You’d think an internal agency project, where you’re your own client, would yield better results. But every year, agencies crank out boring, crappy holiday cards. And now since everyone’s all Web 2.0 and shit, they crank out boring, crappy digital holiday cards.

I could fill a few thousand words posting about the bad ones. Instead, I’ll show off the decent-to-good ones. You can decide which ones are which.

Y&R Team Detroit and their customized snowman maker.

Langland does goofy do-it-yourself holiday jingles.

Traction went the simple but interesting route.

Collective London wants to know if your Twitter stream is naughty or nice.

AKQA also gets in on the Twitter thing with Resotweetion.

ASI Communications offers up some Season’s beatings. Why? No idea.

Taxi did a billion short videos from all its employees.

Yes, Creature did a singing Christmas sandwich.

And if you want to see a billion more, just search Twitter for “Agency holiday card.”

UPDATE: AdFreak has a big review of the best and the worst agency holiday cards up now.

When Jack Link’s Beef Jerky first came out with their “Messin’ with Sasquatch” campaign, I can’t say I was a fan. It was one of those “WTF does this have to do with the product?” ideas that seemed like nearly any product could do. But despite the lack of a link to beef jerky, the campaign eventually grew on me. Not all the spots were home runs, but several of them were kinda funny.

Now they’re out with the 12 Days of Squatchmas mini-site which warps the classic holiday song into 12 different bigfoot themed pranks. The problem is, it’s just not as funny as the commercials and it really goes nowhere. After the initial run through, it gives me the option to “Play on your own.” But what am I “playing”? There’s no game – just a clickable advent calendar of pranks.

It seems like they went to a lot of work with no real payoff for the consumer. But who knows… maybe it’ll grow on me.

So, recently Tam decided that his holiday gift giving should start a little early this year.  What did he give everyone?  Why, a question to which he would like the answer.  What did Tam want to know about me?  He was curious to know about the most difficult decision I’ve had to make in WoW and how I felt about it in retrospect.

At first I looked at the question and went “man, I think I would have preferred the murloc one!”, but to be perfectly honest, the answer came to me very, very quickly.

Back in vanilla WoW, where I walked uphill both ways in molten lava to raids, I joined Monolith.  I had left a top alliance guild where I was part of the leadership team, due to a number of reasons, and joined a team where I would be able to just be part of the team.  A team where I had been assured that I would under no circumstance have to deal with the bullshit that caused me to leave my alliance guild.  And it was all true.  I got to raid, people were friendly, and I didn’t have to deal with bullshit from young males who had more ego than was good for them.  It was almost nirvana for me, in its simplicity.  All I had to do was show up to raid…and raid we did.

Apparently, naiveté could be added to the list of things that I also enjoyed during that time. 

Because I was very friendly to everyone, I never noticed the little cliques that had formed.  I never noticed the changes around me.  I was unaware of the underlying issues within the officer ranks.  I went along my happy way, raiding and enjoying the people around me.  But, as the Burning Crusade drew nearer, all of the sudden I became keenly aware of things changing around me, things that would have a great effect on the game for me.  Change that was like waves that kept crashing against a stubborn rock, determined not to be worn down, yet unable to prevent the waves from continuously crashing against it.

One night it happened…and it was horrible.  One of the officers left, taking the majority of the other officers with him…and people followed him like rats jumping from a sinking ship.  He claimed that he was going to offer an “elite” raid experience.  He lied to people about things that had occurred, largely by his hand, during his reign as an officer in Monolith, so that they would follow.  He told some of our best players that they weren’t good enough for him and his new guild, because they didn’t fit into his “plan”.  And for the duration of his time on the server with his new guild, he set out to destroy Monolith (a task he clearly failed to complete).

The split devastated me.  I had a lot of friends in the guild, I had foolishly thought that those people would remain a part of my gaming experience into the expansion.  I was happy how everything was, I didn’t want things to change.

