It came from the bar: The Simple Pleasures.

Once again one of the guests frequenting the bar of The Pink Pigtail Inn has decided to speak up and share a story with us. As a matter of fact, this voice is getting quite familiar, since it's the same guest writer as the previous times, Holly Elizabeth from the US Feathermoon server. New or not, she's very much appreciated by the innkeeper who takes the opportunity to slack a little bit in a corner, just listening to the buzz, sipping a pint.

This time Holly has done something rarely seen at The PPI: she has included a bunch of fancy screenshots. Now, Blogger isn't exactly the best tool for doing flashy goodlooking posts with a ton of screenies. And as if this wasn't enough: Holly also wanted to provide a link to a video. "Imbed it", she said.

Larísa has been scratching her head, trying to figure out how to make the pictures and the video look if not glorious, at least decent. There's a distinct risk however that this won't work as intended. After all: this blog was made for writing walls of text, not for publishing pretty pictures. Anyway: if it looks horrible, we just want to let you know that Holly is innocent. Blame Larísa.

And now... take away your eyes from Larísa and listen to Hollly's story!


Hello again! After doing a mind numbing amount of heroics on my newest 80, grinding old world dungeons on my lowbie (it has tree form now!), and questing for a few hours on my lowest of lowbies, I started to get bored of yellow question marks and looking for dungeon queues.

It was about this time I realized something, I hadn't really just enjoyed the World of Warcraft in a long time. It had become to me, all about progression, get to the next level, get to the next item, get to the next raid, get to the next...well anything, when was the last time I, to coin an old addage, stopped to smell the roses?

I realized it had been a very long time, burning crusade long actually. I remember after grinding island dailies for many many moons, getting my slow flyer on my priest and flying for hours. Flying was so cool then! I used to tease Honor Hold and see how long I could stay with the debuff dodging the things they shot at you, dive bombing on unexpecting players and see if I could surprise them, teasing the felreaver by aggroing him then flying out of his reach! I had hours of enjoying the beautiful skies, and hitting the flight barrier and watching my mount have a heart attack.

My drood engineer made it's roflcopter and I enjoyed sitting idle in the air, watching the engines cut off (it's idle animation) it dropping only to be saved at the last second by the engines coming back on in Blizzard's sick way of saying 'we -could- have made this malfunction too!.'

So when was the last time I just really had fun looking around? It'd been a while, and I was going to fix it. The question was, where to start. I actually just spent about four hours flying around Northrend and outland, turning down every dungeon invite I got, explaining to people I couldn't run their lowbie through stocks because gosh darnit, I wanted a day to just play.

I then spent another three hours or so running around Azeroth, and I had -fun-. I went to try to find places I hadn't been before, like if you head south from Feralas via ocean, on the very southwest tip of Sillithus is an empty tauren village, and an empty cave! I had heard about it but went to see it for myself (yay for levitate.) It occured to me towards the end, when I was visiting some of my favorite places, to actually take screenshots to torture you with! And also luckily the sunnart viewpoint art add-on I use makes the perfect place to post commentary to burn your eyes!

Have you just given up with the fast paced dungeon from time to time? Maybe go farming for a pet you wanted for a while, or visit some of your favorite locations? I recommend if you do, putting on classical music (I did Pachelbel's canon in D mostly because of the rant I'm going to link below because it is -hilarious)

I highly recommend if you're getting burned out with the 'gogogo' attitude, if you find yourself longing for Cataclysm for some fresh air to just....stop, and go play in the world, it's massive! There are so many fun things, go hang out with Mario and Luigi twins in Un'goro. Explore some of the caves in sillyfish! Have fun and just see what -you- can find, or look up some of the references in Warcraft, and go find them for yourself!

Hope that made you giggle! It did me, now I'll give Larisa the spotlight back, even though it's so pretty, and warm, and makes my lunar festival drink even sparklierererest. . . nooo don't take it back, my light! my light! gah! stupid unhumanly gnome strength *sad face*

Holly over and out!