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The Great Landrun

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Joining the Circus

joiningthecircus I have decided, that after the day I had yesterday, I am going to run away and join the circus.  Not that I particularly want to be a part of the circus, and especially not since clowns have always freaked me the hell out.  It however seems like the proper thing to do when you’ve had a day as bad as the one I had yesterday.  Lets scan back through the annals of time to September 11th 2012, and “the event”.  I had just returned back to work from taking a few days off for the death of my Grandfather, when a gross overreaction to a security scan gone wrong changed my life for the worst.

Yesterday was my first day back after taking two days off for the death of my grandmother.  As I was travelling in I got a text from my boss making sure that I would be there.  When I got in, things were bad.  Seems as though a security scan gone wrong had locked up and was not essentially DDoSing our websites.  So I spent most of the morning dealing with trying to triage our servers as the scan completed.  Finally someone had to go in and force cancel the scan because it seems like things had hung up completely.  I ended up spending a good chunk of my afternoon dealing with the fallout.  Then on top of that we had a major GIS system release, that kept me there until after 5:30.  Which doesn’t seem very long until you realize that I generally work 7 to 4.

Basically I was already not in the best shape after losing my grandmother, and to walk back into this shit storm… was almost more than I could handle.  However I managed to soldier through and do the stuff that needed to be done to get through the day.  Apparently this is what happens when I lose a grandparent… the world plots to destroy me.  I feel like it is appropriate still to run away and join the circus.  That seems to be the thing you are supposed to do when you have had a phenomenally bad day like yesterday.  The only problem is it might be difficult to find a circus with wi-fi, so I guess I will just limp through the rest of this week and try really hard to recuperate this weekend.  To add some icing to this cake, it seems like we need to go refrigerator shopping.  While most of the food is still freezing well enough, we have reached the point where Ice Cream is no longer “icy”, but instead more yogurt like consistency.

The Great Landrun

Landmark64 2014-03-27 06-04-21-29 Yesterday afternoon Landmark reopened and we were greeted by a slew of new servers and some completely new island names.  Gone was my beloved Liberation/Pingo so I knew I would have to venture out and find someplace new to call home.  I spent a bit of time popping between the tier 1 zones until I settled upon Liberation/Shield.  Originally I thought I would only be in game long enough to stake my claim and then run off and play some Diablo 3.  I was apparently wrong.  It turns out that this time around we had to gather up enough materials to be able to craft our very own claim flags.  By the time I landed on the island I noticed that the claimable land was already shrinking… and while doing a lot of complaining over twitch… I proceeded to try and gather the mats to make my claim flag.

With the founders pick, it was actually rather simple.  The claim flag requires 7 elemental iron, 10 heartwood, and 10 sapphire.  Before I really knew what I was doing I had gathered up the iron and the heartwood and only needed to find some sapphire.  However a short run from the portal spire I managed to find a patch and get more than enough gems to finish my flag.  I zipped to the portal which now has not only a forge but a sawmill as well as a brand new mailbox.  I was shocked and amazed that I was able to make a claim within visual distance of the spire on Liberation/Shield.  I proceeded to faff around for the next thirty minutes clearing my claim to prepare to try and rebuild Belgarde Keep.

Grappling Hook Lust

After I ate some dinner I popped back in and started streaming again.  Granted like usual I am in with my friends on mumble and we are not necessarily talking about Landmark.  However before too long the all consuming mission of Rae and I was to get back our grappling hook.  Being able to zip around the map rocks, and NOT having it made me sad.  So I popped around the map looking for a machine capable of making the grappler.  Turns out it is the outfitters workbench that can craft it, and just southeast of the portal in Liberation/Shield has a really great claim.  Serac has apparently poured through the creation of some of the better machines, and will hopefully serve as a nice outpost close to me for building all the stuff I need to build.

While it took damned near all night to find 20 elemental tin… since surface tin seems to be a rarity, I did manage to cobble one together before I had to go to sleep.  The only problem… I had forgotten just how bad the Bronze Grappling hook sucked.  For starters the cord is insanely short, so you can only grapple very short distances.  On top of that it has always felt like it is far more random in its hook points than the later ones.  All of that said… any grappler is better than no grappler.  At least now I can dig my way into a hole with impunity, knowing that I can zip back up to the surface just by hitting E.

