Found In the Woods

Some people jab at me for playing a lot of WoW, but on the flipside I point directly at this steamy pile of shit:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/In-Loving-Memory-of-Lawrence-Kutner-on-House/63172043443?v=feed&story_fbid=62328588089&nctrct=1239135106140

For those of you unlucky souls who can’t see this, it’s a tribute page on Facebook for a character on a show called House. The character, played by Kal Penn, is named Dr. Kutner, and apparently he died in the TV show. Yes, Dr. Kutner died. Not Kal Penn. The page is entitled “In Loving Memory of Lawrence Kutner on House”. At first I thought this was a joke. But then I read on. And got scared. Not only is it not a joke, but people, who are obviously VERY detached from reality or complete media whores/slaves, have posted replies like these:

Matt Waas at 7:34am April 7
I still can’t wrap my head around this. I cried like a little baby at the end of the show. I don’t understand a single bit of it…. But why was Taub so disconnected from his death. He was the closest to him and it seems like he was just pushing it away as if it didn’t happen. Sure he cried at the end… we all did. I sure as hell hope that this is some kind of bad dream that someone is having. I don’t know what to think of House and its writers. Bad move.

Carol Ann Knell at 6:58am April 7
We were very saddened by the death of Lawrence Kutner. He is really a loss.What a sad day for all.

Melissa Joy Blumkin at 7:26am April 7
I am sooo upset. I saw the blood on the floorand was liek omg omg plz let him livee! Then when i found out it was suiside I was liek no its gotta be a mistake!!. I ♥ U 4ever Kutnerrr After house ofcourse you were my Fav doctor ♥ ♥

Denise Cooper Felty at 7:56am April 7
That was sad. I hope my boss hires a grief counselor and offers me some time off, I could use it!! I think it sucks big time but I understand why they did it. It’s another mystery for House to solve. I would’ve preferred either one of the other two though. The next couple weeks should be awesome. I love House. 🙂

Debra Martin at 9:53am April 7
I DIDN’T KNOW HIM PERSONELY BUT I REALLY LIKED WATCHING HIM ON HOUSE. HE SEEMED LIKE SUCH A NICE YOUNG MAN. HE WAS OBVISLY HURTING IN SOME WAY AND I WISH SOMEONE CLOSE TO HIM COULD HAVE SEEN IT IN TIME TO STOP WHAT HE DID. HE WILL BE MISSED ALLOT BY ALL WHO KNEW AND WATCHED HIM…….. MY CONDOLENCES TO HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS AND PEOPLE LIKE ME WHO WATCHED AND LIKED HIM…….. REST IN PEACE LAWRENCE…………

I love this last one from someone who OBVIOUSLY WORKS IN THE ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT. The comments on the pages go on and on like this. Some folks are level-headed, discussing the character and the implications of him leaving the show, how it will affect the storyline, the actor’s choice/reasons for leaving, etc. But so many more of the posts are heartfelt “OMG” and “WTF” posts, with people expressing real emotion to the “loss” of this character. Wow. This is mind boggling. I will never in my life come close to comprehending this nonsense. It just completely baffles me. How shallow are these people… and I suspect that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Sad.

Last night our guild was supposed to work on Kel’thuzad for the first time, but due to a long string of reasons, our group was halved by real life. No, really! Check this out:

Rylinn – her RAM actually exploded. Like, popped apart inside of her PC exploded.
Necrobringer – had to work late (surprise meeting)
Nirvelli – had to work
Bruxtus – had an emergency and had to go to hospital
Migdemuerto – No idea… burrito overtime?
Dhemori & Diagrianna – MIA!

Was a little disappointing after a really incredible effort this past weekend but that just means we have a week to get gear tweaked up and stronger for our group. I’m banking on at least 3.5 quarters cleared this Saturday night so we can focus on Sapphiron & Kel’thuzad on Sun/Mon. The group is really feeling good, we are gelling and having a blast.

I’m blown away by everyone’s effort and I’m really excited about the future. I just wish we had enough for two groups (or maybe a 25-man effort) because people are getting left out (can only fit ten people in a ten-man group). I hate not inviting/leaving people out/asking them to sit out… if it were up to me, we’d take as many as we could whenever we could and have the dungeon scale for us. But, alas, we can’t.

