Yeah, so … no updates or something for a while. “IRL.” It happens. Lots of things to discuss, not a lot of time. That, too, happens.

I canceled my World of Warcraft account a couple months ago – more on that later. I have a standing copy of Aion, which has been quite fun so far. More on that later as well.

Are we sensing a pattern?

I’ve been reading a couple books of late, both I find fascinating. One is a collection of “Aesop’s Fables” and the other is a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species (6th edition). Both have been genuinely illuminating. Many of the colorful aphorisms we drown in every day date back far, far earlier than I realized. It’s interesting that many of these sayings I’ve heard attributed to biblical passages when the true origins dated back to the oral storytellers a millennium or so before quill was ever put to papyrus. As for Origin? Wow. Let’s just say I’ve never met anyone who articulated what he was actually saying. Most people, in fact, get it wrong. Exposure to this material would have been handy 15 years ago. Thanks again, public education.

In other news, I’m car shopping. What a nightmare. I think I have it whittled down to a couple solid choices. I’m past considering the wishlist vehicles and focusing in on solid price/performance comparisons. A couple more test-drives and I should be able to pull the trigger. Knowing myself as I do that may take months.

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…

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!

Yeah, yeah, that was last expansion, but this one doesn’t have a fancy tag line. While I cheated and back-dated this particular post, I WAS waiting in line at midnight. It capped off an excessively long day of driving back from South Dakota (more on that later) and then driving back to Madison from my parents home up north. Two hour nap, then off to wait in line…

What a line it was, too. I had my pre-order waiting at the local Best Buy and the line went halfway around the store. I had my copy in-hand around 12:30am and the line was actually longer than it was when I arrived at 11:30.

Of special note was the conversations of a couple scrubs standing behind me in line. One, apparently, plays a rogue. Poorly, from what I can gather. Anyone who’s done specific content more than once can readily identify folks who haven’t, but insist that they have. Protip: Knowing acronyms and a scan of the BossKillers strat has no actual correlation to seeing content yourself. It also helps to not use fuck and/or shit every 4th word. Despite what Sir Lewis says, “fuck” is not a comma.

That’s all for now, off to explore Northrend!

We’ve been running Zul’Aman bear runs non-stop for the last 6 weeks or so trying to rack up some bears. The bad news? We fell short too often and as a consequence 2 members of our group won’t get theirs.

The good news?

Yeah, that’s me. I got the last Amani War Bear bear we’re likely to get. So dandy and stuff.

Patch 3.0.x is likely to go live on Tuesday, with much gnashing and wailing of teeth. Mostly by me. The buff changes, class homogenization and rogue fuckery have me on edge. Not only is combat a joke, rogues in general are still 2nd-class citizens within the existing setup. It’s broken, clearly, the questions are a) how long it will take to fix and b) how much they’re even willing to fix things.

I’ve tooled around in beta a bit. Enough to know that leveling won’t be an issue for a death knight or rogue, regardless of spec/changes. So I’ve got a 45-day window or so at least for them to fix end-game before I’m even there to get spanked. Like most things WoW-related, only time will tell.

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