mellicious | Entries tagged with guildwars

I have very little brain today, and I'm pretty much all reminisced out, anyway, after a whole month of that stuff, so we'll go with an oldie but a goodie today: screenshots. I'm back on a Guild Wars 2 kick, and it turned out I had a stash of screenshots going back to 2012. This will probably be a lot of character shots, because GW2 is like old GuildWars in that choosing and recoloring your armor is a huge thing. (OK, really almost every MMO is that way to some degree, but the GuildWars games in particular seem to revel in it.) GW2 has updated their dye system, and it's easier to use than ever and gives you a ton of control over the coloring. I redyed everybody's armor to Christmas colors for Wintersday, and then since Christmas have recolored most of them again.

So some of these pictures are old and some are new. I'll put some big landscapes at the bottom, too, because GW's painterly style is cool. (But I'm putting most of the pictures behind a cut so if you're reading it from an LJ feed it won't be so obnoxious!)

Oh yeah, I had forgotten this one: a ghost cat.
ghost-cat

GW2 has always been full of ghosts - many of whom are characters from GW1, actually - but if Alfa the cat was in GW1 I've forgotten. (I'm not even sure which one of my characters this is here, one of the warriors.)

( Cut for more large pictures... )

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.. )

I never got around to doing an entry yesterday - I worked late in the afternoon, even though it was Friday, and then I got on a big GW2 tear last night and played right up until I went to bed. I was trying to finish up an area called Blazeridge Steppes, and I did get that finished. Next is what I think of as "the pirate zone" - I think its official name is Bloodtide Coast, although I have a terrible time with all these names in this game - they are almost all compound names like that and they're really easy to mix up.

So since I'm on the game tear and I can't actually play where I am right now, I might as well write about it. I always end up writing to a greater or lesser degree about whatever game I'm playing - I know it doesn't interest everybody but at least it's not another entry about parents and death! I'm not in the mood for anything serious today anyway.

Guild Wars 1 was my first MMO (I nosed around in my archives and here, apparently, is the first time I played it, in March 2006. I still had dial-up back then and the load times were horrendous, but I remember having a good time and thinking about how amazing the artwork was, once I finally got to where I could play.) I had been playing some sort of MMO-like things before that like KoL and Dofus (both of which are still around - I know KoL is not an MMO at all in most ways, being entirely web-based and single-player and with no graphics fancier than a gif, but still, it's clearly heavily MMO-influenced and it served for me as sort of a gateway thing). My friend Col got me interested in MMOs, and walked me through it and was mostly endlessly patient about it - and we're still playing together all this time later, at least when he's not writing novels (as he is now) and when we can agree on a game to play. We've been through, let's see, various editions of GW1 and now 2, various releases of WoW, Auto Assault (long-gone now, that one is), LOTRO, DDO, Rift, SWTOR, and a fling with The Secret World last summer. We've both played various other things alone but those are the ones we've played together, unless I'm forgetting something.

So I guess I'm more or less an MMO veteran nowadays, although I don't generally do dungeons or raids or PvP or all of those kind of things that a lot of people spend all their game-time doing. (I did a sort of dungeon-type thing with some of my new guildies a few weeks ago and man, do I suck at it. I hear other people talking about this particular one - it's called fractals or FotM - so I know it's hard for everybody, but still I'm pretty sure I was worse than most people. I felt sorry for the poor people who were stuck with me.) But I do pretty well at normal (PvE) gameplay most of the time. I tend not to pay much attention to things like builds and how you're "supposed" to do things in any given game, and that tends to bite you in the butt when you get into big groups and they expect you to have certain skills. (Also apparently FotM is really meant for level 80s with fancy gear and I was about 60 at the time with no fancy gear whatsoever, but nobody told me about that at the time. The game does level you up to 80 stat-wise but it doesn't magically improve your gear. I guess it could, but it doesn't.)

My main solo character in GW2 is named Rina, and in the last few weeks since Col has been mostly absent and I've been playing her pretty much exclusively, she has gone from 55 to 80, which is the max in this game. I think this is especially a feat given that she's an elementalist, meaning she has light armor (although I play her as fire, mostly, and she can really do a ton of damage to everybody else), and given my generally-unorthodox play style.

( Read more... )

(The icon is from old GW - it was one of the elementalist skill icons, as I recall. It might have been Phoenix.)