In other news, I got my hunter, Hossenfeffer, to 78. I really love playing the hunter but I just can’t find the time to devote to him. Lately I’ve been bored with Beast Mastery and considering switching to Marksmanship. I need a good build, though. Survival is just too wacky for me. Over the weekend I leveled my Druid, Darstynne, up to 47 as well. He’s my Jewelcrafter/Leatherworker and got some love a couple weeks ago. It took a some good time, searching the AH for creative ways to work with all the years of mats I’d accumulated in my bank and level up the JC. I got his JC to 300, and LW to 254. Not sure what I’ll do with him as I have so many friends who are skilled JC/LW. I guess I wanted to have some fun with it – too many characters, at the moment. I probably should just can the LW/JC and do Skinning/Herbalism or something more profitable. It’s nice to have a guild that has resources!

The idea of working toward some of the more difficult raid achievements has crossed my mind, and unfortunately with the eminence of patch 3.1 I think they are impossible. It’s my own fault, really, from the getgo choosing to level my warrior first in WotLK when I should have leveled my Priest. I had a much greater opportunity to get into a larger raid group with my priest, and I have barely raided with Dobrhaltar at all. I miss tanking, but I do love healing. So lessons learned. Moving forward I won’t make that mistake, regardless of my warrior pride. Ulduar is going to be coming soon, I’ve got a Monday night group ready to go and I am really excited to get going with that.

Yes, I know. Maybe it’s because I grew up with his big smiley face, but this spam just doesn’t bother me. I think it is funny, though, that the speech bubble is coming out of the gold microphone and not Ed McMahon’s mouth. If I only had some extra gold laying around.

I found this post about making sense of popular video formats & codecs on Gizmodo quite informing. A snippet:

H.261 is not a term you have to worry about, but it’s the technology that most video standards and codecs were originally based on. Originating in 1990, it’s the first major digital video compression standard, and like other “H” standards, it was developed by the International Telecommunication Union. This one was primarily for teleconferencing over ISDN lines, and as such, it looks like ass.

The first ever official Camp Bennett paintball war was held last weekend, and a great time was had by all. Over the last couple months, Kevin and his crew of diligent workers/volunteers have been clearing brush, building structures, planning games and organizing to put together one kick-ass paintball field. Some of us have been researching gear, finding deals and looking up info on how to play. Marcus even bought an authentic AK-47 paintball gun!

Most of us are very new to the game, so it was much of a learning experience. I think we still have a long way to go in order to figure out some good techniques, tactics and games to play that aren’t just hide & seek or capture the flag. The group played hard, got muddy and had a blast. No serious injuries, and plenty of war stories to tell. Upcoming games are going to be more intense as we all get the hang of this exhilarating sport.

Well, I have to say, I am excited. I have had very mixed expectations for the latest x-pack, many of them revolving around the fact that I really didn’t meet all the goals I had for Burning Crusade. I never got to see the inside of Black Temple, only downed one boss in TK, and got Rage Winterchill to 1% one night in Hyjal. Our alliances did manage to get 5/6 in SSC (with our first look at Vashj last Monday night! – got her to about 40% but the raid was more interested in seeing the Scourge Invasion event in Stormwind than avoiding the Elementals & Elites). I never really got to raid the way I wanted to, mainly due to my own fear of stepping out and getting into a more active raiding guild, but moreso wanting to stay close to all of the great friends I’ve got in Regulators. I have more fun with those guys than I’ve ever had in the game.

So the goals can wait, hopefully our raid alliances will still do old stuff from time to time and we can go mess around in BT/MHJ and I’ll get to witness that stuff. (Same thing with old-world, pre-BC instances, but that’s another story) So… WRATH!

