Tuesday, October 31

WoW and battleground-hoping.

I should really be writing a paper right now, but I'm not, so I might as well post an update since it's been a while. If you're reading this Dr. D, I'm sorry, I really am.

Warning, this post makes no sense if you've never played World of Warcraft. I should make a translated version for normal people one day.

So after being "encouraged" by RL friends to activate my World of Warcraft account, I went back to my Druid and decided to give the cross-server Battlegrounds a try (I left WoW around May). I like how this new system allows you to hop from BG to BG with minimal effort, and you don't even have to feel bad about leaving your team since everybody does it. Not something you'd do in a pre-made, but Alliance PuG's are really funny once you stop taking them seriously.

The moment that I thought was the most fun was the following: I was queued for all 3 BG's, and as it happens usually, AB called first. I go in, 10 of us against 15, already 500-200 down in resources. I'm ordered to help at the Mine, I run there, only to be ganked by 5 Hordies. As I'm about to die, WSG calls, I leave right away. No HK's for you!

WSG looked equally dreary. 30 seconds before the match started, there were 5 of us against a pre-made, from Dragonmaw I believe. The game starts, only a couple more on our side join, nobody says anything and we just go through the gates and hope for the best. In just a few seconds almost everyone is dead, the Horde has our flag and I've barely managed to stealth to the Horde base, hoping to ninja their flag and buy us a few seconds. Unfortunately there was a warrior and a druid guarding their base, so it seemed hopeless. I decide to try it anyways, but as I'm about to jump from the balcony and grab the flag, AV calls. So I switch to bear, jump down, type /bye to the other druid and leave for AV. Can't say I wasn't polite this time!

Then I joined AV, hoping it'd be one of those times when you enter an AV as it's about to end (a friend of mine actually entered AV a couple of seconds before it ended). No such luck, it hadn't even started again. Since I was already bored and had places to go, and people to see, I give the pink paw buff (not a sexual euphemism, to those of you not familiar with WoW) to a few people and /afk'd out. For some reason that made me laugh out at the time.

Point of this post? None. But it's amusing how meaningless and pointless WoW PvP can be, and how you can basically act like an ass and not get punished for it. Hopefully the arena system in the expansion will work better.

Wednesday, October 25

Olbermann on the "death" of Habeas Corpus.

I usually avoid talking about politics, for many reasons. I prefer talking about why the warrior class in Burning Crusade, the upcoming expansion to World of Warcraft is getting shafted, for example. Nor am I always up to date with what's going on. I get my politics from the Daily Show, the Colbert Report and the Sunday edition of Eleftherotypia, a local newspaper. That's about it.

But when I saw this video of Keith Olbermann over at Brooke Burgess' (the creator of Broken Saints) blog, I felt like I had to share it. I'm no Olbermann fanboi (Stephen Colbert fo' life etc.) but this rant made my respect for this man go up a hundredfold. I don't care what he may or may have not said or done in the past, on this subject, the new law allowing the U.S president to ignore Habeas Corpus as well as allowing him to interpret (interpret!) the Geneva convention, he is dead on.

Watch this video. Reflect on the consequences of this law, regardless of your political inclinations or your feelings about G.W. Bush. You may or may not harbor dreary thoughts about the future, that's up to you.

Tuesday, October 10

"What is a saint?"

This is something I found in Leonard Cohen's official site and really, really liked.

"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think that it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."

L. Cohen, "Beautiful Losers" (1966).

Sounds like a book I need to read...

Sunday, October 8

"Arrogance or..?" supplementary.

I've been meaning to post this for a while, but I've kept forgetting, mainly because my mind has lately been...

here ->

<- there

everywhere >_<

Anyway.

A few weeks ago I decided to create a slightly aggressive post about the independently created adventure game Les Miserables. I've since spoken to the guy creating the game (it's still an one-man project) and decided I was a bit unfair. He is 100% serious about this, and seems to have a pretty good idea of what he wants to achieve with this game. If nothing else, such projects should be encouraged instead of ridiculed, so for what it's worth, I admit to being unfair in my previous assessment of the game.

My main point still remains though. There's an unwritten rule about games that amass hype long before their release, they rarely even get finished, so aspiring creators, take note. Those gods, they could really do with some anger management lessons I tell you. In any case, I'll cross my fingers for this specific project.

Friday, October 6

"Then we will fight in the shade!"

The official trailer for the movie 300 is out, and it's looking good. Great. Ass-kicking.

No, it's not historically accurate because it's not trying to be. Instead, it remains true to its source, Frank Miller's comic of the same name, which in turn is homage to one of the finest examples of badassery in human history.

I'm being purposedly Laconic tonight. :P