Further Assimilations

• 10:14 Ok, fandom: if you say, "Oh, I want to be *just like* Rorschach", or indeed any Watchmen char, I suspect you've utterly missed the point. #
• 10:33 Huh. The WoW Armory seems to be busted, I can't look anyone up. #
• 11:08 @UrsulaV Fools on the Internet are like the legendary Hydra - cut one down, and two more spring forth to replace it. #
• 13:21 Meiran's going to want to see this: tinyurl.com/aum42e 1978 "Lost Ark" story conference, Lucas and Spielberg (125pg. PDF) #

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• 06:25 Since I didn't manage to see a single new movie in 2008, the Oscars piqued my interest not at all. #
• 09:15 Sewing machine FAIL. Got nice book, but was too busy with other errands this weekend to sit down and play with machine. Maybe later this wk. #
• 19:14 @fuzzface00 I found out about the anti-air flak in WoW the hard way myself! Thank goodness for mage Blink and Invisibility. #

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• 09:31 @meiran Awesome! Very well done! Are you going to shoot for "Elder" in the last couple days you have left? #
• 09:44 A 32-degree morning seems much balmier compared to the 12-degree ones last week. #
• 10:05 Dangit, I have just accidentally spammed Starr's work address with the invite to the Shadowrun tonight. Hurr, me use computer good. #
• 11:47 @meiran I picked up the coins for all of Kalimdor yesterday (not counting capital cities). The Horde outposts were a bit exciting :) #
• 12:01 I think the guy two people ahead of me in the lunch line was trying to pay in Euros or something. #
• 13:15 Wish I could leave early. I still have dishes and laundry to put away before gaming. And the Xmas tree should come down someday too. #

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This morning Chesapeake got its first real frost of the season. Combine that with a very light fog, and the drive to work was just generally washed out a bit. Just a little bit dim and faint, as though the world was fading in around me and had gotten stuck at 98% complete.

On the other hand, at least I got to make the entire drive with the sun up. This has nothing to do yet with the longer days, but with the fact that the new kitten fall asleep on my chest this morning as I read the night's email. I can't blame it on the kitten - she weighs substantially less than a pound - but she was certainly a contributing factor.

Did you know you can program your computer to play World of Warcraft for you while you're not there? Pretty pointless of course, and Blizzard and the rest of we players would like it to stop because it messes up questing and the economy, but it can be done. I decry the practice - decry, decry - but the one place I'd consider it is the Fishing hobby.

You can level up your character's Cooking skill by standing in front of a stove for a few minutes with all those critter parts you've been collecting while you killed everything. You can do the same for your First Aid skill by spending five minutes making bandages from all the cloth the bad guys dropped. But leveling up Fishing takes hours and hours and hours and hours of staring at the little float on your fishing line. The higher Fishing level you reach, the larger number of hours you'll be spending for the next 25-point gain.

WoW fishing is fairly useful in the game, and I wish I had a higher level in it, but this is just too much realism for me.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I will repeat that using the autoplay programs will get a player banned from the game, and myself I agree with Blizzard's reasoning on the matter. On top of all that, it's also lame. You don't want to be lame, do you?

Nice, nagging back pain today, the result of moving boxes. I'm packing everything into those folding white "banker's boxes" so that they'll fit easier in the cars, and so there will be more of them safe for me to lift; but it doesn't mean my body's used to it, oh no. The funny thing's that I didn't do any lifting at all yesterday, because I was simply out of energy. Why does my body keep waiting 24 hours to start announcing muscle pain?

Also, sore throat. Yay weather changes.

Starr and I continued to run around Azeroth for a while last night hitting the candy buckets at the inns. I have the feeling we'll be spending more time before the expansion collecting Achievements than attempting to level, which is absolutely fine with me. The more 'ways to play the game' Blizzard can add, the happier I'll be to keep forking over my subscription, especially since I've never exactly been a speed leveler, and just am not really sold yet on the whole raiding thing.

After I went to bed, Starr got recruited by a group shooting for the Leeeeeeeeeeeeeroy! Achievement. Seems it didn't work out; but I'd have been mightily amused if it had.

