| current resident

print "Hello {name}, I hear it's {occasion}. On behalf of {organization}, we offer our {human emotion}!"

| Ay! Mussolini.

Thanks for the Happy BDay wish Ry. Another few thousand steps to the grave.

j0rn, I am glad you enjoyed the First Law series. Quite an accomplishment for a first writing by Joe Abercrombie. I really enjoyed the characters and the sense of dark humor in the book. Twas a shame eLzar couldn't get into it.

Off to work... Blah.

D>M>

Happy Birthday Enron, you jerk.

| Stuff

1. OK, this is cool. Most of you guys probably know I was a serious nut about Infocom text adventures back in the day. I still break 'em out and play them from time to time. And from about 1995-2002, I spent a lot of time playing modern day IF (Infocom-type games, but written in the modern day), hanging out on various usenet groups, and even took a couple stabs at writing some adventures. Nerd! Anyway one of the best IF writers by far was this guy Andrew Plotkin. He wrote several games that were both excellently crafted pieces of software (exceeding Infocom stuff from their heyday) and extremely well written. Anyway, he started a Kickstarter project to take some time off work and write a text adventure for iPhone. His goal was $8000, and he made it in one day.

2. Jumped in some random WoW dungeons with Aeryk tonight. Very, very fun. Basically you turn on that you want a dungeon and what role you are and go about your business as usual. About 10 minutes later the game gets a group together for you, you automatically teleport into the instance and start killin'. We did two random dungeons in a row and it was a total blast, not to mention XP and loot-tastic. Definitely got the itch to do more of them soon.

3. I forgot to mention, but Enron lent me this series called The First Law by Joe Abercrombie and it was really good. Definitely worth picking up if you feel like a good, fast-paced, well written, exciting, humorous and cynical fantasy series. In many ways the events of the series are intentional subversions of typical fantasy tropes. Some great characters and a really good ending to the whole thing, well worth checking out.

| Not a committment team... but The Sexy Team

Thats cuz we're sexy. oh and that's a good deal from Amazon. tempting. It's hard to do the middle ground kindof thing. It's either spend 14 hours straight or nothin! Actually, was just thinking about an idea with one of those electrical excercise devices that straps on when you play Wow - So you get excercise while also being able to feel the burn when you run from Booty bay to the Wetlands. It'll also add to the realism, like when you swing a sword it excercises your arms.



Geeky? definitely. crazy? you bet. feasible? possibly

Amazon's having a big "Get Three Games for the Price of Two" sale right now which includes a bunch of random shit, including the 60 day WoW time cards for $30 bucks. Mostly newer games from all different systems/pc, so worth checking out.
LINK!

Starcraft 2 is in that list too, so SC2, WoW card and then something else, blam!

Well, it's always hard to get any sort of meaningful commitment from The Action Team, I mean what do you think we are, The Commitment Team? But I'm signed up for a six month subscription so will be playing through then. My character and Doc are on the same ol' server.

You don't need Cataclysm to see the changes to the vanilla zones. They are just going to flip the switch on 12/7 and the changes will affect everybody. You will need to buy Lich King if you want to play Death Knights or go from level 71-80. You will need to buy Cataclysm if you want to play the new races or go to level 81-85. I could see them putting out some kind of bundle in the future but for now, yes you have to buy them all separately.

If you do decide to check out the changes, start downloading at least a day and a half before you want to play because the patches are MAMMOTH, like 12 gigs. If you don't have the game installed at all then it is much more time-efficient to just download the installer from the Blizzard site and start from scratch than it is to install off your old discs and patch up.

| I am Hitlairgo

So does this mean everyones gonna play and on what server? I wonder if you have to buy the LK and then have to upgrade again to CATA. Or if you buy CATA you get everything??? Kinda of sham if you ask me.

Or should we all just play Starcraft II and go to Korea to beat those silly koreanamese at their game? Jon will definitely have to improve his RTS reflexes from past experiences with Warcraft I.

I don't know, tough call.

Have you guys heard of a site called w w w . s k y m e . c o m? It has all the latest movies, EVERYTHING absolutely free. you have to download a small app about 2 megs, doesn't have a tracker, you might have to read a little chinese, but all the movies are in english. It's an awesome site if you haven't used it yet.

| The Gauntlet Has Been Thrown!

Healing IS an art, not a collection of mods! :P

Each dungeon or raid is going to be different because of the mix of the group you are running with, so even if the boss fights are the same, the dynamic will be different and the healing needs will be different for each situation.

Heroic Lich King dungeons even more so as the boss fights get nutty.

Each class is going to heal differently, and as I only have experience as a healin' priest, I know that Discipline and Holy were totally different ball games, and when running as a Shadow, I know that Droods and Shammies also have different healing schemes.

