Yeah it’s been a while since I’ve written here. A lot’s been going on in Real Life, so there went that time. WoW took a backseat to LotRO for a while, then LotRO had to go away because of time constraints. The time I’ve had to do things, I’ve been trying to do things that weren’t stressing me out. That meant cutting guild raids for a while, then cutting out WoW. Knitting I can do while watching anime and movies, so that’s a good thing for me. Yey swordfight! Oh look I finished a sock! Wewt!

The last few months, I’ve not been the best blogger. The time hasn’t been there. The energy hasn’t been there. And the WoW hasn’t been there. I still like to play, don’t get me wrong. But right now, I’m at such a scattered focus in my life, I’m having to trim some things to focus on what needs to be focused on. Work, my personal life, promises I made myself and others: that’s what needs my attention.

No, there’s nothing dramatic. No relationship problems, no “omg my job!!! /flail”. I’m fortunate in that respect. It’s more a case of me trying to take some time to sort out what -I- want for myself, not what everyone else is expecting of me. Cos frankly, I’m harder on myself than anyone else is. And yes, I’ve been smacked about that, so a couple of you that I see picking up bats to hit me, well you can put them back down. You, too, Breana! I see you over there! ::grin::

So what does all that rambling mean for this little blog? Well for the time being, until I can do a few things on the back end, NE Hunter is in stasis: it will still be around but not being posted to. I’ll be keeping this domain cos dammit, I like it. I’ll most likely be starting a more varied blog, more personal, but not until I can get a few things settled down, pick a template, make some art, reformat a computer, stuff like that. Right now, my store’s getting ready to hit a busy time, so I don’t know when that will happen. Maybe this weekend, maybe next month.

In any case, this will no longer by a WoW-centric space. I’ll be most likely posting anything from books to knitting (yes, knitting, mwhahaha), to other games, to other bits of random life and amusements that I find. Yeah there’s still gonna be WoW in here, just not a single focus of it. Any blog will be renamed and NE Hunter will move to a different section of the domain.

But that’s in the (possibly near but maybe later) future. For right now, for those that are still scanning this site to see if I’m alive and posting, thank you. I never expected anyone to read this and have been humbled that anyone did and stuck around. For those of you I met through Blog Azeroth, it was a joy and privilege to get to know each of you. I made some wonderful friends that I plan to continue to annoy and pester for years to come. I’ll still be hitting the chatroom when I can, so there’s that. I don’t want to single out any one person from the blogging community, cos dammit, I’m not dying, I’m not winning an award and it just feels weird. ::grin:: Instead, I thank all the community for their advice and friendship over the past year and then some.

And now… damn I need to find lunch! /hungrytummygrowl /wanders off, stage right

My WoW playing have been kinda quiet these days, which can squarely be put on the fact that I’ve not logged into WoW for the past few days other than to raid. The rest of the time I’ve been watching TV, knitting, reading, or playing Lord of the Rings Online. I admit I looked at the demo cos it was “pretty” and LotR based. But the LotR part wasn’t that big of a draw. It was something different, something I hadn’t played to death for almost 5 years. I cackled my way through a night of the trial, then said screw it and bought myself (then Exar, who’d commented “you didn’t get me one?”) a copy of the full game.

LotRO’s been out a while, and thus is cheap. $20 for the full game, plus the first expansion. Honestly, even with two copies, that still cheaper than a current gen console game that you can play for 30 days, which is about how long most console game get played in our house. With my trial time, that means I get until the 15th of July to play for free. That’s a damned good deal.

The set up as far as UI and abilities is similar enough to WoW that it was no biggie to set up and get into fast. There’s traits instead of talents, with a bit different setup on how to earn/install them. There’s different classes, and what classes are “standard”, like “hunter”, are different enough they make the class fresh again in my head. Hunters don’t have pets. I’m okay with that. I do a nice bit of damage instead, slowing down mobs before they have a chance to get to me. Mwhahaha. Let there be carnage!

