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The view from my front porch…

I’ve been having a lot of fun with World of Warcraft these last couple of weeks, mostly because “Legion” is really just that good. But to really understand what is right with “Legion”, we need to have a talk about what went wrong leading up to it.

I played WoW from late beta, and in vanilla I set up a fairly well known PvP guild which killed more Alliance than anyone should really be able to do… This was before Blizzard removed city sieging and everything moved to ‘battegrounds’, where I eventually earned the “Warlord” PvP title. But without a real “war” in Warcraft, my guild transitioned to raiding, followed shortly by killing everything one could kill in 40-man content.

We were at the top of our game in “Crusade”, but eventually the rinse and repeat of boss farming took its toll and the guild broke up as we hit the gated content of “Wrath”.

After “Crusade” I was never really able to re-kindle my passion for the game because repeat content annoys me, and with Wrath the concept of ‘dailies’ was pretty much the entire end-game. I mean, repeat content was required to unlock new content – which is just crap game design and purely there to artificially extend game play.

Now “Cataclysm” did manage to hold my interest briefly; it was entirely new content with a new story, and this was enough to get me to roll a new character (a Tauren Druid) and go see what could be seen.

Then I hit level 50… And with the prospect of enduring yet another run through Outland (I despise Outland as I leveled through it like six times for various alts to support the guild) I once again called it quits.

The “Pandaria” expansion once again drew me into WoW, but I didn’t even finish out the 30 days I paid $15 for, let alone get any real use out of the $60 expansion. I think my exposure to all of the Asian import MMOs has made me jaded (pun intended) and I just couldn’t get into Pandas.

Then came “Warlords”, and another $75 to Blizzard for the expansion and a month of play time.

There’s no two ways around it really; Warlords sucked. Not only was the story a total shark jump, but Blizzard managed to surgically remove multiplayer from WoW with the whole Garrison concept. You could literally play most of the game’s content without seeing another player.

On top of this, Blizzard apparently pulled everyone off of WoW to work on Overwatch. So not only did Warlords suck, it was literally the only content for WoW for an entire year.

It was the nail in the coffin for me and I determined to just wash my hands of the game.

Then the movie came out…

Yes, that movie. The movie Blizzard had been teasing everyone with for like a decade. The movie the critics hated because you really had to be a fan to understand more than ‘big green dudes with funny names beating the tar out of little human dudes with funny names’.

The movie was a love-letter to fans of Orcs and Humans; the very bedrock of pretty much everything Warcraft had become over the years – good and bad. And it got my interest, so I went to go see it – and loved it – because I know who most of those funny names are from within the context of the narrative.

At this instant Blizzard released the trailer for “Legion”, and here again was another, albeit shorter, love letter to the Warcraft fan. And I resolved to dust off my Cataclysm Druid and give WoW one last attempt.

So 600-ish words later the stage is set for a short expose of what makes Legion so good:

To start with, the story is the epic war between literally everyone and the Burning Crusade that we’ve been wanting for about a decade now. And the story is really, really amazing with plenty of good voice acting, really well done cut-scenes, and even a couple of tear-jerker moments.

It’s worth the $60 just for the level 100 through 110 play through as it really is like five interactive fantasy movies following a common theme.

Secondly Legion fixes the Garrison solo-game with Class Halls. Every class has a rather epically themed HQ and the narrative does a really good job of making you feel like the most important whatever you are in the entire world… Even though there are a hundred other whatevers running around the class hall at any particular time.

Along with Class Halls you also get your very own legendary weapon(s). For anyone who remembers the epic efforts required for legendary weapons in vanilla WoW, this is that sort of deal – but done as more of a personal long-term solo-quest chain versus needing 39 other people to like you enough to devote a couple hundred hours to you getting a nice sword.

These legendary weapons are closely tied into the lore of the Warcraft Universe. For example, my Druid is wielding the Scythe of Elune… Yep, that Scythe of Elune.

The third thing is that the entire Broken Isles (the expansion map, kinda like Outland or Northrend or Pandaland) scales to your level. So you can go anywhere and do anything at any time. Feel free to pick a direction and run off looking for adventure – whatever you find will be scaled to your level and offer level-appropriate rewards, automatically.

And lastly (for this post) is the total and complete lack of ‘dailies’… Yes, finally!

What Legion does now is when you hit 110, you open up ‘world quests’ of which there seem to be thousands. Granted, some of them will be dealing with things you’ve dealt with before, but usually in new ways. For example, one day you may have to rub out a selection of Naga in a certain area, and this is couched in the narrative of the ongoing back and forth war going on and the fact the Naga have had reinforcements land in the area. Another day you may be sent back into the same area, but this time you need to gather some resource instead of killing everything. And a few days later you may be sent back to off the leader of the invasion (a mini world-boss).

So while there is repeat content – there has to be really as it would be impossible to have infinite quests – it is generally couched in narrative that makes it feel logical, and it is varied enough that it’s not Sunwell-style killing 50 arcane constructs every day.

Overall, I’m having a blast with this expansion. The story is good, the lore is solid, the content is pretty damn epic, and it’s not been super repetitious.

And that’s a win in my book.

Clinton came out to visit for a few days, and is a bit of a rollercoaster nut like I am – so I drug him over to Lakeside in Denver to ride The Cyclone.

It was just as rough and bumpy as I remembered – and lots of fun. Pity the park is so run down these days… No money with Elich Gardens downtown.

