Monthly Archives: November 2009

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Once Upon a Time…

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…Pike wrote a book.

PikeIsTheChampionMyFriends

I’ve mentioned it here offhandedly, and annoyed the heck out of my Twitter followers no doubt, but after four solid weeks of writing I have finished National Novel Writing Month. Not bad for someone who wasn’t planning on participating until basically the day before it started, and who was working from little more than a skeleton plot.

The novel itself isn’t finished– I’m not at the end yet, and once I’ve got it all edited up it’s gonna be longer than 50k words (I’m sorta aiming for 75k give or take, as a personal goal), but I just have to say that participating in this all of November, even to the point of hardly touching WoW and pretty much putting raiding on hiatus, and sorely neglecting the blog as a consequence… has been a truly amazing experience. On this blog, I write stories about a world that I love, but with this book I was able to write a story about a world that I love that I created. I like to say that I’m more of a storycrafter than a theorycrafter, and this little adventure nailed that home for me.

Anyways, I’m still trying to figure out where to go from here. As I said, the book isn’t finished, and finishing it as soon as I can and moving into editing is a major goal, although I already feel lost without the little word count chart. I would like to get back into WoW again but I’ll be frank, playing WoW right now– particularly because it’s basically just the same raid over and over at this point– really doesn’t feel quite nearly as heroic as guiding my novel’s characters through a quest to save their city. >.>

Some of you have expressed interest in reading my book, which is extremely flattering and is something I’d like to have happen at some point.* Currently I plan on finishing and editing the thing, then letting some friends and family read it and offer their suggestions, then I’ll go through and polish it up and maybe self-publish or something. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. Primarily this is my official “zomg I wrote a book” exhilaration post, which will be followed by ordering a celebratory pizza and listening to Men Without Hats on repeat. (Wait, I do that last part all the time anyway. Crap.)

Thanks for putting up with it being so quiet around these parts lately. <3 -- * You know you want to read it; it has airships and giant robots and dragons in it.

linux

And Now a Tech Post on the Penguin Channel

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Note: The following is a techie-ish post intended for people to find on Google or for me to easily be able to link to on Ubuntu Forums. You’re free to skip it if you do not run WoW on Linux.

konqi-kubuntu-book2Dear Pike, something horrible has happened! As of a couple patches ago, clicking on the WoW launcher messes up my permissions and doesn’t let me run WoW! In even more baffling news, chown -R etc. etc. doesn’t fix it! What should I do?

Never fear, my imaginary hypothetical letter-writer, there is a band-aid fix that we can put into place until either Blizz fixes it via patch or we come up with another solution.

Basically this is the problem you’re running into. It’s not actually changing the permissions of the folder so much as it’s making it unable to be read or written into. If you go into your Wine folder it’ll look something like this:

WoWLocked1

The launcher is somehow the catalyst for this happening because of some weird glitch (which caused issues on Windows too, by the way.) So what you need to do is first fix the folder so it’s readable/writable again, and then avoid the launcher like the plague. Here’s how to do it graphically (in KDE, anyway):

1.) Right click on your locked World of Warcraft folder
2.) Go to the Permissions tab
3.) Press the Advanced Permissions button
4.) Check all the little checkboxes

Now you should be back in business and you can access the game by clicking on WoW.exe in your WoW folder:

WoWFolder1

(There’s a bunch of patches and crap in there so it’s probably somewhere towards the bottom.)

Now, if you’re anything like me, you’re super hardwired into pressing the desktop shortcut or button on the QuickLaunch-equivalent panel to access the game. So you can fix that, too, so the shortcut just launches the game instead of the launcher, by right-clicking and changing the command so it says “WoW.exe” instead of “launcher.exe”:

WoWDesktopShortcut

See where it says “Launcher.exe”? Yeah, we’re kiling that, and replacing it with “WoW.exe”.

Now we’re not going to to see the launcher anymore, at least until the issue gets fixed. This shouldn’t be a particularly huge loss for you, although I’ve seen a couple people get all tin-foil-hat-ish about how this means they can’t download any patches. Yes, you can. Just go into your WoW folder (should be something like: /home/[your username]/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft ) and you will find BackgroundDownloader.exe in there. Just run it every so often and it’ll do patches and stuff. That’s how I’ve been downloading bits and pieces of 3.3 with no issues.

