Since recently canceling my account with Blockbuster and signing up for Netflix I have been quite pleased the service. Being able to download so many movies instantly, and for no additional charge, has allowed me to watch a lot of movies that I likely wouldn’t watch if I had to go pick them out, or if I was going to be keeping the wife from watching something she wanted to see while she waited for me to return the dreck I had rented. Netflix probably thinks I have some pretty odd -and likely demented- tastes in movies, but really I don’t. I just like a movie that I can immerse myself in and enjoy, which I really can’t seem to do with most of what is coming out of hollywood these days.

I find that for the most part I can really only enjoy comedies that are current. I watch a comedy for the express purpose of laughing at what is happening onscreen, and for that it doesn’t matter who is in the film, or what the circumstances are. That seems to be the problem I have when trying to watch a drama or thriller that is current: I usually can’t enjoy it because of who is in it. For me it is extremely difficult to watch a movie with Nicolas Cage in it and see anything other than Nicolas Cage pretending to be someone acting out events. I have seen him (and all the other actors that seem to be in every damn movie that comes out) play so many roles that I simply can’t watch the movie as a story; I can’t suspend my disbelief, and that takes all the fun out of watching. When I go to Netflix to pick out something to watch, I intentionally try to find movies with people I have never heard of, and stories that I have never heard of, and I find that it makes it much easier for me to enjoy the show.

I find a lot of duds.

Even when I do find duds, I am usually able to watch them, and I don’t think I take any more or less away from them than if I had watched the latest Hollywood blockbuster. But sometimes I do find genuinely good movies… Though not nearly as often as I would like.

Netflix has been keeping track of the movies I have been watching though, and is offering up suggestions. The movie suggestion it had for me this morning was dead on: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.

I really enjoyed this one. Thanks in part to knowing absolutely nothing about it going in, partly because I was able to believe the characters -since you haven’t heard of anyone in this film, and the roles were played well- (Robert Englund is in it, but in a role that his Elm Street work actually strengthens the character if you have seen those movies), but mostly because it was quite clever and unique. The basic premise is simple: A documentary crew follows around a young man who has aspirations to become a killer. Not a serial killer, but a killer of legend or folklore: a la Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers. A killer much bigger than life (death?), with a story and reputation that will live on long after he is gone. That seems hard to believe, and as I sit here typing this I remember that I was thinking at the start that there was no way I would be able to believe the premise. Though as the story flowed I found myself not only believing it, but not finding it odd that the documentary crew was with him, and actually rooting for the guy.

That is about as far as you should read before this is going to get spoilery. Be warned.

As the story unfolds Leslie (the would be killer) is showing the crew all of the detail, training, and preparation that goes into making a successful appearance as a legendary killer. He picks a town where there was a tragedy some time before. That tragedy has already spawned some local folklore about the young boy who was pushed off a cliff to his (probably very real) death. Leslie was planning to make his appearance as this dead boy coming back for revenge. But to make sure that everyone knows that he is the resurrected boy, he fabricates news clippings to leave lying around conspicuously. These clippings also have a bogus photo to make the story seem like it personally affects one local girl. It really is genius in its own twisted way.

If you have any experience with these types of horror films parts of this are actually pretty humorous; for instance it shows him cutting through the handles of all the farm tools that could be used against him. Now you know why that damn axe always breaks with the first damn swing! He nails windows shut, has a remote control for the breaker box in the basement, pre-cuts the limbs of the trees near windows so that they will break if used as a means of escape, later he removes the spark plugs from all the cars. All the things that normally leave you wondering “when did he have time to do that” in the horror movies, he shows you.

The first hour of the movie really is just him showing the crew what goes into it. They follow him through the entire setup of the final showdown, filming it all as he starts to terrorize one poor girl. And as expected the crew grows more and more apprehensive with every passing moment. The question that you will be asking yourself the whole time (at least the one I was asking myself) is “are they really going to tape him killing all those kids or is the movie going to end just as he goes into the house?” And the answer does not disappoint.

I’ll not go into much more detail. I liked the movie when I finished watching it, and the more I think about it, the better it gets. The only complaint I have is that the movie would have benefited from being possibly fifteen minutes longer. There are two characters that are left absolutely hanging at the end. If you watch it you will know the two I mean. There is no resolution as far as they are concerned and for the protagonist to have closure we really need to see what becomes of them; it simply is not possible for them and the protagonist to coexist.

My words don’t do this movie justice, and I am terrible at trying to review movies. But take my word for it, watch this one.

One of the things that I noticed while trudging through every page I have ever written was that I made a lot of posts about games. I suppose that makes sense, as I do spend way too much time playing them. What I found odd, though, was that while I have spent more time playing World of Warcraft than all the other games combined, I have posted less about it than any other game. I have 11 posts about Guild Wars but only 6 that even mention Warcraft. I mean seriously, I have 8 posts that mention Roller Coaster Tycoon FFS, and I barely played that game at all.

As previously mentioned, I have logged more than 2400 hours of play time in WoW on my Horde characters alone. Were I to add the time played on Alliance characters that number would nearly double.  That is way more time than I have ever devoted to a game. Even Diablo II, which I played the hell out of, couldn’t hold a candle to that number. Not that I am necessarily proud of that, just that I found it odd that with all the time I have spent playing it I didn’t post about it more often.

The game can immerse me so completely that often I will sit down to play for an hour and the next thing I know the day is gone. At least it used to be that way. They have been changing the gameplay so rapidly over the last couple of years that all the parts of the game that used to take up so much time (traveling at low levels, professions, leveling new characters) has been reduced drastically. Rather obviously they are trying to expand their fanbase to include the more casual gamer, but making it so easy has really taken a lot of the fun out of it. I have 6 level 80 characters at this point, and each new character I level goes exponentially faster than the previous ones. Part of that is just knowing the game mechanics and quests, but a lot of it is just the big nerf bat that Blizzard has been hitting the game with.

