Month: December 2015

Santa and Grumplings

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Santa Lives

I’ve been going through this strange set of emotions since getting out of the movies on Thursday night.  One of the things I am learning about myself is that I am in fact deeply susceptible to nostalgia.  Growing up I honestly thought I was not nostalgic at all, because the things I cared about never seemed to align with the things I was supposed to care about.  Photos for example are just not one of the things I care about that much, and the only time I take a photo of something is when I want to show it to someone else.  I have a pretty good memory when it comes to visual images, and I can always summon up images from the past when I want them… and as such I never placed much value in having a physical representation.  My mother on the other hand…  that is the thing she finds most important in the world and has taken volumes of photos that the world will likely never see… because she never does anything with them.  My nostalgia… seems to be firmly rooted in the things and places that gave me the most joy in the world.  The king of all of this will always be Star Wars, because it truly was my first love.  For so many years I doubted my memories, or at least doubted that I had as much fun with Star Wars as I seemed to remember.

Then Thursday night I watched Force Awakens and remembered just what it was like to experience that level of joy again.  Now I am just riding the giddy contact high of the experience, and looking forward to talking about it with anyone that has already been indoctrinated into the club.  Yesterday there was a sequence of tweets trying to decide when it was time to talk about the movie, and I guess personally… I am going to wait until January 18th.  I am going to give the world a full month to watch it before I start openly talking about spoilers and spreading the world with my theory crafting.  Spoilers are such a weird thing…. because for me personally they do not adversely effect my enjoyment of the movie.  I personally guessed at four or five of the plot points from the movie, and it was in no way tarnished for me when I saw them coming.  In fact there was a bit of strange excitement coursing through me when I realized that things were playing out in one of the ways I had imagined them.  For others though… once something is spoiled it ruins the experience, and as a result I am going to try my best not to ruin anyone else’s.

The “A” Team

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I love the Star Wars universe, and while I was greatly disappointed for years…  shows like the Clone Wars and the current Rebels made me remember just how awesome the setting COULD be.  I think they were essentially the gateway to allowing myself to indulge in the hype leading up to Force Awakens.  The problem with Rebels is that as good as it is…  it isn’t the team of characters that I wanted to be engaged with.  Shows like it or Agents of Shield… no matter how amazing they might be… will always be stuck in the rut of being the “B” Team.  These are the characters that are ALSO in the universe…. but aren’t really the characters that you really want to be watching.  While shows like that might raise the excitement level a bit every now and then with a “special guest appearance” you know at the end of the day… you are never really going to get back the characters you care the most about.  While to some extent the new movie is setting up a brand new cast of heroes to take over the throne… in the form of Finn, Rey, Poe and Ren, it still very much feels that we are going on another adventure with the characters we grew up loving: Han, Luke, Leia, Chewie, R2, and C-3PO.

There is a continuity that other derivative products lack, and in a way I am more okay knowing the cast of the original trilogy will always play a secondary role in this new trilogy of movies.  The Avengers are still an active team… and while they exist… Agents of Shield will always be the lesser product.  Similarly no matter how cool Rebels is… and how awesome it is for filling in the gap between the prequels and rebellion era movies…  it will always be the story of people we didn’t know existed until Disney told us they did.  So in the meantime I am going to embrace the joy I am feeling, because there were points yesterday where I wanted to take my hot-wheels Millennium Falcon and go running around the office making “space” noises.  There is a kid inside me that has woken up, that has not been awake since the 80s… and I am perfectly okay with hanging out with him again.  Part of my whole mission to limit the negativity in my life, and to be less cynical…  was to be able to truly feel unbridled joy again… and this movie has paid off in spades.  Sure I am almost forty years old… and sure I probably shouldn’t be enraptured by Star Wars.  To that I say “fuck it” I get to decide what sort of Adult I am going to be, and I choose to be the one that never really grew up inside.

Grumplings

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The most annoying part of any in game holiday event… are the things you have to fight other players for to get spawns.  In the new Winter Veil garrison event, you have to fight players for patches of snow on the ground, in the hopes that instead of getting a snowball of various kids…  you get a Grumpling pet.  Last night after looting many piles of snow I managed to get one… and now I am done touching those piles of snow.  I am not going to be one of these players that tries to profit off this event, because it is my hope that by removing myself from the picture others will have an easier time getting their own Grumplings.  Now however I am still going to be completing the daily event… until I get the damned mount.  I’ve decided to send all of my packages to Belgrace my MooCowAdin, because he seems to be the closest to getting all of the appropriate factions for the flying mount.  So among the four characters I have that can do the daily, I am hoping ONE of them gets the stupid mount.