And there you have it, folks. Yes, the patch was wonky and did funny things to your launcher. But it can be overcome! ’til next time, remember:

peacelovelinux

fun, lists

A Very Merry Thanksgiving…

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Happy Thanksgiving to those of you that are celebrating it today (such as yours truly!) In honor of the day, I present to you a short list of things in WoW that I am grateful for:

  • 30 minute hearthstone. Yeah, yeah, we can all get together and talk about how “back in the day we had an hour long hearthstone and mounts at 40 and we had to walk through the Wetlands at level 6 to get to Stormwind from Darnassus”, but really, would YOU go back to having an hour long hearthstone? I didn’t think so ;D
  • Mechanostriders
  • Memories of the greatest raid in the world
  • All the friends, guildmates past and present, Twitterati, and fun people I have met through playing this game and blogging about it
  • Lil’ KT iceblocking something and cackling
  • Applebough, and dancing with him when I am on my Tree Druid.
  • Tree /cower
  • The Skybreaker, because guys, I seriously love the Horde, but the Alliance just owned the Horde in the airship department. Balloons are so last week.
  • The Safety Dance. I swear it’s WoW-related. See?
  • Addons that I couldn’t live without
  • The 30-39 and 40-49 battleground brackets. Post-twinks (for the most part), pre-Death Knights. Sooo delicious.
  • The fact that Argent Tournament dailies, while they make me want to bang my head into a wall, still somehow succeed in being over nine thousand times more tolerable than the Shattered Sun dailies
  • Coming up with the perfect name for new pets
  • Putting something expensive in the Auction House and waiting for the little mail icon next to your map to light up
  • Heroic Mech and running it a million times for a tank friend
  • Druid Epic Flight Form quest… quite possibly the best questline in the game.
  • The Mag’har, because they actually made Nagrand awesome, oh and while we’re at it,
  • Defending/attacking Halaa
  • Onyxia Whelpling
  • Baby Murlocs
  • Female Tauren, because we look awesome and there aren’t enough of us!
  • Snowman Costume, Picnic Basket, Orb of the Blackwhelp, Steam Tonks, Pygmy Oil, Haunted Memento, and all the other toys I carry around in my backpack

I could keep going, but alas, I should keep this list a decently manageable length before it turns into my blogroll or something. Above all though, thank you Blizzard for making an awesomely fun game, and thank you to all of you for reading and sticking around this long ^_^

movies

My Five Favorite WoW Movies

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In the two and a half years that I’ve been playing WoW, I’ve seen a lot of movies about it on YouTube. In fact, I’m willing to bet that I’ve seen most of them. As such, cutting it down to my five favorites was tough. Really tough. So tough that I found myself wanting to change this to “Ten Favorite WoW Movies”, but I didn’t want to crit everyone with YouTube movies. Really though, cutting out some of the stuff by Nyhm and MrVoletron hurt my soul, so… maybe I’ll just make a part two later.

Regardless, after much debate and consideration… here are my five favorites:

5.) Forever A Nub Ft Wick and PoshJark

One of the most recent WoW movies I’ve seen, it jumped immediately to “one of my faves” status, which is bragable*. The great thing about it is that I think it’s sort of supposed to be funny, but it just ends up being really touching and super, super nostalgic. Somehow manages to perfectly capture the journey from level 1 to 80 while also throwing in equal parts RP, raiding, and Warcrafty puns (“Darkmoon Card, and I’m destined for greatness!”). Definitely wins Pike’s approval.

4.) How To Play a Mage

I’M CONJURING MANA STRUDEL! AAARRRRRRGHHHH

3.) Hootie the Strigid Screecher

I first saw this movie back when I was level 50ish and it was Tux the Strigid Hunter and I versus the world. By the end, I was teary-eyed, and ya know what? I’m not afraid to admit it. The whole thing just rang true to my huntery heart on so many levels. That Christmas I got some WoW trading cards; one of them was Hootie the Strigid Screecher. Flavor Text: “He doesn’t mean it when he blocks your view.”

He can also apparently be seen in Dalaran sometimes now, too, though I’ve yet to find him myself. A true classic.

2.) The Craft of War: BLIND

I remember everybody being madly obsessed with this when it came out about a year ago, and when I finally got around to watching it a month or so after the hype had calmed down, I realized why.  Watching movies for free is one of the top reasons to buy an IPTV subscription. Not like your typical machinima, this is actual original animation using the game models. Combine that with a catchy song and some absolutely delightful cinematography (Lady Prestor letting out her inner Onyxia and then gently holding up a finger to her mouth in a “shhh, just our little secret” pose… just so freaking brilliant) and this is a no-brainer for the list.

Possibly my favorite part, though, is that the guy who made it says “Earlier this year I got pretty bored and decided to do something creative in my spare time. ” Ladies and gentlemen, this is what happens when amazing people get bored. They should get bored more often.

