World of Warcraft

Still Adjusting

The last couple of nights, by the time I got home from work I was so irrationally tired.  I am sure it is largely just me trying to get adjusted to waking up at 5 in the morning again, but whatever the case it is annoying as hell.  Last night I was so out of it, that I didn’t even cook a “real” dinner but instead simply made a peanut butter sandwich and then proceeded to sit on the couch fighting desperately not to fall asleep.  By the time my wife got home around 7ish I had managed to get a second wind and started actually functioning, or at least a mental state closer to functional.  I am hoping by the time I hit the weekend, I will have worked out all of the differences in sleep patterns and next week will be easier.  What does not really help is the fact that upon coming back Monday it has been crisis central at work.  We’ve dealt with a project that is threatening to go off the rails, a virus scare, and processing some crucial year end/beginning of year things.  I guess that is always the case after coming back from Christmas break.  Folks stop really functioning around Thanksgiving and all of that work gets pushed until we all get back that Monday after New Years.  I have a friend that is smart in that he tends to take his vacation after the first instead of connecting the dots between Christmas and New Years like most of us do.  That means he misses most of this insanity.

The only real positive is it feels like everyone else out there is struggling with 2016, so at least we can share the misery together.  Making matters worse is that my boss is fairly sick, and I am now paranoid that I am coming down with it.  The thing is… I would happily go to bed tonight around 8pm if I thought I would actually be able to sleep all the way through the night.  My fear is that I would go to sleep, and then wake up at midnight completely unable to get back to sleep.  There is just too much stuff to do right now so I feel like I cannot afford to get sick.  There are projects that have to be completed, and others that need to get started.  I am dealing with some of the most extreme impostor syndrome I have in a very long time, because I feel like I should be able to juggle all of this madness better.  Its kinda shit walking around for days paranoid that someone is going to find out that you are a fraud, and that you really don’t know anything…  all the while you are very clearly doing complex things that negate the notion that you are a fraud.  Brains are dumb.  If I could figure out how to negate the effects of this… and also the weird panic freak outs that I have been having life would be awesome.  The other solution that I would love to fix is the fact that regardless of how tired I seem to be sitting on the couch, the moment I put head to pillow I am either wide awake or deluged by a panic attack.

Pushing Alts

Once I finished Draenor Pathfinder, I was hit with this feeling of…  “Hey! You should finish some more alts!”.  As a result I started in pushing up my Draenei Paladin Exeter, and as of last night I managed to hit level 100.  I am honestly shocked at just how fast leveling goes when you can fly.  Now one would think that maybe this would tip me to the other side of the “flying in draenor” discussion, but not really.  When I leveled three characters to 100 without flight, the experience felt more “earned” if that makes sense.  The time spent felt like I was actually living in those zones, rather than just flitting from point to point dropping off this or that item.  Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful now for the ability to level faster…  because three characters was about the right amount of time that I wish to spend in these zones.  The other characters, I just want to push as fast as humanly possible.  Ultimately I started doing this Alliance side again because I needed a break from the Old World Horde leveling path.  After rapidly pushing a druid to 40 over Christmas break, it felt “too soon” when I returned to working on my Orc Warlock.  In theory at some point soon I might just end up transferring that druid to The Scryers so that I can play it with the regular crew of people that I play horde with.  It seems silly to transfer a sub 60 character, but I really don’t want to push a new character through those zones that quickly.  I need to do some more research into the horde potential zones, because in just following the adventure guide it seems to always direct me to the same places.  Mostly I want to sort out how to get down the Grom’gol path and into Stranglethorn Vale.

In the meantime while on this break from Horde, I think I am going to work on my Dwarven Shaman.  I have an army of still to be leveled to 100 post 90 characters… and this one is sitting at 91.  I think in theory I can probably wrap him up quickly and make some movement over the weekend.  Mostly what tipped him over the edge was a discussion with some friends that indirectly influenced me.  Tam was talking about specs that became “better” than others… and mentioned some period of time when Enhancement was the bees knees.  Which made me think about how Enhancement is the only Shaman spec I can really play…  which made me remember how much I actually liked playing it.  So as a result I think I am going to push the dorf for a bit and see how close I get to 100 before getting that urge to play Horde again.  Largely I think it would be kinda awesome if I was able to push all of my characters to 100 before Legion….  but given how many horde characters are not even 20 yet… that is going to be a very tall order.  In the meantime I am trying to do whatever feels the best, and trying to sort out how to stop feeling so damned tired all the time.  Today is better than yesterday… and that was better than Monday….  so I feel like it is a gradual thing.  With time I will get back used to this 5 am crap…  and will continue onward being a super responsible adult type person.

