Catchy Name Needed

We spent Christmas evening (not Christmas Eve, but the evening of Christmas Day!) trying to teach Rob how to play cards. He had a deprived childhood in some odd ways - he was the third of four boys and I get the feeling they just ran wild in a pack most of the time when they weren't in school. He says they never played cards at all. (This has showed up in other odd ways over the years, too, like before he met me he had never been on an escalator.)

So we taught him to play Spades earlier tonight. The way my sister plays Spades is somewhat more complex (more like full-on bridge) than the way I remember playing it in the 9th-grade cafeteria, but it was still the same game, really. (Card-playing was very in for adults in the 60s & into the 70s, in general, and for some reason, for a year or two when I was in the lower grades of high school - which would have been 1973-74, maybe - it trickled down to the teenagers of our little town. Then it mostly just went away, as fads do.) Anyway, it took him a while to get the hang of it, but he was doing really well by the time we gave in for the night.

(Our parents, on the other hand, taught us to play bridge, probably even before I was in 9th grade. I think it was maybe when we were still in grade school, and it was a bit over our heads, at the time. Plus our dad had a notoriously bad temper and would yell at us - my mom included - when we messed up. Spades in the cafeteria was a lot more fun. I imagine Rob and his brothers had a pretty good time running wild, too, and didn't care how much card-playing they missed.)

Added: I failed to mention above that my brother-in-law was also there - I feel like it was wrong not to even mention his existence. Besides, without him we wouldn't have had a fourth for Spades. He grew up in Mexico City and he said his mom played bridge, too, but he didn't act like he'd played cards a great deal, either. But he didn't seem quite as ignorant of what to do as Rob was. Rob didn't even seem to know, y'know, how to hold the cards, and that you really needed to sort them into suits so you don't get confused. The basics. (I guess it says something about our life that we've been married nearly 35 years and this never really came up before.)

Well, so the biopsy was positive. I am actually not completely freaking out about it because it's very minor, as cancer goes. It's small and it's away from the chest wall (which apparently is good) and there's no lymph node involvement (I know that's good, it has to do with the way cancer can spread, for one thing) - I just have to have a lumpectomy. And that's really all I know right now. I have an appointment with the surgeon next week so that's when I'll know more.

I didn't tell anybody but Rob and my boss and my sister, so far. I definitely want as few people as possible to know at work because I don't want to have to deal with a million questions about it. Thank goodness for HIPAA, because I can tell you from personal experience that in the old days everybody in the whole hospital knew everything, pretty much immediately. It's a small town, where I work. (Far as I know, nobody I know in real life follows me here, so I'm not worried about you guys.)

I had a bad feeling about it - the first radiologist I talked to acted like it was probably nothing, but then after that I could just tell from the way they were talking that it sounded more worrisome. Then I got a call this morning from a doctor (rather than a nurse) and by the time I woke up he had called several times. So that didn't sound like it was going to be good news. But cancer is not the death sentence it used to be, in general. I've even managed to completely forget about this whole thing for long stretches of the day today.


Um, as far as the rest of life, I'm still playing Covet Fashion with my sister - have I talked about this here? and my god, is she competitive. I'm actually getting pretty good scores though so I may give her more of a run for her money than she expected. Also I finally went to my second movie of 2019 and it was a repeat - Into the Spider-verse. I liked it even better the second time. We will probably go see the Lego thing this weekend but we are waiting til Sunday night so there will hopefully be fewer kids.

I have some screenshots of one game (Portal Knights) and I'm also still playing Marvel Heroes a bit. In Marvel Heroes (I almost said Marvel Knights - I think that's a comic, right? but it's not the name of either game) June is "birthday" month in MH and is marked with lots of giveaways, so that's always fun, and because of that I've gone back to playing more. I've already used some of those goodies to unlock some of the heroes that still were locked - Doctor Doom, Emma Frost, Cable - and then by coincidence, I got a "enhanced" costume which turns Spider-Man into Spider-Gwen (one of the two female versions), so to use that, I have to finally unlock Spider-Man, which I've avoided doing all this time. You unlock characters using Eternity Splinters, which are falling like rain (more or less) right now, so it won't take me long. Spider-Man has never interested me all that much and he's one of a handful of characters that are more expensive than the rest, which is why I haven't bothered before. (There are something like 62 heroes total right now, and I have over 50 unlocked. In fact the Spider-Gwen costume was not part of the birthday stuff, but rather was a reward for having leveled 50 heroes to maximum. I have a couple unlocked but still not leveled, which means I only have maybe 8 left to unlock after Spider-Man. But with several still to level that's not going to be a priority for a while.)