Prior to the release of Wrath of the Lich King I only had two characters at max level. Those two characters consumed hundreds of hours of my time as I leveled their professions and ran 10 and 25 man raids to try to get the very best gear in the game. Of course at that time the difference between the gear you could get in the raids and the gear you could acquire otherwise was enormous. If you were walking around on a Warrior with the mace that dropped in Serpentshrine Caverns, people would notice. I got whispered dozens of times by people just drooling over it. Now the gear that you get from the top end raids is only marginally better than the gear that you can get with badges acquired through running 5 man dungeons. Why waste all that time and frustration trying to get items that are barely better than the ones they are just giving away? It seems so pointless.

I’m sure I’m not done with the game at this point, but it does get tiresome doing the same thing over and over again. As I said, I have 6 Horde characters at level 80, with another at 65, one at 62, one at 30 and another at 14. Once I get them all to 80, I will have one of every class at 80, and then what? I don’t think I have it in me to run all the 25 man raids anymore, and even if I did I am never home at the hours when most people run them. So I just keep leveling my alts with no real plan for what is going to happen once I have them all to max.

This all brings me to why I decided to write this post in the first place. It had been a while since I came home from work -usually around 2am on Monday and Tuesday- and just played a character through the lower level zones. Perhaps since it had been so long, I was able to see the game with different eyes. The artwork in the game really is pretty amazing (at least it was for when it came out), and I absolutely love the world when it is very late at night, just before the moon disappears and the sun comes back out. I have taken many, many screenshots during this late night/early morning time, and currently they are set to cycle as my desktop background. Here I decided to share a few of my favorites (click on them for 1280×800, the resolution I currently play in. They stretch well to 1680×1050):

Even if I don’t enjoy playing as much as I used to, I still love the screenshots. I especially like the top left one (shot off the cost of Shadowprey Village in Desolace) and the bottom right one (shot overlooking Spirit Rise in Thunder Bluff).

I have just finished converting the last of my old webpages to Wordpress.  The total page count was 441, which I thought was a little bit low for every page I have posted since January 2004, but it must be right.  Hell, I haven’t been posting much of anything lately, in fact I have only about 10 posts since January of 2008!

While trudging through the content of all those old pages, I did happen across a few things that I had completely forgotten about.  The first is Pandora. This is basically a radio station with a 30 second commercial every 15 minutes or so. You tell it a song or band that you really like and it will start picking out songs and artists similar to that. If you like what it is playing give it a thumbs up, if not give it a thumbs down. It will then find more songs and artists like that one, and on and on. I remember liking this a lot when I first started using it years ago, but giving up on it because I was crippled with a 56k modem connection that made the songs break up pretty bad. Now I am getting back into it. Even though my mp3 library has some 82hours of music on it, I find that I am getting pretty tired of hearing the same stuff all the time, and Pandora likes to throw in something I have never heard of from time to time. It’s a bit refreshing to hear something new now and then.

Cartoons I’d Like to Fuck (C.I.L.F):

This is a pretty damn funny song. I remember laughing out loud, alone, in real life the first time I heard it. I posted it previously, but it is worth putting up again.

The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny:

This is another amusing song/video that I posted about some time ago.  It is also elol-able enough to warrant a second posting.

This last one is a group called “Tripod” that has a wonderful love song.  They do love their video games:

I strongly recommend that no one else click anything prior to mid 2005 in my archives.  I did take a few things away from going back through them though, the videos above, for instance.  I also realized that the old posts weren’t nearly as bad as I remembered them, at least once they were set into the new format.  Amazing how the visual presentation can make them seem less like they were written by a retarded three-year-old who was very sleepy while writing.

My recent small flurry of website related activity seems to have stopped almost as quickly as it started. I got the pages that I wanted to reformatted, and started on a couple of the features that I had been thinking about for a while, and then my Laptop crashed.

There are two extremely annoying aspects to the Laptop crash. The first is that it was just after we got back from vacation, and aside from the photos that I have posted on the Vacation Photos page (in vastly reduced size and quality), I had no backups of the images that I lost. A total of roughly 300 pictures, from vacation photos to pets, just gone. Damn it. The other annoying aspect was the loss of all the programs I use for the website: Leech FTP, Screen Hunter (image saving program, saves pictures to file with a click of keyboard button), Audacity (music editing), and numerous others. Some of those are easy to pick up again, just a click through download.com, but others I was using older freeware versions instead of new trial versions so I could have full functionality. Those are harder to come by, and usually require going through a seedy website and praying you come out of it without a virus (much like picking up a hooker on Van Buren). And I didn’t want to waste the time doing that on the Laptop since the crash, coupled with heat issues had cemented in my mind that I needed to get a new PC anyway.

I ended up getting a new PC from NewEgg. If you have read my page in that past, you know that I like them so much I am practically a spokesman for the company. The last time I bought a computer I stuck with a name I knew. This time, before I even went to shop for one, I knew that I was going to try a PC built specifically for gaming. Either a CyberPower PC or an iBuyPower machine. Both of these have an entry level price that is roughly the same as an entry level eMachine or a Compaq, but they are (theoretically) built for gaming. The one I chose this time was a CyberPower PC.

