Every other year, Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger runs a mini-workshop on blogging, called 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. This year I’ve decided to participate, for both Duct Tape and Lost in Translation.

Day 1 of 31DBBB is Write an Elevator Pitch: a 30-second/150-word description of what the blog’s about. I was having trouble with this until I ran into a serendipitous error. Last week, I switched the address of this blog from http://www.etherjammer.com/wowblog/ to http://ducttape.etherjammer.com/; the ducttape. subdomain points at the /wowblog/ directory, so I didn’t think there would be any problem. Turns out, though, that some functions in WordPress rely on the address in the URL bar of your browser being correct to work properly; in particular, going to /wowblog/ just doesn’t work anymore – WordPress throws a 404 error! (Going to subpages, like /wowblog/feed/ to pick a random example out of the air, throws an Internal Server Error, which is even more fun.)

This isn’t a shaggy dog story, I promise. See, when you get the 404 error page from /wowblog/, you can click on the “go back to the main page” button at the bottom to get to ducttape., which solves the problem. But for some reason, this unsets the cookie that my What Would Seth Godin Do? plugin uses, and so I started seeing the tag at the top of the blog again.

In the WWSGD tag, as it happens, is an elevator pitch for Duct Tape and a Prayer.

Reproduced here, then, for your reading pleasure: the Elevator Pitch!

Welcome to Duct Tape and a Prayer, a World of Warcraft blog focusing on priests and healing, with occasional tangents into other classes and facets of World of Warcraft. In this place, in the words of Dr. Horrible, the status is not quo; my opinions can, do, and will differ from conventional wisdom, and I’ll do my best to back them up where I can. I welcome comments and discussion, but if you’re the sort of person who starts sentences with “Obviously…” or believes that there’s a One True Way to play the game, you might not be in the right place.

I’m considering a new site icon for this blog. Would you please tell me what you think of this?

The reason I’m not posting here about Discipline priests at the moment is that in order to take the next step, I need to compile a massive spreadsheet so that I can go over the available gear and figure out how I’d rate it. I’m balking at it, but I can’t proceed until I do it. So I’m stuck.

In the meantime, I will clarify a point: I do not mean my previous posts on the subject to imply that Discipline priests should only gear for haste, and ignore crit and other stats. I’m just saying that haste is better for Discipline priests than crit is, no matter how hard they hang onto their Divine Aegis, and that priests should prioritize haste over crit, all else being equal and assuming they aren’t haste-capped.

I have a suspicion that work is what’s making me not want to play WOW. See, I work two jobs, for a total of 40 hours a week. Both are significant stressors, the first because I don’t enjoy it anymore and I don’t have a guarantee of getting paid (and because, since I set my own schedule, my boss reads that as “you can drop everything at any given time to help me at a moment’s notice”), and the second because it’s dull and repetitive, yet requires enough brainpower and attention that I can’t really think while I do it. Neither has any opportunity for advancement, and neither pays me enough.

You’d think that with all of that, I’d welcome the escape, right? Oddly enough, I don’t. It’s not because I see WOW as work too – in fact, it’s exactly the opposite: WOW doesn’t feel productive enough. See, I have a very strong desire to get out of my current situation. I know I have the skills to be doing a job I actively enjoy, and doing it for enough money to support me and my family. (In point of fact, I’ve been informed in the last month that I’m literally making 1/6 what I could/should be making in my field.) The work that I do, however, exhausts me mentally and emotionally, so I have a hard time bootstrapping myself into being motivated for the work that I want to do. Instead, I think about the work I want to do, chastise myself for not doing it, and additionally get on my own case about doing anything that’s not “productive”.

If I could just get going on the new-job projects, I’d feel more legitimately productive; if I felt more legitimately productive, I wouldn’t have to recoil in horror from anything that wasn’t productive; and if I could get to that point, I could play WOW again.

And that’s why work is killing my desire to play World of Warcraft.

In no particular order, my favorite posts from the WOW blogosphere this week. But first, a special mention: my guildie, Dan Howell – otherwise known as BigRedKitty – is retiring from World of Warcraft and WOW blogging to spend more time with his family. Good luck and godspeed, Dan.

Also leaving the WOWblogosphere this week is Omen, from Omen Scourge. Omen, best wishes and good luck getting things back on track.

1. Building a Better Beast-Master Pre-3.1 from Aspect of the Hare, by Pike
2. All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Party from Destructive Reach, by Saresa
3. And They Would All Go Down Together from Egotistical Priest, by Zasp (please be kind and don’t overload their bandwidth this month! ;)
4. Melee Priest from Holy Discipline, by Anea
5. The Value of WOW from Holy Dueg!, by Dueg (if you read one post from this list, make it this one)
6. WOW Podcast List from The Hunting Lodge, by Brigwyn
7. Milking the Silver Hand Economy from Less QQ, More PewPew, by Dan
8. Well, At Least Someone Around Here Has Been Busy from Master’s Call, by Faulsey
9. Achievement Guide: Lovin’ Squirrels and Killin’ Snakes from Mend Pet, by Brajana
10. Twitter Musings from Pixelated Executioner, by Pix
11. It’s A Hum-Drum Time from Rune Tap, by Lyliith (It’s okay to be getting tired of WOW, Lyl, I promise.)
12. Naxxtastic: A Small Guild’s First Attempt from Sideshow and Syrana, by Syrana
13. You’re Marked For Death… By Anyone Around! from Stabilized Effort Scope, by Rilgon
14. Heroics killer in the making? from Tank Like A Girl, by Kadomi
15. The science of relationships from Temerity Jane, by TJ
16. Say Hi to No Stock UI! from World of Matticus, by Matt
17. We Were Pretty Goddamn Stupid from World of Warcraft, Eh?, by Kelly

Anyone else I should be reading? Do I follow your Twitter but not know you have a blog? Leave a comment!