Status Report

Hello reader! Long time no see, eh? Blame work for that – software development is rather draining, and when the clock hits 6 I don’t generally feel like doing anything creative.

I have, however, felt like playing WoW some, although even then only a couple of times a week, and even then, only with my girlfriend. We decided a while back to try levelling a pair of characters up again – we’d attempted this a few times before but never really got beyond level 20 or so – and since she was wanting a break from Heroic raiding we went to a quiet little server and created two goblins, Festoon (my protection warrior) and Ozmund (her destruction warlock) and have been having a mostly super time, barring the occasional fail PuG.

I levelled a prot warrior before Cataclysm hit, up to 77, but it was long enough ago that the changes in talents, abilities etc. didn’t really affect me. They’re just minor technical details, though; the overall feel of tanking remains as I remember it: fun! I quite enjoy having so many abilities and having to know which ones to use in what situations, although it’s sometimes tricky to organise logical keybindings for everything.

It’s been really nice levelling with Zoe, especially since we tried to stay as close as possible in experience/level the whole time, always doing quests together and only rarely going our own ways, usually just to collect ore (me) or farm mobs for cloth (her).

Intermission

I normally write these blog posts using my Soda webapp. This post is no different, except that I finally had both the motivation and the free time to fix some of the most annoying issues I had with it. I also added a new preview mode for those poor folk stuck using IE8 – it scales the width of the preview page only, rather than the entire thing. Works quite well on narrower screens since you can shrink it down and still have it remain readable. I removed the ‘paragraph marks’ option too, because it was kinda pointless and just made the CSS more awkward.

Act II

Having reached 85 together and got a bit of non-crap gear, Zoe and I are now venturing forth into Heroic dungeons! Thankfully we’ve been relatively fortunate with our random groups (there aren’t enough members of our guild for guild-only (or even guild-mostly) runs) so it’s been rather pleasant. Even when we have had the occasional fool, it’s not stressed me out much, as I’m fairly confident in my tanking abilities by now. It’ll be even better when we get a guildie healer.

Change of scene

WoW isn’t the only game I’ve been playing lately. First up there’s Trackmania 2, which is super fun, and in whose track editor I have spent probably 90% of my time with the game. I’ve only made four tracks (and only three of those are on MX as of writing), since it takes a long time to really hone one to perfection, but it’s been great fun.

The other game I’ve been playing is this thing called Skyrim. You might have heard of it. It’s lush, and big, and fun and I’ve been known to stay up til nearly 4am playing it, which I don’t recommend. I don’t really have much else to say about it yet, as despite my marathon sessions I’ve still barely gone anywhere in the world. There’s just so much to see.