I arrived in Whiterun, exhausted and penniless. The suit of armor, if you can call it that, given to me by the blacksmith in Riverwood for my travels barely held together. The result of a ferocious attack by a pack of wolves.
Passing by the marketplace, I overheard something about ‘Companions’ and ‘gold for able bodied fighters’. I needed the money, I needed a place rest. This is no time to be picky. I asked a nearby grocer for directions, and soon found myself at the doors of Jorrvaskr.
The recruiter, a brawny looking Nord, sneered at my meek body, weak from days of travel. Well, mostly running from wolves, but there’s no need to volunteer that information. He doesn’t think I’m capable. I disagreed. We decided to take it outside.
At this point, I was full with hunger and invigorate with tiredness. I was fueled by my own desperation. He seemed taken a back and staggered as I slammed the hilt of my sword against his shield over and over. He conceded.
We went back indoors and I was led downstairs into a large communal hall where members of the Companion could lodge in-between jobs.I slept.
I ran. It as now or never. The basilisk like wings swooped low, knocking the guard down. Screams lit up around me. Knees close to my chest, I sprinted across the gravel road. My back and cheek burned as I ran. It was only when I stopped to catch my breathe that the reality of the situation dawned on me.
I had escape the executioner’s axe, only to be almost incinerated by the fiery heat that is a dragon’s breathe.
The people present seem to be split into two groups. Guards were trying to round up scared families. A few whom I recognized being on the caravan seemed to have form a group of their own.
I could choose to either follow the Imperial or the group of prisoners. Looking at the sorry state of their gear though, I felt my chance with the Imperial was better. Besides, as I lifted a sword up from the charred remains of a body, I could always slit his throat if he wasn’t to my liking.
Now that the exams are over for me, Skyrim is on full swing. I’ve decided to start all over again with a fresh new character so that I can experience the game in long play sessions, rather than an hour here and there. I find long sessions more immersive and I tend to not remember much after a short session. Also, now that I’ve a better knowledge of game mechanics, I can distribute my skill points more effectively. Meet Calreth reborned.
Just over a day of being elated after spending an extended weekend grinding to r8, it seems that all the effort is going to be for naught. According to this dev post published today, the usefulness of PvP gear in PvE is going to be effectively cut by half in the next hot fix.
While I think this is the right move, and that in a game where you have separate PvP and PvE servers, those who choose to play on the PvE servers should never be forced to PvP for gear or other reasons, I’m pissed that they choose to announce the changes after I spend the effort getting gear which would be pointless to have after the patch. If I knew this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have spent all those hours in warfronts.
But what can I say or do about it? For those of us who have been playing MMOs for a long period of time, we know the cycle of nerfs and boosts is a part of the life. Classes could be FoTM one patch, and then broken so badly the next that anyone would be foolish to play it. Gear gets re-itemized and essentially “reset” whenever a major patch brings out new content. I’ve played long enough to be apathetic to these changes.
So what am I going to do? I could hit the forums with a couple of angry posts demanding that Trion not push this changes to the live servers and threaten to cut my subscription if they do, but to be realistic, that’s not going to change anything. Instead, I’m going to allow myself a long sigh, sober up and embrace the grind, one again.
The planets couldn’t have been better aligned this weekend. Rift’s half anniversary coincided with a number of holidays, giving me an extremely long weekend to take advantage of the bonus exp/prestige that was going out. I grinded my way to rank 8. To top it off, I even won a bonus gift soon after.
Fluffy the Destroyer of Worlds
PVP in Rift isn’t the most fun thing ever. If not for Trion’s poor itemization resulting in PvP gear being better for PvE than PvE gear itself, I would never had touched PvP in Rift. If you can get enough focus/hit, the R8 PvP set bonus easily triumphs any PvE set obtainable at this time.
As much as I would to cease PvPing, I’m still short of favor for R8 shoulders and helm. The helmet isn’t as important as I would never use it outside of PvP, but the shoulders are critical for me to be able to keep my 4-piece set bonus in raids after swapping some gear around.
Damn it, I just want to get PvP in Rift over and done with so I can play Deus Ex with no guilt!
