Mabel the Chicken
stargrace 
I’m experimenting this year with parfait yarn and making plushies, in crochet. Here’s my very first one that I made back in January – a chicken named Mabel.
Too Hot
I am not a fan of summer, and this summer has been particularly brutal. There’s no air conditioning in my house, and while we have purchased a small window version for a single bedroom, it can’t keep up with the multiple 40C days we’ve had on end. The heat means it’s uncomfortable to be in front of my computer, and when I am there I have no energy to do much of anything.
With The War Within just a few weeks away from launching, and the pre-patch events in game, I have wandered my way back to World of Warcraft, comfort game of choice. I started placing auctions on the AH once a day on my two accounts, and have gotten some pretty nice sales. I am still absolutely convinced that mega servers are in the works for Warcraft and that we’ll see them before the end of TWW.
Last time I posted I was going on about the many glitches we had seen in the pre-patch, and a lot of those have been solved, but a few still linger. Players are unable to remove gold from their banks without using a weird work around (if the banks are full). Cross realm guilds are a thing – but you cannot use the guild bank at the moment if you’re not from that server. Uniques are not appearing properly in warband banks if you log in with a character who already has the unique on them. You still can’t apply azerite abilities to gear when you loot them.
Speaking of azerite, +speed (and longstrider) have been heavily nerfed, much to the disappointment of speed runners. The influx of raw gold from doing dungeons/raids was also moved down back to pre-pre-patch levels. I think we all knew that one wasn’t going to last and wasn’t intended.
Besides the pre-patch in retail, I’ve also been (slowly) working my way through the Pandaria remix. There’s no way I’ll obtain ‘all the things’ but I suppose it’s ‘fun’ and at least I’m collecting stuff. I just dislike the FOMO of the event. One sure way for me to NOT do an event is to make it temporary. The pressure and fear of missing out is just annoying to my gaming style.
There’s still some Wurm Online (Unlimited) EVE, and GW2 in the works, too, so you might see a post about that in the future. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
Blaugust – but not really
It’s that time of year where normally I would sign up for Blaugust and make a post for every day during the month of August – but this year, I didn’t sign up. I’m not interested in the added pressure of trying to make a post, or the temporary social aspect. I get that this is very much a ‘me’ thing, but I’ve been writing my blog for 18 years now, and if I’m not inspired to write then I just don’t write.
That being said, for those who are interested I think it’s a fantastic event, and a good time to get started. If you enjoy reading blogs it’s also a good time to find some new ones, and if the action on Mastodon is any indication, there’s a lot of participants this year. There’s an active discord for those who are into that, too.
Day 1 of TWW Pre-Patch is ROUGH
Well, after a lengthy downtime World of Warcraft is back up, welcoming in The War Within pre-patch. Except not really. There are SO many bugs at the moment. Here’s a short list of the ones I’ve personally experienced so far.
- Public craft orders have a blank screen (using default UI with zero addons)
- The Warband bank is disabled until further notice (even though it’s one of the main features being promoted)
- The login screen is now basically useless for anyone who has characters with the same name, or more than 30 characters. We can’t sort by any anything, and when I manually set my characters to an order, the game just changed it around.
- There’s currently a fishing exploit involving the DF nets that was fixed months ago and it’s back in game
- You can’t trade cross realm any more right now
- You can’t remove gold from your guild bank
That’s just the small amount I’ve had to deal with. There are other changes that have taken place that are not bugs, but have greatly decreased my personal QoL – one of them is the latest changes to macros. I normally use an addon called GSE to create combat macros, which is easier on my hands when I’m suffering from a MS relapse. Macros now have incredible limitations and new rules to abide by, and GSE in specific has to be completely changed. Thankfully, I have found an active developer who worked on the retribution paladin macro, so I am up and running on that one character at least, but the others will have to wait.
There’s also the matter of raw gold being tuned upwards – is this intended? Who knows! It’s there though, so get farming before it isn’t. After a break away from game, I did the warband bank quest chain (the rest of the story arrives at a later date) and then wandered around admiring all of the bugs. Which ones have you come across? What are you doing to entertain yourself in this pre-patch? Let me know in commends! As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.
Suitcase Challenge Day 71/90: Bye bye Porpoise
It was bound to happen sooner or later. I was mining in an anomaly with a retriever & porpoise combo on (what was until then) a quiet day – and suddenly someone showed up on d-scan. Normally, I don’t constantly run compression on the porpoise because it makes the ship a sitting duck that cannot move until it’s out of siege. I turn on compression only when I have to, and I check first to make sure for the minute or so that I can’t move, all is well.
This time it was just bad luck on every front. First. I attempted to warp off to a safe, but I didn’t confirm anything and instead was looking at my other monitor moving the retriever to a different safe. Turns out, the porpoise might have been out of siege, but I didn’t actually warp her off grid, so when the attacker showed up, I was basically already dead – but it didn’t have to be that way. The porpoise is tank fit, with 97k EHP, and drones. There was just 1 person on me, and it was taking them a LONG time to do any damage, in the meantime, my drones were hacking away at them (warrior II), and I thought if I could just swap the retriever to another ship, I might make it.
Unfortunately, it did not happen the way I wanted it to, and I lost the porpoise. Thankfully, this ship is really not THAT expensive, and in a bonus event, the compression pieces both dropped as loot, and those things are HUGE, so unless you have over 3500m3 of space, you can’t just haul them away. The attacker even left my frozen corpses behind so I grabbed those. I flew in with a hauler, grabbed 80m worth of loot that they had to leave behind (including my compressed ore) and aside from the loss of the hull, it still ended up being an ISK positive day. For now I’ve decided not to bother replacing the porpoise, I know I can compress with the Orca, but I rarely uncloak it these days because I’m terrified of the ISK loss. The cost just seems to keep going up – when I bought my first one it was 450m and now they’re well over 2b just for the hull.
Compression is a big deal when you’re mining out in space. Ore is huge and awkward, and ideally you want to remain out on the grid as long as possible. It was only a matter of time before I lost some ships, I’m just glad it wasn’t any worse than it was.
Fly your way o7