Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Debate and discussion continue over the fate of Furryfaire. The last big talking point took my idea of setting things in the past rather than the future to a wild extreme. I'm not really sure how settings things prior to the last global "Dragons of the End" reset is functionally any different from setting things after the next one. Either way, you're basically throwing everything established out the window and that's... more than I was thinking. Ah well. The doomsaying doesn't really seem any worse than previous times, but there is something to it. MUCKs have been on the decline for years, with the rise of MMORPGs and social networking. Has the time come to give it up? Well, I don't think I could do that entirely all at once, but it's possible Furryfaire may be on the way out. I'm not sure there's enough creativity, interest, and motivation left to hold it together through a major shakeup. Then again, I'm not sure there isn't. It... r

Guh. How is it the end of September already? This year has been insane, the weeks slipping away like hourglass sand. Weekends go by in a flash of WoW and GW nights respectively and an attempt to catch up some on sleep. I have been taking hikes up a little trail nearby on my days off, but that doesn't make the days seem longer or myself more accomplished. A decent book rarely lasts more than a couple days, and then leaves me struggling to find anything else worth reading. And now all this stuff about Furryfaire, which has been a habitual haven for many years, ups and downs included. Some people are pushing ahead with the assumption of centering play on Threshold with a five year time lapse. Some are still arguing for other things. Well, there's no way to please everyone. Does it avoid some of the restrictive IC law enforcement? Yes. Is it a locale closer to wild, untamed lands? Well... technically yes, but functionally not really - it's still too far away for most uses.

So I understand the setting under consideration at the moment is the trade city of Threshold, five years down the line... I think that's an improvement, but doesn't solve the major issues in my mind. And the city, as presented, seems a little off in my mind. I think people are clinging to the old Threshold and ignoring thirty to forty years of Drachen control. I have trouble envisioning a "tent city" outside the walls. I mean, given how far north the city is placed, that wouldn't likely survive a winter, much less many. And I doubt Dove would be willing or able to ignore things for that long. I could see public longhouses, at least, but more likely an effort to get people settled there and elsewhere. The city also wouldn't be quite the might/wealth-makes-right place it once was. After all, the big players behind that were murdered before it was handed over. It would, however, be a good bit less strictly lawful than the Shire. There's room for a crim

So... we ended up missing a couple regulars and one person short for a solid Lich king attempt last night. With no one of the desired classes to call upon, we took care of the weekly and reshuffled around for an "alt" run on lower ICC. We pulled in a few friends-of-guildmates to fill slots as time went on and out bear tank had connection problems. Adjusting the group took a while at every stage, but we moved fairly quickly when we were going. We got in through Svalna and killed some plagueworks trash for rep before calling it a night. A little early by some standards, but one person wasn't feeling well and I was pretty mentally drained from yesterday. The one real upshot for me is I finally got the Gargoyle Spit Bracers I've been after since downing Saurfang the first time. As unappetizing as they sound, I'm glad to have them. It only took 17 kills for them to finally drop. Go, go RNG! ... About the timing of the shoulders Laj dropped, too, I think - shortly be

Furryfaire in flux once more. As laid out over in Tashiro's journal , management and the future of the MUCK are sort of up in the air right now. It's a rough situation all around, and this will probably get long... Personal rant first, I guess... I feel responsible. And I feel bad about that. But also, I feel offended at feeling responsible. I don't really think I should be the single lynch pin that keeps the head wiz logging in. There should be other people to interact with and other things to do. That's sort of the point of a MUCK. If you just want to talk to one person, that's more the realm of IMs or something. So it really should not be the fault of my own waning interest that someone else bows out. I could certainly point to all the other contributing factors - plenty of inactive players, staff that didn't fill their roles, etc. Yet I still feel guilty about it. And I think that gets close to the reason I don't like being fully relied upon. I u

I got to talking some about Star Wars last night, Jedi philosophy in particular. It's a topic I find interesting to consider, but often frustrating to debate or be asked to explain in depth. Why? Well, because as I see it, there really isn't a right answer. It's a fictional philosophy that served a role in its media, but has never been fully specified. The closest thing I've seen to a complete write-up would either be a few pages in an RPG book (which is going to be written with a slant toward the game type - usually cinematic rather than simulationist) or a Wiki article that's a compilation from many sources, inconsistencies usually included. It's hard to paint a good, solid picture from that. Then there's the issue of what you take as canon. The further you get away from the original source material, the more the image of the Jedi will deviate from the creator's intent. Though... looking at the progression of movies after Episode V, I have increas

'tis all dark and rainy outside. Not heavily at the moment, but enough that I feel an urge to curl up all cozy-like and nap. Then again, I'm also having that feeling trying to get up in the morning, as it's been darker due to season as well as clouds. Alas. Yesterday was intensely stressful at work. Hardware going out on a machine used by the web department didn't help, though I think I was mostly focused on a list of "ongoing computer issues affecting morale in the newsroom." Rawr. Of the four, I hammered out a fix for one right away. I made an adjustment that should fix another. I made that changes that might have fixed a third - results were improved last night, but I can't call it done until that's the norm rather than the exception. Which leaves a fourth issue (which I must admit has been shuffled down as low priority in the past) I was ready to tackle this morning only to find it rendered irrelevant due to the announcement movement of some peo

While I'm waiting for support to get back to me about a new user, time for a brief post. Weekends are too short. GW : Finished the plotline of Eye of the North last night. After some of the things I heard about the last mission, I was expecting more. Really, the only difficult part was a lot of continuous fire damage. The Great Destroyer itself was dead pretty much before I realized it. Umm... Yay? We have some dungeons to go back and do, but the story appears to be over. I still think Nightfall was the best expansion/campaign. WoW : Still stymied by the Lich King, though we got some time on him and did some things after. I'm still amazed at how the learning curve for the raid seems to sky rocket with the end boss, but... ah well. Someday.

