Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Okay... things are quieting at work, and I find some sanity returning after more printer-based frustrations. There's some time before a few more people go home and I get to do setup and troubleshooting around them. At least we've replaced the one color printer that has tormented me for a year or more with frequent jams and erroneous reports of missing components... Naturally, we've all got them and may not even think about them unless they happen to come up. One entry on the list: Installation/Registration for stuff I don't even really want. If a friend directs me to something on the internet and I hit a "you must login" or "you must install this," I'll usually just turn away at that point. Being pressured to do these seemingly minor things actually pisses me off. Why? What's the big deal? Well, I happen to like to keep the number of installed programs and logins down to a controlled minimum. Every new bit of software can cause confli

So we're finally seeing some successin raiding again. Magmaw took a fair number of tried, but we got better and pulled through. I've heard it said that the fight is "all about killing the adds," which is not fully accurate. But we had enough DPS we were usually getting the parasites down five seconds before the next pillar - tight, but enough. The two people who get on the boss to chain him down are vitally important also - bad timing there means a dead tank. And hunters... can't right-click anywhere in the room before the fight without causing a wipe. ;) I didn't have too much trouble from where I was, though a few melee hits (and kills) on others while I was being Mangled disturbed me. It sounds like those might have been due to failed chaining attempts. We also had one wonky attempt where lava pillars were hitting as Magmaw was being impaled, which is some terminally bad timing (again, that may have been due to chain timing). Still, the steady improvemen

Quickie book review for a book that went by in two evenings. Not even boring-nothing-going-on-at-work evenings, but evenings at home around doing other things and still going to bed early. Sorta the typical urban fantasy formula with a female police detective who's also a demon summoner. The police procedural elements seem generally good. I really like the portrayal of demons as otherworldly beings who aren't so much "embodiments of evil" as they are alien beings with a totally different set of beliefs and behavior that just doesn't line up with human ethics. The case/mystery was done fairly, and while the bad guy may have monologued, the twists didn't feel forced to me. There's a slightly higher concentration of sex earlier in the book than I might have expected, but even that's not uncommon in the genre. Overall, decent book, if short. I'm considering the value of following the series, though I picked up a handful of other books to read first

Yesterday was actually a pretty good day at work: moderately busy, but successful and productive. That helped my overall mood, but I still feel like I'm recovering from Monday. I just can't bounce back like I once did, physically or mentally. I don't have special insights into the minds of game developers, but some things are not hard to imagine. They get an MMORPG together and think "Okay, now what?" They could leave it all solo-oriented, but then what's really the point of it being massively-multiplayer? So they want to encourage group play. That means putting in challenges that players can't readily do alone. Since most "challenges" in such games are enemies to be fought, they need something that takes a group to kill. Thus they need an opponent (or group thereof) which does more damage than one character can survive, has more health than one character can burn through, has specific mechanics requiring multiple players - or some combi

Yesterday was a more normal day at work (and I hope that extends through today). There were things to do, but I wasn't facing several things at once. There are lingering questions about the phone system, but the "big project" part of it is past. But even at that, I'm still carrying weariness and stress from Monday. One night just isn't enough for me to recover these days, unless it's perfect. Monday night certainly wasn't. So even last night, I wasn't in much mood to play or be creative, and ended up going to sleep early. It often only takes one rough work day to thusly unbalance me for the week. This is, perhaps, my "normal" state these days. I'm not depressed , though it might not be difficult to get there from here. But nor am I feeling chipper or creative. The thought of running an RPG/scene (be it for one person or several) sounds like work , and thus isn't appealing. If an idea comes to mind that I want to see played out, th

The morning started out okay. Even with the sporatic internet outages, I wasn't too bad off once I found it was upstream and our ISP was pursuing the matter. But then things just kept coming. Computer failure (possibly overheating CPU, though the fans were working), program/user setup, old hardware collection, program crashes... culminating in printer rage as my troubleshooting color issues led me to concluding we actually got two bad cyan toner cartridges in a row. Wrrf. About the only trace of creativity in me is thinking up how I can destroy certain pieces of hardware or otherwise keep people from complaining...

Been a while, so I'm just sort of logging an overview... So what's to say about WoW? My main is sitting in a good position, and just recently capped out on Cataclysm reputations. The push to cap guild rep every week is now passed. I could stand to have more valor points, but I simply cannot get in a heroic every day in any way that is "fun" to me, so there's no sense stressing over that. I love the addition of Rebuke to my standard paladinly toolkit, even though it means losing the interrupt component of Hammer of Justice. So instead of an interrupt/stun (the latter part not working on bosses), I have an interrupt/4 second school lock that's actually off the global cooldown. The only "bad" things about it are having another spell to keep track of and the miss chance inherent in tank stat priorities. Missing a swing now and again isn't a big deal. Missing an interrupt really can be, so it's probably still better to have DPS doing it. St

Recently, I decided I was curious about the story in Dead Space 2 . I was aware very roughly of the plot of the first, and wondered how the details of the marker and necromorphs were being built up in the setting. So I hit up Youtube for video walkthroughs, knowing full well that I wasn't really interested in playing it myself. I probably should not have started that so late. Not-entirely-pleasant dreams that night aside, I can still say I find the whole setup interesting, but I didn't really see any answers to the big questions. What are the marker-induced visions trying to accomplish? They seem helpful sometimes and destructive other times. What was the purpose and origin of the original marker? Why do government/church people keep wanting to make more? It's hard to buy the "energy source" theory when you keep getting outbreaks that cause massive death and no small amount of material loss. Sometimes it's okay for the big mysteries of a setting to go

