Nomadic Gamer

Real Life

Real Life

Nom Nom

stargrace 1 Comment

A post that’s not about gaming for once, what’s gone wrong? Well, nothing. I’ve been having fun leveling my baby dirge up in EQ2 (yes, that’s right I’ve gone over to the evil side. Tired of betraying the troubador back and forth I decided to start up a counter part much like I have with the illusionist and coercer). She’s level 32 right now, and I need to make gear for her and some spell upgrades. I also played Guild Wars last night, and blogged about it because I was just too dang excited, which left me with nothing to write about this morning.

Tonight Nostalgia meets up in EQ1, and we’re off to the Plane of Hate. For those truly old school, you’ll remember it as a raid zone. It’s got some raid encounters left in it still, but it’s now a group zone. You can access it by buying a stone from an npc in Neriak and turning it in to the plane of Tranquility off of PoK. Who, I forget. How much it costs, I also forget. It should be a blast though. You can also hand the stone in to your resident guild hall gnome, and he’ll set the guild portal to hate for you. How kind.

I do all of my groceries (weekly) at a place here in Ottawa called Farm Boy. I don’t own a microwave (I know how horrible eh) and I don’t buy anything frozen. I do love cooking, and I love the new foods that are out there and experimenting. So when I saw the above two items at the market, I decided to pick them up. Now, the amusing thing about the small box that contains a ready to eat tuna salad – is that it’s from Thailand. No big deal, but on the back of the can it says that the Tuna is from British Columbia. Thank you for selling us our tuna back! The meal is actually delicious, it’s almost like a tuna version of vegetable soup, minus the soup portion.

The sweet and sour noodles were VERY spicy, and amazing. I added broccoli and chicken to the dish, and it made way too much of course. The rice noodles didn’t exactly turn out as I would have liked. I’ve never cooked them before and it said to soak them for 3 minutes in boiling water which was not nearly enough time and they ended up weird and chewy.

Tonight? Good ‘ol BBQ chicken legs with rice.

I promise I’ll post something about gaming either later tonight, or tomorrow..

Real Life

2008 Summer Olympic Opening Ceremony

stargrace 1 Comment

I’m not huge on sports, aside from hockey which is a given, but I do love the Olympics. This year is the 29th summer Olympics, and I watched (and am still watching) the opening ceremonies right now. Our Canadian athletes made their way across the stadium floor and it’s hard not to burst into cheers from my living room.

We qualified for 25/28 of the events, missing out on Volleyball, Handball, and Basketball. I was sad to hear about the basketball bit, though there are reasons behind it (like our main athlete not wanting to partake this year because he’s been so many times before, and is just so busy).

I loved the beauty of the ceremony. I loved what was done with the ‘footprint’ fireworks leading up to the building, it was great to watch and I got chills. All of the cultural aspects were well done as well.

It’s not the winter Olympics.. but for now it will do. Vancouver in 2010, see you there!

Gaming Real Life

This and That

stargrace 2 Comments

I wasn’t really in a gaming mood tonight – yes, I know, did hell freeze over (would be nice to get out of this heat that’s for sure). I spent the afternoon in EQ1 for the most part. My beastlord reached level 48, and the druid finally hit level 51. Actually she was 2% from 51 and died, but a kind cleric rez’d me for no charge and I wandered off for one more kill to ding 51. Very pleased with that progress. Afterward I headed to MPG (Muramite proving Grounds.. though I probably spelled that wrong) and exp’d some with an old friend of mine.

Anyhow, as I was saying. Tonight I wasn’t exactly in the mood to game, so I settled down for a few hours of DAZ Studio’s, which I’m still learning. There are two important things I need to learn how to do. Well, three I suppose. One would be applying textures. Another would be applying backgrounds, and the third would be lighting which I can’t seem to figure out for my life. Me and computers just simply do not get along. The 300 paged manual that comes with DAZ could probably help if I had any idea where to start. I’ll have to look up some other tutorials for it no doubt.

The screen shot above can be seen in far better quality (and size) here. Just click on the image if it doesn’t bring you to the full view right away. I still have no outfits to render for my characters, but the face shots are coming along nicely. I tried to frame this one after Stargrace in EQ2, who is a wood elf. It didn’t turn out too badly. Thinking of using one of these images I create to make a signature. We’ll see how that goes. I’d really like a dark elf texture, and I do have one but it’s not for V4.2 which means it’s not really going to work for me. I suppose I could colour it by hand in photoshop, but we’ll just have to see. Some times, it’s just nice to take a break.

Gaming Real Life

Harbor

stargrace 4 Comments

The harbor of Khal is an amazing sight. Especially when people’s boats are all parked in various places along the docks (as pictured above). Last night I dipped into Vanguard for a short while with Gozad and Growlius. Not on mains this time though – for once we all played lowbies. I was on my 18 psionicist, Growlius his 22 disciple, and Gozad on his 22 necromancer.

We all got the diplomacy necklace we needed to work towards our mount, and headed to Qalia to work on hunter’s league quests. We did not have a tank, but things went fairly smooth anyhow.

Shoulders were first, and it was very little effort despite the more interesting pulls we had from time to time.

Psionicists work slightly different then enchanters in EQ1/EQ2 in that they can only mez one mob at a time (or at least, that’s all I can do right now at level 19) but we can also charm one mob, and AOE stun for 8 seconds. When we mez (I’ve mentioned this before) we actually phase the mob right out of exhistence – and in order for anyone to actually attack the mob again, we have another spell that phases them back in. That’s right, no more breaking mez – at all.

One of my favorite tactics is making sure I cast my duplicate spell (it taunts the mob and replicates it, but basically does 0 dmg) before I unphase it. That way when I do unphase, the mob is already attacking the duplicate of itself, and I have a chance to snare it and nuke it a few times before that breaks / wears off.

Psionicists also have a world wide channel attached to one of their spells, it’s called ‘mind’ and it’s great. When you have the buff on you’re auto joined to it. A handy tool to ask others questions you may have about your class.

After we’d completed the shoulder quest I decided to take a break for a bit – being exceptionally worn out after a fairly exciting day. Thanks to Tipa over at Westkarana, I’m now writing for Beckett Massive Online Gamer – about EverQuestII. A writing opportunity came up and she happened to mention my name. Wow how amazing is that? I have my first interview next week, and yes I’m very nervous. These newsstand magazines are actually printed and sold in multiple places, you may have heard of them before for their sports magazines. My first two articles (as long as everything goes well) should come out for the September issue.

I think I’m still stunned over that one.

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