Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

I was going to post this on Dear_Gnome, but I don't think I can take the flaming (if it came to that) today.

As I mentioned, I've been doing a lot of PvP lately. As happened last time I threw myself into it, it's making me hate the game and the players of it. Part of it is my own fault, but part of it is not.

I do Tol Barad as often as I can. When the queue is kind to me, I do it a bunch of times on a weekday and many times on a weekend. As Horde wins 90% or more, Alliance doesn't queue as much, so fewer Horde people can get in. This evening, after three times not being called to battle, I got in.

Unsurprisingly, the battle was very one-sided. I'm not sure why, since the game keeps the numbers about even. Why are Alliance doing so poorly? I don't know. It wasn't always like this, I remember when they won more than they lost. Not everyone who fights in TB does.

Tonight was worse than usual, people insulting Alliance in /raid chat. I made the same mistake I always do: I spoke up against it. I pointed out that keeping trying when you lose a lot means something, but I got shouted down. Over and over I tried to point out how easy it is to show up and fight when you win all the time, but no one wanted to hear it.

This is my issue (only worse) in other BGs. When someone uses "gay" wrong or "tard" or whatever, I bite my tongue so hard, but I can't stay quite. If I'd just keep my mouth shut it would be less stressful, but I always have (misplaced) hope that at least one person will listen and learn. (Why would they, when the whole PvP culture says it's okay to "rape" the other team?)

I'm tired and I'm depressed. These aren't just characters run by a computer, these are people who are out there walking the streets. They're not all kids, either. How many adults playing thing it's okay to call other players a "bunch of tards"?

PvP can be fun, it IS fun, it would be just as fun without the stupid insults. I understand (fully understand!) that IC is different, but these people have to know that the people sitting behind the keyboard on Alliance side are the same as them.

I'm just so sad and depressed and hurt that people think this is acceptable.

To quote the late Rodney King, can't we all just get along? At least OOCly?

Back to work tomorrow, blah. I wish I had taken more days off post-cruise, but I was already using so many of them for that...

I also wish I wasn't still sick. During the day I'm somewhat okay (still coughing lots), but I haven't gotten more than a couple broken hours each night for the past while -- whenever I'm horizontal, my chest and throat fill up with stuff and I feel like I'm drowning. I'm not sure when/if I should go to the doctor. It's been about eight days of coughing/chest clogged. I don't feel sick at all, other than that (and low energy).

"Tell me more about your problems."


But that being said, I'm still SO SO SO HAPPY. Being home is such a joy. My desk. My chair. My TV (with real shows on it!). My bathroom is such a wonderful thing! (I didn't write about how TINY the shower on the cruise ship was.) I walk through my apartment and I'm just so happy.

I saw The Avengers yesterday and liked it a lot. I wish it had had more interaction and less action (the scenes with the guys just talking were my favorite ones, I could have done without all the battle scenes). I'm poking about at fics now, but haven't found anything I really like yet.

Ellie New Cat has 5 fewer teeth. She has a couple of viruses in her mouth and they're causing her teeth to become loose and rot. D: She's only two years old! Hopefully we can fix this before she loses any more. (And amusingly, fewer teeth do nothing to stop her efforts to steal things. She's such a bold thief! She tries to take the pen right out of my hand and items right next to me...)

I've not RPed in forever, so I pushed myself to try to find some tonight. I did, and it was good! Though apparently it was someone Thistle yelled at over how he dressed and I didn't OOCly remember it at all. Oops. I have to make more effort to get to SMC in the future. I really do like RPing, I just feel so lazy about finding it (and everything else).

I've spent most of my on-WoW time PvPing. I live in TB (or at least as much as the queue permits me to). Clove has 4,900 HKs now, of the 20K I need to hit 100K on my account. The problem is honor. As in, I have too much of it. I converted it to 4K of JP and bought a heirloom weapon I don't need (I have 10 85 alts!). I know you can trade honor for some items, but the rate per item is so bad I'd rather buy heirlooms I'll likely never need.

Okay, that didn't quite work. A cat and a Korra and a WoW!

djinni, the fellow who does hundreds of free icons at a time, was drawing them on livestream tonight, and I caught it. AND he was doing mine! EEE! Unfortunately he stopped for the day in the middle of my batch (I get three this time, since I donated). But I got to see the first one being drawn! I love seeing sketches and things in progress, it's like getting to see how a magic trick is done. :)

( Three images back here... kitty! )
Unfortunately I messed up taking a screenshot of it finished/colored. It came out so spiffy! "No matter," I said to myself, "I'll get a screenshot when he starts on my next one!" But that was the end of his hour of work, so he stopped. Hopefully I can catch the next time he does a livestreaming, so I can see my next ones made, too. Otherwise it will be a surprise, which is great as well.

