Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • The Grand Tour

    my 30-day introductory membership to WoW expired today, but I haven’t yet renewed. I am resolving to finish my PC upgrade first. Unfortunately I neglected to order some thermal paste… so should I just build the PC anyway or do I delay it (and WoW, accordingly) to obtain some? I’ll have to order it from Newegg or something, which will take a week. I suppose I could use that week to do other stuff, like blog or watch anime or whatnot. Heh.

    In other news, my (human warrior) main is up to level 15. In one session I decided to basically grab as many flight points as I could, so starting from Westfall I 1. flew to Stormwind and 2. ran to Lakeshire, then 3. hearthed back to Westfall, 4. flew to Stormwind again, 5. took the tram to Ironforge, 6. ran to Loch Modon, 7. flew to Lakeshire and 8. ran to Darkshire. Actually I may have mixed the order of operations up a bit in there, it was kind of a blur. At any rate I basically have all the FPs for the Alliance in the southern Eastern continent. I’m mostly done with the pre-Deadmines quests in Westfall, but now I plan to polish off quests in Lakeshire and Loch Modan first. I’ll also pick up whatever easy quests there are in Dun Morogh too for leveling.

    Of course, this is all on hold until I upgrade the box…

  • Guild proposal: Otaku Renmei

    I’m starting to understand how to leverage my alts to each other’s benefit, but an hour with a friend I met online who took me on a spree through Westfall (and who mined and crafted some nice new armor for my warrior) convinced me that there are limits to soloing a bunch of new characcters all at once. It really helps to have a whole range of characters, high levels who can make great gear and lower levels who can contribute raw resources. Plus the secondary professions, like cooking and fishing, are almost a waste to have on more than one alt, because you have to tediously train each one up – far better to let one alt be the cook, another be the fisher, and then just mail stuff back and forth. But even so, you end up with far more provisions than you can actually use – and though I tried, there’s not much market for spider kabobs at the auction house.

    The Guild system makes more sense now. You can freely reallocate resources like raw materials, finished products, and food between high and low level chars with ease. However, the guilds my two main chars belong to are large faceless orgs whose chat boxes are full of useless chatter. The ideal guild would be one where i know everyone and whose membership is fairly small, tailored for heling people discover the game. I’d love to start one, but am wondering how many of you all would be interested in joining?

    Here’s the basic charter of the guild i have in mind:

    – invite-only, not public. new members approved by 2/3rds vote after we get the initial roster going. Cap on total membership at 2 dozen.

    – all members are automatically highest rank in the guild – no “privates”. That way everyone has access to everything.

    – set aside a night for battlefield play, plus have regular dungeon runs. Try to really sample the world and see the coolest stuff rather than focus on just grinding levels, money and equipment.

    this would basically be a way for us to easily get new alts going and enrich our experience of the game overall. Most of us are Alliance but id like to create the identical sort of guild for the Horde side too (I have one horde character so far, Aelasha the female blood elf paladin, also on Staghelm).

    Anyway, none of this is set in stone – I want your feedback. What do you all think? Whats your idea of the perfect guild? Or are you pretty much happy where you are and don’t see the need?

  • Sublime Star Trek episodes: “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and “The Offspring”

    Yesterday on sci-fi’s TNG block I caught the ending of Yesterday’s Enterprise, which was then followed by The Offspring. These are two of the best TNG episodes ever. It struck me that TNG as a series remains unmatched even by DS9 in terms of how many truly great episodes there were that really explored the human condition in such powerful ways.

    Yesterday’s Enterprise handled Trek nostalgia brilliantly though subtly – the uniforms worn by the Enterprise-C crew were directly taken from the Trek movies from Khan onwards, for example, and the shape of the Enterprise-C was far more evocative of the iconic Enterprise from TOS than the Enterprise-D (I always felt that the Enterprise-D was flat and curvy in exactly the wrong places). But the way the story retconned Tasha Yar’s character was the real lodestone – and the scene with Picard where she argues to be transferred to the doomed ship was perfection, especially Picard’s final almost-refusal resigned-approval. Plus Castillo’s simple statement, “I don’t want you here.” – superb.

    The Offspring, meanwhile, is remarkable for how it explores father and daughter love, using emotionless androids, and manages to convey the essence of that relationship in a simple scene where Data and Lal hold hands. This is the fundamental purpose of science fiction – to explore the human condition by using non-humans, and Data is the personification of science fiction itself, making the literary genre a character in its own right. The final scene with Lal and Data, where she tells him she will feel for the both of them, is one that moves me every time. And the scene with Riker in Ten-Forward never fails to make me laugh out loud.