(Friday)
I just accidentally swallowed a cherry stone, and I'm having this totally irrational fear that a cherry tree is going to start growing out my ears. My grandmother - and possibly my mother, too - used to tell us an old wives' tale to that effect when we were kids. Although I think it was oranges, not cherries, at the time.

I've been doing Jade Quarry all night in GuildWars. I had never done it at all until about a week ago, because when I tried before there were never people available to fill up both sides to do it. (It's a sort of a hybrid PvP-mission kind of thing. You're playing against other players, but you also have an objective you have to do. In this case it's about keeping control of (guess what) jade quarries, and whoever gets a certain amount of jade back to their base first wins.) Columbine may be surprised to hear that I was doing this because we never used to do these missions. But I've been racking up the faction and I may get the Friend of the Luxons title this weekend if I keep it up.

(Saturday)
Rob asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Usually he gets me things like DVDs and sometimes a piece of jewelry, and I usually wrap up a couple of odds and ends I bought for myself, if I suspect I need it to balance things out. (I sort of try to make our gifts to one another match in size, if you know what I mean - I usually buy him a bunch of books and DVDs, and he tells me what to buy there, too. So I figure the expenditure should be more or less consistent for each of us, although I'm not stringent about it at all. In fact I don't really total it up at all except in the very roughest way. Some years my stuff costs a bit more, some years his does.) This year is a bit different, though, because of me not working, and while we're not out of money, we are definitely watching the purse-strings much more carefully now than we were. So when I thought of getting a Kindle I thought no, that's too expensive. Only it turns out that I have quite a large credit with Amazon, almost large enough to pay for the whole thing, if I get the Wi-Fi one. Although I'm thinking I might even go for the 3G one. The amount we'd have to pay in cash to get the 3G version would be roughly in the range of say, the MST3K box set I've got put away for Rob, anyway. ~~Anybody have any opinion on this? If you do, speak up fast, I may be ordering something soon.~~ (Too late, already, that ship has sailed. I got the 3G.) They say "In stock" but I don't entirely trust them. (Late word: I got an e-mail already that says that it has shipped, due in Wednesday.)

Poor Rob got called in to work today. That's been happening pretty regularly lately, at least sort of once a month or so. He went in and worked about 5 or 6 hours, but he told them that if the person who was missing doesn't come in tomorrow, they're going to have to find somebody else to cover then. Which I think is wise. We can use the OT, sure, but he needs a day off, too.

One of the things I've been reading, or re-reading (do you consider it re-reading if you listened to the audiobook the first time?) is A Game of Thrones, and I just stumbled onto replicas of the swords in the book, on Amazon. I guess I should not be surprised, but I am. Wonder if these were around before HBO announced the miniseries.

Anyway, here's Arya's sword Needle, for example. (I've started on the 2nd book but I'm not even far into it. So if you have anything to say about those books, be careful with spoilers, please! I would welcome non-spoilery discussion.)

Needle, Sword of Arya Stark. Licensed from George R.R. Martin

I got home from class in time to see the Rangers win, woo! I'm not sure where along the line during the last year I became a Rangers fan - I think it was partly because my DV-R didn't know the difference between Astros games and Rangers games, so it recorded the Rangers games periodically when they turned up on Fox Sports Houston, and I usually watched them. Also, there's the whole Nolan Ryan factor. Nolan looks a lot like my dad these days, which isn't particularly a recommendation, but the man could pitch - actually it appears that he still can pitch, if you look at that "ceremonial" first pitch he threw the other day - and it also seems that he can run a baseball team. And of course there's also the fact that they're playing the Yankees (sorry, Robert). I'm not sure when I became so anti-Yankee; I haven't always been that, either.

(I still hate the Cowboys, though; that one's not likely to change any time soon.)

I haven't written about online games in ages - well, I haven't written about anything much this year, admittedly, but that's another story. Anyway, we have abandoned DDO (which we in turn abandoned LOTRO for a while back) temporarily in favor of Guild Wars. This was not really

columbina's choice; I have Issues with DDO which he doesn't seem to share - it may be a Win7 thing, we never have quite figured it out - and while I'm not ready to give up on DDO, I was not enjoying it too much. I'm sort of hoping they will eventually fix this, but in the meantime, GW2 is supposed to come out someday relatively soon (they are still being coy about exactly when) and they have been releasing some new content in GW in anticipation of that. And there ~~are~~will be goodies available in GW2 that depend on how much stuff you have in your Hall of Monuments in Eye of the North, which is probably the big thing that lured me back.

