Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

Someone put this much more poetically a few months back but by the time I hit exalted with a faction, I hate their guts.  It seems to me that every rep ding should be accompanied by a note saying how much more you hate that faction.  I start off at neutral and by the end I want to watch those miserable pixilated beings die horribly. 

The irksome thing is that if I choose to raid in WoW I’m going to have to rep grind with those bloiting blits the Sons of Hodir.  I cannot begin to express how much that made dinging 80 a miserable experience for me.  Currently there’s an exploit for the Argent Crusade rep grind, but I can’t be bothered to take advantage of it.  I may just stick to buying the Aldork/Scrybaby shoulder enchants and live with being sub-optimally geared. 

Infovore has a fascinating take on If Gamers Ran The World.  The way in which he tied various games and game related skills to life skills rang true to me. 

I think the interesting thing about games is that they manage to motivate you without much (if any) external reward.  Why do people play for hours to flip some bits from one state to another, or to win the most tricks, or to get the high score?  Some of that can be written off as the social aspect, but that doesn’t come into play in pursuits such as crossword puzzles, solitaire, and single-player computer games.  It’s neat to see how this aspect of games is creeping into motivating people to accomplish tasks they might not tackle otherwise.  For a personal example, I’m doing the hundred pushups, and I don’t know if I’d still be trying if it wasn’t for the game-like aspects.  Hopefully someone can figure out how to gameify more of life. :) 

100 Best (free online) Books For an Education is based off of Will Durant’s list. I love Will and Ariel Durant’s writing. I’m partway through volume 4 of their Story of Civilization. The Story of Philosophy has been a comfort to me many times. Now I need to choose to take the time to actually read more of these works.

Racial restrictions on mounts have now been lifted. Night elves on mechanostrider? Tauren on raptor? You’re not seeing things.

I still think my Tauren warrior looks silly on his Frostwolf Howler. Should I ever decide to get one of the smaller mounts he’s going to look absolutely ridiculous! Mind you, I also think my blood elf paladin looks strange on her charger. “Look, I can ride my daddy’s horse!”

Patch 3.0.8 PTR Notes.

Mute your Speakers with the Caps Lock Key looks as though it would be useful. I’ll have to give it a shot.

Nabterayl on the The Wowhead Blog has an interesting take on PUGs Anonymous. Rather than seeing a bad PUG as disaster and trying to get out as quickly as possible, they try to save the PUG. The post outlines the steps used to turn a bad PUG into a good one. Interesting material to consider.

Dave Banks sat down with a stopwatch and checked How Much Action Is There Really In An NFL Football Game? Add in my general distaste for watching sports and it’s hardly surprising that that I’m not even slightly interested in watching football.

Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
– George F. Will

Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers.
– Merle Kessler

This SuperSculpey Firm as described on Cool Tools looks like something that would be fun for the kids. Maybe for Christmas?

Yay! Elitist Jerks has Pawn Values for all Specs up. I’m planning to use something along the lines of Left’s Scales for my protection paladin.

Google Reader suggested Clarkesworld Magazine as a feed I might be interested in. I’ve read a couple of the stories and it looks interesting. The stories remind me of some of the better Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact stories.

If you want to see how your character would do with a different piece of gear/different enchants/different gems look at Warcrafter.net or Chardev.org.  I’m sure I’ve mentioned these before, but I couldn’t find the link to these sandboxing tools. 

There are two things I would like to see added to World of Warcraft - one to make the game more social and one to make it less social. 

I’d like a way to chat with people in game from outside the game.  Why can’t I connect to WoW chat via an IM program for those times when I don’t actually want to be logged in but would  like to keep in touch with what’s going on in game.  At this point I’d settle for being able to send email to in game characters. 

I’d like a way to play invisibly so that I don’t show up on my guildmates/friends’ lists.  There are times when I just want to play and not talk with anyone.  It’s gotten to the point where I stop playing because I’m tired of the random chatter in guild.    I suspect my solution is going to be a /gquit, followed by a /ginvite when I feel like being sociable. 

SF Signal has a big list ofFree Science Fiction. It looks as though a lot of the stories are from Webscriptions so they’re not pirated works.