I’ve been wandering over to the local park of an evening to work on my Pokemon Go stuff – the park is a gym – and tonight got to see a pretty nice sunset… So I’m sharing.

I’ve been back for a week now and feel rested enough to reflect on my week of financial recklessness in Las Vegas!

Being as I spend so much time in the Los Angeles area every year, and invariably drive there for at least two of those trips, I’ve driven through Las Vegas on I-15 probably a hundred times – but never stopped.

Well, it was high time for that to change!

Being as a friend of mine in the Army is heading over to the sandbox for nine months here soon, and he’s a /huge/ fan of all things Ancient Rome, I thought it would be fun to have a bit of a get-together with him, his wife, and two other friends of ours at Caesars Palace for a week as a bit of a sendoff.

Monday!

So we all arrived at McCarran Airport at around noon on Memorial Day, collected our luggage, and hopped into the ginormous limo to head for Caesars Palace… I’d never actually seen “The Strip” before, so this was quite the experience. As we meandered through the traffic between the monstrous hotels and resorts, the cohort polished off a bottle of champagne as I rubbernecked at some of the largest buildings I’ve ever seen.

It’s fascinating that this was all in the middle of a blasted wrath-of-god desert…

Anyway, we arrived at Caesars in short order and began the check-in process.

Check-in is all automated. You just stick your driver’s license into a machine, it figures out who you are and what your reservation is, and then makes your room keys and prints your paperwork. Brilliant!

But right after this you discover that Caesars Palace is a literal rat-maze the size of a small town. The clever check in kiosk gives you printed directions to your room, but it uses landmarks like “the lobby bar” which make no sense when there are no less than five bars within view from the lobby.

Anyway, after a good half-mile hike and a solid half an hour of searching, I was able to locate the “Palace Tower” where my suite was located; a 750 square foot apartment basically, on the 25th floor…

The others were in the “Augustus Tower” which is essentially the other side of the planet… So I dropped off my luggage and immediately attempted to return whence I came as we were all hungry and wanted lunch.

After another 20 minutes of aimlessly wandering the casino I eventually found the others, and we hit the first restaurant we found; Gordon Ramsey’s Pub and Grill, which was pretty amazing for what amounts to a burger joint.

After lunch it was decided to walk off the big meal by wandering the Palace and seeing what was to be seen. This resulted in us walking amongst the Forum Shops for a few hours…

While on the rounds we got coffees from one of the several in-casino Starbucks while Cass tried valiantly to get “The Prince of Lightning” (a penny slot machine) to refund the money Imperious had spent on some other machine.

She was actually successful!

After this we hit up “Rao’s” for some superb Italian fare.

Seriously, this place is amazing… Which then led to me, being the elder of the group, entering a food coma and retiring to my suite. While I was hot-tubbing, the others trekked to an oxygen bar where they were hooked up to medical equipment and oxygenated whilst being electrocuted, or something. Apparently this was not all that amazing… I dunno, I was asleep. 😀

Tuesday!

The following morning, I was up hours before the rest of the group so I decided to go get some coffee and play some slots for a bit. And once I’d gotten another dose of Starbucks to carry around, and having pulled $20 out of an ATM to feed to the one armed bandits, I started cruising the casino looking for a machine that caught my eye.

Of course the one that did was called “Mystical Unicorn”…

So I parked myself at the machine, put in my $20, and after carefully reading all of the instructions (apparently something no one does, judging by the looks from the older folks next to me), I pressed ‘max bet’ and watched.

This machine was amazing to watch… Even having read the instructions I had /no/ idea what the hell was going on other than it was pretty, flashed a lot, and had nice music.

On the third press of ‘max bet’ the first two rows filled up with Unicorns, and the machine started to get frantic as each additional row slowed to a crawl and began to flash, filling up with more Unicorns. Eventually the machine lit up like Christmas and started playing a full orchestra piece, loudly, and was counting up coins.

It did this, and other musical, flashing gyrations, for a good 3-5 minutes while it racked up my $500 in winnings.

The older folks next to me were agog, and the fellow said “was that a $2 bet?” I just nodded, not really knowing but assuming ‘max bet’ was probably $2. He said “Nice” and suggested I stop for the day… I agreed, cashed out, and went on my way – leaving him to scoot over and start playing that machine.

A few hours later he was still feeding that machine, but it appears I’d stolen its thunder.

Anyway, eventually the dead were roused and the team was reassembled before we gathered for brunch at the Payard Patisserie & Bistro – which was once again amazing. Afterward we meandered around the casino for a while before deciding to spend a few hours at the “Montecristo Cigar Bar”.

This is where we basked in expensive Scotch and cigars for several hours – and determined this would be our base of operations between events for the rest of the week…

Eventually though it was time to walk over to the Paris casino to see “Jersey Boys”. We headed over about two hours before the show just to see the other casino and take in the ambiance… I played a few more slots and lost about $50 of that $500 before the show started.

“Jersey Boys” was a really great show, highly recommended, and we all had a fantastic time. The seats were right in front of the sound booth, which is the best sound in the theater – and for a musical this is perfect.

We then walked back to the hotel and ended the night at “Beijing Noodle Number 9”, a Chinese restaurant there in Caesars that was quite good. We were eating light, for tomorrow we would face the beast…

Wednesday!

While I waited for the others to rise from their crypts, I spent some of my now $450 in winnings on a few more slot machines. I won some, I lost more, but eventually walked away with about $100 less than I started with. My primary goal was just getting in a good walk around the casino (about a mile or so of walking) before the others joined me at the “Bacchanal Buffet”.

