Gaming Weather, that's for Sure

I believe that someone, somewhere, had to have said that it'd be a cold day in Hell before Messi and Argentina finally won a World Cup.

Uh oh.
From Associated Press, photo by Martin Meissner.

I do know that people said as much concerning the Cincinnati Bengals and the Super Bowl this past January.

Double uh oh.
From Associated Press, photo by Charlie Riedel.

So... Be careful what you wish for, I suppose. Time to turn on the heater down below.

***

Time to batten down the hatches, here comes the Snowpocalypse.

From The Weather Channel.
NOAA's forecasts are more detailed
but the maps a bit cruder in design.

Okay, that's being a bit self serving, but most of the US is (or will be shortly) in the grip of what is being called a bomb cyclone, along with temperatures low enough that's not been seen in quite a while. 

From The Weather Channel.
Just search for "bomb cyclone."

Here in Cincinnati, the forecast is for -2F/-19C with wind chill reaching -28F/-33C (or worse), so...

Not gonna be fun outside, that's for sure.

I guess that means its time to play some games!

EtA: Corrected a grammatical error.

You know the world has turned upside down when....

...I pull out an album I've not listened to since roughly 1990.

My wife asked me to fix her old Magnavox
stereo system, ~1987, so...

Some of the oldest mini-Red's university stuff is to the right; her university is going virtual for the rest of the semester, and I'm pretty sure that the second mini-Red's university will follow shortly.

EtA: Aaaand we just received word that his university is definitely going virtual. I guess it's time to hit the road again.

A Job Tailor Made for Stephen Colbert

Yes, really.

I'm not talking about his current job as host of The Late Show, but rather his Tolkien geek status.*

You see, according to a recent Destructoid article, there's a Tolkien Loremaster on staff at Standing Stone Games to make sure they remain true to LOTR and The Hobbit. That Loremaster also consults with some academics on Tolkien as well as investigates Medieval and Dark Age source material to help round out the work on LOTRO. If that doesn't sound like a job perfectly suited for Stephen, I don't know what does.

I knew that Blizz had a resident Loremaster on WoW Lore, but I was unaware of Standing Stone having a resident Tolkien Geek in-house. Okay, they're all likely Tolkien Geeks to some degree, but the knowledge that there's an official Loremaster position was news to me. But this makes all kind of sense, given the amount of work that went into the storyline behind LOTRO. LOTRO was definitely not a "throw it on the wall and maybe it'll stick" philosophy that some MMOs I've played have; the game is so well done that there are parts to LOTRO that you'd swear were part of Tolkien's world that were actually made up for the game.

Like most of the North Downs, for instance.
In LOTR, North Downs consisted of The Greenway
and the ruins of Fornost. And that was it.
From lotro-wiki.com.

So here's to Standing Stone for putting forth real effort to make LOTRO appealing to your resident Tolkien geek.




*I thought I was a Tolkien geek, but Stephen outgeeks me by a long shot. My Tolkien knowledge ends at Unfinished Tales, as I simply could not get into the books of notes and early versions of the Middle-earth stories collectively titled The History of Middle-earth. My brother-in-law, however, has read them all and he also rereads The Hobbit and LOTR annually.

Time Marches On

I was wondering what to write about for this Friday, and contemplating something silly like "how high can you jump from a cliff on LOTRO before you die from the fall", but then I saw this come through the interwebs today:

AOL Instant Messenger Will Be Discontinued

Wow.

For some reason, I didn't see this coming. I'm not surprised, per se, but I am kind of sad about that.

My D&D group started playing on AIM back around 2001, when AIM was (roughly) at its height. I knew about AIM --anybody involved in tech knew about it-- but I really had no reason to use it until that point.* We spent about a decade on AIM, killing virtual baddies and working our way through two major adventure lines, until some of the changes AIM made on things such as saving our transcripts and whatnot forced us away and eventually landing us on Google.**

But for that decade I had AIM fired up alongside my work IM.

I'll miss AIM purely for the nostalgia, because I'd not logged into AIM in about 5 years.

