Start of the New Year
The year kicked off quietly enough for me. In fact, I was so tired I think I was asleep New Years Eve by 11 and missed the ball drop entirely. Ah, so it goes.
Nothing major up at work, which just means to me we're probably falling behind on the upgrade plans. Home is home - quiet, but reasonably stable. There's another homeowners meeting coming up next week, at which we can discuss things and hopefully move on. Guh. I really want to get this repair project done with, and it feels like we're so close but just out of reach. We'll get elections there, so I may or may not be on the board afterward. I'd probably prefer to not be, honestly.
And that's the "important" stuff, such as it is. Then there's the other stuff on my mind...
Star Wars
It seems bizarre to me, but the more I watch the Clone Wars series, the more I like it. Admittedly, I'm usually hoping for Ahsoka-centric episodes more than Anakin-centric ones, but still. On the other hand, the more I watch the prequel movies, the less I like them.
I was recently pointed to a video review of The Phantom Menace (http://forums.furaffinity.net/showthread.php?t=59098&highlight=phantom+menace) and while I don't care so much for the narrator's "persona" and tangents, I find it hard to argue with any point he makes. Who's the main character of TPM? Umm... Which of the characters do you connect with and feel anything for? Errr... And yeah, there's a whole lot of lines in the movie that make no sense internally and a lot of things that make little or no sense when weighed against the orginal trilogy. It really is a mess.
The behind-the-scenes clips are... eerie. I see them and I keep thinking "okay, he's got to be taking this a little out of context, but... man, the looks of some of those guys, and those comments... did they really know how much of a mess they had on their hands?" Absolute power can be a bad thing, even for the man who created Star Wars.
The observation about the change in lightsaber battles between the trilogies strikes a particular chord in me. It's something I sort of noticed, but didn't really think about. In the original movies, lightsaber duels were, indeed, more about internal conflicts. Vader comes across as powerful, but slow. In Empire, he shows up the unskilled Luke with effortless one-handed blocks. By Return of the Jedi, he's simply outclassed - once Luke really lets himself fight. But all those duels deal more with internal struggle that's beyond the swinging of laser swords. Then in the prequels, lightsabers are not only commonplace tools, but the duels we see are little more than overly-choreographed fluff. Sure, it's neat to watch Grievous with his whirling sabers, but there's no emotional conflict or impact with Obi Wan fights him, and even the duel at the end of Sith is overly long, too flashy, and feels superficial.
To me, one of the biggest deficits in the prequels has always been the characters and chemistry between them. In the original movies, the viewer was drawn in to relate to Luke, and the interactions seemed genuine and natural. In the prequels, Anakin is shoved into the central role somewhat belatedly, he's not very easy to connect with, and far too many lines actually feel scripted - because everything has to end a certain way, there's no room for the characters to act naturally.
World of Warcraft
Last night, I ran a heroic Halls of Lightning. When Wrath came out, this was one of the hardest of the 5-man dungeons. Even though I often see one or two DPS characters in a group doing 3500-ish DPS, the three DPS and tank ranged from 2000 to about 2600 and the run was really easy. Okay, there were a couple points the healer almost died, but I was surprised at how smoothly the boss fights went, or the once-tricky run through the elementals. It was a little stunning to me how much things have changed as characters have advanced.
Of course, then we ended up running Nexus (one of the easier 5-mans) and got grouped with a hunter whose bow broke in the middle of a boss fight. Aheh. You can offer progressive content and better gear, but some people just suck. >.>
A guildmate was recently hacked, too. Perhaps the saddest part is they ordered authenticators just a few days before that probably would have prevented it. From what I saw, nothing in the guild bank was touched, but their gear was sold off for gold, a server transfer was initiated, and some alts were deleted. This strikes me as really scattered.
Emblem gear was not deleted - you can't sell it for gold, so that sorta makes sense as you wouldn't get any profit from deleting the gear. But then, you wouldn't get any profit from deleting alt characters either.
Stranger yet, after getting control of the account wrested back, the main character has tons of valuable non-bound stuff on them, presumably that the hacker was compiling to move around and/or sell. Those battered hilts alone are probably worth half a million gold, given current server prices. It's a horrible temptation to keep and use this stuff for someone who was recently frustrated by having to go through customer service to even get their account back.
But... as the Martin's Fury scandal (http://www.wow.com/2009/04/30/the-martin-fury-scandal-karatechop-reveals-all/) taught us, all of that stuff is poison. Using those items or giving them to others is an offense that could genuinely be permanently-bannable for any of the parties involved. So instead it just sits and teases while the GMs are petitioned to... do something with it all (and hopefully return some of the gear that was lost, though how much they can do remains to be seen).
