Beta reader n00b

So I finally finished the manuscript.

At least a month later than I wanted to. I took my time so I didn’t just rip through it like a lot of books I consume, but now the perplexing part is what to say. They’re looking for feedback from me, and looking at what another friend had to say, they had sections, chapter, etc; very specific. I can only think right now of one event in particular that I have comments on. I’m trying really hard to think of something helpful, but truth be told, I thought it was a great book. I wouldn’t change anything significant.

I’m a bit busier at work today than anticipated, so I’m not making much headway in thinking it over and writing something down. I keep getting interrupted by *gasp* doing my job…

The times, they are a-changing

Summer already seems to be here. All this week it is forecasted in the mid 20s, and the weekend was much of the same. Why is this important? Because for the first time, I am living in a home with no AC whatsoever, central air nor wall unit. It wasn’t unbearable on Saturday/Sunday, but it was quite warm and left me fatigued.

Last night my parents generously bought me two standing fans. Before I get to that, one amusing note when we were at the Mart of Walls getting them: we passed a ‘bargain book’ table. Mother stopped to look at a cookbook, and I noticed a number of the Twilight (shudder) books on the table as well. Now my mom is one of those who will still smack myself or my brother if she hears us cuss, this is important. I told her, “careful you don’t let that touch any of that Stephanie Meyer bullshit” without even really thinking. She didn’t even bat an eye. Course I call someone a bitch in traffic for cutting us off and she yells “HEY!”… Hmm.

Back to the fans and the apartment. They came just in a box, in pieces. I’ve put things together before – my desk, laptop table, shelves, etc – but never a fan. The directions were poor and essentially were just a diagram of all the parts. It took me about half an hour but it all seemed in place. I turned it on and there were no explosions, lost limbs or bunny volleys. A small thing to get excited about, but these days I say take it where you can get it!

Last night and the night before, our ICC 10 mans had their first round of Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquishers. I was not one of the lucky ones. Why? Because I spent Mother’s Day with my mother and missed our only to-date heroic Sindragosa kill, even though leading up to that I had been there every time we attempted it. We’ll be doing it again, I just don’t relish the thought, and I’m sure the others don’t either.

Tonight TBD and Camendu are going back to Ulduar10 to do hardmodes for 310% Rusted Protos. I’m tanking. Pheer me.

Lastly, I have not started FF13 yet. For the exact reasons I said I wasn’t allowing myself to. I have only a few pages left of the manuscript to read, and my clothes are still everywhere in my apartment. I will have less trouble with the latter now that I have some air movement (see above) and don’t feel like a drained slug as soon as I get home from work.

Priorities

I’ve been a horrible procrastinator and slow at getting things done lately. I do have some health issues I’m currently dealing with, but that’s still not totally good enough for an excuse.

My copy of Final Fantasy XIII came yesterday at last – though I am not allowing myself to fire it up until I have a few things done first. I am reading a friends’ manuscript and meant to have finished that over a week ago. I’m really not sure why it’s taken this long, as I’m really enjoying it. The only thing I could possibly suggest is because the file is stored on my Blackberry so I can carry it around with me; whenever I have to cycle it for any reason, Documents to Go loses my place and I have to go in and look for it again. That itself is a hassle. Another I suppose being some other issues I had lately that multiple times left me in a mindset where all I wanted to do was break s#@t. I took some time away from the normal activities and I seem a bit more centered. I am by no means perfect or normal but being able to deal with crap is so much easier.

The other thing is since I moved into my apartment in December I’ve been slow with unpacking a few things (not like my last apartment where it took months to unpack MOST of my stuff, and even then…what a waste :p) namely my ‘extra’ clothes – ones I don’t often wear or were out of season, etc. There are 2 extra suitcases with clothes that are still on the floor in my bedroom. I suck, I know – so those also have to be taken care of (put away, thrown out, whatever) before FFIV is allowed.

Arthas, Pink Pigtails and Heroic Boners

So I have had a real jumbled up brain for the last little while, but last weekend we finally bagged Arthas on 10s. It was AMAZING. I won’t go into anything about the ending in case someone who does not want to be spoiled is reading this. I know I avoided spoilers like the Plague as the surprise was well worth it (aside from the one detail some jerk decided to tell me anyway).

I got my tax refund on Friday (with the addition of payday my bank account was quite happy) and am trying to decide if I want to put another hard drive in my desktop or buy Rock Band 2; I want to get myself one thing and put the rest towards bills/emergency funds. Is a tough decision. I have FF13 on order from Amazon though…we shall see.