But to balance out the sadness, here's Avenged Sevenfold performing a cover of one of my favorite songs:

*I was far more fond of Usenet back in those days, before it got overrun by trolls and spam, and the people who made Usenet great migrated to more gated discussion forums to keep the discussions on topic. You used to be able to find some of my posts on FAQs for groups such as rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan (yes, I was a Wheel of Time fan back through A Crown of Swords), but a lot of those have gone away as Usenet has declined and The Wheel of Time finally (!) was completed.

**A few of us have argued that we should use some of the sites such as Roll 20 for our platform of choice, but our DM is infamously a computer luddite and refuses to migrate off of a regular IM platform into something more modern.

Fun With Computers -- College Edition

While I've been working my way through my next MMO, I've been keeping an eye on the oldest mini-Red as she has been getting ready to attend college.

This has been a surreal experience, watching the pile of "things to take to the dorm" grow.

When I left for college, I was the first person in my family to go away to get a bachelor's degree in four years.* As you can imagine, I had no clue what I was getting into when I carried my dorm stuff into my room that first time. Now, however, my oldest has two parents who went through that same experience, so while some things are different --cell phones, laptops, internet, and cable television-- the basic dorm experience is going to be the same as ours.

But that tech thing, that's been gnawing at me.

Her laptop is 3 years old, and while the processor/memory is still pretty good as far as non-gamer specific laptops go, the hard drive that came with the thing is slow as hell and I'm concerned it'll become a problem in the near future.**

With that in mind, I've begun an investigation into solid state drives.

Come to papa.
Image from Amazon.

Having seen the prices for SSDs, all I can think of is what it must have been like a few years ago when they were even more expensive. This actually reminds me of the old days --24 or so years ago-- when a local computer store ran their "Buck a Meg" sale. Yes, a dollar per MB of hard drive space, so a 300 MB drive cost $300.

The prices don't change --the drive pictured about is listed at around $270-280-- but the size and type of the storage does.

All I can think of is that I hope this (or a similar) drive is worth it and will extend the life of the laptop by a few years, or at least last her through her bachelor's degree.





*My father received an Associate's degree (2-year) in engineering, and then went to night school and a decade later finally finished his Bachelor's degree in Economics. My mother took a class or two at a time at a local college and finally received her degree --the only one of her siblings-- a few years after mine.

**That's a big part of the reason why the laptop is a $600 non-gamer laptop. Sure, the screen's resolution isn't full 1080, but the basic 5400 rpm HDD was designed to save energy and cost, not provide performance.

***I also looked at the performance hard drives, but since there's really space for one drive in the laptop if I want to make a real difference I need to go in the direction of solid state drives.

A Brave New World I Suppose

I've noticed a recent uptick in traffic to PC from anonymizeme.pro. Normally I'd not worry to much about it, but this uptick almost exactly matches the passing of the new US law to block online privacy regulation.

If you've not heard about it before now, the long and the short of it is that back in October the Federal Communications Commission presented rules prohibiting internet service providers (ISPs) from selling your online browsing data to third parties: companies wanting to sell you stuff, private investigators, anyone at all. Congress decided that was "executive overreach" and passed the bill above to elimination such privacy regulations, with the side effect of letting ISPs sell your data to whomever they feel like it.

Normally if this were a problem with one ISP, you could simply replace them with another ISP. The issue here is that in the US a huge number of people have only one real ISP to use --their cable company-- because local towns and cities often have non-compete agreements with one cable company in exchange for that company providing local access programming.* So, if your local ISP decides to sell your online browsing data, you don't have an alternative available to jump to.

To fix this issue, some people have set up their own virtual private networks (VPNs) and others are using anonymizing services such as anonymizeme.pro. So while some people look at browsing records from anonymizeme and think "okay, who's doing something shady?", I look at it as merely a sign of the times.

And naturally, late night television has been using this new law as cannon fodder:

And....

*That's something that has almost completely disappeared from local cable, but that hasn't kept the cable companies from using their local monopolies to keep competition out.

For a Monday Morning

I know that Mondays can drag for a lot of people, so here's some music featuring New Age artist David Arkenstone and his ex-wife Diane.