Essentially, for $45 you get access to like 120 yards of buffet line, where each kind of food is in its own somewhat themed area and ranges from 20 kinds of salad, through Chinese, Italian, Mediterranean, Mexican, European, etc, etc, etc. The only catch is you only get two hours to eat.

That was quite literally the most food I have ever seen in one place, and all of it (that I had) was superb. I was full in 15 minutes though… I am clearly not a champion buffet eater by any stretch.

From here we waddled back to the cigar bar for a while before braving the Las Vegas heat and walking over to the Luxor hotel to see the “Blue Man Group”. Which, even at 106-108 degrees it wasn’t too bad of a walk, because you can hopscotch between casinos and malls to cool off in air-conditioned bliss between stints of hellfire outside.

It’s still a two-mile hike though, with a lot of stairs to traverse to get to the pedestrian bridges – so at those temperatures it is not something for the weak of constitution to attempt. 🙂

Once at the Luxor I made the determination that my next Vegas trip will be staying there. It’s a really, really neat building full of really, really neat stuff to see.

Once we’d looked it over a bit, we decided to lay siege to the “Aurora” bar for a couple hours until the show started… Not only because the bar was really neat looking, but also because it was very appropriately named. 😉

Eventually though it was time for the show, and we were treated to a lot of blue whilst taking our seats – which were about the best you can get without being so close you get wet.

And after the show we walked back to Caesars…

By the time we got back to Caesars, Imperious and Marco had each had about a gallon of beer and were looking a bit green around the gills. So I determined the best course of action was to get some starch into them, and this of course called for a return to Rao’s for some more astounding Italian food. Which was followed by another stint at the cigar bar where I have more Glenmorangie ‘Signet’, and Imperious had coffee.

Thursday!

Given the epic drinking of the day before, no one was even breathing before noon today. So the first stop of the day was a late lunch at Wolfgang Puck’s “Spago”.

Unfortunately, Spago sucked majorly. And this was amplified by the entire week leading to this being so full of truly amazing food. Everyone’s meal at Spago was either bad tasting, prepared oddly, or in my case simply undercooked by a dramatic (and probably unsafe) margin.

Of the lot of us, I think only Marco left a visible dent in his dinner…

So we decided to self-medicate at the cigar bar once again, and drink enough to ensure anything food-borne was good and dead before walking across the street to the Bellagio to see Cirque Du Solei’s “O”.

“O” was… Well… Very French. There is clearly a story there that they are trying to tell, as there are reoccurring characters with what appear to be agendas – but I’ll be damned if I could figure out what it was. So it turned into this amazing stage and set dressing doing truly magical things while a bunch of weird people cavorted about and I head-scratched at what they were trying to show me.

I probably would have liked it more if I’d not seen several other really amazing shows beforehand. That and I was really burned out on Vegas; five days of Vegas is the upper limit of human endurance.

After “O” we returned to Caesars and I took the crew to the Old Homestead steakhouse, which is supposedly the best steakhouse in the world.

It is.

First of all, I’m from Colorado… Colorado is a beef state and we know a thing or three about steak, and accordingly there is a plethora of steakhouses here. And many of them are world-class establishments I frequent pretty often. So I’m a pretty good judge of steak.

I had the 12-ounce fillet with a side of grilled seasoned mushrooms, and it was essentially the best steak I’ve ever had. Aurkae and Mario had a surf and turf dinner that involved steak and shrimp – and the shrimp were the size of bananas. I’m not sure what Imperious and Cass had, all I know is that Imperious’ meal evaporated in about two minutes flat and he was extremely happy with it.

And this left us all totally stuffed… So of course I had to order deserts for everyone…

This is the apple cobbler with cinnamon ice cream and a bourbon anglaise I ordered for myself, and it /wrecked/ me. It was soooo good though. I ate about a quarter of it, and had the rest for breakfast the next morning. 🙂

Anyway, after dinner we went our separate ways as we were all on early flights home the next morning.

Friday!

I was up and at ‘em bright and early, packed, and ready to go. Made it to the taxi stand where I ran into Aurkae and Marco so we split the cab ride, and eventually made it back to my spot on the map without incident.

It was a fantastic week with equally amazing folks, and from what I gather was a pretty stereotypical ‘week in Vegas’.

I will probably do it again someday – but probably only over a long weekend next time. Five days is about two days too may for me. 🙂

My ‘retirement era’ has appeared on the distant horizon, and accordingly I have entered my ten year planning and setup phase for it.

Yep, a decade of preparation; I don’t do anything without proper evaluation and orchestration. 🙂

This last month has seen me looking over land options in southern Colorado, specifically around Huerfano County, for both business ventures and building a home. The area is beautiful, the seasons are mild, and the land is inexpensive – and this meets certain criteria.

I have a few friends that just moved into the town of Gardner, so they have become my canaries for the area and I am learning about how this thing called life pans out in the valley…

My ‘retirement job’ will most likely be the small-scale ranching of bison on 70+ acres, which can be had down there for around $80k if you want a stream and good grazing, though there is an opportunity for a slightly more high-tech income…

Huerfano County isn’t really “remote”, it’s about an hour south of Pueblo on interstate 25, and is home to about 6500 people. The areas I am looking at though are in the valley about 30 minutes west of Walsenburg. There is no terrestrial internet service in the valley, and 2000 or so people who live there tend to use bi-directional satellite – which is workable, but can be slow and spotty depending on the global situation.

