Yeah, forgot to mention this last week, but my raid dropped Netherspite for the first time. This marked our first complete Karazhan clear, so go us or somesuch.

For a fist-kill the loot was bleh. I got lucky on our first Nightbane kill to walk away with my BP, but no such luck on mah pants! It really chaps my ass that the Spiteblade isn’t an upgrade. Damn you Blizzard! Where are the goddamned swords?!

Oh, wait. They’re in the next 2 tiers of content up. GG, assholes. If I keep pounding away at zee PvP I might get a new pair of swords sometime right before the expansion hits.

note: I don’t think I mentioned it in other wow-posts, but I’m the wtfpwn rogue in the middle with the mongoosed daggers.

So yeah, I haven’t had a job since October of last year. It’s an interesting experience, actually. A wild confluence of events turned a 3-month “break” into what may amount into nearly a full year off. I guess at that point you can call it a sabbatical or something? At any rate, I’m cranking out emails and such in full force now looking for yet another IT job I’ll hate in six months. My optimism is infectious, no?

I still hold out hope that some MMO studio will return my emails so I can con them into a producer or an associate designer gig. That’s no small task for people who have actual industry experience, let alone someone who’s spent the last decade in IT/IT management.

One morning it hit me - I’ve been spitballing a game concept on and off for the last year, why not actually WRITE IT DOWN. Artists have a portfolio and “shipped titles” are generally considered to be the analog for a producer or designers so why can’t I create one?

Given how my thought process works a simple document would be nigh useless. After a week it’d be so convoluted that you’d need a cryptex to decipher every 3rd paragraph. My solution was to use a wiki and it seems to be working pretty damned well so far. Navigation and categorization let me easily move around to edit/add details to stub entries and the built-in metrics show me where I last left off or places that are unfinished.

I’ve been at it for about two weeks now and I have around 50 entries written for the skills system. Writing it all down has also helped me see some weaknesses that the random afternoon navel gazing never revealed.

Caught this over at Lum’s shack today and had to join in the viral love. Enjoy.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYvZnTFpip0

A last-minute run last night yielded our guild-first Prince Malchezaar kill. So-so loots, but a win is a win is a win. Sadly I can’t claim the win as my own but we wouldn’t be standing there without my work so my ego stands just fine.

We’re back on my raids this week so the true test of any encounter is if you can repeat. Progress, generally, has been swift. Curator is on farm and the “new” Aran fight has been cracked without issue. It bothers me that we didn’t finish it before the nerf, but such is life in a casual guild.

Oh, we did swing by the terrace afterwards and throw a few bodies at Nightbane. That’ll be a fun one to learn. I haven’t decided if I’m going to run that this week or re-focus to the middle optionals first. Illhoof has some great gear and would clear a running path to the chess board for post-raid funzies.

• Paris is in jail, and apparently a giant.
• One of my most favorite mod sites, Gazzmik Fizzwidgets, is down. Has been for days. Get well soon?
• GUILD DRAWMA!
• IGE sued for raping the economy. <3?
• WarHammer Online beta opened (at some point) - good luck?
• Zombies!

This linkbomb has been brought to you today by the letters B, O, R, E and the number D. Enjoy.

For whatever reason I seemed to have forgotten to mention that I was playing a neat little webgame called inselkampf. It’s quite fun, but be prepared for a rough entry. It’s not my particular bag, but new players should give world2 a try first as it just opened this week and you won’t be facing folks with 20 islands and 20k troops at their disposal.

The premise of either world is that you start out on an island. You can build resource gathering, troops, ships, defenses, etc. You build up, you find an empty island (or make one empty by force) and colonize with extreme prejudice. After about a week playing you’ll be at the point where you have queues running for 5+ hours so micro-managing is easier.

Note: if you play on world 1, make sure you join an alliance before you colonize a 2nd island and make sure it’s one with support close to you and ranked in the top-15.

Another game I found courtesy of corpnews is called Hell Rising. I’m still trying to get my bearings, but it has potential.

NCSoft and/or Cryptic Studios are certifiable geniuses. Not necessarily in the money-hat-factory sense of Blizzard, but they’re certainly putting in the effort.

About a week ago I received an email warning me of the impending “free weekend” for City of Heroes. The free weekend is exactly that - free. No muss, no fuss, just log in and play on my old CoH account with no restrictions or hooplah. For serious!

The process was literally thus:
1) Find install CDs (harder than it sounds)
2) Install & Patch (1.8gb from launch masters to issue 9, 8 hours)
3) Play. Well reset password and then play.

