On the way to work…
The cat, as always, is trying to get me to stay home this morning.
I am going to attempt to reach level 60 in WoW by the end of the week. I’m at 58.5 now, and this will probably involve questing and grinding in either a) Winterspring or b) Hellfire Peninsula. The XP per monster seems to be better at option (b), but I do run the risk of virtual-30-foot level 64 monsters wandering by, noticing my little gnome, and one-shotting her. Apparently, some guy in France made level 70 in less than 30 hours from release date (apparently by tagging monsters for kill credit, and letting several friends who ‘happened’ to be standing nearby Alpha Strike the poor critter)
There were lines from “The Princess Bride” flying around the office yesterday. I think that Prince Humperdinck is one of the best villians in fantasy; he’s smart, skilled, capable, is surrounded by competent, loyal minons, and his evil plan would have worked great were it not that the good guys were even more smart, skilled, and capable. I hate it when, as is usual, the villain’s really an idiot whose plan is eventually going to fail one way or another (what was Lex Luthor’s plan in “Superman Returns” really going to net him? A continent of un-arable blackened crystal and lotsa dead bodies? Whoop-de-doo).
That’s right up there with the storytelling sin of having the hero escape the villain’s fatal challenges by blind luck and the skin of his teeth, and then having the villain declare, “Welcome, Mr. Hero! Your presence here is the final element in my master scheme!” and I immediately think “Well, what the hell were you going to do if the sharks had gotten him? Retire?” (And don’t tell me that the villain was counting on the hero surviving the deathtraps – if the hero’s that competent, then he’s still a threat to the Master Scheme.)
