winter veil Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Winter Arrives at Casa Belghast

So something I am realizing yet again is how badly I need a schedule to function. During the work week, I am on super tight time constraints. I get up at 5:30, make coffee, pack my wife’s lunch, and then am usually upstairs sitting at my keyboard by just a little after 6. Then I bang out a blog post, feed the animals… play with the ferrets because they are begging to be picked up… and then am out the door at around 7 am. On the weekends however…. and on this holiday break… I am completely all over the place with my blogging. When I know there is no real time constraints… I feel free to screw around in the morning. I’ve been reading twitter and blogs for the last two hours… and finally it is getting to the point where it is kinda embarrassing that it is 11:30 and I have yet to produce a blog post. While I complain about stress, I am also apparently one of those people who thinks most clearly when the shit is hitting the fan… or at least I am bumping up against a deadline. It is like my creativity flows more freely when I know there is something riding on the line. I know that at pretty much I can start writing and come up with a post… and because of that… it means when there is no deadline I keep putting it off. I am the king of procrastination… and among the list of things that need to do today is book my hotel room for Pax South… which is only a few weeks away.

As you can see in the above image, Winter has finally arrived in Casa del Belghast. For most of the Christmas break so far it has been windy as hell, but still pretty warm. On Saturday, it started raining, but between the showers… it was still nice and warm outside. The thermostat started to turn down yesterday, and overnight the constant rain turned to ice, and eventually as of this morning snow. The Monday morning commute was apparently hell, based on conversations with the folks holding down the fort. This is one of those moments when I am damned happy that I still have essentially another week to go before I have to worry about it, and by then I am hoping that we have returned to the balmy conditions we have been in recently. I am perfectly fine with not having a “real winter” here in Oklahoma, because our normal Ice Storms suck. If we got fluffy and happy snow like the rest of the world seems to, I would be perfectly fine with winter. Instead we get ice… and lots of it… that usually starts out as sleet and then eventually becomes glaze ice that freezes to anything it hits… high means power lines. Why the hell we have above ground powerlines still boggles me… because the ice can snap the aerials like very brittle twigs. Thankfully from what it seems, this is going to be our major day of ice and snow… and then it will warm back up shortly after.

Mission Yeti: Accomplished

I told Lodur last night, that he would have to hold down the fort without me… because I am officially out of the Team 360 No Mount business. I’ve talked over the last few days of my Christmas gift that required a little work. A really good friend of mine read my commentary about the struggle to get the holiday Yeti mount, and when she managed to get two of them… pinged me that she had a gift for me. The gotcha of course was that it was on a server that I have zero characters, so I rolled a level 1 druid and have been leveling like crazy over the last few days. It took me roughly two days of marathoning Star Wars movies to go from 1 to 40 and last night I wrapped it up getting the final two thirds of a level in Feralas. I stopped what I was doing as soon as I dinged and made my way to Orgrimmar to learn Journeyman Riding, and of course learn the mount. From there I fiddled around and got to an interesting vantage point to take a few screenshots. I am super happy to have the mount, but also really enjoyed the “Catte Durid” leveling process. The only problem is… that this character is now stranded on a server that I am not sure if I will play much on.

I talked a bit about the general toxic environment I encountered while leveling the character, which does not give me warm fuzzies about staying there. That said this is the only server that my friend really has characters on. The frustrating part is that to move a character it is $25 each, which seems like a lot of money when you are looking at an army of alts. Considering that at this point moving a character is a scripted process, and requires zero manual intervention… the game as a whole would be a happier place if they just adopted the Rift system of server transfers. In that game you can move one character per week for free, pending that character is in good standing and above the level of 15. That means over time you can move servers with your characters, and sure you have to wait a week per… but it lets you get out of bad situations without being taxed into oblivion for doing it. There are many times that players end up getting stuck on a server that they literally do not know anyone playing the game anymore. So it seems like insult to the injury of losing their friends…. to ask them to cough up another $25 per character to move off of the bad environment. Sure you can always group with Battle.net but there is something you miss by not having access to the friendly green spam of guild chat… and all the while I was leveling this druid… I felt the pangs of not having access to my friends. At some point I will likely delete the druid I have on The Scryers and move this character to that server, but in the meantime it will serve as a sort of hiding out alt… which is largely why I have not mentioned the server name yet.

