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...