Yes, it's titled Music Inspired by Middle-earth. The CD that the YouTube video was ripped from was released in 2001, and was unconnected with the release of The Fellowship of the Ring.

Somehow I missed this entirely, so I've been catching up this morning.

Hey, at least I didn't die of dysentery

I haz returned.

The Great College Tour is complete. Universities and colleges were visited, food was consumed, and nary a video game was played.

Hell, I didn't even THINK of MMOs or video games until our last visit of the Tour. The guide for the last university tour paused in front of a room at the Student Center and asked if anyone here played video games.

Three mini-Reds' hands shot up, along with those of a couple of other people.

Well, the guide said, this is the video game room. There are consoles and oversized screens there for people to play, and it's all free of charge.

I swear I thought I saw the mini-Reds' levitate.

***

Not all was serious business, certainly. We did sample the local cuisine (which, in Chicago, means Chicago style hot dogs and Chicago style pan pizza), and we took a day off and visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Here, have a picture of the Pioneer Zephyr --the first US streamliner-- which was donated to the Museum of Science and Industry in 1960:

Paging Neil deGrasse Tyson...

...white courtesy phone, please.

Sorry, but I just had to add this.

Okay, not really, but typically during an MMO's nighttime I don't often look up. I'm more used to the focusing on the baddies on the ground, and besides, the sky at night in MMOs changes depending on what zone you're in.*

Some MMOs don't even bother changing the sky based on the time of day --I'm looking at you, SWTOR-- because the background scenery is only important enough for the imagery it presents to you as part of the story.

Lord of the Rings Online, on the other hand, is a bit different.

For starters, some baddies only come out at night, such as trolls, and any quest that involves getting rid of the trolls that roam the countryside in, say, the Trollshaws** close to Rivendell, means that you have to wait until the sun goes down before you can go troll hunting.

This is where LOTRO's sped up game time comes in handy, so you don't have to wait for the night time on whatever time the server is set for to actually go troll hunting. If you play only from 2 - 4 PM at your local time in a game that keeps a true 24 hour game clock (WoW, for instance), you'd never actually see the night sky unless you played on a server on another continent. LOTRO's in-game clock is so fast that an in-game "day" is slightly over 3 hours of real time.

Well, this is nice and all, but on one of those times when I was travelling through Evendim (swimming across Lake Nenuial because, you know, a F2P player doesn't have access to things such as boats that make such travel easier), I happened to look up at the night sky above me.

Ithil (aka "The Moon") is off screen above and slightly to the left.

I'm by no means an amateur astronomer, as what qualifies as a telescope in our house is an old Stevens 3" reflector that I received as a Christmas present back circa 1981***, but I know enough about the night sky that I picked out this immediately:

Apparently my toon has good eyes, as I can only see about 7 or so in real life.

The Pleiades. Right next to the tower at Tyl Ruinen.

Now, when Tolkien wrote the stories about Middle-earth, he grounded the tales by referencing real world items and putting his own spin on them. The Moon became "Ithil" in Sindarin (one of the Elvish languages), "elephant" became "oliphaunt", etc. The Pleiades became Remmirath (in Sindarin), or the Netted Stars.

I realize that MMO skies aren't going to be astronomically perfect --the developers have way too many other items to worry about to be concerned about getting the night sky in Northwest Middle-earth in the Autumn completely accurate****, but I still found it surprising that the devs took the time to get The Pleiades right.

I might have to go back and see if I can find Orion in the sky.





*Think of how cloudy with an eerie glow Icecrown Glacier is in Northrend, and you get the idea.

**I know, I know. Silly name. But Tolkien wrote it that way and put it on his maps.

***I still occasionally drool over a Celestron, Meade, or Orion telescope catalog, wishing I had the money and time to do some stargazing on a regular basis. I even considered trying to build my own telescope, but I realized after crunching some numbers that I'd be better off simply buying my own telescope than trying to make my own. And I think my wife would be very upset if I took years to finish another one of my "projects" around the house.

****Tolkien does reference Remmirath and Menelvagor (Orion) in Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.


EtA: I just had to add the Airplane scene after the fact.

