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Forty On Internet

This weekend was an extremely interesting one for a whole bunch of reasons.  Firstly instead of my wife flying home from her week grading AP exams in Kansas City I decided to go up and meet her.  KC is only a 3 1/2 hour drive, and the roads are great…  albeit travelling across Kansas is a boring mess with both spotty cell phone and radio coverage.  While travelling I played this game called “find the radio station with the least static”.  I have not joined the realm of paid radio, because around Tulsa I prefer to listen to our NPR station.  Once I got close to the KC Metro I thankfully found one located in Topeka that seemed to come in just fine, which oddly turned into a Classical Station in the metro proper.  I took a half day Friday and after piddling around the house and doing a few last minute chores I managed to leave around 2:30 which put me pulling into the hotel around 6 pm.  Firstly I have to say that we had never stayed in a Drury Inn before, but it is definitely a hotel chain I would be interested in within the near future.  Not that I partook of it but they offered a free dinner buffet each evening from 5pm to 7pm coupled with happy hour at the same time.  We did however hit up the free breakfast Saturday morning which consisted of biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs, sausage patties and a plethora of pastry options.  It seemed like a shame that quite literally we just slept there the one night, but I think when we go to Pax South next year we might see where the Drury Inn locations are in that town because it was pretty spiffy.

The other big thing that happened on Saturday other than running around Kansas City was the fact that I turned Forty.  Having a birthday on the internet is a really interesting thing and as we roamed around town, each time I stopped to check my phone I had another deluge of well wishers.  I cannot say enough how much I appreciate this, because wow it was just overwhelming in a good way.  There are times you wonder if you have much effect on other people, and then there are other times where they completely collapse upon you with feels.  This was one of the later times, and I thought about a proper way to represent this feeling on the blog but failed miserably.  The good is the warm fuzzies I felt all day long… the bad was the fact that my phone battery died at some point during the day before we got home from all the notifications.  Turning Forty feels so damned strange because in truth I don’t feel that much different than I did in my 20s.  I am maybe a little slower to anger, maybe a little less impulsive… but overall I think I am the same “Bel” I have always been.  The internet has been a strange equalizer, because I don’t feel nearly as out of touch as I thought my dad was when he turned Forty.  It feels like I am still very much on the first wave of memes, before they enter the public conscious.  The one place I feel like I am lagging behind horribly is in music, but namely because I don’t listen to a lot of it anymore.  I stumble onto new music via YouTube or google music, but I am not actively engaged in the indie scene the way I once was.

Bibliophiles

I would say that you could tell our ages by our activities, but then again we aren’t really do anything we have not always done.  When it comes to wandering around a town we have a pecking order of priorities.  The number one being hitting old bookstores, and namely finding out if a town has any Half Price Books locations.  It is extremely hard to describe this store to the uninitiated.  To call it a used book store is a bit of an understatement, and to call it anything else…  well I lack the proper words.  Essentially it is the best bookstore chain my wife and I have ever found, and namely because of the breadth of material they have within them…  that and the extremely high turnover rate.  We could easily hit the same HPB every single week and keep finding new stuff.  I personally go there for the SciFi, RPG, Comics and Software sections…  all of which are generally amazing, and my wife goes there for teaching materials which are also amazing. Then there are all of the little neat incidentals that they have like Doctor Who memorabilia, LEGO stuff, and a random assortment of cool action figures and other geek accouterments.  The highlight for me will always be the pen and paper section because I am constantly looking for gems.  When we were in St Louis I found a copy of the unofficial Headhunter expansion for Rifts, which I picked up because it was extremely cheap and also pretty.

This time around I mostly window shopped finding a neat Menzoberanzan boxed set, that was sadly incomplete missing several maps…  and an original “Cthulhu” version of the Deities and Demigods book.  The last bit would have been something I picked up… were it not $75.  It was cool but not that price tag worth of cool.  The thing I was a big shocked about was the lack of Palladium stuff, which makes me wonder if that system never really caught on in KC… or if it caught on so much that no one ever sold their books.  My friends however lacked onto the GURPS books when I tweeted out the pictures, which is a system that always seemed interesting but I never really got into.  I figured I only had room for a single one size fits all pen and paper system in my life, and I went down the Palladium route.  The truth is… we go to a lot of HPB locations.  There are none in the Tulsa area, but several times a year we head down the turnpike to Oklahoma City just to hit the three locations there.  We’ve been to most of the Half Price Book locations in the Dallas area, including the giant flag ship store downtown.  In addition to that we have been to Kansas City, St Louis MO, Every Location on the way to San Antonio TX, Madison WI, and if we make it to any of the other towns where they exist… you can bet we will go there as well.  Other than HPB I hit up a Micro Center…. which was way smaller than the St Louis store, and a few Targets and Toys R Us looking for the new Destiny Megablocks that are supposedly now out in the wild.  Then there was of course a trip to IKEA to try and find the one thing that was out of stock when we were in St Louis.  It was a great day and according to my Pebble Time we wound up walking around 14,000 steps.

