Mom's Cake

I play Dungeons and Dragons with a couple of groups. One group meets online. The other actually plays the way the game started, with pencils and paper and dice and maps. For the latter group, we get together roughly every 2-3 weeks. Part of that involves food. We've had theme food night and last week, it was breakfast.

Originally, I was going to make a chocolate walnut bread, but chose to sink my time into sewing shirt number 2. But I still had to bring something. I wasn't interested in dashing to the store for anything. I wanted to bake. What could I make that was quick but symbolic of breakfast? I know. Mom's coffee cake.

It's ridiculously simple and I've probably blogged about this before. Mix dry ingredients together with vegetable oil.

Set aside a cup of this crumbly mixture and add egg and buttermilk to the rest.

Pour into a 9x13 greased and floured pan and sprinkle the saved crumb over the top.

Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes and inhale the fragrance of cinnamon and nutmeg and brown sugar.

Cut in pieces and serve warm, with ice cream or cooled for breakfast or as a snack. This cake freezes very well. I've made it, cut it into pieces and stuck the pieces in the freezer. Even defrosting them at 3-4 months out, they were still moist.

This was a staple of family meals when I was growing up. I don't know if mom remembers where she found the recipe but she's been making this for at least 55 years, maybe longer. It's pretty much foolproof and would be a great cake to get kids cooking. I took what was left to the office and then finished off what was left after everyone at work had a piece.

Here's the recipe:

Salad Oil Coffee Cake

3 cups flour
1 cup white sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

1)  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2)  Grease and flour a 9 x 13 inch pan.
3)  Mix flour, sugars and spices together.
4)  Add oil to dry ingredients, stirring until blended and mixture is lumpy.
5)  Reserve 1 cup of the flour/sugar mixture. Set aside.
6)  Add egg, buttermilk, soda and salt to the remaining mixture. Beat until well blended and creamy.
7)  Sprinkle reserved mixture over the top of the batter.
8)  Bake in preheated oven 45 minutes or until a tester comes out clean.
9)  Remove from oven and let cool 10 minutes before cutting and serving. May be frozen for later servings.

Enjoy.

Beverage:  Water

Deb

Relaxation = Stitching

My computer mouse is not working properly. For an online gamer like myself, this is not a good thing. I use the mouse for 75% of my gaming activities from combat to simple movement. When movement becomes hop stop hop stop, I'm fairly worthless.

It also affects the whole browsing experience. There is something wrong with the front two buttons of the mouse. Clicking on the scroll bar on the right side of the screen will, sometimes, result in being stuck. All I can do is frantically click while the bar goes up and down and hope the thing will release its grip. Or, other times, it won't grab the bar at all. I was clearing photos from my desktop after uploading them to Flickr and the mouse grabbed everything on the desktop and moved it to the trash. After screaming, I carefully removed all the icons and folders one by one and put them back on the desktop.

Monday night was terrible. I couldn't do anything in the game and just simply navigating through some of the news web sites I read was a huge chore. You know how frustration feels when it builds and builds? That's what it was like. I tried everything I could think of, but neither right nor left clicking worked to get into or out of screens. When I felt like crying, I knew I had to turn off the computer and go find something else to do.

Cross-stitch.

I plopped down in the recliner with a mug of tea. I turned on the light and the bulb popped. Why is it that when you are stressed and at the end of that proverbial rope, little things, like light bulbs quitting, happen all the time? It's a 3-way bulb and I don't have any in the house. No matter. I stuck a 60 watt in the lamp and will get a 3-way later.

I sat there and stitched. Pilchard wanted the lap a couple times and then became content to simply sleep next to me. Mija jumped up onto the back of the recliner, sort of near my head, and purred herself to sleep. I concentrated all my frustration into those little "x's". After a couple of hours of stitching, the light yellow and light blue are completely done and I'm on to just yellow.

I know it still doesn't look like much when you don't know what I'm trying to stitch. As I worked, cats within scratching distance, I felt peace return. No, the mouse doesn't work. I spent the weekend performing computer maintenance which did nothing to help the mouse issue. I had to ask my more tech savvy friends for advise before calling the manufacturer. But, Monday night, I just needed to relax. I needed to de-stress. I needed to calm down. That's what cross-stitching did for me.

This is the 10th day of work on this. I might be half-way done. The yellow that I've started will be the most used color on this design. It's to be a rainy weekend upcoming. We desperately need rain. It's so very dry. Rainy weekends are perfect for afternoons spent stitching. Expect more blocks of color next week.