No codes, no activations, nada. I did waste another 2 hours making a new character on a newer server as my old one was “double yellow” and laggy as hell. That and it really did take 8 hours to patch at an abysmal 70k/s, but if I had installed a few days after I got the email vs 5 minutes after I decided to play…

That’s all fine and good, you say, but “what’s the point?” The point, dear reader, roadblocks. Or more precisely, the lack of roadblocks. This is a lesson Blizzard taught the industry with the runaway popularity of WoW. WoW isn’t a super l337 hardcore game. Learning the basic mechanics of any class and the game itself is a process easily completed in the first week of free play. This allows a new player the maximal amount of time to discover the game and not just how to play.

Cryptic “got it” with the concept of free weekends. It looks like they do these events periodically when there’s a major change to the game. The “excuse” this time was Issue 9 going live. I played CoH-beta and for the first 3 months following launch. I know exactly why I left, but this chance to jump back in with no strings attached had me seriously considering a 1-month resub. Ultimately I came to my senses and realized that none of the reasons for my departure had changed so a resub would be silly.

But still… good try. No MMO I’ve ever played has ever come close to this level of nostalgia.

The end result? I can spare the 2 1/2gb. So who knows what might happen?

So I dragged the chimps back into Karazhan again last night for another crack at ye ol’ Curator. Dropped him (again) like a bad habit and moved on to whack the loot pinata in the Chess Event.

Fun stuff, and the handy Consortium vendor sells supplies and fixes your shit and whatnot.

Nabbed some druid and … caster? boots. I don’t recall and I forgot to write it down.

In years past, before the onset of “adulthood”, I could sleep forever. I could sleep for 12 hours, hit the can, take a nap for an hour, then go back to sleep. Fast forward to today - I can’t seem to sleep past 9am. I blame him. I cope with this rather tragic turn of events by napping. My couch is rather comfy anyway…

Tuesday was as uneventful as Monday. I dropped my work laptop off at my former place of employment so I have to scrounge a workable box out of the mound of spare parts that have been collecting here for the last decade+. The first rig I tried had a non-functional version of gentoo on it and refused to bend for XP allow.

She’s All That was on StarzHD today… don’t ask. Rachel Leigh Cook in HD is incredibly cute, FYI. So is the SD version, but that’s neither here nor there. While it’s not readily apparent in type, I just spent 10 minutes finding an appropriate image URL for Rachel. Let’s just say images.google dropped the ball. Badly.

I tried to play Knights of the Old Republic tonight and ultimately quit in disgust. I got the same ich feeling I do when trying to replay Diablo and such on modern machinery. I get that they can’t make use of widescreen, but it feels like I have a frakkin mouse plugged into a cave wall.

For some reason lately I’ve found myself spending an inordinate amount of time playing stupid web games. Since I’ve challenged myself to actually BLOG shit instead of thinking of things that would make excellent blog posts and then going to sleep… It’s meaningless, it’s talking to hear myself talk, yadda yadda yadda. It’s my house, suck it up.

Sudoku Combat - Nearly every morning I start with one of those wacky Sudoku things. I’m sure there’s 101 places to play them online, but this is the first elegant one I’ve found. I am really not good at them, honestly. I keep at it because it’s the good kind of frustrating and I hold out hope that I may actually improve my brain somehow. My best efforts are 5 minutes, fyi…

Motherload - This game is incredibly addictive. I’m still trying to figure out a proper strategy but I can tell you that you shouldn’t go below 1000′ with the first 2 tiers of fuel tanks.

Clash N Slash - From the same MiniClip site as Motherload. I just played this for the first time yesterday and it seemed fun. YMMV.

N - I am ninja? I’ve unlocked the first 20 levels or so…of like 1059102. If you watch the teaser screens it gets about 50 times more complex than the toughest level I’ve cleared. Incredibly well done game.

Stick Arena - Like all online FPS games it’s more fun with friends. 4 or 5 people in a private arena > pug.

Andre’s NES emulator - Java base NESticle. With exception of the crazy imports just about everything you could want to play is available. My only complaint is that the game window is a 2″ x 2″ square on a 1680×1050 widescreen

DHTML Lemmings - uh… do I need to ’splain this one?

Raiden-X - Courtesy of digg. I’ve actually just deleted this one and had to page through digg to find the URL again. Once you’ve finished it without dying (on hard, no less) it’s not that entertaining. Be that as it may, I still played a lot of this one. The save feature is a welcome addition to any gamelet.

That should keep any bored nerd busy until the next staff meeting. Enjoy.