autobottrixter

I'm feeling this itch to write more Etheris backstory, either something set when he was studying in Dalaran and first falling in with the Cult of the Damned or something from when he was a full-fledged Scourge necromancer. A story with a setting but no plot is hardly a story, however, it is a drawing and I am incapable of expressing myself thusly. (I do have a half-finished story in the latter setting, but it's horribly dirty and not anything I expect anyone to want to read and really just written to purge it from my brain.) (Yes, I fully expect one or two "I TOTALLY want to read that" replies.) So maybe that needs to brew a little longer. I had this perverse urge to bring him back in some way, to make Dariahn magically regurgitate his soul, but dead characters actually staying dead is such a rare and unique thing in this sort of setting. There's also the fact that he's pretty unrepentantly a Scourge loyalist, which would be hard to get around in a playable character. He could start taking a more active role in Dariahn's head, make the whole thing a little MORE Death's Head II* why don't I, but that might just spur on the whole magical regurgitation thing. He doesn't want Etheris talking in his head, and if it got worse than it already is he would likely try to force him out.

I'm also itching to actually try out my idea of playing an Auchenai draenei priest, one of the few who didn't go crazy with the whole Auchindoun blowing up/some naaru getting corrupted in there thing. She would still be kind of crazy by normal draenei standards, of course, but not batshit. It would be a good excuse to actually play through the Alliance side of things before Cataclysm, since my highest-level Alliance character ever is 26. Because I am totally awesome at playing things that are not my Horde mains am I right?

Speaking of that, I'm thinking I may start over with another character or two in Dragon Age before deciding on who I'm going to continue the story with. I'm kind of torn on my Dalish elf warrior, because archery is better for her as a character but I chose a warrior because I wanted to get in there and beat the shit out of things. I've got a female human noble warrior and a male human mage in the queue already. Hopefully I can dedicate some time to that game later this week. I also installed the original Neverwinter Nights on my netbook, but that'll likely end up as more of a lunch break thing than something I actively dedicate time to.

Also I need to actually RP Velthys some so I can establish him as a character before I go having him get all angsty about being a big coward and go Shadow because I can't imagine enjoying endgame healing.

*Have I mentioned recently that I have the original art for "High Noon Tex"? I don't think I have.

In my ongoing campaign to upgrade everything I own, I ordered a new netbook last week. The one I've had for about a year and a half now is EXTREMELY first-gen, and while it showed me how much use I could get out of a netbook it also showed me how much I needed a better one. So I ordered an Asus Eee 1005 from NewEgg, complete with Windows 7 Starter.

Holy shit this thing is awesome.

Conceptually I really liked that the old one ran Linux, but in practice I had trouble doing things that should have been simple, like updating to Firefox 3, because there wasn't a great deal of support for that particular distro. I've thus far installed all manner of crap on my new one, up to and including Ventrilo. (After uninstalling the bloatware, of course. I'll pick my own crap I don't need!) I'm mulling over installing WoW, since technically it will run, but I'm likely going to wait until I get the RAM upgraded to 2GB. I wouldn't try to raid on it, but it'd be fun to have for, say, opening Winter's Veil presents from my parents' house. I'm also thinking of getting Torchlight, since I hear it's both excellent and has netbook-optimized video settings. It feels much more like a small computer than the old one, and Windows 7's boot time is no problem. It's heavier, though, but presumably that's the trade-off for 5 times the battery life of my previous one.

I am digging it.

My immersion in culturally relevant but tragically out-of-print fiction in the form of the previously-mentioned Corum books has inspired a little rant on my problems with digital distribution, but that deserves its own post.

I've been putting off posting for, like, a month and a half not because things have been horrible, but because I've been having kind of an "I can has nice things?" going on and I've felt kind of compelled to wait until I could post pictures of stuff. Except I'm lazy about taking pictures so I've just gotten to a point where I want to post regardless of whether I have pictures of nice things.

I got a Zune HD for my birthday, and not just some stock one but a custom from Zune Originals. It's blue, which is an ideal state for my small electronics and such. I still loved my brown brick of a Zune 30, but the Zune HD was too pretty not to upgrade. It's an awesome little media player, with shiny little details like artist portrait backgrounds on the album screen and screen saver. The sound quality is excellent. I downloaded all of The Guild and a couple movies to take advantage of the video, and I've been watching that on lunch breaks when I can pull myself away from my musty old Michael Moorcock paperbacks.

