Freaktastic
This took place about 90 miles from where I live. While it certainly would have been terrifying, it still would have been something to see.
Chaos is multiplicity without rhythm
What an unusual weekend.
As happens in the Texas Panhandle each year, what will probably be the last gasp of winter blew through this weekend. On Thursday of last week, the temperature was around 71. Friday was slightly cooler. Friday night, the temperature dropped into the single digits and Saturday didn’t get much about 20. Saturday night was single digits again. Yesterday reached about 40 before starting to drop again.
Now, this wouldn’t have been a problem under normal circumstances. I like the cold weather and generally enjoy the overall atmosphere of it being chilly outside. However, I am in the midst of a dispute with the electric company here. I have lived in the same apartment for roughly a year and a half and, in that time, my electric bill has never gone about $55. Last month, it skyrocketed to $195. I didn’t do anything differently and didn’t run the heater any more than normal. When I called to dispute it, they basically told me they could check the meter again but if the reading remained the same, they would charge me an additional $75 for the service call.
Well, I basically just turned my heater completely off. I have now been running without heat for about 3 weeks. It gets chilly, but if I put on sweats when I’m at home and sleep under the covers, I’m generally comfortable. This weekend was an exception.
I woke up Saturday morning with frost on the mirrors and windows. When I stepped outside into the cold air outside, it almost felt warm. Taking a shower was almost painful as the warm water heated my very cold body. It was all fairly miserable.
The coming days should see a warm up, however, so hopefully I won’t have to do that again any time soon.
The cold actually gave me an excuse to spend some long hours playing this weekend as the heat generated from the computers created a nice bubble of semi-warmth (or less chill) for me to sit in.
The whole reason for me to have created this brigand that I’m playing on my second account was so that I could level him up to the point where he could group with my dirge and keep him alive. Unfortunately, the more I play the brigand, the more I wonder if I actually will go back to playing the dirge at all.
I spent a good portion of Saturday just screwing around. I spent some time in Antonica and then Thundering Steppes just harvesting because I had let my harvesting skills fall behind the curve. Catching 1 toon up on harvesting isn’t so bad. When you are doing 2 characters at the same time? Much less fun.
Once I got bored with that, I ventured into Varsoon a bit since I really didn’t get to go there with the dirge. I didn’t go too deep inside though. The brigand/wizard combo is a great hunting combo, but even with that amount of DPS, even 1 add in a dungeon can be lethal. I can handle 1 ^^^ heroic without much problem, but 2 is just too many.
Yesterday, I made my way out to Zek. I was actually a level or two too early to hit that zone, but it didn’t prove to be a problem. The DPS of those 2 together is sufficient for the task at the entrance area to the zone. Everything is yellow with the occasional white mixed in, but I was able to tear through it pretty quickly.
After a bit there, some of my friends asked if I could come help with some quests, so I logged the wizard and set out with just the brigand to go watch over them through some Butcherblock quests. This group kind of cracks me up. They all have multiple alts scattered from levels 1 to around 27 or 28, but they always hunt the same way in the same places. If they want a race/class combo that has to start in some location other than Timorous Deep, they create the character and immediately make the journey. Their path is set in stone… Timorous Deep to Butcherblock Mountains. They haven’t seen or done anything beyond that.
On Friday night, I took one of them on a tour of Antonica, Thundering Steppes, Nektulous Forest, and multiple dungeons along the way. He kept ‘ooh’ing and ‘ah’ing and asking why they never came to these other places. I told him to talk to the ring-leader as he is the one who determined that TD and BB were the only roadmaps to success.
I ended the night last night doing something completely fun for me. A friend that I used to group my dirge with periodically is working up a defiler. He asked me if I wanted to go hit Runnyeye with him. As this was yet another zone that I was only able to pay lip service to while leveling my dirge, I was anxious for the challange and off we went.
We spent about 2 hours there and I think we both learned a great deal. He was working with aggro management on his pally and I was learning group dynamic on the brigand and wizard. I only over-nuked on 1 encounter which, of course, got the wizard smushed. On the brigand, I think I pulled aggro from him twice the entire night, but in both instances, it was towards the end of the fight and so it wasn’t too big of a deal. Granted, pulling aggro at all is not the way to go, so I need to learn to space out specials a bit more when grouping so that it doesn’t become a habit.
Tonight will most likely be a tradeskill night. I’ve done a lot of hunting for many days straight and am starting to feel the desire for a break. Besides, I really need to crank out some adepts for the brigand and wizard, make some arrows and a new bow for the brigand, make some new armor for the brigand, and make some new clothes for the wizard. I didn’t realize until I was about to log last night how much I have neglected the wizard by way of gear. More than half of his gear is stuff that I got during the beginning on the Isle of Refuge. Not great gear for a level 32.
I hope to start getting back into some photography shortly. My first major is college was actually photography, but I dropped it due to money restraints. I kept needing to upgrade my gear for different classes and just couldn’t afford to do so.
I have never actually owned a digital camera. The last camera I owned still used film… and the digital camera hadn’t even been invented yet. I’ve been doing some research lately. I don’t want to just buy some piece of junk that isn’t good for much of anything, but I also don’t want to go crazy and buy something that is more valuable than my truck.
During the course of doing some research, my recently divorced buddy told me that he had one that had hardly ever been used that he was thinking about selling. He had one of those $2500 cameras that his father wanted. Unable (or unwilling) to pay him what it was worth, they worked out a trade and his old digital camera was part of that trade. Apparently, he had only owned it for a couple of months and only used it twice, so it is nearly brand new. Because I let him move in for a while when he had no where else to go, my buddy has offered to just give it to me for free.
While that is definately a very generous offer, I intend to pay him something if I decide to take it. It is definately not a top of the line. In fact, I would rate it as just over beginner quality. The camera I had actually decided on was on what I would consider the lower end of the spectrum. It was only $200, but the choice between paying $200 for a camera that is only moderately better than a camera he is offering to give me for free… hmm… not much of a decision there.
Anyway, I’m going to play around and tinker with it in the coming days, so I might throw up a shot or two here just to see how the images transfer and look before making any decisions on if I want to buy it or not.
Whew. Who knew that mental chaos could be so long-winded?
Most interesting
It would seem that someone over at a website that I have never even heard of before copied one of my posts in its entirety and posted it over there with themselves listed as the author. One of the readers from that site was industrious enough to track down the original post here and posted a link there.
Today, I am being bombarded with traffic from that site. I don’t really mind, but this page is primarily an EQ2 page where I occasionally rant on real life issues. From what little I read over at that other site, it has nothing to do with EQ2.
The responses over there ranged from understanding to confusion. The replies were all polite with only one questioning the validity of the post.
Despite the fact that this is all just random postings, I do find it a little annoying that someone would re-post my words and claim credit for them. But, in a situation like this, it’s not like it is really that big of a deal.
So, for any of you from the State of Confusion website who have found your way here, I am the original author of that post but I did not post it to that website. I was going to make an entry at the bottom of that re-print indicating that this was so, but it really just seems like more trouble than it is worth to be honest.