There is a Calculator for figuring out how many goodies you're going to get on the GW2 site. I was at 15 points (out of a possible 50) when I first looked a couple of weeks ago, and I'm already up to 21. Forty or fifty points isn't realistic for me after the two-year layoff, but the rewards run out at 30, anyway, and that might actually be doable. My "to do list" says I can get to 30 with two more titles (like finishing the original Prophecies game, which I never did do), 2 hero statues (I have lots of heroes; the trick to getting the statue is to get them fancy armor), a rare pet, and 5 fancy weapons. If I really work on it, that might be doable.

Video-game gender, that is.

( Warning! World of Warcraft ahead! )

(I have nothing to say about WW except that I need to stay away from Pizza Hut.)

Three "Lost" episodes to go. We got to the point where

( Spoiler for anybody like me who's not caught up! )

right about the time Rob was ready to go to bed last night, and I was so interested I really didn't want to stop. But I did. We would have gotten further, but I made the mistake of reminding Rob that "American Idol" was on. And then there turned out to be a new "House" episode on too. Aren't all the scripted shows supposed to be running out of episodes, already?

Mostly for

columbina's benefit: at least two of the guild members who stomped off in a huff last week have already come back. Which made me happy - it got a bit quiet there for a while. (For everybody else: we've had pointless internet drama going on in our GuildWars group. Nobody even seems to know the whole story - I certainly don't - but a good proportion of the guild got mad at the current officers over something-or-other and quit. So silly.)

Linkage:

( political, economic, and wardrobe-related )

Rob's birthday is tomorrow, so we went out for a celebratory seafood dinner. (I had chicken, actually, but Rob had shrimp.) Rob got a new DVD player - it's to go with the 2nd TV in the bedroom - and several DVDs that he picked out. Also we spent the night at the Hilton in Houston for the race last weekend and we traditionally consider that part of his birthday present, because it's always right around the time of his birthday and it makes race day much more convenient for him.

When we bought the DVD player at Sam's yesterday I also bought a huge bag of mixed caladiums - 50 or 60 bulbs, I think. I got out on the back porch and stuck about half of them into various pots out there. They may not all come up but it doesn't really matter. I've had good luck with caladiums in the past, so hopefully a lot of them will come up, at least, and I will have plenty of color out there all summer. I have more pots on the front porch so I will probably plant a bunch more out there.

columbina may kill me - I finished another GuildWars campaign tonight. Nightfall, this time. I wouldn't have thought of trying it except that he and I were experimenting around with Gate of Madness earlier today. We didn't get close to finishing, so tonight when somebody in the guild started looking for people to do GoM with them, I went. I figured that even if this group didn't finish, it would be good to see how people handled the part that Col and I wiped on. And I did see that - and we finished the mission and then some of us went on and did the final mission too, Abaddon's Gate. As is the pattern with the other ones I've finished, the last mission was pretty easy. It's always the 2nd-to-last mission that's a booger - then the final mission is pretty much you battle the Big Bad and you're done. I was kind of laughing because Abaddon is this gigantic thing (although you only see his head and hands) and I was thinking that this has been my weekend for gigantic monsters. First there was Cloverfield, and then the Torchwood episode that was on last night involved another gigantic incarnation of Abaddon, coincidentally, stomping all over London - or Cardiff? I dunno - like Godzilla. They're everywhere!

(Col, I will tell you more about GoM later. I suspect that it is doable with heroes & henches, except that I'm not so sure about how to handle Shiro, in that case.)

This is pretty accurate, I think.
( meme )

Hey, I'm a published photographer... sorta. schmap.com asked if they could use one of my pictures in the latest update of their guide to New Orleans, so I said, sure, why not? You don't get money but you do get credit! Although I didn't use my real name, I used Mel. I figured to the extent I have a "reputation" as a photographer it's for all those pictures on flickr as "mellicious" - not for my real name. Anyway: go to this page and hover over the listing for Hotel Monteleone - a little slideshow comes up on the right, and my picture is in there. It's not exactly big fame, is it?

I seem to have picked up my quilting again, in a small way. About time, isn't it? I went to Office Depot tonight and bought a somewhat expensive lamp for the sewing room - it was too dark in there - so I guess I'm serious. (There's more about that over here, if you're interested.)