This game is truly a revolution in Warcraft. The game was basically reinvented from patch 2.4.x to 3.0.2. We got revamps of nearly everything. Even bread and butter stats, techniques and methods (habits?) were totally reworked and changed. Streamlined, some may say. It all shows a tremendous effort by Blizzard and the community (which it seems to react to very well) to get it right. And right they got it. Departing SW and arriving in Borean Tundra, the epic feel of struggle against losing odds, against a tide of darkness, being on the front lines of battle, is very real. The atmosphere is so well crafted, textures, characters, quests, music and storylines are all just wonderful. It’s challenging to head out to do quests that no one has done (except us lucky beta testers… even though I didn’t play beta as much as I wish I had), not knowing which way to go, looking up loc’s on Wowhead.com and finding that the pages are blank… can be frustrating. BUT, nowhere near as frustrating as trying to kill a miniboss mob while about 10 other people are trying to do the same thing! (spamming AoE, instant casts, hostile pet… lag wins in the end)

I chose to bring Hossenfeffer, my hunter, over to BorTun first. (Dob went to Howling Fjord and Healtacular to BorTun too) Mainly because he’s a Miner and I wanna get a bit of a start to the Blacksmith process for Dob. Quests go extremely fast at first, they are well grouped up at Valiance Keep and at a nearby mine. The D.E.H.T.A. quests are also grouped up nicely and are a blast. I didn’t expect that one, and it’s a pretty amusing storyline; Nessingwary will get his! My hunter has a gorilladin, Panzerwagen, who I am most impressed with. The AoE pet tanking thing is just a wonder to watch. I’ve been following BigRedKitty’s Wrath posts pretty closely and I knew months ago the Gorilla was for me. So far, he’s an amazing tank and fits extremely well with a leveling toon. I’m able to group up tons of mobs and AoE them down so gathering quest items goes a lot faster.

So, yeah. I’m loving it. The place is HUGE. Northrend is ENORMOUS. Spent a day and a half playing and still only see a little bit of two starter zones. Barely! Got my hunter to 71 on Thursday about 5pm. First in my guild, so that was fun. We hit up Utgarde Keep last night but got pinned on the second boss. Tank needs a bit more gear and we should be good to go. UK is just the most georgeous instance I have seen in ages. It’s got a Nordic theme, and it’s done extremely well. You can just smell the place in there, heavy wood and metal, smoke and hay. Incredible. I’m like a kid in a candy store with this x-pack. There are new things to see and try around every corner. It’s still so new, people are spamming general chat constantly, looking for trainers and quest mobs. it’s very weird, being that I’ve never experienced an expansion launch like this before. I’m looking forward to progressing with my friends, to seeing new content, challenges and achievements. it’s going to be great.

On Wednesday night I showed up at the local GameStop around 9:50pm to get in line to grab my two copies of Wrath of the Lich King, the new Warcraft expansion pack. There were only a few people there so I gathered my things and headed over to stand in line with the other nerds. It turned out to be a fun experience, pretty low key, full of heated discussions over which class combinations are more powerful in Arena matches, what it was like raiding in early BC (“OMG remember when Magtheridon hit the tank for over 1k each time? That was nuts!. We used to have healers for our Shadow Priests just to keep them up”), how lame RP is, how much Rogues *used* to suck, and how l33t old school pre-BC raiding was. I had a good time eavesdropping in on the various conversations and soaking up the excitement as the line grew and the level of anticipation for the 1.5-year-wait that was coming to a close.

One of the coolest things that happened, besides getting my copies a few mins after midnight, was I overheard a few of the guys at the front of the line talking and recognized a name they brought up from an old guild I was in. Actually, it was my first guild, and I was only a social. Invited by a RL friend of mine, I soaked up a lot of good stuff in that guild. They were off running high-end pre-BC raids when I was just getting my feet wet in Elwynn Forest on Dob. They were plowing into Karazhan when I was falling in love with tanking, head first in Zul’Farrak. Well, it turns out the few guys at the front of the line were all in Shadow/Legacy/Requïem, and the guy at the front of the line was no other than Aranor, the GL. He’s a really nice guy and it was pretty damn cool to finally meet him in the real world. We shared some stories about the old days and swapped war stories from recent adventures. He told me to transfer a toon over to Cho’gall (where a lot of those guys play now) and join them, but my commitments to Cenarion Circle are deeper and I’m having so much fun working on things over there. It’s tempting, I guess the jury’s still out. Maybe I’ll transfer my mage or something. Who knows.

