Booster Gold

King of Mondays

As I said yesterday, I struggled with the time change like I normally do.  As a result this tends to be the worst Monday of the year.  Of course that would be the Monday my wife’s sister decides we need to go out to eat.  By the time we finished work both of us simply wanted to go home and crash.  However we felt obligated to go act normal and attempt to enjoy dinner.  Thing is we don’t get to see my wife’s sister that often.  She works this really odd job where she cleans nuclear power plants when they go into shutdown periodically.  So as a result she and her husband drag their RV all around the country, and it can literally be years before we see them again.

So I did my best to pretend to be normal and pleasant, when all I really wanted to do was go home… climb upstairs to my office and decompress.  Since the night was already pretty much shot we decided to run a few errands when we got back to town.  Dinner was at least relatively enjoyable, and by the time we arrived home I had gotten a bit of a second wind.  Over the years we have been to three different Ruby Tuesdays.  One in our town that just closed this past week, one in Joplin MO and another one in Upstate NY.  It seems like they were doing it wrong.  The one we ate at last night was really rather nice, and had free biscuits and salad bar.  Maybe the one in my town would have survived if they also had this.

Watching Me Sleep

I’m a fat man, and I will likely always be fat.  I have reached a point of acceptance with that.  However my wife and I have been trying to be “less” fat.  Over the course of the last year I lost 70 lbs, and my wife has lost an amount that I have not kept up with as closely… but as much if not more than I did.  She looks absolutely great, and I pretty much still look like myself.  We have done pretty well with diet and while I have fallen off the wagon a bit in keeping track of my food intake…  I have managed to remain the same weight…  so the habits seem to have stuck.  One of the things we both struggle with is exercise.  So for awhile now we have kicked around the idea of getting a Fitbit.  Yesterday we picked up a couple and now I am under constant surveillance.

One of the interesting features is that it keeps track of your sleep patterns.  When it comes time to go to bed, you rapidly tap your bracelet until it buzzes and it knows you are going into sleep mode.  I have often wondered why I feel like shit after getting what seems to be an otherwise good nights sleep.  Apparently last night for example I woke up ten different times through the night.  Some of these I remember, but the majority I do not.  This also explains why the covers on my side of the bed are always fubar.  Granted last night it was a bit odd trying to sleep in what is essentially a watch band, but I will get used to it.

Booster Gold

The big news yesterday that I have somehow neglected to talk about until just now… is that while I was off at lunch running errands, it seems that Warlords of Draenor preorders went live.  Granted this weekend there was a leak of a boost to 90 trailer video.  So we mostly assumed that at some point this week the preorders would go live, as well as the boost to 90.  The other thing that caused quite a bit of a ruckus was that a “release date” has been entered into the systems for 12/20/2014.  However minutes later Blizzard came out saying that this was not the final launch date, but that the game would be launching sometime during the Fall.  So that begs the question… what exactly does “Fall” mean.  Some are saying September, and at last years Blizzcon they stated that we would be playing Warlords by the time the next Blizzcon rolled around.

My friends have suggested that we are likely going to see a significantly truncated beta cycle, but even at that… it would be nice if that actually started.  I would feel significantly better about the projected launch if I knew that friends and family alpha was at least going on.  Not that I am expecting to be in it mind you, but just knowing it is happening is a good sign.  Now that I have a free boost to 90 that came with my preorder, I am not exactly in a huge rush to use it.  For some time now I had planned to use it to boost up a mage to 90.  I figured this was the one class that I was least likely to level on my own.  I had been playing my little Warlock, and even streamed the hell out of it on Sunday.  Demonology is essentially the “faff about while your demon kills things” spec, and I was perfectly okay with this.

However it is starting to seem like Frost is the “faff about while your elemental kills things” spec.  At one point last night I ended up having to afk in a cave to take care of something… and I fully expected to log back in dead and have to run back to my corpse.  Turns out my elemental killed everything that got anywhere near me.  I am sure this will not last for long, but it was entertaining to watch for a few minutes before I took back control of my character.  At this point my plan is to level the mage to 60 and then boost him to 90 with the doodad.  Essentially my logic is this… I would far rather level to 60 in the cataclysm old world content, which I enjoy…  than level three tradeskills all the way to 600.  If you boost a 60+ character you get your primary and secondary tradeskill to 600 as well as First Aid.  So last night I proceeded to strip my warlock of all of his heirlooms and am now in serious mage leveling mode.

Another Experiment

Yesterday I talked about my experiment over the weekend with streaming through FFSplit to my Twitch.tv channel.  It seemed to work pretty well, and the overall video quality was acceptable.  Now it is time to take it to the next level…  the one where I actually unmute my microphone.  To go a step further, I have created a channel on our guilds mumble server called “Bel Is Streaming” and my hope is to coax my friends to join me in the channel and be entertaining… so I don’t have to.  I can’t say I will have the most exciting stream in the world, and I don’t even hope to do it as well as the Qelric…  but it might be fun.  I decided to name this endevour “Bel Faffs About!” in honor of the Godmother of Faff who raised the consciousness of all things faffing over the last year.  My plan is to post on twitter anytime I am streaming something, and just let the chips fall where they may.  I’ve heard rumor that this weekend is another big ESO beta event, and if that is the case I will stream it as much of the weekend as I can.  In the meantime, expect me leveling my mage to 60 and playing some Diablo 3.