I need to put up some GuildWars screenshots, I haven't done any in ages. I have a baby paragon named Delilah who I've been bringing up in Nightfall - it was a good mindless thing to do while I was sick - and nobody has ever even seen the poor child, not even

columbina, and she turned level 20 tonight so she's not a baby any more! (I also have - this will make Col laugh - another necro in pre-searing. I like to play low-level characters when I'm tired, it's soothing!)

And I am ~~tried~~ tired now, I'm going to bed!

aet was talking about families in the kitchen, and as it happens, I have a few pictures taken in my grandmother's kitchen - although like both Aet and

columbina, we always went elsewhere for "formal" pictures. But my family is generally a pretty informal bunch, and we never particularly minded having pictures taken in the kitchen, any more than anywhere else.

( Cut for big pictures, plus shopping, GuildWars, and matters optical )

I have had sort of an inspiration about what to do about Holidailies; I was worried I would burn out on writing daily before the end of December. (Although I won't really be able to write daily the whole month anyway - I'm not intending to try to track down a computer while we're on vacation!) I'm still not swearing I'll actually post every single day, even before the vacation - but I thought of a category of entries I can write that I've never done before, and hopefully that will keep me interested enough to keep posting. It's something that I've been thinking about writing lately anyway - and no, I'm not going to tell you what it is!

Pizza Hut ad I saw today:

A CORNUCOPIA OF CHEESE!!
(That means a whole, whole lot!)

It just makes you despair.

I don't have much to say because I didn't really do much today. I played GuildWars with

columbina and folded fabric. (You can see pictures of some of the fabric on flickr.) It really is an obscene amount of fabric. I am going to have to try to figure out how many yards it is, when I get done. Although I probably don't want to know.

( I'll spare the uninterested the GuildWars part! )

I called this entry "Gray Friday" because there was no shopping going on here and it was a gray, gloomy, chilly day. It's been chilly since Wednesday but today I finally turned the heater on for the first time and the smoke alarm promptly went off. (It stopped after a few beeps, though, which is good because it's on the ceiling and I certainly can't turn it off easily.) Did you see the pictures of all the fools fighting to get in the shopping malls? Honestly, it's just nuts. Rob did actually go in Wal-Mart to pick up a couple of things late tonight, and he said it was pretty empty. I said, well, that sorta made sense because the crazy people came early and the sane people wouldn't go near the place today.

Even though it's been 80 degrees here in the afternoons, part of me seems to think it's fall - at least, I went and took the bright colored batik quilt (which is my mom's handiwork) - and the purple-dotted sheets I bought to go with it - off of the bed last night, and put on the one I consider my winter quilt and slightly more subdued sheets instead. Although then it occurred to me that I also have Mom's big Christmas quilt, so I guess I will have to switch to it soon. Or just add it on top, if it ever actually gets cold. I had better use it, one way or the other, because I went through a little mini-drama to get to keep it. I had told a certain extended family-member that she could have some quilts, and she tried to take that one with her and I said "Oh no, I was intending to keep that one," and removed it bodily from her pile. I felt sort of bad but I was perfectly entitled to do it, and I would be kicking myself now if I hadn't.

We got the easy part of the unpacking done pretty fast - the dishes and books and things like that that had obvious places to put them. Now we're down to the hard part. I think I probably need a filing cabinet for all the papers - between estate stuff and our own finances, there's a lot of stuff I'm going to want to keep for the near future, at least. And I need to get back to all that scanning and shredding I was doing before the move. We still really have papers out the wazoo. The sewing room is a mess, too, because on top of all the sewing stuff I have all of those quilts - some of mine, some of Mom's, and some that came from my grandmother's house that I don't even know who made them! (Although I'm pretty sure it wasn't my grandmother.) And clothes. Jesus, I have a lot of clothes. I hung stuff up in the half of the closet that doesn't have quilt stuff in it, and filled up all the storage things I bought for clothes (several of them) and I still have clothes overflowing. And I already threw away/donated a whole bunch of stuff! Who knew I had so many clothes?