I now have 5 80s, though I do not currently actively play Belltrine or Amynndra. I use them for crafting or horde-side spying now and then but that’s about it. Yandor is my little pink-pigtailed warlock who I have lots of fun running different instances and some raids with; she blows things up almost too well now, wherein the crit seedspam will often get her killed. It’s funny as hell though :p

Camendu (Cam en’du = Hand of Darkness in elvish) is my long-neglected and now 80 Death Knight. I was Unholy for the longest time, but recently, just before patch 3.3.3 hit I started trying dual wield Frost. It is a hell of a lot of fun. I originally meant to try and make her a tank but right now DPS is just too much of a blast. For now I DPS for tank gear and will work towards having the two suits.

Last night we spent about 3 hours wiping to heroic10 Marrowgar. It was not terrible, but a real challenge. We lost people repeatedly to Bone Storm, or they would get spiked during it and either get the storm, frost flame or all of the above. We tried a few ways of both spreading out and grouping up, and actually got to 4% I believe on our best attempt.

I admit I’m curious how other people do this fight on heroic, as even though we tried all kinds of things it still felt like we were missing something, and hell if I know what it is. I will say I miss having Kevlin around, not just because he likes to yell “BONER STORM!” when Marrowgar does Bone Storm…

Yoicks

In the last few weeks, work has been crazy. Last Monday an upgrade to our software platform was rolled out; we had training and other general system issues before that; and also, with 3 new people starting at about the same time as the upgrade, it’s a bit hectic. I’m happy to say though that the one non-bilingual new person was ‘assigned’ to me with me as their mentor. My boss said this was because of my great presence on the phone (ie me = awesome at my job ^.^). One step closer to being more than ‘just a temp’ imo!

Po po po po po!

I know this has likely made the rounds several times, but I never get tired of Walken. If you haven’t seen it before, enjoy :)

Yes I will sometimes post videos I found interesting or amusing. Speaking of…

Hail to the king, baby

Last night we spent all but the lol-15mins-max-it-takes-to-clear-vault-of-archavon on the Lich King fight. We seem to have phase 1 down pat, except when people are slow on running to the shambling horror…and I have to cleanse them before they die. Previously, I would wait until I saw them be more than halfway from the group to the destination; but that got some people killed. With lead permission I started waiting about 2-3 seconds and then just cleansing it no matter what. As you can guess, that sometimes didn’t go so well. Too slow and the plague will bounce around the raid like kids on an inflatable castle. Every time it bounces to a new target after a cleanse Arthas gets a damage buff, and for the most part this is not too big a deal; since the offtank takes a metric crapton more damage (at least with no way of dispelling enrage) from the shambling.

Phase 2 brought some new fun into the mix, with val’kyr swooping in and randomly picking up raid members to drop off the edge of the Throne and plummet to their death. After seeing the buff/debuff on them I looked it up on wowhead, and yes they can’t be slowed by more than 50%, but nowhere did it say they could or couldn’t be stunned. And we did that. It made it pretty easy, though if they pick up one of the healers it got a bit messy. Don’t get me started on Defile. That shit is nuts.

I have to eat my words from yesterday and say kudos to Blizzard on finally making a challenging (yet not bang-head-on-wall worthy) encounter. I thought a little too…little of Arthas and he proved a lot more challenging (thank goodness). I would have been sorely disappointed if he was too easy. I know some people have already got this beat, even without cheating *cough*ensidia*cough* but we’re getting there; especially with not reading someone else’s canned strategy.

Well played sir Lich. We shall meet again next weekend.

Last night’s dinner

So I don’t often put a lot of effort into cooking, though I really do enjoy it; I usually feel like “what’s the point? It’s just me here” or I’m tired. Most days I’ll do something simple, like a burger, fry up some perogies, or bake some of those frozen chicken cordon bleus. I make good use of the rice cooker I bought before I moved, I love that little thing.

On Saturday I went grocery shopping with my parents – after not being able to for 3 weeks due to emergency money issues – and had on my list a bag of stir fry veggies. I had used a bag that I bought long ago back at the old apartment with some sauce I bought then too. It was good but I was telling my mom how I had to pick out most of it since I don’t like cooked peppers, or onions, etc. She ran off and grabbed a bunch of fresh vegetables and dumped them in my cart. I had already planned something for dinner that night so I promised I would cook on Sunday night.