After watching Yahtzee take apart the XBox 360 game "Too Human", I saw a trailer for the new Warhammer Online game starting up, so I stuck around. Now, I won't be playing "WAR", as it's called, if for no other reasons than a) I'm still enjoying WoW just fine, thank you, and b) as is so often the case, I'm using the wrong OS. One WAR developer's mentioned with a wink that he's working on something important involving his non-Windows computer, but I take that with a Massively Multiplayer Grain Of Salt (MMGOS).

Okay, but I do read the blogs from the beta testers, and it looks like while WAR won't be a revolution in online role-playing, they have a few nifty ideas, and kudos to them if they make it all work. As I've said before, I've long grown out of the idea that my fandoms and other people's fandoms must engage in steel cage matches until only one can stagger out. But the point of this whole entry is the reaction I had to the trailer, a reaction that surprised me. While I might have been interested in the game under other circumstances, I hated the trailer. I had an intense negative reaction to it. Why?

WAR has two 'factions' one can play: Order and Destruction. In the trailer, we see Destruction assault a capital city of Order. Death is everywhere, people dying of (bloodless) sword wounds, spear wounds, arrow wounds, magical fire, magical ice, and crushing mass. The trailer shows us the Dwarves, Humans, High Elves, Dark Elves, Greenskin, and Chaos forces slaughtering each other as the city is knocked apart around them. (I am somehow unsurprised that both Elven 'hero' avatars are females who manage to make it through the trailer unscathed, and in the case of the Dark Elf, scantily dressed.)

So, of course there's war. It's called Warhammer! But the video made something abundantly clear: in the world of Warhammer, Destruction wins.

It may not look like it. The last scene of the trailer shows the three Order races facing some huge monster, and we are led to believe that the resolution is up in the air. But look around the heroes. There are bodies everywhere. The city is smashed. Even should the monster be defeated, Destruction can just come back tomorrow, to a city that's still smashed and carpeted with the dead.

(Oh, I know that in the game, the city will reset overnight, buildings will spring back into existence, and the citizens will respawn. I'm not talking about the game, I'm talking about the fictional world.)

It takes years to build a city, weeks to construct a building, and decades to produce an adult warrior. It only takes hours, minutes, or seconds to end that existence. Destruction is easy. The years of food and housing and training and socializing that went into that warrior are countered with a single arrow. If all one cares to produce is wreckage, the world is quite willing to help.

(This, by the way, is why I had to give up on Battletech fiction after a while. Excellent games, and the individual novels ranged from okay to excellent, but they painted a reality where a star-faring humanity nearly pounded itself back to coal and steam, called a truce, recovered long enough to rebuild some technology, and then immediately resumed smashing everything within the reach of a Jump Drive. And they did this cycle repeatedly.)

Now, the game isn't exactly its fiction. Once online, Order and Destruction have nigh-infinite resources in the long run, and new weapons, warriors, and metropolises with the click of a mouse button. But the fictional background shown in that trailer is far too bleak and pointless for my tastes, and unless the WAR loremasters have something up their sleeves, this is a world that offers me little appeal.

Players who participate in WoW Battlegrounds from the 8th to the 24th get a Competitor's Tabard with 4 linked colored rings. What could that refer to? Battleground winners *may* get a gold medal summoning a special dragon pet.

So, I jumped into my first PvP Battleground ever today: "Warsong Gulch", a capture-the-flag competition. Great Cthulhu, but that was lame. I see the enemy, and I'm preparing a spell - oh, I can't move while casting, and they've run off. Okay, another enemy, and I'm using my lower-damage instant spell - oh, their warlock has "feared" me, and I will now run in circles while they zap me dead. Okay, I'm back, and I've infiltrated their base... oh, wait, the enemy Priest just killed me with a single instant spell. Yes, that's right, their Healer class one-shotted me.

Hmm, three captures for the Horde, and they've won. How many did we have? Oh. None at all.

I have the tabard. I've lost interest in the pet.

I really want to sit and watch some good DVDs, preferably with company as I hate watching movies alone. I wonder if it's worth it to buy an upconverting DVD player at some point; we're using the PS2 at the moment.