Aaaaand…

…

1.) Jimmy: The World of Warcraft Story

It might sound silly, but this little movie probably defines my first year of World of Warcraft for me. When I first saw it, the boy and I were still leveling (us being Burning Crusade babies), and although we had no concept yet of Aldors vs. Scryers, we both immediately latched onto this movie as the ultimate source of personal little WoW injokes and random funny lines to toss at each other. We still quote it. “Screw the blue staff Jimmy, we’re going for the epics. EPIIIIICS.”

I still can’t watch it without cracking up. I don’t think Rurikar plays WoW anymore, but man. The guy is endlessly witty, and the movie is chock-full of little hidden jokes as well, so it holds up to repeated viewings more than… just about any WoW movie, ever. Good game, Rurikar. Good game.

“BY THE LIGHT OF ELUUUUUUUUUNE! *poof*”

—

* Cookie for the first person to get the (possibly obscure) reference…

Uncategorized

Pike’s Got Mail!

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If I have an Achilles’ heel when it comes to blogging, it’s answering e-mail. I stink at it.

First of all, I get a lot of it.

Secondly, I often read it via my cellphone at work. Then I compose a long, grandiose reply in my head.

Thirdly, when I get home from work, half the time I can’t remember if I actually answered a certain e-mail or if I just… well, composed a long, grandiose reply in my head. Then when I go to find said e-mail in my inbox, it’s squeezed in between blog comment notifications and all sorts of non-blog-related e-mail and the like. So then all these lovely e-mails I get wind up unanswered because I can’t find them and I’m terrified of looking through the clutter through them.

SO!

In my best attempt to rectify this, I have a new e-mail address. I’ve stuck it on the sidebar and also made Eltanin the Mail-Windserpent a mailto link. It is aspectofthehare [at] gmail [dotcom]. This is going to be my new e-mail specifically for people who want to get ahold of me or ask me questions. Therefore, in theory, said e-mail won’t get buried between non-related e-mails, or forgotten about.

If you have sent me e-mail in the past and have not gotten a response, and would like one, I promise it’s not cause I hate you and encourage you to send it to my new e-mail. /nods

Today’s Copout Post was brought to you by the letters Q and Q. And today’s “brought to you by” was brought to you by my guild‘s message of the day.

thoughts

Of Healer Guilt and DPS Envy

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Back when hunters were my only endgame characters, I would get super jealous of those healers and tanks who could seemingly daintily dip a toe into LFG and be in a group seconds later, while I still sat waiting… waiting… waiting…

I saw being a healer or tank as being like the Beatles or Elvis as people flung themselves onto their car. Everyone wants you. Everyone loves you. You are needed.

And ya know what? Having an 80 healer has largely proven to nail that point home. On my druid I get invites for PuG heroics in a matter of seconds, most days.

But there is another side to that too. A whole ‘nother side that I didn’t realize until last night.

See, I finished up our weekly ToC25 on my hunter. I was getting sleepy cause I’d been up for a really long time. But there was somebody in our Vent (though not in our guild) begging for a healer for a quick Ulduar10 he was setting up. He’d been searching for a while, apparently, with no luck.

So, I hopped on my druid and went. With the strict conditions laid out from the top that I was getting tired and could only stay for a few bosses until they found another healer.

Aaaand a couple hours later I was still there. Eyelids drooping, reaction time all over the place. Why? Cause I felt bad leaving. I was a healer. They needed me. The Raid Leader would whisper me every so often, “I’m sorry, but I can’t find another healer :(” So I stayed. Even though I really just wanted to go to bed. It was a bizarre phenomenon.

Finally somewhere around Thorim or Mimiron or one of those bosses (I was too tired to really have any sort of situational awareness anymore, and any remaining healing skills I was hanging onto had been flushed down a proverbial toilet sometime around Hodir anyway), a DPS had to leave. “No problem, we can replace a DPS really easily,” said the Raid Leader.

And suddenly I saw the horrible other side of the coin of being “needed”. Suddenly I really, really missed being an expendable, “DisPoSable” DPS.

But then the Raid Leader added that now would be a good time for me to leave, and they would tough it out and try to find another healer, so I mumbled something incoherent and hearthed away and was asleep within about five minutes.

Man. You healers and tanks didn’t tell me you had it so hard with the Guilt complex. I’m sorry. /pets you all

non-wow, photos

Ever Wonder What It Would Be Like to Live in Northrend?

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Today was my day off. I was going to go do errands and grocery shopping and stuff, but then I looked out my window and saw this:

WheresPikesCar

I know it’s hard to believe, but under that big pile of snow? That would be my car. AKA “Epic Geekmobile” (the upgrade from my last car, the normal “Geekmobile”, may it rest in pieces), AKA “Nautilus“.

