Cyrodil Bound

Prouds, I has them

Yesterday was the second day in a row I managed to hit the default goal of 10,000 steps since I got my fitbit.  While I normally clock in at the 8,000 steps range I have actually hit 10,000 four times so far.  As I wrote when I got my fitbit, it makes interesting tweaks in the way you look at the world.  These last two days I mostly performed a simple tweak to my routine.  I spend most of my life pushing as many things as possible to autopilot, and as such… unless it is super important I try and make things absolute routine.  As a result I prefer to park in exactly the same place every day, so I don’t have to think about where I parked.  The only place that is reliably open is the roof of the parking garage, and while I do try and find a covered place when there is bad weather… it works for me.

Normally speaking I have been going up and down the stairs from the roof for a while now, but I opted to make a slight tweak in this routine.  Instead of walking the stairs, I decided to walk the long winding ramp between the 6th and 4th floor.  This is a large number of new steps to add to my routine, and I think is really the difference between consistently having 8,000 days and 10,000 days.  My other friends that are also using the fitbit tend to skew the results by walking in place at night or pacing the halls to try and finish off their steps.  I however wanted to try and tweak my routine to a point at which it was sustainable and repeatable, and slowly over time I am getting there.

A new thing my wife and I have been doing in the evenings is attempting to walk to dinner.  Granted we live in the suburbs and it is not exactly designed for walkability… but we are making it function.  There are a number of restaurants that are within a mile of the house and Wednesday night we walked a grand total of 4200 steps to RibCrib and back.  Last night she got home super late so we didn’t do this, but instead walked around the corner to the grocery store to buy a ream of paper and some advil.  It seems that if we are walking someplace with a purpose in mind, it is easier.  This is still very new to us, but so far we both seem to be adjusting well.  The only negative is that I seem to have developed shin splints which hurt like hell, but hopefully they will lessen over time.

Cyrodil Bound

If you remember some weeks back there was a question as to which campaign to choose.  After much discussion we ended up picking Wabbajack, and apparently this was a very good choice.  It seems as though the Daggerfall Covenant is doing extremely well there, and when I logged in last night we had the faction wide buff indicating that we had crowned an Emperor.  In addition we managed to hold all of the elder scrolls, but as my friend Kodra reported it looked like we were about to lose one of the keeps holding a scroll.  I feel a little bad that as cool as Cyrodil seems, last night was the first night since the mandatory pvp testing weekends that I had set foot in it.  I completely skipped the tutorial quests, which are apparently really good, and worth a lot of skill points… and jumped straight into combat.  I had more fun than I have really had in PVP ever… or at least since Dark Age of Camelot.

We successfully defended the keep, and took several objectives around the keep.  What was nice about defending the keep is that we were able to consistently push Ebonheart Pact away from the siege weapons and destroy them, giving our keep time to repair.  I died a ton, but also managed to get in my fair share of killing blows thanks to being able to shield charge into targets.  I pvp’d as sword and shield and overall I was pretty pleased with the results.  I might tweak things up a bit, to add a bit more annoyance to my toolbar.  I managed to get three skill points and at the end of the night was halfway through realm rank two.  All in all it was a fun little outing and something I could see doing again in the near future.

Podcast In the Air

For some time I have been streaming in the evenings from time to time, and in doing so I hop on mumble and join a channel called “Bel is Streaming”.  Folks pop into the channel and we end up chatting about damned near everything but the thing we happen to be playing.  When I went back and listened to some of the videos…  they almost sounded like impromptu podcasts.  This started a discussion among a few of my friends and is slowly working its way towards a real podcast.  There is a group of friends that I have been hanging out on mumble with on an almost nightly basis.  Over this time we have developed a really good chemistry, and the goal is to take that same chemistry to a podcast.

So sometime in the very near future we will be recording our inaugural episode.  I will be joined by my good friends Rae, Kodra and Ashgar.  Between us we each have just enough overlap of tastes to make it work, and just enough divergence to hopefully make for differing points of view.  Rae is currently working on some really amazing Chibis of us to eventually become a logo.  Special thanks to Sypster to answering some questions and helping me pick a libsyn package.  We don’t really know what we are doing…  but that is okay, we all have to start out not knowing what we are doing.  Right now the gameplay is to keep a google doc going with potential topics, and then just see what happens on air.  Hopefully it will be something worth listening to.