The Homefront

On the home front, all of the animals missed my wife… and when she has not been outside partaking of the back patio… she has had two or three of them surrounding her.  On the flower front I regret to say that the heat claimed our first victim.  We had this hybrid mini petunia plant that was a mix of red and white flowers.  Several weeks ago when we were in St Louis the heat and potentially the change in watering habits claimed the red flower from that pot.  The white one however seemed to be holding on, and we had removed the dead red plant hoping that it would be able to spread out and claim the extra area for its own.  Life was going peachy until this week when the extreme temperatures had a serious effect on the plant.  When we got home Saturday night it was pretty crispy, and while I am still watering it hoping that maybe it will spring back… we’ve replaced it for the time being with the above pictured plant.  The greenhouse around the corner from our house is currently having a 20%-50% off sale on all plants, so we took that as a good sign that we should go ahead and replace it with something else.  So far it is happy, but the blue plant has only actually been seated in our back yard for less than 24 hours.  Like always I have no real clue what the plants are by name other than the made up names that I end up calling them.  My neighbors probably think I am absolutely insane because I talk to them while I water them.  I treat my flowers the same way I treat my other pets…. which might be odd or insane but screw it… it makes me happy.

All in all it was a great weekend, and I am thankful that I took today off to recuperate before heading back to work.  Other than the above… I have been spending a lot of time in Rift but that is a story for another day.  Thanks again for all of the Birthday wishes.  Each and every one of you out there are amazing and I am thankful to have you in my life.

I

am sitting down to write this Thursday night after having just come from watching the Warcraft movie.  Firstly let me state that I am going to do my best to keep this spoiler free, even though in truth the story that the film is based on is now multiple decades old.  I attended the movie with quite possibly the perfect person I could have in the grand scheme of things.  I went with my friend Vernie, or at least that is the character folks would know him by.  On November 24th of 2004 the two of us farmed our little asses off to be able to purchase the guild charter for House Stalwart, a guild that still stands living and breathing today.  I have to admit I went into watching this movie with a lot of conflicting emotions.  A lot of time has passed since those heady days over ten years ago, and my feelings for Warcraft and the franchise as a whole have evolved over the years.  I also had a bit of trepidation going into the picture seeing as I have seen many fondly remembered franchises end up marred by the churning machine that is Hollywood.  I wanted to believe that this movie could do at least an adequate job of encompassing my memories and feelings and placing them on the big screen.  When I found out that my local theater was showing the film on Thursday night, I purchased two tickets without even checking with Vernie first to see if he was interested.  Thankfully he was, but otherwise I would have gone by myself because I had to know one way or another what the film ultimately would be.

Firstly I have to say that overall I am very pleased with the film.  This is not a film that is going to win Oscars, but nor do I think that every film should be that.  I grew up during the 80s, in an era when it was perfectly okay to make an exciting science fiction or fantasy adventure film without trying to aspire to pretense.  I could sit here and knit pick little details, and complain about minor flaws… but instead I decided to embrace the joy of seeing this setting that I have spent so much of my time involved with spread out on the screen before me.  If you have ever loved Warcraft, then there is likely magic to be found in this film for you.  There was something uniquely mesmerizing as I saw setting after setting that I recognized immediately from my years playing the games.  There is a moment early in the film where you see Dun Morogh and Iron Forge, and having spent the early years of my life in this game as a Dwarf there was this excited little child deep inside of me that stirred free from years of being jaded.  Moment by moment the characters on screen appeared in settings that were as familiar to me as my own bedroom.  There is a certain loving craft that understood the parts that needed to be there, and those that could be enriched and improved without losing the feeling of the original setting.

Then there are the characters, ones that came largely from a time before the current fidelity of World of Warcraft.  We know them largely from lore that has been written in the years since the release of Orcs and Humans and Tides of Darkness.  While I said earlier that none of the performances are likely to win Oscars…  that is not to say that each of them did not play their parts perfectly.  Medivh was immediately recognizable as Medivh for example, and Durotan worked perfectly especially with the renewed focus on that character that Warlords of Draenor brought.  There was not a single role that I felt was miscast or failed to hold up to the jumbled memories I have of the lore and setting of the early games.  I have to say that of all the characters, the one I came to like the most has to be Khadgar, which is shocking considering I am not much for finger wigglers… and Warlords made me largely think he was an ass.  The character I most closely related to of course was Anduin Lothar, but given my proclivity for warriors this should surprise no one.  The real breakout for me however has to be a tie between Garona and Draka , but I can’t really go into my reasoning for either without dipping into spoiler territory.  Suffice to say that for the story that is being told, I thought each and every actor did a great job delivering their role.