The CyberPower was my second choice. I had actually already put one from iBuyPower into my cart and went through the payment process, but due to a changing zip code my order was put on hold. Three days later it still hadn’t processed so I cancelled the order. By that time the machine that I wanted had sold out, so I went to plan b. The CyberPower machine I chose came with a 2.9ghz processor, 4gigs of RAM (upgradeable to 16gigs), a 1gig GeForce 9500 video card, and integrated 5.1 surround. I ordered an additional 4 gigs of RAM (to upgrade myself) and got the whole setup for just a shade over 600 dollars. And boy am I ever glad that I chose to go with a name I hadn’t heard of.

The tower is huge, but that is pretty much my only complaint about the system. When I fired it up for the first time and got to the desktop I was ecstatic to see that there were no icons there. The machine came equipped with 64bit Windows Vista and nothing else! This was a huge plus for me, though I could see how it could be a minus for someone who actually uses anti-virus software. The thing about anti-virus software is that it has always bogged down my machine so much that the tiny amount of security it provided (let’s face it, I have been on the internet for 15 years, I know how to keep myself virus free) isn’t worth sacrificing the performance. Honestly, I think the anti-virus software does more to harm the system by constantly running and updating, keeping you from running programs -even windows update won’t run under some of the bigger names-, than the actual viruses they are meant to protect against. In addition to the lack of anti-virus, there were also no trial software offers for AoL, NetZero, MSN, and all that other crap that usually clutters up a new machine. In fact while looking through the start menu, the only trial offer I could find was Microsoft Office. There were only a recycle bin and two other icons on the desktop, neither of which necessarily needed to be removed. The lack of third party software is why my next PC purchase will definitely be from these guys.

I do have one petty bitch about the machine though. For reasons unknown the 5.1 surround that it comes pre-installed with has all of the tools turned off. Instead of having an audio manager with an equalizer and such, the only thing it shows when you click on the “Via HD Audio Deck” is the ability to change the input/output assignments of the audio ports on the tower. It took me a lot of toying around to find out that if you go into the control panel and get into the sounds settings, under the advanced tab there is an equalizer option (which has presets that sound so terrible and tinny that they are of 0 use to anyone) which I was able to use to get it to sound great -but not through headphones. I am not sure if the headphone issue is my hardware or a software issue though, so I will hold back my tirade on that bit of it for now.

So in order to set the equalizer, I needed to get some samples of different types of music onto the machine. I have an external hard drive networked here in the, well, let’s call it an office, that all the pcs have access to, so I copied the library here. I started tweaking the settings while playing different styles of music until I got to where it sounded great for the Heroic Power Metal that I seem to listen to the most, and it still sounds good for the more popular Rock and Metal that makes up the rest of the library.

While I was copying the entire library from the external drive, I realized that my taste in music has changed quite a bit over the last decade. I used to listen to almost exclusively death/thrash metal, but that has been slowly evolving to where I now enjoy melodic stuff more. I still like the music to be in-your-face and pounding, but with death metal getting ever more bestial in the lyrics (the sound, not the content), and me with no particular desire to listen to the Cookie Monster doing death metal, I have been gravitating to the other type of music that seems so prevalent now: Heavy Music with a woman doing harmony over it.

I heard a song by the band Luna Mortis a couple of months ago, but wasn’t able to find the album online until recently. This is just the type of thing I am talking about, but with a twist. The music is heavy, but the vocals on this one range from beautiful and melodic to just a hint of the cookie monster-esque death metal that turned me off to death metal in the first place. For unknown reasons it doesn’t bother me in these songs, perhaps since there is actual singing to compliment it? That well could be, as I also like the band Bullet For My Valentine, who also have normal vocals mixed in with the Jaba the Hut chorus. Here is a sample of the song “Ruin” from Luna Mortis’ album The Absence

I chose that song because it was a good example of the mix of lyrical styles, not because it is one of the better songs on the album. In fact, I think it is probably one of my least favorite songs, but it typifies the style in a small sample far better than any of the other songs do. Now even I can’t listen to this style of music exclusively, but mixed in with a library old Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, and newer, popular rock and metal, it fits nicely.

And speaking of newer, popular rock, I can’t stop listening to Halestorm, even though every time I find myself enjoying it I want to kick my own ass. They are another band with a female vocalist, but very clearly trying desperately to be mainstream. All of the songs are three minutes long, they all have very easy to remember hooks for the chorus, and let’s face it, if you have a penis, you can’t help but want to bang the singer. She does display some amazing vocals in a couple of the songs, but every time I started trying to find an example of that to sample, I just ended up scrapping it and going back to this:

That is the beginning of I Get Off from their self-titled album. I don’t know what it is that keeps me coming back to that song. Perhaps it is the sexual deviant in me finding some comfort in a woman finally admitting that she knows that she is being watched when she is undressing near the window, and that she is doing it exactly for that reason. Which is great for me, since it just gives me a visual of a sexy, sultry woman in a teddy, posing near a window. But I could certainly see how a more delusional sexual deviant could take this as license to stop jerking off outside her window and go in to get him some. I have no doubt in my mind that within a year this song will be cited as a mitigating factor for some pervert raping someone. Just hopefully not Lzzy Hale, ’cause the visual doesn’t currently work for me if the woman teasing me is dead -that is an entirely different song.

My wife downloaded the Monopoly game for her iPod and we had it with us on our trip to California this year. I played the game a few times during the drive, mostly to keep me from staring out the front window. Even with sunglasses on, if I find myself looking out the window for extended periods on very bright days it gives me terrible headaches. The little monopoly game kept my focus inside the car, which seemed to have worked for keeping the headaches at bay.