Part of what boggles me about it is how all that stuff was acquired in the first place. It seems like the battered hilts and primordial saronite represent a huge amount of time in Icecrown 5-mans and the raid or so much gold it's silly. And I doubt our server's auction house has seen that many of those items in the span of a few weeks, much less the three hours or so the hacker had control of the account. Where did it all come from and what did they hope to gain?
Ugh. I hate hackers.
Rachet and Clank: A Crack in Time
Cool game and lots of fun. I love the tone, I love the visuals, it moves and controls well, the story's not at all bad. I don't think I'll follow the series back a generation or more, but I'm glad to have played the PS3 games, and it's a series I'll keep an eye out for going forward if they continue it.
I still have things to go back and do, and it's good for filling slow times in other games.
Computers
I'm seriously considering a new laptop in the near future. My current one is... several years old. At least seven, probably more. It's technically the property of work, though I'm not sure they'd even have any use for it anymore. It runs slow opening a web browser and while it's worked okay for MUCKing, even that has been inconsistent of late (though I'm not sure the problem there is actually the computer).
I'd like to get one that will run WoW, cleanly if not spectacularly. Time to start researching some, it would seem.
Books
Hmm. Serious lull here. I've been borrowing and reading the Greywalker series, which is okay. I think I'm jonesing for new Butcher, Carey, or Sanderson material, but I don't think there's any new releases from them for months (if not years). I've kinda of given up on expecting any further works from Patrick Rothfuss even in the next decade, though I occasionally read that he's going to signing and shows and such.
Furryfaire
Reminded belatedly that I left one line of thinking out. I've gone on before about how I think the Nimby plotline is full of missed opportunity. And now, the Nimby characters are allowed to traverse back to the primary world. They're supposedly restricted in power use, but this is... almost insult to injury in my book. As I understood it to start with, part of the point of the plot was to get some of the "uber" characters off the main grid and let them play somewhere else. Now they can come back just fine (and with augmented, divine stats, whether they can use them all or not), which totally shoots that idea down. The crossover also makes all the effort of setting up separate rpinfo entries and chargen pointless, as allowing them to travel back and forth means bleed over in characters. We're also stuck with two side-by-side worlds that have already operated on different time-flow standards, which is a pain to coordinate.
It feels like a poor patch made in order to give people invested in Nimby more opportunity to play (as the main grid has a higher population these days). I say "poor" because it seems to cause other problems, and not make anything really better in the long term.
Nothing major up at work, which just means to me we're probably falling behind on the upgrade plans. Home is home - quiet, but reasonably stable. There's another homeowners meeting coming up next week, at which we can discuss things and hopefully move on. Guh. I really want to get this repair project done with, and it feels like we're so close but just out of reach. We'll get elections there, so I may or may not be on the board afterward. I'd probably prefer to not be, honestly.
And that's the "important" stuff, such as it is. Then there's the other stuff on my mind...
Star Wars
It seems bizarre to me, but the more I watch the Clone Wars series, the more I like it. Admittedly, I'm usually hoping for Ahsoka-centric episodes more than Anakin-centric ones, but still. On the other hand, the more I watch the prequel movies, the less I like them.
I was recently pointed to a video review of The Phantom Menace (http://forums.furaffinity.net/showthread.php?t=59098&highlight=phantom+menace) and while I don't care so much for the narrator's "persona" and tangents, I find it hard to argue with any point he makes. Who's the main character of TPM? Umm... Which of the characters do you connect with and feel anything for? Errr... And yeah, there's a whole lot of lines in the movie that make no sense internally and a lot of things that make little or no sense when weighed against the orginal trilogy. It really is a mess.
The behind-the-scenes clips are... eerie. I see them and I keep thinking "okay, he's got to be taking this a little out of context, but... man, the looks of some of those guys, and those comments... did they really know how much of a mess they had on their hands?" Absolute power can be a bad thing, even for the man who created Star Wars.
The observation about the change in lightsaber battles between the trilogies strikes a particular chord in me. It's something I sort of noticed, but didn't really think about. In the original movies, lightsaber duels were, indeed, more about internal conflicts. Vader comes across as powerful, but slow. In Empire, he shows up the unskilled Luke with effortless one-handed blocks. By Return of the Jedi, he's simply outclassed - once Luke really lets himself fight. But all those duels deal more with internal struggle that's beyond the swinging of laser swords. Then in the prequels, lightsabers are not only commonplace tools, but the duels we see are little more than overly-choreographed fluff. Sure, it's neat to watch Grievous with his whirling sabers, but there's no emotional conflict or impact with Obi Wan fights him, and even the duel at the end of Sith is overly long, too flashy, and feels superficial.
