Belghast: Wedding Photographer

Belghast: Wedding Photographer

Most kids growing up end up working food service of one form or another, but I somehow lucked out and missed that experience during my formative years.  Honestly I had a pretty good string of jobs throughout High School but probably the most bizarre would be that of Wedding Photographer… or more so the Photographers Assistant.  My father was a machinist by day and professional portrait photographer by night and weekend.  Essentially I grew up in the darkroom and was extremely comfortable around photographic equipment before most kids had learned to ride a bicycle.  As I got older and needed an allowance, I often got drafted into helping out with the “family business”.

This was not as glamorous as it might sound.  Essentially it usually meant sticking me up in a balcony somewhere during the service with a zoom lens and getting the nifty overhead shots that my father could not get from the ground.  By my teen years I could name all the basic parts of a wedding, and could spot little variations coming before they actually happened.  This whole experience has caused me to loathe weddings.  Being the wedding photographer is a really uncomfortable experience, for a few hours you become part of the family and have to figure out how to wrangle your way through getting the shots taken.  Thanks to tradition no one wants to take the photos before the wedding… and then after the ceremony it becomes a sheer struggle of wills to keep everyone in their clothing and willing to line up in the various shot arrangements that the bride and groom will want.  Everyone wants to mingle with family because they go away…  and while the photos don’t seem that important on the day of the event…  they will certainly catch the fact that you didn’t get a photo of them with uncle bob afterwards.

This summer I had to reprise my role of Wedding photographer as I got asked by the same neighbor who cleaned up my blood mess to photograph her wedding.  I mean seriously… how could I say no?  So I gave it the good ole college try and I think overall the photos turned out pretty well.  Within a few minutes of the ceremony ending I remembered all the reasons why I hated doing this in the first place however.  We couldn’t keep the groomsmen from changing out of their clothing into shorts.  This was an outdoor wedding in the middle of a August Oklahoma heatwave.  I feel like I got the workout of my life trying to wrangle a bunch of people who did not want to stand still for photos.  All in all however it was pretty successful and over time I managed to get everyone together.  It did not help to improve my hatred of weddings however.

Giving Up, For Now

EverQuestNextLandmark64 2014-02-04 05-53-33-00 For the time being I am going to give up on building anything in Landmark.  This is the fourth time in recent days that the servers have gone down and I have logged back into my claim being fully reset.  I could clear it fast enough again with the select tool, but it feels absolutely futile since I know I will likely be logging back in again to nothing.  Dave Georgeson posted this tweet last night which I seems positive… but we have had some optimism in the past as well.

I ended up clearing a little bit this morning so if things are still clear by the time I get home this evening I will consider that a positive sign and maybe just maybe start building again.  Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but it seems as though if you use ctl+v instead of delete when you have a large area selected… it appears that you harvest the materials contained within that area.  I made the mistake of clearing the last time with the delete key, meaning I likely lost all of my props permanently.  Honestly right now I wish I could figure out how to make torches, that is really the only prop I need to be able to craft a whole bunch of.

EverQuestNextLandmark64 2014-02-04 05-48-19-47 Another huge plus is that I managed to figure out the lightstone.  Essentially unlike Everquest, it must be equipped in a slot.  Since the slots are not marked at all, you just have to keep dragging them into each slot one by one until it finally fits there.  You can see in the above picture the light radius that it gives off, which is more than enough to be able to see what you are doing.  Really that is all I was wanting since my claim is mostly cast in shadow all the time.  I like that aspect of it, and once I actually get my temple ruins built it should look really cool.  Before I can really do that however I need to figure out how to make torches.  I realize at this point I only have two crafting machines and based on what I saw yesterday there are like half a dozen or so that someone had out on their claim for people to use.

EverQuestNextLandmark64 2014-02-04 05-59-09-46 Since I can’t really craft I have been working on upgrading my tools.  This morning I managed to craft the Heavy Silversteel Pick shown above.  I am not sure if it is always a legendary item, or if I just lucked out in the randomizer.  Previously I had been using the starter pick to clear any tier 1 material away from what I was actually wanting to harvest since the Pick/Axe combo was so much faster than any of the upgraded picks I had gotten.  However this one seems to finally be roughly the same speed.  Now that I can harvest another tier higher of material I am hoping I can craft the next set of crafting machines, and maybe even the next tool which I think is terrain paint, but I am not really sure.  At this point mostly I am looking forward to the voxel database stabilizing enough for me to start building again.