I also have trouble sleeping in hotel rooms. My sleeping is sketchy in the best of conditions, I don’t really know why. In an average night I may have three stretches of uninterrupted sleep that range from 2-3 hours each, with each one requiring me to go back through the falling asleep process (which can take from 10 minutes to more than an hour). If I don’t have somewhere that I have to be in the morning, I usually just get up after the first increment of sleep and occupy myself until I feel tired again. If I try to go right back to sleep I often find myself just staring at the alarm clock for a couple hours before eventually drifting off, only to wake up feeling extremely tired in the morning. It is entirely possible for me to get only three hours of sleep -when I am feeling really tired- and wake up feeling better than having had 7 hours of that incremental sleep under normal conditions. When I am on vacation I try to only sleep when my body tells me to, which often leaves me awake till 3am or so. Or if I get to sleep early, I will most likely be waking up between 3 and 4am, with little chance of getting back to sleep for at least a few hours.

Of course my wife doesn’t suffer from any such sleeping problem. So when I wake up (of if I can’t fall asleep) I have to find things to do to occupy myself that won’t bother her. In the hotel this year I found myself on the laptop, but without internet access the first day I started making notes about Monopoly instead:

I played Monopoly against the computer three times during the trip, which just cements in my mind why you should never play these games with friends or family: emotion. Honestly, if you ever play the game with someone you know, it can only end one way: People shouting at each other, the game board flying, accusations of theft from the bank. That’s how it was in my family anyway. With the computer there isn’t any emotion. The computer is also more likely to make trades since it is looking at the potential value of the property to his future bankroll, while a human opponent seems to see only the potential value of the trade to their opponent’s bankroll.

I played two of the games on medium difficulty and one on hard. I would have played them all on hard had I known that there was a setting for difficulty. The only difference I could see between medium and hard was that the computer would actually mortgage properties to outbid me on anything that made it to auction on hard mode. Of course once I realized he would do that I used it to my advantage; mortgaging my own properties to drive the price up, but always stopping just short of what I thought he was really going to pay for it, then unmortgaging the properties before the next roll.

The game went the same way every time. The computer was using the same strategy that a lot of people use; He was putting all his eggs on Boardwalk and Park Place all three games. He didn’t land on them both, of course, so I was able to make a trade to him in all three games. While I don’t remember precisely the way the trades went down, I do know that in one game he traded me one of the yellow properties on top of the board, one of the purple on the left of the board, and the only railroad I didn’t own for Boardwalk. This gave me a Monopoly on yellow and purple, along with all the railroads. I also had both utilities and all the orange and red properties. He ended up having the 5 actual properties on the right side of the board (three greens and the 2 biggies) but I owned every space between the jail and the go to jail corners -and had a minumum of 2 houses on each property. I hit his green spaces a couple of times, but I made enough money off of him hitting my properties usually three times on the other half of the board that I was always able to stay on the offensive.

My monopoly game in a nutshell is this: Try to get all four railroads and avoid trading. At any given time every player has a minimum 8% chance of landing on a railroad -that doubles if they are on Batlic Avenue, States Avenue, Indiana Avenue, or the Community Chest space on the east of the board- with an overall chance of 9.75% to land on one (you can’t roll from the Go To Jail tile). If you have all 4 railroads, every player has a roughly 10% chance to owe you $200 every time they roll the dice. There are no other properties that give you that. If you own Boardwalk and Park Place, for instance, there is a 69% chance that the opponent won’t be in range to land on one with any roll of the dice. So if you own both the overall odds of them landing on one are about 4.26%, counting only rolls of course (it is closer to 7% for any 3 card set). This completely dismissing the fact that there are many “Advance token to ‘X’” cards that will skip you past that side of the board completely.

To look at actual values of rent, the $200 you get if you own all the railroads may not seem like a lot, but it really is. There is no other property on the board that commands that amount without building houses. Boardwalk is the only property that can fetch $200 with a single house, all the rest require more. Roughly half the spaces will get more than $200 with 2 houses, but that requires a pretty decent investment, while the railroads require no additions. Also having the extra space on every side of the board gives you one less chance to land on someone else’s property.

Whether you are playing a single opponent or multiple, consider only trades that will give you railroads early on. If someone is willing to trade you your third railroad in the second orbit, but this will give them a monopoly on a set, they probably don’t have enough money to build houses on the property you are trading them anyway. The rents that are being traded the first 4 or 5 times around the board are under 50 bucks, but if you can get those railroads you can be making 4x the base rent of Boardwalk while the others are trying to trade their way into those monopolies. Every time a player hits your railroads they lose their salary for that orbit. That can be devastating if it starts to happen before they have built houses or hotels, or especially if they haven’t completed any monopolies.

Always consider any trade that will give you that fourth railroad. It may not seem like a good idea to trade away Boardwalk for a railroad, but if it completes your set you should really consider it. Unless you are trading it to someone who already has a couple of monopolies, or a ridiculous amount of cash, you can usually do this safely. The more people there are playing, the easier the trade for that last railroad will be. If you have Marvin Gardens and someone else has the other two of the set but no monopolies, they will usually be happy to trade that last railroad to you so that they can start building some houses. This is a bit tougher if you are playing a single opponent, but if you can pull it off you are in a great position to win the game.

I guess I must have been pretty bored the night I sat down to write that out, but that is pretty much my game. The railroad strategy has always worked for me. Of course there are times when a trade has come back to bite me. Catch the wrong end of variance and hit Park Place with a hotel on it a couple orbits in a row and you can go from sitting pretty to bankrupt real quick. More often than not, though, you will be able to keep your opponents from building much if you control the railroads.

