Kind of a mishmash post today. I start out with some EQ2, then move on to TV and lastly a little bit about work right at the end.
Being a recruit in a highly successful raid guild going through Veeshan’s Peak for the first time leaves me plenty of time to play alts and watch TV shows 🙂 The night before last, I worked a couple more levels with Winterwing, my Arasai bruiser who is bringing the fear to Butcherblock and about whom I’ll write later. Last night, I played Dera, whom I hadn’t played much since she reached 80 over the weekend.
Those 35 AAs won’t earn themselves. And I don’t see any inquisitor masters in the mailbox, so there’s work to be done here. You can see from the picture that I’ve decided the look I used for her when we first got the appearance slots turned out to be exactly the look I needed all along, and so that horrid swirly hypnotic gag-inducing RoK armor is safely hidden, and you may look directly at the halfling once more.
The Crypt of Agony was the first dungeon of the evening. I’d just finished getting the last two Adept 3s for my class — Ministration, my fast heal (thought I’d done my heals FIRST, but not this one), and Tenacity, my stamina/dps buff. Tenacity… hey, didn’t I cast that waaaaay back in EQ1? Yes, I did. In fact, I could MGB it — cast it on everyone in the area all at once.
When will EQ2 stop slavishly copying from EQ1…. Sheesh…. the name doesn’t even make sense unless you know it was part of a spell line that included Virtue and Conviction. Here in EQ2, it’s just dropped in with no history.
I met up with Glokk in the group — I used to be in Revolution with him, and he used to blog as Quylein the Mage. And probably still gets more traffic to his blog than I do 🙂 He asked me near the end if I knew he was Quylein, and I sat there stunned… did he think I had been pretending to know him all night (and other nights when we chatted without necessarily grouping) because I was being polite but actually had no idea who he was?
I mean, that is something I will do (hi, Bremia)… but not in this case… (Bremia, I know who you are now. But sometimes I wonder if YOU do.)
Anyway, CoA went swimmingly; I got the Tiki healer shield (holding it… doesn’t it look awesome? The face is sculpted — you can tear someone up pretty bad with that nose).
That wasn’t going to last. Next up was Vault of the Eternal Sleeper. They were going to go hardcore. Just me solo healing, no mezzer, nobody who could root, level 77 tank who’d never been before. But what, the heck. We ROCKED. We cleared that place MERCILESSLY. We wiped NINE TIMES. Only one of the previous three statements is true, by the way. Can you guess which one?
I don’t know if it would have gone any better if I had been heal specced. I truly and honestly believe Inquisitors need to be melee specced to unlock the power of the class — otherwise they are just wannabe Templars. I just don’t think anything could have saved the group with that collection of classes.
A halfling dirge who came to replace someone who cut and run was a gas, though. I was in dark elf form, just for fun, and when he zoned in and I saw he was a halfling, I said what any good citizen of Freeport says upon meeting one of the shrub elves — “Ah, a Halfling. Brell’s most imperfect creation.” Well, actually it’s the gnomes who say that, but I thought he would get a kick out of a little roleplaying.
Little did I know he was very hurt by the comment. How was I to know he was, in real life, a halfling and really worshiped Brell and took offense at the notion that Brell wouldn’t love him. Or something. I sent him a tell and explained that it was a joke, a little RP, and that’s what a halfling might hear on the streets of Freeport. “*I*,” he huffed, “am a citizen of MAJ’DUL.”.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
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James Bernandelli over at Reelviews.net noted recently that he’s watching a lot less television. Perhaps because the writer’s strike has effectively weaned America from television, but mostly because, like me, he doesn’t channel surf looking for more TV to watch. He just watches specific shows. And since he has a Tivo, mostly he records them and never does get around to watching them.
This is one of the downsides of our modern life. Not enough time for television. Too many other things to do. I never saw that Terminator show (though from guild chat last night, I needn’t bother looking it up). And I just discovered Jericho.