Korra is so amazing. o.O I need a Korra icon. I cannot believe how much happens in one ep! It feels like a whole season in a half-hour. It's boggling and so very great. Other shows would draw out the bending tournament for an entire season!

WoW: I've finally made a full circle in WoW. I leveled my first alt to 80 (then cap) through PvP only... now I'm back to PvPing. Warlock PvPing is pretty darned fun. I'd like to think people kill me first because I annoy them too much with damage and fearing them, but likely it's more like "Hey look! A clothie! Easy kill!". It amuses me to make myself as challenging to kill as possible. Oh it'll happen eventually, sometimes sooner rather than later, but I do enjoy making them work for it.

I'm up to 900 HK (of 22,000 needed). Twin Peaks is the Call to Arms, and I gave it two shots, but I HATE it. HATE HATE HATE. It's just WSG with a more annoying layout. And let me tell you how much I hate WSG! So mostly I've been TBing (since hitting 85, before that it was all BGs).

I hope this isn't all for nothing. A blue post said for hard achievements, like 250K HKs and 2,500 daily quests done, progress would be shared across alts. I'd think 100K would have to fall under that, too. Fingers crossed.

How fitting is that sign for my LJ? :P

TV: Confession time! I wasn't in love with the first season of Game of Thrones. Sure I watched it, I even sometimes looked forward to it, but at least once per ep I got bored in the middle of things. I have no idea why, I loved the books, but the show didn't hook me.

I'm happy to say, this season is different. I've been looking forward to the new eps ("Hey, tomorrow is Sunday, yay!"), and they seem to be over in the blink of an eye. Was I expecting less of the show this season, since I didn't really love it last season? Or is it actually better now? I'm not sure.

However, it's not my favorite show currently on TV. That honor goes to Korra. Seems like my entire friends list wrote about it this weekend, so I'll keep this brief: The show is perfect in every way. It's a children's cartoon, yet it treats the audience like an adult. Even just a few eps into the series, and it's endlessly cool and has had honestly creepy moments. So nicely mature.

WoW: I love you, Darkmoon Faire. I bought yet another Crimson Deathcharger yesterday (gotta catch 'em all?), so my money fell below a million again, which made me flail. Stupid, stupid brain, that's no reason to panic. The horses are an investment at this point. With account-bound mounts coming for sure in MoP, I expect the price of mounts to go through the roof (you're basically getting up to 10 of them for the price of one! Or is it across servers, too? Even more, if so!). I'm hoping to sell each of them for at least 500K, when MoP drops.

So anyway. DMF. I had about 300 quest items saved up. I was certain I would never move them all, I stopped buying about two weeks before the faire, but amazingly they're almost all gone now, on the first day. I have no idea how much money I made, but I bought them all for 20 gold or less (with a few exceptions, some of the rarest ones I bought for up to 50), I've sold them all for 50-200 (with the rare ones for 200-300). It boggles me, flat out boggles me, how many people do not buy these items ahead of time. But hey, I'm willing to take advantage of their lack of planning.

I think I need to start adding 'liquid' to my amounts, when I speak of my money: Liquid gold and goods. I easily have a million in mounts, pets, Lich King drops, mats, and other assorted things waiting to sell. (Or in the LK items, just holding onto.)

Plants: Alas, my basil went the way of tersa's. I brought it home, planted it, and right away the adult plants started to die. I saw younger ones were just growing leaves, so I thought maybe the young ones would replace the older ones, but as soon as the young ones got to adult size, they all fell over dead too. No idea why. I guess it just doesn't like growing in this area.

Everything else is growing well, though the poor sunflowers are running flat along the ground. They're still so small and thin, it's really hard to stake them up.

Ellie New Cat: I got her a new carrying case (case #4... sigh). But I finally got one she's not afraid of! As in she's willing to be in the same room with it without fleeing. So I've been working with her, putting her in it (without closing it), then giving her all the pats. It's backfiring though, I'm going too fast, now she's back to being afraid of being picked up by me. :/ Sigh. Poor kitty.

It's got to be hard for her. She wants to be brushed, she seems to very much like it, but she's afraid of both the brush and being in a position where I could easily keep hold of her. She's so clearly torn between wanting to be brushed and afraid.

