Within Temptation

From a friend’s blog, a band that I’ve never heard before: Within Temptation: The Howling.

Watching YouTube videos of this band led me to others, some good, some bad…and that was the thing that longlong ago I loved about the net. (Remember way back then, when it was all new?) Surfing…reading something that led you to something else that led you on and on and on, like paths into the wild forest. We’re all so efficient now, we want our information fast, sorted by relevance. Rarely are we seduced off the path.

Try it. You meet so many interesting strangers.

Shagged

This weekend we painted the kitchen, shampooed all the carpets in the house, went through all of the storage areas and threw out stuff for the tip, planted window boxes with flowers, painted flower pots gold, rewired a light fixture in the bathroom, hung new lampshades, scared the cats, sanded and revarnished woodwork. Still to be done is laying floor tile in the kitchen.

Oh, and I reupholstered the reading chair in my computer room - I never tried anything like that before. It’s time to pour a monster vodka and relax.  :D

Why Do We Play?

Via WoW Insider, to Altoholic, to Part Time Druid (in that cannibalistic way that all blogs recycle topics from other blogs for their own interpretation, around and around and around), the subject “Why Do We WoW?” You could expand that to include any MMO…why do we spend so many hours in a virtual world? What are the rewards?

Truthfully, there are a lot of ways that I could be spending those leisure hours. We could do a lot more face-to-face socialising than we do…if I were more into the pub scene. I could buy another horse, and start showing and training again…but I’m rather enjoying the break from mucking stalls on early winter mornings, and we really can’t afford that massive money sink right now. We could watch TV…but I would rather read or play.  Why do I find MMOs to be so rewarding?

Part of it is the social aspect. It allows someone like myself, who is normally very antisocial, to socialise in a more detached way, so I don’t feel that people are right in my face. There is a distance there that works for me…I love talking and joking around in chat without having to sit across a table from someone. Perhaps that’s strange, and I do love having our closest friends over for weekends, but most of the time I prefer people at a bit of a distance.

I like belonging to a guild. I don’t belong to any real-life clubs, so being part of a group is nice. We work for success as a group, and even if it feels a bit like a second job at times, there is still great reward in that.

It allows that achieving type-A side of me to feel satisfied. Sure, you can equate WoW to a Skinner box, but you do get a feeling of satisfaction in levelling, in raiding endgame content, and so on. I was telling Miz recently what I missed in Conan - that visible sense of exploration. You don’t discover new areas, you don’t fill in those here-be-dragons areas on your map like you do in WoW. I like that, in a schoolkid kind of way…you know, like getting stickers to fill in your map of the States.  :)

I like escaping into other people’s lives. I’ve always seen my characters as people in their own right - I’ll have a hard time playing an alt unless the looks, the name, etc., click into place and she becomes a person for me. Kitsune is a very different “person” than Ravven is…and I feel different when I play each one. I’ve even taken an alt to see the Darkmoon Faire, because she had never seen it before. Sure, I’d seen it tons of times…but she hadn’t.

Grinding is even a pleasurable experience sometimes. When I’m really burned out after a hard day at work, it’s relaxing to grind, to get into the zen cycle of gathering or hunting - it soothes me.

So, those are some of the reasons why I play. Sure, I spend an ungodly amount of time playing an online game. But I think I’m a lot more mentally and emotionally involved during that time than the average TV watcher is. It relaxes me, it challenges me, it makes me come out of my private shell and interact with people. For now, it’s a healthy thing.

rofl: The Great Office War

New joy in familiar worlds

I haven’t logged into Conan for about a week. Part of this has to do with disastrous patch and connection issues, and part of it has to do with professions and the economy being almost totally broken. Literally broken, in the case of the alchemy issue (if you open your tradeskills book it crashes the game), and figuratively broken in terms of scarcity of gathering materials and how much resources it costs to level a tradeskill.

Earning money is extremely tough in Conan. I pick up all the trash loot that other players leave on mobs, I grind, I try to sell things in the auction house (without much success). And Dravven has something like 56 silver to her name at level 42. She can theoretically ride a horse, but since the normal horse and riding skill costs three gold, it’s not likely to happen any time soon. The swift horse costs 150 gold, which is a ridiculous amount.

We had a recent heated discussion in the guild forums about buying gold, have you ever, is it wrong, etc. I am very much against buying gold because you’re basically buying other player’s sundered accounts and ruined playtime (in relation to fighting bots and farmers in order to do quests). It’s morally wrong. And yet, and yet…I could easily spend £15 and have a horse. It was becoming very tempting.