 

Spoiler Free Review

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Doing Silly Things

So the other day I said I would be doing a spoiler free review today, since I was in theory seeing it ahead of a good deal of the potential folks that will eventually see it.  As a result I am leading off my post with the single line tweet that I sent out last night after getting home.  Now I am going to talk about the day and night itself for a bit.  I was not one of those first day ticket scroungers, in fact I ended up waiting at least a week before trying to find any.  We have a smallish theater in town within walking distance of the house…  however last night it fell in the “too damned cold” territory to even consider walking.  For Lord of the Rings I was able to simply walk in on opening night and get tickets, without any pre-order…  so I had no real doubt that I would be able to see the movie this weekend without much fuss.  The original plan was to eat dinner at Plaza De Toros  a Mexican place that I like quite a bit that just happens to conveniently border the parking lot of the movie theater.  Just to make life easier… so we could meet up at 5pm and then walk over and start standing in line around 6pm for the 7pm show.  This at least was our plan…  our plan changed.

I went home over lunch yesterday to pick my tickets up, since pre-orders still need to be printed at the theater in our setup.  I ended up having a lengthy conversation with the worker that was manning the booth, and he told me that they were seating for the 7pm show… aka the first showing as early as 4:30 so that we could go ahead and get seats.  So when I went back and talked it through with my boss, we agreed that we would simply meet at the theater around 5ish instead and either eat at the theater… or like I did and grab something really quickly on the way home.  The positive of both options is our theater has unlimited refills on both soda and popcorn, so my boss went with that option.  The only negative is that I didn’t think to warn him not to take one of the Highways that is notoriously hell to travel on during the evening rush hour… so this meant it was running about 30 minutes later than planned.  Luckily about this time another friend popped her head out of the theater and hollered at me, and saved us some seats near her, her husband that I work with, and their son who was completely amped about the experience and wearing and Ezra Bridger costume.  So there we sat in the theater for an hour and a half ahead of the start time… chatting away and killing the time.

The Movie

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I had a lot of hope riding on this movie… but at the same time I kept trying to prepare myself for the potential of it being just as disappointing as the prequels.  In fact a good deal of my conversation with my friend was that both remember how excited we were for Phantom Menace and how disappointed we were immediately after.  I have to admit… I was not immediately in love with this movie.  Not saying I was disappointed in any fashion… but the movie has a look that is significantly different than the traditional “star wars look” for lack of a better term.  JJ Abrams simply has a different design ethic than George Lucas did… and this is perfectly okay… but I spent the first few moments of the movie “adjusting” to the style.  However at about the twenty minute mark… I was hooked and from that point through the end I was completely drawn into the world and believed that I was in fact watching a new Star Wars epic.  The characters are all excellent, and more importantly than that… their interactions…  are also awesome. There are jokes and quips… and not in a way that takes you outside of the picture.  Much of this movie had to be about passing the torch from one generation to the next… and feel like we are now firmly introduced to the conflict through the eyes of Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron, and Kylo Ren.  Not really going to delve into characters outside of the group, because those are the ones we already know quite a bit about thanks to the trailers.

What I like the most is that each of these characters is their own “new” character… and not “The New Vader” or “The New Luke”.  They are each their own person and don’t really fit any predetermined molds in the Star Wars universe.  The conflict that is set up… is one that I cannot wait to see resolved over the course of the next few movies.  In fact I am hungry to see what happens next…. which is something that never happened during the prequels.  This is the first “new” story that we have had from Star Wars on the big screen in a very long while, because the prequels had a fixed beginning and a fixed end point… and we were simply seeing how the details worked themselves out between.  This time with Force Awakens… we have no clue what is going to happen in the beginning, middle or end… and in spite of all of our machinations and predictions… we know that we know next to nothing.  There are certain aspects that I think seasoned veterans of Star Wars and the Expanded Universe might guess at…. but those guesses are never justified with a firm answer.  This movie feels very much in the tradition of A New Hope, and also feels like this grand Star Wars pen and paper adventure… played out on the screen.  The critics are more than likely not going to like it… because this is absolutely a “Star Wars” movie… and not something that is trying to get an Oscar.  That said… the costuming and use of practical effects absolutely SHOULD get an Oscar.