Beverage: Lady Gray tea

Deb

Visiting Ohio: What I Played

The Ohio friends are a group that has been getting together for eons, usually on a Monday night, to play games. The gaming location varies between houses but it's the same crew. When I came through for the very first time, back in November 2010, I made sure my trip included a stop-over on Monday night so I could participate in game night.

Games have always been a part of my life. Growing up, we had the usual; Scrabble, Sorry, Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land, etc. My house contains three dozen games of the card and board variety. When Carole was growing up, we got one or two new games a year.

I don't do well with strategy games. I term them "stradegy", because my strategy is usually a tragedy. I have never won Clue. The logic of trying to figure out who did it with what where eludes me. I'll play it but I have never, ever won.

April and Perry, Jim and Joe, Chad and Chris, Jim M and Greg are gamers in the purest sense of the word. They follow gamer podcasts and YouTube updates. They keep abreast of what games have been added to the pantheon available at a local store or online. I have nothing they haven't played to death, but there is a vast world of games that I have never experienced. Part of the trip was to assure myself a spot at the table, to be exposed to new games and at least one old one.

I know I'll forget something or put what we played in the wrong order, but here goes. Perry and I played Carcassonne. I really like that game. Every time I visit, I want to play it. It's sort of strategy but it is determined by the tiles you draw. Then, he taught me to play Dominion. I wasn't too sure about the game at first, but it grew on me. I don't think we played anything else, just the two of us, after Dominion because it was time to get ready for the party.

While we waited for people to arrive, we played a newer card game called The Resistance. In this game, spies infiltrate a group of resistance fighters. You draw a card at the beginning which tells you if you are a loyal member of the resistance or a spy. A leader, which rotates around the players, chooses a certain number of people to go on missions. You get to vote on whether you think these people will carry out the mission. Then, they get to vote on whether the mission succeeds. Loyalists have to vote yes. Spies can vote yes or no. It was great fun to try to figure out who was the spy.

After dinner, we played a game I knew about because Carole plays it; Cards Against Humanity. You can see one set up above. If you are easily offended, do not play this game. If you like Apples to Apples and have a quirky sense of humor, you will love this. It's exactly like Apples to Apples but the cards, well, interesting doesn't quite cover it. There was much, much laughter and poor April got the worst one to read. She wound up handing off the black card to someone else to read because she was laughing so hard.

This is a game called 7 Wonders. We ended the night with this but I know we played something else that I had to learn and have forgotten the name of already. It was green.

I was lousy at 7 Wonders. I had a lot of cards, but you also have to build wonders from each age and that part I didn't understand. Oh well. We had to maximize gaming and card games seem to be the best way to do that.

On Monday, Perry and I played quite a few games in the afternoon. We started with a game by one of my favorite card game creators, GameWright. We played Forbidden Island and There's a Moose in the House. I really liked both of those.

After those, we set up Settlers of Catan, but discovered you can't play that with two people. So, Perry pulled out Rivals of Catan, a card game with the same idea. This was great fun. It took me a bit to figure out what I was supposed to do, but it is easily learned. I won that game. I was quite surprised.

Chris arrived at this point and we played some Wii bowling. I had never done that. I'm rather impressed that Wii bowling even gets your hook. In spite of tossing the only gutter ball, I won with a 146.

We had supper and settled into another Cards Against Humanity. It was fun but the game definitely benefits from having more rather than fewer people. After that, we played Citadel. This was a very fun game, once I got the hang of  it.

From there, it was another round of Cards Against Humanity and we ended the night with Munchkin Impossible. Last year, I played Munchkin for the first time under the Munchkin Booty banner. Munchkin Impossible was just as silly and enjoyable.

I do miss gaming. I miss the long games of Trivial Pursuit we used to have. I have a large number of GameWright games, including a few they don't make anymore. Nothing like a rousing round of Rat-A-Tat Cat to end an evening.

In getting together, it's not just about the games, trying something new or something familiar. It's about the camaraderie. It's about friendship. It's about being with other people, sharing life and conversation and insults across the table. I got to see a lot of different games, games that, if I had a group I regularly played with, I'd get.

Most importantly, it's about laughter and togetherness. Solitaire is nice but sometimes, there's nothing better than playing a card on your neighbor that destroys his army.

Beverage:  Edinburgh's Finest tea

Deb

Back to April and Perry's

Monday, May 23rd dawned cloudy in Morgantown, West Virginia. We were under no real time constraints to get anywhere. Indeed, we had to linger because of doctor's appointments. Free breakfast at the hotel ended at 9 a.m. so that's what we had to worry about.