    There’s no way around it – I need to get myself a full set of these as soon as possible. Even Firefly can’t match TNG as far as its literary science fiction credentials go – and while I wish the new Trek movie franchise all the best, the Star Wars-ification of Star Trek is not science fiction anymore, but just space opera.

    If anyone has a favorite episode of TNG to share, please comment! lets get sentimental.

  • almost done with Teldrassil

    Zzamba is now a level 12 druid. The only quests I have left to do are Ursal and Oakenscowl; I also need to go get Blackmoss The Fetid’s heart. I have been routinely finding random people to group with for these quests, and thats been a lot of fun. Not only in the social sense, but also to see other players’ styles. I tend to be cautious as I enter a zone, carefully picking a target and then dropping spells on them from afar to soften them up as I close in for melee. Clearly I’m the most timid elf in Teldrassil because almost everyone else just runs straight to the nearest foe and starts slugging it out. It’s also humbling to see that most people I team with are lower level than I am, but way better at killing off enemies (in terms of speed and strategy). I suspect almost everyone I meet is playing an alt, though I did meet a couple of players even more noob than I.

    I have been using the mail a lot, sending a lot of gear and silver to my other players, especially poor dwarf Gganda who is only level 4 and thus doesn’t have access to a mailbox yet (haven’t found one yet, anyway, in the dwarven starting area playpen). I also started that blood elf paladin, Aelasha, and decided to keep her on Staghelm with the rest of my characters just for convenience.

    At any rate, once I am done with Teldrassil then I will be ready for Zzamba to do the druid quest for bear-form and move onwards to Darkshore. I will probably switch over to Gganda for a while once I’ve left Teldrassil though just to keep things balanced. To be honest, though, Gganda hasnt been as interesting to me; I’m more motivated to give Aelasha a run (the blood elf scenery is breathtaking, reminding me of the whole Dragonlance elven city. Its so techno in contrast to the night elves’ leafy burbs).

    I like the combinations I’ve done so far: human warrior, night elf druid, blood elf paladin, and dwarven rogue. I will probably do an undead mage for the fun of it, and an orc priest, at some point. I’m considering a repeat druid for the Tauren, too – they have that whole shamnistic, native american vibe going so it seems a natural fit.

  • guilty of fictional crimes

    Ogiue Maniax has a very important post about a man charged with a crime for possessing obscene manga. I was not familiar with the case prior to his post but it really is a chilling matter. As he points out,

    fiction should have every right to depict an aspect of reality while not being completely behold to it or the law. In other words, if fiction were to be forced to depict a world where everything is legally okay or turns out that way, fiction would die. Imagine Death Note without murder.

    It’s worth reading the whole post for the details. In a nutshell, what is being punished here is thoughtcrime.

  • The glory of Fez, and That 90s Show

    Sometimes, when you’re looking for something on YouTube, you end up finding hilarious material from fans that you’d never have been able to find otherwise. I was looking for video of Fez’s awesome “rule with an Iron Fist” comment from That 70s Show and came across this paradoy by a bunch of high school kids which is so hilarious it deserves some highlight. Fans of That 70s Show will appreciate this; everyone else, move along 🙂

    Since my original intention was to put some Fez up, here’s Fez versus the ninjas, enjoy:

  • hardware update

    I’ve taken the plunge, and ordered the ASRock mobo I mentioned earlier, as well as a Dual Core chip (E7400). I went with the E7400 instead of an E5200 (about $40 cheaper) or an E8400 ($50 more expensive) because it was matched to the FSB speed of the mobo, at 1066 MHz. The board does support the slower FSB (800 MHz) for the cheaper CPU but i want to broaden my upgrade path. The more expensive chips run at 1333 MHz so that (or higher) will have to wait for my next upgrade cycle which is not going to be for a long time.

    As I mentioned earlier I bought some DDR 400 RAM to upgrade the pc earlier which I can still use with this new board. In fact I have a plan; this PC is the second kids pc, which I have now outfitted for gaming and processing, but the original kids PC (whose temporary death motivated me to start this whole journey) is a really ancient dell that originally came shipped with Windows Me. So, what I can do is take the mobo and present P4 chip from the PC i am using now and use those to give it a boost as well. I can wait on this for a year or so, at which point i will also transfer over the old DDR 400 ram and the AGP graphics card too, and buy new DDR2 ram and a PCI-e graphics card for the more powerful machine. so, I will have have upgraded two PCs and not wasted anything. I’ll put Vista on that one too – its running Win 2K at present. at that point ill have two systems:

    1. kids PC alpha – ASUS P4s533-e mobo, P4, 2 GB DDR 400 ram, AGP 4x
    2. kids PC beta, gaming rig – Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2, DC2, 2 GB DDR2 667 ram, PCI-e

    its a little less than optimal but i think it worked out well, especially since i dont need to upgrade both systems right this minute but can wait on it a year or so, by which time the DDR2 and the PCI-e card should be even cheaper, and I’ll probably spring for a new hard drive for system 2 and transfer its IDE hard drive to system 1.