So I promptly changed my mind about the errands business and decided to stay home. I’ve got oatmeal and ramen and Transformers fruit snacks and Dr. Pepper; I can hold out a bit.

Then I remembered I have to go to work at 6am tomorrow. So I went outside to survey the damage and realized I couldn’t even get to my car.

Fortunately, I have relatives with shovels:

PikesCar1

PikesCar2

Slowly but surely…

PikesCar3

Somehow, the front of my car turned into a wall o’ snow. You can see the shovel and one of my front tires for size comparison.

But look guys! We’ve found buried treasure!

PikesCar5

Bwahaha!!

The snow has– finally– started to let up a bit, so here’s hoping tomorrow morning doesn’t have it back at Square One. Now, about those non-plowed, 5:30am roads… /shudders

FAQ (Frequently Anticipated Questions): Pike, where in the gorram world do you live? Right heah. And I say we redirect “Storm Peaks” to it. Since clearly this series of pictures is depicting my new mount there.

screenshots

No need to fear, Underbog is here!

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So, ladies and gentlemen. Underbog. Let’s talk about it.

Superfun Coilfang instance for level 63ish. Was great fun as a heroic back-in-the-day. Is still great fun as a level 63ish instance now.

And guys, if you’re like me, and a.) dailies got old and b.) playing the Auction House isn’t really your thing, then Underbog is the instance for you.

Here’s why:

  • Half of the mobs are skinnable. They give you Knothide Leather. Which you can sell.
  • The other half of the mobs are herb-able. Half of the time they give you junk, but there’s a ton of Ancient Lichen laying around to make up for it. Which you can sell.
  • The place is a loot pinata. Greens are all over the place. Which you can sell. (or DE, or what-have-you.)
  • Regardless of your professions, everybody can pick Sanguine Hibiscus. Sanguine Hibiscus is a Sporeggar rep item. Sporeggar rep gets you a minipet and is part of the “the Diplomat” title achievement. Depending on your server and how much of this tends to be on the AH, you can sell this stuff for 5g a piece, at least. Oh, did I mention that you can scoop up about 30 in 20 minutes?
My Mechanopeep brings all the flowers to the yard
My Mechanopeep brings all the flowers to the yard


How to do it:

Run in. Kill everything, including all trash. The trash has a good chance to drop aforementioned Sanguine Hibiscus. Not to mention, skinning/herb frenzy if you have one or both of those professions. Kill the first boss. Keep going until you get to that ramp with the Naga*. Twenty minutes tops. This is with a character that isn’t particularly geared; it would probably go even faster still on my main (I plan on trying it later today.)

This is the Naga Ramp. 19 minutes, 43 seconds.
This is the Naga Ramp. 19 minutes, 43 seconds.

Run back to the beginning. A bunch of the Sanguine Hibiscus has respawned; scoop it up on your way out. Then, reset the instance and do it again!

The best part is that this instance is easy. Thus, you don’t need to pull out a special solo-y spec or anything. I just pull out my crab and do it spec’d as Beast Master Raid. You could probably do it just as easily with Marksmanship or Survival, so long as you’ve got a Misdirect macro handy.

The other best part is that if you like solo’ing old stuff, this is super fun, and if you don’t like solo’ing old stuff, then it’s easy enough that you can do it while you have a movie on in the background or something.

The other, other best part is that I am pretty convinced this is a higher gold-per-minute ratio than dailies. If I run around and do all my Argent Tourney dailies, that’s 200ish gold in an hour. Meanwhile, 20 minutes in this instance will get you 200ish gold at least in stuff you can sell, assuming you have skinning and/or herbalism and are on a server that is into achievements. Compare an hour to 20 minutes. Hmm. (Sure, the Argent Tourney probably pulls ahead in the long run cause you can buy and sell minipets, but come on, do you really want to go do the Argent Tourney stuff again?)

Now you have to be careful, of course, because you don’t want to oversaturate the market, but if you’re patient, you can always find someone who will pay top dollar for this stuff.

So yeah. Underbog. Burning Crusade’s Best Kept Secret. Much love. <3 (Or, you can go nuts and solo EVERYTHING like Rilgon, but not all of us have the T5 bonus *grumbles*)

* Note: the reason why I advocate stopping at the Naga Ramp is it means for the next little while of the instance, there are no Sanguine Hibiscus, no herbs, and nothing to skin. You start getting some again towards the end of the instance, but I think it’s quicker just to do the first half and then reset.