Things other than WoW have taken over my life

It's been a while since my last update. I can see the dust starting to settle around here.

There is a little more to report on the car front. I was going to pick up Eunice from school last night when I heard a very loud "CLUNK". The car seems fine. I think something may have hit the side of the car --it being a Saturn, it doesn't dent very easily. Hopefully the Vehicular Fortitude saga is over for now.

I did find one disturbing thing while trying to locate the source of the noise. I was looking around in the trunk and saw that my emergency roadside kit was soaking wet. It turns out that entire little corner of the trunk is soaking wet. There is even some standing water. I didn't find any evidence of anything having exploded, so I have to wonder how all the water got there, and how I'm going to get all the water out. Our complex has an industrial strength vacuum --we'll be trying that in a bit.

Eunice's computer died and was later resurrected. Her power supply quit working on us, right when she needed to write a paper. Fortunately we were able to replace the power supply and the computer felt significantly better. The new power supply has 2 fans and is louder than the last one. That'll take some getting used to. At least she has her computer back.

Last weekend Eunice and I went to visit my sister. Eunice needed a dress hemmed, so we used that as our excuse to go for a visit. We had a lot of fun, except for the part where I was stunned by a wasp. It turns out that 40 degrees is indeed warm enough for some wasps to be out. It got itself caught in my pullover and stung me when I tried to take it off. At least now I know that I'm not allergic to wasp stings.

Eunice and I finished watching all 4 Samurai X discs. Samurai X is part prequel and part sequel to Kenshin, and is much darker. You find out why Kenshin is the way he is, and you get an ending to the story that is much better than the ending supplied by the original Kenshin series. If you're a Kenshin fan I'd recommend it, but be warned. The tone is completely different from that of the series.

So, with Kenshin over we moved to a new set of movies in our Netflix queue. We have jumped in to Jeremiah (the showtime series). We're enjoying it so far. We just saw episode 8 (Firewall) and it's starting to get good. I did enjoy the earlier episodes in the series, but the series really gets good around City of Roses and Firewall.

I have some high expectations for Jeremiah. J. Michael Straczynski is involved. And if you don't know, JMS did Babylon 5, my favorite sci-fi series of all time.

Of course, in doing my research for these links I've just found that Jeremiah was not renewed for a third season, and that JMS declared he would never work with MGM again under it's current administration. It also appears that season 2 isn't yet out on DVD.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about the series the more I watch it.

Finally, I've been busy reading Arcana Evolved. It's very cool, and deserving of it's own post (again).

Anyway, I'm off to watch The Return of the King with Eunice, to celebrate Easter.

Happy Easter everyone!

Vehicular Fortitude, part 4

So I went to pick up my car on Tuesday. It is nice to have the car back, even though I am about $1600 poorer.

The first thing I realized as the car shot forward was that the friction point on the clutch had changed significantly. It went from somewhere around halfway up to about 2 centimeters off of the floor. The next thing I noticed was that it became a whole lot harder to change gears. I had to pull on the stick shift pretty hard to get it to move.

So, in one of my not-so-bright moments, off I went towards home, shifting painfully and trying to cope with a clutch with an instant friction point. After a couple of miles I could no longer get the car in to any gear at all. I missed one light cycle trying to get the car into any gear except reverse.

Did I mention that the road I was on is very, very busy, almost all the time?

Before the next light cycle came around I managed to force the car into second gear. I used a side street to turn around (and almost got stuck in neutral once again) and headed back towards the dealership.

The folks at the Saturn dealership were very nice. They sent me on my way with a rental car and a promise to fix the car first thing in the morning.

They delivered. The next day my car was as good as new. Or at least the clutch was.

Hopefully this will be the end of the Vehicular Fortitude series for a while. My pocketbook can't take much more of this.

Gaming tables evolved

Ok, despite the title this doesn't have anything to do with Arcana Evolved.

This gaming table setup is pretty awesome.

Someone else has a similar setup, detailed here.

All I can say is that once I'm independently wealthy, I'm all over this.

Vehicular Fortitude part 3

Sadly, there is now a part 3 to go along with parts 1 and 2.

This month my car is 7 years old. Apparently in car years that's somewhere near 1 million, or at least that's the point where everything starts to fall apart. I admit that I don't really understand what they need to do to the car. It has something to do with some crazy leaking, replacing the clutch, and moving either the transmission or the engine out of the way to deal with the crazy leaking. All this to the tune of nearly $2k.

So today the car is at the dealership, and I have the fastest, most maneuverable car in the world as a replacement. That's right, a rental.

I'm sure wackiness will ensue.

Old News

I may be unfit for duty in the Israel Defense Force. Not that there was any chance at all of me joining the IDF.

The article is actually talking about LARPing, where players dress up as their characters and live the role. Sometimes they hit each other with foam weapons.

I've never been into LARPing. I have been at cons where LARPs have been present. I even went and watched one LARP that was run by a buddy of mine. I'm perfectly happy saying, "My character makes camp for the night," rather than actually making camp. Most people who know me know that I don't get along with the so-called Great Outdoors. On more than one occasion I've said, "The Great Outdoors would be better if it were inside, temperature controlled, and bug-free."