I’ve been brewing a plan to bring a thing called WiMax into the valley. Now this set of ideas is brought about primarily for my own use; I like high speed-internet – but I figure if I can resell some of the bandwidth, then at a minimum I get cheap high-speed internet. 🙂

Given my freakish knowledge of cold-war era AT&T towers, I knew that there was one called “Red Wing” up on the western ridge of the valley, on the line between Huerfano County and Alamosa County. And this old tower looks right down into the town of Gardner, so it would be a great location for a WiMax transmitter… The complication is ‘who owns it?’. The county line literally goes right through the building, and the BLM annexed pretty much everything on the Alamosa side for the Great Sand Dunes National Park. So I opted to take a trip and have a look…

Like I said, beautiful area down there…

It does appear the site is owned by the BLM, which puts my chances of using the site right above launching myself into orbit – but I don’t know this for sure, and am pursuing it still… This has required a lot of telephone time with bored and disinterested government drones, but I’ve not gotten a “no” yet – so I soldier on.

I have a ‘plan b’ that rents tower space on a couple of cell towers to do a similar thing, but any profits in the venture will be eaten up by monthly tower rental…

As for housing I have two plans; the first one is to build on the property I pick up for the ranch. This will probably be a 35×12 Liscott “APH-503” which is 389 square feet and can built to my exacting specifications for about $60,000.

I know that sounds ridiculously small against the US “requirements” for giant houses that are 80% empty space, but I’ve always been happiest in small places… My apartment before the ginormous house I live in now was about 700 square feet, and I pretty much lived in just the living room because it was too much space.

And the master suite in the house I have now is about 700 square feet, and I pretty much live in the office end of it because it’s too much space.

See, I’m not a hoarder by any stretch of the imagination, and everything I actually care about still pretty much fits in my car. That and imagine for a moment how easy it is to clean and how inexpensive it is to heat and light a space that small… I plan to be retired remember, and Social Security only goes so far…

The benefits to this are living in the wilderness away from people, and not having to drive to tend the herd.

The complications to this idea are power, water, and unimproved roads…

Water is pretty easy in the Valley; you just have to dig for it – which can be expensive. Power is also pretty easy; you just have to get it run to the property – which can be expensive.

Then there are the “roads”, which aren’t bad, but do require high-clearance at all times. I own a Fiat race car, which is pretty much anti-high clearance – so I have to buy a 4-wheeler of some sort, which can be expensive.

The other option is to pick up a small fixer-upper in Walsenburg for around $60k and spend the next ten years paying the loan off and improving the place on weekends.

Walsenburg is quaint and kind of a neat little town, right on I-25, so it has amenities like city water, sewer, power, pavement, and high speed internet. And I can score a fun little 700-1000 square foot house for around the same price as the brand new modular above.

Once paid off, a house in Walsenburg, figuring $300 a month in upkeep and repairs, would be about $5-$6000… Per year!!

That’s pretty easy to do on social security.

The benefits to living in Walsenburg are, well, civilization. It’s small-town enough to appeal to my need to get away from humanity, but still a town – so it has gas stations and grocery stores.

The complications are no land, so if I want to pursue this bison plan I have to get land elsewhere and commute.

Anyway, I’m spending this year just researching the area and getting a feel for how things work there. This requires weekend trips down to the area, but given how nice it has been so far – this is not a hardship. 🙂

The sculpture of Iridae I commissioned has arrived and immediately went into one of my glass doored bookshelves for safety.

She was shipped in several pieces because of her size and complexity, and required some assembly, but she came out perfect!

She was made by Viistar on Deviantart.

The drive home today happened a bit earlier than usual due to the blizzard…

It normally takes about 15 minutes to get from work to home – today it was slightly over two hours – so I got home at the same time as usual…

Now to make something warm for dinner.

I did it again!

47 times now! In a row! That’s pretty good I think. 😀

And here’s an amazing picture a friend drew for the occasion:

We as a race have spent thousands of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there?”

Wondering and hoping and guessing and imagining…

Is this because we as a species are so lonely? We want to meet other species and to talk to them, and we want to learn from them… Because we want to stop being the only people in the universe.

Then one day we started to realize that things were maybe not going so good for us.

We got scared that we were going to blow each other up… We got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently and that in a few hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone. And even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them…

So we built robots and we gave them hands made of metal and brains made of silicon. We gave them names and we pretended they were people, and we asked them “hey, you wanna go exploring?”

And of course they did – because we had made them in our own image.

So maybe in a few hundred years we won’t be around anymore. Maybe, yeah, the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say “Hi! How are you? We’re people too! You’re not alone anymore!”

Maybe we’ll be gone; but our robots will still be here… Robots with beat-up hulls and metal brains.

Robots with names.

And if the other people come and ask, “who were these people that created you? What were they like?” the robots can say, “When they made us, they called us Discovery; they called us Curiosity; they called us Explorer; they called us Spirit. They must have thought that was pretty important.”

“And they told us to tell you hello.”

Annnnd – 2016.

Feels amazingly like 2015. But 2015 felt amazingly like 2014 – and on and on.

What I find fascinating is the time dilation; time goes faster as you progress along the line…

I have always been a writer, so I have diaries that I wrote when I was like seven – and they are full of whining about how long the year was and how it seemed like an eternity to reach Christmas.

Now, 40 years later, it feels like last New Years was about six weeks ago. 🙂

I assume when I turn 60, I will immediately turn 61, then a second later 65, then 78, then 118… Then the heat death of the universe!