Oh, so that was the Catacombs of Kathandrax I was babbling about at the bottom of my entry last night - not that anybody but Col cares, and he probably knew what I meant, anyway. I shouldn't post when I am sleepy, I either go off on some incoherent rant or just plain babble incoherently! Anyway, it's a GWEN dungeon with three levels and it was pretty difficult. We had six people from my guild and two monk heroes - and later five real people, because one player was in Europe and I guess he didn't realize it was going to take so long! It took... well, I'm not sure because I don't know what time we started. Two and a half hours, maybe. (They almost went off without me in the beginning. Apparently nobody was paying attention when I said "brb"!)

It is supposed to actually get cold(ish) sometime tonight. Rob said it wasn't here yet when he went for his walk an hour or so ago.

I finished defensive driving at last - I put off working on it too much this week (or just forgot about it half the time, really) and ended up spending most of the day on it today, at least off and on. I figured that I needed to finish before tomorrow, because I only paid for three-day shipping and it takes them a day to get it in the mail. I have to be done by Thanksgiving Day, actually - which means I have to turn it in before then. So I'm figuring it will be here Friday, which gives me a couple of spare days to get it down there to turn everything in. It was very boring, but hey, I made 100 on the test and at least it's over with.

I'm still working on getting pictures online, too - another thing that I'm ready to be done with. I'm getting them up faster than I did last year, I think, though. As I recall it was just about Thanksgiving before I finished last year. Flickr has made the process easier and of course it helps to have broadband, and I've gotten somewhat better at the process of getting the names on them, too.

columbina and I played GuildWars for a good while this afternoon, for the first time in weeks. We've both been busy, we both have new computers to get set up, all of that. Anyway, it was nice to play together. We played my baby monk (who is not such a baby any more, she is at level 17) and Hecuba, Col's elementalist who is playing in the same area. We did a mission in Kryta and then we took Celia to Elona, where she can get heroes, because the fact is, henchmen really suck. So yay, heroes.

Rob did go out - he went to the bookstore for a while and then went to see that Denzel Washington gangster movie, which he said was good. I wanted to stay home, the movies didn't especially appeal and it's nice to just stay home sometimes. We ate pancakes this morning, and drank coffee and had really, really good sex, which always brightens up the day, doesn't it? And then I alternated between GuildWars and getdefensive.com and downloading pictures for pretty much the rest of the day. And now I'm tired and I'm about to go to bed. And I have a whole week of work ahead, darnit. Friday afternoon off, I suppose, but still, a whole week. But there's not much I can do about that.

I did get some GuildWars in this weekend - not a lot, but some - and what I found was that I loathe playing games on that computer, and incidentally that I also hate playing at my mom's nice computer desk. The slide-out keyboard is too low, the desk itself is too high, so there's noplace that's at the right height to suit me. Which is ok, in the end, because both of those will be Rob's when the new computer gets here, and I can go back to playing on the little piece o'crap desk which is the only remaining piece of furniture that Rob had before we got married. It's not a bad little desk, actually, except that it needs refinishing, and more importantly it is starting to develop a crack across the top, probably from me pounding on it all the time! (But hopefully it won't fall apart completely any time soon - especially once it has my shiny new monitor on it!)

I didn't really want a laptop, incidentally. I know a lot of people love theirs, but I like playing at a desk. I have enough back and hip trouble without trying to play GuildWars on my lap.

I think I'm going to try plugging the old Dell in at the desk where the Compaq is, just to see what happens. I've already tried it in two different wall sockets, so I don't think that's the problem... but just in case. It's too late to cancel the new computer, even if it decided to work - but at least if it was to boot up, I could get my data off of it! (I have a save of everything crucial that's only 10 days old or so... but I would like to have some of the non-crucial things I didn't think of - like all my GW builds!)

I've been unnaturally silent, haven't I?

There's a whole entry by

columbina that's pretty much All About Me, anyway! Or more correctly, it's about the two of us and how we interface in game situations. (Interestingly, I proceeded to melt down rather spectacularly last night. But I recovered and life - and gaming - went on.)

I have spent the last two weekends playing GuildWars pretty extensively. The first weekend was the Sneak Preview and I took Rima the Elementalist and played mostly with her. I got her most of the way through the Norn series of quests. I took some of the other characters into the beginning of the new game (which is called Eye of the North, or GW:EN - it's also an in-joke, because Gwen is also the name of a character who's been around in GuildWars from the very beginning), but nobody else went far into it. Then this Friday (the 31st) was the go-live date and so Col and I played all weekend, with his main character Kaeleen and my dervish Sharzad, mostly because Sharzad was the one who was in the right place to join up with Kaeleen at the time we started playing. (And leading indirectly to the problems described in Col's entry.) Despite the occasional clashes and fits of temper on both sides, we enjoyed it. It's not an easy game and it's not meant to be. But it's fun. It has some great bits of comedy in it, too. In-jokes, Monty Python jokes, Pinky and the Brain jokes, you name it.

