A few things

Apparently I haven't blogged in awhile. I'm not sure why, it's not like interesting things haven't been happening.

Like on Thursday, the Badgers completed an Undying run through Naxxramas -- 10 people, no boss deaths through the whole run. Very, very, nice.

Then on Saturday, I found myself in a bar in Wrigleyville having green beer with Dethnotronic, Ragonbadger and Sariana. It was a very fun evening and great to get to chat with some people from online face to face. But there's still something funny about the game/RL divide where talking endlessly about online adventures is all good and fun, while somehow a lot of RL stays somewhat private. I've been mulling over that a lot lately and I'm wondering about why a lot of us keep a lot of RL stuff more private and whether it's worth bothering. For example, I learned that there are a handful of Noctambulists who are all on Facebook. I don't have a Facebook page myself. Not because I'm old, so much, but mostly because the different social networks I have at work, old RL friends, gaming are generally somewhat distinct. I've been wondering about that. Perhaps I should be blogging about it more to play around with the ideas.

Sunday we re-convened for more Heroic raiding but once again only had 20. There was a little bit of back channel stuff going on among the officers that really derived from some overall concerns about the lower turnouts we've been getting. Are we drifting from our mission of a fairly consistent 25 gearaed mains -- no pugs, no alts, no respecs? Or are we just in a holding pattern between beating most of the content and 3.1 and Ulduar releasing? Nobody really knows and some people tend to worry.

But we did Sartharian with 20 and it was as easy as expected. Then we went to Malygos and did not expect it to be easy. It wasn't, really, but it only took us 3 tries. It felt a little like Thaddius -- pushing everybody to play a little more perfectly. Except it went a lot faster.

But a bunch of us really want to do Sartharian with 3 drakes up and we're going to need a turnout of 25 to make that work.

On Monday, we went and tried for Sartharian w/2 drakes with 10. We just couldn't get it rolling, though. We had a couple of very promising looking pulls, but a lot of pulls where something would go wrong. We tried with 2 tanks, 2 healers for awhile and that looked decent. Then Lenina got d/c for a bit and we brought in Ragonbadger for a 3rd tank and that also looked promising. But we couldn't manage to play quite mistake-free enough for long enough. I think that's the 3rd or 4th Monday we've wrestled with 10-man Sarth+2. I wonder if we need to have a couple of nights in a row to build on the experience better in order to get on a roll.

Tonight it's back to regular Heroic raiding and hopefully we'll see a solid 25 turn out and try Sarth+3. If not, we'll just keep farming Naxx and see what we can do to try to get a full raid another night.