Since I have been playing WoW so much less of late, I find that I have had some time to work on a couple of website related projects that I have been putting off for, oh, let’s call it 4 years. If you stopped by my page in 2005, then again yesterday, you would have noticed that my navbar (everything to the left of the body here) has remained unchanged for that entire time (and you would also have a freakishly good memory). Since converting to the blogger script way back when, I have to update my blogger template to change any of that. Of course when I do that anything that is already over there is just gone unless I take the time to archive it. What I have been working on all day is just that: archiving the Music Lost to History.

I had to trudge through all my pre-blogger posts to find as many of the songs I had featured there as possible, and was a bit irritated that the links to samples of the songs were now all broken. So I decided to figure out how to do the samples myself. First I had to figure out how to embed them. Of course I know the standard HTML functions for embedding .wav files, however since a 1 minute wave file weighs in at about 11megs, I wanted to try to get a slightly smaller format. That was when I found out that a standard MP3 can’t be embedded unless the user (you) has a third party plugin to play it. I also found out that the third party plugin that had been in use for Firefox browsers has been blacklisted for allowing remote code execution. So I had to find another way.

A bit of hunting around on google found me a number of audio embeds, but the thing they all had in common was that the source was stored on their server. These are available from Google, Yahoo, MSN, pretty much any name that you can quickly link to anything internet related. Since the actual source is stored on their server, it is subject to being moved/renamed/changed without warning, thus leaving all my links just as dead as they currently were, so that was straight out the window. Most of these players are running in Shockwave Flash though, so I started searching for shockwave audio embeds rather than MP3 embeds and soon found myself at this site, which was offering just what I wanted: A source that I upload to my own directory for embedding the files. Bonus is that it is so lightweight and hides away (mostly) when not in use, and is easily resizable. Here is a sample:

So now that I was able to embed it, I had to find a way to edit the MP3’s so that -hopefully- I won’t get any angry emails from the record companies. I am going on the logic that if I am only offering a small sample of the song I am more likely increasing their revenue (by forcing readers to seek out the MP3 and pay for a download) than advocating piracy. I don’t know anyone that has an MP3 library filled with about a minute’s worth of each song at the very least.

In the past I have used Goldwave for my audio editing needs. At least I have tried to. Since I lack any post-graduate work in audio engineering, I am barely able to figure out how to make it do a damn thing. I’m sure it is extremely versatile (hell it has to be with that intimidating wall of sliders and buttons), but I’ve no inclination to become a sound engineer just to sample a song. Thankfully I happened across Audacity.

Audacity is great for what I am doing. The intimidating wall of sliders and buttons are neatly stored in drop-down menus so I don’t have to look at them. There was a minor situation involving being able to extract my edited songs as MP3’s, which required downloading a “Lame.DLL” encoder, but that went fairly smoothly. Now I am able to open up the song, slide the bars to the section I want to sample, extract it as MP3 and upload it. It only takes a minute to get all this done (a huge plus since I am so lazy), so I have no excuse not to do it.

If I would have known how easy it would be to find the tools I needed to complete this project I would have done it years ago. There are so many programs and applications available for just about any task you can imagine now, it boggles the mind. When I first set up this site I had a problem finding applications like this, and if I even could find them they were ridiculously complicated to use. I’m glad to see that so much of this stuff is so readily available now. Perhaps it will motivate me to take care of a few other things I’ve been meaning to do here…I still haven’t changed the rest of my navbar since 2005, for instance.

World of Warcraft has become a time vampire of epic proportions for me. It seems that no matter how good I become at the characters, or how much gear I get to drop, there is always something else to do. Maybe it’s working on getting my reputation to exalted with some faction; maybe it’s getting my trade skills to maximum level; maybe it’s leveling my fishing skill… And when you find yourself fishing in a game, I’m pretty sure that is a warning sign (unless it is actually a fishing game, but that is probably a completely different warning sign all on its own).

I have been getting bored with the game of late. Having not played at all for a week while I was on vacation, I found that it was dreadfully boring when I tried to play it once we got back. I have run a couple of raids since we have been back, but the thought of day to day questing and reputation grinding just isn’t appealing anymore -at least not right now. The Wrath of the Lich King expansion added 10 levels and a lot of new dungeons, but the levels went fast, and the dungeons are old news by now.

The biggest contributing factor for my distaste for it at the moment is the bloated badge system that they have going right now. You use these badges to upgrade your gear, and prior to WotLK there was only one type of badge: the Badge of Justice. Just collect however many you need (items cost between 15 and 150 badges) and trade them in. Right now there are three separate types of badges: Emblems of Conquest, Valor, and Heroism. There are 3 separate vendors that sell items for each respective emblem, and each emblem can only be acquired by running very specific dungeons or raids. So if you run normal 5-man dungeons you can only get one type of emblem, that can only be traded for very specific items. If you want the better quality items, or something for a different item slot -a ring for example- you have to run 25-man raids. And of course the best items (newly released with the Ulduar patch) can only be acquired by doing 25-man Ulduar, which can only be done once per week. Blizzard seems to have realized how cumbersome and annoying the current system is and are scrapping it completely with the next patch, making all emblems from all dungeons and raids the same -which can then be traded in for other emblems if you need to fill other equipment slots. Once that happens I may start taking some more pulls at the giant slot machine that is WoW, but for now I just find it annoying.

This morning, just for fun, I logged on and took some screenshots of each of my characters to do a cast of characters here. So here we go.

