Trixter's Ramblings

I can has nice things?

2009-11-04T15:06:28Z

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.

Anders

2009-10-08T01:38:33Z

"Mister Anders?"

The young woman's hesitant voice speaking his name cut through the murmur of the Trade Quarter, interrupting the dead man's thoughts. He turned his head slowly toward the woman who now approached him, narrowing his eyes. Another dead person, just like nearly everyone else here. Like he was now, though the thought of himself as one of these had not yet entirely sunk in. He regarded her, trying to place her while her own face started to look a little more confident now that she had a better view of him. Not his Annabelle, certainly, not calling him by something so formal, and anyway she was taller than this little thing in front of him. And certainly not his Brendin. So who she was only mattered so much.

"I'm...not mistaken, am I, sir?" the woman asked as he turned back to stare at the passersby going about their business in the Undercity, leaning against the stone wall. "It can be hard to tell sometimes, you know," she added apologetically. He sighed and grunted an affirmative. She perked up. "Oh, I knew it! But I suppose you don't recognize me, I've changed quite a bit... It's Meridith, you know, the Darrow's daughter?" He turned back to her again. She was wearing official-looking black robes instead of the dresses she had always worn in life, and her once-long blond hair was now a barely-kept teal rat's-nest, but behind the pallor and rot her features did look like the daughter of his employers.

Anders turned back to the Trade Quarter bustle again. "No, I did not," he said. His voice came out a gravelly rasp from disuse and whatever damage death had done to his vocal cords, not even familiar to himself. "But now that you mention it I do. Did the rest of your family survive to join...all this?"

Meridith's polite smile showed a trace of a grimace. "Ah...no. No, it's just me, I'm afraid."

He grunted again and nodded. "Have you seen my family?"

"No, I have not," she answered quietly. She shifted slightly, wrapping her arms tighter around the oversized tome she had been holding close to her chest. "You haven't been free for long, have you?" He shook his head. "Not a lot of us made it here, in the overall view of things. I mean, there are a few thousand of us, but compared to how many were killed..." She frowned as she trailed off. "Though it might not hurt to check with the Undercity Census." Meridith glanced up then, noticing it was just a short way from the Census' record-keepers that Anders had paused. "Unless you...have already." She wilted a little as Anders declined to respond, still glaring at a spot somewhere several feet ahead of him. "I'm...terribly sorry, Mister Anders. If it's any consolation at all, most of us here feel the same. Perhaps I can show you around the city?"

Anders was quiet for a moment, then simply nodded. "Might as well. It's home now, isn't it?"

I am so too old for this...

2009-10-05T19:00:52Z

...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!

Ohshi-

2009-10-03T05:37:14Z

WARNING: 3.3 PTR spoilers ahead!

Having heard that there was srs bsns going down in the Undercity on the PTR, I copied my dashing Death Knight who now gets the proper spelling of his name over and did some investigating. Sure enough, repercussions for the whole Wrathgate debacle may have been slow in coming, but come they did. All the abominations in the Undercity have been replaced with Kor'kron Overseers, and they're none too gentle with their charges...

Well sheesh, excuse me for not needing to breathe... And don't they know the proper derogatory is "deader"? I headed on into the catacombs to the Apothecarium and standing menacingly over Master Apothecary Faranell I found the orc who is doubtless going to be Meridith's new favorite person:

Faranell, for his part, is being very diplomatic about the matter. Fair enough, given that Putress seemed to be kind of a douche to him.

Back upstairs, I decided to gauge the reactions of some more of the guards. They were not sunny.

Finally I headed over to the Royal Quarter to see who's keeping Sylvie warm now. Honestly, in comparison to what I had seen already our new orcish overlord was pretty civil:

So heck, that was worth the price of a character copy and a download right there. (That price was "free".) Forsaken RP sure is about to get way more interesting!

Word-dump!

2009-09-24T15:08:58Z

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.

Storytime

2009-09-16T23:52:50Z

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

Scheming

2009-09-08T15:26:02Z

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.

Play them off, Deathwing!

2009-08-26T16:16:04Z

*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.

Burly

2009-08-13T14:01:04Z

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.