The Aviator and Catch Me If You Can are on my list. I've seen them before, but they are cool enough to make me appreciate Leo as an actor, and Starr's never seen either. The uncut, re-dubbed My Youth In Arcadia is on the list, as is the recent CGI Appleseed. (Is there an uncut, properly dubbed Galaxy Express 999 available? I'd like to find a good version of that too.)

Also sitting unwatched on my shelf: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Heroic Trio, about which I endlessly badgered kittykatya for a copy; and the new Transformers movie, which may not be fanservice perfection, but at least it's got the right Optimus Prime voice.

We won't even talk about the movies in theaters. Everyone's raving about Iron Man, yes I intend to see Speed Racer despite the reviewer bashing, and ditto Indy 4.

I can't even blame World of Warcraft for this. I enjoy the game enormously, but go weeks without touching it sometimes.

This weekend was good. I got to chill a little bit, which I'd long needed. Had caviar for the first time ever; it tasted mostly of salt, and slightly fishy. I've heard it's served on buttered toast, and I think that would improve it quite a bit.

I also tried the Lord of the Rings online role-playing game. The first thing I noticed is that it's certainly prettier than WoW (and therefore needs more video processing power than, say, my desktop can handle). I enjoyed the Minstrel class I tried - there's something entertaining about whipping out a lute in the middle of a melee and dealing damage with a few bars of a song.

But, when all's said and done, I enjoy the slightly surrealistic graphics of WoW - they seem to fit with a world which has so many fantastic shorthands for everyday actions - and the LotR game takes itself fairly seriously, which also isn't really what I'm here for. I might play it if there were a Mac version and no other competitors, but my subscription will stay with Blizzard for now.

This week's Doctor Who episode brings the Series 4 average down to .667. Even discounting the goofy, thoughtless science - which is hard, since one element is a major plot point - there wasn't much special about it. Donna was great; her emotional arc about the future of humanity and our ethics, and the conditions of the Ood provided a welcome touch of development.

But overall, the episode was fairly formulaic, including at least one completely gratuitous CGI death, and someone trying viciously to kill the Doctor for no reason at all. One touch I did like: ( minor spoiler )

Fun fact: the episode was filmed in sweltering heat - yay for fake snow. And I'm looking forward to seeing some old foes of the Doctor next week!

This morning brought a bank of that 30-meter visibility fog, and the "bridge from nowhere to nowhere" effect on the Monitor-Merrimac. Already, though, it's turned clear, mild, and sunny with a cool breeze: I suddenly want to skip work tomorrow and go to Busch Gardens. Won't, of course, but still.

Yes, "I can't support your virtualization software at this time" means I can't troubleshoot the apps you're running in it, either.

I finally have the free Pirates of the Carribean MMO running correctly on my laptop. I'm likely to play it about as often as I launch Second Life - which is to say, almost never - but it's amusing nevertheless to get "FedEx" quests* from Johnny Depp. None yet from Orlando or Kiera, but then, those are probably saved for people who actually play.

Starr went to her mom's on Tuesday to plant the irises I retrieved. Turns out there were about two dozen, so with the other plants she'd brought, she spent most of an afternoon digging. Add that to her hospital shifts for Wednesday and today, and I've got a still-tired lady on my hands!

Happy WoW stuff: thanks to shrewlet, I got all the materials to finish building Mirandala's epic quality Destruction Holo-Gogs. Among other materials necessary were 206 chunks of difficult-to-mine ore... I can only assume that a LOT of refining is done to turn that into a single pair of goggles.

Also, my polymorph quest issue was resolved while I was offline, so Mir can now turn people into pigs. Thank you, GMs! Too bad that the spell's unavailable to my warlock, since I named her Circy.

And thank you ranchonmars for the postcard! I have too aged since the Pathfinder days, but it's dang nice of you to say otherwise :)

*Game character A gives you item to take to character B, who will reward you with money, loot, XP, or often as not another FedEx quest. Perversely amusing when characters A and B are less than 20 gameworld yards from one another.