Still alive and wicked busy. My company is slightly understaffed as business is, as they say, “booming”. When I’m not working on work I’m working on play, with the Benevolence Suicide Kings app taking the bulk of my non-work-non-gaming time these days. It’s hectic and oftentimes frustrating, but it’s the good kind. The kind you want to experience.

A few items to note just in case I don’t make it back around here anytime soon -

Tron Legacy was an average movie. The soundtrack by Daft Punk is excellent. You’ll see it pop up on my last.fm scrobble feed often. Note: I liked the movie, I’m just under no illusions that it was, at best, average.

The Golden Globe noms alternate between terrible and FUCK! THAT IS TERRIBLE!

I’m moving my parents from an old XP box to a new Mac Mini this spring. I need a shower.

The Steam holiday sale has ruined me. I’ve added frightening number of titles since mid-December. There are a few I’m really looking forward to playing, but the ones that are taking up the bulk of my time right now are DeathSpank and Recettear. DeathSpank is a Torchlight/Diablo/whatever style title intended to be a parody and Recettear is a JRPG. YMMV.

I’ve been playing Spreadsheeeeeeets iiiiiiin Spaaaaaaace Eve again. But that won’t last long, I’d wager.

Cataclysm is out. I’m not playing. WoW is done for me. I went back, briefly, but by the end of the 2nd month it just felt like I was playing because I was supposed to play. There was no joy in Mudville. Here’s hoping 2011 snags me an Old Republic invite post-haste.

I guess that’s all the update I can muster for now. Toodles.

After 2 days of battling the 1st Ulduar boss (the instance server) we finally managed to get IN the damned zone with 20-some. Flame Leviathan was a blast and, like most guilds, dropped it on our first run.

For the last couple hours of the day today the leadership and I had been discussing what to do about the legendary du jour if and when our first fragment dropped. Some things were discussed, not really things I liked, but it was a good discussion to have. My parting shot before I left work was “think about it over the weekend, we’ll vote on Monday”. I guess my assumption was that we’d get, at most, 2 bosses down tonight and that there’s no possible way we’d see this rare item.

“Ooops?”

So we had a quick meeting and voted on the course of action we thought best for the time being. not really something I was looking for, but such is life in a republic… or reasonable facsimile thereof.

Regardless, a big G-rats to my homeskillet Liandroa on his first fragment. Only 29 more to go!

Yeah, that took long enough…

Sigh.

I keep guild drama off the front page most days, but sometimes it’s cathartic to just vent. I’m pretty sure no one from my guild actually reads these pages so the risk is pretty minimal.

The core players in my guild have been around a long time, some going back years into EQ raiding on Prexus. In that type of mix of old/new players and grudges YEARS in the making, it’s a wonder we don’t have more angsty bullshit than we do… *knock on wood*

A few months a back we gained a couple players who were with us in the beginning on Stormrage. They left to join the #1 and #2 power guilds on the server and did the whole hardcore thing for a couple years. Their departure caused a few ruffled feathers. These guys are pretty caustic individuals. I don’t mean that in a bad way – I find their demeanor to be absolutely hilarious. But I’m not a 6-year-old-girl, either. I can take a hit and give it right back when the need arises.

What gets them in trouble is that they have no issues telling people the plain truth no matter how ugly it might be. Again, I’m a big fan of honesty. If you don’t say what you mean how can anyone take you seriously? So combine old grudges with their no-holds-barred truth-telling and you have the pack of dogs with bees in their mouths that I’ve got now. Tank A told tank B that he was frustrated with the quality of tank B’s tanking. Tank B threw a hissy and bailed on the raid all the while going batshit crazy in private about how he won’t put up with that shit and why weren’t we supporting him. It was a fun night, lemee tells ya. Tank B still isn’t raiding after two weeks, but he’s apparently found time to pug 25s and run some sort of clandestine 10-man operation. What can you do, really? My initial solution of throwing them both in a burlap bag and chucking it off the side of a boat was a non-starter.

Getting pissed off at other people for inexplicable reasons just bugs the shit out of me. Seriously. What the fuck is the point? Anywho, here’s a helpful life lesson from me to you – don’t be that guy. Just don’t.

Man the fuck up already.

I know, I know – impossible, right? I don’t recall mentioning it here, but the achievement system in WoW 3.0+ left me largely unimpressed. It never really registered on my radar for that reason, but tonight I feel the need to brag just a little.

Malediction the Undying

A couple other people helped, too…

We’re happily clearing heroic Naxx every week now so we’ve started peppering in more difficult Sartharion and Malygos attempts. Malygos is a beast in heroic and frankly pretty soul-crushing when shit takes a turn. If you give the thumbnail a whack and load up the hi-rez you can see the skeletons left over from the 2 or 3 previous wipes.

My team’s normally on top of things but these days the attention span is rather thin. Not so thin as to preclude our first Sartharion+1 kill tonight though, so hoorah for our side!

I don’t recall what the loot was but I’m sure the winners were pleased. I’m camped out at #1 on our suicide kings list patiently waiting my spot at the trough.

You will be mine…oh yes, you will be mine.

First full clear of heroic Naxxramas is under our belts. Not nearly as hard as I expected, but still far easier than I’d have liked. Sapphiron was tough, especially since a great number of our players haven’t seen him in Naxx-10 yet either. No Calamity dropped; maybe next week

I’ll throw some pics up tomorrow after my early appointments. The new dropbox sync I’ve got rolling on the various folders has been working slick!

Not anymore?

Finally got a chance to kick the tires on the new raiding setup last night. We took 21 into the Arachnid Quarantine Zone and had a grand ol’ time with much achievementing and whatnot. We also managed to nab the achievement for dropping Sartharion with a mere 20 raiders. The loots were phat and plentiful. 15 suicide pieces, including 2 upgrades for moi. Lost the shot at the Fury of the Five Flights but I did grab Dawnwalkers and a Widow’s Fury for my troubles. A Webbed Death dropped as well.

I know I promised some pics so I’ll get to it later, promise. I’m thinking it might be useful to symlink my wowpics folder to DropBox or maybe the new LiveSpaces thing that I picked up the other month. Still gotta find a better way to push images. PWA is fine, but clunky for blogginatin.

Sunday night means Sunday sunraid – our weekly roll-up of Gruul, Mag and whatever else we might be interested in as the week draws to a close.

Our first Gruul kill was on Dec 12th, 2007. Yesterday marks our hojillionth kill and 2nd Dragonspine Trophy. That’s 158 days to you and me. I lost the roll on the first one but last night karma came up big as I dropped a natural 100 and crossed another “won’t replace until post-Lich King” off the list. I’m exceedingly pleased. The DST is a big bump and the clock is ticking on nub raid content as we progress through T5.

Oh, and we dropped Karathress for the first time last week. I’ll add some screens when I get home.

As promised, more news re: Professor Plums.

I covered our antics on the Sunday following the patch, but neglected to mention TK on Thursday. For those of you playing our home game yes, Void Reaver with invisible orbs does, in fact, suck ass. We diverted to Solarian who I was promised was “easy”. Yeah, so they were right. Welcome to the 1st 1st kill of the streak.

Nothing overly amazing lewt-wise, we had some shards and some equippers, same old song and dance. So fast-forward past Sunday’s Magtheridon 1st and to the Tuesday Serpentshrine raid. What? What you say? Is that our 1st Morogrim Tidewalker kill? Yeap.

A nice surprise in the cracker-jack box for our 1st – grats me. Talon of Azshara