I’d heard the name before, but had absolutely no idea what it was about. Just this weekend, a blurb on io9 told that it was a show about the survivors of a nuclear war and trying to stay alive and sane in the small Colorado town of Jericho while the nation struggled to rebuild — sort of a “Testament” meets “The Postman” without as much suck.
Now if I had channel surfed onto it last year, I would have watched it. As it is, I never even heard of it. I immediately begged the Internet to deliver unto me the pilot episode, and I watched it. Good stuff.
Because I’ve been a bad person, I haven’t been keeping up with Goong, so last night I finally got to Episode 3. The seeds for Yul’s strategy to get himself installed as Crown Prince are being sown as Chiang and Shin finally tie the knot and Chiang gets elevated to royalty. Her friends think she’s abandoned them, though — and perhaps there’s the first small glimmer that Shin may feel something for Chiang?
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Drew and I saw Cloverfield over the weekend, the movie that does for kaiju films what “The Blair Witch Project” did for horror films — put you into the movie via the handheld camera. Go see it. io9 (how did I ever follow SF before they started? Well, aside from religiously reading everything Cory Doctorow pointed out on Boing Boing, I guess I did not.) points out that the last scene, a tape of Rob and Beth’s day at Coney Island, shows a Japanese satellite smashing into New York harbor, over there at the edge. Ah, now we know what woke it.
I’m always a big fan of underwater nuclear tests. Traditionalist, you know.
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And if you’ve read this far, you’re probably related to me, and so you won’t care that I am finally getting to use Perl on a real project at work 🙂 I’ve never had a chance to really get my hands filthy with Perl before now, and I think I might just become a fan of the language. It just does what you WANT in a way I have never experienced before in a computer language, not even my long-time fave lang, Python. That built-in regular expression stuff is a monster all by itself. I am seeing why people swear by it so much.
It hasn’t replaced Python in my heart. But I’ll save a spot for it.
8 thoughts on “EQ2 (et al): Random Bits”
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Oh drat, read to far, I am now related to Dina. Perl is ok when used right. I’d stay away from most cpan modules apart from DBI. Good luck with your adventures in Perl.
Hrms, I must be related too…
Suppose there are worst things in life…
lol… I always just assume people wander off whenever I don’t talk about EQ2… most people who subscribe to my blog feeds only read the EQ2 (and oddly, the sparse LotRO) entries.
Hey, I wouldn’t mind being related to you guys. Canadians rock!
I saw the preview for season 2 of Jericho and it coincided with me finally finishing every tivo’d Fall show I wanted to watch. So I started downloading season 1 and I’m enjoying it a lot. How I missed a show like this I’ll never know. My only guess is that CBS doesn’t cross channel advertise like NBC. Half the shows I watched this year was because I saw the previews on the Sci-Fi channel. Speaking of Sci-Fi, I like the new Terminator series but I’m noticing a lot of undeserved bad mouthing of the show. My thought is that Terminator 3 was soooo bad that people are turned off by the idea of female terminator now. Its too bad because Summer Glau basically plays the same role she did in Firefly and is pretty good at it.
I never saw the third movie. I thought the second movie was more or less stupid. The first movie should have been left alone. I know Summer Glau is in the show 😛 but just because she was in a show I liked doesn’t mean I’d like the show. I didn’t watch “Drive” or “Chuck”, after all… well, not more than once. The horridness that was the “Bionic Woman” kinda turned me off of television SF for the year.
