Sheesh, so much going on! I know, I keep saying that; but it keeps being true.
Was sick (as in, in bed sleeping and/or moaning pretty much all Monday) with some annoying replicator, was (fortunately on different days) in charge of adorable children while M was out of town for a couple of nights at a class, my car had little incident with another car and is now in body shop (and I'm currently driving a rented Ford Pretentious; like driving a barge, woo woo!), just made like Level 18 in WoW (and SL friend who is like level 50 ran me across the continent to very cool elfish city which I'm now exploring around in), and lightbulbs keep burning out an' a lens popped out of my reading glasses an' I'm constantly in meetings at work, an' etc, etc, etc.
WoW (which a couple of observant readers have pointed out I called "Word of Warcraft" in that first WoW entry, which is a typo I rather like) has turned out to be great fun, but not as good for taking snapshots as Second Life let alone The Sims 2). I do have a couple, one of lil female gnome rogue Spennix looking nobly into the sunset at like 11th level, and one of Spennix and high-level friend sitting on riverbank in scenic elfish city. They're on The Other Computer, and I kept starting to write this weblog entry, but then thinking "Oh, I should wait until I have those Spennix pics over here", but then I finally realized that it might be weeks until I get to that, so here we are pictureless.
Whew!
Somewhat breathless, too. Apologies for the rush of words. *8)
Today's Spam In Its Entirety o' the Day:
Internet is overloaded with information on credit cards. It's usually very confusing. After having surfed those numerous sites I've come to the conclusion that the most helpful and easy to navigate is
Bit of a cliffhanger, I thought.
Five years of Kafkaesque! ("Caution! Do Not Insert In Ear Canal!")
So this Ford Pretentious (actually an, umm, Crown Victoria) has all sortsa automatic stuff to keep rich people who can afford Ford Crown Victorias from having to fend for themselves in the harsh world of automobile user interfaces. When I parked it upon bringing it home from the rental place, I naturally set the parking brake (because I always set parking brakes). When the little daughter and I rushed out of the house the next morning in the usual attempt to get her to school on time, I couldn't figure out how to unset the parking brake.
Fortunately the manual was there in the glovebox, and it turns out that this luxury vehicle has an automatic parking brake release. The parking brake automatically releases as soon as you put the car into drive. It does not automatically release when you put the car into reverse.
So, being a busy executive type or porn producer who drives a Ford Crown Victoria and who backs out of his driveway and/or parking space at Lord and Taylor, rather than having to remember to pull on a parking brake release or anything, all I have to do is put the car into drive (at which point the parking brake will release but with any luck the car will not lurch forward and crash into anything), and then put it into reverse, and I'm all set! How convenient!
lol, as we say both in SL and WoW.
So WoW has turned out to be great fun. Wildly different from SL; about as different as anything in the same basic genre could be. Where SL is open-ended and user-created, WoW is (or is based around) a set of clearly-defined tasks created entirely by Blizzard Entertainment. Where SL is designed for folks over 18, WoW is chock-full of 14 year olds who are of course fine with violence but who would be traumatized by anything like sex (although, I should note, the "lie" emote is transitive, producing narration like "Spennix lies down before Whoever"; but you can't take off your undies hee hee). WoW is beautiful and logical and well-laid-out and centrally controlled. SL is beautiful (and ugly) and illogical (except where it's logical) and hardly controlled at all. And so on and so on.
Lil Spennix is like 18th level now, and knows how to make Clam Chowder and Westfall Stew and Bronze Tubes and Target Dummies and Practice Locks and Large Copper Bombs and Flying Tiger Goggles (a pair of which she is generally wearing), and knows Eviscerate and Ambush and Lockpick and has pretty high Dagger and Thrown (and even Barehanded) skills, and her inventory is almost always almost full (despite having some very nice Mageweave Or Something Bags that can hold relatively lots of stuff). And she runs around jumping and yelling Woot and killing monsters and doing the amusing lil gnome dance on the bank steps, and getting distracted and forgetting exactly what quest she was on and why she was trying to get all those Boar Intestines anyway and accidentally selling them to make room in inventory and so having to go out and slaughter a bunch of boars again.
WoW appeals to a very different part of the ol' psyche than SL, although in both cases it's a part that's interested in alternatives to this here (pointing) very nice but forty-odd-year-old "real" world. But definitely fun.