Still Adjusting

The last couple of nights, by the time I got home from work I was so irrationally tired.  I am sure it is largely just me trying to get adjusted to waking up at 5 in the morning again, but whatever the case it is annoying as hell.  Last night I was so out of it, that I didn’t even cook a “real” dinner but instead simply made a peanut butter sandwich and then proceeded to sit on the couch fighting desperately not to fall asleep.  By the time my wife got home around 7ish I had managed to get a second wind and started actually functioning, or at least a mental state closer to functional.  I am hoping by the time I hit the weekend, I will have worked out all of the differences in sleep patterns and next week will be easier.  What does not really help is the fact that upon coming back Monday it has been crisis central at work.  We’ve dealt with a project that is threatening to go off the rails, a virus scare, and processing some crucial year end/beginning of year things.  I guess that is always the case after coming back from Christmas break.  Folks stop really functioning around Thanksgiving and all of that work gets pushed until we all get back that Monday after New Years.  I have a friend that is smart in that he tends to take his vacation after the first instead of connecting the dots between Christmas and New Years like most of us do.  That means he misses most of this insanity.

The only real positive is it feels like everyone else out there is struggling with 2016, so at least we can share the misery together.  Making matters worse is that my boss is fairly sick, and I am now paranoid that I am coming down with it.  The thing is… I would happily go to bed tonight around 8pm if I thought I would actually be able to sleep all the way through the night.  My fear is that I would go to sleep, and then wake up at midnight completely unable to get back to sleep.  There is just too much stuff to do right now so I feel like I cannot afford to get sick.  There are projects that have to be completed, and others that need to get started.  I am dealing with some of the most extreme impostor syndrome I have in a very long time, because I feel like I should be able to juggle all of this madness better.  Its kinda shit walking around for days paranoid that someone is going to find out that you are a fraud, and that you really don’t know anything…  all the while you are very clearly doing complex things that negate the notion that you are a fraud.  Brains are dumb.  If I could figure out how to negate the effects of this… and also the weird panic freak outs that I have been having life would be awesome.  The other solution that I would love to fix is the fact that regardless of how tired I seem to be sitting on the couch, the moment I put head to pillow I am either wide awake or deluged by a panic attack.

Pushing Alts

Once I finished Draenor Pathfinder, I was hit with this feeling of…  “Hey! You should finish some more alts!”.  As a result I started in pushing up my Draenei Paladin Exeter, and as of last night I managed to hit level 100.  I am honestly shocked at just how fast leveling goes when you can fly.  Now one would think that maybe this would tip me to the other side of the “flying in draenor” discussion, but not really.  When I leveled three characters to 100 without flight, the experience felt more “earned” if that makes sense.  The time spent felt like I was actually living in those zones, rather than just flitting from point to point dropping off this or that item.  Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful now for the ability to level faster…  because three characters was about the right amount of time that I wish to spend in these zones.  The other characters, I just want to push as fast as humanly possible.  Ultimately I started doing this Alliance side again because I needed a break from the Old World Horde leveling path.  After rapidly pushing a druid to 40 over Christmas break, it felt “too soon” when I returned to working on my Orc Warlock.  In theory at some point soon I might just end up transferring that druid to The Scryers so that I can play it with the regular crew of people that I play horde with.  It seems silly to transfer a sub 60 character, but I really don’t want to push a new character through those zones that quickly.  I need to do some more research into the horde potential zones, because in just following the adventure guide it seems to always direct me to the same places.  Mostly I want to sort out how to get down the Grom’gol path and into Stranglethorn Vale.

In the meantime while on this break from Horde, I think I am going to work on my Dwarven Shaman.  I have an army of still to be leveled to 100 post 90 characters… and this one is sitting at 91.  I think in theory I can probably wrap him up quickly and make some movement over the weekend.  Mostly what tipped him over the edge was a discussion with some friends that indirectly influenced me.  Tam was talking about specs that became “better” than others… and mentioned some period of time when Enhancement was the bees knees.  Which made me think about how Enhancement is the only Shaman spec I can really play…  which made me remember how much I actually liked playing it.  So as a result I think I am going to push the dorf for a bit and see how close I get to 100 before getting that urge to play Horde again.  Largely I think it would be kinda awesome if I was able to push all of my characters to 100 before Legion….  but given how many horde characters are not even 20 yet… that is going to be a very tall order.  In the meantime I am trying to do whatever feels the best, and trying to sort out how to stop feeling so damned tired all the time.  Today is better than yesterday… and that was better than Monday….  so I feel like it is a gradual thing.  With time I will get back used to this 5 am crap…  and will continue onward being a super responsible adult type person.