Switching over to the other game, Portal Knights has been in beta for a while and just came out very recently, and Col has been playing it but I was involved in Marvel Heroes and wasn't paying too much attention. Then it went on sale and Col bought it for me as a gift because he thought I would like it, which was really nice of him! It's sort of like Trove in that it's got the Minecraft-style building component and it's also got some questing/PvE to it - a little more actual story than Trove had, as I recall.


This house was already here in the game, although it required some repairs. It's considerably more elaborate than anything I would have built on my own. There was a lake between the spawn point and the house, so I built a bridge. The lake was originally higher than this, but I think I accidentally drained a lot of the water out! (Then I planted crops all over the former lake bottom.) - If you know what to look for, there's also some creatures at the back of that water area. The orange things are slime creatures and there's probably some turtles and a sort of mobile plant thing. I think they were originally spawning up at the top behind where they are now, and they migrated. (I built a doohickey which I can't remember the proper name of - and you can't see it because it's around on the back side of the house - which keeps anything from spawning near it. I put it up because tired of having angry turtles in my virtual front yard! It covers a pretty big area, so I think those guys are probably spawning right at the edge of its range. They don't come near enough to bother me where they are now.)

Here's a shot inside the house that's really not too interesting. I didn't make much in the way of changes to this floor - I just added some chests and stuff for storage.


That thing on the wall is a trophy - that's the head of one of the mobile plants that I was talking about. This is not a big room, you're seeing most of it. There are stairs which originally just went up, and a fireplace, and there were originally some chairs which I moved.

(I was going to add more pictures to this, but I hit enter by accident (again!) and so I'll do the rest in a separate post later.)

Some movie and movie-related(-ish) stuff, starting with the Rogue One tickets. I'm excited about this and apparently so is Rob - at least, when the trailer came on for it the other day, he looked over at me and said, "Next week?" "Next week, yeah," I said. I didn't buy the tickets a month ahead like I did with The Force Awakens, but we've got them now and I'm excited. This is Christmas, to me. They did de-embargo the reviews today, apparently, because it went from "no reviews" last night on Rotten Tomatoes to 83% today, so yay. If it'd been 30% like Suicide Squad I would probably have gone anyway, but I'm glad it's not.

I know I've talked about this several times, but the movie theater we go to is a bit atypical (or maybe it just seems that way to me). It's Premiere Cinemas, a small chain. They own theaters in Texas and a few other places around the South. They started in this area, I think, because they used to just have a handful of theaters, including the one in my hometown, which I notice is not listed any more (so that probably means they sold it somewhere along the line). They've built some theaters from scratch in places that were "underserved" for movies (including Galveston, which for quite a few years didn't have a movie theater at all) and in our general area they also have the "dollar theater," which is on the freeway right next to the big Cinemark. We go to the dollar one a good bit (I forget, I think the tickets are actually about $2 except on certain weekdays that are cheaper) but mostly for first-run movies, we go to the one that's in the next town over from us. I started to say it's a small-town theater, but that's actually not true - in fact it's in one of those fast-growing suburbs that's coming up on 100,000 residents or so. Still, it's like a small-town theater: it's in a strip center, it's hardly ever terribly crowded like the Cinemark is, and it's cheaper. Even for things like The Force Awakens, we did have to stand and wait for a few minutes for that one, but nothing like the chaos I've experienced at other theaters. So I'm expecting to get into Rogue One without much trouble, too. It's about equidistant for us to go to the Cinemark or to go in the opposite direction to the Premiere, but the only time we go to the Cinemark these days is if we want to see something that's not showing at Premiere. (The Cinemark has 18 screens to this particular Premiere location's six.)