Quiet Night...

Helloooo!!!!

Hellooooooooo!!!!

Where is everybody?

Oh, wait. Star Wars.

Nevermind, carry on. I'm just gonna leave this here....

And this....

Google Gets in on the Fun with Star Wars Easter Eggs...

A Post in which the Blogger Attempts to Remain Relevant

No, I'm not blog-fading.

Really.

And no, while I've been playing some Wildstar --and poked my nose into SWTOR on the first day of early access-- I've not been consumed with MMO playing either.

I've been adulting.

As in, I've been a parent and been dealing with parenting stuff, an employee and dealing with (lots of) employee stuff, and a janitor dealing with (lots and lots of) cleaning stuff.

And you do know what's on the horizon, don't you?

NANOWRIMO.

Oh noes!

Oh, yes. THAT.

And yes, my Sisyphean attempts continue unabated.

I'm pretty sure that mini-Red #3 is going to make an attempt of her own, having succeeded at writing a 12,000 word story last year.* This time, I hope to get her officially registered, but you never know. She's very much a self motivated person and would likely consider any external reminders/encouragement to be annoyances.

In that respect, her natural tank-style stubbornness shines through.

Me? I'd just be happy to write about 10,000 words, let alone 50,000.

Maybe if I wrote really crappy MMO fanfic.....

....like that time Quintalan and Lady Liadrin hung out together
in Nagrand with a picnic lunch and.... NO NO SCRATCH THAT!!

Or maybe not.





*Yes, she beat my own word output by a mile.

Passing the Hat

I occasionally will mention a crowdfunding campaign that is relevant to gaming and/or gamers, and I figured I ought to catch up and post a few notices so that the people behind them can get some extra visibility.

***

The title from the FDWL website, fromdraenor.com.

From the minds (and pens) of WoW bloggers Rades (Mike Eng) and Vidyala (Stacey Landry)* is their webcomic From Draenor with Love. Originally it started off as snarky/fun one shot comics (such as the one poking fun at everyone who wanted to transmog into a certain Paladin Tier set), but has since evolved into an ongoing story which includes Vid, Rades, the Black Prince, Four (an Ogre), and assorted minor characters.

The storyline is a bit complicated, but some of the recent episodes involving Vid meeting her mother have really landed some huge emotional punches. I honestly don't know if I could write those scenes, but Vid's artwork really captured the complexity and heartbreak of the story arc to an incredible degree.

From Draenor With Love has its own Patreon site to cover materials and web hosting costs.

***

If you've ever gone to a con, you've run into cosplayers. Hell, you can even find them participating in parades, such as the 501st has done at the Tournament of Roses Parade.

But what about the history of cosplay? Where did it come from, and how did it explode into the public eye?

While filming the documentary She Makes Comics, Respect Films talked to a lot of people about the rise of costuming in the 70s. After the release of She Makes Comics, they talked to even more people, found a lot of interest, and decided to make a documentary on the subject of cosplay.

Cosplanet: The Evolution of Cosplay from Respect Films on Vimeo.

And here is their Indiegogo link:

***

On the lighthearted end of things are Leigh Lahav's YouTube videos, like, say this one (about Doctor Who):

Under the moniker of OnlyLeigh, she's been posting on YouTube about Fangirl topics for almost two years now.

She also has a Patreon site, and created this video to explain her reasoning behind it:

*They get equal billing, but I went alphabetical here.

More Musings on a Vulcan's Passing

One of my first memories was of Star Trek.

My parents had a black and white television throughout the 70s, and in the afternoons the local independent television station would show all sorts of cartoons from 3 PM until 5 PM.* And at 5, like clockwork, the image of the starship Enterprise whooshed across the screen. My five year old self was riveted to the screen in much the same way the mini-Reds are to Star Wars Rebels and Marvel's Agents of SHIELD**. When the aliens appeared at the end of Part 1 of The Menagerie, I would have nightmares that they would somehow turn me into an automaton like Captain Pike had become. (Hey, I was young and couldn't follow the plot that well.)

Talosians, with their pulsing craniums,
still give me the creeps.