I feel guilty, but even now, more than a year later, I think about how things would have been if I had gotten a different cat. I'm glad to have given Ellie a home, her foster mother said she wasn't happy living with so many other cats, but a loving, not scared cat would be so nice. I know she's made lightyears of progress, and she'll still keep improving, but... :/

Almost a year ago, I bought this pasta maker on Amazon. I had read about it on my friends list, and it sounded perfect: No need to boil water or wash pots, just toss some pasta in, add water, and microwave. I was eating pasta on a regular basis, so this seemed fast and easy.

Before the package arrived, my lifestyle had a change and I could no longer eat pasta. Boo. So the Amazon box sat in my living room, unopened, for a year. Today, while shopping at Target, I saw pasta on the shelf and had a WANT WANT WANT reaction. But I resisted. "No pasta! Carbs are bad*! Move on!" and so I did.

Then I saw Giada de Laurentiis pasta sauce. I stood there long enough, trying to remember where I knew her name from (hi Food Network) that the bottle ended up in my cart. And so I needed pasta!

So, long story not-quite-short, I unpacked the pasta cooker and tried it tonight. It was just as simple and easy as I had hoped! Measure pasta and water, stick it in the microwave for 14 minutes, perfect pasta. Amazing! And the sauce was SO GOOD. Best pasta sauce since I lived in New York. Unfortunately the sauce is only sold at Target, but you can get the pasta cooker from Amazon. Keep your kitchen cool this summer, cook your pasta in your microwave!

PS: Having pasta for dinner was SO GOOD. Great sauce on perfectly cooked pasta, put some cheese on top and then broil until it was nice and melty. Mmmmm.

*I know carbs aren't bad, but lots of carbs at once are bad for me. I have major trouble with portion control, so I do better with having no pasta at all than I do with having a reasonable amount of it.

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In WoW news, I'm out of space again. Sigh. On Horde-side I already had two guilds, His Doxy and Boxy Doxy. (Her Doxy is Alliance-side.) His Doxy has all the tabs a level 1 guild could have. Boxy was one short. So the question became: Pay 5K gold for the new tab, or get a third guild and get four tabs for a fraction of the cost?

Hello Doxy Moxy! (I know Moxie is actually spelled with an -ie and not a -y, and usually I'm strongly anti-incorrect spellings, but Doxy Moxy is cute enough that I was willing to go with it.)



So, I had 4 new tabs for about 1K gold! ...and three of them filled up off the bat. Sigh. So much stuff to sell come MoP! Mounts and pets and a crapton of mats and other assorted things.

The downside of this is, come MoP, I had wanted to get my alts into high level guilds for easier leveling, now they're going to be stuck with no guild perks at all. :/ Though I could rotate guild leadership around as alts hit max level...

I didn't realize how bad I was at RPing Thistle's IC garden. My RL one is being visited by the Plagues of Egypt. Wait, there was a Plague of Powdery Mildews, right?

Yesterday I went out to check and see how my plants were doing in our uncharacteristic rain. They're under an overhang, so they don't get rained on directly, but they were still nice and damp so I was happy. Until I noticed the rosemary looked like it had been snowed on. Hm.

Google tells me it's likely Powdery Mildew, a common plant disease. If this were a flower or something, I'd be less upset, but it's on a herb I'd like to one day eat! And will it spread to the others? (Survey says... YEP!) I thought about digging up and throwing out the rosemary, since only it had signs, but it was so badly covered with the stuff that I figured the spores must have spread already.

Sigh. Growing plants is way too much trouble. Going into this, I thought my worst trouble might be squirrels eating things. Now I have bugs and mold and blah. Thistle's IC garden grew fine in RP! :P

Speaking of RP, Penny is four months old now. For those playing at home, that's this big:

She'd be looking all grown up!

And I haven't been RPing at all lately, which has me very depressed. Ore, ore, ore, ore. All I do in game anymore is make money. I spent 6 hours yesterday on it, 8 hours each night before that, and even more over the weekend. I finally crossed the million gold mark (again), but it's at a high cost. I meant to take a break and RP last night... but then a ton of cheap ore got listed at the AH. When I hit a million last night I said that would be the end of my ore buying... then this morning there were 150 seriously cheap stacks up. Sigh. I'm just going to move my buy price lower. I'll only deal with the cheapest of cheap ores. I will take my free time back! ...but there's so much money to be made.

So close to being King. I've made a mini-game for WoW: When you collect all of the drops from the Lich King's Unsealed Chest, you get to be the next King!