I was also put in a position that was very difficult for me: follow a lot of my closest friends and go to the new guild that will have a mentality and goals similar to those that I have, or stay with Monolith, and Brade, and nurse the now flailing guild back to life.

Brade gave me carte blanche to leave, and I think that deep down inside he knew that I really wanted to go.  But here is what made me different from those people who left without so much as a “goodbye and good luck”, even though Monolith had been their home for two years, and given them all their experiences in the game:  Loyalty.

I am fiercely loyal, and will remain so even if it makes me miserable.  This is both an asset and a fault.  But I could not think of a bigger slap in the face to Brade than to say “I love you, but I’m gonna go get phat purps”.  And I damn well wasn’t going to do it.  If Monolith was going to sink its captain was staying on board, and I was going to stand strong next to him.  It was a horrible decision to make, and I nearly lost a very dear friend to me (we have only just recently rekindled our friendship) because of my choice.  But, I made my decision for better or for worse, to stay with Monolith.

My decision was made more difficult by the person who split making it an apparent personal vendetta to sink us, and personally attacking  me (and being very nasty about it) to try and get at Brade.  I think this hurt me more than anything else, because here were people who I had considered my friends.  People who shared laughs with me, people who were very cordial to me for over two years…now being down right nasty to me because I opted not to join them.  Because I decided to root for the underdog.  I would go to bed many nights in tears.  Tears of anger, tears of frustration, tears of grief, tears of misery.  It got so bad that I actually took a few months off and played over on the alliance again, casually, just to get away from these people.  My skin was not thick enough and I let them ruin the game for me.

It was so hard as I struggled through recruiting, people leaving, raiding, back gearing new people, more people leaving to more progressed guilds, recruiting more…only to have my friends from the other guild gloat about how well they were doing, or what new piece of loot they had just gotten.  It was like rubbing salt into an open wound.  Although I’m sure they never intended it to be that way, it got to the point where I just had to isolate myself from it all.  Draw myself away from it, into my own little world.  I left all my group chat channels, I stopped responding to tells, I just needed to get away from it.

Eventually, I decided to come back horde and play with Brade, because that was one of the main reasons I played the game.  But when I came back, I made a promise to myself: I would no longer give a shit about what other people were doing.  Guild X beat us to a kill?  So what?  I took the time to focus on the positives of why I played the game, and not the negatives.  I placed a great number of people who I just didn’t want to deal with on my, up to that point empty, ignore list so they couldn’t push my buttons.  I stopped visiting our realm forums, even to recruit, drawing instead from friends of friends that knew someone who wanted to raid. 

I pushed giving us a more casual raid schedule, down from our then 5 nights a week.  I pushed weeding out the dick heads that we were holding onto because we “needed the bodies”.  I pushed a new focus for us: we are a progression guild, but will not force progression to the detriment of our members.  Many people were apprehensive about the change, but it was shortly after the change that we killed Lady Vashj, quickly to be followed by Kael’thas.  Granting us access to Mt. Hyjal and Black Temple.  But it was that Lady Vashj kill that told me we were going to make it.  That we had survived.

Every kill after that was just a giant “fuck you” to everyone that thought we were finished and everyone that hoped we would fall apart, with Illidan punctuating our statement.

In the end, what happened?  We ended up with a group of friendly, largely good-natured people who were a team.  And where are we now?  Back to where we were before the split:  The top horde guild on the server.  Only, better.  Our environment improved, our members have improved, our attitude has improved.  The new Monolith far surpasses what the old one ever was, regardless of progression.

And where is the guild that split?  Disbanded when they failed to get a world 100 Brutallus kill.  And in hindsight…our guild is largely a better place for not having most of those people in it.  After they disbanded, we did let a few members return to our friends and family ranks.  And in time, some of them even came to raid with us again.  But we made our objective and focus clear, and they were required to accept those things.  However, before anyone was permitted to return, the entire guild was given the opportunity to object.  If anyone said “no”, they were not granted permission to return.