I also splurged for some RenFest boots last month. I've been wanting to put together a proper full costume, but with my weight in flux I didn't want to shell out that kind of money for something that (ideally) wouldn't fit next year. I got a short pair that remind me a lot of Meridith, with red details and skull lacing-buttons. I've taken to wearing them for D&D like a huge dork to get them broken in, though they're already pretty good and comfy. I'll post pics...sometime.

I have, as mentioned, been diving back into Michael Moorcock after finding collections of the Corum books at Half-Price Books. It finally occurred to me that I enjoy his work so much because of how much he plays with the idea of archetypes. The concept of the Eternal Champion is almost meta, with characters often aware of the role they serve in things as those archetypes. The last of his I read was a rereading of the Elric books, and after that Corum seems almost blessed.

WoW has been WoW. With Caeryn and Kraal back on the server there's a pretty strong impetus to start raiding again, which I certainly have no problems with. I've been having moments of flailing in frustration at feeling too squishy as a tank, but that was soothed a great deal by Blizzard saying that they know that damage mitigation has become far too RNG-based and essentially that the problems that I'm having are hardly unique to me or my class or my playstyle. It doesn't help to be constantly upstaged by paladins, though. I've been considering on and off getting Meg better geared, but every time I start thinking I should go grind some rep for better stuff I remember I have a hunter who's two levels from Outland or hey, Ten and Lain and Die are in Dalaran I should go harass them! I already have a well-geared tank, and there are so much more interesting things I could be doing. Which is sad, because she's still an awesome character. I'm just enjoying DKing so much more than warrioring right now.

I wish I had some deep and insightful things to say about RP and character development at this point, but I don't really. Meh.

Also I bought Dragon Age: Origins, and I will totally play it once I'm past the raid part of my weekday schedule. Elves are hardly my default race but I'm really feeling a Dalish elf warrior woman.

...but fidgety little things I can poke at from behind the work firewall are few and far between.

What? Go on, click the little buggers!

There was a wedding! Any wedding where I don't have to go out and buy some frippy new dress that I never quite feel comfortable in is a winner by default. I didn't take any pictures myself 'cause I figured everybody else, up to and including people hired to do so, would have it covered. So all you get here are well-wishes. Well-wishes!

I also had a birthday. I have not yet received my big birthday present, because apparently when just about the only place to procure a new shiny is a single web site that also customizes them for no additional charge there tend to be "unforseen delays". In fact, as I look at it now the color I got is no longer listed for the size I ordered, so presumably I was lucky to get one while blue was still in stock. I'm willing to be patient, though, because there's nothing strictly wrong with my old Zune30 apart from it not being a ZuneHD, and because Andrew has a Zune that was ordered from there Christmas-before-last and I have seen first-hand that what they are adding to the stock model is pure uncompressed love.

The exercise bike thing seems to be paying off slowly and steadily, which I suppose is a good thing when it comes to something like weight loss. I was satisfied that I was able to go from doing it 15 minutes at a time to 30 in less than a week, considering just how horribly out of shape I've been. It took some trial and error to find the best thing to do while on the bike: Watching TV left me constantly checking how much time I had left, and reading a book was sufficiently distracting but I tended to pedal slower. Earlier this week I tried downloading an old RPG on the Wii Virtual Console, Phantasy Star 4 to be exact, and that seems to be distracting enough to keep my eyes off the clock but not too distracting for me to stop actually doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I need to find a better way to position the handlebars for it, though. I've been meaning to start tracking my progress through Wii Fit, and now that I seem to have fixed a problem I was having with the sensor bar I'll likely start that this week. If it continues working out so well next spring I may have to buy an actual bike.

I'm having this sudden urge lately to play a physically frail male caster in something, and I need to be stopped. Not like a foo-foo gay princess boy, just your sort of typical I-don't-really-get-outside-much low-Strength high-Int type. I may just have to dust off Phantasy Star Online again and make one of their male human casters, because that's about what I have in mind. I suppose a Blood Elf mage might work though. Or an eladrin wizard in D&D?