My gaming sessions tend to be more like this.

Stabbin'

Stolen blatently from my buddy's blog! Here is the perfect gift for someone who likes stabbin' stuff!

The Order of the Stick

I was browsing the Arcana Evolved messageboards (here and here) and found a link to a great web comic called The Order of the Stick. It's pretty funny. It's funnier if you're a gamer and have read or played d20, but that isn't a requirement.

The site also has various articles and other resources for d20 gaming, though I haven't yet had a chance to dig around much --I've been too busy laughing at TOotS. The guy who runs the site is named Rich Burlew. Apparently he was one of the runners up in the Wizards of the Coast Fantasy Setting Search contest, so based on that alone the site is probably pretty good.

Regardless, I've found a new comic to keep from working, err, I mean amused.

Gaming Evolved

I'm very excited.

Today, Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved ships. AE is what Monte calls a "director's cut" of his original Arcana Unearthed.

Arcana Evolved is an alternate Player's Handbook. It has new races, classes, spells, the whole nine yards. It's predecessor, AU, brought me back into 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons gaming again. I hate to sound too much like an advertisement, but it really made the game new and exciting again.

For a while last year I ran an AU game, but it fell apart when work picked up. I have AE ordered at my Friendly Local Gaming Store, and I hope to start up a campaign again.

Bumper Stickers

Normally I'm not a bumper-sticker kind of person. However, I'm very tempted by this one.

Pizza and rat bashing together at last

I played Everquest for more than 2 years off and on. I started when it launched. I had horrible alt-itis, and could never play one character exclusively. Which means that even though I played for 2 years, I never got a character over level 25.

When I was strongly addicted I would come home from work, fire up EQ and play until after midnight. I'd get up, go to work, and repeat the whole thing all over again. Weekends were entirely consumed. There were several nights where I would either pick up something on the way home, or I'd order pizza.

Now I've kicked the Everquest habit (and moved on to other habits like City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, and Dark Age of Camelot), those wacky folks at Sony Online Entertainment have made it even easier to deal with the monotonous real life problem of ordering food while you're playing EQ. You can actually order pizza online.

As a gamer, I think this is awesome. Feeling hungry? /pizza

I can only imagine where this will lead.

ZIM

Action figures of spooky doom!

Movies

Eunice and I have seen a couple of movies lately that are worth talking about.

First, Eunice and I rented The Butterfly Effect. We had wanted to see it when it was in theaters, but we never got out to. I hadn't seen any ads for it other than at previews to other movies, which is usually a good sign. I've found that the suck-itude of the movie is almost always directly proportional to the size of its ad campaign.

Anyway, on to The Butterfly Effect. The title refers to chaos theory, which states that a nearly imperceptible change can have massive effects. A butterfly flaps its wings in central park and the coast of Indonesia is hit by a massive tornado, which to me shows butterflies to be a menace on global proportions, but maybe I missed a point.

Anyway, Evan, Ashton Kutcher's character, finds out that he can travel back in time to specific points in his life. The movie is all about him trying to fix various things with a "small" change, and then seeing what happens. Everything hangs together well. Everything is important. It's very well written, and I have new respect for Ashton Kutcher. A word of warning though --some pretty messed up things happen. Evan and his friends don't have a very nice life.

It appears that the second move will have to wait for another post (which will hopefully come in less than a week this time...).

RPG Nirvana

I think I can say, based solely on the name, that this is the BEST RPG EVAH! I don't think it gets any cooler than that. Monkeys. Ninjas. Pirates. Robots. Yup, all the coolness is there.

Previously I thought the award would go to Ninja Burger (also based solely on the name). I mean, it has Ninjas. And they do food delivery. How could you go wrong with that?

For Freedom!

I was a big fan of the PC RPG/strategy hybrid Freedom Force. It had some issues, but overall I thought it was a great game. I have two requirements for any game that claims to simulate superheroes, and FF actually fulfilled two of them.

First, the surroundings have to be breakable. As a hero, I want to be able to knock holes in walls, topple buildings, and generally reshape the terrain by force.

Second, my character should be able to tear up chunks of scenery and use them to pummel bad guys.

Third, my character should be able to knock bad guys through scenery. If I can't knock some blockhead through a building, it's not a superhero game.

So, if I can't tear a street light out of the ground and use it to whack some bad guy through a building, it's not a real superhero game. To date, there have been no real superhero games available on the PC. FF has come the closest. It does let me destroy the scenery, and use chunks of it to pummel bad guys.

Anyway, ever since I played FF, I've been looking forward to a sequel. It appears that I won't have to wait much longer, because you can already pre-order Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich. I haven't pre-ordered it, because I'm not usually a pre-order kind of guy. What is neat about this is how developer Irrational Games paid for the project.