It will be very exciting, I look forward to it! 😀

My Christmas gift this year from one of my roommates. Very apropos. 🙂

Well, it’s been a couple of weeks since my vacation, and I’ve finally gotten caught back up enough to take a weekend off.

Vacations suck.

In my scant free time I’ve been working on lore and systems for the RP setting in SL… Which is just the dark-future of Roanoak, the place I wrote about previously…

It’s gotten hugely popular, so much so we had to acquire a second region just to have some place to build the various event scenes.

The setting is something akin to the fanific “Fallout: Equestria”, which is the horribly written bastard offspring of the Fallout game franchise, and ponies… It sounds weird, and it is, but the juxtaposition of bombed out irradiated world and Gen4 ponies actually works.

The incongruity is the selling point I think.

Anyway, the character I am using as the narrator is fun; I essentially turned my ignorance of the fanfic the setting is based upon and my technical education into a character. So I have this cloned pony who knows nothing about the world, but has this wealth of pre-apocalypse technical knowledge.

What makes the character really intriguing is that I basically created Gen4 genetics for this; actually sitting down and figuring out how the various allele groups would express the various phenotypes for the three tribes…

It’s okay, I get that blank look a lot…

Anyway, the Gen4 show dropped a bomb on everyone by literally building an episode around the fact that Earth Pony parents can give birth to Unicorn and Pegasus foals. So “pony” genetics contain the allele groups to express each variant kind of pony.

So Iridae, my character, is (was) a perfectly blank slate – a frozen zygote created for an advanced plan to try and preserve the race beyond the war.

See, to lock up a bunch of anything for 250 years to try and outlast a nuclear winter, and get around the inbreeding problem, you need like 6000 breeding pairs at the outset… That’s a lot of mouths to feed and environment to reprocess. But if you freeze most of the breeding population as zygotes you can start off with like 50, and only thaw out what you need as you need it.

The problem in Iridae’s case is that plan didn’t exactly work out… And long story short, everyone died and all but five of the zygotes were tainted by radiation. So some 200 years later the radiation in the facility had gotten low enough that the computer does what it was told, and brought the last five to term via an accelerated growth protocol… Making Iridae about 15 at the beginning of her story and with an advanced education based on pre-war sciences and technology.

Another complication is because they contain the alleles for all three tribes, and that phenotype expression comes about based on vagaries of magic from the parents – and Iridae’s ‘parents’ were technically a computer – she started out life as an oddly spindly pure white Earth Pony (the genetic baseline).

Then she found the necklace that Aurora used to wear all the time – or it found her – one or the other…

The necklace is an artifact a bit older than Aurora, and is a key entrusted to her that opens one of the prisons that contain various elemental evils that once roamed the world. But it’s also the vessel she used to contain a shred of her essence the day the bombs fell.

Given this bit of arcane trickery to try and circumvent her death, the necklace has become something of a phylactery that houses at least some of Aurora’s spirit. And once in the possession of Iridae it has supplied the required magics to cause Iridae to begin expressing tribal phenotype – specifically a Unicorn.

There is this big story about how the facility that was created to save the race actually tries to kill her for her gradual genetic deviation and how she escapes with the aid of Aurora’s ‘spirit’. This spirit cannot directly communicate with Iridae, but it can cause hallucinations and such where Aurora can pantomime what she wants to get across.

Anyway, what started with simply gaining a short, stubby horn has progressed over the last two years of Iridae’s life. And today she looks considerably different from her four siblings back in the government continuation facility.

This is not what the average Unicorn looks like in modern times, but is instead a serious throwback to what they looked like thousands of years ago. Why this is, she has no idea…

She is also struggling to learn magic. Being as she cannot internalize magic the same as the average Unicorn and must instead draw it from the world around her, she must go it alone and has to figure everything out for herself.

These days Iridae lives with a bunch of other … beings … in a place called Diablo Canyon; a ramshackle collection of shipping containers turned houses in the middle of what used to be a reservoir, but is now more of a junkyard.

Iridae is still changing though, and unbeknownst to her she is genetically progressing to match the phenotype of the first ‘pony’ she encountered – namely the Empress. The Alicorns, like the Empress, are a strange fourth tribe of incredibly long lived and rarely seen pony – a bit like the Noldor Elves of Tolkein myth, and being as I killed them all off in the war, Iridae will be the first of their kind in this brave new world.

But, it doesn’t end there – Iridae has four siblings, and once it is discovered what they can become the race will be on to capture them and turn them to whatever goals the group has, or in some cases kill them before this can happen.

We truly live in exciting times. 😉

I was teaching CompSci at Marianapolis Prep in northern Connecticut in late 2001.

I’d just come off a stint of working the Beltway in D.C. – specifically at the Pentagon as a contractor; setting up email systems for the Coast Guard on Banyan VINES just to date things. The company I’d started had run it’s course and I was basically teaching as a bit of a vacation from the pressure cooker that is D.C..

It was pretty early in the morning, and I was still getting ready for the day. I had the door to my room open and was preparing to head over to the school building across campus to get some breakfast… See, Marianapolis is a boarding school, so on top of being a teacher I was also in charge of one of the halls in St. John’s, but my class was in the afternoon so my mornings were pretty leisurely once the students were sent off at around 7am.

One of the other dorm supervisors ran in asking if I’d seen the news – something about a plane crash. I followed him down to the recreation area where the big screen TV was running the news and the admin folks from St. John’s were congregating.

There on the TV was one of the Trade Center towers on fire. It was a bit surreal, and I kept thinking it was some sort of Hollywood special effect – like something being done for a new movie or something.

