Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Ah, the fine art of character creation. It is an art in many ways, and I fear I am lacking my muse. Part of my longs for the days of being able to put together a D&D character as, literally, a collection of stats and abilities and then going from there. Personality and niche develop out of play, dependent on the rest of the group and the campaign itself. More and more, I've seen games pushing for starting with the character of the character and working stats secondarily to match. That's not invalid by any means, and I could argue it's a better way to do things in order to make a character worth playing. But it also leads to a total roadblock when lacking creative ideas. Most of my characters of the last ten or fifteen years have come about in one of two ways. First, there's the inspired method. Here, I have an idea of the character to start with. Often it comes to me as a mental image that conveys their personality. I don't always get all the details at

- I haven't really commented on Furryfaire, for good or ill, since February. - It's been approximately a year (judging by a Wiki edit that happened around the same time) since I thought to myself, "Cyra wants to make something. Oh, but magic rules got changed and artificing is due to be changed soon, so I may as well wait on that." I don't even remember what the thing was now. - In November, I made comments to myself regarding the return of Raveena. Current laston: 6 weeks ago for less than ten minutes. Not much of a return (though it beats Lairu at 132 weeks ... two and a half years? Sheesh). - As recently as a couple months ago, I had hopes an IC marriage might be cause for some roleplay. None of those involved, myself included, has shown any idea or drive as to where to take that, so it's become a non-issue. It's still my primary means of contact with a very few people. I still occasionally get involved in one-on-one RP scenes with someone. But

Back to a "normal" night week at work. Yay. Still unable to put together a coherent character concept for Dresden Files, which bugs me. Spending less free time on WoW, though I've been questing with my warlock some (but now that we have another regular in the guild who does inscription, that should matter less for Cataclysm). Friday: Took off work a little early in order to meet with the other HOA board members and walk about the condos with a couple contractors, discussing their proposals. I don't want to be blinded by first impressions, but one group seemed a whole heck of a lot more professional and experienced than the other, and we're pursuing that. Afterwards, the board sat down and had a chat. The others tend to be less worried than I am, and more easily brush off the complaints of our two-three most ranty owners. I feel a little better for having talked to them and seen their focus on fixing things and moving forward. I'm not sure if I feel more w

Heavy Rain is a neat game. Sort of. I still think "interactive movie/story" is probably better. It functions a lot like its predecessor (in terms of design, not storyline), Indigo Prophecy . They're both similar to adventure games of old where you walk around areas to find things and trigger events. Instead of extensive use of key-based puzzles, though, you get extensive use of quick-time events, even for the most mundane of tasks. Heavy Rain looks good. It sounds good. The story is good (though not without a few flaws). The overall experience is engrossing, both to being enjoyable and troubling at times. It drew me in well on an emotional level. Definitely worth playing, in my book, though I don't see any sign that it lives up to the pitch of "one little change can alter everything." There don't seem that many pivotal moments that shift the storyline in more than a minor way. On one hand, I like that the story avoided the metaphysics and "W

I find some small relief in typing out my responses to emails bounced about by HOA members, or detailing my thoughts on our property manager. And then I don't send them. Heh. Not yet anyways. Email is too easy to copy and forward. The last time I replied directly to one person, most of my message was copied and sent to everyone, eliciting a pissy response from the property manager. Whee. If things I "say" are going to cause minor shitstorms and lots of stress like that, no thanks. So yesterday I printed a letter specifically to the other board members about my concerns and asking their opinions. Hopefully physical copy won't get around so much. This morning, I've typed out a response to some lingering questions in email, but I'm hanging onto that for now. Depending on how things develop, it may or may not actually be sent to anyone. Just writing it, though, eases anxiety a little bit. The whole fiasco still creeps into my thoughts every waking hour of

I'm definitely down, bothered, and distracted. There were some okay and even good moments over the weekend. Last week is over, and that's probably the "worst" of what this period of work has to offer. But it's just hard to feel positive about things. Last week mostly sucked due to overlap in training scheduled for the advertising/accounting system and the go-live week for our newsroom system. Now that we've successfully published with the new stuff in the newsroom for several days, people should be settling in. Because it's remotely hosted, we're still horrifically vulnerable to any disruption in the internet between here and there. I believe it was Thursday night we lost our connectivity for about five minutes. Previously, we could get through that without anyone even noticing. Now, it disconnected everyone from their work right at deadline, had us worried like crazy, and set people back some in unlocking files left in-use. All this for an outage

So I'm settling in for night 2 of using our new newsroom software. Last night, our most serious problems were printing-related and we bypassed them by having the hosting company switch our print jobs over to another server. Theoretically, they're set up the same way, but from the results, that can't be the case. I did get the morning off, at least, skipping another session on the accounting software's reports - which seemed fairly straightforward for what they were, so I doubt I missed much. Tomorrow's morning session, however, is more important, so it looks like another split shift for me. As it stands, I was in a bit early today and will probably put in 9-10 hours before the day is done since I can't leave before everything is finished for tomorrow's paper. Whee. It's overtime, right? Somehow, that never feels like much consolation. Edit: 12:49, last page done and sent. Whee. Have to be back in before 9 am.

