cool instance interior designs that Blizzard have done. It's not odd, because we rarely have a reason, or the time, to stop and just take a look at everything around us. But some instances have loads of details which get lost if you don't decide to turn your camera slightly up or down here and there. Vortex Pinnacle and Halls of Origination come to mind as two instances where I have found lots of details which I'd missed the dozen of times I did the instances before. Just tilting your camera slightly back, looking up into the ceiling of Halls of Origination will often result in a view you never noticed before. These detours often give you a new idea of how the instance really looks and an Aha-experience like I had when I flew over Zul'Farrak the first time. Although I knew exactly what the instance looked like, having done it some 100 times by now probably, seeing it all at the same time from above still offered me a unique experience to something I had seen 100 times before.

The other day I was standing by the summon stone outside of Blackwing Descent and summoning a couple of guildies. Well, the guildies did the summoning, and I mostly ran around while waiting. Suddenly I stopped, started circling the camera around and felt a small light bulb emerge inside me. Waiiit a minute, I thought. I recognize this place. Doesn't this look exactly like Nefarians throne room in Blackwing Lair? When I told Love about my discovery he looked at me like I was the village idiot. "Duh", he said. "You only just noticed?" Yeah, I had done BWD some 20 times before I noticed that the entrance actually is the end room from Blackwing Lair. To my defense I never did BWL back in Vanilla, and had only done the instance a handful of times afterwards on fun-runs, which usually doesn't mean you spend a whole lot of time on any one boss or in any one room. Still, it took me ages to notice I had been at the exact same place before.

You probably won't believe me on this one, but what really sparked this post was when I noticed that there is a skull on the loot screen. It was a while ago now (actually probably a year ago), and I didn't use an addon that replaced the loot window. I had the regular one. I had been playing the game for a couple of years when I suddenly one day just... noticed the skull. I turned to Love and said "did they just implement a skull onto the loot screen?" and he looked at me like if I was a flying pig. "It has always been there", he said, "you won't get me to believe you've never noticed it before". No indeed, I must have noticed it before. I am quite sure I've seen it everytime the loot window opens. But that day I actually noticed the skull. If I had noticed it before and just forgot about it I can't say, but the experience was quite freaky nonetheless. Kind of like having an elephant in the living room which you just suddenly one day see. I could find some sort of explanation for my random blindness. When opening the loot window, you're really looking for the loot, and not the design of the loot window. The skull was completely uninteresting, so I just never bothered to process it. Also since I had changed to auto loot pretty early in the game, the loot window only actually flicks up on the screen for a brief second each time, and like I mentioned, at that time I won't be focusing on much else than what I was looting, if anything at all. Still, it was freaky as hell. How could it be even possible to miss something like that, right up in my face, countless times per day, for such a long time? Maybe that was the issue exactly - I saw it so often that I didn't see it anymore. You can't see the forest for the trees.

In any case it was a wake up call. This game deserves me to put more thought into the details. Now when I run around and do the new lowbie quests I definitely try to experience as much of them as possible. Read through all the lore, take a moment to listen to the great music that is everywhere in WoW and enjoy the fun and interesting mobs. Even though I've played this game for 6 years, I am quite certain there are loads of areas I've never seen before. Especially now with the Shattering. It's kind of like the post I did about the discussion on how the lfg-pugs were only means to an end, and my conclusion (in some ways) that we might enjoy the pug runs more if we invested more time into them. This could be true for most things in WoW. If we try to enjoy all the small details and the work put into everything in WoW, it might become more than just another Stonecore run. Maybe.

Girls = Drama?

Some time ago I wrote a post about some drama in my guild. Since this particular guild drama happened to be between two girls, some people argued that "having too many girls in a guild means trouble". A guildie posted a post on the forums called "Raidingschedule: Adapting to the "cycle"!" stating that we should adapt when the females of the guild can raid to when they have their period, because they obviously can't act normally otherwise. Or as the poster states;

"With this i dont imply that the women perform worse or anything like that... however i do think that there are periods during the month when the women´s mood, by no fault of their own, might affect the guilds progress. Therefor the officers have a suggestion to minimize this effect, and that is to adapt our raidingschedule to the womens menstruation cycle."