We've finally officially opened up recruiting for Hand of the Blightcaller, though it's been pretty slow so far. I think it will help the most to get into the habit of throwing out the occasional guild recruitment spam in-game. Hey, now we'll only have to explain that we're an RP guild to people who don't bother reading the message! With Curse we were having to explain both that we were an RP and an all-Forsaken guild when Frostshocklol the Troll shaman responded to our GR tells wanting to know if he cn hv invite. Ironically, right before we finally got that going was when I decided to push Meg those last couple levels to 80, so now I'm spending more time on her than when Dariahn was effectively unguilded. It doesn't help that it's Brewfest, which is for all intents and purposes Her Holiday. I've been running the holiday boss as much as I can trying to get the ram for her. I've done a couple Heroics with her, and I feel mostly confident on that level. It's really just a matter of getting the hang of warrior taking again.

I'm such a geek that last weekend I pointed out to Andrew that we can't go to RenFest this weekend because we have D&D.

For anyone who's interested but doesn't follow his journal, I posted a new Dariahn story over there.

I'm super-antsy to get home today because, after hearing that some people on wow_ladies had successfully petitioned GMs to free up the names of inactive alts, I asked if there was any way I could get them to free up a name so I could snag it for my Forsaken hunter. I got to work to find an email from Blizzard Support saying they had determined it was being used by an inactive character and had freed it up for me, and recommended I snag it as soon as possible. OMG awesome! Except...I'm at work. There's server maintenance this morning, which will give me a little more of a grace period (and let me feel less bad about not checking before I left for work), but I'm still going to be antsy all day. Not that I imagine scads of new characters with believable RP names are being rolled on TB immediately after maintenance on a weekday when the kiddies are back in school, but...I want my name. I already deleted Etheris' placeholder to make room.

So yes, I have started planning for Cataclysm, not by getting all worked up about a new worgen or goblin character but by getting excited for the new race/class combinations. I'm planning to go ahead and start my Forsaken hunter up as a low-level "civilian" character, possibly even having him involved with Hand of the Blightcaller in some administrative capacity. I'm not going to poach his name from an inactive alt just to slap it on another alt who'll stay inactive for a year, after all, and I like the idea of establishing him as a little bit of a character ahead of time. Likewise I went ahead and rolled up a placeholder for my Tauren paladin once it really sunk in that this means I can have a Horde paladin without playing an elf. Her name, which was available, is going to be Opelika. (Yes. Har har.) I made her placeholder a warrior but I think I'll have her be a druid for a few levels since the Tauren paladin path seems thus far to be an offshoot of their druids. Maybe she can dip her hoof in the Kalimdor RP scene, too.

I'm so glad I got that second account.

*flails*

So I guess there's a lot to talk about, huh?

I haven't yet gotten my hands on the Allspark Almanac, but the more I hear about it the more I am filled with need. Barnes & Noble said they would call me when it came in, but they also said it shipped on the 15th, so if I don't hear back from them this weekend it will be time to go a'hunting.

Andrew and I decided to take last Friday off and got the Blizzcon live stream from DirectTV. We hooked up his second computer to the TV and watched the big stuff in the living room, which made me realize it wouldn't be that big of an issue to put together a media center PC and cancel the cable. Now that Transformers Animated is cancelled the only things we really watch are Clone Wars and the occasional MSNBC, and I don't think I can say that's worth $40 a month. We may jack up our broadband a little more while we're at it.

The news about Cataclysm pretty firmly answered a question I had been pondering every so often: What's going to happen when WoW2 is released? Apparently the fracturing of the community I feared was forseen by Blizzard as well. In one of the panels they said as much, that they had seen other MMO sequels fragment their communities too much and they preferred something truly game-changing like Cataclysm as an expansion rather than a sequel so there would continue to be one WoW community. I'm really looking forward to it myself, not because I'm all worked up to roll a werewolf like 95% of the rest of the community but because I'm dying to see this little virtual world I know so well get a new coat of paint. I suspect I'll be getting the most out of my two accounts by having space to level at least a couple new alts through the new content. I'll definitely be rolling an undead hunter, and I'll likely use it as an excuse to level one or two of my existing forgotten alts. Maybe I'll even level a paladin like I've been meaning to! Tee hee, Holy Cow.

For those waiting with bated breath for an update on my Death Knight's post-patch status (so nobody):

I haven't gotten a chance to specifically run with Hekimi again yet but I did Heroic AN with Andrew's shiny probably-undergeared just-80 healadin and Heroic ToC with a shaman friend and now that I actually have my tanking set optimized for, you know, tanking I seem to be back up to if not above my pre-patch durability level. There was a little trouble on Heroic ToC but I hear that last fight is a nightmare for healers so I'm chalking it up to the instance itself and not a failing on anyone in particular's behalf. We did get him down after a few tries, at least. So I'm feeling a lot better about continuing to tank with him than I was a week ago. Which is good if I'm likely about to be MT for Hand of the Blightcaller. DPS is still fun and I worked on optimizing that set too, and if I got to a point of deciding between him and Meg being my tank I would probably go with Meg just because I like DK DPS more than warrior DPS, but I am feeling much more secure in my tankhood.