Like I said, the game is damned pretty. Yes, WoW has some stunning areas in the game, some that still take my breath away even after I’ve seen them for so long. This is a different pretty. This is “realistic” pretty instead of WoW’s “stylized” pretty. I’m running the game on a not-ideal system (one of the first Intel iMacs, running Boot Camp to have Windows installed), and it’s still making me drool.

Soloing so far is pretty darned easy. There’s a couple of fellowship (read: group) quests that I’d picked up, but between Exar, Chance (another friend of ours that’s playing) and myself, we were able to knock them out pretty darned easy with no healers in sight. Like I told them, after we’d had our 3rd or so “Oh SHIT! /dodge /kill” moment in less than an hour (I swear those trees snuck up on us) (yes, you read right. killer ELITE trees and they hit like a truck), “You know, it’s kinda nice doing these quests with you two, cos we’ve gamed together long enough, we don’t really PANIC when the ‘oh SHIT!’ happens anymore.” Once we three get up to the appropriate levels, there’s a big instance that we can go do that we’ll need a healer for, so we’ll prolly end up LFG.

The other thing I’ve been impressed with is the relative civility of the channels. The Advice channel has a 80/20 useful/garbage ratio. The LFG channel? About the same. The Regional? Mostly kinship (aka guild) recruitment, but still helpful on occasion. The OOC had the most garbage noise in it, but that was still pretty civil. The amount of backtalk/insults/stupidity on parade was much much less than what I’ve had to deal with lately in WoW. I’m not saying it was gone. Hell no. This is an online game, thus there will always be crap like that, but the amount of it, or lack thereof, was most refreshing.

Other things I’ve been enjoying:
1. actually stopping to read the quests cos they’re all shiny and new.
2. being able to dye my armor so I don’t look like a clown.
3. being able to HIDE my armor with a “cosmetic” layer, so once again, I don’t look like a clown (Seriously? Cosmetic layer, BEST IDEA EVER!)
4. being able to get crits while crafting, thus making a REALLY good version of an item, or 3 times as many of an ingredient
5. player housing that I want so bad I could spit, cos dammit I like making my house look good.

When I played FFXI, I loved it cos 1. I’m a FF fangirl, 2. I could be a cat girl (damn I miss my tail), 3. cos it was so damned pretty (hey at the time, it was stunning!), and 4. cos it had a flavor of EPIC to it that I really liked. I loved the various storylines, and I wish I could have been there for more of them. I liked being able to decorate my Moghouse. It’s sometimes the simple things that make people happy. Hell, I even liked the crafting. Being able to break apart what you’d crafted to skillup and hopefully get parts of it back was excellent.

The biggest killer for me? Absolutely no solo play. Well not absolutely, but it was infinitely more effective to play in a group, and you know, sometimes I’m not all that interested in playing well with others. ::grin:: I had friends that I was in a linkshell with, but when they’re 30 levels higher than you while you’re trying to play catchup, it doesn’t work so well.

So yeah, I’m really enjoying my time in LotRO. I have a hunter (my highest level right now), a minstrel (the healer with some dps), and a lore-master (caster [healing and dps] with pets). Am I leaving WoW anytime soon? Not that I know of. I’m still raiding with my guild (even have one tonight), and when I’m on for those, I enjoy myself, cos I’m with friends. But this step out to the LotRO side of life is certainly making me, of all things, LESS stressed about WoW. It’s a change of pace, and a refreshing of the MMO genre that I’m thinking was due for me.

And on an amusing note, my mother, who was one of those people that bought Lord of the Rings books when they first came out in the US, and had re-read them each year ever since, wants to see how the game looks when she comes to visit later in the month. This is a woman that has a ton of Tolkien reference material just because she was curious and wanted more insight into his writings. She spent some time asking me if Person X or Person Y was in the game, with me trying to explain that I haven’t gotten that far along in the storyline yet. When I finally tell her that I met with Tom Bombadil, she’s gonna geek out on me, I just know it. ::grin

Well that was a long time between posts. Whoops! Pretty much I blame Real Life. Between the store, vacations, and other odds and ends, it’s been kinda hectic.