In retrospect, I absolutely think I made the right decision.  Was it difficult?  God yes.  Did I often question if I did the right thing?  Absolutely.  But, am I happy with the result?  Most definitely.  There were times that I thought we weren’t going to make it, but time after time, we pulled up our boot straps and marched on.  I honestly could not ask to be playing the game with a better group of people.

I helped rebuild Monolith brick by painful brick, from the foundation up, my hands are still rough, and my arms still weary from the effort that it required.  But, Monolith is made from the honest, hard work of every member that is in the guild.  Our hearts and desires went into this guild, and it is a better place for it.

I have no regrets about my decision.

My dad likes to complain all the time about how noisy TV ads are compared to regular programming. “I don’t understand why they do that. It just makes me mute all the commercials,” he always tells me.

I have to explain to him that most commercials really aren’t louder. They just seem louder. When you go from watching golf – with hushed announcers and polite golf claps – to a Chevy Truck spot that has a deep announcer voice, driving rock music and sound effects, of course it’s going to seem like someone cranked the volume up to 11. But while I’ve educated my dad on that fact, Congress doesn’t seem to have gotten the message.

Yesterday the House voted to force the TV industry to keep its commercial sound levels in check with regular programming.

Because, you know, it’s not like there are more important things Congress could be doing right now. Sigh…

Via.

http://www.onlineeducation.net/incarceration_usa/

And this is only one screw up, check out the others on their site

How I love the states , really o_O

the only mediocre thing lupe fiasco has ever done gets the video treatment. i like the idea, and i get what they were going for, i really just wish they hadn’t been so cliche about it. especially when this shit movie ended up with so much goodness on the soundtrack. not a bad video at least (the non-new moon related scenes). meh…

- panda

So, this is my dilemma and, at this time, I do not have an answer.  But with 3.3 upon us today, I need to get it figured out pronto!

After much thought, I, personally, will be picking up the 18/0/53 celestial focus spec.  To do this, I will be giving up the following 7 points from my current 11/0/60 resto spec:

• Living Seed (3)
• Improved Barkskin (2)
• Empowered Touch (2)

 The reasons that I am doing this are:

• I am primarily a raid healer in 25 man progression content.   Getting back as close to our current 1 second GCD will be important for me (I think).
• Living Seed is frequently less than 2% of my overall healing.  While it is nice to have, I think the haste is going to end up being more throughput for me as a whole.
• Empowered Touch (Nourish, Healing Touch) is also frequently less than 5% of my overall healing.  While it was nice to have those bigger nourishes when I used nourish, the haste is again going to give me more throughput for what I’m tasked to do in our 25 man settings.
• Improved Barkskin.  I loved this talent.  I really did.  It seemed to a lot of people to be a throw away talent, but I can’t tell you how helpful that extra mitigation was as we worked hard modes.  However, in the big picture, it was 2 points that were pretty easy to give up for the extra haste.

I know that not everyone will agree with the reasons, or the talents, that I’m opting to drop for the 3% haste offered by celestial focus, and that is fine.  But it is something that I am going to test out and see if it is beneficial for me and if I how it affects my throughput.  That, however, is a decision that I already made…and not, per se, the topic of this post.  The big question at hand, which I do not have an answer for is:  Should I drop my 4 T9 set bonus for non-tier haste gear?

I have looked for an answer to this question, and so far have not found anything definitive.  If I keep my 4 piece T9, along with my current 245/258 items regardless of if they have haste, I sit just under 600 haste.  Recall that to reach the 1 second GCD you require 750 haste, assuming all of your raid buffs and 3/3 Celestial Focus, which I will have.  If I swap around an item of two here and there, namely my breastplate and off-hand, I reach just over 700 haste, with only a slight loss to spell power…but I also lose my T9 set bonus.