Crackhor:
This is my Priest. Since the WotLK update made dual-specs possible, I haven’t been referring to her as a Holy Priest, but that is my specialty. Which is a nice way of saying that I kind of suck at Shadow. I have never really played her as Shadow, not even for leveling, and do so now only when it is necessary in raids. She was my first Horde character, with a time played of 35 days, 1 hour and 10 minutes. She is probably the easiest for me to play. Of course as a healer you do get the majority of the blame for any deaths in the raid, regardless of how the death came about: Say a Tank accidentally pulls 3 groups and the party wipes, that is the healer’s fault. A Rogue forgets to stealth when he tries to sap a mob and pulls while you are drinking thus wiping the party, again, your fault. A Mob Mind Controls you for 15 seconds and no one in the party attacks that mob, so the group goes for 15 seconds without a heal and wipes… Yep, your fault. Even so, a good healer can be tough to find, so if you play the class well (hell, if you just don’t outright suck) you can easily find a group for pretty much anything you want. Prior to this recent step back from the game I had been playing her a lot again, after not paying her much attention since WotLK came out.

Bulsai:
This is my Warrior (the name sounds like bullseye, so the mobs know who to attack). He is my second Horde character, with a time played of 26 days, 5 hours, 53 minutes. I haven’t bothered to dual-spec him, since I have only ever played him as protection, and have no intention of playing him otherwise. I created him when I was a member of a guild who just didn’t have enough tanks. I was able to get him to max level in about 7 days (time played, not calendar days) which was my fastest by far at the time. He was a main tank to be envied back before WorLK came out. I dispensed with the classic stamina is king mentality and instead built him on avoidance. Just before WotLK came out I had built him up to an impressive 60% avoidance (dodge/parry((through gear, socketing and enchantments))) so that only 40% of attacks even made it far enough to roll for damage. Though my health was low for the class, I didn’t get hit often, and as such most healers I played with loved me for not taxing their mana pools. Since WotLK, the Death Knight and Paladin have become kings of tanking, capable of more or less instantly getting threat on every target in a group. Because the Warrior still can’t do that (it takes several seconds to get them all) they have really been relegated to dps/offtank duty, and I just don’t play him that way. Aside from leveling him and getting him a base level of gear, he has been on a shelf since the expansion.

Flamenheimer:
My Mage, time played: 17 days, 21 hours, 3 minutes. One of my first WoW characters was an ally Mage that I named Nukenheimer (I was going to name him Oppenheimer, but I didn’t think many people would know who that was), and he was a lot of fun to play. I made this Mage when I got tired of getting killed by Alliance on my Holy Priest and Prot Warrior. I did a lot of PvP on my Ally Mage and had gotten fairly good at it, so I kept this guy wherever my Warrior or Priest were leveling/questing to get some retaliation on people who would attack those relatively defenseless classes. Since the release of WotLK I have been in a guild that didn’t need me to play my healer or tank, so the Mage is the one that normally raids with them (the only one that makes it into groups for new content and progression). Unfortunately it isn’t the one that I really like to play. As I say, I loved to PvP with him, but I get tired of doing instances and raids. He does great damage, but it is so dependent on mana that I am often sitting in the back drinking while everyone else has already moved on to the next fight. There are so many silence and interrupt spells on the new raid bosses that I am often just standing around waiting for a dispel. Once dispelled, I often only get 2/3 of the way through the next cast before I am silenced again. Frustrating. A fun class to play for sure, but one needs a break from the mana-dependent dps and endless silencing from time to time.

Prophesier:
My Death Knight, time played: 9 days, 20 hours, 48 minutes. Death Knights were the new class in the expansion, and when it was initially released they were comically overpowered. One could go into any dungeon or raid wearing only common items and do more damage than any other class in full epic gear. I had to get me some of that! I leveled this guy in a hurry too (easy to do since they start at level 55). I didn’t really have the intention of playing him when I created him, and that is how it has become. Several changes to the talent trees have taken him from comically overpowered to merely ridiculously overpowered. I take him out to collect herbs for potions and elixirs since the Allys tend to leave him alone, but I never really enjoyed playing him. To this day I couldn’t tell you the name of more than 2 of his skills since all you have to do is mash all the buttons to do great dps. He is fun to play in battlegrounds, but in the end it almost feels like cheating. I haven’t ever really raided with him and I probably never will.

Ehpikfaal:
(That’s right, Epic Fail) My Rogue, time played: 11 days, 12 hours, 32 minutes. I had an Ally Rogue, and I loved the class. When I got sick of the aforementioned problems with the Mage, I made a Horde Rogue. This one is a lot of fun to play because there are so many skills. You can’t just 1 button your way to good dps, nor can you just mash all the buttons. Good dps requires a good skill rotation and keeping a number of buffs active on yourself, while keeping debuffs active on mobs. Always deadly in PvP and against single mobs, the Rogue was given an updated AoE skill for multiple mobs in dungeons and raids. There is probably no class hated as much as the Rogue, mostly for their ability to kill players (or NPC’s) without the other guy being able to cast a single spell. The problem is that there are a lot of really, really bad players who have Rogues. I named him Ehpikfaal for the humor of it, but have come to realize that when you create a character that already has a bad reputation, giving him such a name will keep you out of most groups. So you see him on the right there doing what he does most of the time; sitting around town waiting to get into a group for a dungeon. Even so if I had to pick only 1 character to play going forward it would be the Rogue. Great dps and a lot of fun both PvP and raiding.