If any of the SOE folk are reading this… you guys should totally sneak me a prime grappler code under the table.  I still want to know how those things work as compared to the highest tier grappler I crafted in Alpha, which I believe was Viridium.  Another really amazing addition this time is the mailbox I mentioned earlier.  Throughout the night I mailed several sets of “claim flag mats” to various friends who did not have the luck to start the game with the Founders Pick.  With the massive run on land going on, I wanted to make sure most of them had the chance to claim a decent space while they were still available.  Now if you were an alpha player…  you are on your own since it is relatively simple to gather up the materials after getting in and seeing just how common Iron, Heartwood and Sapphire really are.

Ding 60… and 90

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The Rosary

While I grew up catholic, it has literally been years since I had been to the crux of catholic existence… the rosary.  Somehow my wife who was raised Baptist has never actually attended one at all in the over 16 years we’ve been married (or two decades we’ve been together).  Under normal circumstances this would have been a disorienting experience, but last night it was made doubly so by a weird quirk of the modern church.  It seems as though there is a massive priest shortage currently in the church.  Quite simply put very few individuals enter the priesthood in America, and this is really no big surprise given the negative image of the church over numerous sex scandals.  I am not adding commentary here, just stating the fact that there is a massive shortage of priests.

As a result since the retirement of the priest I grew up with, they briefly had a priest designed to “reinforce catholic doctrine”.  Father had many quirks, one of them was a refusal to have “special offerings” for the various causes of the Catholic church.  Apparently lately there have been no less than three passing of the plate for various causes, so I can see why he refused to do that crap.  Anyways since the reformer priest, they have cycled through a series of priests, none of them native English speakers.  Each one seemingly harder to understand than the last one.  The catholic church is thriving in other parts of the world…  just not here in America.  So when you take what would have already been a confused experience and add in severe language issues…  it was all my wife could do to keep from laughing.

For starters each time the priest would say a “Hail Mary”, he sounded like he was bored with the prayer.  As a result he would begin running his words together and mumbling.  So this produced all sorts of interesting things.  After the Rosary I got together with my cousins and we all compared notes on what we heard.  I personally thought he was saying something about a “Roma Tomato”, one of my cousins heard “Fruit of the Loom” and another something about “flushing the toilet”.  It reminded me of a time when I was at my wife’s church, and the preacher had an extremely thick accent.  We kept thinking he was talking about “Bastard’s For Christ” instead of what we found out later was “Ambassadors for Christ”.  The problem is once you hear it…  you can’t un-hear it… and while I knew by memory the words he was trying to say, I had no less trouble making them out.

So long as he was sticking to prayers I knew I was mostly okay, but there was a period where because of his respect for my grandmother…  he went completely off script.   The words I did manage to grasp, seemed to be meandering and completely off focus.  He was talking about how some people live to be 100, and most people live to be 60.  Which I thought was an odd statement considering the vast majority of the people in front of him… were well over 60.   Thankfully all of us managed to make it through more or less with a straight face.  The only thing I am certain of is that we have a new florist.  The shop we used to use is no longer in business, so we tried the spouse of a person my wife teaches with.  She did an amazing job and produced two gorgeous arrangements for a more than reasonable price.  It’s always good to have a florist at the ready.

Ding 60… and 90

Wow-64 2014-03-25 07-16-07-71 Yesterday during the day I spent a good chunk of my time streaming and playing World of Warcraft.  With the release of Reaper of Souls last night at midnight, and the upcoming headstart of Elder Scrolls Online… I really wanted to get my mage to 60 so I could perform the boost.  Going into the day I was sitting at 57 so just a stones throw away from the finish line.  I spent most of that time chain running dungeons, and if you are phenomenally bored you can watch almost the entire adventure on my twitch stream.  A few odd things happened along the way.  Firstly I ran into a guild called Combat Wombats… which in itself is not that interesting.  What I do find interesting is that they are apparently not connected at all to the guild by the same name run by several of my blogger friends.  I threw out a few names, and the two members of the guild didn’t have a clue who I might be talking about.