To me, one of the biggest deficits in the prequels has always been the characters and chemistry between them. In the original movies, the viewer was drawn in to relate to Luke, and the interactions seemed genuine and natural. In the prequels, Anakin is shoved into the central role somewhat belatedly, he's not very easy to connect with, and far too many lines actually feel scripted - because everything has to end a certain way, there's no room for the characters to act naturally.
World of Warcraft
Last night, I ran a heroic Halls of Lightning. When Wrath came out, this was one of the hardest of the 5-man dungeons. Even though I often see one or two DPS characters in a group doing 3500-ish DPS, the three DPS and tank ranged from 2000 to about 2600 and the run was really easy. Okay, there were a couple points the healer almost died, but I was surprised at how smoothly the boss fights went, or the once-tricky run through the elementals. It was a little stunning to me how much things have changed as characters have advanced.
Of course, then we ended up running Nexus (one of the easier 5-mans) and got grouped with a hunter whose bow broke in the middle of a boss fight. Aheh. You can offer progressive content and better gear, but some people just suck. >.>
A guildmate was recently hacked, too. Perhaps the saddest part is they ordered authenticators just a few days before that probably would have prevented it. From what I saw, nothing in the guild bank was touched, but their gear was sold off for gold, a server transfer was initiated, and some alts were deleted. This strikes me as really scattered.
Emblem gear was not deleted - you can't sell it for gold, so that sorta makes sense as you wouldn't get any profit from deleting the gear. But then, you wouldn't get any profit from deleting alt characters either.
Stranger yet, after getting control of the account wrested back, the main character has tons of valuable non-bound stuff on them, presumably that the hacker was compiling to move around and/or sell. Those battered hilts alone are probably worth half a million gold, given current server prices. It's a horrible temptation to keep and use this stuff for someone who was recently frustrated by having to go through customer service to even get their account back.
But... as the Martin's Fury scandal (http://www.wow.com/2009/04/30/the-martin-fury-scandal-karatechop-reveals-all/) taught us, all of that stuff is poison. Using those items or giving them to others is an offense that could genuinely be permanently-bannable for any of the parties involved. So instead it just sits and teases while the GMs are petitioned to... do something with it all (and hopefully return some of the gear that was lost, though how much they can do remains to be seen).
Part of what boggles me about it is how all that stuff was acquired in the first place. It seems like the battered hilts and primordial saronite represent a huge amount of time in Icecrown 5-mans and the raid or so much gold it's silly. And I doubt our server's auction house has seen that many of those items in the span of a few weeks, much less the three hours or so the hacker had control of the account. Where did it all come from and what did they hope to gain?
Ugh. I hate hackers.
Rachet and Clank: A Crack in Time
Cool game and lots of fun. I love the tone, I love the visuals, it moves and controls well, the story's not at all bad. I don't think I'll follow the series back a generation or more, but I'm glad to have played the PS3 games, and it's a series I'll keep an eye out for going forward if they continue it.
I still have things to go back and do, and it's good for filling slow times in other games.
Computers
I'm seriously considering a new laptop in the near future. My current one is... several years old. At least seven, probably more. It's technically the property of work, though I'm not sure they'd even have any use for it anymore. It runs slow opening a web browser and while it's worked okay for MUCKing, even that has been inconsistent of late (though I'm not sure the problem there is actually the computer).
I'd like to get one that will run WoW, cleanly if not spectacularly. Time to start researching some, it would seem.
Books
Hmm. Serious lull here. I've been borrowing and reading the Greywalker series, which is okay. I think I'm jonesing for new Butcher, Carey, or Sanderson material, but I don't think there's any new releases from them for months (if not years). I've kinda of given up on expecting any further works from Patrick Rothfuss even in the next decade, though I occasionally read that he's going to signing and shows and such.
Furryfaire
Reminded belatedly that I left one line of thinking out. I've gone on before about how I think the Nimby plotline is full of missed opportunity. And now, the Nimby characters are allowed to traverse back to the primary world. They're supposedly restricted in power use, but this is... almost insult to injury in my book. As I understood it to start with, part of the point of the plot was to get some of the "uber" characters off the main grid and let them play somewhere else. Now they can come back just fine (and with augmented, divine stats, whether they can use them all or not), which totally shoots that idea down. The crossover also makes all the effort of setting up separate rpinfo entries and chargen pointless, as allowing them to travel back and forth means bleed over in characters. We're also stuck with two side-by-side worlds that have already operated on different time-flow standards, which is a pain to coordinate.
It feels like a poor patch made in order to give people invested in Nimby more opportunity to play (as the main grid has a higher population these days). I say "poor" because it seems to cause other problems, and not make anything really better in the long term.
Ever check out Tanya Huff's works? If not, you might want to. Specifically the Summon the Keeper series and Better Part of Valor.
ReplyDeleteHrm... Seen that name so much. *peeks* I've read... some of the Keeper series, at least. Hmm...
ReplyDelete