In a (New) World of My Own

Honestly, Mariah and I have been playing a lot of World of Warcraft recently. A whole lot.

/coughwearelevel61now

Ahem.

I’ll have more over the weekend.

These combine with Caira’s My Little Pony toys to form the three pillars of my existence. Untold virtures stem from the combination of their disparate molecules.

They make life worth living and I think I need them. She loves those damm ponies, Blue and Red like nothing else. Blue flies and Pink wants to take long naps… Wait, just wait. I’m playing with plastic ponies? Well yeah. It’s a joy to just see Caira using her imagination to turn the toys into whatever she wants them to be. I full expect that at least one of them will be a dinosaur by next week.

Caira (and I) have come down with a tickly throat cough that kept us awake for most of last night. We tried to give her cough medicine, but she got so upset by this that she got sick. :[

This panorama was tedious to stitch as I had to compile the components seperately and then merge them into the final vista in a process that took four hours, not including the time to post-process the image.

But once again, I’m happy. There are trees, there is grass and there is a fat full moon hanging low in a starry sky. What more could an Irishman want from a nighttime scene?

I’ve finally made it there!

/glee

(Click for the full-sized images)

The Dark Portal

Shattrath City

Mmm-mmh, doesn’t that look appetizing?

Las Vegas is having its first real gloomy, wet weather since the end of last April and I should be happier: This is the kind of glorious wet weather that I’ve missed from home, but I don’t get to enjoy it because of the numerous fuckhead drivers who treat rain as an abberation and just ignore it. The city turns in GTA: Las Vegas for two days. Burnt-out cars piled at roadway intersections. Charred corpses strewn heedlessly in roadside gutters. Spectacular slides and skids and crashes.

And arseholes who drive with no headlights on at five o’clock on a dark and wet morning. Its truly frightening.

Bastards.

Mariah and Caira came home from San Diego last night, tired but happy. There wasn’t nearly enough chocolate brought back, but they found some excellent brown bread as appeasment. Expect photos soon.

And lastly, Merry has gone to an excellent new family who love him, but I’m still going to miss the man-whore.

i know we will, and i think he’s going to do some real good for [my daughter], she gets lonely, it will be nice for her to have a companion. its good for her self esteem as well since he follows her everywhere. [My daughter] came from a bad home and abusive circumstances, so she needs all the bonding and affection she can get, i think Merry will be a major part of the remedy, you’ve done her more favors than you know

Other days, yeah. Mariah has been Big Bear and San Diego over the weekend, so I dusted off my Warlock on Arthas and decided to grind him to level 50 (from 42) so that he could both fill out his Demonolgy tree and get his Felguard. I just didn’t count on weekend warriors.

Immediately after starting a quest on Saturday morning I was obliged to defend myself from speciest Horde who were probably just a husband and wife team IRL trying to grab a few kills, but were ultimately traumatized after their meeting with me. So I moved location and had another team try and kill me. And another. But all this fighting honestly produced some awesome moments because how many level 46 Warlocks can say that they killed a level 58 Death Knight? A level 48 Rogue attacked me at the Steamwheedle Port in Tanaris and as I was finishing her off a Death Knight intervened and attacked me. I immediately spammed Fear, put a DoT on his pet to stop him from mounting and ran for Gadgetzan (the Highlander Boots from Arathi Basin and a Swiftness Potion were my two lifesavers). The Death Knight followed me on foot and was immediately killed by town guards. Easily my most fun kill of the weekend.

Weekend warriors turned what should have been a straight grind into a twelve hour passage through the valley of darkness. I dinged to level 50 at five o’clock in the morning in the backwoods of Felwood and getting an underpowered pet. I can understand the power of the Felguard at levels 70 and beyond, but at the moment you get the pet at level 50, it is severely underpowered. Playing through Demonology I am used to using my pets to control a situation. My Succubus can instantly stun a player for up to fifteen seconds and with the damage mitigation, mana and healing provided by talent tree my Voidwalker becomes the rock on which monsters break themselves. But the Felguard cannot do any of that. The Felguard’s melee damage at this level is middling, it cannot charge/stun players yet and it’s taunt is underpowered. Had I known all of this beforehand I might have stayed with the Affliction talent tree, but what’s done is done.

And maybe getting the Felguard was a premonition of Sunday? If I was the pigeon on Saturday, I was the statue on Sunday and died to every player who gave me so much as a casual glance. I was corpse-camped in Un’Goro and faced ride-by gankings in the Plaguelands. I lagged out so badly in Shattrath City that I ran diagnostics on my laptop and found that my hard disk might be on its last legs.

y da h8?