Second interesting thing is that I reached a point of equilibrium where I maybe didn’t suck at magery as badly.  In fact for quite a while running these dungeons I was pretty damned high on the damage meters and overall damage done.  I felt like I had grasped the basics of playing frost and was ready to move on to bigger and better things.  When I dinged 60 and took the boost to 90 I went from being confident to being completely confused.  In the 30 levels that I skipped over, I had more than doubled the number of buttons I had to keep track of.  Firstly I found it extremely disorienting to have my hotbars completely replaced without being prompted.  At least when I took the jump to 80 from the scroll of resurrection, it asked me if I wanted to have them rearrange my hotbars.

After deconstructing them and trying to remember what I had on each of the buttons, I realized that I had way more buttons than places to put them.  This is the problem with boosting.  In those 30 levels the way a mage plays changes drastically, and I am sure this happens for all of the classes.  So while I felt extremely comfortable playing a mage before the boost, afterwards I felt like I was a complete and total “nub” again.  I scrounged around and found a complete set of timeless isle gear between the banks for a few characters.  Complete in the pieces of armor, as I was missing 1 ring, a necklace and two trinkets.  However this took my overall gear score to 491 which I felt was better than most of the boostards would be.  As a test I decided to queue for the first stage of Throne of Thunder.

While I was not the lowest dps… I was really damned close.  There is so much going on, that I felt completely lost in trying to figure out when I should do what.  I like all the other boostards did things backwards.  After realizing I was in over my head, I did a little bit of research and I think for the most part I have a grasp on what my priority should be for casting.  At some point in the next few days I will try the next part of the LFR to see if my overall numbers improve.  I would run a few heroics, but quite honestly… I find LFR to be far less confrontational when you are not sure about how you are doing.  I can almost always do better than the worst player, so that gives me the leverage to learn on my feet rather than being called out in a 5 man group.

Pugs Aren’t All Bad

I had another interesting incident happen yesterday, that is making me feel like I need to re-evaluate my stance on pugging.  Starting to think that maybe I should even start trying to tank them some more.  In all of the dungeons I have run on my mage to get to 60, I had very few situations where things did not go well.  More than that, I have had a few incidents happen where folks have been genuinely awesome.  Yesterday in the middle of a Lower Blackrock Spire run, I ended up meeting a pretty awesome druid healer.  Throughout the course of the run we chatted back and forth, and when for no apparent reason half of the party bailed on us, we hung out for a bit while waiting on the queue to fill.  She said she was waiting around on a call from the vets, and was hoping to get a few dungeon runs in the meantime.

Since she was on a timeframe, I told her that she should drop group and should be able to get an instant queue.  She thanked me, and we went on our way… thinking that I would never see this player again.  Turns out there were really only a few people queuing at that time of the day, and when the queue popped I was in another LBRS group with the same healer.  We had a really good druid tank to work with, but he admitted straight up that he didn’t know his way around the zone.  So I helped shuttle him through the content, giving him a few tips on nasty pulls.  We wiped a few times, but overall everyone stuck with it and we managed to complete the dungeon.  Over the course of the run the healer talked about coming back to wow and wishing she could find a good guild to run with.

After the conclusion of the run I gave her the spiel on House Stalwart.  Went over our three rules, and a bit of background information.  Once again I didn’t really expect anything to come of it, but within thirty minutes she had rolled a priest on Argent Dawn and pinged me for an invite.  So as frustrating as pugs can be, I guess there are some genuinely nice players just trying to get through the game as well.  I went into the dungeons not expecting anything more than experience, and ended up walking out with a new guild member.  Considering just how many of my current guildies are people who I met through dungeon groups… I really should relax my anti-pug stance and give it a shot now and then.  There are always going to be gems in the rough out there to be found.

Faffing the Steppes

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Fitbit Logic

So this is the point where I am supposed to come up with something interesting to talk about for a blog post.  I kinda over did it a bit yesterday with the double posting, but that family drama piece really needed out of my head.  Once I finished posting it, we both dressed and went out into the world to run the errands that needed running.  The fit bit does funny things to you.  I find myself parking way the hell out in the middle of nowhere just to be able to get some extra steps in.  This also permeated our grocery store trip.  I am normally one of those people who goes exactly to the areas of the store for the items I need and then zips straight out.  I used to be able to do the weekly shopping trip in about fifteen minutes.