The little kid in me is alive and happy.  There was a period of time after the prequels where I doubted if my memories of Star Wars were really genuine.  I wondered if the universe really was as cool as I remembered it.  I am happy to say that yes…  this setting still has amazing things to show us.  Now stop reading this shit and go get tickets to see Force Awakens.

 

Predictions and Dots

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Star Wars Predictions

KermitFlail

It is in fact the day… and I have reached full on Kermit Flail status.  All day yesterday my brain kept going “Star Wars! Star Wars! Star Wars!” and I have zero clue how I am going to be a reasonably functional human being today.  The tickets are for 7 pm tonight at my local generally no frills theater…  in 2D… which is honestly the way I would prefer to watch this movie.  If it can blow me away without any frills, then it will have been a good day.  At this point I am largely in a Star Wars information black out other than occasionally checking what the Rotten Tomatoes “freshness” score happens to be.  For most of yesterday it was around the 98% but right now it is sitting at 95%.  I am super thankful that Google shows the score without having to actually click through into the  site, because really I am trying to avoid knowing much of anything about the actual plot.  That said… when the Legion announcement happened in WoW I did a few predictions that morning, some of which were serious… others very much not.  So I thought it might be fun to do my Star Wars: Force Awakens predictions.  Please note that any alignment between these and actual plot points is pure coincidence and based on sheer dumb luck.  I promise I know nothing… and these are not spoilers…  but “wouldn’t it be cools”.

  • Rey – I think it is probably a given at this point that Rey is the child of Luke and Han that somehow got stranded on Jakku, or at least that is my working theory.  There was a shot of Rey and Chewie flying the Millennium Falcon which kinda lead me down this line of thinking.
  • Han – Harrison Ford has long said that the only way he would ever return to the Star Wars franchise is if they were going to kill off his character.  So I think without a doubt Han Solo will die in this movie.  It will be an even bigger shock to me if he doesn’t… because I guess at the end of the day that means that Harrison Ford REALLY likes printing money.  It would be cool if he got used to the fandom, and approached it with less disdain… but I am not holding my breath.
  • Chewie – I think if and when Han dies… the Life Debt that Chewie owes Han…  will transfer to his daughter.  My biggest fear is that they jettisoned the Expanded Universe just so that Chewie would be alive…  only to kill him off again.  This movie should be all about passing the torch to the next generation… but you still need some aspect of the current generation to make that work, and I think Chewie continuing on would be a good callback.
  • Kylo Ren – This one… I am torn on.  For the longest period of time I thought maybe this was also Han and Leia’s kid… if for no reason other than in the Expanded Universe…  their son did in fact turn to the Dark Side.  Now I simply do not know.  I have a feeling he ties into the Skywalker lineage somehow… but at this point it makes me wonder if he will end up being Luke’s son.
  • Luke – One of the big mysteries is what exactly is up with Luke.  I think this one goes one of two ways… either he has turned to the Dark Side himself and becomes the new big baddie … the power behind the throne of sorts.  There are problems with this however… because if that were the case why would Kylo be on this hunt to collect all of these artifacts of Darth Vader… why wouldn’t he just worship the new embodiment of the Dark Side instead.  I think more likely he is going to play the role of Obi Wan from the first movie… where he has isolated himself from the world and we go on a hunt to find him, where he is slightly mad in an almost Jorus C’Baoth style.
  • Poe Dameron – I think a safe bet would be he somehow ties lineage back to a member of the Rogue Squadron that we will come to know during the Rogue Squadron breakout movie.  That said I am going to go down my “wouldn’t it be cool” line of thought…  and say… wouldn’t it be awesome if he turned out to be the child of Boba Fett?  I mean he bears a vague resemblance to both Jango and Boba as seen in the prequels, and I mean… vague… because its not like Boba looked exactly like Jango.
  • Finn – I really have no real guesses on this one.  My fear is that they will go with the simple answer and make him Lando’s kid.  I would love to think that he is tied into the original cast somehow.  I know in theory he could be the child of Han Solo and Sana Solo which was introduced as Han’s wife in the comics.  I’ve long thought that Han himself was a force sensitive… because his unnatural luck at times…  could just literally be latent force sensitivity.  I think Finn is going to play into the main story line in an important way, and we know he at least ends up wielding a light saber… so could he be also of the Skywalker lineage somehow?

