I’ve played FFXI, Star Wars Galaxies, LotRO, Everquest (for all of about 30 seconds), numerous free to play online games, and you know what? The one I inevitably come back to because it’s the best is WoW. Playing addon-less on a new server with new content is surprisingly refreshing, and the default WoW UI is greatly improved from 5 years ago when it launched. If (well, when) I go back to using addons, quite a few of my “must haves” are no longer relevant because Blizzard just decided to incorporate them into the default UI.
Tomorrow we can once again put 2012 down as a possibility, but I’d upgrade the forecast to extremely likely. I don’t want to get burned out on WoW too quickly so I need to find things to do in order to force myself to not play it all the time every day, but I also don’t want to go too far to the other extreme an end up unhooking myself this soon into starting back up. After all, I have two vacations coming up, and I have to be able to do something for entertainment.
Personal - Seattle
Let’s just go ahead and say that WoW tomorrow afternoon is a given, no questions asked. I did the online install today, probably will have some slight patching to do tomorrow, and then I’m good to go. One thing I would like to avoid (at least at the start) this time around is collecting and running so many addons. I mean, for who knows how long I was 100% against using any sort of addon at all, and then Auctioneer slowly brought me into a world as addicting as crack (or so I would be led to believe, never having tried the latter myself). I’m not going to primarily be playing one of my existing characters, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to hold off on some of the addons that made my life dealing with all of them easier. The fewer addons I use will also mean that it’s easier to jump back and forth between my desktop and my laptop, the latter of which I’ll be using for close to three weeks over Christmas.
Tomorrow is questionable whether or not I’ll have an office, but hopefully I should have some place to sit before too long. The move that was supposed to start tomorrow now isn’t really happening until January probably, so once I do get an office, it shouldn’t be an immediate turnaround. At this rate though, I’ll be in my “final” office for all of a couple months and then it will be time to move everyone around all over again.
Personal - Seattle
By my count, I’ve gone through three “start-stop” cycles of playing WoW. Once when it first came out for about 7 months after which I took a 5 month break or so, again for a single month around its first year anniversary followed by 15 months away from Azeroth, and then my longest span of playing from just after Burning Crusade came out in 2007 up until this past summer when I moved up here. Well, after only 4 months this time of being away from WoW, it might just be the right time for me to head back. I cancelled my Aion subscription which could be seen as the first step (since I see no point in paying for two MMO subscriptions at the same time), and a reactivation this weekend is looking extremely likely at this point in time. I definitely have to say that if WoW doesn’t take the spot of the game that I’ve put the most time of my life into, I’m not really sure what else does.
Today was a very nice day of working from home, and tomorrow is a convenient half day (although unfortunately in the morning). I don’t really have any big plans or significant amounts of work to do for the entire rest of the week, so I can hope that my extended officeless time will be quite relaxing. If I do reactivate WoW, it’s probably going to turn out to be a good thing that I’ll wait until the weekend just to prevent any “distractions” from taking me away from work during the day this week.
Personal - Seattle
Netflix has recommended quite a few movies to me that I otherwise would probably have never seen, and The Talented Mr. Ripley was one of these that I watched tonight. Like A History of Violence, the movie was essentially entirely character driven which normally isn’t a huge plus in my book. However, I did enjoy it slightly more, and while it still won’t be an addition to my collection, it did manage to keep me entertained. My score: 6/10.
My monitors happened to arrive today from Dell (even though the tracking information yesterday swore that the 18th was still the right date), so I’m now running and getting used to just two very, very wide monitors. I basically don’t have any more room on my desk even if I wanted to keep using one of my 17” ones, so either my next upgrade will have to come with a new desk, or I’ll have to do some very rearranging of stuff to make anything larger fit. Then again, I could just get rid of my lower shelf and start expanding vertically, but getting monitor arms that could handle that might just be even a little much for me.
Personal - Seattle
Today, package from Amazon. Tomorrow, another package (or two) from Amazon. Wednesday, monitors from Dell (a glorious Wednesday that I have no reason to go into work at the moment, so I might just stay home and await the arrival of my dual 24” goodness). Thursday is going to seem really sad because I’m not going to have people bringing me stuff. We all know how much I like stuff…
For the record, I was officeless today (and likely still will be tomorrow), but I’m busy enough that it doesn’t really matter all that much. Thursday, on the other hand, is one of those days where I only have stuff to do in the morning and then have the rest of the day open, so if I still don’t have an office by then, we’re going to have to go back to last week’s schedule of working from both work and home during the day. You’d think that an office would be a fairly important component of people getting work done, but perhaps Microsoft just knows something that I don’t in this regard.
