I look kind of human today. I’m probably even recognizable. I’m back to having racing stripes on my forehead instead of looking like I have a caveman’s protruding brow. Excerpt from the visit to the ER:

Doctor walks into the room looking down at the chart. “So, what’s going on today–” She looks up in the middle of “today” and stops speaking. “Oh.”

I just smile ruefully.

We’re out of easy-to-make food in the house, except for a few things I mostly shouldn’t have any more, and I’m so doped up that anything that requires effort just makes me want to go back to bed. Hopefully we’ll manage groceries tonight. I am a coffee-powered machine, particularly when I’m this sleepy from meds, and I’m pretty much out of coffee.

I should finish my latest review book this afternoon, but we’ll see when exactly the review goes up. On an ideal day I’d write it this afternoon, since I already know what I want to say. But I’m so sleepy I’d be lucky if I could string two coherent paragraphs together, and I’d want to wait and re-read it when I was more awake anyway just to make sure something… strange… didn’t find its way in.

I’ll start putting exercises up in the Epiphanies again as soon as I can think straight.

I’ve got charisma Jr. Raglan

I’m not sure whether I look more like a Klingon this morning, or the results of some mad scientist’s experiment to see if he could affix a tomato in place of a person’s head. Apparently my first set of guesses as to which foods to eliminate from my diet to relieve my allergic reaction were incorrect, at least guessing by how much worse the reaction is this morning. Time to find out whether my doctor’s clinic is open on Sundays, and if not, decide whether I need to hit the hospital.

And for god’s sake, MUST NOT SCRATCH MY FACE. So, yeah, not much useful getting done around here for the next couple of days, I’m guessing.

Traditional edit: The nurse on the phone made it clear that waiting for tomorrow to see a doc was right out, so in I went to the emergency room. Now I’m all doped up on steroids, two antihistamines (one prescrip, one otc), and an anti-itch drug. And sleepy as all hell, but that’s better than feeling like I want to rip my face off. They have nice people at the hospital ER near us. I like them. Maybe it’s just me, but I always end up feeling like I’ve gotten better care when I’ve ended up seeing a physician’s assistant/nurse practitioner, instead of an actual doctor. They seem to take more time to carefully ask questions, and they seem to care more. But maybe that’s just the folks I’ve happened to see.

Technorati Tags: allergies

One of the things I love in World of Warcraft is the concept of trade professions. You can learn skinning and leatherworking, for example, and make all sorts of items, primarily armor. You can learn mining and blacksmithing and make armor and weaponry. You can learn herbalism and alchemy and make potions. You can learn tailoring and make armor and bags. Then there’s engineering, and enchanting.

Enchanting is a tricky one. I’ve always been told, “enchanters are always broke,” and that’s often true. Why? Because in order to get the reagents they need to cast enchantments, they need to disenchant other magic items. Normally there are two major ways to make money. One is to sell the fruits of your trade, and the other is to sell the magic items you collect while adventuring. Low-level enchantments are so pointless you can’t really sell them, and you end up disenchanting all the things you’d normally sell. There go your major sources of income. You also have to understand when you take enchanting at low level that you aren’t going to see many magic items as drops, most likely, until your mid-teens or so. This means that if you want to level your enchanting earlier than that, you’ll need to do one of two things: take something like tailoring as your other skill and disenchant the results, or buy items to disenchant.

If your character is a cloth-wearer, then the tailoring option can be a good way to go–spend some time farming up as much cloth as possible so you can not only make armor for yourself but also make items to disenchant. If your character isn’t a cloth-wearer, you’ll have to decide whether you’d rather farm up cloth and d/e your products or do the following.

You see, there’s been a shift in the game economy of late. There are more and more people using the trades, and fewer of them who want to actually go out and collect the resources they need to engage in them. This means you can collect things and sell them at the auction houses for a fair amount of money if you get the right things. Enchanting is one of the few production trades that doesn’t rely on a specific resource trade, which means you can take any other resource trade you want.

Go to the auction house on your server. Spend a day or two determining which resources sell well (for example, on my server it’s metal ores that sell for a fortune right now) and take one of those gathering trades. I took mining. Try to log into the game for an hour here or there during off-peak times, when fewer people will be competing for those resources, and go collecting. Sell them at the auction house. Be smart–sell these resources for less than you think you could squeeze out of them. That way your sales are more or less guaranteed, they’ll sell faster, and, well, it’s nice for the buyer to be able to find things a little cheaper.