UnclBadTouch:
My Warlock, time played: 18 hours 39 minutes. It was in an episode of American Dad that I heard one of the kids call his relative “Uncle Bad Touch” and I liked it so much that I made a Warlock with that name (had to leave out 1 character because it was too long). Included here only because I like the name. I also have an Ally Warlock and I was never able to level either of them. This class bores me to tears. The play goes like this (at least for leveling): Your minion tanks the mobs, you cast a couple curses on them, then stand around and wait for them to die. You can’t really use and direct damage spells since they are so costly in mana, and they aren’t necessary anyway (at low level) since everything dies so quickly from your curses. I think I would really like this character at max level, once you are able to dispense with your minion and start doing some direct damage spells, but I simply get too bored trying to level him. Uncle Bad Touch has a macro that I run around town casting on people that reads something like this: “…Psst, hey (character name)…” “Would you like some candy?” “UncleBadTouch beckons (character name) to follow” “I have some in my panel van parked behind the Inn in Brill.” I laugh every time I use the macro, though the people I use it on rarely find it as funny as I do.

So this morning I was logging onto the characters to see how long I have spent playing the game and I made the foolish decision to total it up. Counting only the characters you see here (which ignores all Alliance players, of which I have 2 at level 70 and 5 others between level 40 and 70) I have 99 days, 8 hours into playing. Mind you that is actual game time, so we are talking about 2384 hours spent playing. Is that disturbing or what?

At any rate, I may find myself enjoying it again once they make the changes to the badge system, but for now I am getting really burned out on it. But after 2400 hours, can you blame me?

With my posting schedule having dwindled down to nothing, I am always amazed when I check the site mail and find that there are still people reading, and that they still care to send me email. What is more surprising is the topic that is generating that email: Music.

I don’t know a damn thing about music. Sure I can play the guitar (not as good as I could back when I practiced for hours on end every day, but I still have the gear just in case I get the call from Metallica..), but my musical tastes are, at best, questionable. The Dungeon Metal that I wrote about in the last post, and one some time earlier, generated more feedback than anything I have written here that wasn’t poker related. There are two possibilities here: 1) There are a lot more people who like this type of music than I had ever thought. 2) There are only a few people who like this type of music, so few that they found my site because there are no other sites talking about it. While I refuse to believe the latter -can anyone seriously be coming to my site for actual information?- it is almost as difficult to believe the former.

Spending in excess of two hours in a car every day really gives me the opportunity to listen to a lot of music. The first few weeks I just listened to cds, but after I had worn out just about everything in my collection, the wife added me to her Sirius Radio account. There are dozens of stations on there dedicated to Rock, and many different types of it. I am partial to Octane, which plays mostly new Metal, mixed in with some classic Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, and the such, but when a band that I don’t care for comes on (System of a Down, for instance) I venture to other stations. Mostly Hair Nation (big hair bands rock!) and Hard Attack. I can’t listen to either of those stations for long though; I hate the growling, cookie-monster-esque voices of most of the bands on Hard Attack, and one can only take about so much Bon Jovi. During those times when I am listening, however, I do occasionally hear a band that I like, that I had never heard of previously. And since I had to listen to hours of mediocre crap to get to these few shining gems, I am really doing you a service by pointing them out here.

A lot of the times when I do hear a band that I like, it never merits a post here. Some of the bands, Forced Entry and Dark Angel come immediately to mind, are bands that I should have heard back in the early 90s, but for some reason missed. Since they aren’t putting out albums anymore, I don’t see a reason to tell anyone about them. The ones I put up here are currently putting out music, or at least currently enough that they have an album released within the last year or so. The one that I discovered today though has about 30 cds in the last 10 years, how the hell had I never heard of Nightwish?

These guys are like the Dungeon Metal I love so much, but take it to another level. The music is really fast, the beats are awesome, you can certainly bang your head to it… But, and I am sure I am going to lose some of you here, there is actual singing. I am not talking about a gruff sounding man barking out lyrics, or words for the sake not being an instrumental, I am talking about full-on, almost operatic singing. Looking for an example on Youtube, I found this version of Kinslayer(which is laid over clips from Silent Hill, and looks pretty good IMHO).

I understand that this isn’t the music for everyone, but if you have listened to any of the other Dungeon Metal I have posted and enjoyed it even a little bit, and if you haven’t heard any Nightwish, go listen now. You won’t be disappointed.

I have always liked what I refer to as “dungeon metal”. I have never seen anyone else refer to it as such, but when I listen to old Yngwie Malmsteen that is still what I think of. This type of music was huge in the late 80s and into the early 90s, but I hadn’t really heard a lot of it lately.

I happened to catch a Dragonforce video on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball (I thought they canceled that when grunge and hip hop pushed metal into the underground in the mid 90’s), and downloaded a couple of albums. Pretty good stuff. The guitarwork is excellent, the beat is fast, but the vocals are mixed so loud that they really take away from the song. In this type of music, the vocals are really irrelevant IMHO, the less you hear of them the better. This guy’s voice in particular sours me, it is just too … I dunno … happy maybe? Not looking for growling here, but it really shouldn’t sound the like the vocal track could be taken as is and laid over an Irish Spring commercial. Like I say, the music is awesome, and the vocals aren’t really that bad, but I can’t just sit and listen to it, mostly because of the vocals.

Last night I happened to hear a song by Symphony X on Sirius satellite radio, and was curious enough to look at some song samples from recent albums. This is exactly the kind of music I am talking about. The one I linked above is heavier than most of their stuff, but it sounds great. Probably a more representative song would be Paradise Lost (the vocals are mixed pretty heavy in that as well, but you get the idea). The music is awesome, and the vocals just add another layer to it. It could almost be classical music if you were to take away the distortion -which is pretty much what I am looking for.

I’m sure this isn’t the type of music for everyone, but if you really like the musical side of some of the great Metallica songs, particularly the instrumentals, you should check these guys out. They write excellent melodies and the songs flow smoothly. Not so overly loud as to be deafening (again, IMHO), but heavy enough to be rock. Sort of like an opera without the the falsetto vocals and done in English. Some songs are relaxing, some are invigorating, and I have yet to hear one that I just dislike.