Whatever the case any of these things might be… I am just hoping that I really and truly love the movie.  I need this to be awesome… because I am still so disappointed in the prequels.  I am even wearing my special Star Wars vans today…  in hopes that tonight will be a truly awesome experience.

Warlocking

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In theory Wednesday night is the night that I raid with Jed and crew, but I needed the night off.  It has been a pretty crazy week, and with something scheduled almost evening…  Wednesday night was really the only night I truly had to sit at home at chill.  So instead of raiding I ended up working on the new holiday quests.  The positive is that there is now a whole sequence of Winters Veil quests that start from your Garrison, the negative is that one of them is horrifically bugged and largely impossible to complete if you wish to retain your sanity.  I guess in theory if you caught the quest during off hours you would do just fine, but since this is the sort of thing you want to do on every character that can possibly do it…  it means that the area is pretty much constantly camped.  Realistically they should have had the Alliance event happen in Shadowmoon Valley and the Horde event happen in Frostfire Ridge…  because simply getting there is a bit of a pain in the ass for my Alliance characters.  The worst part about the new quests is that Christmas has now also become a mount chase… with these chests purchasable from the vendor in your garrison for essentially one days worth of tokens.  If you are insanely lucky like apparently Jaedia…  you can end up getting the Minion of Grumpus mount…  which I will be shooting for during this event.

After fiddling with holiday bits, I relaxed to an evening of working on my new Orc Warlock.  Essentially I am leveling just like I would an arcanist, which means running around like mad and dotting things up.  The end result seems to be a pretty rapid fire way to level… and I am already out leveling the content.  Granted I am fully decked out in heirlooms which is in part what is making that be a thing.  Mostly I am just trying to push my way into “dungeon” levels as fast as I can so that hopefully I can be queued for a dungeon the entire time I am leveling.  If nothing else I am enjoying myself which is a first when it comes to Warlocks.  I’ve always been interested in the class… because demons…  but always struggled with getting into the spirit.  However during the AggroChat podcast and through playing Final Fantasy XIV… I am learning that I basically tried playing all dot based classes wrong, and that the answer is in fact to run around like mad, dotting everything up and watching it just die before my eyes.  So upon leveling this Warlock that is absolutely my new MO, and so far … it seems to be working.  I needed a chill out class to play and this one is fitting the bill.

Many Demons

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Allergy to Advertising

Yesterday in my travels I listened to a piece on NPR talking about the habits of TV binge watchers and advertising.  Apparently a study has found that binge watchers are far less susceptible to advertisements than your average viewer.  They went into some reasons behind this…  but I think as a whole we have just learned how to ignore advertising.  William Gibson is the oracle of our age, because he consistently predicts a thing being a thing… before it actually happens.  I remember in the book Pattern Recognition he introduced us to a person who is so allergic to branding and advertising that they would get the branding ground off the buttons in their jeans.  I feel like I am nowhere near this, but instead I am in this realm where advertising just really doesn’t work that well for me.  When I see the same ad over and over… especially if it feels like they are targeting me for some reason…  I find myself less and less likely to use whatever product that is.  There was a time when I actually like several post cereals for example…  but after watching commercials for honey bunches of oats between shows on Hulu I have nothing but a negative reaction when I see anything with the Post brand on it.

As far as advertising in general, I’ve gotten adept at ignoring it.  If I am going to be serious about a website I tend to snap it into my RSS reader, which also tends to trim most of the advertisements.  From a side effect it also cuts down on the exposure to Malware, since a large number of attacks on end user machines come in through infected ad providers.  While I might trust the hell out of a website, I don’t trust the advertising services that are well known cesspools of Malvertisements.  With Television however…. there is very rarely a time where I will be watching a show without also doing something else at the same time.  So I might be playing an MMO or fiddling around with this or that project… which means when an ad comes on the screen it gives me liberty to look down at my device.  I am vaguely listening, but only well enough to be able to identify when the ad has finished and the television show has started again.  Mostly I really don’t enjoy being advertised to.  I am not bought into the fantasy that they are trying to create that is supposed to tell me that my life will be better with this product.  Instead I prefer to just do my own research when I find that I need something.  There is never a moment when I purchase something, that I have not already googled it, youtubed it, and tried to find multiple seemingly trustworthy sources of information on how said product works.  That said…  I realize I am probably a huge aberration, but I would have to think its an aberration that is growing more and more common.