Nerfbats sting. :(

2009-08-10T18:15:48Z

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.

La La La WoW RP Stuff

2009-07-23T15:13:25Z

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.

Preview!

2009-07-19T17:24:21Z

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!

runs around

2009-07-10T17:03:00Z

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!

And so I did.

2009-07-03T02:44:09Z

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

Also I should get Fallout 3.

2009-07-02T17:43:45Z

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.

Fangasm!

2009-06-24T18:57:55Z

So. Return of the Fallen.

The infantile humor was piled on thick, and I found what I thought were supposed to be the "kid appeal" characters to be reprehensible cretins, but it only mattered so much. I completely understand what the critics found confusing and nonsensical about the movie, and it was exactly why I loved it: It was a cartoon, an action cartoon with an action cartoon's high concept and dense internal logic. When I saw the new Star Trek movie I couldn't believe that it was written by the same people who wrote the first movie, but I can absolutely believe that this one was written by them. This is a geek movie, and if you don't have the geek chops to know your Jetfire from your Starscream you might as well just stay home. The first movie got all the pesky establishment of backstory and concepts out of the way, letting this one dive straight into robots beating other robots up over MacGuffins. Starscream, given more lines than you could count on one hand this time, got to actually be Starscream, there was a scene of a Decepticon base that gave me goosebumps, and I could have watched an entire movie about Jetfire. It had the Fallen in it! Despite being up way past my normal bedtime I was wired and grinning like a doofus. There were moments where I realized things I had read about hadn't happened yet and I was excited that this meant the movie wasn't even close to over. Too long? I could watch a season of this!

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.

The Truth That The Eyes Met Before

2009-06-23T16:26:09Z

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?

Fill my heart with song, and let me sing forever more...

2009-06-18T19:59:27Z

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.

Here I am, brain the size of a planet...

2009-06-15T21:03:51Z

I make a point of not doing too much occupational whining here, because I am well aware of all the stories of assorted people having their employers read their internet scribblings. But my problems at the moment are more about my job rather than my employer, and anyway I only care so much right now.

I've been sick the past week. Last Tuesday I came down with a rather nasty cold, missed most of one day and all of another, finally got over my fever in time to work on Thursday and immediately developed a sinus infection so bad that it killed my voice. Stayed home Friday, went to the doctor (well, an urgent care clinic) on Saturday and got antibiotics, spent Friday and the weekend hardly talking above a whisper, tried to work today and ended up coming home a couple hours early because talking was unpleasant and painful and it's all I do. Which is great and all, but as a call center they're really fussy about unplanned absences, and I was already toeing the line - had in fact probably already gone over it - with my bout of not-swine-flu last month on top of the normal day-here, day-there of the year before. Even taking off two hours early today I was made to feel like I was doing something completely unreasonable. What exactly am I supposed to do? When speaking is paid for in a currency of pain you pay close attention to your accounting. These were not avoidable sick days, but on top of them I have to deal with the stress of waiting for the shoe to drop. Because being sick isn't bad enough, I guess. I have the fortune to have a good performance record at work, which for the time being balances out the attendance issues, but it's still a frustration I don't need when I'm already ill.

What I need to do is use this as further impetus to get my ass moving to the next phase of my career plan: Get my A+ certification and get away from constantly being tied to the phones ASAP. Because many of those sick days - like my couple hours today - would not have been incurred if I had a job with any flexibility whatsoever. I already have to be able to be tied to the phone for hours at a time, which can be a problem sometimes due to things that have tempted me to bring the word "disability" down on them. And having to talk to end users constantly is something I already find tedious because it's not really in my personality. During times like this when my chronic sinus problems are acting up it becomes literally painful. The tech support thing was a lovely halfway point from bookstore lackey to PC tech. I need to let these frustrations push me on to the next step. And I have to be open to the idea that it may not be with my current employer, because I get the feeling I would probably be able to find something outside sooner than I would be able to move to a different department.