Well, I hit a bump in my progress to 100 push-ups.  I was supposed to hit 60 and I only hit 59.  On the bright side, it took me 6 weeks in to hit that.  I’m going to give it another shot in a day or so, then hopefully I can continue on.  I wouldn’t be surprised if I have to repeat week 6 to actually hit 100 push-ups. 

"Learning is never done without errors and defeat."

Stop mashing buttons and learn to kill things: TSF Teaches You How To Start Playing Your Death Knight will doubtless come in handy when I start playing my death knight. My problems with playing my death knight are twofold - first I have to find the time to play him instead of my other toons (not going to happen till I have at least 2 at level 80) and second I want him to be a dual gatherer which means probably a day’s worth of dull while I wander around picking pretty flowers and smashing shiny rocks. I don’t want to miss out on nodes while I’m questing. Someday I’ll get around to playing him.

Yarn Harlot has a well written explanation of What is happening in Canada. I was pretty sure I knew what was going on before, but this definitely helps clarify things. It amuses me that the best explanation of current national politics I’ve seen comes from a knitting blog rather than from any of the major news outlets. (via Scalzi’s Uh Canada comments)

Skeleton Jack provides Pawn Death Knight Scales for picking out your best in slot items.. The whole article is very much worth reading as it describes what Pawn can and cannot do for you and some of the traps to watch out for.

( Pawn: v1: “Unholy”: ArmorPenetration=0.544, RedSocket=39.7552, CritRating=1.12, Strength=2.4847, ColorlessSocket=39.7552, HasteRating=0.621, Agility=0.7336, HitRating=2.474, BlueSocket=17.3929, YellowSocket=25.2329, TwoHandDps=7.567, ExpertiseRating=1.391, Ap=1 )

At the request of one of the members of our guild alliance, I focused in on leveling blacksmithing last night.  Jaimie had spent way too much time mining saronite, eternals, and the odd bit of titanium so thanks to her I had the raw materials to proceed. 

I didn’t bother following any leveling guides.  If I could make an item from the Tempered Saronite set I made two so that both my paladin and my warrior would be geared for tanking.  The exceptions were the two Daunting pieces, which are better than the Tempered Saronite equivalents for tanking.  I wound up disenchanting about 8 items and now I have tons of Titanium Skeleton Keys but I’m almost at the point of being able to craft any blacksmithing item in the game.  I should hit that point tonight. 

Blacksmithing is expensive to level and so far the good stuff seems to be all BOE.  I suspect that if I had taken mining instead and used the money from that to buy the pieces I need, I’d have been way, way ahead.  Nevertheless, leveling professions is something I enjoy so that’s what I choose to spend my in game gold on.  Next big money sink is engineering! 

Taliafears at Elitist Jerks has a Tanking Spreadsheet up for warriors. I’m probably going to harvest this for values to make a Pawn scale for tanking gear. Then again, using a spreadsheet like this might help me spot when when my gear is not optimally enchanted or gemmed. I’m going to have to think about how much work I want to put into this.

I actually did some leveling on my warrior this weekend as I need to catch up to the most advanced member of our static group.  We thought about running our current four instances (Utgarde Keep,  The Nexus, Azjol-Nerub and Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom) over and over to level, but we decided that would be dull and a waste of the shiny new content.  Instead we’re going to try to stay close to the same level and do a fair amount of solo/duo questing. 

I tried out Matthew Rossi’s ideas for Leveling a Protection Warrior to 80.  With Jaimie’s holy paladin beside me, it feels even faster than our paladin/mage duo.  I did a bit of solo questing and even without a healer this approach is amazingly fast! 

Anyhow, since it looks as though I’ll be hitting 80 sooner rather than later, I need to make sure I’m working on upping my defense gear.  Current target is 540 defense skill (i.e. 689 defense rating).  Ciderhelm has an Easy 540 Defense Gear Guide up.  I should have no problem getting enough of these items.  My blacksmithing is proceeding apace, so I should be able to make a pile of pretty crafted gear.  In a lot of cases, it looks as though crafted gear is giving drop gear a run for its money.  As someone who spends way too much money on crafting, this makes me happy.