Even my avatars drink more than I do
Got everything I really wanted from BrewFest this year. Circy the warlock got traditional BrewFest regalia, and a Wolpertinger pet. (Related to the snipe and the pink elephant, my Wolpertinger can only be seen by other players if they are drunk.)
Screenshot of my new stuff, and a pickup line
A VTSFFC Party, Day Two
I slept quite late Sunday morning; I’d not had enough rest in the last week, and a five-hour drive is still draining even when it’s pleasant.
shrewlet fixed a big breakfast for us. I was starving, I honestly ate too much. I spent a few minutes checking e-mail and trying to log onto WoW – I’m trying to earn enough quest tickets to win a prize in-game – but I couldn’t get a good connection. It wasn’t long before I had to give up and get dressed for yubbie and colleenk‘s wedding.
Wile dressing, I amused myself by considering the far greater number of times I’ve worn a Starfleet uniform than a suit, but it’s not as if I’d forgotten how to put it on. Dwight and I left the Arthur digs early, for we had stops to make – I picked up a cute card for the happy couple – and we arrived pretty much on time.
Listing the LJ and fan folk who were there would be quite tedious, so I shan’t try. The wedding was wonderful. Colleen was gorgeous and Ron looked great. I saw people there I hadn’t laid eyes on in years!
That sad part was that I couldn’t stay for the reception – we had a 5-hour drive back (6, really) and Dwight had to be home in time for an early work day. So I didn’t get to pass on my congratulations in person. But the pictures prove I was there!
Home now… I had a great time, and wish I could have spent more time at that end of the state. The Roanoke and New River valleys need to be brought at least 2/3 closer to Hampton Roads (or vice versa).
“I need that in ‘captain-dummy’ talk.”
My Whedonite friends may be amused to know that last night, Mirandala received a valuable engineering schematic from the gnome K. Lee Smallfry.
It’s going to cost quite a few gold to build the “Zapthrottle Mote Extractor”, but I hear it’ll be worth the investment.
Wacky Chinese game companies
The Chinese online role-playing game “King of the World” has banned male users for playing as female characters. Female users must verify their gender with webcams in order to continue playing their avatars.
The general response so far is:
1) This is stupid. Role-playing game, hello? Must I also be tall and skinny to play and elf?
2) This is even more stupid. What about androgynous-looking males – do they get a pass? What about people with the brains to get a female friend in front of the webcam for the verification? What about people with no webcam?
3) This is kinda creepy. Women are not barred from playing male characters – so in other words, this is solely to ensure that female avatars have female players. The only people to whom this could matter are people whose masturbatory fantasies or upcoming stalking plans depend on the object being the desired gender.
My WoW characters are split about 50-50, but it does happen that the most active ones are female. This is more coincidence than planning. OTOH, I don’t eroticize my World of Warcraft, either. No random messager’s getting cyb0rz3x off of me!
Clearly a 6-man raid
Playing around with the WoW Item Creator…
No, it’s not actually in the game. 🙂
Summon Spectral Tigerzord Now!
In World of Warcraft, once you are high enough level, you get to ride around the lands instead of walking and running. At level 40, you can acquire a steed which moves at 160% of your running speed; at level 60, you can get one that moves at 200%. (At higher levels, you can get mounts that fly, but they are only good in certain areas.) When the necessities of the game force you to pass through the same area for the hundredth time, the bonus speed is quite welcome.
My gnome mage rides a large mechanical ostrich, while my warlock summons a demonic horse. Mounts are expensive, but not rare or difficult to acquire. (Poor gnome is still riding her lvl 40 ostrich because she hasn’t yet made enough money for her lvl 60, but that’s purely a matter of time.)
Like anything else in the game, there are rare and valuable steeds found only with the greatest of luck. To mirror this, the trading card game for WoW includes ultra-rare cards with a scratch-off code that can be entered into the game to provide the player’s character with a mount that few in the lands of Azeroth will ever see. This ghostly tiger is pretty keen-looking; the regular tigers of the night elves are nice enough that some players of other races work for the right to them, and this one is certainly cooler than those.
