Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Roughly three inches of fresh powder by this morning. 'tis sunny now, but not above freezing. I imagine the parking lot at home's going to be a mess by the end of the day. It actually looks like winter now.

Movement proceeds toward the new grid which I haven't even really looked at. More new characters are being made. And at least one existing character submitted for import. And with that, I find my interest taking a nosedive. So characters start with 5 points. And the first imported existing character is submitted with (I didn't count, but trusted someone else's sum) more like 23. This... evokes dismay in me. When I saw the polls, I thought "I want to keep my existing character at their current power level" rated low enough that we wouldn't have to worry about it. Apparently that wasn't the case. As a player, this upsets me because I feel like any new character I make will be perpetually overshadowed and unable to do crap in comparison to this guy or, more importantly, anyone else imported by the same trend. As staff, I feel this represents an utter failure of the new system to accomplish one of the stated goals of decreasing the difference in power l...

So patch 4.0.3a updated the geography of "vanilla" World of Warcraft to the new Cataclysm-based landscape, though the expansion itself is a week and a half away. I've been making the rounds through the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor to look over the changes. There are a ton of new flight masters, which is nice to see but will matter less to high-level characters once the old world flight skill is activated. Some places received major facelifts - Stormwind is much more impressive (even if the old park is... uhh... gone). Some places are radically changed - Thousand Needles flooded, the Barrens split, and such. Most of the world has changed visibly, but not seriously. It's definitely interesting to see, and I'm really anticipating being able to truly look at it from above rather than relying on the forced perspective tricks of old. As I made the rounds, however, I couldn't help but think of some of the changes from an in-character perspective. And, overall, the...

Gratitude and appreciation to all my friends. Dinner was nice, if quieter than usual. Often, my parents have a friend or two over for the holiday, but no one made it this time around. I experimented with chocolate pecan pie. Good, though I think I like the traditional recipe better and the layer of chocolate seemed to interfere some with the cooking, the pie taking a good deal longer in the oven than usual and still being a little soft in the middle. Something to ponder.

A news headline point in the last couple days is a survey being summarized as saying people feel "marriage is becoming obsolete." Of course, there's a couple caveats to consider. First, I don't trust any survey or poll in a vacuum. They can be made to say just about anything. There's not totally useless, but to be taken with a grain of salt. Second, the long explanation I heard was not really an argument that marriage was or should be phased out. Rather that people were going into it later, having accomplished more. Rather than a mark of new adulthood, marriage is being seen more as something to do once you're established. So that headline is somewhat misleading. But it got me thinking. What if marriage were removed as a secular institution? That'd sure be one way to get the same-sex marriage issue out of the government's hair. Oh, there'd be work involved as we'd have to pull a lot of marriage-related laws and regulations (such as for ...

See what's become of me? There never seems to be enough time. Thanksgiving is just a couple days away, and I'm having to plan to get pies ready. That means Christmas is not all that far off, so it's time to start thinking about gifts. Aieee! And the sky being dark so early is unsettling. It looks like I'll be swapping shifts for Friday. I'm such a nice guy there. I recently had a discussion that involved an passing offer to join in a weekly RPG or perhaps joining in (in some way) with the Circus activities gabefinder has been increasingly involved in. But that really drove home just how hard it is to fit any more scheduling in my life. I only work 40 hours a week (give or take). Technically, I'm on call anytime I'm not at work, though that doesn't actually come up very often. That should leave plenty of time for other things, right? And yet, it never seems to. Because of my shift scheduling, I can't commit to anything on a weekly week day ba...

Book three of the Incarnations of Immortality was better than the second, though I think the first remains my favorite. It definitely spans a good deal more time than the previous books (even in being about Fate rather than Time), so more of the overall arc is shown. Again, interesting thoughts on the whole incarnation thing. Fate seems... much less awesomely aware of things than hinted at back in the beginning, though perhaps that can be blamed on the way the big events of the book take place when Niobe is new to her particular post(s).