In what may be the highlight of my WoW career, our guild took down Prince at the top of Karazhan last night for the first time.  Unfortunately, no one thought to take a screenshot.

It took us about 12 hours over three days, but we got all the required bosses, and 2 of the 3 optional bosses (we couldn't take down Netherspite - we needed more organization then we had, and none of us entirely understood the fight).  Prince took 4 tries - we wiped early on the first try, then got him to 40%, 16%, and then took him on the 4th try.

I got a bunch of new gear (4 or 5 purples over the entire weekend, including a new healing mace), and got my swift flight form on both druids. 

Now I'm ready for the expansion.

Tags: online gaming

So I've been thinking about going to BlizzCon this year. Tickets went on sale this morning. I started trying to buy them online around 9:30, and the site was horribly slow, with error messages every other page load (looked like ASP.NET errors). I finally got all the way to the last confirmation page - and blizzard.com just went away.

It's still gone, 5 hours later:


You'd wouldn't think they would have been surprised.

edit: Finally back up. I have an order number and a receipt!

Tags: online gaming
Current Mood: annoyed

Having a Monday where you just need to shoot something with a BFG, or take a chainsaw to something?

Download DOOM and friends (in fact, 24 different id games)

Tags: online gaming
Current Mood: busy

So I finally joined a new WoW guild, "Undead Poets Society". We went off on a raid to Astranaar tonight, and I snapped a picture I've been wanting to get for ages:

( Cut to save your friends page, even if it isn't that big... )

Yep, that's my Tauren druid. Fishing. Out of the back balcony of the inn on the lake.

Tags: online gaming

From a story here about the Microsoft cursor vulnerability:

Research by security firm Symantec suggests that the raw value of a WoW account is now higher than a credit card and its associated verification data.

One card can be sold for up to $6 (£3) suggests Symantec, but a WoW account will be worth at least $10. An account that has several high level characters associated with it could be worth far more as the gold and rare items can be sold for real cash.

Tags: geeky, online gaming
Current Mood: accomplished

I'm a big fan of little java-based games. I own dozens of them, and they're one of my favorite ways to kill half an hour.

A year or so ago, I joined RealArcade (which includes one free game a month). Every month, I'm disappointed. They release 2 or 3 games a week, mostly written by other companies and just branded by Real. Most of them are just variations on new existing games with new graphics - there are a half-dozen Bejeweled clones, a few Big Money clones, lots of assemble-food-to-feed-customers games, and so on. In a year, Fizzball is the only really new game I've seen, and even that is just a fancy variation on Breakout.

Last month, the game I downloaded couldn't even be played - after a dozen levels or so, it got "stuck" and you couldn't proceed past that point, even if you uninstalled and reinstalled it. The message boards are full of people complaining about it. But after a month, not only is there still not a fix, but they're still selling the broken version!

I'm so fed up with Real that I canceled my account.

So there was much anticipation when I got a newsletter from PopCap last week telling me they had a new game out - Peggle. I downloaded it the other day. It reminds me a bit of Plinko, an old "Price Is Right" minigame. You have a ball that drops from the top and bounces off pegs. Hitting a peg removes it. The goal is to remove all the marked pegs.

I bought it before my trial was up. I suspect it's going to be one of my favorite little games.

And I can't help but contrast that with my experience with Real. Yes, Real games are cheap ($7.95 each if you get a monthly subscription, less if you sign up for year). But I play them for a month at the very most, then I'm sick of them, and I never go back to them. I'd much rather pay $19.95 for a really cool, well-written, unique game from Popcap. Some of my Popcap games I'm still playing years after I first downloaded them.

Now, what we need is a dozen more companies producing games like that.

Tags: online gaming
Current Mood: amused

We finally got a Wii. Our ID is 3576289257566116 - friend us if you have one, and leave me a comment with your ID so I can friend you back.

It's more addictive then I thought it would be. So far, we're particularly fond of tennis and the air hockey game from WiiPlay. Zelda will be here on Tuesday. I'm open to suggestions for other games.

Even with just WiiSports and WiiPlay, it's easy to lose hours and hours playing. It was worth the wait and the standing in line in the cold!

Tags: online gaming, wii
Current Mood: amused

...some coworkers and I were talking about Simulated Reality - the idea that we're all living in a giant simulation and don't know it.