I tend to lay off the patch notes until right about when a new patch goes live to avoid getting too excited/upset about any changes that don't even end up making it live, but in with the much more interesting talk of dual-wielding becoming more viable for Death Knights and fun Engineering changes there were murmurings of an overall passive mitigation nerf for my new favorite class. I wasn't too worried - How bad could it be? - until I asked a friend who regularly heals for me (Hi Hekimi/Sam!) in the middle of a Culling of Stratholme run and he said I was significantly squishier. Ugh. So because I am unreasonably tempermental lately I spent the rest of the week swearing off tanking, running the new Heroic instead with Tendaros and a shiny new secondary DW Frost DPS spec. And I continued to make Andrew curse at me for pushing close to his DPS in unenchanted, ungemmed half-PvP castoffs, though I actually put a little effort into gemming some and replacing others with gear from the non-Heroic ToC. But last night I ended up getting pulled into a Naxx-10 roflstomp with some friends, and I offtanked most of it alongside Ten, and it actually wasn't quite as bad as I feared. And as I stood there in the armor shop with my shiny Tier 7 head token pondering which to get I decided to spend this week digging into my roflcycle savings to get my tank gear absolutely optimized and get back on top of that game. I realized part of my post-patch problem was that my innate class OPness had allowed me to do crazy shit things like filling nearly all my gem slots with Hit/Stam gems to help my DW fixation and put Nitro Boosts on my tanking boots. All of that's gonna get cleaned up, then we'll see how squishy I am. I love the class enough to work for it.

At this point we're staying the course on TB and trying the new guild thing. Andrew's in the process of kicking everyone out of Curse and dividing up the bank stuff between people who have been actively participating for the last few months. We'll probably move our own characters over to the new guild this week and I need to write up some recruitment posts. Also he wants to get Tyrelys through that last push to level 80 so he can have a raid healer for the new group. We already have some friends interested in either joining the guild or joining us on guild runs from outside the guild, so hopefully we can at least start looking at 10-mans soon. We'll probably forgo regular open RP events for the time being, but a fortnightly guild meeting is likely in the cards. Hopefully this will renew a little bit of that faith in the server as a whole. Since I gave up trying to run Brill it's significantly better already.

I've started to realize - and I realized it before Andrew pointed it out to me last night - that lately if I'm RPing Dariahn then Tendaros is around, and if Tendaros is around Dariahn's being kind of a mushy doofus, and so it seems like that's the end-all be-all of his characterization when it's just that I don't tend to RP out the 99% of the time when he's being a hardass Death Knight out killin' stuff at Plagos' command while his player is, like, at work. I should probably make a point to actually have him be social sometime when Ten isn't around, but often if Ten isn't around I just go do dailies or level a troll or something.

The troll's name is Yayana, incidentally, and she's the result of me thinking the other day when I was home sick due to my immune system's entrenched campaign against my lower intestine that I have all these hunter alts that have never made it past the mid-50s, likely because they've never had dedicated leveling-and-more-importantly-RP partners, and Andrew has been yearning for a troll priest, so there we go. I've never really had a troll character, probably because I rightly suspected I would end up just RPing them as hut trash, but I'm enjoying her so far. ("So far" being to level 10.) She's lazy but she's clever, in a "I'm gonna tame me a beastie to do all my fightin' for me!" way. She's going out into the world because her momma kicked her out of the hut and told her to get her sorry ass a job. If I do stick to leveling her I think there's going to have to be some major character development to get her to the point of facing down actual serious threats, because as she is now you'd have to drag her kicking and screaming to Northrend. It's cold up there!