Just a few things on the mind today... On a Pale Horse Long ago, I was introduced to Piers Anthony with Xanth books. I didn't really like them. Oh, reading a fantasy novel for a book report was nice, but... yeah... puns have never been my thing. That pretty much turned me off to Anthony's work. So having his name come up in a recommendation recently made me wary, but will to try it. It proved a good read. I think I probably didn't read it in the best mindset for it, as I've been questioning my own place rather too much this week, but the book itself is entertaining and manages to be reasonably thoughtful in a good way as well. I can see how several things in this book would further appeal to tashiro , though I find the power of fate (and Fate) to be disturbingly overwhelming. It was pointed out to me as an example of fiction with magic and technology developing side-by-side. And, within the context of the story, it does that reasonably well. It does not, however

So... over eleven hours of work Monday left me a bit fried. Last night, I undertook the task of stringing an ethernet cable across the downstairs of the building which was... messy, frustrating, time-consuming, knuckle-skinning, and it involved stretching some muscles I didn't realize. Ah, but I'm aware of them today. This morning, I woke from a dream where I was in a gaming store (rare as they seem to be these days) run by a friend. I remember the sections of shelving devoted to various systems as I've seen dozens of times before, and one area set aside for his own work of art books and RPGs. ... That was more emotional than it probably should have been. And napping this afternoon, I had a dream in which I had just moved to another condo. Somewhere north, possibly even Canada. I remember display stands with various small metal trinkets left over from a former roommate's stink working with such things. And my parents were apparently staying with me. I recall choosi

Oog. Alternating weekly schedules can be rough sometimes, but it's even harder to be thrown off it. Though scheduled for nights this week, I had to come in at 9 am for the preliminary meeting regarding out circulation system upgrade. So I'm at about eight hours now and have a ways to go, though I probably won't stay all night. I suppose the positive side is that we accomplished what we needed to and I don't have to come in early tomorrow, at least. (WoW) Saturday's raid went okay in general, though a few things are worth commenting on. Razuvious was a mess (though successful and quick), and we headed up to the Frozen Throne. I wish we didn't have to go through 4-ish wipes on the Lich King before we got down our pattern to get through phase 1 regularly (this is mostly dependent on a single person). I'm miffed at one player for going, "Oh, company coming over, I need to go" when we have 11 people at the time we formed up, thus accepted him in over

A much more in-depth look at ways and reasons to limit the influence of gods in a fantasy world than I've ever had the focus to write: http://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/monkeywrench/ I find the log in general to have a lot of good thinking about worldbuilding and running fantasy games. Those behind the blog seem to have a lot more time to put into such things than I did even at my peak. I find it hard to imagine getting into so much detail, but it makes for interesting reading - at least to me.

If my old notes are correct: happy birthday, Moe. Operation: Gnomeregan Honestly? I'm disappointed. It's a neat little quest chain, I suppose. I actually found it cool that the gnomes you round up at the beginning mount up when you do instead of chasing behind on foot like some 'escorted' NPCs in the past. But overall, it doesn't feel as epic as the assault on the Undercity and it doesn't really accomplish anything. It's supposed to be setting up gnome control of upper Gnomeregan as a starting zone come Cataclysm, right? But the plotline ends with the invasion barely escaping back to Ironforge and a new, "more powerful" radiation bomb going off. There's no real indication that the gnomes should gain any sort of foothold there. The first-day technical issues didn't bother me too much. An unresponsive quest NPC was fixed up fairly quickly. Some people insisted on trying to block questgivers with their mounts, though that didn't slow

So... no Lich King attempt again. I feel like I missed a conversation wherein one of our regular healers who often complains about repeating activities might have sworn off any future attempts due to difficulty and wipes. If that's actually the case, we might not get back to that fight for quite a while as we have a dearth of highly-geared healers. For all I know, though, it might have been a temporary thing or blown out of proportion... Instead, we rocked through to the upper spire, attempting Putricide a couple times and downing Svalna before calling it a night. We had a couple people new to our raid group, including... another healer. More gear for them, and we might have our replacement. Odd. Heard of another guildmate, who spends most of her time with her own guild on another server, who has seen the LK defeated. I'm starting to feel left out.

So... a suggestion has been made to move the focus of Furryfaire from the Shirelands (that haven't been aptly named for years) to Siren's Cove. It's a big change in a lot of ways. I'm not sure what I think of it, overall, but some of the talking points that came up in discussion really confused me... It's primarily Joshuite. Wait. Is this supposed to be a selling point somehow? We already determined that a majority of the active playerbase seems to have conflicts with that religion. In fact, the headwiz up and decided something along the lines of "fine, if you guys don't like them, I'll move them" from the Shire to Tarantis. Now we're talking about putting the players into a Joshuite-heavy place again is the way to go? Uhh... that is totally backwards. As pointed out, the place isn't totally Joshuite, but still. There are no Peace Keepers, and it's not ruled by archons... Well, technically true. But I'm not sure why that'

Four years ago today I started a 10-day trial of World of Warcraft. It's strange to think back on how much has changed in terms of the game itself and my experience with it. I had actually sampled the game before, playing a new hunter on a friend's account at a con. It was okay, but didn't grab me. So I wasn't really expecting all that much when I started up a trial account in my own name. I had always thought Final Fantasy XI would be the only MMORPG that could draw me in, and I had instead been disappointed by it (this without even having actually played). I made a priest, thinking "Well, every group/guild needs some support classes, right?" and this became my soloing character. It probably wasn't a good choice, considering priests have been historically toward the low end of the "good characters to solo with" list. I quested around Darnassus and bopped over to Darkshore with minimal interaction with others, though observing the presence o