This is Not Blackrock Depths…

by on February 19, 2006 at 7:10 pm
Posted In: MMO

Well, we had scheduled to do a BRD run this Saturday. The bad news is that one guildie mis-read my notice of clearing my Sat for action as a move of the run to Sun, where I had cleared my SFB game to.

This… irked me some, as I’d really gotten stoked up for this run. But it isn’t really anyone’s fault.

So, we ended up with a Scarlet Monestary run with the second-tier characters instead. Since this was an emergency re-org thing, it wasn’t all that well organized. I did the main pre-req early Sat, and then forgot to grab the sequel that actually goes into SM. Shrimpette was along, but is still too low level to even do the pre-req, so at least Farmishi is in good company when we make another stab at that.

The bit of a run we did do (for Mythology of the Titans), went well. It was me (Farmishi: Pally), Shrimpette (Warlock), Brunev (Mage), and Thermidor (Mage). Everyone had something to do, the two mages had a mage quest, and the ‘low’ three had Mythology, and Brunev had everything. So, I was right at level (38) and playing Main Tank and Main Healer. I’m not exactly experienced at either in a real group situation. We had about four wipes, one right after the soulstone on me gave out… oops. And one against the final boss in the Cathedral. I managed to rezz all the corpses away from him, and the second try worked out pretty well.

The fun part was getting back through all the respawns to the entrance. It did not go well, and we just couldn’t stop getting real wild adds. There was one where we ended up with about 12 guys all told (not all at once thankfully!), and I actually kept us going on that one. The next time didn’t work out so well. So, we took our free trip to the graveyard, picked up our bodies at the beginning of the instance, and headed home.

Well, not quite home. Shrimpette was still needing to do Shadowfang Keep for part of a Warlock quest, so we headed out to there. We ended up picking up a Rogue by the name of Bliss. I’m still not sure what happened… because she zoomed through most everything, despite being about 5 levels under Shirmpette (the lowest Muse present), leaving us to try and keep up. Afterwards, the stats showed her and Thermi (20 levels above her!) as having done about the same amount of damage through the instance, with me at a nice 20% (out of 5 people). And I was healing. One death, Shrimpette (easily fixed ^_^).

I was quite happy to get out and do something more sedate, like run Thousand Needles in my ‘show’ armor (which puts me down by about a third of my armor value). She certainly knew her stuff, but is a bit too overachieving for me. ^_^;

And, in addition to the SM-run discussed under the cut, three of the same people are doing another SM run right now on their Moos characters. (Not me, Malzina still needs to do Wailing Cavern….)

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Wondercon 2006

by on February 15, 2006 at 10:14 am
Posted In: Conventions

I was kind of hoping that Smudge would say something about this one. She has a silly con quote and everything…. (Edit: So of course she posts while I’m posting…. X_X )

Anyway, Wondercon is a regional comic-book convention held in San Francisco, and owned by SDCCI.

I could say they’re turing it into a mini-ComicCon, but while that matches the surface, it doesn’t really describe what’s going on.

Similarities: It is growing fast. It was held in Moscone West this year, and the Fire Marshal closed off the dealer’s room for part of Saturday for overcrowding. Estimates handed out to the city businesses are woefully underrepresented. The Taxi driver on Friday said they were expecting ‘about 500 people’ this year. Um, Wondercon had something like 14,500 last year? Hello? Chamber of Commerce, Reality calling….

With it getting too big for Moscone West, there’s not much to do to expand the dealer’s (overcrowded) room without splitting it between two locations. There’s a few things they can take out, like the open gaming which was 90% deserted the entire time (the other 10% being SJG-sponsored demos).

Sales were poor. I don’t think we made back the relatively low table cost. We were stuck in a corner of Artist Alley that seemed to get less traffic than the rest. But even with the people who went by, it was hard to grab their attention at all. Wondercon seems to have been filled with people there to get their fix of whatever it is they’re already into, and have no interest in anything else.

All too often it feels like the comic industry as a whole is becoming more and more like this.

ComicCon itself seems to fight this trend, but for all I know it’s just so large that the minuscule percentage of people looking for something new turns into a noticeable number.

I did what I could to buck the trend, and went hunting for something new. I didn’t find much that caught my eye, but did come home with a couple new things:

Tales of the Moonlight Cutter is a pair (so far) of done-in-one stories about a ghost hunter in 12th-century China. He’s done his research on history, but they are (deliberately) Wu-Xia stories. The storytelling is okay (certainly nothing wrong with it), and the art is very strong.