I woke up at 7:30 and showered. I woke mom up at 8:15 and we wandered down the hall for breakfast. The Comfort Inn had a better free breakfast than the Fairmont Inn, but maybe our lateness didn't allow us to see all that was offered. As we were collecting our food to head back to our room, there was a Monday morning pep rally by housekeeping and other employees. The start of the rally provoked looks of "What the...?" It must be effective, however, for they had enthusiasm.

We took our time getting going. It was nice not to be expected here at this time, particularly when we weren't exactly sure how to get to here from where we were.

At the West Virginia Pennsylvania border, we drove into rain. It was a drizzle at first but changed into a steady rain. Documenting this section of the trip wasn't going to happen. We drove out of the rain as we neared Pittsburgh. We met more people as would be expected on a Monday in a major city and Pittsburgh put out the welcome mat by closing a lane of Interstate so traffic came to a halt. I'm used to this. I sometimes think the Interstates surrounding Chicago were built, not to assist people in getting semi-swiftly to destinations because, quite often, you just sit, but to provide a steady source of jobs. They are always under repair in some fashion.

Once through the construction, we sailed towards Youngstown meeting more rain at the Ohio Pennsylvania border. It cleared as we approached Youngstown. April and Perry's house was a very welcome sight as we drove down Oakridge.

It was attempting to get out of the car that made me realize things were not right with my knees. We collected our stuff, I swung my legs out and went to stand. My legs refused. I had to scoot to the edge of the driver's seat, grab onto the side of the car and more or less hoist myself to a standing position, my knees protesting all the while. I knew this wasn't right and I had one more day to get through.

We got some lunch, after unloading the few things we would need for our overnight. Then mom took a nap while I learned to play Munchkin and we played another game of Carcassonne. We tidied up just in time for Joe and Bea to arrive.

Joe is a member of my World of Warcraft guild. Bea is his wife. Joe has known April and Perry "for-ever" and is one of the crew who gets together on Monday nights to play games. If I didn't live so far from them, I'd play once or twice a month. We ordered Italian food and then set about to playing games. You can read about our game night here.

Heavy storms pounded the area while we were gaming. A tornado warning was issued for near Joe and Bea's hometown. Joe, the iPhone surfer, kept watch on the weather while being beaten in "Killer Bunnies" by his wife.

When we were all done, I asked for a photo. (Me, April, Perry and Joe, left to right.) One thing, an online role playing game, brought us together. We stay together outside of the game because we have discovered we share interests; music, games, history, literature, laughter, senses of humor. My life is so much more enriched with these people as friends and I never would have met them had we not been manipulating pixels in a fake world.

Beverage:  Cranberry Pomegranate Juice

Deb

Games Galore

One of the great things about April and Perry, other than how fantastic they are as friends, is that they are gamers. Now when you see the word, gamer, there is a stereotype that pops up. It's a nebbish, late 30-something male, overweight, unemployed and living in the basement of his parents' house. He probably went to college but his degree in business management really hasn't gotten him anything. He held a job for 5 years but got laid off or, probably, fired and he's thrown up his hands and quit looking. Mom would love it if he'd stop playing on the computer and find a job.

Gamers aren't like this. I fall into this category as do April and Perry. They are "hard-core" gamers, too. Walk into their dining room and you'll see a stack of games on the sideboard. Perry regularly combs the Internet gaming sites looking for new games. They have a regular Monday game night where they get together with a bunch of people to play games. They like role playing games but also have dice, card and board games. As I planned my trip to Connecticut in November and this trip to the wedding, I planned around being in Youngstown for the Monday night game session.

We played just a couple of games on Wednesday, Wits and Wagers and Say Anything.  In Wits and Wagers, all answers are numbers and they are based on trivia such as, "In 2005, how many people in New Zealand claimed 'Jedi' as their religion." You answer and then bet on whose answer is the highest without going over the actual number. Bets have a 2-5 to 1 winning and, at the end of the game, you can bet it all. I don't remember who won, but it was fun.

Say Anything. It's hysterical and prone to lots of silly and very ribald comments. I had played this with the crew in November when I had passed through and it's one of those venerable chestnuts you pull out because you know it's going to be fun.

You have dry erase boards on which you write an answer to a question. "In my opinion" starts the question so you want to give an answer you think the reader will choose. Then you bet on which of the answers is most likely to be picked. The potential for answers involving "vibrators" or "in bed" or other similar sentiments is high, particularly if it's late and the group has imbibed. I don't remember who won Wednesday's game. I think Perry won Monday's version.

