Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments - Boing Boing looks absolutely fascinating. Too bad I’m not likely to get it or use it. There are too many things I’m mildly interested in, but lack the will to pursue.

11 Excuses: How to Tell the Real Life Professions of Your Healers : World of Matticus amused me. I liked the first comment too.

Chardev looks like it might be a useful site. I wish it had a way of filtering items by drop location (or at least showing the drop location on the tooltips). It does me no good to look at a lovely piece of Sunwell loot. (via The Hunter’s Mark » Elune Bless Death & Taxes)

Having blogroll is one of the things the I really need to fix on my blog. The Better Blogroll plugin might help with that.

I have to say that I’m getting less and less interested in D&D 4th edition every time I hear about it.

First there was the $15 per person per month charge for playing D&D via Wizard’s online system. “You provide the vast majority of the work and we’ll charge you the same as any of the online games that let you just log in and have fun, k?” At best D&D 4th edition is at a Diablo 2 stage of market penetration - something like Blizzard’s free Battle.net would have made a LOT more sense. Maybe with 4.5 or 5th edition they could have gone with that kind of fee, but my reaction is “Why would I pay $15 per month when I’m the one doing 90% of the work?” The online system helps a bit with the perennial D&D dilemma of finding players and game masters, but that’s not worth $15 per month.

Here’s is what was leaked as the proposed new license.

Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, is releasing a new license with the upcoming fourth edition of Dungeons of Dragons. Publishers can create compatible D&D products, but only if the companies no longer publish any games which are distributed via the Open Gaming License.

Sleazy proposed new Dungeons and Dragons license seeks to poison open gaming systems - Boing Boing

Now they’re actively trying to kill third edition rather than letting it die a natural death. This strikes me as a dirty move. I’m sure their position is 100% legal. You could probably even make a case that there’s nothing ethically wrong with it. Nonetheless it seems like a rather underhanded move.

I had been thinking about buying and probably trying D&D 4th edition. I doubt I would have played it much, but I would have given it a shot. Now I think I’ll wait till I find it in a used book store for a buck a book.

I thought this quote was telling:

In terms of gameplay and mechanincs WoW is the equivalent of a cheeseburger prepared by a gourmet chef: Nothing original, but the contents and preparation are first rate. What makes the difference is that while World of Warcraft is a gourmet burger, you can get it for the same price as all those greasy McBurgers that have been sitting under a heatlamp for six hours…

It’s not that WoW is anything spectacular and original - it’s that it’s extremely well made and that it has no serious competition in terms of quality.

The Daily Grind: What does WoW do better than any other MMO? - Massively

How to Make a Quick and Dirty Guild website Banner « Pugnacious priest’s Warcraft Blog might be useful. Right now we have a big blank space where our guild banner ought to be.

Well, I’m finding myself bored with playing WoW again. The raids are somewhat fun, but I really don’t want to do the extra stuff - dailies, gathering, unfinished quests, 5-mans. Or to put it more precisely, I don’t want to do them regularly. I’m not going to cancel my account, as WoW is still somewhat fun and even after a year I don’t have other entertainment options lined up. My plan is to avoid logging in by default. I’ll log in for raids, I’ll do my daily auction house scan, but I’m not going to log in unless I specifically want to do something. If I wasn’t the main tank/raid leader, I think I’d take a couple weeks off.

I wish WoW had an invisible login option. I would like to have the option of logging in and not being in any chat channels, not showing up in /who, and so on. There are times when I would like to just be unsociable.

Sleepy Dog Labs - Bathtub Cleaning Drill Brush amused me. I can actually see that there would be some practical use for this. I wonder if there would be a way of filling up the soap reservoir with some kind of cleaning product and having it dispensed evenly?

The CommonCraft Show | Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English is really neat. It explains a variety of technologies (particularly internet buzzword technologies) in straightforward terms. I found their latest video, Twitter In Plain English to be a very solid explanation of not only what Twitter is, but also why you would want to use it. (via Presentation Zen)

Buffy Between the Lines might appeal to Jaimie. One of these days I really want to buy the complete Buffy on DVD. (via Download Squad)

BBC Bike maintenance guide looks like a good guide. Maybe I could use this to walk my kids through taking care of their bikes?

Massively had an interesting article on why Raid leaders are jerks. Basically it boils down to the classic drill sergeant approach - the raid leader is a jerk to make sure that everyone know and performs their role. The verbal abuse adds an extra sting to screwups which helps ensure you won’t screwup again. I’m not interested in raid leading this way, but it is interesting to think that optimal performance requires a jerk. If we get to the point where a jerk is needed as raid leader, I’ll step down and bow out.

General TPS/DPS Comparison Charts gives some numbers for how much threat I should be generating to keep aggro. Looking over my WoW Web stats, it appears that I’m not using Heroic strike nearly enough. Sigh.

Here’s what I should be aiming for (from Meter Readers Inc.)
Normal 20-24%
Shield Slam 20-24%
Heroic Strike 18-22% (Note, every % of HS is 1 and a little less % of normal damage)
Devastate 16-18%
Revenge 8-12%
Everything else

A Year of CrockPotting: CrockPot Spanish Rice Casserole looks simple enough and should be tasty.

We’re Ready to Raid! by Rhaina is a good guide to issues that guilds getting into raiding will face. I believe I have covered most of these on our guild site, but I’ll have to check again.

Cool Tool: Reelights look like they’d be good to have on my bike. I wouldn’t need them except in winter when it gets dark awfully early.

Bremm’s Musings: Enchanting Drop Recipes is a nice list of the current drop recipes. I doubt I’ll get many of these as farming them would cut into my play time and I don’t know anyone who needs them from me. If I could enchant my other toons’ gear I’d be more tempted to get them.

A Year of CrockPotting: Seasoned Potato Wedges CrockPot Recipe looks tasty. For a while we were making potato wedges on baking sheets on a regular basis, but the cleanup was annoying. (Slice up potatoes, toss in olive oil, sprinkle with seasoning salt and bake.)

The Bountiful Container: Gardening in Small Spaces looks like a book that might be of interest to my inlaws. Now to actually remember to get it when birthdays/Christmas comes around.