  • Finishing Elwynn

    My human character, a warrior named Aabde, has now completed all the quests in Elwynn Forest and reached level 12. One of the highlights was the griffin ride from Westfall to Stormwind; I should have taken some screenshots. The final two quests were to get rid of Hogger and Morgan the Collector; in both cases my timing was fortuitous in that I found other players to team with. Hogger in particular was a pain because the kobolds had a very low drop rate for the quest items (armbands), so we kept having to roam around that area and ambush every kobold we could find, and Hogger would keep respawning and attack us over and over. Still, it’s amazing how much more effective even a small group of two players is than going solo. I also managed to join a Guild – the first one that invited me while roaming around Stormwind City. Thus far my Guild membership hasn’t really been a material benefit but I figure it’s good to be affiliated for now. I am indebted to Anachronda’s character Chisa for the plethora of bags; thanks, man!

    So, at any rate, I’ve gone as far as I can in Elwynn at this stage. It seems the next thing to do is go to Westfall and start the quest chains there (kill X of this, Y of that… etc). I did venture east and discovered Three Corners, but there were all sorts of level 15 creatures roaming around, so I lost my nerve and turned back. Another option might be to take the tram to the Dwarven City and see what quests I can find up there. Any suggestions? Whats the natural pathway? (I do have one quest that will require a trip to Loch Modon).

    I also have picked up the leatherworking and minng skills, and have collected a pile of leather hides and copper ore, but am not cure how I go about turning this into money. Plus, I have earned two talent points, but that doesnt seem enough to actually buy any talents yet. I did catch a couple of fish, though. I want to get a bit more up to speed on these skills but am really unsure where to start.

    There is one other temptation, to shelve Aabde for a while and focus on my elf Zzamba instead. He just graduated from the playpen and is at level 6, so getting him up to level 10-12 will be a good diversion and change of pace. Well, change of scenery, any way.

    Anyone have any advice for me on where to go and what to do next?

  • Episode 1: a long, long time ago, in a fandom far, far away

    Today, May 19th marks the ten year anniversary of Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.

    It’s been ten years. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe the excitement and the thrill and the magic of anticipation I felt back then. My friend Eric and I waited in line, for how long I don’t even recall, to get in on opening day at the Cinemark Theater in Katy on I-10, which will forever be my Star Wars theater. The months leading up to the release were amazing, with tidbits and screen shots leaking out from sites like TheForce.net, sites I reloaded obsessively. To this day, this teaser image still gives me the chills:

    Episode One: The Phantom Menace
    Episode One: The Phantom Menace

    And of course the pod race and the final battle with Darth Maul – the greatest star wars villain ever – were pure-adrenaline amazing enough to make all the annoyances worthwhile – even Jar Jar. Mostly.

    In a lot of ways Episode One let us all down, but the anticipation was something special, and an experience in and of itself. So, rock on Star Wars, with your Clone Wars and your CGI and your toy lines and your Anakin backpacks. Someday someone is gonna come along and pull a JJ Abrams on you, too.

  • Gurren Lagann: piercing the heavens with a drill

    I’ve been watching Gurren Lagann on Cartoon Network’s monday night anime block for the past couple of months, and have been really enjoying it. The design of the mecha are truly unique, gigantic faces as torsos, and the story is your classic young boy becomes a man, along with a big brother role model and love triangle on the side. Throw in your all-powerful (sorta) alien threat and scrappy humanity rising from the post-apocalyptic world and you’ve got a pretty solid series that isn’t surprising in any way, but still manages to be a lot of fun – and the technology deus ex machine that the hero Simon uses is just plain cool. There is a surprisingly mature introspection about Simon finding his identity not in being a flashy hero, but actually in the value of his humble profession (mining and digging) that lends the whole opera some serious emotional heft, too.

    Actually the whole series is very evocative of Robotech, which seems so blatant at times that I wonder if it is deliberate.

    For more substantive analysis, check out Drastic’s review (along with the iconic image of Yoko from the opener that should be a crowd-pleaser).