#Blaugust Day 12: Liebster 2: The New Batch

I have been Liebstered once more, this time by Tamrielo. I'm not going to try to come up with another 11 facts about myself; that was hard enough the first time. I will answer his questions however. Rumors that I am using this as free content because I can't think of anything better to write today are absolutely false and should be disregarded. The computer is your friend.

The computer desires answers

What is the best spell to cast?

Time Stop, no contest. Casting Time Stop gives you the opportunity to set up a cascade of fireballs, lightning bolts, and delayed blast fireballs all capped off by a prismatic sphere to utterly annihilate your foe. Not that I have any experience doing this, nope, not me.

What food item(s) from a game do you want to eat above any others?

I'm extremely curious about that goblin cheese. If the Illuminati want it, it must be some impressive stuff.

You’ve got an infinite supply of one consumable, and can never carry any others. Which consumable do you choose?

Fairies in bottles. Infinite fairies in bottles mean you can brute force your way through any problem.

#Blaugust Day 12: Liebster 2: The New Batch
Cures what ails you

You have to choose a race and class that you’ve never played seriously before. What do you pick?

Bugbear warrior. Bugbears are clearly the chosen race, and are particularly good at beating people up.

What game did you think you would hate but actually loved?

Team Fortress 2. I got it in the Orange Box because Half-Life 2 and Portal. Turned out to actually be a whole lot of fun.

What game did you think you would love but actually hated?

Ultima VIII. I was a huge fan of Ultima, and the idea of taking the fight to the Guardian's world was really interesting. The game was... not good.

Pick a zone from any game to live in. Why?

Hrm, maybe pre-Cataclysm Loch Modan? I always liked it, and it's a reasonably pleasant terrain and climate. Good fishing too.

You can excise one class from every future game. Which? Why?

Warrior. Replace with something more interesting than 'guy who hits people with sharp objects'

What’s your favorite story?

The Wizard of Oz

What hobby does no one (yet) know you have?

I'm a (very) amateur birder. I'm not going for a Big Year anytime soon or going way out of my way to hunt down rare birds, but I do actively keep an eye out for birds when going about my life, and keep record of new or interesting ones I see.

What is your favorite secret shame? >:D

I enjoy bubblegum pop music way too much.

#Blaugust Day 10: Liebster


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?

On the Liebster Award

Blaugust Post #8


Grace called it a blogging disease, I think of it as more of a chain letter. Either way, thanks for the Liebster award!


Here are my 11 random facts:

  1. I am the youngest person on the regular cast of Aggrochat.
  2. I’m a decent ice skater, and used to play hockey.
  3. However, if you put me on roller skates, I just fall down a lot.
  4. I will admit to liking a single song by N’SYNC. Said song is produced by one of my favorite EDM artists.
  5. I was given my first computer (a laptop the size of a briefcase) when I was 4. I could barely carry it.
  6. I have beaten Mega Man 8 more times than I can count. While in school, I beat it every time I came home, which meant about twice a year.
  7. WoW was technically my first MMO (and like Grace I didn’t play before Burning Crusade), but before WoW I was in the beta for Wish.
  8. I have an irrational love for shapeshifter characters. This has manifested in me playing a Druid whenever it comes up, but it isn’t limited to just that.
  9. I buy rulebooks for Pen and Paper RPGs I’ll likely never play, just to see what’s interesting in them.
  10. As far as food goes, I believe that cinnamon makes almost everything better.
  11. Despite claims to the contrary, I’m not a robot.

And here are Grace’s Questions:

1.Why do you blog?
I blog to get my thoughts out to whoever might be interested in reading them. In some ways the podcast serves as this, but the blog helps for more long-form thoughts.

2. What was your favorite childhood cartoon show?
The answer to this question depends on how you’d like to define “childhood”. I remember really liking the Powerpuff Girls when I was younger (It premiered when I was 7). Later, I was part of the Toonami generation, and really liked Dragonball Z.

3. Fantasy or Sci-Fi?
Fantasy, full stop. Exceptions are made for Sci-fi that’s really just pretending to not be Fantasy, like Star Wars or Mass Effect.

4. What’s the most amazing place you’ve ever been? I was too young to gamble (or anything else, really) when I was there, but I really loved Las Vegas. It’s just an amazing spectacle, and I haven’t seen the like anywhere else.

5. Pizza: Chicago or New York?
In general, Chicago Pizza is better than New York Pizza. However, it’s nearly impossible to actually get good Chicago-style pizza outside of Chicago while a bunch of places do a decent imitation of New York-style pizza around the country, so in most locations the opposite is true.

6. If you could only pick one game genre to play for the rest of your life, what would it be?
I’m a big fan of Action-RPGs. If I can stretch that definition far enough to fit Diablo, Kingdom Hearts, and Elder Scrolls under the same umbrella, so much the better.

7. What inspired your character name?
This one’s easy. There’s some more story there, but that’s the name I took for my Druid in WoW when we started playing Horde-side, and it ended up sticking.

8. What is your greatest gaming moment or achievement?
I like soloing ridiculous content, and every so often I drag other people into it. I managed to solo the first boss of AQ40 at level 80 (it required a silly amount of Nature Resist gear), but I’m more proud of getting enough people in to clear the instance. I’d previously had groups that even at level 80, could not get past Twin Emperors, so doing it with a few guildies was a pretty awesome experience.

9. Do you share your love of games with your real-world friends and family, or keep it to the internet?
I keep a Pikachu Amiibo on my desk at work, so my love of games isn’t exactly a secret. I’ve gotten into discussions about games with family and co-workers, but a lot of my current co-workers play World of Tanks, which I don’t have a lot of interest in.

10. Have you ever had a really weird pet?
Nope. I had a dog once, and when I move somewhere that allows them, probably will again.

11. What is your favorite type of environment/biome in-game and IRL?
I’ve always been a big fan of forests. I grew up in a location where nature trails were readily available, so I spent a decent amount of time walking and riding through shaded areas in the summer. In games, forests (but not jungles) tend to be relatively quiet and mysterious, but they sometimes have the “twisty little maze of passages” thing going on. My tolerance for that trope depends on how much you’re expected to rely on trial-and-error.


And 11 more questions:

  1. Why do you blog? Yes, I know it’s a repeat. Deal with it.
  2. What’s the first game you remember playing?
  3. Dogs or Cats?
  4. Do you have a favorite villain?
  5. What are your thoughts on escort missions?
  6. Borrowing from the “stereotypical interview questions” list, What would you say is your biggest weakness? (I did actually get this question a lot last year.)
  7. What character archetype do you find yourself playing most often?
  8. Other than games and the means to play them, do you own any gaming-related items?
  9. Because I know who these questions are going to, I can ask this one: What’s your favorite system for Tabletop RPGs?
  10. What upcoming games (if any) are you looking forward to?

Because Thalen hasn’t beaten me to it, Tamrielo and Kodra, have fun with this one.