It is meant as a joke, and I don't post it here to point at the poster and call him a jerk. Seriously I don't. I like this guy and I do think people can joke about most stuff, and this post in particular isn't an issue. But it could be part of an issue. It would be horrible if people actually thought that women = drama (or even worse, if women actually equalled more drama). And apparently this impression does exist among some people, and it has to come from somewhere. But where? Are women really more prone to arguing than men? My personal experience says no. In the guilds I've been, men argue at least as much as women and are just as stubborn, and yet when women do it, it somehow stands out as special. It's not only when females argue amongst eachother, but when a woman argues with a man she usually comes off as the obnoxious one. Why is that? At first I wasn't going to care much about it. I did write some thoughts down on the matter but decided that it probably (hopefully) was limited to the particular situation in my guild. But then, just the other day, I was watching a morning show on swedish television and they had a special program called "Jealousy among women - do women keep eachother back?" (paraphrased). I was startled, and even though I was at work (ahem) I tried to listen to as much of it as possible and jotted down what the four women in the studio were discussing. The question was about how women act towards each other at work places, and if women are inherently more jealous than men or if we only think that is the case and that in turn make us interpret regular quarrel as some special womenly catfight of jealousy. It made me return to my original notes and think more on the subject. Why is it that women arguing is something that stands out? Either we have to accept that women argue more than men, which I don't, or we have to understand what about women arguing that is so special that people think it is a female trait to argue.

I have thought of some reasons;

Girls shouldn't have opinions
People notice when girls argue, or have opinions, because that is out of the ordinary. I know that girls in school get reprimands for being 'talkative' and 'disturbing' when they talk and act out as much as many boys do. But 'boys will be boys' as they say. Girls aren't supposed to be arguing, or confront an issue. I'm not saying people expect girls to be mindless, standing in the kitchen all day. But still we have some sort of opinion about how girls ought to behave, and if you don't conform you will stand out as the "provocative" person. Eventhough you're really just as annoying as 10 other guys in the guild. In fact, in the tv debate this was one of the things they offered as an explanation. Even though men are as jealous and argumentative as women, they simply do it in another way. Since the tv debate were talking about work places, which might work slightly different than a WoW-guild (although the resemblances probably are more than we'd think), theyir theory was that it's "uncool" for men to express their feeling vocally. Instead they do it through action. If women prefer to tell eachother they have an issue with the other person, that might be more noticed, and be interpreted as the women arguing more often.

Girls care about other stuff
One reason girls stand out as drama queens could be because they argue about stuff that guys don't care about. So when an argument starts between two girls, the guys stand by and just don't understand what's the matter. Same thing if the girl is arguing with a guy and he just doesn't understand her problem. They might think the argument is unecessary and meaningless and therefore the girls get branded as quarrelsome and as someone who argues about nothing. Although guys in turn argue about other stuff that don't really matter. Because the guys make out the majority of people in WoW, the female will be seen as the odd minority. This requires us to accept the view that men and women understand basic stuff in fundamentally different ways, which I don't personally believe to be true enough to warrant this kind of trouble. But maybe it is some small part of the problem. With the issue I mentioned that blew up to a guild drama, part of the problem was that my complaints about us healers having problems when one of us didn't want to communicate, weren't understood as important or serious. We had done well all through Wrath, why would communication suddenly become a problem? The people who argued against me weren't healers, so they didn't always see that healing issues were the reasons we wiped plenty of times.

Girls aren't arguing
Although plenty of arguments are real enough, it might also be true that guys perceive a normal conversation between two girls as arguing. Maybe the girls don't have a real quarrel at all, but the guys interpret it as that and so most conversation between girls is seen as arguments, and again - about nothing (since they're not really arguments). Another possibility is that girls, more than guys, are perceived as being bitchy and nosy when they tell people, or ask people about their performance (or yet again, have an opinion about something as mentioned above). A guy who is a bitch is perceived as a whiny pro, a girl who is a bitch is just simply annoying. In many cases I have honestly not meant to be rude or offensive, but have been perceived that way. And I am completely sure that if someone else (a guy) had asked the exact same question, it wouldn't have had the same impact. When a girl asks about someone it's because they want to make a statement, but when a guy does it it's just pure curiousity. Or when a guy does it, it's ok. Love calls it "authority", and there seems to be something to it. This too was something they mentioned in the tv program. When women ask questions or comment on other peoples performance, people will question their intentions, and usually interpreted them as ill-willed. I think this could be part of the reason, but I also think that this relies more on personality than sex. If you have an undiplomatic personality you will be interpreted as always having ill intentions in your questions and comments, regardless if you're female or male. I know many guys fall into this trap as well, they don't mean anything bad but are always perceived as "elitist jerks". Still there is a difference regarding perceived competence. Most people seem to have trouble realizing or accepting that girls can be really good gamers, and any claims from a girl will initially be interpreted as her trying to be someone without proper authority. Even if some people don't enjoy a guy acting like an elitist, guys are overall viewed as more competent gamers when bragging than women are.