I've been playing Squirrel Girl in Marvel Heroes and I was amused to see a Squirrel Girl reference in today's Questionable Content. I wasn't sure I would like playing SG but I do. For one thing, there are a few heroes that I can't play because the things they say (each character has a limited number of these and so you end up hearing them a lot) annoy me so much I can't stand it. (The #1 example there is Invisible Woman, who's basically a nagging mother, in a really obnoxious way.) But Squirrel Girl's comments still just seem funny to me, where IW's are clearly intended to be funny but are actually funny maybe once, and then not at all after that. Squirrel Girl is also massively overpowered, as befits somebody who's supposed to have beaten both Doctor Doom and Thanos, and that also makes her pretty fun. Plus, y'know, massed squirrel attacks are just sort of inherently funny, and I'm surprised at how much I continue to think so even after a couple of weeks of it.

And then I haven't mentioned that we went to see Dr Strange again last weekend. It was my third time and Rob's second - I think that he liked it better the second time because he knew what to expect. As I think I discussed previously - yup - Marvel Heroes taught me plenty of background on the doctor - and the Wand of Watoomb and the Mindless Ones and other assorted Strange trivia - so that was never an issue for me. I still enjoyed the heck out of it, myself. (Rob is kind of hard to read, even for me, sometimes, have you figured that out?)

columbina and I have been playing Trove for ages - I think he started before the beginning of 2015 and I started right after, maybe - and I have some screenshots so I thought of putting some of them here. We'll see what I have. I probably need to go document the stuff I've built in my club world more than I have, but I might have a few pictures of that already, and some out in the adventuring areas.

Here's a character and her mount and her ally. I haven't played Minecraft so I don't know about the similarities and differences between them, but I gather that this is considered a Minecraft-type game. This is my Knight - Trove is different from most games I've played in that you stay the same character all the time (in the sense that you have the same name and the same face and hair - although there are actually faces that are an armor item, too, I just choose not to have them show) and you just choose which class you're going to play. Each class has different abilities and different armor, and then you have mounts - which are a collectible, so after you've played a while you have more mounts than you can possibly use. (This one is a Battle Caterpillar - there are horses and dogs and bikes and even nowadays dragons - although they deliberately made that last one hard to get. Players submit designs and so you get all kinds of stuff. One of my chars rides a pinata!) All the mounts are good for is to go faster, but as far as I know even dragons don't go any faster than any other mount. Although I'm not sure about that because they're new - but for most mounts, they all go the same speed no matter what they look like.

Then you have allies - here that's the little guy that looks a bit like a floating Tardis. They give you a small stat boost so you can pick between them - personally I usually end up balancing between what my character can use a boost in, and appearance. The stat boosts are not that great, that some of them override appearance. I usually try to pick something with both allies and mounts that seems appropriate to the character. (For example, the ranger has a red panda mount; the tomb raiser has a skeletal horse.) There's a whole series of cats that are probably among the most popular allies.

Everything in Trove is cube-shaped. The characters and some other things in the world are made up of little tiny cubes, as you can see. And you can build, but only in large blocks - about as tall as the character is, in fact. Everybody gets a "cornerstone" house when they start. It has a specified size (16 by 16 blocks) and it starts out with a little basic house on it, but most people tear that one down and build something unique to them. My original one was sort of a latticework skyscraper - this is from the bottom looking up:

You have to mine for the different colors of blocks, so I just used whatever I had to begin with, that's why it's all patchworky. I kept building up and up - inside it was sort of patchworky also, it was just a maze of multiple levels and stairs and such. There's not really any particular use for making it tall, I just liked playing with it. You can also dig down and I did that also. Finally I decided I had gone high enough - I was up about cloud-level and I hadn't found a top limit yet - so I put on a roof:

This was a screenshot from one of the dungeons which was itself floating (it's a floating spaceship, in fact). I did some re-siding and made it at least look like a more organized patchwork, but eventually I decided I was bored with it and I built a narrower tower instead, that didn't take up the whole 16x16 width. I built it from the top down - things stay where you put them (mostly), even if where you put them is up in the air. (Col has built a whole floating castle on his club world.)

I had built a couple of towers on my club world so I had a basic design - I just elaborated on it a little bit with this. So I knocked down the roof of the original house and started building downwards from there, and I knocked the old latticework tower down as I went. It took me a good while - days or weeks, I don't remember exactly. (Building can get very involving, sometimes I'll get to working on something and lose all track of time.) So here's a shot looking upwards into the new tower:


and here's a picture where you can see both new and old:

I remember experimenting with the burnt-orange color you can see here, but I took that off eventually and went to the bright colors you can see in the picture above that. The colors are all bright purple and pink and blue. The part that looks white is actually light gray, because making light gray uses up gray blocks, which are the most common thing and anybody who likes to excavate builds up a ton of them. Light gray looks so close to white that most of the time you can't tell the difference anyway. I imagine the light-colored blocks in the green-and-white checkerboard are also light gray.