That’s what makes not finding out about Jericho so annoying. A show with some intelligence and it totally flies beneath my radar. I don’t know how they promoted the show, but I only found out about Lost and Battlestar Galactica through word of mouth — those were the two reasons I started watching TV again and I would have done so way earlier if I’d known there was stuff worth watching. I’d stopped watching entirely back around 2000… around the same time I got into EQ…
Heya Tipa,
I wandered into Perl territory about 15 years ago after spending years writing AWK/SED and TR scripts to get work done and C or Basic or Pascal?? was just too heavy weight. It’s funny to me how it’s become my “go to” language (man does that bring of old memories of Dijkstra http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ and the goto/gotoless wars of years gone by…) and has even moved to preferred status. The more I’ve used it the more I’ve liked it – and I have found CPAN to be a treasure trove of well built and useful features/capabilities. I enjoy the freedom the language brings along with the portability between Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix. Having used REXX under OS/2 I had been looking for a strong scripting language that gave me regular expressions, quick debugging, good performance, tons of libraries and was just fun to use. While I have written small and large systems in Java and Python over the years my first inclination is still to code initial solutions in Perl (although the web2py framework http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/examples/default/index is an excellent package for web-based development) and to develop stand-alone apps for data munging and building.
Being a programmer (still think of myself that way) since 1975 and having used more than a dozen operating systems, dozens of languages including multiple assemblers, forth, python, java, c, c++, fortran, cobol, modula II among others I have to chuckle over the continuing religions wars you can hear daily about which language is “best”… they’re all just tools any decent programmer should have on his/her toolbelt – along with the ability to choose the right tool for the job for a given set of requirements, user expectations, budget(s), timeframe(s), experience on the part of the team, etc.
Sorry for the diatribe – I’m just geezing from the rocking chair on the porch – hope you enjoy Perl…
On a closing note – I check you blog daily and read any and everything you post – it’s a fun glimpse into EQ2 and gaming that I had to give up for the time being. Keep posting!!
Cheers…
My favorite example of an early goto-less programming language was INTERCAL, a FORTRAN derivative that did away with the GO TO in favor of the COME FROM statement. Truly a language ahead of its time, since only modern computers have the speed and power for such simple programs as calculating the prime numbers through 65536, which once took 17 hours to complete.
If work hadn’t required Perl, I would have used Python. Perl is very… messy. It “just works”, and I can do useful quick filters from the command line more easily than using awk/sed/etc (and I have known some awk/sed wizards; I’ll never match them). I still appreciate the object-orientedness and simplicity and *clarity* of Python. After having to use Java/CSS/JavaScript/Hibernate/Ajax etc at work all day, it’s a pleasure to use *any* language where I can just get something done.
You mentioned Forth — I loved that language 🙂 I wrote one of my first Atari 800 games in Forth. It was a platformer. With penguins. And ice flows. And walruses. And dive-bombing skua birds. Rawr. Those old days poring through Byte Magazine, scarfing down Chris Crawford’s articles on programming for the Atari 800, designing sprites on graph paper… life was simpler then.
Gosh. I haven’t thought about those old games in years. After I worked on Nethack, I wrote my own Rogue-like game for the Atari ST but couldn’t find anyone to publish it. They wanted fancier graphics. (It had color, visual effects and real-time events, was fully scriptable, but… text only). I started a graphical rewrite but was stumped by my rudimentary artistic skills, and the people who were helping me test the game didn’t include any artists either.
I wonder what happened to the source for that. “Lords of Darkness” was the name, real original.
Anyway, glad you like the blog 🙂 I sure like writing it.
Oh boy – Chris Crawford – I haven’t heard that name in decades . I can recall a similar event from my past. I had just bought a TRS-80 with a whopping 16k of memory for $800 (I splurged on the Radio Shack cassette player to save/load programs). Before you groan, I wanted to buy an Apple but just couldn’t afford it on a college students budget… I had played Zork on the PDP-11 we used at the Psych Department to monitor the sleep encephelograph in the sleep lab during the night and had played a few “graphical” adventure type games (typed in and debugged from magazines) and figured I could write one on my own. I succeeded in getting about 15 or 20 rooms up and operational with hidden rooms, secret doors, armor, weapons and foes before realizing my vision was just far greater than my programming skills at the time or what the machine was capable of… I had a blast however and learned a heck of a lot while going through the experience.
I always loved Forth and built a number of systems in it – from multi-user systems on PDP-based systems to games on the Amiga and Mac.
Anyways – thanks for bringing back some fond old memories.