Other than that, well, life goes on as normal. The top floor of my mother's house is empty except for some furniture. (I am keeping some of this furniture but at some point fairly soon, I'm going to have to figure out how I'm disposing of the stuff that nobody else wants.) We have finally got the last piece of her investments transferred over, which is something I was beginning to think was never going to happen. Now - there is always a catch - I have to decide how to invest it. I think I am over-thinking the investment question, and that in turn is sort of immobilizing me. It's an important decision, yes, but it's not a life-and-death decision. I need to relax about it, a bit.

Oh, I don't think I ever said here that we booked a trip to Las Vegas at Christmas. This will be our long-delayed 20th anniversary trip. We are leaving Christmas night - so we won't have to miss the family celebration - and staying 3 nights, I think it is. That's as long as I could persuade Rob to stay. It's long enough, especially since we're not coming back until really late Friday so we essentially have that whole day to fool around in Vegas, too. I booked us at Treasure Island but I might possibly change that if I find a good deal somewhere else. I had it in mind to stay somewhere that's sort of in the middle of the Strip, though. Years ago when I came the first time we stayed at the north end (at the Riviera), and a few years ago with the TUS group we stayed at the very south end (the Luxor). So the middle is the part I've never really explored. (Rob has no opinion on this, since he's never been before. His only opinions so far are that five days is too long, and that he wants to see topless girls. Men.)

Dervish dance
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

You know I can only go so long without a GuildWars picture. This is Sharzad the Dervish, doing the whirling thing in her very, very expensive new armor. (I know it looks like a party dress, but it's armor, ok? That's just the Way of Guild Wars.) I gather that columbina was not terribly impressed by Sharzad's armor, after all the talk about it - it had its own thread on the guild forum, no less - but I love it and I'm the one who has to look at it all the time, so that's what matters, right? I guess it's all that detail on the skirt that appeals to me so much.

We went to see Letters from Iwo Jima yesterday (which was really, really good, by the way), and we missed the first quarter of the Super Bowl because of that. I don't usually get all that excited about football these days, and even the commercials have been pretty lame the last couple of years, but I have to admit that what I saw of it this year was fairly entertaining. The game was close enough to be in doubt until pretty close to the end, and at least some of the commercials were funny - even the Kevin Federline one, much to my surprise. (Some of the other much-ballyhooed ones were pretty lame. Go Daddy - yuck. Career Builder's "office jungle" stuff was off-putting. And the men licking the HHR was just plain weird.) Oh, I also liked "connectile dysfunction" - was that Sprint? - they hit just the right straight-faced tone with it, I thought.

(No mom news to speak of. She's just the same.)

The last entry is all wonky, but trying to fix it just seems to make it worse and it is more or less readable as it is, so I have given up. (If you're wondering, "columbina" is behind the cut, but it's actually the first word of the paragraph after the cut.) The whole last two paragraphs were really meant to be under the cut, since I always figure anybody who wants to know about GuildWars will follow the cut and anybody who's bored by it probably isn't going to read no matter what. But you guys are smart and I have faith that you will figure it out!

Have I talked about how the weather has sucked lately? It's either been cold - which is okay - or cold AND rainy, which is not. And lately it's mostly been the latter. Sunday when we came out of the movie the sun was out and we were like, Huh? What is this? Because we hadn't seen sunshine in I-don't-know-how-long.