So yesterday I pulled a chicken breast from the freezer and thawed it in the afternoon while I played games and did more dishes (I swear these things just don’t stop). I cut up all the vegetables while I cooked the chicken (cut into cube pieces) in a little margarine and some fresh chopped garlic. The veggies I had were carrots, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, mushrooms, and bean sprouts. I wanted to use cabbage also but didn’t find one that wasn’t huge or overpriced or both.

As it was my wok was totally full. I put some more chopped garlic in first, then the big veggies and bean sprouts last. The sauce was teriyaki, I forget the brand as I’m not at home right now. When it was done it smelled and tasted awesome even though there was a fair bit of liquid in the bottom, suspecting that was from the cooking of vegetables that are mostly water.  :P

I brought the leftovers to work for lunch and it was just as delicious as last night; and couldn’t help but show off my craft. Two things will get geeky guys’ attention: homecooked food and either tech or boobs (work vs. home). It felt good to have made tasty food from scratch even though my kitchen was a disaster… I am a good cook but a very messy one.

So, not something I would do all the time, but it was a lot of fun and the result was awesome! I still think I would be much more inclined to cook like this if I had someone to cook for/with, but that has not happened just yet. Something to look forward to imo.

Excuse me while I do my Garfield impression

Mondays. Bah.

Incoming Post of Random.

I do tech support for a living, not general public but for an internal help desk and it is SO much better than the former, which I have done before. Mondays are often our busiest day, given that some of our ‘clients’ either don’t bother calling in on the weekend (even though we do have someone here) or don’t even know we’re open on Sat/Sun. Today has thus far been pretty tame by comparison to the norm, though I don’t expect it to continue.

It’s gloomy and hazy and yesterday’s melted snow became icy sidewalks this morning. I’ve already had one bad wipe-out outside my apartment building – I pretty much skated to the bus stop today, the drive and sidewalk were completely iced over. I still have all my brains in my head and not on the pavement

Back on the WoW front, last night we blasted through 10 man ICC with just me and Wulf (our awesome resto druid) healing. Normally we run 3 healers. It was fine with the exception of Saurfang beating the living crap out of the tanks on the gunship (for I’m On a Boat) and Sindragosa – where if one of us were ice-tombed it got um, hairy. I had to work a lot harder than I usually do in 10s, but I still enjoyed it. We also knocked out Flu Shot Shortage and Portal Jockey, which were not hard at all.

Tonight we head to Arthas, and I would be very surprised if we do not beat him. We spent some time working on phase 1 and 2 last week, and now with the zone buff from Wrynn I expect not too much trouble. As bizarre as it sounds, I’m probably going to cry when he dies. I’m a huge lore nerd and even though I know all the horrible things Arthas has done as the Lich King, I can’t help but feel sadness for having to kill him. Even in a game. I really get into good storylines in games I enjoy.

Sindragosa

In all the time I have been raiding with AP, we have always found and formulated our own strategies for conquering instances and bosses. Tonight we spent 4 hours on Sindragosa and though our best attempt was 1% (700k hp) there were still some glitches.

Me personally, I am having trouble running directly out after she pulls us all to her ala Shade of Aran. Her body is huge, and I cannot tell what direction I’m facing. At first I thought it was the same direction I was facing before the pull-in, but it’s not. Most of the time (as we’ve done this successfully in 10 mans) I can use my mouse to turn in midair, then strafe out. For some reason, that was not working very well for me tonight. Multiple times I thought I had turned and was actually running forward, towards her front (OMG BAD). The half second – second it takes to redirect, I do not make it out far enough and die to the blast. It seems I can only live through it if I run straight out to the side of her body.

So I had a few fellow raid members try and help me. I then was able to get out of MOST of them, but still, sometimes I would be directed in some weird direction and not make it out. So I am going to continue to ask around. I’m also wondering if the lag or poor FPS I get most of the time in 25 man raids might have something to do with my turning. I never had a problem in 10 mans.

Tomorrow will likely get to that point in the 10 man raid so I can confirm that statement. In the meantime, before the next time we attempt her in 25s I am going to have to ask and look around a bit more. Not looking at strats perse but looking into how others make sure they can run out in time.

Oh my freaking gosh it’s 4:30 am. We were messing around with heroic 5 man achievements (got 3 of my friends finished their red protos tonight at last, huzzah) and then ‘newb runs’ ie playing my human DK. Good night moon.