Other than that the personal side of things has been going well. Right before leaving for BotCon Andrew picked up a refurbished 42" HDTV from his work, and that new addition to the living room pushed us to finally get the place out of its post-move entropy and make it livable. Also we got a $15 loveseat at a yard sale. And then we actually had friends over. I realized that my beautiful but ancient DVD player didn't have widescreen output, so I picked up a super-cheap one at Big Lots to fill in until we can get around to getting a BluRay one and it turned out to be region free. I am going to buy such imported Transformers DVD sets! It'll give me a reason to keep it around even after we've upgraded.

Our Naxx group is still going well, having finally cleared the Construct Quarter for the first time this weekend. I think we have the fights down and I think we have the gear, we just need to streamline things so we'll have enough time to work up to a full clear. Andrew and I make a really good Razuvious tag-team, what with not having to use Vent to time our trade-offs. It makes him nervous 'cause he's really not used to raid-tank levels of responsibility, but we managed to one-shot him last night, so I don't think he needs to worry. My guild angst has settled down a little, possibly because others have shown an interest in taking on some of the responsibilities, possibly because Andrew and I have taken up a side-project of leveling Alliance alts on a server with some of my coworkers, and possibly because I was just too damn sick to angst last week.

I am so going to go eat a popsicle now.

cough

2009-06-10T01:38:59Z

I think my general WoW malaise...

2009-06-08T02:16:45Z

...pretty much comes down to this.

Thoughts (And Lots of Them)

2009-06-03T17:52:01Z

BotCon was just amazing fun this year, even if we ended up missing Sunday. I don't know that there's much to say that hasn't been said elsewhere, news-wise. Also all over Twitter because Twitter and I got along really well on this trip. My sinuses decided it would be a fun time to screw with me and I ended up having trouble getting my ears to pop properly on the trip out, but they more or less cleared up by the time I had to get on the flight home and the exorbitantly overpriced pressure-equalizing earplugs I bought at LAX on the way out seemed to keep it from happening again. It was noticible how much lighter the #wiigii! contingent was this year, and while I really missed a few people it was awesome seeing those who could make it. I thought the MSTF went really well, and despite the urgency it was fun hanging out in a hotel room together working on it - bonus points for Derrick Wyatt hanging out with us. Getting to see Weird Al was a thrill, and he managed to defuse the always-awkward Q&A really well. I'm looking forward to the reissue Perceptor and movie Bludgeon most of everything shown at the Saturday Hasbro panel. I'm a bit wary of the idea of everything being based on the movie style for a while, but I think that's less because of any problem with the movie style itself and more because the movie is a sorry excuse for fiction. I didn't get a whole lot of toys because I skipped prereg again this year (maybe if they get some Animated molds next year...) and we bought a new TV immediately before leaving, but I was satisfied with what I picked up.

This year the focus for me was very much on Transformers because I've been feeling kind of disillusioned with WoW. Not the game specifically, and not my characters, but my place in it at the moment. I'm really, really tired of running a guild. I'm tired of being accountable both for our low membership and for any problems with anybody I try to bring in to pad out that membership, I'm tired of being expected to arrange raids for everybody, I'm tired of 14-year-olds deciding I'm their new best friend. I'm tired of running events that hardly anybody in my own guild bothers to come to. I have a big target on myself at work, and I'm tired of having it in my hobby as well. We've reached a point where for one reason or another we just don't have the team dynamic that I see in other guilds. I see a group like the Zepher Crew or more recently the Scourgebane Outriders, see how their characters relate to each other and get involved with each other's lives, and I really wish we had more of that. I want to blame myself for this, but I don't know to what degree that's valid. I just want to blame myself for everything, and that, as it turns out, makes me very ill-suited to guild leadership. I think a lot of that problem is because, including myself and Andrew, we have a sum total of four "mains" in the guild right now. It's mostly alts, and with occasional exceptions alts don't usually have the depth or time commitment to really contribute to a team dynamic. Our guild RP has gotten stagnant and I don't think I as a single person can fix that.