And coming from me, that is something.

I have always been a gamer. When Atari hit the shelves back in the early 80’s, or when it hit our television set to be more specific, I was absolutely hooked. I was intrigued especially by the game Adventure. The game wasn’t much to look at, and seems beyond horribly cheesy by today’s standards, but back in the day that was my first experience with honest-to-gosh action/adventure games. My fascination with Adventure would actually go on to influence my console purchases over the next decade or so.

I must have been about 14 or so when we got our first Nintendo. There were several games that came along with it (I believe we bought the system with games at a yard sale), one of which was The Legend of Zelda. I was an instant addict. Here was an adventure game that was far more expansive than my previous experience in the genre, and there were actual graphics and gameplay! Many times I stayed up overnight playing that game, forever trying to save the princess.

There were a couple of other games for the Nintendo that caught my fancy for a time back then. Faxanadu is the first one that leaps to mind. That stands out in memory as the only adventure type game that I was never able to complete. This may have been because I never actually owned the game, so my play was limited to the 24 hours I could get it from the video store back then.

I was 16 at this point, and had just started working. When I decided to buy a console of my own, Zelda and Faxanadu would influence my decision a great deal. In an odd twist however, they would actually lead me away from the Nintendo platform.

A teenage gamer is a pretty shallow creature, and I was of that group. My friends were based more on their machines and game selection than their character or even whether I actually liked them. The next generation of consoles was just hitting the market, the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo were in competition for my paycheck and in due diligence, I made it my mission to play every title I could on both systems before making a purchase.

I chose the Sega. I made that choice for basically two reasons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun and Shadowrun. Warriors of the Eternal Sun carried on my love for the fantasy genre. It was the next similar to Zelda, but with better graphics, a better interface, all the things that influence my game purchases today. Shadowrun was completely different. This was my first experience with a more Sci-Fi type fantasy. I absolutely loved this game, but was never able to get involved in any other games from this genre (although I am still anxiously anticipating the release of Hellgate:London, just to see if the fire still burns).

When I moved to Arizona, I came without a console. The Playstation was released a couple of years after I got here, and I bought one of those as soon as I could. This would be my first experience with Final Fantasy, and it would last for many releases thereafter. There were many, many other similar games for the playstation platform. While I remember Suikoden and Vandal Hearts as being a couple other favorites, I also remember that they were just the ones I happened to grab out of dozens of similarly themed games.

When my wife and I got our first PC, I was still playing games on the playstation. As a result of that, she spent a lot of time playing games on the PC. She started playing a game called Diablo. While I played it in bits and pieces, I was never able to get as involved in it as she was -what with my neverending quest to save my girlfriend awaiting me on the playstation. However intrigued I may have been by the initial Diablo game, I was still a console gamer.

Sometime in the year 2000, my wife made mention that she would really like to get a new game for the PC. It was Diablo II. Being the loving husband, I bought the game for her. Our PC was so ancient at the time though that I often had to tweak a lot of settings to make games run, so I wanted to install it and make sure it was playable before she made it home from work that day. That was what I would really consider the precise moment that my gaming went from a pass time to an (unhealthy?) obsession. I just stepped out of the little village to make sure everything was loading correctly, make sure the machine wouldn’t freeze up, etc. Hours passed. It was with reluctance that I let her play it when she got home later that day.

I bought a laptop computer later that year, as well as another copy of Diablo II. That way we could both play it at the same time. When the Lord of Destruction expansion was released, we got two copies, on the day they were released. When we moved from our studio apartment to an actual house, we set up a room for the PC, but I mostly played on the laptop so that I could watch TV with her in the living room.

I continued playing Diablo II: Lord of Destruction well after she had given it up. And would probably still be playing it were it not for a chance click-through on an ad at the diabloii.net website. “E3 for everyone!” it said. A demo weekend of a new game called Guild Wars. We both enjoyed that game so much that by the time of its release, we had a second computer set up in the “office”. We would go on to get headsets to communicate with other people in the game and eventually buy multiple accounts..each..

The simplicity of Guild Wars would lead to it falling out of favor in our house. Character level max was only 20, so it was possible to take a character from creation to max level in a day (if helped) and with a limited amount of gear and skills, your character was no different than anyone else’s. With one patch they started offering titles for certain goals. Protector of Tyria, for instance, was available to those who had completed all missions and bonuses on the Tyrian continent. This was what we did to keep ourselves playing the game after having completed it on multiple characters.

Then Guild Wars made a huge mistake. They were going to implement difficulty levels. You would have to complete all the missions and bonuses on Hard to get a title. So we would have to go back and replay every mission to get the title. This pissed off the wife something fierce. In fact I think it was on that very day that she downloaded World of Warcraft.

With multiple characters, multiple professions, and 70 character levels, this one takes a while to get through. I don’t remember exactly when we started playing it, but we have been playing it ever since leaving Guild Wars. 1 person from our old guild made the switch with us, and it has been a lot of fun bringing up our new characters from lowly n00bs -especially so after having had all the elite gear that Guild Wars had to offer.

So that is where I have been all this time, and where I will likely be going as soon as I hit publish on this post. While I have made it to level 70 with one character, I have others at 53, 51, 46, 35 & 15 that I still need to play. Plus even the highest level one (a mage named Nukenheimer ((I wanted to name him Oppenheimer but didn’t think anyone would know who that was))) hasn’t maxed his professions yet.

And once I have completed all the goals I have in this game, I am sure that there will be another to take its place.