However yesterday we purposefully meandered up and down every possible isle, not because we didn’t know exactly what we needed… but we were trying to milk the trip for as much walking as humanly possible.  So we wandered up and down the isles, saving the frozen foods for last.  Not unexpectedly we probably bought a lot more groceries than normal but we got our maximum amount of walking from the trip.  It feels like cheating, since I am going out of my way to try and put in as many steps as possible into everything I do.  However… I guess that was really the point of gamifying exercise.  Funny thing is, last night at one point I got up to get a drink while watching the walking dead.  When I got back I ended up pacing around for a bit while watching the television before sitting back down.

Faffing the Steppes


Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTV
Most of yesterday was spent faffing about in World of Warcraft.  With the impending launch of Reaper of Souls tomorrow, and the headstart for Elder Scrolls Online soon… I really want to get my mage to 60 so I can boost it.  My gameplan in general has been to work on quests while not in a dungeon.  But I am pretty much habitually queuing at every chance I get.  This has been interesting to say the least.  Normally speaking I can stomach pugs if I am not tanking, and for the most part this has been the same with playing a mage.  The only problem I run into is when I have a tank that simply doesn’t know what they are doing.  To make it worse, many of these tanks in question are not speaking English.  I really question the logic behind blizzard lumping non-english and english speaking servers together.

Granted this happens with European servers in pretty much every single game.  However speaking more than one language is a much more common occurrence there.  While I can pick out a few words here and there of Spanish, I am by no means fluent enough to get my point across.  At one point last night the tank in question skipped half of the zone.  Since we were all leveling, and killing things means more experience… I didn’t really get the point.  Since the tank was only speaking Portuguese I had no real way of conveying my questions.  Maybe blizzard needs to look into embedding Google translate into their API, or maybe that is an add-on idea waiting to happen.  There have been many games that have bridged the language gap very well with some auto translation.  I think maybe it is time for Blizzard to look into doing the same.

Veronica Mars

I finally got around to watching the Veronica Mars movie this weekend, and I have to say I liked it quite a bit.  I started watching the series on a random whim, and thought my wife might also enjoy it.  So together we worked our way through the entirety of the series when it was on Netflix.  It is one of those rare instances where a TV show appeals equally to both of us.  Mostly for me…  I like the title character.  I love the random quirky smartassery that comes out of her mouth, and the creative solutions to awkward situations.  I find it odd just how this show, much like Firefly has found such an active “life after death”.  If nothing else this proves to me that Hollywood knows exactly jack shit about what people want.  Kickstarter and similar community backing seems to be a way for the huddled masses that don’t fit into the neat bubble of “pop culture” to finally get the things they have always wanted.

I did not back the show, mostly because I was feeling more than a little bit of Kickstarter fatigue when it happened.  Thankfully not everyone was me.  When it came out I bought the $20 digital copy from Amazon, because I wanted to put my money where my mouth.  The only problem with the digital offerings here is they are all pretty much heinous, and none of them are really compatible with my chosen method of watching television and movies.  Namely I prefer to stream things to my television using Chromecast and Plex.  Granted I could do the crappy tabcasting thing, which is fine for say a twitch stream, but ends up annoying me when trying to watch something more “long form”.  As a result I went out an acquired a downloaded copy of the movie to back up the one I paid for.  Dear Hollywood…  your DRM is dumb for making me pirate the movie after paying legally for it.  You are doing it wrong.

As far as the movie itself goes…  I liked it a lot.  I am not sure exactly how I can give it a proper review without absolutely giving everything away.  The characters I liked from the television show that I cared about, all made cameo appearances even if they didn’t always factor heavily into the plot of the movie.  The quality of acting and cinematography was great, especially considering this did not go through the traditional channels.  That said however… the movie felt a bit off at times, or more so it just felt like I was watching an hour and a half long episode of the television show.  The movie ends in a perfect place for them to pick up a sequel or even another television show.  So here is hoping this is not the last we see of Veronica Mars.

Comfort Gaming

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Classy Defined

This morning I got up like I do most weekend mornings, and threw on enough clothing to make myself presentable.  Generally speaking I don’t shower until later in the day, so generally this means I have to throw on a skull cap to tame my hair that is sticking straight up.  In the winter this makes sense… in the summer not so much.  Honestly in the morning anytime I see someone in a skull cap or baseball cap… I pretty much assume they are doing precisely what I am doing.  As always I went to QuikTrip to gather up sustenance, and walked away with chocolate donut holes for the Mrs. and a jalapeño sausage roll for me.