On Monday, mom and I arrived at April and Perry's much earlier than expected. That allowed us to play a couple more games. Another chestnut of gaming is Carcassonne. In this game, you draw a tile and then use it to build a city or a road. You score points when your "meeple" claims a road or a city that gets completed.

I had played this with them back in November. It was a bit confusing at first, what I was supposed to do, but I got the hang of it. I don't like strategy games and there is a small amount of strategizing here. But the game is quite dependent upon what's on the tile you draw. I finally got the hang of it and I won this round.

After Carcassone, we played Munchkin Booty. I am familiar with Munchkin. I have given one of the various expansion card sets to various friends of Carole for birthdays and Christmas for many years. I had never played it before.

It will take maybe another couple of games for me to really get the hang of what you do and what the cards mean. They are silly, witty and full of puns. I had a great time and I see why people like to play it.

After this, Joe and his wife, Belinda, arrived and it was time to haul out a brand new game, Dixit. This was different. You have to think when you play this one.

You're given a handful of cards. Each card has an image on it which can only be described as "surreal". On your turn, you pick a card and come up with a word or phrase that describes the card. Once you say that word or phrase, the other gamers must pick a card from their hand that they think best represents what you have said. These are laid on the table and mixed. Then you bet on which card is the speaker's. Points are awarded based on whether you successfully pick the speaker's, don't pick the speaker's or have your card chosen.

As this was the first attempt at this game, we played it until Joe and Perry won. I'm on the fence about it. Some of the cards I had in my hand were weird, in a disturbing sort of way. I would play it again but I don't think it's something I would own.

After this game, we played a game I am adding to the wish list. I love Apples to Apples and Say Anything is great too. But playing a card game with killer bunnies, trying to kill bunnies and trying to be the person who has the magic carrot at the end was so much fun. There's strategy with this game in terms of "Do I want to kill Perry's bunnies because he has 3 carrots and he can't win the game if he doesn't have bunnies alive at the end of it?" That's the extent of it and that's the kind of strategy I like. Belinda won this and she was very excited because I guess Greg, who wasn't in attendance, usually wins. My mom had fun playing games too, which made the evening special.

I wish I lived closer. I could see a once a week game night where you get together with friends, order pizza or something else, have snacks and beverages and spend 4 hours playing games. I grew up with games and we bought a lot of games when Carole was growing up. While I love playing WOW, stepping away and playing Mille Bourne or Sorry or Uno or Carcassonne or Dixit or Killer Bunnies would be a great way to spend an evening. Sometimes I wonder if all the games that could be invented have been and then something shows up and, wow, this is great.

Solo games are a lot of fun, but they really can't beat the social interaction of a bunch of friends laughing over "In my opinion, what is the worst thing you can say on a first date?" No, I won't put down the winning answer.

Beverage:  Huckleberry tea

Deb

Crazyness on the Lunch Hour

I'm eating leftovers again and decide, after crunching numbers and listening to myself on tape off and on all morning, I need a palette cleanser for my brain. I head on over to BigFish Games. There's a lot of fun stuff on their web site for very reasonable prices. If you buy enough, you can get games free. Great time wasters, I mean...no, time wasters although I do feel challenged when it's a time management game and I can't beat the level.

They have daily games that are free. Sometimes, these are truncated versions of full-size games and it gives you a chance to try out something before you buy it. Sometimes, they are stand-alone games with no purchase available. The one I'm playing now is the latter. If you ever wanted to be a demolition "expert" or if you just wanted to blow things up, this is the game for you.

You can see, below, I'm up to level 10 here. You get a certain number of dynamite bundles that you have to use to take down the building and make sure it collapses below the yellow line. On some levels, there will be a red bar to the right indicating another building. You can't have any piece of the demolished building touch the red one or you have to try again.

You can see where I chose to put my dynamite for this building on this level. Here is the result.

I did it. Yeah, it's a time waster, but I have 4 minutes left on my lunch hour and there's something very satisfying about blowing something up.

It's www.bigfishgames.com. They are PC AND MAC friendly.

Beverage:  Dr Pepper

Deb

Getting My Geek On

If you need me, I'll be in the office on the computer, not that that's anything new.

