Shores of Oblivion

Mornings Are Hard

This one in particular is extremely difficult for some reason.  I guess it could be the fact that I fell asleep at the keyboard last night, and as a result ended up getting to the actual bed far later than I had intended to.  Now as I attempt to jump start my brain with caffeine I am realizing how frustrating the act of a morning can be.  More than anything I am finding myself extremely easily distracted.  Of late several of us have been slowly migrating to Anook.com as a social site.  Primarily this is for the fact that it is ideally suited for a multi-guild meet-up site like the Alliance of Awesome.  At this point I am wondering if I could simply transplant my folks from the House Stalwart forums to the site as well making the whole experience more fluid.

For those who don’t remember… or were not reading my blog at the time, the Alliance of Awesome is a weird experiment that we have been running.  With the launch of Landmark alpha, several of us realized just how many different overlapping groups we were a part of.  So we proposed a grand alliance, and since then many of us have been laboring to make those efforts successful.  Right now the AofA as we call it, is a combination of Combat Wombat, Dark Religion, Mercy Gaming, Multiplaying and House Stalwart.  Elder Scrolls Online was the first game we really went into as a large amalgam guild and so far it seems to have worked extremely well.  I have been shocked at just how little drama has been involved, but I guess that is to be expected when most of us are “thirty somethings”.

Shores of Oblivion

Last night was an odd sequence of events.  Firstly I was supposed to be doing a pen and paper thing with several of my friends.  However I did not want to get into anything too deep because I knew I would need to go do things with my wife when she got home.  As a result I ended up piddling around in Elder Scrolls Online while waiting in a holding pattern.  As the evening went on, the time of her arriving home kept slipping backwards, so in grand total I ended up playing and streaming my gameplay for a few hours.  The mission of last night as always was to finish up Bangkorai.  I have finally reached a point where I think there are just two objective areas left in the map.  However completely by accident I seem to have moved past the zone and into Coldharbor by following the storyline.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVAt some point soon.. or at least as soon as I can find a wayshrine in Coldharbor I will be venturing back to Bangkorai to finish up the last few things on my map.  I find it almost impossible in this game to “skip” content.  It drives me absolutely insane that there is still a black skull on my Alik’r map from a world boss that was bugged out.  I feel like I have to explore every corner of the map before I finally and reluctantly move on to the next area.  At this point I am just a stones throw away from 47, so I figure that I will ding 50 well before I even come close to finishing Coldharbor.  That zone looks equally huge as compared to Bangkorai.  When I posted the above picture on Anook, someone commented about the Mudcrab.  That is “Butter” my faithful companion that has been with me the entire journey.  I am not sure why I bonded with the brown mudcrab pet over the Monkey, Bantam Guar or Red Mudcrab… but I did and he has been at my side throughout all of this.

Crush the Resistance

I love the Elder Scrolls Online with every fiber of my being, but the game requires a lot of focus.  This past weekend and the last few days I have struggled a bit in trying to maintain that focus.  Wandering around the world requires you to be constantly aware of your surroundings, because an afk in the wrong area can end up with a hefty repair bill.  As such I need a game that doesn’t quite matter so much.  For a long while this has been landmark, but I have reached a point of builder burnout there for the moment.  On a whim this weekend I decided to fire back up SWTOR and I have been piddling around on my Caithar Sith Juggernaut.  I never really got to see the Sith side of things, so overall it is pretty enjoyable.  I opted to go Light Side Sith, which seems to be far more my style anyways.  I am this island of honor and nobility in a seething mass of evil.

To be truthful… this specifically is the reason why I logged in over the weekend.  On “May the Fourth” they gave everyone that happened to log in an adorable astromech droid pet.  I could not pass this up, because of my friends… I am the only one who ever seems to be nostalgic enough to re-up a game subscription and revisit games the guild has moved on past.  So while it started out as “get this thing while it was available”, I am actually finding myself enjoying the game again.  It is no real competition for ESO, but it scratches the itch that most everyone seems to be satiating with Wildstar beta weekends.  Additionally… after all this time I finally have a machine that will run SWTOR on maximum everything.  This client is so poorly optimized that even on my laptop with dual video cards… it runs like complete shit.  No clue how long I will piddle around with SWTOR, but I might even stream some of my adventures.

From the Desk of Doctor Hannah

Another good friend of mine decided to enter the Newbie Blogger Initiative fray.  Dallian, otherwise known as Doctor Hannah from twitter… has had a blog for ages, but for the most part it had lived in a dormant state.  I think both the blog and the twitter account started as a joke reference to the now infamous Tabletop episode where Felicia Day creates this massive backstory of Doctor Hannah while playing Last Night on Earth.  So while the blog started off as a joke, at some point during its life it morphed into being Dallian’s personal space.  With the NBI he is taking the step of rededicating himself to blogging more regularly, and about his gaming side as well.  In this post on the forums he mentions wanting to do at least a post a week, but so far he has made like four posts this month.  I will do whatever I can to help support this effort, but in the meantime you should totally pop over to his blog and check it out.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #SWTOR #DoctorHannah #NBI2014