Discarded Hulk

img_20170722_153552

I know I have started out many a Monday post with something along the lines of it being a weird weekend, so I am going to refrain from doing so today.  The odd factor comes from the fact that we were pretty busy… but also mostly busy around the house.  I’ve talked about my wife who is a teacher several times in the past, but one of the side notes that you need to know is that teachers here in Oklahoma have very little support for all of the things that are required to make a classroom work.  My wife for example gets a $25 credit…  per school year to buy anything she needs for her classroom from what is in effect the school district storehouse.  Most teachers don’t even get that…  so we spend a lot of time doing things in an effort to augment her classroom experience.  Anecdote aside… how this factors into our weekend is that for years we have had what is effectively a office work group printer that I happened to adopt when a workplace was sending it out to salvage.  They were more than happy to have me truck it away…  instead of having to pay some electronic recycling people to come and do the same thing.  I was trying to figure out about when we got the Laserjet 5si…  and to the best of my knowledge I would guess around 2005-2006 ish.  The piece of this that you need to understand is that it was effectively a 23 inch by 23 inch by 23 inch cube that weighed about 150 lbs.  It effectively sat in the corner of my office taking up tons of space…  and any time there was a paper jam I had to try and balance the unit while turning it around because it was way too big to actually get to the back side without doing so.  The other thing you need to know is… that there are several times a year where my wife will print up to a ream of paper worth of materials for her classroom in a single evening.  So it is simply not cost effective to try and do that with a consumer grade laser printer.

This week the computer she had in her office finally gave up the ghost, which is not terribly surprising given that it was an ancient Gateway FX P6831 laptop circa 2008.  So like always this lead us to craigslist to see what all was available in our area on the cheap.  While we didn’t really find anything, given that our craigslist seems to be entirely made up of laptops and custom built rigs that someone overpaid for… and still thinks is extremely valuable.  However in her travels she happened upon a reasonable looking printer that in theory could replace the mammoth beast and give us some more desk space.  It turns out a company was surplussing all of their HP Laserjet P3005 printers and we were able to pick up a relatively low print volume printer for $40.  This however left us with the daunting task of moving the beast downstairs…  something that I am shocked I was able to do by myself years ago…  I know at the time it involved using an office chair as a makeshift handtruck and then slowly lifting it a single stair at a time.  Thankfully I am much older and wiser… and simply opted to remove the two addon printer trays, duplexer and toner cartridge which turned it into something that was way more manageable for us to get downstairs.  This left me room to set up the new printer, and also coincidentally gave me room enough for the Canon Pixma MG3620 color printer that I picked up off Amazon for $30 a week or so back.  Which means for the first time in probably a decade we have a reasonable color printing option.  However the directions that came with the printer…  were for a completely different model and it only took me a couple of hours of trying to set things up in vain for me to realize this fact and to grab the correct directions from the Canon website.  Unlike past wireless printers… you cannot apparently set it up over USB and then set its wireless credentials…  you instead need to do some bullshit mobile phone set up process.  However once I got the correct directions it went pretty smoothly.

diablo-iii-2017-07-24-06-25-56-19

This was just one vignette of the random stuff we did this weekend, and most of it isn’t really worthy of writing about.  However now we have the mammoth printer sitting in our living room because the person who had said they wanted it…  backed out when they realized just how damned big it was.  Thinking about sitting it out on the porch one day and posting a “free” craigslist post to see if anyone will come get it.  I would love to give it to a school or a church or a non-profit agency because it still prints insanely well… and the toner has gotten to the point where you can get it for like $20 in the secondary market and it will print something along the lines of 60,000 copies off that single toner.  Until then however the cats think they have a new toy and one of them has taken to periodically laying on it.  As far as gaming goes…  I largely played Diablo 3 and with significant help from friends am nearing the point where I get my pet in the seasons journey.  Right now I am on a more annoying objective step which involves running bounties until I get five jewelry patterns, which will then unlock the last few pieces of the Rathma necromancer set.  After a few seasons of playing Demon Hunters…. everything feels slow…  but the Necro in particular feels extremely slow when pushing Rifts and Greater Rifts.  Getting the two piece weapon set has greatly improved this but it still feels slower than I am used to even when being drug behind a much much higher leveled friend.  All in all though the Necromancer is still insanely fun, but as we talked about this weekend… I am curious how many previously devoted Witch Doctor players have made the swap to Necromancer permanently.

3 thoughts on “Discarded Hulk”

  1. I’ve definitely gone from Witch Doctor to Necromancer. Used to run a classic Zunimassa / Carnevil / Poison Dart build and have switched over to the Rathamas / Singularity Mage necromancer build. It needs a bit more concentration (although maybe that’s just the newness and learning some muscle memory) but I’ve been able to push much further. Necro is probably over-tuned at the moment, but I love the class fantasy, so I hope I’ll be sticking with it through the ups and downs of future patch tweaks 🙂

  2. One way to speed up the process of trying to collect five jewelry patterns is to buy them. In Act II, Squirt the Peddler sells some jewelry patterns. They are expensive, so you will need a lot of gold in order to get them.

Comments are closed.