But more importantly than that, Star Trek served as my entry drug into Science Fiction and Fantasy, and none more so than Mr. Spock.

Leonard Nimoy's Spock was captivating. Sure, he seemed like a soulless computer at times, but underneath it all he did have the same emotions as the rest of us, only well hidden. He was part alien, misunderstood by a lot of his crewmates, and still forged friendships among them. After meeting Spock and the rest of the crew of the Enterprise, I simply couldn't watch anything resembling "aliens-as-monsters" which dominated what passed for SF on television.

As I grew older, I identified with Spock to a significant degree. I was the different, nerdy kid: I was smart, loved to read, liked things that weren't mainstream cool, and wanted to go to college to get a science degree. I used to order fan stuff from the old Intergalactic Trading Company catalog back in my high school years in the 80s, often walking to a local convenience store to purchase a cashiers check as I didn't have a checking account of my own, and the one item I wanted for my first car but never got was the sticker that said "Vulcan Science Academy".*** Screw Starfleet, I wanted to hang with the Vulcans.

From Cafepress.
There's even a thong with this design; some things you just can't unsee.

It was easy to transition that love of Spock to Leonard Nimoy himself. He directed what was the most popular Star Trek movie, The Voyage Home, and he also directed several other successful movies (such as Three Men and a Baby), demonstrating that yes you can have a life beyond Star Trek.

He also lived long enough to see Star Trek, and SF/F in general, become more mainstream than ever before.

And now he's gone.

The Feels.
I don't know who created this, but
I'll assign credit when I do.

I don't think that mainstream America quite knows what we lost. The Internet simply exploded in geek circles concerning Leonard's death with tributes from all corners of geekdom. More than once I saw a commenter on a website say something to the effect of "I came here because I knew people would understand," and believe me, I know the feeling.

This is different than Robin Williams' death. Robin was beloved by many because of his overall body of work, which transcended geekdom. Leonard's best work was rooted in geekdom, and he is defined by what he means to the geek community.

Leonard will be remembered forever by his stellar
work in Westerns.... Waitaminute....

Back in college in the late 80's, I was in a conversation with a couple of fellow students about movies. Good Morning Vietnam had been out that past year, and we'd all seen it and felt that Robin had been robbed at winning an Oscar. But conversation turned to other films, and when one of the girls challenged me on whether guys are only interested in macho "guy" movies, saying "when was the last time you cried at a movie?" I told her that I cried when Spock died in The Wrath of Khan.

Big mistake.

The derisive laughter I got told me exactly where Star Trek stood in the pecking order of interests among my "sophisticated" Honors peers. I couldn't have done worse if I'd have said that Hardbodies is a fine work performed by master thespians.**** To them, Star Trek and their fans were worthy of the mockery provided by Saturday Night Live when William Shatner hosted the show.

So yeah, when people talk about how others don't understand, yeah, I know. I've been there.

You tell 'em, Data.

I'm sad that Leonard has gone, leaving Bill, Walter, George, and Nichelle as the surviving original cast members. But at the same time, I realize that Leonard will live on in both his work and the lives he touched. The original Star Trek series is a geeky touchstone in the same way that the first Star Wars movie was; those who watched it were never the same again.

Redditor MrMorlonelycat captured this image of players
of Star Trek Online serendipitously paying their respects at Vulcan.
Cryptic Studios has announced a permanent memorial for Spock and
Leonard Nimoy will be added to the game in March 5th 2015's downtime.

It is too easy to look at the world around us and not be cynical. Star Trek offered a vision of a better future, something worth striving for. And Leonard Nimoy played no small part in helping that vision play out on the screen. For that, I can thank him, and I wish him well.

Live long and prosper, Spock.





*From 1 PM until 3 PM the station showed an afternoon movie --no national daytime talk shows existed until Phil Donohue made it big-- and among the "boring" dramas I found the occasional nugget of gold, such as Ulysses starring Kirk Douglas.