And so I decided to put Conan aside for a bit.

In Warcraft, I’ve discovered new joy in levelling my baby priest. The Fire Festival has been a boon for her, and she should make 64 before it’s over. I’m trying to balance staying in each area long enough to level a bit, so I can reserve SMV, at least, for questing in post-seventy. I like her so much. Whether or not I’ll like healing, though, is another matter.  :)

Raiding has been boring recently, and we’re back to long delays during raids because of afks and disconnects and (presumably) officer discussions where everyone just sits around. I hate it. I want fast, active runs, I want to keep the momentum up. I don’t want to raid like this, sitting there reading a book with flasks and buffs ticking away, bored out of my mind.

Well, back to work, an ecommerce shop redesign and meetings…and then home to play my priest, as the BT raid tonight has been cancelled due to lack of signups. Does no one wonder why our signups are low? I think it’s sheer boredom, and I very much hope that the officers will try to do something about it, because I love this guild.

awwwww….

Miz just sent me this…it’s so not fair to make someone cry at work.

three things

1. Top Sekrit Projekt got a chunk of investment cash, and we got paid today, with the balance to come. That is a very good thing. To anyone who is considering going to work for a startup, I have to ask: Do you know what it’s like to survive without being paid for three months? No? I’d think twice about it then. Being paid is a VERY good thing.

2. I can stop job hunting. I hate employment agencies, I hate them with a passion. I hated them as an employer, and I despise them as a candidate. I don’t answer my mobile unless the number is in my address book. Anyone else can email me. If you don’t have my email address, then you have no business contacting me. You certainly shouldn’t call me at 9:30pm to tell me about a job at the other end of the country that requires a programming language which is not listed on my CV. If I’ve had a vodka or two by that time, I’m likely to be less than polite…be warned.

3. As part of my jobhunting, I got my hair cut this morning. I have very long, very thick hair - it’s difficult to work with, it’s very heavy and doesn’t like combs.  I was truly afraid that I would look down on the salon floor to see huge bleeding chunks of hair that had been ripped from the scalp, it hurt that much. Plus we were too broke to pay for the extra blowdry (this was before the news about being paid), so now I look and feel like a small animal peering through a hedge. sigh.

But you know what?  All in all, this was a very good day.  :)

First Archimonde Attempt

Well, at least it was quick.  :)

Nightmaere’s Big Day

In honor of the Midsummer Fire Festival, I decided to take Nightmaere to Ogrimmar to meet our horde neighbors, say a friendly hello, and honor their fire. Ok, maybe she was planning on dishonoring it, but what the hell. For some reason (partly to do with the fact that I was closer, but partly to do with the fact that I am stubborn) I decided to try to get there from Azshara rather that fly back down to Ratchet and run from there.

Swimming to Ogrimmar

Finding strange things to see along the way - SO much created but unused content in this area.

Entering the gates. “Here I go!  Eeeeeeeeeeee…”

“…eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek…”

“…eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek…”

“Where’s the Valley of Wisdom? Where the hell am I? Oops, another guard. Eeeeeeeeee…”

“…eeeeeeeeeeeeek! Here we are! Where’s the fire, where’s the fire…”

Made it.  :D

ooh, some Alice news

This is from American McGee’s blog:American McGee’s Alice - Film Interview. Whatever one might say about American McGee himself (I’m assuming that he’s trademarked his name), you kind of have to admit that the movie has potential. Given luck and the gods smiling on it and granting a good writer, director, and so on…it could be awesome. Or it could be crap, which is unfortunately more likely.  :)

As I’m sure you know, the big question on everyone’s mind is, what is the current status of the “Alice” movie project? What are the realistic chances of seeing the “Alice” film go into real production? What challenges are you faced with in getting it made?

SF: The Alice project is presently in “turnaround” from Universal Studios. Jon and Erich Hoeber have written a very compelling feature film screenplay adaptation of the Alice game. Their screenplay will certainly serve as a jumping off point as we find a new studio home for the project. In terms of the realistic chances of seeing the Alice project being produced, all I can say is that I have invested (along with Julie Yorn and Karen Lauder, my producing partners on the project) a lot of time and effort in this project. We will get it made. I offer my eight year effort to get the best version of the Max Payne film produced as proof of my tenacity as a film producer. Every film produced is a challenge. The major film studios are producing fewer movies every year, so to have one of them be yours is a very special experience. On the positive side, the Alice in Wonderland mythology is wonderfully compelling, and is an indelible concept in the minds of studio executives and the movie going public.

Errr, yes…eight years.  Well, fingers crossed…