(When I got down to the bottom, I left part of the old building, so that the new tower sits in the ruins of the old tower. I like the way it looks, myself.)

I mentioned club worlds - you have the cornerstone house which you can take out in the adventuring world with you, and then there are also club worlds. These start out as a little island in the middle of a gigantic impassable ocean, but you can build onto them. When I started, Col had already been playing for a month or two, and he had terraformed and added several extra biomes to the club world that he had started, and so I built a structure there and I did some digging also. We kind of arrived at a "this is your part of the island and this is mine" sort of arrangement, I built a big terraced structure - in candy colors because it was next to a "candy" biome. Unfortunately I don't think I have any pictures of that.

(That's especially unfortunate because it got knocked down in a sort of tragicomic terraforming accident - Col was upset about it at the time, because he thought I'd be upset, but actually terraforming accidents happen a lot and I had quit using it by then so I was not particularly upset. He built sort of a Mel Memorial Terrace on top of it, actually! -- The reason there are lots of terraforming accidents is because it's not always clear where the edges of a zone are, and anything in the area may get messed up if you aim badly. I have done it several times myself so I know how easy it is!)

And I have to go right now and this is long enough anyway, so I will save any elaborations on this for later.

Holidailies starts on Monday, which technically is tomorrow, now, and which means I'll be hanging around LJ more for the next month, presumably. I have a plan for something specific to do for Holidailies - sort of like that Music Advent thing I was doing off and on last year, but with different years and a more personal spin to it. That's if I get around to actually writing anything like that. I'm not working tomorrow so hopefully I'll get my shit together in the next 24 hours, at some point, and write something for Monday.

In the meantime, I'm playing Guild Wars 2 again, since Col, my normal gaming partner, is off playing Skyrim without me. (He can't do it with me, there's no multiplayer mode for it, and I could theoretically be playing Skyrim, myself  - I bought it back a month or more ago when it was on sale - but I haven't gotten into it yet.) I know I'm getting interested in GW2 again because I went from just doing the dailies with my lowest character and stopping after that to hanging around in Orr (which is the hard part) with my high-level guys. (My GW2 characters are actually all girls, not guys, but it sounded more interesting the other way.*) So anyway, I have until tomorrow to finish the monthly part, and I need to do quite a bit of stuff for that, but I have all day tomorrow, so I'll make it. I might even get it done tonight, assuming I stay up long enough.


*Actually, come to think of it, I tend to use "guy" the way a younger person would use "dude" to an extent, especially when it's plural - that is, it just means "people" most of the time, rather than "male people." And all the normal terms for women annoy me - that is, "women" is fine for generalities but sounds totally off when you throw it into casual conversation; "girls" sounds demeaning, "ladies" is worse, and "gals" makes me want to scratch somebody's eyes out. Really, we need better terminology for all of this.

(Lest you say "What's wrong with saying 'women'?" try substituting it where I said "guys" in that first sentence where I got off onto this tangent. "My high-level women" just sounds goofy.)

Because I owe an entry for yesterday, and it's now 3am and I am sleepy and brainless, here are some Diablo 3 screenshots. (Diablo players will notice that these are not actually full screenshots - I cut them down some.)

Diablo is one of the few games I've played where you can't customize your character at all. You pick the class, and you pick male or female, and they look like what they look like. They end up looking different to some extent because of their clothes, though, anyway. Drops in Diablo are sort of randomized, and every weapon and every piece of armor has slightly different stats and there are a number of different skins for each kind, too.

So here's the first character I made, a wizard, named Mellificent (with great originality):

( Read more... )

(Oh yeah, I have game icons but this one above is actually Harry Potter, or Harry Potter Rifftrax, or something like that. It seemed appropriate, though, since I was discussing my wizard.)


holidailies.org

Well, I'm not talking about the news. No way no how. So instead, let's talk about Wintersday, which is the GuildWars version of the holidays. GW2's Wintersday just started today, but I have a million screenshots (ok, maybe not quite a million) from old GuildWars and I loved Wintersday there, so I thought I'd post some of those.