While there… I saw the definition of classy.  This woman walked in, who looked like she was already three sheets to the wind.  What was she buying you ask?  Well she planted an “Olde English” 40 oz malt liquor on the counter.  Granted this is 8 am in the morning, most of the people in the place are buying donuts or juice or something more breakfast appropriate.  In addition she had a package of twinkies and asked the guy at the counter if he sold single swisher sweets.  After some fumbling around he found her a three pack, and I guess that was “close enough”.  So yeah… I guess that is how some people roll.  I am guessing this is not breakfast but a “night cap” of sorts.  Just not something I normally see in the neighborhood QuikTrip.

Comfort Gaming

I think I grieve differently than most.  Since the news of my grandmother, all I have really wanted to do is “turtle”…  aka pull my head inside my shell and forget that the world exists.  One of my chosen ways of doing this is to go off and play games that have always made me happy.  One of the games I always cycle back to eventually is Everquest 2.  It is like an old friend that I have spent so much time with, that I don’t even need to talk anymore… and I know that it understands me.  Yeah I am sure it is odd that I personify a game like that, but really EQ2 was a thing I did for “me” and no one else.  All the while raiding in WoW I would steal private time by logging into Norrath and wandering around aimlessly on my army of alts.

Just as a coincidence, right now my absolutely favorite event is going on in EQ2.  Once a year Chronoportals open up allowing players to revisit areas from the original Everquest.  Some of them are rather funny, like the Ancient Cyclops event in Sinking Sands.  Back in the day there were all sorts of “theories” for how you get the ancient cyclops to spawn.  Some of these involved killing all the madmen, spiders or mummies… and none of them really worked.  It was a fairly random chance that you would get him to spawn.  Why did players care? Well the Ancient Cyclops dropped the item needed to start the Journeyman Boots quest line, which of course provided the player with their own personal way of casting “Spirit of the Wolf”.  SoW Plx!

Basically they are a really awesome way of getting account bound gear for your alts.  I am not sure when I will actually level an alt again, but sooner or later I always seem to, and having these weapons and gear makes a bit difference.  On my Shadow Knight I am still using the sword that comes from the Lower Guk chronoportal event.  It is precisely the kind of mindless nostalgia that I need right now.  The above video has me running through several of the events, or at least the ones I could remember off the top of my head.  However if you are looking for a full listing, the place to check is Zam as always the amazing Cyliena does a great job as always with updates.

The Great Wipe

The end of Alpha is I believe next Wednesday morning, and the beginning of Closed Beta begins Wednesday afternoon/evening when the servers come back up.  What this means is everything we have created along the way… will be gone.  The only thing that will be kept are your characters, and the various entitlements like things that came from the trailblazer packs and things purchased from the store.  This means all of the claim data will be wiped.  I have a big mixed opinion about this.  I don’t mind the idea of losing the work I have done on my claim, but I really don’t like the idea of losing my claim in general.  I like my claim, I like where it is.  My frustration is that there will be a massive landrush Wednesday evening… which is going to suck.

My plan will be to try and get a spot similar to where I had it before on Liberation/Pingo, but if I cannot… who knows where I will end up.  Basically the acquisition of goods begins a new.  So that means we will have to go back to square one with only our extra special trailblazer axe to start and work our way through the gearing tiers again.  Here is hoping that with the addition of heartwood the grind for stuff is far less painful.  As a result I got in for a bit yesterday, but I didn’t really feel like doing much.  I made a few claims extension flags to see how well that worked, but really with everything going away, I don’t feel much like screwing with it.  I have a bit of my stuff templated, but really I found using super huge templates really awkward so I will probably build everything back from scratch.

The cool thing about closed beta is that each of us trailblazers are getting friend keys.  The notice from the other day says these are no longer going to be time limited keys… but instead permanent access to the beta from this point onwards.  I know a few people who wanted them, so I will be trying to hand mine out that way.  However there should be a lot of them up for grabs as I know a lot of people in the blogosphere who are Trailblazers.  My hope is that they pretty much limit the closed beta access to just the friend codes for a bit, at least until the great landrush is over.  My goal is to get another claim somewhere in a forested area and then start over from there.  I really liked being in the forest, especially since the later item grind ends up being wood, and not ore.