But the raiding! What about the raiding?! Wellll, the 25 mans have dried up for the time being. The other guild was starting to have people fall off the radar on their end, and we ended up with way too many PUGs in the group for the raid leaders to feel comfortable, so we’ve tabled them for now. In the mean time, we’ve absorbed a few of the other guild’s people into ours, since they were still wanting to have some 10 man action, but can’t quite do that on their own anymore. (Ah summer, how you shred guilds!) So our guild is back to 10 mans three times a week, which honestly, we’re fine with.

But that leaves some time to wander around. What have I been doing with all that time? Completing old world stuff I never did on the lockette! I’d pushed the lockette so fast through everything on the way to level cap that I totally missed out on getting achievements for things like, oh, killing the end bosses in 3/4s of the old world dungeons. And most of the Outland dungeons. Whoops. But the last week, I’ve been running around soloing what I could and grouping up with friends for the others. Then there’s the quests that I’ve yet to actually finish on the lockette. That’s been another source of amusement. There’s just something satisfying about smacking around quests and instances that you’re way OP for. /happy purr

So yeah it was my birthday today. Yep, May 5, Cinco de Mayo. Now ask me what I had to dinner tonight.

Japanese! Woot!

Oh and Uldar too. New raid rule for Wrenn/Siana on raids: raid drunk. Or tipsy. Either works, really. DPS? ‘Salright. But damn I had fun. Got lewt too

And now, I go to bed, prolly much to the relief of the rest of the raid group. (Feisty? Oh yeah, I was that too. /rowr)

/flop

/snore

So I had these plans about what I was going to do this weekend. I was going to run heroics. I was going to quest. I was going to finally learn how to joust. Oh and maybe do some of this Noblegarden stuff.

Plans? HA! /ruined

A friend of mine came by Friday morning, just as I was about get started reading loot lists and planning what gear I needed to put onto my “wannnnnnnt” lists. She begged a favor, I told her I could help, then that afternoon she brought by my nemisis and weekend interrupter: Kitten.

My friend was going out of town, and for whatever reason, the person she was getting the kitten from insisted that she HAD to pick Kitten up Friday. I told her I couldn’t in good conscience let her leave Kitten at her place alone all weekend. So Kitten came home with me. Seriously, could you say no to that face?

Kitten was cute. Kitten was snuggly. Kitten insisted on playing a feral dps druid with my fingers, hands, arms, chin and nose. Then she would “bandage” me (aka lick my “wounds”). Her favorite attack? Leap all of 4 inches into the air and land on her object-to-be-destroyed, shredding away. Rawr-bomb indeed.

So my play time was limited to the 5 hours that I spent in Naxx-10 Saturday night, with two drunk hunters, a doped-to-the-gills post-surgery druid, a noob death knight, and 5 other guildmates. Yeah it was a good time, but not the fastest run ever. By the time the new mommy came to pick up Kitten on Sunday, I was tired and dozing off on the bed with a movie playing, while Kitten napped on me for the 15th time. I think my two cats were more than happy to see the kitten gone. Hopefully, Kitten will soon have a name other than “kitten”, “listen you little twerp”, “gah!”, “cutiepie”, “thankgodshe’ssleeping”, or my favorite, “quit licking my nose!”

/flop

Yeah sorry about that. Life Happened and blogging went poot. So what’s been happening on my end? Not much. Went to Naxx a few times, got more 10 and 25 man loot, got bored and decided to Wrenn a kitty mount, then went nuts and hit exalted on all the Alliance city factions and picked up all the mounts “just cos.” Right now, I’m in the middle of getting Wrenn a nether drake, cos Netherwing dailies are stupid easy now. I’ve installed the patch, explored the Argent Tournament dailies, and found that at 8am after only 5 hours of sleep, I absolutely cannot joust worth crap (owie).