The online game I play has "expanded" once again. There's that dragon what toasted Bill and I last week. You could officially play the new content yesterday. I had to go to Hallmark and get more Christmas cards for the office and Game Stop is just a few doors down so I nipped in and picked up my copy, which I pre-ordered back in early October.

The past 2 times the game has added content, installing and then logging onto the game the first day it goes "live" has been something of a joke. Their very first expansion, called "Burning Crusades", was fraught with problems. Servers hosting the game kept crashing. I didn't buy it when it first came out because my character was at a low level and it would be months before I could play it. So, I waited until I was close in level before purchasing and attempting the installation. It took me a whole evening. I'd have to look, but I think it came on 3 discs, maybe only 2, but it was huge and problematic.

The next time the game expanded, they were smarter and had people download some material before the game went live. It still came on a couple of CD's but it was much less of a problem to install and get operational. I think it took 2 hours instead of a whole evening and I was able to play the same day it went live.

For this game, we have been background downloading data for over a month, a couple months, I think, actually. It's released in small chunks that download behind your game as you play. If you don't play very often, you'll have more to download. As I play pretty much every day, the chunks were very manageable. I was kind of dreading the game installation. It was one CD which I started and then went to do a load of wash. When I came upstairs after loading the machine, it was done and I could play right away. From the initial installation, which also took an evening, to a 20 minute installation now, well, it's been 6 years so you hope they have learned something in those 6 years.

It's fun and I had a good time roaming a little around the new areas. The problematic phone sits to the left and a couple of calls came in last night. I took one but couldn't get the phone to work for the second. I forgot to get a new battery at Target over the weekend to see if that fixes the problem. If you don't get me, it simply could be that phone. I'm trying but I can't get it to work.

It also could be that I'm in the middle of a fight for survival and can't answer the phone. Would it be weird if I change the voice message to say something like, "Can't talk now. Raiding and the boss has the group down to 20% health. Leave a message and, if he doesn't kill me, I'll call you back."

Beverage: English Breakfast tea

Deb

Yes. This Makes Me a Nerd.

Several years ago for Christmas, Jon gave me this plaque. It hangs proudly in the hallway of my home.It's one of my favorite things. As I have discovered with the online game I play, World of Warcraft, it's also very apropos.

Dragons are a feature of pretty much any mythical story. "Beowulf", the first epic poem of the Anglo Saxons, tells about the hero battling a dragon. We have come to realize that "dragons" were real to these people, although what the dragon would have been is up for debate. It's not that much of a mental leap to have a previously unknown animal be labeled a "dragon" when it makes off with Uncle George and you can't stop it. Every civilization seems to have had a dragon of some sort.

In World of Warcraft, some dragons are friendly but most would rather kill you first and ask questions later. My guild had lots of fun running around the world killing the "world dragons", 4 green or greenish blue dragons that started out hard to kill, but as we got better armor and better skills, became something of a laugh. But they were dragons and if we saw them in their dragon haunts, the cry went up "Emeriss is in Duskwood!" and we'd mobilize to go kill a dragon.

World of Warcraft is set to what's called "expand" again on December 7th. The game has been changed in anticipation of this event. The dragon you see above is the reason why. According to lore, and Warcraft has deep lore roots, having started as a stand alone game for PlayStation and that ilk, Deathwing tried to take over but was defeated and sealed underground beneath the sea. On November 23rd, the 6th anniversary of World of Warcraft, he broke through his prison and changed the world. Places I'd known and loved were destroyed and changed. It's been fun to run around and see what's changed and what hasn't.

Deathwing is very much a part of the game scape beyond just altering the landscape. There is a chance to encounter him. Randomly, he shows up in one of the zones in the game and "destroys" it. I was running around with my best in-game friend, Bill. We had just tamed a beetle for him as a hunter pet, which, if you don't play the game, makes no sense, but bear with me here. We're riding back to the main town and my display goes blood red. Seriously. The sand, the mountains, the animals, everything. I thought, at first, there was something really wrong with the computer. I don't know what I would do if that happened, which is yet an other reminder that I need to make CD's of these thousands of WOW screen shots and movies and move them off my computer to make room for the game.

Anyway, the world around us erupted in flame and I briefly saw the tail end of an enormous dragon.

You die and you have to run back to your body. Plus, your gear has been battered so you need to go repair once the event is over. You also get an achievement, which is in-game recognition of something unique. That's my lowly dwarf hunter lying dead on the red sand. A guild member said the sky turns gray as Deathwing approaches but honestly, if you're going to tame beetles, you're not looking at the sky.

