Thalen

#Blaugust Day 10: Liebster

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I have been tagged by Grace with the Liebster. She has questions, I have answers. Let’s see here.

11 Facts about Me

  1. I own approximately 50,000 comic books. They are mostly superhero comics, and are very well organized.
  2. I’ve never broken a bone.
  3. I got my first computer when I was 4; it was a TI 99/4A and I was hooked from then on.
  4. I wear hiking boots most days. They’re very nice boots though.
  5. I own all the Street Fighter RPG books that White Wolf released. It’s a better system than you might think.
  6. The only sport I pay any attention to is soccer, and that mostly just at World Cup time. If we had a club in my area, I might actually go to matches but that’s not happening any time soon.
  7. No matter how much I try to change my sleep schedule, I remain a night owl. It’s just how I am.
  8. The first book I read (not counting picture books and such) was The Wizard of Oz. It’s still a favorite.
  9. Washington, DC is my favorite city in America. I’ve been there 4 times and there’s still so much more to see.
  10. For most types of games I prefer PC over consoles. JRPGs are the main exception.
  11. I play FPS with keyboard and mouse.

Why do you blog?

I blog as an excuse to write. It’s something I like to do, but without some concrete goal in mind I tend never to do it. Therefore, blog.

What was your favorite childhood cartoon show?

I have to pick just one? Man, it’s hard to think back and decide what was my favorite then as opposed to what I like now. Probably Duck Tales, I think. Duck Tales was pretty awesome.

Fantasy or Sci-Fi?

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

What’s the most amazing place you’ve ever been?

Tokyo is incredible in ways I have difficulty putting into words. I had been to large cities in America such as Chicago and New York, and I still wasn’t entirely prepared for the scale of Tokyo.

Pizza: Chicago or New York?

New York. Chicago has excellent pizza-flavored casseroles; they are not pizza.

If you could only pick one game genre to play for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Hmmm, toughie. I think the 4X genre (Civilization and that sort). Infinite replayability.

What inspired your character name?

I needed a dwarven sounding name, and I just started throwing syllables together until I came up with something that didn’t sound stupid. The original Thalen Firebeard was a dwarven mage I played in the first D&D 3.0 game I was in. I reused the name for my dwarven hunter in World of Warcraft, and it ended up becoming my main internet identity.

What is your greatest gaming moment or achievement?

Hard to choose. Possibly the Sindragosa kill that Belghast has mentioned in the past where I was one of just a couple of people still up and got the killing blow on her just before she put all of us in ice blocks.

Do you share your love of games with your real-world friends and family, or keep it to the internet?

Most of my real-life friends aren’t big into online games, but we play local multiplayer games together on occasion. And we play plenty of tabletop RPGs and board games on a regular basis.

Have you ever had a really weird pet?

It wasn’t really a pet, but we had a quail in a terrarium for a couple of weeks after it hit my dad’s truck and he brought it home. It turned out to still be alive, so we kept an eye on it for while and he eventually took it back out and released it.

What is your favorite type of environment/biome in-game and IRL?

Forest, definitely. Preferably nice open forest without too much undergrowth so it’s easy to walk through.

And now I’m supposed to tag some people. Finding people who haven’t already been tagged for this is not easy. If I pick someone whose already been Liebstered, I apologize. My tags:

Aywren

Dallian

Wolfy

And my 11 questions:

  1. What movie, game, or book do you love that noone else seems to?
  2. Birds: Fine feathered friends or freaky tiny dinosaurs?
  3. What’s a place you’ve never traveled to and would like to?
  4. Mac or PC?
  5. What’s the first video game you remember playing?
  6. How quickly do you tend to adopt new technology?
  7. What video game character can you just not stand, and why?
  8. What’s your favorite non-gaming hobby?
  9. How many cars have you owned over the course of your life?
  10. Would you rather live in an urban, suburban, or rural area?
  11. Do spiders and insects bother you?