The news folks were saying it was a plane crash, and I was thinking ‘private plane’ – like a Cessna or something. It was only a few minutes after the impact, so they’d not had a chance to create slick graphics and whatnot yet.

The room was just sort of quiet – no one really saying much of anything and letting the news folks fill in the silence. They started talking about hijackings, and then the second plane hit the other tower – live.

That’s when I knew this was something serious.

At this point the news became a mishmash of conjecture, opinion, and plain old guessing as the FAA turned New York into a no-fly zone.

I guess it was about an hour later that we saw the news about another plane hitting the Pentagon… At least, that’s what it sounded like. The news was in turmoil and every channel had a different set of ‘facts’. Then the FAA essentially grounded everything with wings over North America and D.C. pretty much evacuated amidst fears of more crashing airplanes.

It was then that the school released the students for the day, so I was gearing up to spend the rest of the day plying my psyche degree to help a bunch of teens deal with a pretty shocking event.

And at 1 minute to 10, just as the students were all filing into the rec room, the first tower collapsed.

Seven minutes later another plane crashed into a field and is suspected of being another terrorist situation.

Thirty minutes after that, at about 10:30, the other tower collapses.

The rest of the day was spent pretty much talking to students, organizing phone calls to family, taking phone-calls from family, and just trying to be available and present.

Through the whole thing I don’t really recall being phased – it was just this thing going on that was impacting folks that needed some tending to. But I’m not really the panic or get upset type, and the worse the situation, the more focused and non-emotional I get… Probably a military thing.

So that’s ‘where I was’ on 9/11…

Friday night was a whirlwind with the friends I had there at the convention; Imperious, Cassius, Aurkae, and Marco, and two new folks from SL that I’d never met; “Grumpy” and “Chilled Steel”. And then we found Tursi, who had flown in from China! Also, one of my roommates, Scott, went with me as I had a big room at the hotel, and Clinton also showed up and palled around for the weekend.

It was awesome. 🙂

So eventually Saturday morning rolled around, and after breakfast and coffee we wandered the convention looking at things, pricing things we thought we wanted in the dealer’s room, haunting the halls a bit, and eventually laying siege to the hotel bar – where we met Tony. Tony would become our personal waiter / bartender / hotel representative for the weekend – and he’s really a great guy.

Ask for him if you find yourself in the Hilton Anaheim. 😀

During one of the various trips through the dealer’s room I discovered that Agnes Garbowska, one of the MLP comic book artists, was doing these quick sketchy watercolors of ponies – and just had to get one!

So, here’s Ri’Hahn as doodled by Agnes Garbowska:

Saturday night I took everyone over to McCormick & Schmick’s for dinner, which was also amazing – even if Imperious did pour half a Blue Moon into my lap on accident. 😀

Sunday arrived with another breakfast and coffee session, and then we collectively descended upon the dealer’s room to snap up all the stuff we wanted at Sunday Discount prices! See, I used to sell stuff at conventions for a living back in the early 90’s – so I know all too well how it works; anything on the table after about 4pm on Sunday has to be packed, and schlepped, and checked for travel, and – it’s a pain in the butt. So you can always get dealer’s room deals on Sunday.

So Imperious got the stuffed Rainbow Dash he’d been lusting after since Friday morning. A $300 hand made one of a kind from a rather well known seamstress Rainbow Dash mind you…

Then Marco picked up the most accurate stuffed Celestia ever made – for SL’s very own Stuffed Celestia; Aurkae:

Cassius picked up a big floppy stuffed Shining Armor, and Marco not to be left out picked up a tiny stuffed Nessie – because Nessie is an honorary pony, or something. 🙂

I did not buy into the stuffed animal craze; I am above such things (and I’m still waiting for my $1500 custom 28″ tall fully pose-able accessory-laden Alicorn to be finished.)

I did pick up a second watercolor from Agnes Garbowska though; this one of the Empress herself – the world’s most famous OC Alicorn…

I also picked up this really nice sterling silver feather bookmark from a silver smith that was at the convention.

Following the buying frenzy we all headed off to the bar once more to waylay the buyer’s remorse by getting too drunk to care – only to be told that Tony was working the pool bar. So we headed off to the pool to sit outside and get hammered.

During this Marco and Imperious decided that, well, enough was never enough! And with a Mad Max-esque “WITNESSSSS MEEEEE!!” went full hooah.

Never go full hooah…

Especially when the waiter / bartender is being friendly and mixing with a very heavy hand…

The end result was Imperious blacking out and not really remembering much. And poor Marco … well … Marco ended up in the fetal position in the shower for about two hours…

All was well though! No harm done – except to maybe some pride. 😉

Once that was all resolved I called it an early night as I had to be up at 4:30 for a 6am trip to LAX.

I hate LAX…

The flight was fine though, and I made it home in one relatively large piece and am taking it easy to be ready for tomorrow… I’ve been away from work for a week – I’m not sure what I will find tomorrow, but I’m sure it won’t be pretty…

EQLA was, quite simply, illegal amounts of fun.

Literally so much happened over the last three days I cannot actually write about it all – I’d be here for a month. So I’m just going to post a few photos for posterity and note a few of the more amazing events…

So, to begin at the beginning – the convention began.