Use the money you get from that to bid on uncommon items with a low initial bid price. I started out extremely low–5 silver or less. Sure, I got outbid on most of them, but it was worth it for the ones I got. This does mean that you’ll be spending some quality time in the auction house. Depending on whether having money or raising your skill is more important to you, you can raise or lower your maximum bid. Also as you go up in level and have greater cash reserves you can raise your maximum bid. I highly recommend using Auctioneer to make this easier on yourself–you can use it to scan the auction house while you go eat breakfast, then come back and search for things with certain parameters.

Disenchant these items. When you get full stacks of reagents, turn around and sell them at the auction house again, at least until you start getting useful enchantments and you can’t gain skill points via disenchanting any more. These, too, often sell well, and allow you to buy still more green items at low bid prices. (Once again, sell them for a little less than you think you could probably get for them.)

You blow some time in the auction house bidding and getting outbid, and collecting stuff, but it’s a sure-fire way to raise your skill level while not only not going broke, but actually having extra money to spend if you’re careful. Now if only I had enough time to play that I could really go crazy with this!

Alliance Oversized Wall Calendar
Comes in other sizes and a Horde theme!
Images also available on shirts and mugs

Technorati Tags: gameplay, gamers, games, gaming, enchanting, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

Okay, don’t expect anything useful from me today. I just love it when I wake up with mysterious allergic reactions. (That was sarcasm, in case you missed it.) Benadryl makes me very sleeeeepy, so I expect to be doing a lot of, well, sleeping. My upper lip is rather puffy and I have a hive or two on the back of my right hand. And since I have no idea what’s causing it, I can probably expect it to get worse before it gets better.

Tomorrow we take Selene in for her distemper booster shot and a microchip. She has vaccine allergies, so she gets a Benadryl shot before her vaccines. Last time she got this done she kicked during the shot and ended up lame in one leg for months and taking steroid pills. Hopefully that won’t happen again…

Later I’ll post about the wonders of the current microchipping program for pets. It’s awesome.

Traditional edit: AAAARGH! I was really hoping to nurse my ailing computer through another year, but I’m seriously starting to wonder about it. I’m now going to stop doing just about anything on it for the rest of the day until I can back it up tonight. Yes, it’s acting that flaky. As much as I’d truly love to run out and replace it, well, the furnace, A/C, and breaker panel were more important.

Mistletoe Value T-shirt

Okay, I finally yanked my brain out of warcraft long enough to start a Tabletop Roleplaying section at the cafepress store. So far it has:

Both include dark T-shirt variations. Oh, and there’s a plain variation of the Chaotic Evil design:

Chaotic Evil (plain) Baseball Jersey

Technorati Tags: cafe press, cafepress.com, gamers, games, gaming, roleplaying, rpgs, t-shirts

I’m fascinated by psychology and psychiatry. There’s a very good reason for that: I have several psychiatric/psychological disorders, mostly inherited, but at least one developed: bipolar (genetic), ADD (probably genetic), PTSD (developed), seasonal affective (genetic), and generalized anxiety (who knows?). These are things that influence my entire life and that I work constantly to… well, I don’t want to say overcome, because genetic disorders stick with you. But “deal with” and work around, certainly.

I’ve known a lot of negative people over the course of my life. I knew one or two early on who influenced me greatly, and we tend to see the things we grew up with as “normal”, so we end up seeking them out, consciously or unconsciously, as we get older as well. For me the problem has been people who lack empathy. Now, people who lack empathy exist on a scale, ranging from well-meaning folks who simply have no ability to put themselves in others’ shoes to people who, because they can’t understand others’ needs, just don’t care about anyone but themselves and have no qualms about hurting others.

Technorati Tags: psychology

(more…)

You Are an Espresso

At your best, you are: straight shooting, ambitious, and energetic At your worst, you are: anxious and high strung You drink coffee when: anytime you’re not sleeping Your caffeine addiction level: high

Hmm. I guess that’s partially true. I would probably drink coffee any time I wasn’t sleeping if I weren’t so sensitive to caffeine/acid and didn’t mind the idea of being addicted to caffeine. As it is I have a strict limit of one cup in the morning and one in the afternoon. Which I only occasionally break for a third in the evening…

Also, Marcus vs. HP DeskJet, Cat 1/Printer 0:

Oh, and, although Cafepress seemed to be having some glitches yesterday that kept me from adding my newest design for a while, I did eventually put it up:

Who’s going to play the cleric?
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Technorati Tags: cats, coffee, humor, memes, quizzes, videos

Yes, you saw that right–fishing.

