Whirly: good to go

Last night was a dream dungeon crawl. It seemed we could do no wrong as we took huge groups, adds and ambushes with ease. We were darn near invincible.

We worked our way through Blackrock Depths (BRD) to the coffer room with surprising ease. Activating the 4 stone guys and the other fellow caused us to wipe — it was our first time there. I think we could have taken them, but we were out of time and it was a good place to end.

Time is our limiting factor in BRD now. We can only do so much in two hours. BRD is a huge zone and we are about to our maximum. It’s a self imposed limit to our raids, we just aren’t 6 or 12 hour raiders, and I’m fine with that. Even two hours can wear me out.

Last night was great though. One of those nights when, after a particularly hard fight, you say to yourself, “Damn, that was good.” I got to say it over and over.

We were punished by the World of Warcraft god of lag last night in Dire Maul east. Repeated deaths, and worse, getting a full re-pop on our return. It’s hard to make progress that way; two steps forward and exactly two steps back.

We made some small progress though, making it to the end of the hall and around the corner into the room with Zevrim. By this time I, the warrior, was calling out my health level to the priest who couldn’t see my health bar move.

It was getting late, so we called it a night and gated to IF. I had expected more, but we made some good experience, and basically no loot. With less lag I’m sure we can do a decent job in there. I had an enjoyable time anyway. It’s patch day. Maybe thing are better. We’ll see when we get to Blackrock tonight.

Last night, in a moment of bored weakness, I re-activated my EQ account. Yes It’s foolish, but cheaper than buying a new game. I down loaded the big update, played for a little, decided to create a new toon on the Test Server, and downloaded even more updates. Fetching updates, that’s not much of a relief from boredom.

They must have added new skins because the first thing you do is select a look for your old toon. It’s difficult to choose hair style and color when your character is wearing a helmet, but you’ve got to choose something and live with it forever.

You also choose a profession sub-class. Before, you worked your way through levels and quests to get to the sub-class you wanted. Now you choose one of the class names, with a very short description, and live with it forever.

When starting a new character, you begin on the island with a shimmering line leading to your first quest person. The boat is completely gone; I guess they are assuming everybody knows how to move and such, they are probably right. The boat was ok the first time, but old on repeat visits.

I haven’t progressed very far (level 4). The quests and inhabitants of the island are completely different now. I seem to be collecting newbie armor from the quests and getting to know my skill set at a good pace. The changes are an improvement for an experienced player. Oh, I think the run speed is faster now. It looks kind of funny, those little legs pumping so fast.

We survived the Ring of Law in Blackrock Depths opening content we’ve never seen. I think we were all surprised, I was. We don’t know our way around as yet, so it was your standard dungeon crawl, always good for a laugh. At one point we had 7 mobs. That’s just crazy; there are only 3 of us. Mark has found a good walk through on the web, guess we’ll have to read it now. I hope it has pictures.

We were all close to 59 so decided to solo ding. I saw Saturday night we all made it. Congrats to us. I’m concerned what’s to become of us at 60. We’ll just have to see.

Mike and I played Guild Wars Saturday for the first time. It was frustrating at best. I’ve been playing for a couple of weeks and thought I understood the game somewhat. It’s different when you group with real people though. If you die while in group, for instance, somebody in the group must resurrect you. That’s fine when you have somebody in the group who can rez, otherwise you what? All-in-all it was a painful experience. Mike will probably never talk to me again.

I was so mad at Guild Wars I hadn’t planned to play it solo Saturday night, but the queue in WoW was just too long so I gave it a shot. I had a very pleasant time doing quests and discovering new territory. Also, I’ve figured out the process of making armor, kind of. I had a good solo-play experience. I guess I’ll get used to Mike not talking to me.

I read a lot of news and blog sites daily. Until recently, I went through a cycle of pages looking for updated sites. I read a story somewhere about bloglines.com, a site by Ask Jeeves. My first response was, isn’t Ask Jeeves owned by Microsoft? I don’t know if it is. I’m surprised to find I have an aversion to using Microsoft products.

Bloglines.com is an RSS feed list-making site. You create a list of the sites you want to watch and bloglines.com does the heavy lifting of checking for updates. You need go to only one place to find the pages you haven’t read, and those pages are only one click away.

True news pages, My Yahoo, CNN, Google News, and such, update their web pages too often to work well with bloglines. You find they present the same stories over and over for some reason.