Reins of the Crimson Deathcharger - Check when I got it for Thistle, plus I have an extra one in the bank.
Muradin's Favor - Got it this morning. Kind of a useless item, but it's one of the five!
Jaina's Locket - One was posted tonight! Overpriced (in my opinion, there's no set price for these things), but I grabbed it anyway.
Tabard of the Lightbringer - Got a while back for Reed, but I couldn't bring myself to give it to him and have it bind to him.
Sylvanas' Music Box - Still missing.

My guild bank is a happy place!


I'd complain that my goal was going to be reached too quickly (two of the five items in one day), but I think the music box will be the rarest of them all, and will likely be seriously overpriced, so...

I'm trying very very hard not to look at my total gold. It's not been this low since early in Cata. :/ But what good is it if I don't spend it on things I want? Then it'd be just like FFXI, where I quit the game sitting on millions of gil.

In other WoW news, we did two new-to-me raids tonight. BWL and MC. Lowbie stuff, but I hadn't been to them before. Lots of people got drops they wanted, yay! It was interesting seeing new places.

So tired now. I don't usually do PvE stuff like that on work nights. My brain feels melty. zzz

"Three things make a post", as the saying goes.

1) ani_mama held a contest to give away five speed paintings ("quick 10-20 minute black and white sketches"), and eeee, I won one! She's the amazing artist behind my bestest commissions:

Haken and Morn <3
Haken alone (Look at those cheekbones! And ears! And eyes! Eeeee!)
Keen and Grace
Thistle and Squall (not WoW!Thistle)
The icon on this post.

So I was really happy to have won! I've been thinking about one of the first versions of Thistle, from the book and the MUSH, so I asked for a happy/cute saber toothed cat. "MY BONE, Mr. Butterfly!" :D :D

2) I have only one ep left of the best TV show ever. Misfits!


Simon would really like it if you gave it a watch. You can even watch it free on Hulu!

Remember the old Heroes show? It's like that, take out the silliness and plot holes and the lacking story line, add a bunch of darkness, a ton of seriousness, though a nice dash of humor as well, and the amount of sex you'd get on British TV instead of puritan American TV, and that's Misfits. Great writing, OUTSTANDING wonderful characters, dark and funny!

You really should watch it now. They're remaking it for American TV, which is going to ruin it. Don't wait until then! Watch it now, the real version!

3) I'm finally back over a million on WoW. People were right, when you cross that line, it feels like the new baseline. Million is the new zero! Now I feel like I finally have money again, which is just plain silly. I'm glad I made a new enchanter though, it's bringing in really good money.

My car is old, going on 15 years now, it's the oldest car in the company parking lot. I'd like a new one, but the idea of haggling makes me want to hide in bed with the covers pulled over my head.

In game, there was (finally) a blazing hippogryph for sale. You'll recall I lost snapping one up for one silver. (This screenshot still makes me wince.)


The one up on the AH was 114K, bid only, with no buyout price. But the seller was online! I chatted with her and asked her if she'd go down to 100K. She agreed. Why in the world can I haggle in game but not in RL?!

I have no idea what to do with the mount, other than I'm not flipping it. I think. I'd use it on my mount collector, though he's already using a rare-ish hippogryph (and I really hope to get the scroll of resurrection mount on him). I have two alts with boring OOC mounts (Clove and Reed both ride plain old wind riders), but I never do anything on Reed anymore and once Clove hits 85 he'll become a non-moving crafting mule, too.

In other news: I like ham. How is that news? I've hated ham my entire life, then I got some today because it was on sale and I wanted to give it a try again and it was all OMNOMNOM MORE NOW. (OKay, I had Subway ham now and then, but that doesn't taste like ham. This was off-the-bone hammy ham. And it was GOOD.)

Edit: Falling under a million gold makes me feel all PANIC. D: Stupid, stupid brain! That's still more than I'll ever need! Must work harder to make it back!

This Scroll of Resurrection thing made me blink. The person using it (returning to get game) gets:

A single character boosted all the way to level 80.
A free upgrade to Cataclysm, regardless of the expansions you already own.
An optional free character move/faction change.
7 free days of game time.

The person sending the Scroll gets one of the new mounts for free (the star pony reskinning of the basic faction flying mount).

Looks like a pretty good deal on either side. See more details on the offer and picture of the mounts here.

If this is enough to make one of you want to come back, I'd love to get the spiffy mount send you one of the scrolls. :D