And this leads kind of neatly into thoughts about the guild. After discussing things with our officers and friends we've decided pretty solidly at this point to spin off into a new guild under the banner [Hand of the Blightcaller]. The niche guild idea is a good one, but it's very limiting and we've reached a point where it's kept us from having more than a handful of serious active members. And very few members means very little in-guild RP. There's also talk of wanting to get some raiding in for level-capped members, and we can't rely on only Forsaken to do that. It was decided pretty unanimously, though, that Curse was so at its core an all-Forsaken guild that it would be better to spin off into a new guild than open up Curse itself. The guild will still be very much an RP in-character organization, and while Andrew is interested in putting together the raiding side of things I'll likely be putting my efforts into drumming up RP and keeping the story and theme going. I like to think of it as a darker version of the "military" guilds that are popular right now, a serious unit but one that isn't afraid to use warlocks and Apothecaries and Death Knights and such to get things done, that fights the Scourge not for honor or goodness or the Light but for vengeance. Membership will be open to any character who doesn't balk at the idea of being led by a warlock or fighting alongside others with questionable morals - or who will at least tolerate them for the overall goal. We should be making the transition within the next week or two. And hopefully it'll give me more of a chance to RP Dariahn's more soldiery side.

It still needs some detailing, and Andrew and I are still working on sculpting the helmet, and it's not a great photo, but here's an in-progress pic of Umbra, the Acherus Deathpony!

Step 1: Move Java Monster from the fridge to the freezer about half an hour before drinking it.

Step 2: Chug deliciously frosty Java Monster.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: PROFIT!

So stuff. My car seems to have developed an oil leak on top of the slow coolant leak it already had, so I'll have to be keeping an eye on that. The funny thing was every time I took it in for anything they swore up and down it had an oil leak, and they never ever mentioned a coolant leak, but it was always the coolant that I had to refill and the oil level was right where it was supposed to be. Now the oil is actually pretty unquestionably leaking. It's not the quart-a-day hemmoraging that my Neon was doing late in its life, so I should be able to keep on top of it. I'll need to get it fixed eventually, but right now Andrew's car is looking at much, much worse problems, so I'll just let it be an excuse to tinker with it every weekend.

I like pretending anybody but me cares about my car.

Yesterday I decided to finally go ahead and order a blank My Little Pony from Hasbro Toy Shop to make into an Acherus Deathpony. I want to get back into painting projects, and I think this would be an excellent start. I'll likely end up buying a new air compressor and airbrush set for it as well, to get the whole glowy blue-white flame effect right. I don't know if there's enough cross-audience to tell me how well Citadel Colours work on MLP bodies, though. Maybe I should have ordered two...

After some debate with Andrew over the weekend about RP characters and some following half-serious talk with Sam about my own outlook on things I came to the rather depressing conclusion (at least before I started chugging Java Monster, making myself immune to depression) that whereas some people like RPing assholes because they're nice people in real life, I seem to RP nice, idealistic people because I like to pretend to be someone whose faith in humanity has not been crushed into powder under the weight of everyday interactions. Self-psychoanalysis through analyzing my own creative output has been a hobby of mine since high school, probably a grossly misguided one, but one I stick to nonetheless. This is probably why I'm such a wuss about tackling terrible, abusive relationship stories, because I don't like what I think they say about me, even if it's entirely my own judgement. And by that I mean why I pulled so many punches with Dariahn's backstory. Also because I like to pretend in my own little world that even terrible people have sincere if disturbed and misguided motivations.

And that's my caffiene-induced navel-gazing for this week. Cheers!

I am now on Steam as AutobotTrixter. Be my friend.

The only reason I find the Mark Sanford thing so very, very amusing is because he was being such a turd to Obama over the stimulus money. It is really, really amusing to watch him being completely incapable of keeping his mouth shut for like 10 minutes, though. I blame this on me being a horrible person.

Z-Con was awesome and fun! It was great having so many friends around hanging out and doing stuff, even if it got a little overwhelming after a while and I still haven't quite recovered from the sleep deprivation. Tomorrow I'm off work and Andrew isn't, so I'm pretty much gonna sleep 'till noon. Origins was awesome, and even though we were only there for a couple hours it prodded a little bit at that growing hunger I've had to do more gaming. Also I am obsessed with pretty dice. I'm still way more interested in the RP aspect than the number-crunching, but I find myself wanting to roll up characters for things I don't even have a campaign for or alternate characters for games I am involved in. Bloodaxe saw me leering gleefully at the updated rules for Nagai, who I am unreasonably fond of largely for having been introduced at the tail-end of the old Marvel Star Wars series (I have a long history of fondness for things from late Marvel comic runs.), and bought me the Legacy-era campaign-guide, so as soon as I get around to printing up some extra character sheets I will totally make one whether I have a place for it (him?) or not. Our apartment has had some serious cleaning done, and while it's still a bit small for entertaining on the level we tried with Z-Con, it's in pretty good shape for a modest tabletop group and/or to set up space for painting projects.