Now for a bit of a warning.  For the lore purists out there, you need to go into this accepting that the movie is going to paint a slightly different picture than the one you know from the background of the game.  Lets face it… the early years of the Warcraft franchise were a bit of a mess, with a combination of “wouldn’t it be cool” stacked onto layers of “this is awesome” to weave together a passable story.  The Chronicles series of books have been a method of trying to clear up the tangled bits of maladjusted lore and set straight the canon once and for all.  As a result the story of the movies is likely going to be the new canon of how the events of the first games will be set in stone from this point on.  The sequence of events made more sense that some of the existing lore so I am completely fine with this.  However for those who have to be tyrannically pure to the original source material…  you are going to find certain aspects of this movie frustrating.  I highly suggest you approach the movie with an open mind like I did, and allow yourself to simply get sucked along in the currents of nostalgia for a time when Warcraft inspired greatness in us all.  I’ve never felt a lot of faction pride, but I have to say there was something that swelled inside of me when I heard the lines “For Azeroth! For the Alliance!”.  Thanks to Duncan Jones and everyone at Blizzard for getting the movie right, and making something we can all ultimately be proud of.  Not everyone is going to get this movie, but it wasn’t for “everyone”.  This is a movie for the long time fans of the Warcraft franchise and I am hopeful this will be a long running series of movies, spreading the giant screen with the characters I have loved.

Lords of Iron Return

Apparently last night while I was completely oblivious, the trailer for the new Destiny expansion… Rise of Iron leaked out on the internet.  All of these leaks of course beg the question…  if everything comes out before E3… then why the hell have E3 in the first place?  You can watch the entire leaked trailer here, that was apparently ripped from a Snapchat advertisement of some sort.  I used VLC Media Player to snap a few pictures from the trailer for use in this blog post.  Firstly I am a little disappointed that it seems like we won’t actually be travelling to a new planet or moon.  As was originally suggested by many of the youtubers based on the leaked image from around a month ago… this does in fact deal with the twilight gap wall area.  It seems like it was repaired at one point and the wall has once again been breached.  In the meantime apparently a giant army of mutated Fallen have been amassing on the other side, and we as players are going to help quell this threat.  Now the first thing that really stands out is that these fallen seem to have a “taken” like thing going on… but instead of black and white and shaky… it is all dark red and pixelated.  Which makes me wonder if the virus is somehow like a digital version of the sword logic that has corrupted so many other things in the Destiny universe?

Regardless… I am pretty damned ready to say goodbye to the taken invasions, and I guess I can accept if that now means we are going to start getting Fallen ones instead.  I would have rather seen them spend more time fleshing out the Cabal, but since the Vex and Hive have seen their day in the sun… I guess it is perfectly okay for the Fallen to get theirs.  However it seems like we have already spent so much time fighting the Fallen since they literally appear in one form or another on every planet.  While they are not extremely active on Mars, there is a spot in the Rubicon wastes where they show themselves for a quest.  I guess considering that they are a race that was once chosen by the Traveler as well, it would make sense why they are constantly scavenging in its wake.  The other thing that I find interesting is it seems like they have somehow compromised some of the areas that Rasputin might have controlled.  There is definitely a Warmind-esc look to some of the areas that they have shown… but again they contain the same dark red contagion look.  All of this makes me wonder if… this is really just some sort of an infection that Rasputin has been fighting off.. and it is also why considering his obvious power that he really doesn’t end up lending us all that much help.  Maybe he has been busy with whatever is happening in the above screenshot.  I would say maybe this was an unknown Warmind, but I think lore wise there is only one per planet.

Gjallahorn is Back

The most controversial point of the trailer however will be the announcement of “Iron Gjallarhorn”.  This rocket launcher was the be all end all weapon from year one, and was as beloved as it is reviled.  Unfortunately I didn’t play enough in year one to actually use one.  In fact the ONLY exotic I managed to get in year one was The Last Word, and I think the game just gave me that one because it felt sorry for me.  I am absolutely a year two baby when it comes to this game, and while I played at launch… I only played for a few months before fading into the background and finding something else to do.  I’m not a huge fan of rocket launchers, but I have always though that at least on looks the Gjallarhorn looks amazing.  Now I seriously doubt they will be bringing back the weapon with the power levels that it apparently had in year one… but just the fact that it is coming back at all makes me extremely happy.  I want to be able to use this and see what all the fuss was about.  Maybe this will be the rocket launcher to change my tune and make me love rocket launchers?

The controversy that is waiting in the wings however is that this is that getting Gjallarhorn is a pre-order bonus for the Rise of Iron expansion.  I personally don’t have a problem with it, because I was going to pre-order the expansion regardless.  I like having the peace of mind that the game is there waiting for me whenever I want to participate.  This is a side effect of living through an era when copies of games were actually sometimes difficult to get.  I remember having to go from store to store to try and find several games in the past, and had that happen as recently as the launch of TERA.  The other big benefit in a pre-order is it often comes with the option to pre-load the content so literally at midnight you can pop in and start playing.  Granted my ability to stay up for midnight launches is not what it used to be… and I often times only make it through character creation before crashing.  What is going to cause the drama in the coming days is the insinuation that this might be your ONLY way to get Gjallarhorn.  It is my hope that Bungie is just giving us access to the weapon ahead of time, and that it will exist in the normal exotic rotation from engrams, or at the very least a similarly complete-able quest once the expansion launches.  Gjallarhorn is this iconic weapon, that even people who have never played Destiny have often times heard of it.  When you have something like that…  it just doesn’t seem fair to wall that up behind a pre-order bonus.  So hopefully during the E3 presentation they will do some massive clarification on that point.

At least with the September 20th date… we won’t have all that long to wait until we get to experience it all for ourselves.