I tried not to think about WoW too much while I was out there because I didn't want the stress of all this to overshadow the convention, but at the same time it was a good chance to step away and mull things over. There was a point late last week where I really wanted to just disband and take my characters into other guilds that still did have that team dynamic. Andrew and I even discussed starting up an RP raiding guild allied with other smaller RP guilds where my responsibilities would be limited to making sure tanks were defense-capped and trying to drum up RP. Leaving the server was off the table until we discovered upon returning that two of our best friends are transferring off to an RP-PvP server. The idea of moving to Mood Guard or Wyrmrest Accord didn't sit well with me because I've come to associate them too much with legions of vampire catgirl Blood Elves, whether fairly or not, and I love my characters on TB too much to reroll. But this isn't one of those trendy new servers. Last night while TB was down I started a Death Knight on their new server, but I didn't quite make it out of the starting area, and between that and the number of people who rolled there just to grief because their own servers were down I didn't get much of a feel for the place. Maybe later this week she'll get to be that stereotypical level 58 DK sitting around Brill in her starter armor.

As an aside, I would like to note that I feel terribly self-conscious for defaulting to Death Knights for everything, because it's very much the easy-answer flavor-of-the-month thing to do, but I really truly do love the class both mechanics- and lore-wise. In a few years when everyone is off with their new Demon Hunters who start at level 65 in a yet-to-be-implimented island off Shadowmoon Valley I will still be rolling Death Knights by default. I would do this if they started at level 1. I love Death Knights, and I love RPing them.

For the moment I'm going to turn the guild over to Plagos to get my finger off the trigger and see where things go from there. I have three major characters I refuse to abandon, three who I wouldn't be willing to part with and who I couldn't transfer without the others (at the very least the Wheeler siblings are inseperable), so transferring would be a huge commitment and not one I want to take lightly, even with friends already on the other side. Dariahn's finally got some very interesting RP going on that I'm loathe to pull him away from, and in a similar vein I don't know that I could take Meg if Andrew wasn't willing to take Tyrelys as well. So for now I'm going to sit back and mull things over. I don't see the server getting better, but I'm usually content so long as I have a handful of people I trust and enjoy RPing with. I'll just have to see how it plays out.

It occurred to me over the weekend that what I really need is a good Transformers RP group, but I don't know that I see one meeting my ridiculous standards without starting it myself, and I don't know that taking on yet more responsibility will help anything. If anyone's got suggestions by all means say something.

On the way out the door to BotCon...

2009-05-28T14:00:21Z

I hate California
There’s something out there I just don’t get
I know your friends out there must think I’m pretty strange
Because I dress as if the weather’s gonna change
But it never does
I hate California

I hate California
The sun goes down the wrong side
Something in the water, maybe something in the sand
Maybe some west coast thing I’ll never understand
Maybe just because
I hate California

I don’t blame the Beach Boys
I don’t blame Hollywood
I don’t blame L.A.
Although I probably should
I don’t blame the sky for its careless shade of blue
Lord knows I don’t blame you
Lord knows I don’t blame you

I hate California
One more beach day come and gone
And by the time you’ve finished gazing at the sea
3,000 miles away there’s nothing left for me
If there ever was
I hate California

I don’t blame the Beach Boys
I don’t blame Hollywood
I don’t blame L.A.
Although I probably should
I don’t blame the sky for its careless shade of blue
Lord knows I don’t blame you
Lord knows I don’t blame you
Lord knows
I hate California

Cranking Up

2009-05-18T20:14:50Z

My workplace network has gotten so slow at loading internet sites and it's driving me crazy. Something screwed up with the proxy settings or something. I'm not about to call my employee-support counterparts to whine that Twitter won't load fast enough.

I've realized that my wardrobe of clothes that actually fit me at this point has grown worrisomely thin, and while I don't care about going to Kroger looking like a bag lady I don't want to be at BotCon like that, so next week I'm totally buying some new clothes. I need some trouser-cut jeans in size Bigger Than I Care To Admit and a couple new clever t-shirts, stat!

I'm torn on whether to take Project Laptop (AKA Auntie) with me out to CA or just the netbook. I brought it up to Sam, who suggested I take neither, which I explained was sacrelige comparable to tell me not to take my DS. Project Laptop is huge, weighs a ton, and has unreasonable power and cooling needs, but on the other hand it has a full 1024x768 screen that would be very helpful if I decide to actually modify and upload photos while I'm there. It also has a DVD player that will play any region now that I'm running Ubuntu on it, which would be useful if the thing didn't overheat after like 10 minutes. I may have to dismantle it for a good cleaning and see if that improves before I make a final decision there. It's always a pain trying to get videos up and running at BotCon, and the Eee has some codec issues with a lot of .avi files. Also no DVD drive.

