Every Thursday, Shelbi Roach of The Bronze Kettle guides you in creating WoW-inspired crafts using real world mats with World of WarCrafts.

Being a mom of two boys, this is definitely a good recipe to have in my bag of tricks. Slime is ultimate fun, and the ingredients are super cheap. The secret to this ooze is clear glue and a small amount of Borax solution.

Here is what you will need:

• 1/2 cup of clear Elmer's glue
  
• 1 cup of water
  
• Borax Solution (1/4 cup of water + 1/4 teaspoon of Borax)
  
• Food Coloring
  
• Skull

Optional supplies:

• Broken Weapon
• Coins

Click on the images below to view a gallery of step-by-step instructions.
DISCLAIMER: Common sense here; don't eat the slime. Definitely don't eat the Borax.

Very early in patch 2.4's progressive development on the PTR, the ability to send raid icons over chat was implemented. The syntax is pretty simple, you place the name of the icon in those funny looking brackets, like so: {circle}, {star}, etc.

Personally, I'm not too terribly excited, it's not something you'll be typing on the fly, probably. I can't really see a Mage or Warlock(or anybody) taking the extra time to type that out properly when something goes wrong(ie death), as simple as it seems to do so. However, this could be a good tool for raid leaders, not so much the raiders. A raid leader could include these in a tanking/crowd control assignment macro. "/ra Matthew, tank {skull}. Christian, sheep {square}." That sort of thing.

Regardless of how often this will actually be used, it's a nice little feature, and I'm sure post-2.4 mods and addons will make good use of them, even if the players themselves don't.

World of Raids and MMO Champion both have lists of new gear on sale, come patch 2.3, in exchange for Badges of Justice from the heroic instances, and now Karazhan and Zul'Aman raid instances as well. That's exciting, of course, but let's stop and look at these pics of the new gear for a moment, shall we?

Now, naturally, this gear is designed to fit with the general trollish theme of the patch, which lots of people are understandably excited about. The armor looks pretty good as armor goes, and it definitely brings some new visual design elements to the game that haven't been represented in any previous armor sets. But, let's stop and consider for a moment just where this armor is coming from. It looks like trollish Zul'Aman armor, but do we find it in Zul'Aman? No, it's up for sale by the only known Naaru retailer, G'eras. Does its method of acquisition have anything to do with Zul'Aman whatsoever? Well... it might if your guild has finished raiding Karazhan and gathers the heroic badges in Zul'Aman soon, then yes; but if you still focus mostly on Karazhan or heroic instances, then you might very well acquire some of these armor pieces without ever visiting those Amani trolls even once.

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is the appropriation of the Amani clothing design brand by the Shat'ari Naaru in Shattrath, copied illegally by G'eras, and put on sale with no proprietary settlement with trolls they are mimicking. Who knew that the Naaru could be capable of copyright infringement? If the trolls were down with that whole "I'll see you in court!" thing, their lawyers would be all over this right now.

Seriously, why is a being of pure holy light selling trollish armor with skulls and tusks and voodoo dolls on it? -- or does nobody care?

Rog on MMOROG has an interesting discussion of World of Warcraft's old raid content. Some of the original Azeroth raid content has excellent encounters and interesting story-lines, but adding another ten levels to the game hasn't made them any more accessible to more casual players. "But Elizabeth," I hear you say, "I'm level 70 now! Surely Ragnaros, in his puny level 60 dungeon, holds no real challenge!" But that, dear readers, is where you go wrong, because raid bosses do not have set levels -- all of them have a skull displayed where their level should be, which means that their level is 3 levels above the highest level player in the instance, and that no matter how many levels are added to the game, they'll always be tough fights. While this adds some sense of realism to the world (from a lore point of view, Nefarian, son of Deathwing, should never be soloable, duoable, or even 5-man-able -- though his smaller sister Onyxia is getting there), it also means that more casual players will never be able to check out some of the game's coolest content. Any above-your-level boss requires some decent +hit gear for you to be able to touch them, and if you're geared out well enough to tumble with level 73 monsters, why not just do existing raid content?

From my perspective, the old Azeroth raid content was great fun and should be as accessible to players as possible. It's not like a level 70, even wearing only quest rewards and green drops, is going to be getting any gear upgrades from Molten Core or Blackwing Lair, so why not let them have the chance to experience the content for fun?

So we've all had time to get used to the "lucky charms" icons for parties and (more commonly) raid targets. At first, I'll admit that they were a real source of confusion to me, but before very long I was extremely used to them. Since then, my guild uses them almost every chance we get, right down to harassing each other with them. Of course, now that I'm used to seeing and using them when running raids, I can't help but wonder how we ever got along without them in the first place. Those little icons have just made things so much more simple from a targeting aspect. (Of course, you should be targeting off your main assist, or other assigned assist if you're not the tank or MA, but the raid icons do help all that along...) This post on the World of Warcraft LJ today asking about what kind of raiding symbols are commonly used made me stop and wonder if there is really a somewhat "standard" icon used by many guilds and raiding groups for first target. However, as there are only a handful of answers there, I thought I'd bounce this question off everyone here and try to get a broader sampling -- just for curiosity's sake.

So, tell us -- what are the "kill this first" icons for your guild or raiding group? Does your guild/group have pet names (like "thong") for some of the raid target icons? How about whether or not your raiding group uses them for other than marking kill/CC/tank targets, such as the one player who says that skull is used for people in trouble? My guild favors Skull for main assist, X for off-tank or second kill target, depending. From there, it's blue square for the Main Tank's target, purple diamond is sap target, thong and moon are CC targets. How about you?