Archive for the “real life” Category

In real life, I’ve been preparing a house to sell. Yeah I know, crappy timing with the market being what it is, but I have a nice job change waiting for me in another state 5 hours away. That kinda necessitates selling my house. It’s also becoming spring where I live, which means Spring Cleaning in all it’s insane glory. So I’ve been cleaning out the house of old things I don’t want/use, visiting home improvement stores practically daily, and talking to installation people about appointments to come to the house. It’s more than a little hectic over here.

I’ve found that the “change everything!” mindset has invaded my WoW-space as well. In my collection of alts, I had a human rogue named Duvesa, that I’d gotten to level 57. She was my first major alt, and until I got off my butt and leveled my mage up, she was my highest level alt for the longest time. However, she was permanently stuck at 57. Why? I just couldn’t get into her anymore. I’d loved playing her, but somewhere along the way, I fell out of love. It just wasn’t fun for me any more. I could not find anything that made me interested in playing her anymore. So yesterday, after not playing her (other than hopping onto her and unlocking a low level lockbox for a friend) for almost 2 years, I sold all of her equipment and items, mailed the proceeds to my bank toon, and deleted Duvesa.

Did it hurt? A little. But I’d found myself with no connection at all to her, and was starting to hate the fact she was in the second slot on my list, right behind Siana. Why have her there if I was never going to play her? So I deleted her and once the faint pangs of character deletion were over, it felt as if a weight had been lifted. To celebrate, I did the next obvious thing: I deleted another character. This time it was a Night Elf warrior, Ravaria, that I’d had wandering around. Only level 27, but she’d been a NE priest, a human pally, and then a NE warrior before getting deleted yet one more time. That name is one that I’ve had in previous MMOs and I have sentimental attachments to it, so I created a placeholder character with it. Will I ever play it? Who knows.

So after deleting two characters, I decided since the house feels weird with all the new paint and what not going up, I needed to change up Siana a little. So I did something that made several friends fall over into shock: I respec’d. Right now, she’s the “standard” 41/20 BM spec after being heavy MM spec (my usual choice). I raided last night with it and said I’d give it a couple more days of playing around with it. But once the time is over, I’ll be respec’ing again, this time to one of the MM/SV builds.

Why am I doing this? I’m trying to shake my mind out of any hunter ruts it’s gotten itself into. Specs are always a polarizing element in WoW, with this build or that build being held up as the Holy Grail for whatever your attempting to do, whether it’s PvP, leveling or raiding. But it’s not that simple. There’s not really one “perfect” build for each class/situation. There’s always something that affects the end result: latency, gear, random chaos, and most importantly, the person actually playing the character. It’s that human element that makes two identically geared, identically spec’d hunters have different DPS. It’s what each person brings to the table in personal experience and gaming style that affects the end results.

So I’m playing with specs, rediscovering what does and doesn’t work for me, and having a grand time doing it. I have a feeling I’ll be going back to my usual spec, but it’s always good to shake things up.

Tomorrow? I’ll be watching guys install new flooring into my house and trying to minimize the destruction to my belongings. I’ll get some daily quests done, maybe even work on some quests with my mage, or over on Moon Guard with the About Last Night group over there. Or I could say to hell with it all and hide in the bedroom with the two freaked out cats.

Since a whining bear isn’t a pretty sight (yes, I’m looking at you, Big Bear), here’s your notice that I’m afk a bit. I’m currently being forced out of game to deal with painting 4 rooms in my house, and that leaves little game time this week. Thank god the guild canceled raids for this week. With 2.4 dropping and my real life insanity, it’s been a little nuts. ^^; So yes, I’m away for at least two more days. Here’s hoping the painting gets done soon. I’m tired of the fumes, low odor or not. ::sigh::

Yes! I’m alive again! Geez, I’d forgotten how bad the creeping crud is. Thanks for all the great replies to the pet names post. They made me giggle in between Nyquil-induced comas. Next on the Hunter hit list: stupid pet tricks! No, not really. But it sounded good. >.>

I pretty much missed all raiding last week. Well, no “pretty much” about it. I did miss all raiding. I’m hoping that I can get in some quality WoW time this week, maybe even do a daily or two. Might help, especially since I’m starting to get lean in the pockets again. Need more raid consumables!

“Attention readers. We apologize for any delay in your usual inane chatter from this site. At this time, the blogger has been sent out for a full reformat and reboot as she was behaving in an unusual manner. Everything should be back to normal within a few days.

“As a side note: to the residents at 325 Honor Hold Place, we apologize for the condition your shrubbery is in. We are relatively certain that Ms. Nightravyn was not in a clear frame of mind when she decided to trim them all into the shapes of sand gnomes then proceed to play leap frog with them before she set them on fire for “not following the rules”. A delivery truck from Darnassus Lawn Care will be arriving at your home shortly with replacement shrubbery and a bundt cake as our apology. Thank you for not suing.”

The office’s latest creeping crud caught me. BBS. /dies

Hello and welcome to “Serious Topic”. Feel free to wander off if “srs biznes” makes you itchy, but hope you read and explore more on this.

Network neutrality is a term that’s been floating around for a few years now. What is it? Wikipedia defines it as

a principle that is applied to residential broadband networks, and potentially to all networks. Precise definitions vary, but a broadband network free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, that does not restrict content, sites, or platforms and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams would be considered neutral by most observers.

Real world translation and simplification? Net neutrality is a network where your ISP can’t prevent you from visiting YouTube anytime you want or downloading a 200mb trial for the latest MMO. In a network that is non-neutral, your ISP will determine what sites you can visit and when. Want to go to YouTube? Sure, between 11pm and 6am. Why? You didn’t pay for the “All-Access Premium Plus Expanded” package.

Want to see an extreme example of the new future if the ISPs manage to block legislation protecting a neutral network?

