About Planet of the Hats

Planet of the Hats is a blog about stuff. Mostly this stuff relates to World of Warcraft, or at very least is written from the perspective of World of Warcraft players who are, at least allegedly, also human beings. Originally strongly focused on “theorycraft” for elemental-specced shamans, the hats we wear are now rather more explicitly diverse and the focus of the blog likewise.

Throughout the blog we make liberal use of pretty pictures and irrelevant screenshots because colours make us happy, and we hope they make you happy too.

Who are we?

Charles, also known as Zamir, is the guy who founded PotH back in October ’09 and did all that fiddly elemental spreadsheet stuff until Real Life™ told him to stop right now, mister, or else. Now he masquerades as a 27-year old student of theology, presently authoring a dissertation on the topic “Post-binary gender and the Church” which is more or less as interesting as it sounds. Zamir lives in Scotland but is keen to remind people he’s actually from South Africa, which is not near Scotland.

In WoW, Zamir plays a shaman, druid, mage, priest and death knight as “mains” and has raid-leaded (yes) the top level of content in all four incarnations of the endgame.

Confusingly, Zamir has been known at various times and places by a number of aliases including Sihmm, Chayah, Karris, Tehila, and of course, Charles.

Razzmatazz, also known as Razz and less commonly Mazzratazz, ‘tazz and Nancy (only on weekends), was invited to join Zamir’s blog adventures in late 2010. Never missing a chance to desecrate someone else’s work with irrelevant ramblings, he firmly grasped this opportunity with both of his strong, supple, male night elf hands. He is currently studying philosophy in his home country of Belgium, where houses are made of chocolate and the internet is still steam-powered. When not busy eating houses or studying, he can be found criticising things he doesn’t understand or listening to pretentious hipster music.

In WoW Razzmatazz has been playing a hunter called Razzmatazz since the beginning of time. He occasionally dabbles in alt levelling but quickly returns to his old hunter self because change frightens and confuses him.

After being one of Zamir’s peons for several raiding years, Razz has joined in a mutually beneficial programme of generous co-leadership of their raid group which does not involve Zamir simply delegating everything to him and telling him to get on with it, not at all.

What do we want?

• Both of us have been playing WoW since 2005 and playing human beings for somewhat longer than that.
• Both our names feature the letter “z” because Z is cool.
• In WoW, we’ve raided together as part of a merry cohort of chums since 2006 and co-led the <Fancy Hat Club> guild on EU-Shadowsong since 2009.
• We value friendships, games which are fun and sounding cleverer than we really are; Charles is also very fond of tea (the drink) and Razz is a big fan of The National.

Whether or not you share these tastes, welcome to Planet of the Hats and enjoy your stay! We love reading your comments so please don’t hesitate to post your thoughts, no matter how inane, and we’ll do our best to reply if we can think of anything remotely intelligent to say.  Which, to be fair, is actually quite often.