Your DPS is miserable–embarrassingly bad. My e-celebrity, like a super nova, shined brightly enough to draw the attention of one young warlock. Unfortunately, just like staring directly into a solar eclipse, he was blinded by my genius. I know my perfection was partly to blame for his failure, and as such felt the need to publicly humiliate him.

He had a good idea for a post, and was very nice! I love talking to people who read omgphatloots–and I’m confident that my massive ret paladin DPS can make up for their ego massaging whispers.

<3 Braklock

It looks like WoW.com is trying their hand at a UI column again!

AddOn: Writing about AddOns is tricky business. You need to take something dry and technical and transform it into something accessible and entertaining to read. And no one approached it with more enthusiasm and flair than Mathew McCurley. Once he gets AddOn Spotlight back on track, he’ll be tackling Reader UI of the Week and few more of the crazier ideas he had.

I don’t know who Mathew McCurley is, but the fact that his qualifications are “enthusiasm and flair” does not bode well, dear reader.

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If other, post which addon you use in the comments!

DOWNLOAD LINK ZOMG!

Thank the lord on high that No Stock UI has stopped trying to post about and analyze UIs at all. It’s now just like “Hey bro, here’s an addon and a 900 page post about it.” Pretty good stuff.

If you do one thing before Christmas it should be to install Shadowed’s new mod that makes your screen have snowflakes everywhere. Then take a screenshot of your UI and post it on the forums! It’ll add some nice holiday cheer to the otherwise soul-sucking horror that is the official forum “post your UI” thread.

If you need additional incentive you should know that the 6 different snowflakes were drawn by someone who draws internet animal cartoon things (I think they’re animals, it’s not really clear). He also has a killer mustache.

Get it: http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info15325-LetItSnow.html

Here’s something I got from StormFX today:

For future reference, you need read the license of an add-on before copying it, modifying one image, and then uploading it as your own.

I’m not going be an ass and ask you to remove it, but you need to adhere to the license and state on the download page that your skin is a modified version of Apathy, done with permission, and that all unmodified files are still credited to myself.

Thanks.

Now, this is in reference to my Not_Caith skin. On face we can see one problem – it is not modified Apathy, it’s modified Caith. That trivial (no, it’s not) distinction aside, let’s look at Caith’s license (as accessed today at 7:15ish pm EST)

The contents of this add-on, excluding third-party resources, are copyrighted to its author with all rights reserved, under United States and international copyright law. The author of this add-on hereby grants you the following permissions:

You MAY download, install and use this add-on for your own personal use.

You MAY use code from this add-on, in whole or in part, in your own project provided that the name and code of the target project contain no references to the name of this add-on or its author.

You MAY NOT redistribute this add-on or its contents, modified or unmodified, without the express permission of its author with the following exception:

You MAY include an unmodified version of this add-on in a compilation provided that the author of this add-on is credited in both the
compilation and the download page of the compilation, and that the download page of the compilation include a hyper-link or the URL to the project or download page of this add-on.

The interesting thing is that permissions two and three are contradictory, as “code” is generally ambiguous and the question of when something is simply modified or new product is not a very clear line. While I am ultimately choosing to take down the addon (both as a punishment to the community for StormFX’s failure AND because StormFX told me I didn’t have to and I have no intention of following his advice) I will point out that the license (as written) is a fucking disaster.

If authors are interested in extending legal take-down requests, their license shouldn’t read as though it were written by a student who failed 4th grade logic.

Oh yeah I also gave StormFX credit on the download page.

I’m not done blogging, in fact I have several half finished posts floating around but I’ve just been super-busy as the school year starts again.

Anyway, and I might be a little picky here, WoW.com is full of idiocy even when they’re not posting about UIs. Today someone named Lesley Smith (boring) posted that “she” was ‘Deconstructing’ the Cataclysm trailer. My brain kind exploded as I thought “holy fuck, WoW.com is going to deconstruct something? Are their readers even going to know what deconstruction is?” and more appropriately “Where did they pick up a writer literate enough to not only read Derrida but then apply what they’d learned to WoW?!” I was right to be skeptical, as the idiot who wrote the piece has obviously heard the term deconstruction used by people with multi-syllabic vocabulary and appropriated it for her own uses with approximately zero knowledge of what it ACTUALLY MEANS.

Let’s be clear, deconstruction is a specific process applied to “texts” (like, actual texts, films, symbols, whatever) that was developed by Jacques Derrida. You can read about it here.

In any event, I threw myself on the grenade and actually read the “deconstruction” just to see what they were doing – as you can imagine, it wasn’t a textual deconstruction at all, but rather a segment-by-segment guessing game based on the preview video for Cataclysm. It was a riveting intellectual experience, with such gems as the following observation concerning a tornado ripping through Darkshore:

This image of a tornado tearing through Darkshore suggests a series of ‘natural’ disasters will besiege the land before Deathwing’s return.

Jesus fucking christ, thanks for pointing out the most blazingly obvious thing in the history of the planet. A tornado signals natural disasters? Oh, what else could have brought on the image of a nature disaster…HOW ABOUT THE FUCKING WORD CATACLYSM? OH SHIT. After picking myself up off the floor (I had fallen out of my chair after being blown away by the intellectual mastery of Ms. Smith’s earth-shattering (perhaps, cataclysmic) discovery of cataclysms in the so-named expansion), I sat down to read a few more and they were equally uninspiring. Basically what she did was take the movie, watch it, and then decide that the procession of obviousness that WAS the trailer needed to be made MORE obvious.

Before I began to subject myself to wow.com there were few times when I actually feared for the future of humanity – now I frequently find myself in fits of existential terror. I hope, for generations to come, that a cataclysm comes and wipes their “editors,” “contributors, “authors,” and “serious readers” from the face of the earth.

Oh, and Ms. Smith, the word you were looking for was dissecting - NOT – deconstructing.

I don’t want to claim too much credit here, but it seems like Mr/s. Eliah Hecht has stopped “reporting” the reader UI of the week over at WoW.com. I wonder how much I contributed to that? I feel like a kid who got a fancy new toy, played with it too hard, and ruined it =(

Apologies to Duke for this taking forever! My writing is even sloppier than normal when I’m sick, so the post quality is not great. <3<3

There are very few people who produce UIs that I would use; in fact, the list is three people long. Duke is one of those three people, and the astounding thing is that I’d probably use all of his UIs. This post, how to use art responsibly, could apply to any of Duke’s recent UIs, and extreme examples aside, it could apply to any UI he’s made. There’s more gushing in the body of the post, but for now let’s look at two screenshots

Download! *** See bottom of the post for the profiles to load!!!!!!

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