I think it's really cool that they're self-funded. Having worked for both a self-funded publisher and a company that relies on publishers to pay for everything, I can say that from a worker-bee's perspective self funding is much nicer. The big issue for me is having creative control. If you are self funded, you don't have a publisher telling you that they just played Tetris, and they want some of that falling brick action in your RPG, or worse yet they decide your RPG won't sell because RPGs aren't hot right now, and can't you just turn it into a Starcraft clone? But don't forget the falling bricks.

Earthsea

I got A Wizard of Earthsea for Christmas. I had heard that it was a classic of fantasy literature and I'd seen Monte Cook refer to it as an inspiration for Arcana Unearthed, so I was interested. I had also seen the advertisements on the SciFi Channel about the miniseries, so I figured now was a good time to read the book.

It's a good thing I missed the mini-series, because I really loved the book. The author herself talks about what went wrong with the miniseries, and it makes for an interesting read. I think I'm going to have to see the series myself, just to see how awful it actually is.

It just serves to remind me how few people in the movie/tv industry "get" fantasy, or comic books for that matter. It just seems like most fantasy we see in movies and on tv is crap. There are some notable exceptions of course, but by and large the fantasy movies we see measure up to the likes of the Dungeons and Dragons movie.

WoW has taken over my life

So it occurred to me this morning that I hadn't updated for a while. Apparently "a while" means "more than 2 weeks."

I've been playing World of Warcraft. Occasionally Eunice manages to pry me away to play City of Heroes with her, or to watch a movie, but mostly I just play WoW.

I had these grand plans for the new year. Work on and eventually run a new campaign. Write some code at home. Spend more time with Eunice. Read more technical books. Yet what do I do every night when I get home? Play WoW. It's not even like I can keep up with my buddy, who started earlier than I did and plays more than I do.

Oh well, I am at least having fun.

I was intrigued by the Warrior class. Normally I like playing hybrids. Straight up warriors are boring. Gameplay usually consists of running in, hitting the auto-attack button and then making yourself a sandwich. Or at least that was true in the original Everquest. The hybrids always held so much more interest for me. They offered more options.

Warriors in WoW are different. It's a difficult class to play, and I'm pretty sure most of the Warrior community doesn't understand that. At least that's the impression I get from reading the Warrior boards. Then again, according to the warrior boards I'm not in the bad spot for warriors yet. Depending on who you believe, warriors either always suck, or they're fine until 20 and then suck, or they're fine until 35 and then really suck. I'm only 27, so by most accounts I don't have the necessary experience to comment.

Anyway, Warriors are hard to play. All of their special abilities use Rage, which builds up during a fight. You get rage by hitting things and being hit yourself. Sadly, you don't get rage from missing --only you as a player get that. I'm sure there are some warrior issues, but for right now the class seems fine to me.

And how do you tell a good warrior from a bad one? The bad warriors always have a lot leftover rage at the end of a fight --they don't use their special abilities much, if at all. It's very easy to be a bad warrior.

I've rambled enough about WoW for now. I think I want to talk a little bit about A Wizard of Earthsea, but I'll save that for a different post.

Back in NOVA

We're back from our vacation romp in Illinois.

Actually, we've been back for about a week now.

Highlights include:

• Wonderful visits with family and friends
• Being sick in Illinois
• Recovering in Illinois, only to have Eunice fall prey to something that strongly resembles the plague here in VA
• 4 different Holiday parties
• Learning I can sleep reasonably comfortably in a recliner
• Remembering how nice it can be to be mostly unplugged
• Finishing up last minute details with Eunice's new school.
• Getting home and playing World of Warcraft for ridiculous amounts of time (I'm level 20 now thank you very much)

It was quite the Holiday.

I'll save the new years resolutions (or lack thereof) for a different post. Right now I have to get ready to get back to work.

'tis the season for traveling

The plans are made and the car is almost packed. Or it will be after the Holiday Party tonight. Eunice and I are almost off (some might say way off) on our way home to visit family and friends.

EA gets exclusive NFL contract

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/12/13/news_6114977.html

As someone I work with said, "Hope you liked Madden 2005 because that’s all you’re getting!"

On one hand this doesn't affect me directly. I don't play most sports games. The closest I get is SSX 3, which I broke out again recently. If I were a player, my concern would be for the quality of the game. I mean, competition fosters better products, or at least that's the theory.

The Holiday Spirit

So there I was at the mall. I went into my local EBX to sell back a game I wasn't going to play any more and get Eunice a gift. As I expected, the store was packed. They did, however, have 3 people working registers and one or two more on the floor, which is a lot of the tiny space they have.

Having 3 people on the register seemed to be working, because there wasn't a line. I walked up and asked what I could get for my copy of Fable, and if they had any copies of The Sims 2 left (she already knows she's getting the Sims 2, so it's no big secret).

The guy I had helping me was wound up pretty tight. I don't' know what his problem was. Maybe he'd been working too long. Maybe his shoes were too tight. Or maybe he was just having a bad day. Whatever the reason, it was almost like watching John Cleese do Basil Faulty, only not funny.