columbina asn't around yesterday (I'm guessing that this may have had to do with spousal birthdays) and I was sort of bored since he wasn't there to play with and nothing much was going on in the guild that interested me, so I came up with a new project: getting really really expensive armor to my dervish. (Vabbian armor, to be exact, which looks very much like this outfit from one of the early previews.) It costs 5 platinum for each piece, but the bad part is the crafting items you have to have: cloth, plus a certain kind of leather, plus rubies plus sapphires. Now rubies and sapphires don't quite cost what they cost in the real world, but they are currently running at over 4 platinum each, and you have to have up to six of them for each piece. I already had one of each that I'd acquired somewhere along the line, though, and last night I sold some stuff I'd been hoarding (not even all of my good stuff) and bought three more of each, giving me a total of 4 each. I have enough cloth, and almost enough Elonian leather for the whole thing, so I have all the stuff to buy one piece, at least, but since it doesn't match the armor I've currently got at all, by any stretch of the imagination, I'm going to wait til I have enough to at least buy the 4 basic pieces. (I usually hide my headgear anyway, so there's no rush to make that match.) I just will have to go somewhere and farm to get some more money. (I might could buy everything I need from my existing cash hoard, if I cared to, but I dunno, this is a silly luxury item - it doesn't get you any additional stats or anything at all in game terms - and I feel like I ought to do a little extra work for it if I really want it.)

This picture is the last really expensive armor I got - Rima the elementalist's 15k Kurzick armor, which those of you who pay attention to these things may remember seeing before. It's just changed color.)

Kurzick 15k elementalist armor
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Inaya with horns
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

One more GuildWars picture, because I spent half my day collecting these: the hats for the end of the Wintersday celebrations. I particularly like the reindeer horns. There was also a jester hat, your normal santa hat, and a "Freezie Crown" - which was a whole snowman head, complete with top hat. (I got up at 8:00 this morning to get that one, and I can't say I was thrilled with it. I should've bothered to research hats first!)

The other things we did was go see "Happy Feet" - which was cute. It had sort of a ham-handed environmental message, but it wouldn't be so obvious to kids, who are after all its intended audience. I expected something more... cartoonish, I guess. The penguins were very realistic, for the most part. You know, except for the dancing.

Turns out we don't have to go to work tomorrow - national day of mourning and all that. I don't remember getting that when Reagan died, but maybe we did and I've just forgotten. My boss said we could go in or not, but when I talked to her again she said nobody else was coming to speak of, so I said I might just go in for a while and read my e-mail and stuff. I live closer to work that most of my co-workers do. (And if I work, I get to take that much time off later!)

I made black-eyed peas after we got home, so we damn well better have good luck this year. I think we deserve it.

Current Location: home

Not-so-tiny reindeer
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

The picture is another one of the GuildWars Wintersday quests. You go around rescuing reindeer - there are 9 of them, all identical. Then there's another quest later where you find out that one of the reindeer is named Rudi and his nose mysteriously glows when he gets near presents. (You have to give them extra credit for the realistic-looking reindeer, don't you think?)

I am home for New Year's Eve, and that's where I'm staying. I don't enjoy going out and braving the drunks. I am drinking a coke-with-a-splash-of-vodka, and when I finish this I will probably go back to farming for candy canes in GW, and that will about be it for my big celebration. (I will probably watch Anderson Cooper later. Woo.)

I went over to my mom's earlier - to her house, actually, for the first time in over a month. Art brought her home for the afternoon, and we decided that we will start doing that once a week for now. She didn't seem all that excited to be home, to tell you the truth, but at least it was something different.

We ate pizza and watched football while we were there. The Texans won, giving them six whole wins for the year. Last year they had two, so that was a big improvement. The Longhorns ended up winning yesterday, too, so it was a fairly good football weekend, although the fact is that I forgot to turn the Longhorn game back on after we got home, so I completely missed the big comeback.

I don't do resolutions, incidentally, because I never ever keep them when I make them, so you are spared having to read that. I have no particular desire to go over the year in any detail, either. It wasn't that great of a year. So let's just hope 2007 is better for everybody!

Current Mood: geeky
Current Location: home

Profile

mellicious

December 2024

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Base style: Crisped by timeasmymeasure
Theme: Barren Winter Trees by flatlanders

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 23rd, 2025 12:12 pm

Catchy Name Needed

Looking for a name since 2003

Entries tagged with guildwars

It's the traditional game-spam post!

Ghosts of Wintersday past

The inevitable game entry

Weekend report, Friday-Saturday edition

Rangers - and elementalists

A few musings about gender

I went to Weight Watchers so it must be Wednesday.

Miscellaneous notes from the 3-day weekend

This & that

The family in the kitchen, and other randomness

Gray Friday

Seasonal color indoors

Sunday at home

Ergonomics

Still here

Super Sunday, etc.

Aargh

Armor & weather

I've got happy feet!

It's always understood this time of year