My point here? One of those WoW “loot cards’ just sold on eBay… for TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS.
Great C’Thun, people. It’s a CGI tiger. In a game. It doesn’t even go faster than shrewlet‘s armored warhorse or snidegrrl‘s giant rhino-lizard. Someone just paid the cost of my next Mac laptop for this virtual ride.
Arrrrgh.
Furious slacking
I accomplished very little this weekend, which I think my body and soul needed badly; this morning I went into work quite bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, clearing a lot of tickets over the course of the day. Actually, I slacked a bit too much, as it was my turn to do dishes, dinner, and laundry this weekend, and I only managed 1.5 out of three. Have to do better on that.
I did have a social obligation Saturday, which was nice – got to see some old friends – but the weather had gifted this little cookout with 90-degree temperatures and 90-percent humidity. I was still chugging glasses of water all day Sunday trying to rehydrate myself.
Don’t know if it was related, but I had a weird dream Sunday morning. Someone had physically wrenched the display screen completely off a laptop, and it was my job to fix it with nothing more than a roll of Scotch tape. The dream ended long before I found out how best to approach this little issue.
Mirandala dinged 61 Sunday night, with shrewlet‘s invaluable assistance. Soloing quests in Outland is less practical than in Azeroth, though simply grinding wandering monsters can be good for XP. My last level was in February: at 5 months per, I should hit the level 70 cap around the time they’ve raised it to 90 🙂 Hardcore, yep, that’s me. (Okay, I’d move quicker if I played alts less often. What’s your point?)
Speaking of such – WoW fans are agitating for personal housing in the game. Can the FFXI and SWG players chime in here and tell me what’s so interesting about that? What can you do in your house? Can you watch the magic bard-in-a-box for extra resting credit, or cook special meals for +25 Health bonuses. or throw a party for your friends to get Diplomacy XP? Or is it just fluff? (I like fluff fine, mind you.)
The Running Joke
You’ve probably heard of the “Running of the Bulls”. A WoW guild this week did a “running of the beef”, where around 100 of them created level 1 Tauren (Minotaur) characters; they then ran them as a herd from the peaceful grasslands of their Mulgore homeland all the way the the forbidding, lava-spewing, Blackrock Mountain (an area where a level-one character has no business being). As anyone who’s played the game up to level 45 can confirm, Stranglethorn Vale was the worst bit 🙂
I’m really into this sort of thing – a bit of business which isn’t part of the game, which will net no experience points or loot, and yet was certainly hilarious for the participants. Virtual worlds need more fun like this! There are YouTube videos – search for AIE Bull Run.
Starr and I are a bit socialized out. We really appreciate our friends inviting us places, but we haven’t had a quiet evening at home in days – so tonight will be Azeroth and TV. (What with my <4 hours of play time per week, I think I'm safe from WoW addiction.) Dave and Jodi (ptownhiker & fixitup) were kind enough to invite us to see Pirates 3 last night at one of those dinner movie theaters. There were a lot of fun bits in the movie – plenty of times I laughed out loud – but eventually, the movie just didn’t make any sense. I’m training myself not to mind movie BS as much as I used to, but I still insist on internally-consistent movie BS. I have the terrible feeling that the writers scripted 3 hours of action and double/ triple/ quadruple/ quintuple/ sextuple/ septuple/ octuple-crosses (I’m stopping before the film did) and then suddenly realized that they were going to have to end the flick at some point.
Can’t say it was a wasted evening… it’s not like the movie was lousy, and the company was excellent.
On a quick note, they previewed The Golden Compass before Pirates. Now, the books impressed me little, and I wasn’t planning on going to see the big-screen version. However, there’s some fair acting talent on board, and the visuals in the preview were gorgeous. I may just go for the eye candy.