My latest random alt craving in WoW is a draenei hunter who I made solely to come to terms with my inner conflict between how much I like cats as a general rule and how overused and overpowered they've been in WoW in the past. She's another incarnation of my old well-meaning alcoholic Avalaa, white-on-white this time (she had blue hair before) and on Wyrmrest Accord for no real good reason. I was tempted to roll her up on Moon Guard because a lot of TB's Alliance went over there and I know they're still around, but in the end curiosity about the new server won out. But she's only level 5, so I can still be swayed. ;) I'll be taking her over to Dwarfland soon because I've done those quests once, years ago, and done the Draenei ones like a million times. Once she's level 10 she is totally getting one of those pretty white cats that used to scare the crap out of me on my very first character.

I also poked around Ravenholdt a little on my Death Knight there and drummed up some random RP just by being vaguely polite to another DK, but I'm clearly still having seperation issues with TB and just can't stay away from it for more than a couple hours tops. Even between getting my draenei to level 5 and saying hello to my Ravenholdt DK I had to log into TB just to make sure it hadn't burned down.

I should level a gnome, too, just to experience the world as huge and terrifying.

( So. Revenge of the Fallen. )

So yeah, I enjoyed it, much more than the first one. It's a high-concept geek (but not nerd) movie, and I can see where it would be easy for the uninitiated to get lost, but as someone who's already schooled in who's who and what's what I found it to be thrilling, if a bit cringe-inducingly juvenile at times.

Also Sideswpie's a hottie.

For all my cynicism and criticism of Michael Bay and the first Transformers movie, I find that as the new one approaches I'm actually pretty excited. I've spoiled myself flagrantly, reading io9's daily spoiler posts and an entire post summarizing some early leaks of the novelization. These have done nothing to make me think this movie is going to make any more sense than the first one, or for that matter to not think it's going to be an eye-rollingly written popcorn movie. I suffer no illusions that it will not be terrible, though I believe it will at least be a fun kind of terrible. I'm still excited.

A lot of what I'm excited about is the Bumblebee Blast Slurpees, the Snickers Nougabot Bars, the BBQ Double Stackticons. I'm excited that this week is some kind of crazy, surreal worldwide celebration of Transformers. And I only care so much that it's some completely reimagined version of the Transformers, because there's just enough there to make it real. The only real problem I've had with the movie designs is that they're associated with what I consider to be a piss-poor piece of fiction, and right now that just doesn't matter. What matters right now is that the characters and story that found such a firm footing in my imagination have taken over pop culture as a whole. Fifteen years ago I never would have expected this. Sometimes I still don't.

I have tickets for the midnight IMAX showing at Easton tonight, something I finangled a couple hours of off-time tomorrow morning for to give me a prayer of recovering in time for work. I gave in to my baser urges and bought Skids this past weekend, because despite the fact that he and his brother clearly have some sort of robot Downs Syndrome, despite expecting them to sum up everything that makes me groan about these movies, some part of me still really wanted his toy. (The dumb young character is supposed to be attractive enough to make up for it, Michael Bay! Duh!) I've got plans to see it again with a bunch of friends on Friday. And no matter how stupid I know this movie is going to be, I'm really, really excited about it.

I mean, seriously, it's about the Fallen. WTF?

I've been making Andrew watch Robotech. I've come to discover that, unlike me, he did not actually spend his teenage years amassing geek knowledge. It was only within the last few months that he even heard of Urotsukidōji. I had to explain what the deal is with Magik from the New Mutants, and why Classics Hound came with Ravage. I suppose I can concede that my facination with cultural history is not the norm. Not everybody loves reading Cold War sci-fi for the historical significance. Not everybody's ill-spent youth was ill-spent digging through used book shops for old comic books and out-of-print Lensman paperbacks. But Robotech! I'm thinking this may need to be followed up with the mindfuckery of Neon Genesis Evangelion, though I've just been wanting to revisit that one myself since picking up the Unit 01 Revoltech figure at BotCon and then wandering LAX singing "Fly Me To The Moon" to myself in an incongruous Japanese accent. Also I am ordering the hell out of that new Transformers G1 special edition DVD set, and we are watching it.

I tanked normal Drak'Theron Keep with poor neglected level 75 Meg last night, and I think I've become much too attached to Death Knight mitigation cooldowns. They're like my security blanket.