Squandered Post

Pay no attention to the lack of a proper blog post this morning.  I’ve squandered what is normally my writing time watching a video of Adam Savage recreate the futuristic binoculars from Blade Runner 2049.  I don’t have a ton to talk about this morning because in truth I didn’t do much in the way of gaming.  I logged into both the Warrior and Demon Hunter horde side and did some emissary work and then logged into Destiny 2 only to log right back out.  Since I got only a couple of hours of good sleep last night I was ending up crashing pretty hard starting around 7:30-8 ish last night.  My focus for the night however was to attempt to get some sleep rather than do a lot of epic gaming.  My hope for tonight is to get in and do some Destiny 2 and at a very least knock out some of my weekly milestones.  I also still have a bunch of work to do on the Demon Hunter in trying to finish its class hall.  Additionally I only actually have one mount from the whole order hall madness thing.  I should in theory do some more.  Right now as it stands I have Warrior, Death Knight and Paladin to 110 on Alliance side and Warrior, Demon Hunter and Death Knight to 110 Horde side.  I would really like to get the 3 other mounts that I have easily available between the two sides.  I also at some point think I am going to push up my Warlock because it is something I enjoy but have no real clue how to actually play.

I am still very much getting used to the new routine that comes with managing three groups of people, and expect me to have a lot of adjustment time and probably low quality posts in the meantime.  I love you all and I hope you will bear with me through this madness.

Double Agent

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I’ve reached this sorta happy place with World of Warcraft where I find myself alternating back and forth between it and Destiny 2 for how I spend most of my evenings.  Over the last month or so I had spent most of my pushing up my Orc Warrioress, and have now reached the point where I can no longer easily push her power level up by just doing World Quests.  As a result this caused a bit of an identity crisis over the Christmas break and lead me to pick another of my various horde characters to start working on.  Having not actually pushed up a Demon Hunter… and Legion being the expansion all about Illidari…  I figured it was high time to actually do this thing.  I started out leveling as Havoc like I had before on the Alliance side but promptly swapped over to Vengeance when I started missing tank survival.  It turns out that I really like Vengeance as a spec and you get to do a bunch of fun things…  sadly at the cost of your charge around the map ability.  The way shorter cooldown version of Heroic Leap in the form of Infernal Strike however makes up for the lack of the less predictable movement ability.  If nothing else the build allows me to do most of the World Questing with impunity and at some point I will actually try some dungeon tanking.

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For the moment however when it comes to LFR, Heroics or Timewalking…  I have been swapping back to Havoc and just noobing it up.  This is the point where I have to step back from some of the commentary I made while leveling the warrior.  I was shocked and amazed at how chill the horde side of the house had been during my experiences…  but once I donned the mantle of the demon hunter…  and potentially as a side effect of the long holiday break…  all of the asshats seemed to come out of the woodwork.  Monday night I chain ran my five timewalking dungeons in a row… and all of the cool demeanor that I had originally attributed to the horde side melted away.  It became a night of gripes and wipes as I limped through my five instances and then walked away praising some dark god that my sanity was still intact.  I am still not entirely certain why my recent change in religion of sorts and swap to the horde, but I would have to think a lot of it has to do with simply wanting to hang out with my friends in Facepull.  As a result it has been this super chill place to hang out and have occasional comments about the game and life in general.  On a day by day basis I am feeling way less of a double agent and more leaning towards the Horde.  For years I never could seem to get into characters on that side of the fence and the only reason why I had a max level character during Warlords was because I boosted, this time around however I have the same number of Alliance characters as I do Horde and I am already plotting the next thing to level.  Side note…  Blood Elf demon hunters look way cooler than the damned floppy eared Night Elf equivalent.

Resolutions

The last few days have sorta whirred past as we did not do much of anything.  The cold temperatures and the desire to eat up some of the many things we have in our cabinets and freezer meant that we largely just stayed inside.  This mean’t fuzzy blankets and pants and sheets and cats…  while chilling out and playing lots and lots of World of Warcraft and Destiny 2.  I mostly made it to midnight on New Years Eve but crashed shortly thereafter.  In the grand scheme of things 2017 was not a bad calendar year for me personally…  but for the world as a whole it had a rather soul draining visage.  It is my hope that 2018 will bring forth new and interesting things for us…  while neglecting from finding ways to crush our spirits.  On a personal level I want 2018 to the unbridled goodness that seemed to be 2013-2015.  What I mean by that is 2013 was a year in which I did a ton of interesting things…  not the least of which was beginning the whole blog post a day madness.  In 2014 I founded AggroChat podcast and with it a bunch of interesting discussions have been had.  In 2015 I started going to Pax South and also writing some for MMOGames.com.  Not saying I really want to return to writing for other people because I frankly don’t have the time on my hands for that…  but just saying those three years were pretty great for various reasons.  I am not normally the resolution making type, but I figured I would do it just this once.

Sort out my Blog Feed

One of the casualties of trying to write on someone elses dime was my blog reading habits.  Prior to that I had been a rabid consumer of so many home grown gaming blogs, and while I never commented as often as I should have…  I mercilessly lurked in the background.  It was part of my daily routine to sift through the latest posts and they often times served as fertile ground to come up with something that I wanted to say in response.  During the brief time where I attempted to write a column on the blogging community… I felt like I had to expand my horizons by a large bit and with it my blogroll ballooned up into the 600-700 blog range and became unmanageable.  One of the side projects for this year is to sort all of this out and begin reading on a daily basis again.

Organize my Magic the Gathering Cards

Towards the tail end of 2017 I purchased a bunch of stuff from BCW card supplies with the intent of organizing my Magic the Gathering collection.  This has yet to happen in part because the upstairs is sweltering at the moment due to the cold snap.  That said I want to make sure this actually happens.  I have been playing since 1994 and I have a mishmash of cards spanning through the decades as I picked up a pack here or there for nostalgia purposes.  I want to organize all of these and get these sorted not only by set, but also by card color and rarity.  I got dividers to denote sets and colors, but this is going to be a long process given just how damned many cards I have.  I also have some hard cases for the cards that are more valuable and really should be better protected than a sleeve.

Sort out my Humble Bundle

I have a bad habit of snapping up Humble Bundles when they come out and often times not doing much with them.  One of the goals for the new year is to sort this shit out… consume the keys for the games I do not currently have in steam and try and find homes for the games that are duplicates.  I know there are gamers out there that would love to be playing these games…  I just need to find them a new home.  I did this once upon a time…  and need to spend some time getting my lists up to date.  In theory there might be giveaways or something…  or me just going through steam and looking to see if certain games are owned by my friends.  Whatever the case this is on the list.

Get Back on the Wagon

During 2013 and 2014 I lost a lot of weight and during 2015 it started sneaking its way back on.  Now at this point I have gained back every last bit of it and probably then some.  In truth I have never quite made it back up to my highest weight, but I am up there.  Essentially I need to do something about it for quality of life reasons as much as anything else.  I’m an aging fat man and I need to at least fix some of the things that I can.   I know this involves doing regular exercise and also is going to involve monitoring what I am actually eating as well.  I had a lot of luck with the Lose It app in the past and I will likely return to using it religiously again.  Probably also going to go back to having oatmeal for breakfast…  though I failed completely at that one this morning.  Basically the reality is that I need to do something because I am tired of being as big as I am.  I will never be a small person, nor do I really want to be…  but I want to be a smaller person.  I am not going to set parameters here because I am not even sure what the reality of it is going to look like yet, but I do want to make some changes because I am tired of feeling tired and sore all the time.