OrcLock Instead

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Last night most of the evening was spent going to RiffTrax where I saw Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny….  which is every bit as horrific as you might have imagined.  Well the movie was horrific… the riffing over top of the movie was absolutely glorious.  I would say this batch of shorts and the final movie… was quite possibly the best RiffTrax I have seen.  They are doing a rebroadcast of Starship Troopers early into January so I think we are going to rally the troops and go see it as well, since it was one of the ones they did before we started making this a regular outing.  When I got home however I spent some time piddling around and on a whim decided to roll a Female Orc Warlock rather than flipping over and playing my Dwarflock like I had talked about.  Essentially I am enjoying my time Horde side quite a bit, and I am feeling the need to develop a stable of characters.  I also really really need access to an enchanter and a potion maker, and there is no better way to do that than to make my own.  So in theory Belghula… because I am running out of ideas for Belg names… is more than likely going to be a Tailor / Enchanter…  since having access to crafted gear is always a useful thing.

This is I guess going to be an experiment in just how long I manage to stick with a female character.  This is a thing I don’t do terribly well, and mostly its because… I tend to keep creating versions of myself when I make characters.  At some point I need to do a supercut of my characters, but you will see there is a very specific pattern to them.  They all have beards of some sort… and if there is a game that doesn’t allow beards…  then honestly I don’t tend to stick around terribly long in it.  After that I tend to have long hair drawn back into a ponytail… or if nothing else just long hair in  general, and said hair is generally black or as dark of a brown as I can get it.  Essentially that character ends up being the idealized version of how I guess I wish I looked… or at least my ultimate version of myself.  Maybe I just really like the whole Adrian Paul Highlander thing…  because my Secret World character looks quite a bit like he did in the Highlander Television series.  In any case… I never seem to be able to fully immerse myself in a female character, because it pulls me out of the whole “this is me in game form” aspect.  That said, when it comes to horde in particular… I think the female characters look badass and less sexualized than the alliance versions.  I also like the female Orcs, Trolls and Undead far more than I like the Male counter parts.  As a result I am going to give this a try, and hopefully it works…  because seriously this Orclock looks awesome already.

Devilian Finally

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While I played quite a bit of Devilian in the various phases of alpha/beta/whatever… I had yet to actually install the game proper since its launch.  So last night when I got home… while I was dinking around on the Orclock I had it installing in the background.  I crashed pretty hard around 10pm but I managed to get in this morning and get a character created.  As a result I created Belghast the Berserker on Ravan…  because if you give me a server name that even vaguely sounds like Revan… I am going to play on it.  I am looking forward to seeing what the game is like after the handful of polish passes the late betas gave it.  If nothing else it should at least partially scratch my Diabloesc itch for awhile.  I have significant issues still with the fact that the classes are gender locked, but this is not really a Trion Worlds thing.  That is one of the frustrating things about playing a game that has been localized like this… is that you end up knowing that most of the things that might frustrated you… the company you actually have access to, can’t do a damned thing about it.  So as a result I am going to enjoy what is there, and try really hard not to worry about the stuff that isn’t.

I joined a Discord server yesterday being run by Zoltariel and having a bunch of the Trion folks on it as well.  So I started chatting like I normally do, to which point I was treated to a length rant about how essentially anyone playing a Berserker is a “casual” and that how no one would ever invite them to a group.  I am paraphrasing because this was a rant that took place over the course of twenty or so lines, but the gist was that Berserkers and melee in general had problems dealing with late game mechanics.  The thing is…  I enjoy melee.  If you give me the option between a bunch of characters, I will always without a doubt play a melee… and problem even further play a tank.  Since Devilian is the sort of game that doesn’t have a tank… then I am likely to play as much of a high survival melee as I can because I like being able to live through stupid things.  Melee is what makes me happy, and even if it is absolutely empirically worse than every other class in a game…. I am still going to play it because it is the player fantasy that I enjoy.  So I killed the chat channel when I quoted Tommy Lee Jones from the Fugitive after Harrison Ford just gave an impassioned plea about how he did not in fact kill his wife…   “I Don’t Care”.  Not everyone plays a game to win…  some of us play them to have fun doing the playing.