#Blaugust Day 9: Books

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I’ve always identified as a reader. Reading books isn’t just something I do when I have to to learn something, or even as occasional recreation; it’s a major element of who I am. I’ve taken some pride in the fact that I’m always reading; whenever I finish a book, I always have another to start on and I make a point of reading at least a few pages so I’m never in between books.

Recently I’ve not been reading as much and I’ve been a bit disappointed in myself because of it. Between work, gaming, family time and so on, I haven’t been carving out time to read like I used to. Where I would normally be reading at least a book a week on average, I’ve only read two in the past month, and one of those was a reread of a book I had already read once.

I’m going to try to make an effort to change this, to take more time to read again. It’s always been one of my favorite pastimes and there are so many books I want to read that I would hate to not get to. As such, I’m setting a short term goal for myself. For the remainder of Blaugust I’m going to read at least one new book each week, and I’ll review each one here once I’ve finished it. If I get back up to speed and read more than one in a week, then I’ll review multiple books that week.

First up is a science fiction classic that I’ve been wanting to read for years and finally got ahold of at a recent library sale; The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison. Hopefully I’ll be reporting back next weekend with a glowing review.

#Blaugust Day 8: Legion

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So the news that everyone who's still playing or at least following World of Warcraft was revealed a couple days ago. The new expansion will be titled Legion, and will presumably be chock-ful-o-demons. I don't think this came as much of a surprise to anyone; it's been clear for a while that the player base has tired of orcs, orcs, and more orcs and the Burning Legion are the go-to bad guys that haven't been focused on in a while.

He's still out there
(As an aside, I considered doing a joke post where I pretended to misunderstand all the talk about Legion as being about the X-Men character. Really though, I think I have one reader who would find it hilarious, a few more who would actually get the joke, and everyone else would just be confused. I still may write something about that character in the future though, because he's amazing.)

#Blaugust Day 8: Legion
I think the hair is his secondary mutation
It's been interesting watching the reaction. It seems pretty muted on the whole, but that may just be because of the section of the Internet I hang out in. Most of my gaming friends aren't playing WoW anymore either, so I think for a lot of them their interest is just a matter of curiosity and nostalgia. I'm sure if the excitement is higher than I think and subscription numbers go back up or even level off, Activision/Blizzard will let us know.

On the whole, I think this mostly just drives home to me that my time with WoW is truly done. I played for 9 years and enjoyed it for most of that time, but after nearly 2 years out I don't really feel any desire to log back in. I don't hate the game, and I have no desire for it to get shut down or anything like that. The World of Warcraft has moved on without me, and I without it.  And really, that's a good thing.

#Blaugust Day 8: Legion

by
So the news that everyone who’s still playing or at least following World of Warcraft was revealed a couple days ago. The new expansion will be titled Legion, and will presumably be chock-ful-o-demons. I don’t think this came as much of a surprise to anyone; it’s been clear for a while that the player base has tired of orcs, orcs, and more orcs and the Burning Legion are the go-to bad guys that haven’t been focused on in a while.

Sargeras
He’s still out there

(As an aside, I considered doing a joke post where I pretended to misunderstand all the talk about Legion as being about the X-Men character. Really though, I think I have one reader who would find it hilarious, a few more who would actually get the joke, and everyone else would just be confused. I still may write something about that character in the future though, because he’s amazing.)

I think the hair is his secondary mutation
It’s been interesting watching the reaction. It seems pretty muted on the whole, but that may just be because of the section of the Internet I hang out in. Most of my gaming friends aren’t playing WoW anymore either, so I think for a lot of them their interest is just a matter of curiosity and nostalgia. I’m sure if the excitement is higher than I think and subscription numbers go back up or even level off, Activision/Blizzard will let us know.

On the whole, I think this mostly just drives home to me that my time with WoW is truly done. I played for 9 years and enjoyed it for most of that time, but after nearly 2 years out I don’t really feel any desire to log back in. I don’t hate the game, and I have no desire for it to get shut down or anything like that. The World of Warcraft has moved on without me, and I without it. And really, that’s a good thing.