Heh. Well, no further major glitches anyway. Time to go home. So... roughly 11 and a half hours on the clock today. Probably looking at being here about as late tomorrow - have to stay until everything is done under these conditions. I think I'm going to skip the morning training session, though, as it's of limited benefit to me anyway.

Well... it's been an interesting night, and it's not over. I haven't been bored, but there were times I thought "it really feels like there should be more for us IT people to do ." Then, of course, we ran into some fairly serious printing errors and scrambled for a bit before finding a workaround (that works, but we're not sure why it fixes both problems we were running into). All-in-all, this switchover to a new system appears to be working okay. That warrants a (hopefully not premature) "yay."

Day shifts sync me with the rest of the world, which is sort of nice. Night shifts are usually more relaxing. This week, however, my work schedule looks like split shifts and craziness. Technically, I'd be working nights, but... There's training that I'm not critical to, but should be a part of if possible scheduled from 9-11 and 3-5 all this week. Wednesday night, the newsroom is shifting over to the new system, so both of us IT people will probably need to be around then. And very likely Thursday night, and possibly Friday, too. I don't like split shifts, but there's no reason for me to be back in the office until this afternoon's training. So I guess I'll have lunch and a nap for now and play things by ear this week. If some other things fall into place, there might be reason for me to just stay through midday. Either way, I'm probably not working as late as usual tonight and maybe tomorrow night, but I imagine I'll be into overtime before the

Probably making slightly better time in the lower spire. We got started roughly a half hour late. We're showing consistency even against Saurfang and even with people who haven't been there everytime. That's good. I worry a little about the time in the central citadel, though. I suppose it's a fair enough point to take a break, but we had a lot of people AFK immediately there. And the mini-bosses slow us down some. So it was almost 40 minutes to line up for Festergut. He went down in one this time, which is another good sign, though if the AVR overlays are accurate, we could still stand to get our close-range group (tank included) closer together. Rotface is our particular challenge at the moment. There's a lot going on, which is true of many boss fights, but everyone is required to react to it, and that gets us. In "check" fights, we have a sense of how much harder we need to push with DPS or healing, or whatever. In coordination fights, it's rea

The week's training sessions completed yesterday, thankfully, so it appears today should be much more relaxing by comparison. Of course, there's still plenty to be thinking about and issues which may arise. Our newsroom system is currently scheduled to go live next week, and there's more training on the advertising system them. Whee. I have no idea what schedule I'll be working, even though it would be a "night" week for me. Wednesday was almost blissful as a lull itself. Afternoon training was cancelled, so I got out at a normal hour. I wouldn't be playing WoW, even, so I decided I would just kick back and relax. And, for once, that worked. Actually relaxing was almost euphoric.

I have, by and large, been in a foul mood all weekend. Saturday's raid, at least, gave me something to focus on. Otherwise, I've been thinking about stupidity over email and HOA crap. Then there's training this week at work that'll keep me late and bring me in a little early (an hour an a half early today to set up, but probably less than that the rest of the week). I went to bed early last night in preparation for that. Then I tossed and turned for two hours and woke up several times after that. Too cold. Too hot. Too much bouncing through my mind. Argh. So I'm operating today on a horrible night of not-enough-sleep. And the morning training session today crapped out after half an hour because of some issues with running the new software under terminal services. Specifically, it would only work for one person at a time rather than the three who need it. So we're waiting for that to be figured out and hopefully will be resuming for the afternoon training ses

Saturday's raid went fine overall. Just ICC. About two hours to access the inner spire - that seems about the norm for us. Then another two hours to down Svalna, Stinky, Precious, and Festergut - which amounts to one more "real" boss. About 45 minutes on Festergut himself, over several attempts. Our biggest stumbling blocked seemed to be getting spacing right for innoculations, and I think there was a learning curve for healers finding pacing of switching to tank heals. Sadly, while I hear things about that fight indicating when a tank switches off they can drop Righteous Fury and pop Avenging Wrath (or go cat form, or switch stances) and do major damage with the buff/debuff in effect. Even dropping RF and avoiding AW, however, I still had to throttle back on using damaging abilities to keep from out-aggroing our druid tank. I'm confused as to why. So I wonder about the remaining hour and a quarter spent in the middle of ICC. It doesn't seem like clearing trash