In WoW news, I got Dariahn set up for dual specs after fiddling around enough with my second DK to decide that Unholy was a lot of fun. It's really nice to be able to go out and just give things the beatdown and not be in constant fear of death like I am with Meri. Also I immediately ran a Heroic in my PVP epics and ungemmed blues from runs where nobody else wanted them and rolled my face around on the keyboard and got more than acceptable DPS. I'm starting to wonder if I really have the proper temperment for casual raiding, because I find myself more and more having less fun the more casual everyone else is. And it's sad because I really, really like all these people, and then they go AFK forever and all my buffs I worked hard to farm wear off and we're not moving as fast as I'd like through trash or regrouping fast enough after boss wipes and kills and people from the group I was trying to organize but gave up on start being upset that I'm running without them and I kind of want to just park myself in Brill and do nothing but RP. I like having a casual raiding schedule, especially with my RP schedule, but when I raid I want to be serious about it. For that evening I am a raider. I'm already serious enough about it that there are very few things I need from Naxx-10 because I have comparable badge/crafted/Heroic gear in most of my slots. I outgear most of the people there. I'm just doing it for the experience of doing it. Maybe I need to force more RP while we sit around waiting. Maybe I need to keep my DS nearby while I raid. Maybe I need to start drinking.

I still want a fennic fox.

No, no pig flu.

2009-05-13T19:23:37Z

Aaaaaargh today is kind of boring.

So Andrew and I are both feeling much better now. We took him to a clinic over the weekend and they said he had some sort of opportunistic post-flu infection and gave him antibiotics and he slept most of the rest of the day and has been improving ever since. I had my three or four days of wanting to sleep really really badly (but mostly fighting against it because I'm weird) and now I'm done. I might have had a fever on one of those days. By this weekend I suspect we'll both be back up to speed. There may be spring cleaning.

BotCon is soon! Like really soon! Eek! There's been so much going on that I don't really have much spending cash put away, but given that the dealers' room these days is 95% stuff I already either bought or passed up on at retail and 5% stuff I could have bought at a quarter of the price ten years ago if I really wanted it spending cash isn't a huge deal. I will have to try to sweet-talk someone into selling me that Leozack. Has that even been announced? I don't even know. I've always been bad at keeping up with that kind of thing. I'm so behind on the news it's all gonna be awesome surprises. It's nice to be surprised.

Everybody's going on about Star Trek, so I suppose I should too. I thought the time travel aspect, while kind of cheezy in concept, really helped validate this offshoot universe without invalidating the original. I agree with some reviews I've read that Kirk comes off as kind of an unlikable douchebag, but everything else was engaging enough to overcome that, and he did often get his comeuppance, even if he also got, you know, totally undeserved command of a starship. It still felt like a genuine, authentic Star Trek movie rather than a remake. I just wonder if we'll see these new actors show up on the convention circuit.

Now that I have Meridith at 80 and geared for Heroics for values of "Heroics" that = "Heroics with friends who have really good DPS and don't mind dragging my sorry ass through", I'm feeling a strong urge to nest a bit in WoW and just hang around RPing. I couldn't even manage Naxx last weekend without trying to RP with people. I've been reminded lately that what I tend to find most compelling in RP is relationships - not necessarily romantic RP, friendships are just as interesting - and between upheaval in the Zephyr Crew and Dariahn making some very interesting friends in Brill there's a lot of potential for that right now. Both of the Wheelers have strong protective streaks, if different motivations and inner conflicts about it, and I can see a lot of interesting RP coming of them trying to help and take care of their friends. I really think most of what got me so meh about Meridith was when she got too professional and stopped really getting personally attached to anyone but Plagos and Orloc. Maybe she needs to get out and cultivate some friendships again too.

I've suddenly decided I really want a pet fennec fox. Nobody told me there were foxes that people kept as pets!