Kaitlyn was talking about how, if you could do a sufficiently good job of saving the state of the reality, the people inside it could be saved and restored without being aware of it. She pointed out that there are several things that point to the fact that this already happened - for example, the huge difference between the vengeful God of the Old Testament and the loving God of the New Testament.

"Ah!", I said, "God sold his account on eBay!"

Tags: geeky, humor, online gaming

I have just thrown out the contents of my drafts folder.

I've been sitting on literally dozens of mostly-formed posts for months now, and I'm never going to finish any of them. Instead of sitting on thoughts until they're perfect, I'm just going to post them as they happen.

Today, I've been pondering an interesting idea from my friends page. In this post, elfs says "In a recent conversation on my favorite MMORPG, Usenet..", and it got me thinking about the idea of Usenet as an MMORPG. Why wouldn't it be? Okay, it's text-based, but so are MUDs, and no one argues they aren't MMORPGs. There's certainly lots of role-playing going on, particularly in some darker corners.

I was a hardcore Usenet poster for many years. In the last few years, I've discovered that I am not a unique voice - there's very little I'm likely to post that someone else couldn't post as well or better, and I really have quit posting, and mostly quit reading. Except for one group - houston.eats. It's amazing to pop in there once every few weeks, and realize that the same core group of a dozen or so posters, many of whom I've met in real life, is still there, still talking about food and cooking. Like any other MMORPG, there are bad guys (the trolls), and the one guy in the group who just can't keep from pulling troll aggro, thereby preventing them from going off and attacking some other adventurer. I'm looking for a guild in CoH right now, and that group of posters on houston.eats is exactly the type of people I want to be in a guild with, which is honestly probably the reason I still read the newsgroup.

It's an interesting idea. And I cannot come up with any reason why Usenet is not the text equivalent of Second Life. More useful, certainly, but the social feel is so close it's scary.

Tags: online gaming, usenet
Current Mood: productive

Thanks to the delightfully evil kathygnome, I have a new City of Villains/City of Heroes account (on Virtue, if anyone who plays would like to say hi).

I'm playing a Technology Corruptor. Named "BufferOverflow".

Sometimes, I'm too geeky for my own good.

Tags: geeky, humor, online gaming
Current Mood: geeky

Despite the wonderful weather here this weekend, I spent it home cooking.

I'm still making candy. Last week, I did a batch of creams, a batch of caramels, and a batch of jellies. Saturday, I dipped the jellies, and did another batch of caramels. Then I took a big box (heavy on the jellies) to my mother, who loved them. I'm getting closer to tempered chocolate - the last batch actually got properly tempered, but towards the end I got it a bit hot, so some of the last ones have a bit of streaking. It's much better then the early versions, though.

Sunday, I made tamales. I used this dough and filled them with this. I didn't want to bake them, so I steamed them traditionally.

Michael's parents were supposed to have gone home Sunday afternoon, but there was a blizzard that closed Newark, so they stayed until this morning. So, for dinner last night, I picked up some takeout rice and beans and took the tamales over there. They were quite a hit.

I was telling some of the women at work about this, and I may end up having to teach a tamale-making class at the office. I find this amusing, since I've done it once, and now I'm the expert?

Anyway, now I have a dozen leftover tamales in the fridge. I'm thinking that the next batch will have spinach in them instead of meat. I'll sautee it with a bunch of garlic, and maybe some chili powder and cumin. I'm afraid without the chili spices they'll be too bland.

Besides cooking, life's been going slowly. The Valentine's Day World Of Warcraft content was way too much fun. I'm not usually a fan of holiday content, but I really enjoyed the quests, and I have 2 new purple dresses and a black dress to show for it. I was sick a lot of last week, but I think a weekend of taking it easy helped a lot.

Tags: cooking, online gaming, recipes
Current Mood: full

( My night in the battlegrounds (WoW content). )

Tags: online gaming
Current Mood: amused

I've been playing Puzzle Pirates a good bit lately.

I'm not particularly social, but I see lots of people wander around, and I've discovered I have a new pet peeve.

What is it with people who choose names based on their relationship with other people? I was on a ship today with someone named "brettslover". I've seen so many variations on this - one of the women in my crew is named "boogswife", I saw "andysmom"...

Can't you pick a name based on something about yourself?!?!

Tags: online gaming