The Sidewalks Roll Up

This holiday is considerably different than most. Always there is a natural flow to the events, but due to my Aunt needing dialysis it has completely changed the order of things. Traditionally last night I would have been up with my family, as they have always celebrated on Christmas Eve. Traditionally we would go to “midnight mass” that actually happened about 7 pm, and then retire to my grandmothers house afterwards for awkward conversation and eventually even more awkward gift exchange. During this my uncles would get into the cherished conversation of “why this random thing I own, is better than this other random thing you own” or “who hates ethnic groups more” or even the more recent “random insane government conspiracy theory”. One of my uncles spins these grand tales of conspiracy that are delivered in way that they almost sound cogent… until you realize that the keystone of his argument is completely batshit crazy.

Now however the game has changed, as we did not spend last night with them… but are instead supposed to go up today. Which pushes aside my wife’s family gathering… but that is a tale for another day. This left us at home, by ourselves for the first time in years on a Christmas Eve. We did not exactly plan well for this occurrence and as about 7:30 rolled around we decided we were hungry, and that nothing at all in the house sounded good. Which is slightly insane, since we keep silly amounts of food on hand that could be prepared with minimal effort. I got bundled up and went out into the cold night in search of sustenance.

We have a saying here that the “sidewalks roll up” as a way of saying that the town is completely quiet and no business is being transacted. Last night it quite literally felt as though the sidewalks had rolled up. The only businesses open were Walgreens and Taco Bueno… and the line there extended quite a long ways across the now empty Reasors grocery store parking lot. Seems like there were other people trying to find food on Christmas Eve. Slightly forlorn I returned home and cobbled together something to eat out of the banquet of things we have laying around the house. This morning when I went out to forage I was feeling no more positive that it would not occur again, however I successfully scrounged two sausage rolls and a jump start of caffeine to get us both going.

Santa RNG

I would have thought that maybe last night players would have felt a wee bit more charitable since it was in fact Christmas Eve. However if anything it seemed to make the assholes more assholish, and the clueless even more lacking. I got to listen to more than one variation of the “you all suck” speech, but I dealt with it, because like I have said before playing DPS lets me compartmentalize my world. I only care about the objective and achieving that objective, and since I am not tanking or healing and by default only responsible for myself… I can just zone in on that job and perform it. I have lamented over the last few weeks how I have been unable to get weapons for my Enhancement Shaman. So yesterday I soldiered on in the effort of trying to fill those gaps.

It might have been in the spirit of the season, or maybe I just finally hit a lucky spot in the random number generator… but for whatever reason Santa RNG paid out big-time. First I managed to pull the extremely cool looking Softfoot’s Last Resort from the protectors event. Not very long after that I managed to pull the Seismic Bore mace from the Iron Juggernaut encounter. So in one night I managed to bump both of my weapons up to decent levels and can now actually chart on the damage meters. Thing is… Santa RNG was not finished quite yet. Over the course of the evening I managed to pick up two pieces of the Tier 16 Shaman set the Shoulders and then finally the Chestpiece. I still have a few slots that have 496 gear in them, but at this point there are not that many. I have reached the point where Throne of Thunder really has no benefit at all for me, so I can simply focus on doing Siege each week. I might have to do one last run however to pick up my final sigil of power.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

So while I might sound sullen at the moment, I am sure as the day moves on I will enjoy myself. Right now we are trying to get up and about and out the door so we can be long gone from my grandmothers house by the time my uncles show up. As a result I need to finish this post up, get showered and ready and gather up the gifts. I hope you all have a really awesome holiday, and that if you didn’t get what you wanted… you at least got what you needed. I personally got exactly what I needed… some time off work and the freedom to mill about the house peacefully. Other than that anything else I gain from the holiday is gravy. Hopefully you have a wonderful day surrounded by loved ones and blanketed in goodies. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and if you don’t read my blog again before then… have a very Happy New Year.