My parents gave me an Amazon gift certificate for my birthday, and I've been pondering what to do with it. There's some toys I might consider, but that's really sort of frivolous space consumption. There aren't any video games I'm after for a while. I consider some kitchen items, but I get along just fine without more knives or a spring-form pan or the like. So generally I come back to books. I can always use stuff to read, right? Well... yes, but it feels like I'm in the middle of a written-entertainment drought. There are several books I know of that I want to read, but they're either out in hardback (Black Prism) or coming out soon in hardback (Wise Man's Fear, Republic of Thieves). ... I was going to add a third category of books that are due out in the near future in paperback, but I don't think I can name any - it seems like all the author's I've been following have reached the success level of hardback publication. Rargh! It'

Naturally, what's annoying in a character depends on the audience, and everyone's opinions vary. I'm curious about others, but here's a discussion of some of my pet peeves. This came about because someone insisted on watching House at work last night on the TV over the area I was working in doing software installs for the new phone system. I have to be perfectly honest here. I have never really given the show a chance because, based on what little I have seen, the character annoys the crap out of me. I can envision House as an RPG character. There's so many points in the primary skills/abilities that he's a frickin' savant at what matters to the campaign - in this case, he can guess obscure medical conditions when everyone else's assumptions are wrong. And if people complain that he made too good a character, the player gestures at the disadvantage column, pointing out the use of a cane (which doesn't matter much in the particular campaign) and

... busy and idle. Life's a bit of a rollercoaster lately. Yesterday morning was pleasant enough and I have an assortment of music to listen to. T'was a sweet gesture, though I still haven't had time to gain a familiarity with the collection. Yesterday evening pretty much sucked with problematic software installs and the annoyance of someone turning on one of the TVs at work to watch House (which spawned a tangential line of thinking that may be a post in itself) and not turning it off for a few hours. Then I got home to find someone parked in one of my spaces (not uncommon as of late, but I try not to fret over it too much) and a neighbor parked crappily overlapping the other enough that I couldn't get in. Hours of frustration left me in a pretty foul mood last night. In game entertainment: We've started vanquishing (hard mode zone clears) in Guild Wars. We had a meeting in WoW about the guild and raiding, which really didn't establish anything new in my m

Whoo, a whole hour less spent at work than yesterday. Nevermind that most of it was in high-stress "crisis mode."

I already hate this morning. But while I'm waiting impatiently for a NAS device to finish its self-checking and become responsive again, I have a change to read a Bioware statement on Sith/Imperials in the Old Republic Era. It's a fair point. Many "evils" by current standards were commonplace, even arguably necessary, during the greater part of human history.

Clocking nearly eleven hours at work can do that, especially when much of that time is on my feet running around between multiple projects. My feet feel it. My brain is mushified. At least I did get a short lunch, so I'm not homocidal, but... ugh...

I've officially worked through my backlog of books to read. Time to start considering what's next. The last in the pile was Benighted , which came by way of Christmas gift. It's an intriguing concept: a modern-day world where a vast majority of humans are born as werewolves (well, "lunes" or other nicknames, they don't use the term "werewolf" in the book). And this is the normal most of the time, but feral beasts on the night of the full moon variety of werewolves. So it puts the non-lune minority in a very odd position. They's so precious and necessary to keeping the world safe that one day out of the lunar month that they are basically drafted into government service and given allowances above "normal" law in many cases. But they're at a huge social disadvantage, largely viewed as disabled, because they're a minority and they're resented/hated/feared for what power they have. As an group, the non-lunes border on scary-p

Last night, I happened to stumble across a podcast on writing linked off Brandon Sanderson's blog, I believe it was. That particular episode , they were discussing broken promises in stories - how bad they are and how difficult to actually do in a way that works well. They cited a few examples and gave some general explanation - basically it's jarring to the audience to lead them to believe one thing, then turn the story into something else. And they put forth that it only works well when the audience has been sufficiently prepared along the way. They didn't mention it, but Indigo Prophecy came to mind (and one of the books they did mention seemed to work similarly, actually). The story opens as what seems to be an issue of insanity, where the main character appears to be a murderer, but doesn't remember it. Then, partway through, the story veers toward the supernatural. The change felt sort of abrupt to me, but not so much so that I couldn't go with it. If you w

The clock rolls over and there's no particular fanfare and not much change since yesterday. It's been a looong time since the day was really special (especially judging by posts from previous years). The well-wishing is appreciated, and nice, sure. I think the weather's got me down a little at present, though I am thankful this big ol' storm is only clipping us here with no real accumulation of snow expected in town, just cold and perhaps a dusting the next couple days. I know the mountains need the snow and all, but it would be a relief to get through this season with just the one major snowstorm. Work remains reasonably busy with periods of waiting. Some people aren't satisfied with the upgrades they're getting, predictably, and the last 24 hours were complicated by network problems that I hope are now resolved. Had a dream this afternoon that was, I'm sure, Valkyria Chronicles inspired - a special operations team delving into ruins behind enemy lin