**And The Flash, and Doctor Who, etc. Even Constantine, which had gotten blah reviews, is much better than anything we had in the SF/F/Superhero genre in US television in the 70s and early 80s (with the exception of The Incredible Hulk). We live in a golden age of genre television, even if we have to put up with Jerry Springer and Honey Boo-Boo.

***I was never convinced that the car would last long enough to justify the sticker; it had more Bondo on it than metal. It also had a hole in the floor where the driver would put their left foot, so as a consequence I had to put my foot in an awkward position to avoid turning the car into a Flintstones' mobile.

****It's not; don't go looking for it to see for yourself. Trust. Me.


EtA: I removed the link to Intergalactic's website, since it seems like it hasn't been updated in ages. Also, apparently customer service has declined, based on the poor reviews I've seen online.

Live Long and Prosper

Leonard Nimoy has passed away.

He'll be missed.



Update:  Here's a link to Star Trek Online's tribute.

Sometimes You Just Can't Make This Stuff Up

Under the heading of "Oh really?" comes a report or two from Reuters claiming that Apple is working on it's own version of a car.

(What, you thought an MMO?)

The kicker is that the car project --apparently a self driving car if the reports are to be believed-- is codenamed...

TITAN.

No, really.

For Charlie

From abcnews.com.

Oh hai, Friday. Where'd you come from?

It's been a busy week at work, and I've not had much time for writing.  Therefore, check out this female Draenei cosplay instead:

From fashionablygeek.com.

Yes, there's several more pics at the site; go see it. I'm seriously impressed by the amount of work that went into it.

EtA: Fixed the broken link.

Quick Weekend Post -- D3 Cosplay

I don't often post things such as cosplay on here very much, but I do keep tabs on various cosplay items. (Having kids who want to dress as, say, Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor or Tauriel from Hobbit Part Deux will do that.)

Anyway, I came across this cosplay of the Diablo 3 Crusader, and I thought I'd share the love. Click on the pic to be taken to the full post.

EtA: Updated the link as it broke.

We've been Liebstered!

I thought I'd avoided the recent blogging meme to sweep the MMO blogs --the Liebster Awards-- but it seems PC was nominated just before April Fool's Day.

For the curious, the original rules can be found at liebsterawards.blogspot.com. Just so you know, the blog is in Spanish.*

The basic concept is to follow a set of rules, like so:

1. Acknowledge the blog that nominated you and display the award badge
2. Answer the eleven questions given to you by the blogger who nominated you
3. Provide eleven miscellaneous facts about yourself
4. Nominate eleven blogs of relatively small readership that you think deserve to be better-known
5. Notify the bloggers that you’ve nominated them
6. Compile eleven questions for your nominees to answer

(Shamelessly stolen from the blogger who nominated me.)


Okay, here we go...

1. Kamalia of Kamalia et alia nominated PC for this award. Thanks, Kamalia!

***

2. And now to answer the eleven questions posed by Kamalia.....

a) Tell me about a game or games — video or table or both! — that you are really enjoying right now.

Hmm...

I'm going to break these down into three categories:  MMO games, non-MMO video games, and tabletop games.

MMO games: WoW, SWTOR, Age of Conan, Star Trek Online.
Non-MMO video games: Civ IV and Rome: Total War. (Yeah, I know I should get Civ V but I still like IV a lot).
Tabletop Games: Fluxx (various incarnations, but Star Fluxx and Monty Python Fluxx are great), Settlers of Catan (an oldie but goodie), D&D 3.0, Zombie Dice, TransAmerica, Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures, Savage Worlds. Really, there are too many good games out there to limit yourself, but I had to try.

b) What classes, races, or roles do you find yourself most drawn to in RPGs, whether in D&D, a single-player video game, or an MMO?

For video games, I don't really have much of a preference. In the Baldur's Gate games, I played Fighters, but in MMOs I've been all over the place. I'll play just about any race, class, or sex, depending on what I find interesting.

In non-video games, I tend to play Clerics. I kind of got roped into playing one on my first college D&D campaign, and I've been playing one ever since. The current campaign I'm on --the D&D 3.0 campaign that's been ongoing since 2001-- I play a Human Cleric.

c) When you make your first character in a new game, do you try to make a character that is in some way an avatar of your RL self, or do you make someone entirely different?