I was a ‘star sponsor’, one of the 20 people who paid large sums per ticket for the convention, so I had awesome seats, front of the line privileges, private meet and greets with the guests, a VIP mixer, room perks, and on and on… I was literally royalty for the show, which was kind of nice and apropos for the Empress of Roanoak I suppose. 😉

So from my reserved seat at the front of the auditorium the convention began:

From here I used my “Star Sponsor” powers to get into the autograph singing room before the mile long line of other fans to get this signed:

Autographs of the two ladies who created the core aspects of ‘pony’… And thus my collection is now complete. 😀

Following this I sat in for the ‘creator’s panel’, which was the first time Bonnie and Lauren actually sat down and chatted… It was, well, amazing – and culminated in this:

Lauren asked Bonnie to autograph her “My Pretty Pony”, which is the toy Bonnie designed that led to the ponies everyone is familiar with…

It was a pretty emotional thing for everyone, and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a dry eye anywhere in that auditorium.

After this I had pretty much achieved fandom nirvana, so all that was left was to browse the dealer’s room and then spend the evening hanging out with friends.

And that was Friday! Saturday will be recounted in the next post.

I wasn’t exactly ‘prompt’ with keeping ye olde journal up to date here – I shall blame the presence of so many fun people creating so much fun stuff that I simply did not have the time and/or energy until I got home – which is now. 🙂

Picking up from the last entry; I’ve still never seen an evening show at Disney!

I tried, twice, and either the show I was intending to see only runs on weekends (Fantasmic!), or I simply ran out of steam long before the sun set… It’s okay though, something to shoot for next time.

So, anyway: Disney – day two.

I arrived at Disney bright and early Wednesday morning with the intention of doing the other half of the park; “Disney California Adventure”.

Being as I was at the park about 45 minutes before they opened for the general public, I spent some time browsing the stores and admiring the decor. As with Disneyland proper, DCA was also done up in Diamond Jubilee decorations.

And this shot is looking down one of the themed streets leading towards the Hollywood Tower ride…

The park was not quite open yet, so all of those people standing in front of the trolley are waiting for the rope to drop. And about half of the apparent length of the street is the clever Hollywood style backdrop back there. 🙂

So my first ride of the day was the afore mentioned Hollywood Tower, which is essentially an elevator from hell housed in a really well themed hotel-like building occupied by Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone”.

From here I wandered through Bug’s Land and into Cars Land with the intention of riding the Radiator Springs Racers ride.

This is a really fun ride, and quite the technical marvel – but the line is always like an hour long… But the blue car I was in won the race, which makes the wait worth it. 😀

After this I walked over to the main part of the park, Paradise Pier, which is the area most people have seen at one time or another.

My goal here was the roller-coaster known as “California Screamin’”…

This is a really long coaster – probably the best ride to line ratio in the world! I love it.

Unfortunately by the time I got here I was simply beat from an day and a half of hiking around in the California sunshine… So I got my ride and then hiked my way around the opposite side of the park to finish the circuit at the stores just inside the gates. I took the time to buy some 60th anniversary swag and then retreated to the hotel to have dinner and rest up for the convention.

Well, yesterday was kind of rediculously fun.

Anaheim is kind of an odd place in that even if you sleep in until 7am, you still can’t really do anything for another two to three hours… The place really doesn’t ‘open’ until 10am.

Having been to Disney before, I knew pretty much how things were going to work when the ropes dropped, so I entered the park at about 9:30 then piddled around the stores along Main Street USA for about 20 minutes, before casually making my way over to the Tomorrowland entrance. They dropped the rope, the Voice Of God on the P.A. opened the park, and I strolled over to Space Mountain to get a SpeedPass first, then waited about ten minutes for the first run of the day.

When the ride finished, everyone who was there took off for the rest of the park because the speedpass wouldn’t ‘activate’ for another 10 mintues – so I got back into the line and walked pretty much right back onto to loading area for ride number two. And when ride two completed the slowpokes were arriving and making the line quite long – but the speedpass kicked in and I walked back into the loading area for round three.

I pondered going for a fourth ride, but my breakfast was threatening to come back to haunt me if I didn’t stop being stupid. 🙂

From there I wandered over to The Matterhorn, which is right next door and did a quick run on that.

I need to mention here that September first and second are like the best time of the year to visit Disney – because school just went back into session pretty much everywhere. So the park is nothing but strollers – which presents its own challenge – but the lines for the bigger attractions are 10-15 minutes long at worst. 🙂

So continuing my counter-clockwise run of the park I walked past the castle, took a photo of Small World sign (and the sign is exactly the same as the first time I was here – probably on purpose), and walked though toontown real quick (still not impressed with it) before ending up in Frontierland and getting in line for Big Thunder Mountain.

Once satisfied with Big Thunder, it was break time – so I got the customary frozen Lemonade and hopped ontop the Mark Twain riverboat for a sit down and unwind around the lake.

Once onboard I got to talking to the throttleman about his boat, and he seemed really happy to have someone take an interest in his rather gorgeous machine. I love the ‘living’ nature of steam engines as they look and sound like living creatures, and this one was no different.

Break time over, it was back to the rides – next up on my route was Pirates of the Carribean…

My timing was perfect, by the way. See, I have this routine that gets me to this part of the park just as it is starting to get stupidly hot becuse the next few rides are all indoors, dark, air conditioned, and slower paced. So after hearing about how dead men tell no tales – repeatedly – it was around the corner to The Haunted Mansion!

Which was closed. 🙁

From here it is on to the last ride in my loop which is the infamous Indiana Jones ride.

