Organizing Alts

Blogust is almost over and personally I'm glad. I'm running out of things to talk about. Its the summer and my life hasn't been all that interesting. I've been playing lots of WoW and trying to go through all my random papers in my room. Alts and hanging file folders has been the last week for me!

Raiding with Meyr: Ulduar

As foreshadowed eariler in the week this week's topic is the Ulduar raid. This is one of my favorite raids that Blizzard has released. Its expansive and I think its fantastic lore/storywise.

Here's some concept art for non-WoW players.

The backstory:

Ulduar is a Titan prison, where the worst of the Titan's enemies are held. However, one of these "Old Gods," named Yogg-Saron unable to gain freedom has begun "influencing" his jailer's minds and corrupting Ulduar. 

The bosses of Ulduar. Including Kologarn who I drew a couple days ago.

Why I like it?

I love the look of everything-- its very mystical. The graphics and the setting is absolutely beautiful. Algalon the Observer in the middleish-left of the picture above is designed to essentially be a constellation. Also the voice acting and the dialoge is all very memorable. Many of the reasons for my love of Ulduar can be seen in this set of videos.

Also I had a lot of fun when Raiding Company was running around in Ulduar. So I may be biased. That and I really like some of the fight mechanics. I think that Flame Leviathan with two towers is my favorite encounter in WoW, period.

It spawned our love and obsession with the Hoperender, polearm. 

Pandarific

I'm hanging out with my brother today-- watching movies and playing video games. So we went to Panda Express to get some dinner. And they sell bottles of their famous sauces.

they. sell. orange. sauce. now.

Orange sauce, people.

That is all.

Foreshadowing

Today is a little bit of foreshadowing to the next edition of "Raiding with Meyr." It may also be because I running out of things to write about for BEDA. Which is now almost over again.

Kologarn!

I hate drawing hands.

Thunder

Thunder makes me think of Thorim from WoW. I'm not sure why, but probably since he's a homage to Thor, god of Thunder.

I remember you, in the mountains...

Anyways, thats completely unrelated. The weather here in Lancaster-eno has been weird. Its a hundred-and-a-gazllion degrees outside, and yet its finding time to be rainy and thunder-y. I like it though. Gray skies are my favorite. And the slight humidity is nice sometimes. Although I could definitely stand to lose the heat.

Soda

Earlier today my family and I tried out a newish restaurant here in Lancaster called Bex. One of the draws of this restaurant is the soda fountain. Why is the soda machine a big deal? Well, instead of a standard machine with approximately  6-12 different flavors the Coca-cola Freestyle offers just over 100 different combinations.  One of the flavors that I sampled today, and am currently still enjoying is a Peach Sprite.

PEACH SODA!

I love peach soda. More specifically my favorite soda is a bottled variety of peach soda. Nehi Peach soda.

Yum!

Blinded with Science

This is possibly the cutest most romantically nerdy thing I've ever seen. Squee! I love it. From last week's episode of Eureka, a Sci Fi show based about a town of super genius scientists.

Apparently Youtube broke my video. Sad face!

Back to Schools

Most of the people that I know are on the semester system for school, which means that they start school much sooner than I do. For example my friends and brother at AVC start this week. Whereas (I love that word it's like combining words --which I love doing-- but it's an actual word already) I don't start classes until the end of September. And while this sounds horribly unfair I actually don't start my summer until about a month after everyone else so it evens out. 


It does make me want to go back and start school a little at least. I'm kinda excited about this quarter since I start O-chem. And better yet...








I don't have a math class!!!

Raiding with Meyr: Raiding Company

Raiding Company is the name of the small guild or the group of that I raid with on Sundays. We've been raiding together for 2 years now. Lately our attendance has been pretty meager and as I talked about last week we've had to pug more people for our weekly raids. Tonight we had slightly better attendance than usual. And in an exciting twist Stiix, one of our tanks and regular RC members, was back from an extended hiatus. Yay!

Often times in WoW there are players that you get to know through the game that live who knows where, that disappear from the game. While this is a normal occurrence for people to take a break from the game (I've done it before), the catch is that since you only know them in the context of the game that they seem to disappear off the face of the earth until they log back into the game. That sort of unreliability saddens me, because there's a handful of people that I only really know in the context of the game. SOme of these people I've added on Facebook and who I would be able to contact and then there are others who I know almost next to nothing about (here's looking at you Bach) but get along with smashingly in game.