Mods of course help, but the FACT of the matter is that no mod can automate healz, broham!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DISCLAIMER: The statements in the above blog post are fact and irrefutable. Any attempt to deny, dispute, or discourage belief in said claims will be considered an action worse than any ever performed by a terrorist and/or Hitler.

If you don't like the difficulty/loot changes they made in BC you definitely wouldn't like Lich King, and I assume Cataclysm will move in the same direction. PVE questing is noticeably easier in Lich King than vanilla/BC and the loot is still awesome. It is a good tradeoff for a streamlined game, but it does get a little silly when I only need a couple of my 25+ spells/powers to get through 95% of the quests.

Have you tried out Starcraft II? I always like the idea of those games so much, then play like 4 levels, totally suck and never play again. The mods people are coming out with though are pretty amazing though. Like FPSes and stuff like that.

| Allodin the Palodin returns?

Was reading some of the game changes. Streamlining the stat lines and armor bonuses has potential. The bonuses to spirit and mana regeneration will be improved which will make it a viable spec. This seems interesting, if they do it right. I would make a healer with +spirit instead of +int, since you would last much longer healing over time.

by the way, healing is not an art. Healing is downloading the right healing mod.

I hope they fix the game difficulty a bit though. In the burning crusade they whored out the magic items and saturated the AH with goods. It made level advancement much quicker and better for the casual gamer, but took a lot of the difficulties and fun out of the game.

| Hauser-craft? More like you're Hauser-craft

I hear you. You played that game pretty hard. Meanwhile my main still doesn't even have as many days /played as Ja-el did in his marathon 2 months. Yeah that meetup was awesome, I kept getting killed by alligators running through the effin' wetlands. I also have fond memories of my (first) retirement from the game when you and Ja-el ran me through Gnomeregan. You guys were like level 55 so you just punched everything to death.

I'm looking forward to trying the dungeon finder. That's one thing I've barely done so it should feel relatively fresh. And they are changing almost the entire 1-50 experience when cataclysm launches (don't need the expansion for that) so I'm looking forward to make a new dude at that point.

| world of warcraft? more like world of pffffft-craft

... I can't believe the thrill is gone but it's SO fucking gone for me. I had me some awesome times in WoW but the last few times I've loaded it up it's done nothing for me. Enjoy it fellas. I still remember one of our first meetups in Darkshore after just getting out of Elf-land. I think Eric and/or Jon having to run to Darkshore from human-land. That was such a great time :)

I've successfully pre-ordered games from Amazon with release day shipping and it's worked. The only time I hear about it being an issue for computer games is the risk of update servers being slammed and being unable to actually play on release day. If you buy it electronically through Blizz they're supposedly offering pre-loading (which most pre-release games on Steam offer) which means you can have the game downloaded and installed on your computer before release day and then be good to go at 12:01am or whatever.

Good luck with your project Elrick. I think you're gonna miss out on some joy and pain but hopefully you've got something great and creative in the works. If you change your mind mid-Nov you can always try the "Random Logline Generator" and see what you come up with:

RANDOM
"A large banjo player, a passive-aggressive cult leader, and a sleep-walking conductor plot to take over the world in virtual reality." Hmmm...

Hurry up with your overtime Dennish!

| WoW Tangggggg

Ha! Same here. Though I'm only sipping the juice from a baby sipping bottle. I read somewhere that prior to the release, they are going to have events leading to the expansion. Already I've felt small earthquakes while traveling around. I'll be on more ofter before the release just to see what they do.

Rude - thanks for the heads up on Deth Angle. I canceled my Amazon order and went to the Barnes and Noble by Del Amo Mall. I'm surprised they have so many games. They even had Agricola. Haven't played it yet though. The rules aren't written that well either. Not the worse, but I actually had to "school" focus to get through it. Or maybe my brain is just getting old and soft.

| Back on the Sauce

I'm back on the WoW-sauce.

Docnorvell is alive and well, being retooled with all that I have learned over the years NOT playing him and I want to get him to 80 before Cataclysm hits. Care to join me?

I have abandoned a few other characters I started recently to just get this guy to 80, I think he deserves it and it has been a long time coming.

I still have not done ANY dungeons from Burning Crusade so once this joker hits 80 I'm gonna try and dungeon my way through the levels with my Paladin, although I don't think I can handle tanking anymore; DPS is a science, Healing is an art, and Tanking is a job - I don't want to work two jobs unless I have too, thank you. Unless of course I am tanking for an all Action Team guild run... :)

I am also working on yet another secret Eric project that if it finds it's way to completion, I will let you all know, otherwise I'm burying it. The only downside to it is that it is going to probably make my NaNoWriMo attempt to write a novel in a month not happen. :( Go Rudy, go!

BTW, I'm trying the Amazon pre-order for Cataclysm that guarantee's launch day delivery, anyone have any luck with this?