As many of my regular readers are aware, I have tendonitis in my hands & arms. This means that sometimes when it’s acting up I’m fairly limited in what I can do. I’ve found that fishing in World of Warcraft is one of the things I can do that’s relaxing and fun and doesn’t bother my hands.

It has a sort of instant gratification thing going for it, since you accumulate fish and skill points fairly quickly. Once you get your skill up enough you can fish for the rarer fish, which are useful to alchemists as reagents, such as firefin snapper, stonescale eels, and oily blackmouth. Others, like Lightning Eel and Plated Armorfish are now used in faction-related quests. I use some of these for my own quests and potions; others I give to folks in my guild who need them or sell at auction.

At some point Blizzard updated fishing to make it more interesting and fun. There are “schools” of fish from which you can fish up greater numbers of the rarer, more useful fish for a short period of time. There are bits of floating wreckage that can yield trade mats, green items, money, stranglekelp, and more. There’s even a weekly contest in Booty Bay–I’ve always meant to play in it but never got around to it (I always seem to have other things to do on a Sunday).

The effects make fishing very relaxing–the water shimmers and sounds like real waves crashing on shore. (This is particularly handy when I’m having trouble sleeping as it helps me wind down.) It’s also a great chance to chat with other people I know–friends and guildmates–without having to worry about stopping the conversation for a fight every 30 seconds.

There are a couple of UI mods that make fishing even easier:

Fishing Buddy is my all-time favorite fishing mod. You can set “fishing outfits” that you can equip and unequip with the click of a single button (minimap button or Titan Bar button). You can set it to automatically apply a fishing lure if you don’t have one applied yet. You can set it to cast on right-click so you don’t always have to click the little icon. It keeps track of which fish you get where and how many, so you know your percentage chance of getting a given type of fish in a given area. It interfaces with Gatherer to mark fishing schools on your map.

Telo’s QuickLoot opens the loot window under your cursor. This removes much of the need to mouse back and forth across the screen, which makes fishing a lot faster and easier on my hands.

Azshara, Winterspring, and EPL are great places to fish up interesting things. Azshara has the benefit of being on the coast, which gets you some different types of fish than you can get inland (and wreckage), but EPL and Winterspring are good sources of Plated Armorfish and Lightning Eels because they’re higher level. They also yield Whitescale Salmon, which makes great hunter pet food, if you need that.

It helps, of course, to have an engineer among your characters, because aquadynamic fish attractors are easy to make but tend to be expensive to buy. Collect nightcrawlers when you kill undead (or buy them cheaply from vendors), and combine with coarse blasting powder and bronze. Voila!

One additional tip: get yourself a Big Iron Fishing Pole (+20 to your fishing). Many people don’t realize how easy it is to get one of these yourself if you have a little patience, so the things sell for outrageous prices at auction. Don’t buy one–go farm one up. Just go offshore in southern Desolace, where the shellfish traps are. Keep opening shellfish traps and killing the crustaceans. Eventually you’ll end up with a fishing pole. You do need patience for this, as it can take a handful of passes through, and there are often other people there. But it’s better than paying 20g at auction, IMO–or even more, depending on the day.

My hook never lands in fishable water
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Technorati Tags: gameplay, gamers, games, gaming, fishing, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

Finally! Blizzard is adding an LFG interface to the game with the Burning Crusade expansion. It looks very handy, and I can’t wait to have it available! You can queue for multiple zones, dungeons, raids, or quests. You can auto-join or manually go through invitations. You can add comments to your LFG requests.

I really can’t wait for the expansion to come out. I’m saving up a character slot or two on my server to play Draenei, and I’m looking forward to leveling my 60 priest to 70. I can’t wait to explore Outland and play with the new Herbalism and such. I have my rogue to 59, so I’ll be able to play there with her too. Jewelcrafting also sounds like it’s going to be a ton of fun. I love new toys, goodness knows!

Amazon says 11/22 for a release date. I wonder if that’s even remotely accurate?

Technorati Tags: gamers, gaming, Burning Crusade, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

Hmm, that post title gives me story ideas…

Anyway, there’s a new Twilight Time issue all about World-Building Considerations. This time we took a page from a very interesting book–but you’ll have to read the issue to find out which one and how. Read the latest issue in the archives and consider joining our more than 1000 email subscribers!

Yes, more than 1000. That still stuns me sometimes. This is also two issues in two months, which is excellent. Back on track we are!

Pope - Art Not Chance
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Technorati Tags: ezines, game master, gamers, gaming, GM, roleplaying, rpgs, world building