Midnight hit, the manager let us in one-by-one to pick up our already-paid-for copies, and we all ran to our cars, smiles a mile wide, booked home and installed the x-pac for a long night of leveling in Northrend.

I just learned, or rather admitted to (I’ve been in denial these last few weeks, really) the fact that my nUsed Mac PowerBook G4 (1.5 GHz PPC G4, 2 GB DDR SDRAM, Mac OS X 10.5.5) will not be allowed to run the new Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. Apparently us G4 processors aren’t good enough for Arthas and his scourge. Well, HARUMPH!

PC:
• Windows XP SP3 or Vista SP1 (Windows 2000 no longer supported)
• Pentium 4 1.3 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 1.5 GHz (up from 800 MHz Intel/AMD). Dual-core recommended.
• RAM: 512 MB/1 GB for Vista, same as before. 1 GB/2 GB recommended.
• Video: GPU with hardware transform and lighting and 32 MB VRAM, same as before. Recommended 128 MB VRAM.

Mac:
• Mac OS X 10.4.11 (10.3 no longer supported)
• PowerPC G5 1.6 GHz or Intel Core Duo. G4s are no longer supported. Intel 1.8 GHz recommended.
• RAM: 1 GB, up from 512 MB. 2 GB recommended.
• Video: Hardware transform and lighting, 64 MB VRAM. 128 MB VRAM recommended.

Wow it’s been a long time since my last post. I’ll try to do better to keep up with all my loyal listeners and fans-a-plenty. I’ve been pretty wrapped up in WoW raiding and prepping/leveling for Wrath of the Lich King. My online mind has been elsewhere. I just learned that November is NaBloPoMo (http://www.nablopomo.com/) so I’ll do my best to contribute; probably a lot of WoW content as I truck it up to Northrend at midnight tonite!

I’m not a huge car nut, but I do like cars. I enjoy driving tremendously – I spent a good amount of time in my car. Currently I’m driving an ’03 VW Jetta Wagon GS 1.8t. This thing has been a fun car to own; it’s zippy, has ok space, decent fuel econ for a sporty car (~24 MPG for last year, which is on target as-advertised), and I can haul stuff in the back if need be. (Trust me, I’ve hauled a myriad amount of things in this puppy) So why would I think of getting a new car? Well, I like to dream, and think about the future. The what-if’s. So here, without TOO much ado, is my current list of cars that I’m considering for my next car purchase. MIND YOU, this will be no time soon. I’m hoping to get a least another 4-5 years out of my Jetta Wagon, and yes, I know, car models will change, disappear and reappear over time, so I will have to reevaluate again. BUT, let’s say I was buying today; this is my top six wishlist:

BMW 535xi Sports Wagon
base MSRP $54,400 (~58,765 with options)
3.0-liter, turbocharged inline 6-cylinder engine
300 horsepower
xDrive, intelligent all-wheel-drive
EPA Est. MPG 24 mpg hwy

GMC Sierra 1500 Crew Cab 4WD
base MSRP $31,345.00 (~$39,525 with options)
Vortec 4.8L V8 with 295 hp and 305 lb.-ft. of torque
EPA Est. MPG 15 city/20 hwy

GMC Acadia SLT AWD
base MSRP $30,470 (~$39,400 with options)
3.6L Variable Valve Timing V6 MPFI 275 hp, 251 lb.-ft. of torque
EPA Est. MPG 16 city/24 hwy

Subaru Outback 2.5 XT Limited
base MSRP $21,995 (~$33,844 with options)
243-hp turbocharged SUBARU BOXER engine, 241 lb-ft of torque at 3,600 rpm
EPA Est. MPG 18 city/24 hwy

VW Passat Wagon VR6 4Motion
base MSRP $25,200 (~$39,934 with options)
VR6 V6 280 hp, 265 lb.-ft. of torque
EPA Est. MPG 23 city/32 hwy

Audi S4 Avant
base MSRP $ (~$54,185 with options)
S4 Avant 4.2 quattro 340 HP tiptronic, 302 lb.-ft. of torque
EPA Est. MPG 15 city/20 hwy