The guild decided to step into Uldar on Saturday night, with only our raid leader having read anything on it. 20 minutes of explanation later (I kid, it was only 10), we went through the trash to Flame Leviathan, got lost, turned around, confused, then finally plowed over. Third time was the charm for FL, I picked up an achievement for taking out turrets, and then we bravely bounced off to the next bosses. We wiped on Molten Colossusx2, had to get the raid leader to breathe cos he couldn’t stop laughing at the XT-002 Deconstructor’s voice (and wiped repeatedly), then went to say hi to Razorscale (and wiped repeatedly). To feel better about the evening (although everyone agreed that the Flame Leviathan fight had been fun as hell), I managed to beg enough people to go do a timed CoS run and Wrenn walked off with a new bronze drake (and feeling better about my dps to boot).

And then there was last night. Since the patch dropped (and so did the servers) on Tuesday, which is our normal start of the raiding week, we didn’t do Naxx-10 like we usually did. Instead, a group of us logged in on Sunday and plowed through Naxx-10 in just over 3 hours. Achievements were gotten, Wrenn has a new sword (mmm sword shiny), and on the boss fights, I was pleased to see her sitting at least #3 on dps, if not #2.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I’ve found my enjoyment of WoW back. It’s not from the raiding, or the shiny phat lewt, or the “OMG I just a rare!” It’s just logging on, being silly, having some laughs and setting myself a goal, usually for something small. And right now, with everything else that’s going on in my life, that’s quite enough for me. Doesn’t mean I’m going to stop raiding tho. I NEED MAH LEWTZ! /grin

This was brought on by my flipping through the latest monthly catalog of books I receive from my book vendor. Pardon me while I head off WoW-topic. ^^;

Dear fantasy authors of the world,

Please, for the love of all that is sacred, quit it. Just… stop. We get it. Women are empowered. Women kick as much butt as guys. We are not fragile creatures doomed to wail and bemoan our fates off on the sidelines while the Hero comes to save us. We’re just as inclined to listen to the Hero’s posturing and strutting, shoot him in the leg to keep HIM out of the way, and go on with the kicking of much ass. We can be wicked sexy AND wield an Uzi that has a clip of magical bullets. Blood? Eh, we’re tough. We can handle it. Oh and don’t mind us while we club the Hero on the head and drag him off behind the trees over there, both of us covered in blood, and have our way with him. Sure, we’ll internalize all of our self-doubts, pressures, and mental failings, but that’s cos we’re Tough Chicks.

We get it. Now please quit writing the 50,000 knockoffs of Laurel K. Hamilton. Seriously, it’s starting to become an embarrassment. Could you please go talk to Elizabeth Moon? She’s written quite a few strong female heroine novels, ones that don’t involve the umpteenth variation of “Dracula is my boyfriend ohemgeeeee! /mentalflail”. Anne Bishop, love her or hate her, has books that are dark that, shockingly, don’t have the heroine wondering if she’s doomed to never be loved by that werewolf she’s swooning over while she’s in the process of kicking the zombie’s teeth in. And while we’re at it, gentlemen, you aren’t out of this equation either. Go have a nice chat with David Weber about a little character he has called “Honor Harrington.” Sure she’s from the sci-fi side of the street, but she’s in the middle of a story that’s as hardcore as any out there for sending the main character through hell, but still keeping the readers emotionally invested in the story.

We get it. Now quit having your book covers showing models that have been run through Photoshop a couple hundred times with a “dark” “street” background, holding a sword, gun, knife, or staff. Oh, and those cleavage shots? Totally unnecessary. The tight black leather pants, so tight we KNOW she’s not wearing anything under them, says everything you need…and are annoying as well. The high-heeled boots? Get real. You try running at top speed for your life (or to save someone else’s life) in 3 inch heels. With the amount of bitching about heels and the other trappings of “femininity” that your heroines complain about on a 24/7 basis, they’d break their ankles in 2 seconds flat.