Detainee, the word itself, it must be noted, is one of the great Orwellian inventions of the past decade. A word that would have had great meaning to Solzhenitsyn, meant to describe a prisoner for whom, for a variety of good and terrible reasons, a suitable judicial system cannot be found. A “prisoner” knows his fate. A “detainee” just lingers.
I encourage you to read the article about the life a particular individual before, from his humble birth, and through the inhumane system at Guantanamo. You’d think something like this happened only in the Soviet labour camps in the 60s, but it’s still a harsh reality today.
The author really captivated me with his style of writing – cold, detached, concise and absolutely minimalist. It brings out the sense of isolation and hopelessness the individual went through. It’s a touching read.
My guild, like many on Wolfsbane who had already done so, transferred to Laethys earlier this week. Ever sine Trion flagged Laethys as Oceanic, boatloads of Oceanic players have sought asylum on its shores. We figured it would be imperative for us to move before immigration is on to us and transfers in are closed. We’ve been leaking people recently, and Laethys would be hugely beneficial for recruitment. As part of the refugee care package, we received a 2H relic sword from Lord Greenscale.
We’ve been stuck on Lord Greenscale for several weeks now, including an agonizingly painful wipe at 5% a few weeks before. Greenscale goes through different phases, most of which are easy, except for the last. There is so much going on during the last phase, having to pay attention pollens and brackens which if not taken down quick leads to a wipe. A lot has to be micromanaged.
I’m extremely pleased that we were able to clear Greenscale tonight, even more so that it took only two attempts. Starting from next week, I’ll be in Melbourne for the rest of my holidays and would probably have little chance, if at all, at raiding.
When I first saw this clip on The Colbert Report, I had a good laugh.It speaks volumes about our declining attention span and our increasing failure to comprehend anything longer than 140 characters, or even, two questions within 140 characters. Try texting someone the following:
“When are you leaving town? Want to catch a movie?”
Chances are good that you receive only one answer to the two questions, probably a “yeah” or “nope” response.
Laugh all you want, I did, at least until yesterday when the healthcare reform was brought up in a conversion between me and a friend. We tried to compare it a against the healthcare system here in Singapore to understand why government insurance works here, but might not in the USA. This is when we ran into a wall. Despite heavy media coverage on the topic, we both knew very little about the specifics, about how much money each person would be covered up to, the kind of cases covered, how the payout would be done and so on. We decided we had to get our facts right, and like most people would do today, we turned to Google. Herman Cain’s speech ceased to be a laughing subject.
There was no way either one of us could pour through over 2000 pages of text, and then have a discussion on it. Hell, when I read Gone With the Wind over a span of days, I had forgotten portions which happened early into the story when I was halfway through.
How many of us have actually read through a software EULA, wading through pages of heavily padded legalese before reaching a sentence that is useful information? A new version of the software, with a modified EULA, would have been released by the time we get through it.
To promote informed discussion, which is essential to any functioning democracy, information has to be readily available and easy to understand. It has to be concise. The old lady pushing her cart to the market should be able to understand it just as the well-manicured businessman in his lavish office does. Transparency is only as useful as the information that comes out during the process. Having a wall of text isn’t transparency. It’s simply a wall.
Quoting Einstein, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” We’ve been successful at advancing the human race as a whole because we’ve made basic scientific principles easy to understand. This is what drives the search for unification between the various fields of physics in search of a “theory for everything”.
In A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking, he closed the book with the following paragraph.
If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the quest of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.
This is what we should strive for in the field of politics and legislature, so that we, as ordinary people, can partake in the process of democracy.
Also, we’ve finally cleared the 10-man raid, Gilded Prophecy!
Uruluuk took us 5 hours, but it was worth it
After an intense 5 hours attempt and multiple aggravating wipes when Ulruluuk (Judging by their names, Orcs and Klingons might have had a common heritage) when he was at 5% or 1%, we downed him. The loot wasn’t fantastic, at least as far as mages are concerned anyway.
Despite 3 nights a week of raiding, loot has been lackluster in general. We’ve either been ending up cleric tank loot, or loot which people already have. So, I was extremely pleased when a mage staff dropped in GSB on Thursday night, and a mage chest from Warmaster in RoS yesterday. Although they are not the best in slot items for my class, an upgrade is still an upgrade.
