mellicious | Update, update, update: (Reply)

Weekend update: My dad came to visit and we ended up riding the ferry. Not really what I would have picked to do on my birthday but it was pleasant enough (except for the hordes of love-bugs that swarmed us at one point). Also in the "not what I would have picked to do on my birthday" category was going to Alvin to pick up my quilts from the quilt show, which I had to do as soon as we got back from ferry-riding, and we were almost late, at that. (There's a reason I rarely visit my home-town - it's a long drive to nowhere.) (And the other half of the weekend was uneventful - I was so tired from running around all day Saturday that I didn't even stir from the house on Sunday.)

Birthday gift update: I don't think I ever put the picture of my birthday present over here, which I will now do. I'm not sure everybody will think this is worth the (rather substantial) amount of money that it cost, but oh well. It's a hundred-odd year old collectible - from back when "collectibles" were things that were made in small quantities - from Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee (celebrating the 60th year of her reign) in 1897. I also got a fairly substantial wad of cash, which is always nice, and a couple of gift cards that are actually very belated Christmas gifts! Hey, better late than never. (And both the plate and World of Warcraft were waiting for me at home yesterday.)

Game update: Knowing me I will probably go on at some length about this, so I will do a cut for this too.

There's already some stuff in the comments on the little entry from yesterday, so if you're really interested in this you should see over there.

I am interested in the "races" in WoW and the differences in the professions from GW, also. So some of this is me trying to get things straight in my head and anybody else may read or not, as they like. (Of course.) The Alliance races are Humans; Dwarves (the usual, short and stocky); Gnomes (teeny-tiny, much smaller than a dwarf - guessing, I'd say maybe 30" tall, although of course on a computer screen there's nothing to measure by. Not quite as small as the Travelocity gnome, but small!); Night-elves (reputed to be sexy but so far I am failing to see it); and something called Draenei which only appeared when I added in the new expansion, and which I haven't really figured out at all yet. (Aliens that crash-landed? Something like that.) Then there's the Horde, the sort-of-bad-guys (only not really so much, I think), which are Orcs and Trolls - so far neither of these is intriguing me so much; Undead - sort of interesting, that one; Tauren, which are big bipedal ox-like things; and Blood-Elves, which look like night-elves with a different color scheme to me. And of course they're all pretty balanced power-wise, so there's not any compelling reason to play one over the other. They have smallish bonuses to one stat or the other, but nothing big.

And going by what I did in GW, I will probably try out most of them sooner or later! Ditto on the professions, probably - except there are so many combinations here that I doubt I will ever try them all. Col went to a lot of trouble yesterday to try and explain the differences, but I can't really say that I took it all in. (It's not as bad a case of information overload as when I first started playing GuildWars, but that feeling is still there.) There are multiple healer classes - Priest, Shaman, and Druid, plus Paladin, which is a healer-warrior combo - and then there's also a straight Warrior besides Paladin. There's the usual archer and trickster types, in this case Hunter and Rogue (the guy-with-a-bow is a Ranger in GW, but the trickster doesn't exist there, really). But there are multiple sorcerors, also - Mages and Warlocks, here. Warlocks have minion-like pets, though, so they're more like a Minion Master in GW.

I had a bit of a scare on the install - it had been installing for quite a long time already, and looked like it was about done - this was just about the time

columbinasigned off to go attend to his social obligations, you would know - and all of a sudden it shut down and gave me a bunch of error messages about "unable to copy files". And I was worried I was gonna have some kind of weird conflict and was going to have to go through a bunch of crap to get the thing installed, which I hate. But I had several things open, including IM and defrag and god knows what else, so I shut everything down and rebooted and then went around cutting off every background utility and everything I could think of before I ran it again, and the second time, after another 20 minutes or so of waiting, it ran fine. (You guys who know what you're doing in WoW can correct me or not, as you please - I know I'm unclear on a lot of this but I'm sure I will figure it all out eventually!)

Linkage: Interesting editorial from David Brooks yesterday about the divide in the Democratic Party. I can't say that I disagree with his conclusions, particularly.