Personal - Seattle
Today was still movieless for me, so unless I want to pull an evening (or lunch) trip to the theater this week, 2012 will just have to wait until next weekend. Critics hate it, so it should be a pretty solid choice whenever I do go see it. Surprisingly enough the average for Independence Day was 61%, but I guess we have to agree sometimes on whether or not a movie is worth seeing.
Tomorrow morning I’m supposed to have an office to stay in for about a week, but we’ll see how accurate that is when I get into work. For all I know, I could be working from home for an indefinite amount of time. Hey, while I won’t be one to complain about that situation, having an office again at some point in the future will be a welcome thing. After all, if I’m just working from home, I could do that without having needed to move up here to Seattle, right?
Personal - Seattle
No 2012 again today, but my movie tonight is going to be The Day After Tomorrow. If I go see 2012 tomorrow, I’ll at least already be in the disaster movie mode. My initial plan was actually to watch Independence Day, but considering all these movies are by the same director, I should be good to go if I decide to head to the theater tomorrow.
I didn’t beat Mass Effect today, but I did make much more progress than I realistically was expecting to. Still, New Super Mario Bros. Wii is going to have to take precedence and push Mass Effect to the back burner for a while. Fortunately the new Zelda is for the DS, so I can hold off playing it for about 10 days and actually have something to do on my trip to Dallas to complement my Kindle and Zune.
Personal - Seattle
Ok, so I didn’t go see 2012 this afternoon, but it’s still on my plate as a possibility for this weekend. Instead, I watched A History of Violence which showed up from Netflix today. Another movie that I put in my queue based off of Netflix recommending it to me, and it was odd. Extremely light on the plot in favor of a heavily character driven movie, and while I didn’t hate it, I didn’t think anything special of it. A true “middle of the road” movie for me. My score: 5/10.
Apparently New Super Mario Bros. Wii comes out on Sunday, so I should probably do my best to beat Mass Effect tomorrow since Mario (and Zelda) take precedence over everything else. I had been contemplating renewing WoW this weekend, but I think I’ll have enough other games to keep me busy. After all, I’m paying for Aion and haven’t played it in a few weeks, so what makes me think that another MMO might change that? Oh right, the other MMO is WoW.
Personal - Seattle
Ok, so today I actually was up at Microsoft for what could be considered a typical workday. While I didn’t hate it, it was highly inconvenient and not anything that I desire to repeat in the near future. Fortunately tomorrow I only have something at 2:00 (actually, a meeting that I’m in charge of), so I can get back to the convenient working from home schedule once again.
2012 comes out tomorrow, and I might just have to go see it this weekend. Hey, I might go see it tomorrow night if I have nothing better to do. Considering that my alternatives are watching TV or playing video games, saying that I did would be sort of stretch. Of course, I’m not one to always go with the logical choice, so we’ll just have to see what kind of mood I’m in after work tomorrow.
Personal - Seattle
I tried, tried, tried to make progress in Mass Effect this afternoon, but either the game’s AI is insanely stupid only for my characters (which it might be given some of my other experiences up to this point in time) or they just feel that boss battles need to be so insanely hard that you can try ten times, fail repeatedly, and then punch your couch cushions in frustration. By the way, couch, sorry about that. You were just an innocent bystander in this sequence of events, but thanks for being comfortable to sit on while I play and get angry at Bioware.
There are some games (the Sly Cooper series and I think Psychonauts also) that if they see you die over and over and over and over, they’ll actually tone down the difficulty so that you have a chance of winning. New Super Mario Bros. Wii is even going to have a mode for if you die 8 times on a level, you can watch the game show you how to do it correctly and then assume control once you’re past that part. See, Bioware, that’s all I’m asking for. Notice that I’m failing horribly, cut me a little slack, and then we can both be happy. Well, I guess you’re already happy since you have my money, but you can at least make me happy. That way I give you more money, and then we can both be happy (or rather, happier).
Personal - Seattle