Struggle Is Real

It is Monday morning after my week and some change holiday break, and I have to tell you… the struggle to exist in the world is real.  I am hoping through that yesterday I ultimately went through the worst.  As I said yesterday morning, we set an alarm in an attempt to force ourselves to shift vaguely in the direction of a schedule.  As a result I pretty much sleep walked through yesterday, and found myself generally staring in the direction of things rather than actually participating.  This was doubly awkward since we were having our last “christmas” event of the year with my mom-in-law coming over.  I tried desperately to keep up with the conversation, ultimately failing.  The small wonder however was the fact that she brought her laptop for me to look at because it wasn’t working.  Sure enough the first time it attempted to boot, it hung after login.  However on the second shutdown and restart everything went normally, and as a result I busied myself staring at its screen for the remainder of her visit.  I did the normal gamut of fiddling…  checking her antivirus to make sure it was up to date, and patching as much as I could with windows update.  A computer requires significantly less interaction than a human being, and that was ultimately what I was banking on.

The ultimate problem is…  that she has no internet connection.  What I mean by that is that she does not pay for internet at her house, but instead piggy backs off the wifi of her grand neice.  This is perfectly find mind you, it is not like she was war driving one day and hijacked a wifi signal.  The problem being that there is roughly a half football field of distance between her house and the nieces house, and our RV pad is smack dab in the middle.  It was my hope that either we would put in wifi at our RV eventually, or set up a network of signal boosters to piggyback the signal across.  The problem is since she doesn’t really know how technology works, it is hard to explain why her internet connection sometimes works fine and other times not at all.  Basically it shouldn’t be working at all, and it is by sheer dumb luck that you can pick up a wifi signal from that sort of distance.  The problem also being that she cannot differentiate between telling us something is wrong with her laptop and the software itself and her internet connection.  This is the truth with most of our family, they know that facebook isn’t working but are of little to no help to actually diagnose over the phone as to why that is the case.

Paladins Everywhere

The problem with a big goal is once I accomplish it, I end up floundering for a bit trying to find something else to focus my attention on.  In the past many of the times when I have left a game it was because I completed some big item that I was grinding my ass off to achieve….  and lost interest after finally getting it.  I know it is in my nature to feel let down after finally getting something, and I am trying really hard to not let Draenor Pathfinder be that way as well.  Since I finally can fly around, I have been focusing for a bit on trying to push up some of my post 90 characters on Argent Dawn and my highest of those is Exeter my original Alliance Paladin.  Over the course of the weekend I took him from 94 to 98 and am now starting Nagrand, where I hope to finish up.  I like finishing in Nagrand because gear wise I end up in a fair better position than if I grind the hell out of Spires of Arak.  After the initial leveling in Draenor I have followed the pattern of swapping zones every time the game prompted me that the next one was available.  So in my case that would be 94 for Talador, 96 for Spires of Arak and 98 for Nagrand.  Doing this ends up with me in a mishmash of gear, and a bunch of abandoned quests, but seems to also be the fastest possible way to churn through the content.

Ultimately my goal is not to experience the quest content, because I have already done that several other times.  The goal is to level as fast as possible, and I guess in theory I could simply just do the dungeon queue as a tank and be done with it.  That is absolutely an option I will consider, but yesterday I absolutely was not competent enough to be responsible for the lives of anyone other than myself… and at times even that part was questionable.  I died an awful lot yesterday, and spent probably as much time running back to my corpse as I did actively questing.  The problem being that while every fiber in my being told me that I really just wanted to go to sleep, I knew that would only prolong the horribleness and make my first day back at work sheer hell.  So I continued trying to busy my mind.  While attempting to level the paladin we searched Netflix for something anywhere near as compelling as Making a Murderer, only to strike out multiple times.  In the evening we ended up watching a documentary called Dear Zachary which was extremely good.. and moving… but I would not suggest watching unless you are really ready to cry.  We ended up closing the evening out watching the Netflix comedy series Master of None because seriously… after that documentary we both needed a laugh.  We ended up shutting down around 10 and making it to bed…. only to sit there and talk for awhile as neither of us seemed to be sleepy anymore.

I hate my brain so much at times, because through out the day all it did was complain about how tired it was… and begged me to go to sleep…  and now that I am finally read for it to shut down it is acting like a spoiled toddler crossing its arms and holding its breath.  I wish so much that I had a normal relationship with sleep… that it was just one of those things that happened naturally for me.  My entire life it has been a struggle to actually have a normal sleep schedule.  Every fiber of my being is wired to be awaken during the night… because I feel far more alive after the sun goes down than at any other part in my existence.  The sun and I really do not get along, and I think in theory I could be happy working night shift.  The problem being I work the sort of job that happens during the day time, and I have tried for years to become the kind of person that functions during the day.  There are all manner of tricks that I play upon myself and an absolutely silly amount of caffeine and energy drinks that I use to force myself to remain viable and cognizant during the hours I am supposed to be.  But my brain is a brat and refuses to function like a normal human being, and I get so tired of playing the game where I am laying comfortably in bed… and every neuron is firing wildly trying to keep me from achieving a restful nights sleep.  Fuck you brain… you are an asshole.  But hopefully I got enough sleep to be mostly functional on this first day back from break.