Since we've been pugging more lately I've also been interacting more with people I'm not used to and some of them are neat people. From time to time there's also another female voice in vent. But largely most pugs make me happy with the people of Raiding Company. We're a competent bunch and we are actually able to converse and have fun while raiding each week.

This week the raid was made up of five Raiding Company members and 1 Raiding Company ally(non-guild regular).  And despite of raid full of pugs, our DPS (the players that focus on damaging/downing enemies) was absolutfranfreakinsupertaculous.

Epic Music

While I have no musical talent whatsoever, I find that music and sound is something that is important to me in entertainment. Today I ended up on this songs wiki page because of its use in entrainment, as "epic music." And I like epic music. There is something absolutely satisfying about it that makes everything else awesome. Similarly from the latest Star Trek movie the main villain, Nero, was given a leitmotif tune. This epic music bled into our last D&D game and became the theme music for Nick our resident necromancer.

Fourth Edition

As the number of posts I've tagged as D&D shows, I love Dungeons and Dragons. What you may or may not know is that I'm passively interesting in DMing. To be more accurate I'm very interesting in campaign building and telling a story but am very intimidated to actually get somewhere with it. Part of that intimidation comes from not knowing the rules as well as many of my fellow D&D players. Recently, however, I've been looking at 4th Edition D&D rules. And while I still have some doubts about the system so far from what I've read in the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide and the D&D podcasts I mentioned earlier this Blogust, I'm really liking the streamlining of the rule. This might be because I'm not a rules person and don't have a ton of devotion to any of the older systems, but 3.5 had way too many supplements and too many options in a lot of cases. So, I'm learning 4E so that I can try it out, because whether the game comunity likes it or not this is what's being current;y supported.

That and I'm absolutly loving building an entire world from the ground up. Yesterday I was working on the calendar and it was nice because I could make it as convenient as I damn well pleased. 28, 29, 30, or 31 days in a month? Bah! Mine have 25. Made of 5 weeks with 5 days a piece. Its kinda therapeutic to my OCC tendencies.

Transparent Screens

My own Transparent Screen, originally uploaded by w00kie.

Surfing the interwebs today I discovered a group of pictures showing seemly transparent monitor screens. They are actually desktop wallpapers of pictures the user took of whatever is behind there computer. Clever, eh?

I Love Geeks

I love geeks!
More importantly than loving geeks I love being a geek. I love geek culture and everything here is about being a geek. One of my favorite things about being a geek is that even though there are many types of geek, we still understand and have the same basic mindset. Geeks understand me.

Because not everyone understands staying out till 5:30AM when they hear what D&D is.


Letme get this straight, you were out til four AM siting around a table talking about doing stuff? 


Uh, yah.

Zoroastrian

In High School I basically took as many AP classes as I could. My first AP class was AP World History during my Sophomore year. Before we had our first taste of a real AP test Ari, Emma, Darla, and I (I think at least) got together for a "study group." We ended up getting very little worthwhile studying accomplished. Although I believe we all passed the test pretty handily. And of the college credits I've gotten from my AP classes this class counted for more GEs (General Education classes) than any other test I took.

The first of our gems was a passage from an AP test prep book, that we then wrote on a whiteboard.

Actual quote about the Maji Maji Rebellion's use of "magic water."

The second stemmed from the question of "what were the beliefs of Zoroastrianism?"

 My answer being, "I don't know. Chill and don't kill?"

"Chill and don't kill," ladies and gentlemen, words to live by. 

The Internet

As a regular blogger (I'm very proud I can say this) my love of the internet is somewhat obvious. I think that largely the Internet is fantastic. Also, random fact: it's grammatically correct to capitalize the word "Internet."That being said the Internet-- in m household our Internet provider/service is kinda terribad. So, today were trying Timewarner Cable's Roadrunner to see if we want to switch. This does however mean in setting this all up that my Internet access and therefore ability to blog is somewhat unreliable, hence why I'm rushing this. 