Um, yeah, I do. Of course, finding a Blood Elf with a beard was a bit of an issue, but it is there. Barely.

Once I get that out of my system, I tend to veer off into other toons that look nothing like me.

d) Describe a typical session of playing your current favorite video/computer game.

Depends on the game, really. If I'm not at max level, I log in and do a bit of questing, and maybe get in an instance (with allowances made for time). If I'm at max level --like Azshandra is in WoW-- I'll queue for a battleground. Either way, my play time is fairly limited due to family/work/whatever, so I try to get the biggest bang for the buck.

e) What was the very first computer/video game you ever played? How old were you?

Hoo boy. I guess this dates myself, but I remember playing the Sears version of Pong back in the mid-70s as a little kid.

But the first adventure game (not Atari's Adventure, but a "real" one) I played was Colossal Cave circa 1980, on a friend's brother-in-law's** work network, that you had to pay on a per hour basis to access. We didn't even have a computer monitor to look at, the "computer" was a terminal with a scrolling paper printout, so you'd type in a command, hit RETURN, and wait for the teletype machine to spew out the results on the roll of paper. We got in BIG trouble playing the game one afternoon, as we were told we could play one hour and played for four.

f) Do you have more than one blog? If so, what is/are your other blog(s) about? (Blog names/links not necessary, and you don’t have to include personal/family/work-related blogs unless you really want to.)

I've got an LJ account that I rarely post to, but aside from PC that's about it.

g) Name three non-WoW/game-related websites that you visit frequently.

Non-WoW or game related?  Okay...

• The Register -- It keeps me grounded in the IT world, and it's not afraid to tweak the big IT companies.
• The Mary Sue -- A geeky website that also presents things from a feminist slant, which given that I have daughters, is a good thing.
• The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County -- Just because. And that the local library system is really awesome. You really should check it out, even if you're not local to the area, because you just might find interesting things like this.

h) What was/is your favorite animal to see at the zoo?

The white bengal tigers. When the new habitat opened at the Cincinnati Zoo back in the late 70s, that was THE major attraction. Of course, the tigers kind of loafed around most of the day, but the concept of white tigers was awesome.

i) Cake or Pie? What is your favorite flavor of your preferred dessert?

Pie. If you'd have asked me about 30 years ago, I'd have said cake, but I love a good slice of apple pie.

j) What toppings do you like on a pizza? on an ice-cream sundae?

Pizza:  Pepperoni and pineapple. I only rarely get it because I get outvoted when we order pizza. You'd think that pineapple was anchovies or something...
Ice-cream sundae:  Good ol' chocolate.

k) What is your favorite writing instrument?

The computer. A long time ago I used to be able to write cursive, but after years of typing (and writing code) I've lost the ability to use cursive. Considering I was never that fast or that good on penmanship anyway, it's not that big of a loss.

Until I started using Wordstar and Wordperfect in college, I used to compose at the typewriter. It's not the fastest method of composition, but when I was finished I didn't have to revise. But nowadays, I'm grateful for the built-in editing capability of word processors.

***

3) Eleven miscellaneous facts about yourself? Well, in no particular order...

