Happy 2017!

[Rash]

Happy 2017!



I needed a couple of days to recover from the sustained 5-day IRL-cyberbullying I experienced in our Norway meet up before I could make a front page post wishing you all a happy new year. Despite all the naysayers complaining about how bad 2016 was, 2016 was a great year for Iron Edge, and I’d argue, World of Warcraft and gaming in general.

The Norway Meet Up
Even though we had already had a huge meet up this year in Manchester, somewhat spontaneously it was decided to have another meet up in Norway for new year’s. With the help of Stian (Glacio) we were able to book the master suite of a fancy 4-star hotel in downtown Stavanger, which turned out to be a great place to get wasted and do a whole bunch of sexually questionable shit with each other. I will once again attempt to keep Palmar’s tradition going by summing up these events to a few bullet points filled with dank memes and sneaky insults.

• The week started off slowly with me, quietly sobbing on a Norwegian toilet near the Noodle Noodle, slowly coming to terms with the fact that Norway is still the most expensive place in the world and that this was going to leave us all financially devastated for months to come.
• The hotel room lived up to most of its expectations, with the biggest lie being the “fast wifi” as advertised on the website. 3 mbps might be fast in the suburbs of Berlin but for a spoiled Dutch man it was quite the struggle.
• Valkyrie’s cat is much better behaved than I thought he would be, turns out Bendie was just being an asshole to it and totally deserved to be clawed.
• Front facing cameras on phones turn your phone’s screen white on maximum brightness as a flash, who would have thought?
• “Turtleneck and Chains” were never gone, they just needed someone awesome enough to remind everyone how cool it looks.
• Norwegians don’t fuck around with fireworks on New Year’s. We got up to a higher point in the city and enjoyed a professional fireworks show.
• We asked our tour guide and tank Oxcit to take us to “the one where we could get up closest” so that’s exactly what we did. This was probably the last year you could get up as close as we did, because a Norwegian girl behind us got hit in the face by some of the professional fireworks. Hope she’s okay!
• Our bear tank has magical, but useless eyes. He’s actually completely blind.
• Lethys’ lips do not taste like a healthy, mutually consenting interaction. I’ll let your imaginations figure out what that means.
• We never got to wish Bendie a happy new year, because he decided to make a very clever decision by leaving shortly before midnight. Valkyrie was not held responsible for the misunderstanding but did admit he done goofed.
• Be careful with who you let Stian bring into your hotel room. Whether they be drunk middle-aged men, drunk younger men that look like Wildlings who destroy your toilet and cause noise complaints, or cute Polish girls who seduce you into taking very, very long walks with them.
• One of the Polish girls took a special interest in everyone’s favorite German, but that interaction can be best summed up with this picture.

Overall I think I can speak for everyone when I say that we had a great time in Norway and I’m looking forward to planning our meet up in the summer of 2017. You can find the pictures of the meet up in this thread. Thank you all for coming out and I hope to see you all again soon!

World of Warcraft
Back on the WoW side of things I’m extremely proud to say that Iron Edge once again has three sustained raiding teams running simultaneously with varying degrees of casualness, thanks to the efforts of the brand new Too Old for This raiding team and the Weekend Porkchop Warriors. Legion has brought us a lot of new content and there is no indication that this is going to be slowing down any time soon, with The Nighthold opening up in just two weeks of my writing this. It looks like Helya was a little too difficult for us (and everyone else) to kill within the time, but since it doesn't have a "Cutting Edge achievement" attached to it, I guess it was never meant to be that way anyway. Next month will also be Iron Edge’s 12th birthday, so I’m looking forward to celebrating that with you all as well.

Anyway this post has been going on for way too long. Thank you all for a great 2016 and may we have an even greater 2017!