Now, at the point I am at haste wise, we are talking tenths of seconds with regards to my GCD reaching 1 second flat.  How much will that matter?  Are those tenths of seconds worth giving up the set bonus for?  Tentatively, I think not.  But I could be quite wrong about this.  I won’t know for certain until I get into a raid setting and see how sluggish I feel, and analyze the parses to see where everything fits.  However, if things seem hugely slow, I may well decide that it is worth the loss of the bonus to equip a few haste pieces instead of set pieces.  I may also swap out a gem here or there for one with a touch of haste on it.  The last I recall reading haste and spellpower were scoring out about equally for throughput.

Now, getting into T10, I absolutely would not give up haste for the 2 pieces bonus, as it’s a rubbish bonus.  But what about the 4 piece T10?  I just don’t know.

How about all of you?  Are you giving up your set bonuses for haste pieces?  Are you keeping your set bonuses?  Are you flat out staying away from the haste train?

เชื่อมั้ย?

เข้าใจหรือเปล่า?

เมื่อคืนลองถ่ายดู

อืมม จริงอย่างที่เค้าว่า
ภาพไฮไลท์รายวัน

I am so frustrated.

Work has been a disaster for the past week. Problem after problem, which in the Payroll World means people aren’t getting paid on time or correctly, which means that I spend all my time fixing these problems, which means that I did not get something that needed to be done, done. Which creates more problems. I don’t want to go back tomorrow! I don’t want to spend my day off feeling sick to my stomach about all of these problems that are appearing!

My Father is good. He gave me this job, and since I have not found anything, this is where I am still supposed to be. So I will go tomorrow, a little reluctantly, and be positive and get everything done. God-willing.

Oi. Ay. Someday my Darling and I will both have jobs we love.

Wood Shed

Daddy's Garage

Mrs. Claus cheating on Santa with a snowman and then killing Frosty with a hair dryer. Somehow this is supposed to sell cell phones.

Ok, admittedly, Boost Mobile is targeted at a younger crowd who would probably find this funny. And Mrs. Claus does a good job of getting straight to the selling points and giving you an actual reason to go with Boost over other carriers. But how many times are we going to see the Rankin/Bass stop-motion animation rip-offs before we get tired of them? Verizon has one out that’s actually good.

Side note: I viewed this spot for a second time while in the middle of writing this post and my wife (who’s not in advertising) looked over and said “What did that have to do with cell phones?” Bingo.

Via.

scusate ma mi organizzo… è il secondo fine settimana di fila che passo a letto con raffreddore, mal di gola e febbre, il tutto  inizia il venerdì pomeriggio e per domenica sera sto bene… 

non vorrei passare così anche il prossimo week end!!

Beep bop beeeeeep.

Geez Louise, it’s been a while. Oops. It’s called the I Hate Sitting In Front Of A Computer All Day And Don’t Want To Add More Time At Home While I Could Be Doing Something That Hurts My Eyes Less.

Hurrah!

Thanksgiving was great – I made my first turkey and Ethan&I hosted our first family dinner. Wonderful. An apartment full of people, lots of food, whining brothers, bonding with my sister.

Very nice.

Spencer films the Don&Ahn wedding.

Wedding Knees.

Pots and Pines of Tuolumne.

Year-Round Christmas.

Garage Sky

One more. I’m making up for so much time with no photos.
Also, I’m going to get a haircut this week, probably. Pending financial support.
Also, I’m watching The Santa Clause! I’ve always had a crush on Bernard, he’s so great.

Mean 'Ol Roosters

Credit: on pic & baidu + saju

1. Bad Romance

2. Alejandro

3. Monster

4. Speechless

5. Dance In The Dark

6. Telephone featuring Beyonce

7. So Happy I Could Die

8. Teeth

9. Just Dance featuring Colby O’Donis

10. LoveGame

11. Paparazzi

12. Poker Face

13. Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)

14. Beautiful, Dirty, Rich (Album Version (Explicit))

15. The Fame

16. Money Honey

17. Starstruck featuring Space Cowboy, Flo Rida

18. Boys Boys Boys

19. Paper Gangsta

20. Brown Eyes

21. I Like It Rough

22. Summerboy

Yogeditty Yo. Ive moved HERE.