I like it so far. I’m now searching for more places to put on my list as it’s easier to follow them now.

I needed a break from Blackrock Depths, so I came up with a list of alternatives. We’ve been planning a return visit to Dire Maul, now that we are 58, and last night was the night. It won by 1 vote.

We snuck in, killing only one of the outside giants, and entered the instance through the unlocked door near the arena. We know of three entrances, two of which are unlocked, but we aren’t experts on Dire Maul, there may be more. We worked our way around the upper-ledge to just past the second entrance. We’ll probably enter there next time and by-pass most of last nights content.

Trees and more trees. The huge trees, while still work, are not a problem for us now. Single walkers, no problem. Three walkers with one being a caster are still difficult; I’d guess our success rate at about 60% with them. We also had success with the single standing trees that seem to go out of phase. They are a pain to kill, but with practice, we worked out a consistent system. There were also groups of 6, or so, little trees that Mike, the Mage, had fun AE blasting.

We got squat for loot. A few weeds for Marks alchemy, but that’s about it. It was challenging work with a good level of difficulty. I look forward to going back.

As I’ve mentioned before, I live in the wilderness. Brokeback Mountain arrived just this weekend and is playing for only 1 week. I don’t know what that’s all about, but it’s the price we pay for clean air and rain every day of the year.

Has there ever been a movie with this much buzz? I have an acquaintance who said, “It may be the best movie I’ve ever seen.” Come on now. Let’s not go crazy. I’m a big Ang Lee fan, but best movie ever? Sometimes a movie is built-up so high that when you see it, you’re like, it was good, but I didn’t like it as much as I’d hoped.

I’m looking at reviews that are saying, “revolutionary”, “unmissable and unforgettable”, “exquisite taste”, “powerful performance”, and these from people who can write, not people like me. Did I bring up I’m a big fan of Larry McMurtry?

They are right about this movie.

I’m old enough to have seen Truman Capote on TV while growing up. With his unique voice, style and stature, he stood out like no other. When old enough, I read In Cold Blood. The mesmerizing book that cemented him as a great American writers.

This movie covers the time when he was writing, and living, that book. It’s more a story of how this unique man was able to connect with the people touched by the terrible murder it chronicles, including the two men convicted and hung for its commission than an expose on Truman Capote life.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, amazingly, makes real someone who seemed a caricature in life. I was going to list the awards he’s won for this performance, but in truth, it’s too long. It’s another in an extensive list of great work by Mr. Hoffman.

I’m not all that familiar with Truman Capote’s life. I was completely unaware of the Harper Lee connection depicted in this movie. My first adult book read was To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m one of Harper Lee’s multitudes of fans.

Mike needs Felcloth for some project he’s working on. It drops in Felwood, so we went there looking for some. We did like a million Jadefire everythings. Felcloth doesn’t drop all that often.

We took out a guy named Xavaric just because he was standing in front of us. Who would have guessed he’d have a flute? Turns out, a flute can start a quest in WoW. Step one of the quest: Kill Xavaric and take his flute. Well, that was easy, we might as well continue. Step two: Five jadefire felbind. Who knows what that is, but we came up with some anyway.

It’s a long run down to Emerald Sanctuary to turn in the quest. What a dump, no place to sell off, but the quest lady gave us some good experience and two more quests. One to fill up a vial with water in Darnassus, pthhh. The other, kill more Jadefire guys. Hey, we were doing them anyway.

We made over 13500 experience just with the silly quests. Counting the million Jadefire, I’m over half way through 58. Oh, we picked up 5 Felcloth as well.

On our way into Blackrock Depths we stopped to take the named elemental “Ovemaster Pyron” who we finally have the quest to kill. Oops, bad pull, we wipe. Our next attempt was better and we completed the quest.

We tried the Ring of Law and got the worms this time. We couldn’t keep them together, they have poison, they kicked our butt. You don’t get a second try with them.

We attempted High Interrogator Gerstahn. We’ve killed her once, some time back, and I have the key, but we need some pay-back for all the time she’s spanked us. She did it again, damn. We killed her, the second try, but we went down in the process. It didn’t feel like pay-back. Mike picked up a key this time.

I unlocked the door to the left of the entrance and we were cleaning the singles, getting ready to take the first group of 5 when I accidentally aggroed them. Um, we died. We didn’t try again.

Yup, it sure is nice being uber. Everything is much easier now.