Beyond the fact that I play an online game whose target audience is male between the ages of 18 and 35, Bill and I agreed we are definitely "nerds" or "geeks" or "neeks" or "gerds", whatever appellation fits. I sat at my computer watching, with my mouth hanging open and then we spent the next 2 hours bragging to anyone we know that we'd been "toasted by Deathwing". And, pointing this out before you do, I am now bragging on my blog. Yup, that's me there, crunchy and good with ketchup.

Silly dragon. I didn't have far to run to get back to my body and my repair bill was a paltry 62 silver. I pay more after a few minutes of beating on skeletons in Icecrown Citadel. But, I got the Deathwing achievement which is very rare. So far, only one other person I know of in the guild has been roasted.

So, my advice is, "Don't stand in the fire but in this case, enjoy it."

Beverage: Orange Cranberry Juice

Deb

A Laugh and a Half, but maybe you had to be there.

Most of the readers of this blog are fellow gamers. But there are a few who have no idea about this game. The introduction is for you. Everyone else can skip to the bottom two photos.

This is my character, Gimmlette, in the online game, World of Warcraft. She is a dwarf hunter class. That's my Core Hound, Huckleberry. There are several of this kind of pet in the game, modeled after the mythical Cerberus, guardian of Hell. Huck is from a place called Molten Core, where it's lava and fire and rock. One of his attack abilities is to breath fire. I got him because he's unique. Not very many people have a Core Hound as a pet. He's named Huckleberry because, well, extra rations of gruel if you can figure out why.

I've been playing since October of 2006. It's fun. It's what I do to relax. At the time this photo was taken, my character was at level 70. There have been two expansions, or additions, to the game since I started. The first took characters to level 70. The second, which came out a year ago, took characters to level 80, which is where Gimmlette is.

When I log into the game now, I have almost no challenges in terms of following what's called a "quest chain". One person will give you a challenge which, most of the time, leads to another challenge and so on. I have reached the stage where what I do is run "daily quests". As the name implies, they can be done every day for gold or something else. The pretend gold and pretend "Emblems of Triumph", for instance, can be redeemed for better armor or other things.

I come on and run 2 dailies in the capital city. Then in fly to a place called the "Argent Tournament Grounds" and pick up 7 more daily quests. They rotate among a selection. Some times, you can get the same quest several days in a row. That happened with the daily cooking quest. Ask me, some time, about meatloaf.

One of the daily quests from the tourney is to rescue a dwarf and 4 of his compatriots from this area just west of the grounds.

You are also to "off" 15 of the mobs holding his friends in cages. That's where I was on Friday when it got, well, interesting.

You see the small squares. Those are cages containing people who need rescuing. Mean baddies roam around this area and you have to kill them because they have the keys to open the cages. It's not just you doing this, however. You're also "enjoying" the company of any number of people who all have the same quest. Finding a live mob to kill can get difficult sometimes.

I was running around, with Huck, killing bad people, getting keys and opening cages. Another hunter showed up and tried to "steal" one of the mobs that I had targeted to kill. If you shoot or otherwise engage a mob before another person does, you get credit for that mob. There are people in this game who think nothing of running around tagging other people's mobs just to be mean. That's called "griefing" and is, technically, not allowed.

I don't know if that's what this person was doing. They had missed a couple of times to get a mob I had targeted. They ran to the right in the photo, near the edge of the area and attempted to hit another mob I had targeted. They missed again. So, to stop auto attacking, they did a maneuver called "Disengage". The hunter flies backwards. It's very useful if you get too close to use your bow or your gun.

Now you're all intelligent readers. You can probably see exactly where this is going. The other hunter didn't. He hit his "Disengage" and misjudged how close he was to the edge. All I have to say is, "It's a long way down." Your pet will disappear if you get a certain distance away from it. As I was laughing, his pet wolf disappeared.

Of course I've done it, not here, but in other places in the game. In fact, we've often talked about having all the hunters at the edge of a high cliff and the, on the count of 3, Disengaging over the cliff. The name of the guild is Spectacular Death for a reason. It would make an awesome recruiting statement.

I never got the person's name. I wish I had. I was going to send them an in-game letter telling them we'd decided to make them and honorary member of SD. That was just priceless. Fortunately, you're never obliterated in the game. You can run back and claim your body, assuming you can find it.

This area borders on a sea. I don't know if he would have hit the water from this ledge or if there is still land below. I just know that I was laughing so hard, I had to stop doing my quests for a bit.

Beverage: Robert the Bruce Scottish-style Ale

Deb