This is Old Ascalon, I believe, and this is my dervish, Sharzad:
 

Here's my ranger Mila in Lion's Arch (note the carolers in the background):

(I don't know how well you can read that text, but Dwayna is the lightbringer, see, thus the carols are about her.)

( More screenshots.. )

OK, so this is what I get up to in The Old Republic when columbina isn't around - he was off today, and we played for a couple of hours this morning, but he left with a migraine around lunchtime. So after he left I:
1. decided I needed (game) money (which is, in grand old Star Wars tradition, actually called "credits" rather than money), and one way to get it is to kill a lot of stuff. So I...
2. run around the planet where we already were (Balmorra) and kill a lot of stuff. This does get me moneycredits, slowly, from looting directly and also from picking up sellable items. It also gives me a slow but steady pickup of xp (experience points), which is probably going to displease Col later because he doesn't really like it when I get ahead, and we have been playing these characters entirely together. But oh well, I didn't do it on purpose to get xp, and I didn't do any quests. (Well, except for one which I mention below, but that's a daily so it doesn't count either.)
3. I was also picking up archaeological items at the same time - that's my Sith's gathering profession - and I did some crafting along the way, and then I realized that I was running out of the crystals that you get earlier on, and I wasn't getting any more of them on Balmorra. But none of the crafting recipes used the higher-level items yet, so I decided to go to the Imperial Fleet to the crafting trainer, and see if I had any new recipes yet. (Eventual answer: I did, but they were not much help.)
    Now the game does not make this bit of travel really easy to do - I guess going from one planet to another really ought not be that easy, should it? so I trekked back to town to the spaceport, got on my ship, made the jump to the fleet (which actually is in an entirely different sector of the galaxy, so the galactic map says), got off the ship again, and ran through the cantina at the center of the spaceport (don't ask me why, but that's where you come out when you get off your ship) and halfway across the spaceport to the trainer - which takes at least as long to do as the hyperdrive jump took. The space station is big.
4. Then I made a pit stop at the Galactic Trade Market (which in any other game would be called the auction hall - although here there's no pretense of an auction, really - you put your stuff up for sale at a price you choose, and people buy it or not). I bought some of the crystals I was looking for at a fairly reasonable price, then I realized that all the rest of them were for sale for much much more (like 100 credits each) and I probably wasn't going to get any more at the reasonable price (which was more like 12 each). So then I...
5. bopped off to another planet, to Dromund Kaas, which is the Sith capital, and is where I got the crystals in the first place, to hunt down some more of them.
6. At DK, I get sidetracked between the spaceport and town by some elites that I figure out I can now kill without getting killed myself. They don't give me xp any more, because I am 10 levels higher than them, but they do give me a fair number of credits and I'm still interested in credits. (I also manage to do a daily that involves killing these elites. Once again, no xp, but credits.)
7. I cut across the bottom of town and head off toward the ruined temple place because I'm really supposed to be hunting those crystals, and I remember that that place had a lot. On the way, I wander into another elite area, and this one doesn't go so well - they are higher level - still lower than me, but they're elites and I'm not big enough to kill these guys yet. I die, poor Vette (my NPC companion) dies, and when I rez, I back the heck out of there.
8. Wander around the exterior of the temple looking for crystals. Find a lot of crystals, eventually also find a green doorway (meaning one I can go into) that I don't think I remember seeing before. Nothing tries to kill you, there's just some machines. (Apparently it is the Matrix Assembly place described here, but I just now got around to looking that up.) I poke around at the machines, and figure out that they have something to do with datacrons and something to do with these matrix shard thingys that are lying around in my inventory. Play around with them randomly and end up with a Matrix Cube, which describes itself in the tooltip as a relic, which is something I know there's an inventory slot for. It's not really the stats I need, but oh well. I'm lucky it was something useful at all, and it didn't summon some elite that would have killed me - or make my shards go poof because I did it wrong. I am just pleased I figured it out without consulting the wiki! (I think it was the RYG one I made, and those were the only three colors I had so my options were limited anyway. A blue one would have been required to make the ones for my warrior's primary stat, and I didn't have that.) Never did make it inside the main part of the temple.

So there you are. Got some credits and some useful items, and learned something interesting. Not at all what I expected to do today, but not a total loss, in game terms.