I do hope this works out. Faster Internet would be fantastic.

Raiding with Meyr: Pugging

Since on Sundays I raid on WoW and I want to talk about some aspects and highlights of raiding, I figure what better day to do this than on Sunday.

Pugging. What is "pugging" or "a pug?"

Not this.

A "PUG" stands for "Pick Up Group," meaning that the group is not prearranged of people you know. It's random people, that share a similar goal for raiding or grouping together. Pugs, however, are notorious for being all sorts of bad and awful. Because you don't know the people beforehand they have the potential to majorly suck. With a prearrgaed group you know the strengths and weakness of the people you play with, you can assume a certain level of competence, and you know if they have connection issue and the like. Also, with a set group you start to get to know people and conversion blossoms.

So, why am I talking about this? Lately our Sunday raid attendance has been abysmal lead us to pug more and more people to fill in raid spots. The content were working on has 10 man groups. Lately we've been pugging between 3 and 5 of those spots. Tonight my brother and I joined a raid that was essentially a complete pug. It was interesting to say the least. Our raid leader had a brother who was undergeared for the instance. We wiped (everyone died, forcing us to retry the fight) on the easiest fight in the game currently Gunship Battle, which to show its ease had been dubbed "Lootship" (which "loot" refers to gear, much like pirate loot). The reason we wiped was because we tried to do the encounted on a harder difficultly, but it took fours tries before the leader decided "Hey, maybe we can't do this on the harder setting. Especially since we're carrying the weight of my brother." Although come to think of it I don't think she used those words per se. In the Lady Deathwhisper encounter the tank didn't trust my kiting and almost got himself killer. But still most of the fights did go smoothly, which makes me appreciate even more raiding with people I know.

Heroic

I was bored today, so I made a superhero. Using a superhero generator. Yay! Random fun on the internet. 

It's Captain Meyrific, or something.

I don't know what her super power is though. Being really pale maybe. I'm a little bored if you can't tell, Internet. I miss D&D.

Cookie Monster!

The original Brown Butter Cookie.

Original Brown Butter Cookies

1 cup (2 sticks) Butter

1.5 cups Brown Sugar

2.5 cups Cake Flour

1 tsp Baking Soda

1Tbsp Vanilla Extract

Sea Salt

Chocolate Brown Butter Cookies

1 cup (2 sticks) Butter

1.5 cups Brown Sugar

2 cups Cake Flour

3/4 cup Cocoa Powder (Hershey's Special Dark)

1/4 tsp Salt

1 tsp Baking Soda

1Tbsp Vanilla Extract

Sea Salt

Brown butter on the stovetop. Combined butter and other ingredients in mixing bowl and let chill. (Dough should have a claylike consistency) Roll into walnut sized balls and top each with sea salt. Bake at 325 F for 13-15 minutes. Makes 2 dozen.

(Revised again. 12/13/2011)

Sweet Nothings

I talked about TV yesterday and it gave me (read: almost relates to) an idea for today's topic-- Internet time wasters. More specifically TVtropes. I find that TVtropes and Wikipedia are dangerous places for me, since I can sink hours into them. Although all things considered I could be doing worse since I learn a lot of neat factoids form doing this. The problem for me is that I start harmlessly on one page and end up jumping and opening up a bazillion tabs different tabs (which makes me seriously glad I'm using Chrome). For example I currently have 20 tabs open.

Unrealated, I this is at least the 6th time this months I've blogged while in front of the TV.

TeeVee

I feel like I'm running out of things to talk about this month and I'm not even halfway through Blogust. Such is life and blogging I suppose.

Well then, TV. Yes, TV-- television. As part of my 20 Before 20 I intend to finish the seasons of Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 (since, I've never met Sci Fi I haven't liked). Anyway, this summer the shows I've been watching "live" are Psych, Warehouse 13, White Collar, and Burn Notice. As I write this I'm watching Psych, which led to this post. Mostly I feel because they have a "Spot the Pineapple" challenge in each episode where you watch for a hidden pineapple in the background of the episode. Which is a tricky way to get you to pay attention to the episode, which for me is interesting because I tend to do other things while watching TV (like Blogging, for example).

Also, I may have already missed the pineapple.