• Unlike Westley or Inigo Montoya, I am left handed.
• I once got the Evil Eye from legendary Temple University basketball coach, John Chaney. How he found me in the sea of 13000+ people when I was hollering at him "Siddown, Chaney!" after he protested a call by the refs, I'll never know. But he looked right at me with that look, the 'I'm gonna find you and make you wish you were never born' look.  "Oh my God," I breathed to my wife, "I'm SO dead."  (Thankfully, nothing happened, but that was only a few years removed from Chaney threatening to kill another coach during a press conference. He was, um, a bit of a hothead.)
• Due to my tendency to be a font of weird facts, one of my high school nicknames was 'Cliff' after Cliff Claven from the television show Cheers.
• I ran track in high school. You'd never guess at it now, given that my build resembles the Pillsbury Doughboy, but that's life.
• I'm an introvert. (Okay, stop laughing.) No, seriously. I still remember the first time I went into Orgrimmar, following Soul as he was giving me the tour, but I was stunned by the crowd of players. I kept telling myself that nobody cares, nobody is looking at the noob, but it still was a shock. And, naturally, I was found by the guy looking for people to sign his guild charter, which didn't help my sense of feeling exposed. I eventually got over that, but when I'm out in the wild and I stumble on someone after having not seen anybody for a long time, I still feel the urge to port out and get away. And I still rarely talk online, even to the people I've friended on MMOs, because I'm sure they're busy and I'd be taking them away from that, yadda yadda yadda...
• I have a dead-on impression of Kermit the Frog, but it hurts my throat to do it for any length of time.
• I once organized a water gun fight in the Chemistry/Geology building at my university. My co-conspirator and I called it Urban Warfare in Wohlleben Hall, and it was back in the pre-9/11 environment when you could pull this sort of thing off without having Campus Security descend on you. My team won, mainly because one team member hid so well that nobody on the other team could find him. He then ambushed them when their guard was down, "killing" them via super soaker in one fell swoop.
• I had a ringside seat at the "Satanic Panic" surrounding D&D and other RPGs back in the 80s. My own collection of D&D material was thrown out because it was considered to be Satanic, and I was ostracized by my fellow middle school gamers who feared that their parents would jump on the "D&D is Eeeevil" bandwagon just by associating with me. Needless to say, I have a pretty dim view of the people who promoted this sort of thing.
• I've worn a beard since my senior year of college, when my girlfriend back then suggested that I would look good in one. It must have worked, because she married me a few years later.
• It's been a decade since I last did it, but I've puttered around with homebrewing and home winemaking. My favorite beer I made was a Scotch Ale (partial mash, for those who know homebrewing), and my favorite wine was a Pinot Noir made from a kit.
• I once had a DJ shift during college. While I'd like to say that I had a hand in programming my shift, I'd be lying. Still, it was fun to work the board, punch up the music via tape and vinyl (!), and chat over the air. The bonus was that almost nobody listened to us, so I didn't have any fear of performing.

***

4) Well, thankfully the blogs I can nominate range from five through twelve, so I'm going to try to hit that sweet spot.

The devil is in the details, naturally. You're supposed to nominate people who have a small following, such as 200 followers or less. I know that PC here fits this to a 't', but the first blog I thought of nominating --a certain blog by Rades-- obviously blows past the 200 follower limit.

Therefore, without much fanfare, here's my list of nominated blogs:

• Biobreak (who might beat that 200 follower limit, but it's worth a try)
• Going Commando
• MMO Gypsy
• She's All Nerd (I wonder which of their blogging team will get to do this one)
• The Jazz Panda
• The Dacheng Diaries
• Warlockery
• Hawtpants of the Old Republic
• Null Signifier
• MMO Gamer Chick (since I already nominated 2/3 of the Battle Bards, might as well get Steph too!)
• Alts Etcetera (because Lyrestra retired Musings of an Altoholic and created a new blog)

Hmm. Looks like there were more out there than I thought....

***

5) Let the bloggers all know that I nominated them, eh? Well, I'll ping those that don't comment in the next few days.

***

6) And drumroll please, these are the eleven questions the bloggers who take up this challenge need to answer:

1. When did you first get into gaming? (It doesn't have to be computer gaming that you started with.)
2. What MMO toon is your favorite of all time? Right now?
3. What was the funniest thing that ever happened to you in an MMO?
4. Just how many toons do you have, anyway?
5. Raiding, questing, PvP, or RP: which do you like the most and why? The least?
6. When you put the keyboard and/or gamepad down, what do you do for fun?
7. What drove you to write a gaming blog?
8. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter: which season do you like the best?
9. What music do you listen to?
10. What is the best dish/dessert you cook?
11. What's the worst earworm you've ever had?

*Google Translate is my friend!

**The friend's sister was much older than us --I think about 12-14 years older-- and he was visiting her for the summer. I'm not as old as Ancient, but I'm definitely on the older side of the average MMO player.

Well, that explains a lot...

If Thrall is playing the center position,
who is the point guard?