I love this ride for its high-tech wizardry of motion controlled cars, projection, and sound. This is also the last ride on my loop, and from here I headed back to the hotel to rest, get some dinner, and then come back for the evening shows! Which I will detail in the next post.

At the airport to hop a flight to L.A…

Tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll be at Disney, and for the first time in, well, forever I will actually get to see the park. Normally I am there with a bunch of folks and it is a whole lot of hurry from one ride to the next to try and pack as much of everyone’s want-list into as few hours as possible.

Not this time.

I plan to get there when they open, and leave when they close… Walk around looking at stuff, maybe hit up some of the more ‘adult’ activities like the behind the scenes tours and such, hang out on a bench somewhere and people watch while enjoying a $30 soda, and catch the evening events that I’ve never seen… Stuff like that. 😀

Oh, and take a lot of pictures.

This trip my camera will be my iphone. Normally I pack a very expensive quasi-point and shoot G12 which takes amazing photos – but it is large, needs a neck strap which is unfun for more than about 15 minutes, and I wind up worrying about it more than what I’m taking pictures of. I figure I have the phone with me anyway, and Apple trumps up the camera quite a bit, so – we shall see if it can really do double duty.

Thursday is a day of rest and I don’t plan to do much of anything but lounge around the hotel.

Friday the convention starts, and from that point until Monday morning I’ll probably be involved in something or other. Most of my ‘want to do’ list with regard to the convention happens on Friday; autographs from Bonnie Zacherle, Lauren Faust, and John de Lanci, two creator / writer panels, and the VIP reception in the evening… The latter requiring a sport coat and tie.

Saturday and Sunday will be typical convention fare for me; trips to the dealer’s room and random event attendance, but mostly hanging out at the hotel bar or restaurant with the dozen folks from SecondLife I know who are also attending.

Monday morning I’ll be on a flight back to Denver, which gets in at around noon, and once home I plan to rest up for what will undoubtedly be a hellish Tuesday being as I will have been gone for a week.

So let’s see here…

In the last month I’ve tried a few new MMOs. This time around it was FFXIV, as I mentioned previously, in which I made it through the intro content before the oddity of the setting just started to wear on me… I just don’t like the Final Fantasy genera I guess – it’s too much of a mishmash of gritty realism and weird bad acid trip for me to really care much about why I’m having to kill ten bizarrely alien critters. So I uninstalled it.

I then re-installed WoW as it is free until level 20 now… I’m happy to report that I am completely over the addiction, as I got terminally bored with it in about an hour and uninstalled it.

Next up was WildStar. I really, really want to like WildStar – the writing and art direction are amazing and right up my alley, but the game just lets the story and art down so badly. I played for a few days before the frustration with game mechanics overwhelmed the desire to want to play it – and I uninstalled it.

After this was a very brief stint in TESO. They have, once again, redone the starting instance of Coldharbor… I think Coldharbor has been completely redone like eight times now – but the rest of the game tends to be the same broken mess it was during alpha. Yep – uninstalled it too.

And now I find myself back in ArcheAge, and having fun with it.

I was in the early, early alpha for the North American version of the game and it was great, then it released and the first two months were pure hell; server instability, Trion trying to figure out how to handle the popularity, and the game was absolutely rife with bots, cheats, hacks, and other such game-breaking things.

It was not uncommon to actually see accounts teleporting inside the vendors on the intercontinental trade routes – skipping the hours long travel and player pirates or brigands that were the risk to the reward. Then the economy tanked because of duped items, and eventually the cash shop was really the only thing left standing – and all this was the first 30 days…

I had managed to plan and play well enough to score an amazing bit of property in a perfect location on three long trade routes with easy access to the ocean for trade with the other continents – then the servers were down for a week, and when they came back up one of the land bots took my property in milliseconds and Trion was unresponsive to my problem.

So I bailed.

But here we are a year later and most of the stupendously broken things have been fixed, and I’ve been once again wandering the world looking for fame and fortune – and having some very good success I might add. Some friends of mine are still living in ArcheAge, so I have a good basis to start with, and I’ve been working on getting to level 55 as time permits.

ArcheAge is a PvP game, so there has been plenty of that as well. I am happy to report that I still have ‘it’ – whatever ‘it’ is – and I can hold my own out in the world. I’m not one for starting a fight, but I damn sure finish them when I get jumped.

I play what is called a ‘skullknight’, one of the tankier classes out of the 120 classes in the game, but I’ve set it up to be a bit of a sleeper in that no one is expecting that much crowd control and damage from a defense build… One of my spells is something called ‘imprison’, which creates an impassible bubble around my character out to about 10 meters in any direction – and once that is cast, whomever attacked me is locked inside that bubble with me for the next 15 seconds – and that tends to not end well for them. 😉

Something similar happens if my clipper gets boarded out in the ocean, in that I pop imprison and accelerate – the enemy are trapped in the bubble, but the ship is not, so they just slide off the aft end of the ship as I sail away.

It’s fun.

I hope to have land and a farm here soon, so I can resume where I left off a year ago with trade… If anyone reading this is interested, drop me a note. I’m on the server called “Kyrios”.

Lastly for this update I will be in Anaheim the first week of September; I fly out of Denver on the 31st and get back on the 7th. I’m there for EQLA on the 4th to the 7th, and a whole lot of folks I know (Aryte, Kei, Aurkae, Clinton, Kali, etc., etc.) are all getting together there for a weekend of total chaos. So the few days I am there before the show are just to slum around Disney and have a bit of a relax before the weekend.

If anyone just happens to be in Anaheim the fist week of next month, let me know!