Want that? Yeah, me either. Yes, that’s the ‘OMGZpanic!” version, but there’s still a lot of truth in it. With a non-neutral network, gamers will be finding themselves paying higher rates to have that all-important lag-free access to the internet or flat out blocked from it.

Want a bit more in-depth discussion? Read this commentary. Tech reporters from all over have been commenting on this and urging their readers to take a stand. Boing Boing, a site that’s vocal about copyright fighting and net neutrality (along with the wonderful oddness that is society) has also been urging it’s readers to step forth and fight the ISPs. There’s an entire site devoted to keeping our networks free of tier systems and downgrading: SavetheInternet.com. Click over at their “about the coalition” section. It’s not just the ACLU that’s joined in. And then there’s the ECA or Entertainment Consumers Association. Not heard of them? It’s a group founded to help protect gamers’ rights to play what they want. Laughable? Not really. In a world where video games are being blamed for every killing and crime done by anyone under the age of 28, I personally like knowing there’s an organization out there working to ensure that I’m not stuck playing electronic versions of My Little Pony.

Bottom line is that the world has changed. Electronics that were unheard of even 40 years ago have become commonplace. Video games are no longer solely a single player affair. People meet and connect through the internet through gaming, VOIP, and YouTube. Censorship of the internet, whether through deliberate degradation of connections, a tiered service allowing different levels of connectivity, or outright blocking of certain activities (lawful uses of Bittorrent, large file transfer from freelance designers to clients, etc.), needs to be fought. So this is one more link I’ll be adding to the site after today. Until there is legislature protecting network neutrality, and the ISPs continue to fill the FCC meetings with their own people to prevent everyone else from speaking on behalf of a neutral network, it will stay up.

A New Guest Post from Aerye, this time in honor of Big Bear Butt’s Man Vs. Wild post.

So, back when I was a junior hunter… I mean Girl Scout, we had overnights in real Girl Scout Camps. Not sure what they do now, but our closest camp was not the ‘pretty princess hideaway’. We walked 3+ miles up gravel topped roads UP to one of various camp clearings that consisted of a lean-to with a huge trough-like sink, a large rock ringed campfire with a metal setup for cooking, a latrine that was… erm… rustic, complete with a shower set up that was really no more than a curtained area with three shower heads over wooden planks. You slept on these wooden platforms that had three steps up, and canvas walls, no doors save a canvas flap you could tie and you slept on the floor in yer bedrolls that YOU hauled up. For all of us who lived in even the semi city that was Queens NY, it was WONDERFUL! No lights save your flashlight, real honest SKY.. cold ass wind that froze every single part of you that it touched and made the concept of a shower unthinkable… even after 2 days in the wilderness.
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Not catastrophic, but seriously upsetting news today. I’ll be back tomorrow. Have a good one.

Ugh. Okay this “away/here/away/here/away” crap has got to stop! It’s seriously impeding my WoW Time! /cry

At least I’m back for the next couple of weeks…

Love is in the air, and I’m taking a break. Not a long break, but after a spectacularly “off” day (mucked up things, snarled at some people) on Saturday, I decided I needed to have a “time out”. So yesterday, I slept in late, watched some TV, then played some Katamari on the PS2, one of my all-time fav games. Tonight? More of the same, only with Final Fantasy 12.

I find that every so often, I just need to “reset” my head when it comes to WoW. Take a night or two off, not log in for a weekend, or tell everyone “Vanishing for a week, back later!” During that time, I go play other games, read 3 books at a time, cook insane amounts of food, or do various things to the house. When my time is up, I walk back into WoW and find my drive is in place again. Once again, I’m ready (and happy!) to spend the next 5 hours in Nagrand destroying the ecosystem all for the sake of leather, dying to various bosses 4-6 nights a week, etc.

On the good side of things, after having a couple of “%#$#%” moments in SSC on the Leo fight, I did manage to kill my own demon twice. Considering how out of it I was, I’m putting it firmly in the “Win” column.

I have a love/hate relationship with my service provider. When it works, it works very, very well. When it doesn’t work, all hell breaks loose.

The past few days, I’ve noticed an odd slowdown to my wired computer. The laptop running wirelessly has been fine, but the wired computer, my main computer, has been running oddly. It’s been having delays connecting to websites, etc. Once it’s connected, it’s fine. I figured the Mac needed to be cleaned up, so I started backing stuff up, repairing permissions, etc. No big deal. Then last night happened.

It started off with the same weird slowdown. I didn’t bother messing with any of it, and after getting myself prepped for raid later in the evening, I headed offline for a little supper. When it came time to log in, I was faced with even more slowdowns beyond what I’d had before and a 500+ queue that bounced between 10 minutes and 35 minutes. Once I was finally in, I saw the call go out for raid invites, so I sent my tell to the raid leader. Nothing. Sent it again. Nothing. Then it hit me: no one on the screen is moving. Cue the reboot router/modem/computer dance. Too bad that it didn’t work, because 10 minutes later, I had ripped my router out of the loop and plugged straight in to the modem, rebooted everything again, and was frantically IMing the Hunter Class Lead to let her know I was on the way in.

Once I was finally in, I ran to SSC, caught up with everyone, had a ton of manna biscuits tossed at me along with buffs and joined in the killing spree. Hydross and Lurker both got one-shot kills, and I managed to pick up a Nether Vortex along the way. About halfway through the trash to Tidewalker, everyone froze on my screen. Yep, internet fall down and go boom. Another 10 minutes later, still no internet, and I now have a headache from swearing. Why yes, I did call it a night at that point. At least all the raid was doing then was Tidewalker trash runs without actually killing him.

This morning, I plugged everything back in. Yep! Everything’s working fine like nothing happened! Arrrrrrrrgh…