A Monk’s Tale is also set in ancient/medieval China, but draws it’s inspiration from Chinese history, rather than hewing to any particular period. The story is a very warm adventure tale of three sheltered monks making their way across a China wracked by civil war and a corrupt military. Well recommended with engaging characters, a good story, and some very nice penciled art.

I’m not generally a big kung-fu fan, but that’s what the new stuff I happened to find was.

Not new, but I was happy to see the creator of Little Bat Koku, which I discovered last year, again.

Between the corner of the room given over to Playboy/porn or whatnot starlets, and various girl-attendees that seem to have installed springs under their shirts, the con needs a jiggle-counter…. -_-;

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Mechanical Computing with Legos

by on February 8, 2006 at 9:50 am
Posted In: Technology

Legos are wonderful things, they can be put to so many uses.

One fellow has gone so far as to create a simple difference engine entirely out of Legos. Difference engines were popular in the 19th century as they were handy for compiling solutions tables for complicated functions like logarithims, books of these were essential for many disciplines until the advent of modern calculators, and had generally been plagued with errors when computed by hand. He has obviously spent a lot of time on the project, and it sounds like he’s accounted for the natural problems of trying to do something precise with plastic Legos, and made it pretty robust. Smarter than I….

Another person has come up with a set of Lego-mechanical logic gates, the essence of modern computing functions. It sounds like they have a lot of problems, and hooking together more than a couple will immediately run into slippage ‘errors’. I wonder if anything could be done about that, but they already look pretty darn complicated.

I’ll also admit that the only thing I truly follow in both of these is the math theory of differences. I follow the general plan and function of the difference engine itself, but that’s only because Andy Carol has done a good job of explaining it all, and I didn’t entirely follow all of that. I generally understand logic functions, but the mechanics of these things are completely beyond me.

Still, it’s very fun to see what some people will do with their spare time!

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End of an Era

by on February 2, 2006 at 11:29 am
Posted In: News

As of January 27th, you can no longer send a Western Union telegram.

To a certain extent the surprising part is that they were still offering them. Another surprise is that they didn’t try to cash in on nostalgia and make a bigger fuss about it.

Still, it is kind of odd to actually stop and look around and realize just how far things have come. There’s a lot of old Hollywood movies that will feel a bit different now. No more furious exchanges of international telegrams like in Tintin and the Picaros.

But the more things change, the more they stay the same. The message you’re reading was transmitted as 1s and 0s, the functional equivalents of the dots and dashes of Morse Code.

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Minions in Maraudon

by on January 30, 2006 at 12:47 pm
Posted In: MMO

Maraudon is an instance that’s been sitting on the back-burner for a while. Blanc and Dunain have been looking at quests for it for… nearly 15 levels or so. With Sunken Temple successfully taken care of, it was decided that it was well past time to get ready to run Maraudon.

Quest setup was easy, since the quests are generally not part of chains. Late-ish Sunday four of our top guildies were on-line and ready… and wondering where the fifth was. I spent my time trying to run errands and clean up my inventory a bit, which meant that when we decided to go in anyway, I was a bit late.

We did pick up a fifth person, a Druid named Teamsleep, who I would like to thank right now as having done a wonderful job with us. Especially as he ended up main tanking for the party. Our house connection was slow as we started, generating 2+ second lag times in the game. Real bad news for Blanc, who couldn’t depend on things to go as smoothly as needed for a tank. It eventually cleared up, and we went back to green lag, but Teamsleep was doing so well that Blanc didn’t want to shuffle the duties around and stayed on off-tank and DPS duty.

Other than that, the instance went very smooth, and really fast. No deaths (I think that’s a first!). With a little clean-up for the early stuff after the main run, all the quests were completed. Admittedly, we were mostly over-level for the instance, but I was the second-highest, and most monsters were still green for me, with the end being yellow.

At the end of it all was the Princess. I’ve seen a fair number of stories about fighting her, generally with things going… not so well. It was a challenge. We had a couple of characters hanging on by the skin of their teeth, but she went down, we didn’t, and she made an ugly splat on the floor. (Reports of the character design are not exaggerated.)

Gottesfaust (finally) leveled, along with me (late) and Lance (early). I’m not sure if anyone else leveled off-hand, but I don’t remember any at the moment.

Speaking of leveling, Nanshe, the oldest member of Fickle Moos hit Level 60 the other day! (More shocking when you realize that Nanshe is newer than most of the Fickle Muse characters, and 58 (Blanc) is still the highest on that side!) Happy 60th Nanshe!

Next up: Blackrock Depths (…gulp!)

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