I know that I have talked before about my feelings on obtaining gear in WotLK, and the difficulty in coming by that gear.  In large part, I still feel the same…I think.  But something happened over the weekend that made me wonder: Is gear too accessible?

So, my little priest hit 80 this weekend (yay me!), to finish out my “set” of healers.  Let me be more specific.  My priest hit 80 about 12:00 Midnight on Saturday night/Sunday morning.  Yes, that is correct, less than 48 hours prior to the time of this post this priest was 79.  What’s my point?  I’m gettin’ there! 

For those of you that were too preoccupied to click on the link, you might have noticed that my priest is almost in full epic gear (~3/4), at roughly 1850 spell power, less than 48 hours from leveling.  Not only that, but if you take a closer look you will notice two things: that she is wearing a helm from Ony 10 and a robe from Anub (ToC 10).  She is also wearing 245 gloves from a lucky drop/roll on the flame dude in VoA 25.  Of the items she is wearing, I purchased only one from the AH (Je’Tze’s Bell), I have no crafted gear, and everything else was obtained via dungeons and raids.  I’ve had purples thrown at me from every which way!

Now, the leveling and gearing process for my characters has always been one of my favorite aspects of the game.  I love fleshing out upgrades, and devising ways to acquire new, shiny gear.  This is my first character to hit 80 since 3.2 and the inclusion of ToC.  This is the first character that basically can just farm upgrades through a twenty minute instance and be on my way.  And let me tell you…it’s pretty boring   There really are no decisions to make as far as “where” to go to get my character the best gear to be raid ready.  No planning.  I don’t get to “shop” in atlas loot.

Hell, I healed a 10 man raid of the current tier content less than 24 hours from the time I reached level 80, half in blues…and we did not wipe one time.  Not only that…but I felt like I fairly reasonably carried my weight throughout the zone.  *sigh*

Sure, there are still plenty of upgrades out there for my priest to obtain, and she is nowhere near finished as far as I’m concerned.  But there is very little of the planning that I loved about leveling my other four 80s involved.  I will still run all of the heroics, because I love instancing, and because I’m a completionist that way.  But no longer will I be running them for gear to get me ready for the next thing, I will merely be running them for some personal perverse desire that I have to complete them.

Learning to heal in heroics was always a challenge, especially since I always healed an undergeared tank (some form of Brade) as he was gearing his way through heroics as well.  It was sometimes hard, and it made me learn things about how to better play my class.  Like…Pain Suppresion has a relatively short cooldown.  Don’t panic in a dire moment, just use it, save the day and move on!  Or learning what your limitations are as a healer, and had to maximize your strengths to offset those limitations.  Of course, you need to actually experience those strengths and weaknesses to be able to identify them…

Hell, maybe I’ll even go far enough to say that ToC is part of the reason that we have such poor players in the community right now, and why expectations are being set so low as a whole.  Nobody has to actually learn  to play their class anymore to feel that they have succeeded as far as gear goes.  While exceptional players will still learn and remain exceptional players, others will just faceroll their way to nifty gear never learning how to work and truly excel.  Never having to truly work to obtain their spoils.

I will still follow some loose form of a progression chain as far as gear goes…I guess.  It’s just that now my starting point is more ToC 10 and I’ll be progressing to Ice Crown when it comes out.

As a recruiter, I truly do love how easy it is for people to gear up.  It makes them more viable raid assets much sooner and without having to back gear them through an entire content’s worth of shit or carry dead weight around in progression raids.  But, I have to say, as a player, I find it pretty lackluster.  And in all honesty, it’s pretty much ruined one of my favorite processes of leveling up a new toon.

So, what do you think?  Has gear become too accessible?