We get it. So please, no matter how much your agent bitches and moans, try coming up with another plot. You know, something at least somewhat original compared to the other 50 books released this week. No matter how much your publisher’s art department insists that the model’s tits are going to sell your book, insist they hire one of a thousand talented artists out there that won’t use a photo of a model with a cheap-ass prop sword as 90% of the final image. A lot of those artists know how to use Photoshop as well, so they’ll still get a digital image in the end. Insist on treating your readers like intelligent humans. Does this mean that you need to write the Great American Novel? Hell no. But don’t talk down to us either. It’s getting really f’ing annoying and I’m getting tired of seeing books released in the fantasy genre that look more like they’re “chick lit” with vampires.

So quit it, or so help me, I’m gonna stop this car and come back there and smack the lot of you. And you, over there with the zombies-in-love book? You are SO grounded.

/stomping off, irritated

And I think I just heard everyone in the BA Chat room groan and start to throw things at me. Woot! \o/

Lady Jess decided to punish award me with a link and award. TY Jess, even if I’m still trying to figure out why.

“This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.”

1. When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it, including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to the said person so everyone knows she/he is real.
2. Choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have seven friends. Show the seven random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog. Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.
3. List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself. Then pass it on!

10 things about myself? Oh lord…
1. I gave up being a graphic designer/production artist in a major metropolitan area to move to a (comparatively) small town and open and manage an art supply/teacher resource/book store. I regret nothing (even if it gives me headaches on occasion).

2. My mom was the one that took me to my first science fiction convention back when I was 8. I’ve been going to them ever since. Yeah, I get my geek honestly.

3. Jim Henson and Chuck Jones are my gods. /bowscrapeworship

4. Timbuk2 makes too many things that I see and say “I neeeeeeeed.”

5. Apple does too.

6. I’m actually horribly shy. Corporate parties made me twitch. Thank the stars I don’t have to do those anymore.

7. I love romance. I’ve been known to melt into a thousand pieces while watching A&E’s production of Pride & Prejudice. Don’t even get me started on manga like Kare Kano or Fruits Basket.

8. I love to read so much that there are books all over the place where ever I live. 98% of them I re-read at least twice. I have a -lot- of books. >.>

9. I would dearly love to travel to the British Isles, France, Italy, and Japan. However, I don’t think I’d actually have enough time to do all I’d want to do in each of those countries, nor the money, without winning a mega-lottery.

10. I’m a member of the International Guild of Wenches. Badge and everything. (Huzzah Ren Faires!)

And now the fun part, nominating 7 other blogs! Or gnominating. But I’m refusing to (g)nominate anyone, cos just about every blogger I know has been tagged and they’re all an awesome group of people. So everyone gets a g/nom!

You’d think I’d have posted before now. I mean, I’ve gotten “phat lewtz”, Wrenn’s getting better about bringing the damage and hurt in raids, and I’ve even managed to quest a little. But nooooo I just up and vanish without saying a word to anyone and leave this poor blog to languish in the barren fields of indifference!

::cough:: Okay, maybe not quite that dramatic, but still!

But I have a good reason. Yep, the same reason that crops up now and then with just about every blogger I know: Real Life. In my case, it was the store I manage needing to have inventory done on it. Inventory, in a word, blows. It eats yer soul and makes your math brain hurt.

But WoW’s doing well-ish. We’re doing one night a week of 25-mans with another guild, and while it has it’s bumps along the way, we’re still doing okay. 10-mans, of all things, are starting to slow down. We’re not quite to the point of being able to clear it all in one night, but all 4 wings? That’s more than within possibility.

I think at this point tho, except for the 25 man stuff, we’re starting to have a case of “dammit, when’s the next content patch coming out?” /le sigh

Cos I said I would. Here ya go, Aoirselvar! /cackles and flees