Wow! Belated Gratitude.

The title of this post is more than a terrible pun.

Perhaps a month ago it was a typical workday, but I had a meeting scheduled at around 9am, at an office closer to home than my normal base of operations. The net result was that I had an extra hour or so to kill before starting work. Jules had already shot off for the day and I had nothing better to do, so I fired up WoW and logged in to my brand new Shammy.

I was dicking around near the edge of the Northern Barrens, perhaps level 8 or 9. All of a sudden I get a wisp from somebody I don't know. Shift-click, what? An 85 Orc Shammy. What does he want with me?

I don't remember the dialog exactly, but it basically boiled down to this guy claiming he was leaving WoW and wanting to spread his accumulated assets around before he left. Admittedly I was pretty skeptical but I figured since he wasn't asking for anything in return, what was the risk? All of a sudden out of freakin nowhere, this giant drake descends from the skies, with him riding it. Keep in mind I'm a practically naked Tauren in greys/whites slaying wandering wildlife. Him coming down and landing next to me was fucking majestic.

Up pops the trade window, and with no questions asked, a bunch of greens, level-appropriate gear appears. I grab it, and it wasn't until the trade was completed and I open my inventory that I notice the cash. 30,000 Gold. Thirty Thousand.

Now I'm not some mad farmer or hardcore player, so even 1K is a big deal to me. But Thirty Thousand G? Jesus. It's like somebody handed me an envelope with.. Christ, I don't know how much. Let's get some perspective. Depending on where you shop, WoW gold is valued at around $0.01 USD a piece. So in that sense, it's like somebody handed me $300. But in game, Buying the parts and tipping for assembly for, say, the motorcycle mount, is around 12 to 16,000 gold. He gave me enough money to buy two motorcycles.

In the end, he was really nice. He was moving on to Rift, he'd been a part of the WoW scene for a few years, and it was time to move on. It seemed to mean a lot to him that I was an enhancement shammy, as he was, and he asked to follow me around and slaughter a few beasts with the new gear I'd been gifted. I was more than happy to oblige. It was part RP, part charity, and all awesome.

I'm not going to post his name here, in case somebody stumbles across is and starts bugging him for free stuff. But for what it's worth.. I don't know how many others got gifted that day, but I feel that in some way I'm his in-game spiritual successor.

So thanks, friend. Thanks for the stuff, thanks for the cash. Thanks for being so friendly. And most of all, thanks for creating an immersive, amazing experience that will stay in my memory for years to come.

Yarr?

>quiet day at work
>google up sum PDFz
>feel guilty about reading a stolen ebook from an author who is awesome and deserves to get paid
>realize I actually already own this book these books in hardcopy and just haven't gotten around to reading them

Geography vs Science Fiction

Eastern European SF is not the same as Western SF. Not better or worse, just different.

I don't know much about Asian SF. Will have to investigate.

Robutts

To any moderately advanced robot civilisation, wouldn't our pervasive use of computers look unnervingly like a society that keeps brains or hearts in jars?

Length is Relative

While I'm here, I might also reflect on the fact that I've always maintained a distance from the activity of blogging mostly because where I'm from, blogs are typically these long, laborious, self-indulgent and generally quite wanky series of articles. But I guess some exposure over time to the net has dulled these reflexes, because I am reminded that the length and nature of an article are not fixed properties.

So what I'm nominating is the concept of shorter, snappier pieces. They don't have to be much, perhaps 100-400 words, one or two paragraphs max.

I'm calling it microblogging, since it's snappy and arguably in tune with the mobile-yet-online lifestyle that has developed over the last couple years. Get an idea, throw down the basics, post it up and let the peanut gallery argue over the fine print. Sure, you could say that Twitter has already garnered this market, but after an abortive one-month stint using it I realised that my best thoughts are far too beefy to fit into 140 characters. That, I would call nanoblogging.

A Brief Sabbatical

Hello little blog.
Did you think I had forgotten you?




...well, I had. For a while, anyway.
But lately I've been streaming things through my mind that might be worth writing down, if only so I can consult them later. Had a few things brewing up in the back of my head that I should really get around to putting in action. Or at least put into words so I can hash out my processes a little.

Things to do:
1) Fix the boot.ini on my work laptop (eugh, maybe I should just backup and request a reimage).
2) Load up the other partition on my personal laptop with Snow Leopard again, and see if I can't track down a fix for the lack of Mac support for Intel integrated video chips.
3) Set up J's Chumby properly.
4) Level a toon to 85 in World of Warcraft so I can say I've at least seen endgame content.
5) Sniff around for some digital copies of the textbooks I'm going to need for SP1 of my OUA course. I have a horrible feeling that saving %25 by ordering from Amazon is going to burn me in the delivery window.

Resetting my TF2 Stats: The Great Purge (and Inevitable Analysis)

I've got a couple articles in the pipe at the moment, but I've been on holidays (and also hideously lazy, though that's a given, really).

Something I've been tossing around lately is the idea of resetting my TF2 stats, and I just took the plunge. So for the sake of posterity, here are my old statistics up to the 8th of August 2009.

See the bizarre Pyro score anomaly? That's what screwing around on farming servers gets you. It's half of why I reset in the first place.

Clearly I'm a career medic, but in the days before reset I became hellbent on getting the Pyromancer achievement, and as such wound up accruing lot of extra Pyro time, almost 20 hours worth, in order to get it.

The Pyromancer effort, coupled with my compulsive decision a few months back to delete all my unlockable items, has really renewed my appreciation for the Pyro as a class in general. They're almost universally panned as a nub class, but who else gets ludicrous close range damage, decent health (175HP), can extinguish teammates, return explosive projectiles, disrupt the aim and movement of even the heaviest enemies, guarantee melee crits, inspires terror in every single other class, and has generally awesome taunts and characterization?

You know it to be true. Turn to the dark side, and let our power engulf you.

Anyway, with that tangent out of the way, I thought I'd analyze my stats a little. My hours were as such:

Medic - 253:54:01
Pyro - 140:45:33
Engineer - 105:00:46
Scout - 74:57:08
Soldier - 46:26:49
Heavy - 33:47:39
Demoman - 26:01:19
Spy - 15:02:15
Sniper - 5:44:11

This calculates out to a total playtime of 701:39:41 - or a little over 29 days straight. Offensive classes (Scout, Solly, Pyro) earned over 262 hours, Defensive (Demo, Heavy, Engy) got about 165 hours, and Support classes (Medic, Sniper, Spy) rang in at roughly 275 hours.

Clearly I'm more inclined towards confrontational classes, which is evident even in my weighting towards Offensive and Support class roles (with Medic being my main, Spy/Sniper left in 8th and 9th slot, and Pyro/Scout taking 2nd/4th).

There is plenty more analyses to be done if one was so inclined; but I'll leave you with this: at the time of my reset, TF2 had been online and playable for 668 days (one year, 9 months and 29 days). This works out to me having played, on average, a little over one hour per day since release. Truly, this is the mark of an enjoyable and well-designed game.

My extended statistics are available below. Much respect to ImageHosting.com for permitting a 1048x3075 PNG file without any resizing, and not requiring an account.