Girls are scapegoats
Melfina over at The WoW Noob makes a really good suggestion.

"there is some female drama that the woman herself has nothing to do with. If player A finds out player B is female, and treats her differently from then on, then the fault lies with player A, not with player B. Any drama caused by this different (and likely preferential) treatment is player A's fault. But sadly, many will look at a scenario like this and say "See, girls in game cause drama!" and place blame on B instead of A. This is rather like introducing a minority person into a group and having drama because a member of the group reacted in a racially-insensitive fashion. Would you really blame the minority person? I doubt so."

The idea that girls are more drama makes it easy to ascribe any drama that comes up to their doing, whether that is the case or not. As soon as a girl has her finger in the drama bowl, the easy explanation to the source is she. And if two girls are at the center of the drama, well what other explanation is needed?! The fact that there might've actually been an issue is covered up, just blaming the girls for being dramatic is a lot easier way to handle things. Because we all know girls are drama, right?

Girls really do argue more
It could also just be that girls have another way of "hanging out" or socialize. Guys and girls both bully, but they do it in completely different ways. The internet medium does work better for the girl type of bullying, in that you can talk behind peoples back and post evils things about them on forums and the like. Guys usually become physically offensive irl, and that is difficult in a game. Instead I can imagine they become verbally offensive, but girls could've taken this to another level. Maybe girls just don't work together in groups? The TV show actually did talk about women possibly simply being more evil and malicious than men, which I don't believe at all. Still, I'm one of those people who think there is a grain, however tiny, to any rumour or prejudice.

All of the above could be true, or none of them. Probably a little bit of each of them. Like mentioned, by personal experience, 9,5/10 of my girl relationships in WoW are awesome and I've argued with more guys than girls, even when taking into account that there are more male players than female. Yes, I probably have a 'provocative personality' in that I confront stuff. I also apparently suck at phrasing my thoughts so that people don't get offended, and wham - you have drama. I like to think people just want to misinterpret me, but at some point you just have to realize that you're the common factor. In the end I don't think girls equal drama any more than men do. Some people equal drama more than others do though. I seem to be one of them. Still, if people joke about female arguments and go "look at her quarreling again, catfight lol!" there is a foundation for problems. It doesn't really matter who's fault it really is if you always get the blame in the end anyway. I know it's not easy or fun when I'm not being taken seriously and I get the impression that it is just because I'm a girl.

Mystery Files - Doom Skulls and Wolfoids

This is alot less of a mystery than my earlier posts, but on the other hand it was way more of a wtf-moment. I've been reading about how awesome the new quest chains in Silverpine Forest and Hillsbrad Foothills are, and so I decided I would have to check them out myself. Me and Love had started fresh little alts to do some lowbie instancing, and eventhough I quickly outleveled those zones, I wanted to quest them through. If you haven't done it, I couldn't recommend it more. The quests are fun, well designed and I find myself actually wanting to do the quest for no other reason than to find out what happens next. I haven't felt that way about questing since I started playing the game. Since I've outleveled the zones I get no exp for the mobs, barely any exp for the quests and the quest rewards are obsolete. Yet I return just for the fun of it - me, who hates doing questing with no added gain. Well I am trailing off topic here, and I don't want to spoil it too much. If you have done the quests you know what I mean. And if you have done the quests, you will also recognize the below "mysteries" or rather "wth-mobs". If you really don't want to know anything about the quest lines and want to be surprised like me, you shouldn't read further, but I promise you that I'll write nothing to spoil the actual lore or turn of events in the quest chains. Maybe this could be the motivation you need to realize that these quests deserve a play through at least once.
I made a little page break so that you don't accidentally see anything you wouldn't want to see. Click if you dare! Not sure if this works in all readers though...