Sleep Away The Afternoon

A Little Respect

Originally published at Sleep Away The Afternoon. Please leave any comments there.

And if I should falter,
Would you open your arms out to me?
We can make love not war -
And live at peace in our hearts.
I’m so in love with you,
I’ll be forever blue.
What religion or reason
Could drive a man to forsake his lover?

I’ve written my foreword, I’ve produced a PDF of the (un-)finished article, and very shortly I’l be sending it off to the printers, for a very limited print run of two copies, much as I have for each of the three other completed NaNo Novels.

Tomorrow I get to kick back, relax, and most importantly, not write anything. It’ll be marvellous.

In case anyone is interested, while I’m not ready to release the text of Thinner than Water to anyone other than myself as yet, you can read the foreword, which I hope gives a clear indication of what I’m doing, here: http://sleepawaytheafternoon.org.uk/foreword-to-thinner-than-water/

Another Universe

Originally published at Sleep Away The Afternoon. Please leave any comments there.

It’s a strange way down from the cradle to the hearse,
Take me back, oh, put me in reverse.
‘Cos you’ll never be the last one and you’ll never be the first.
Maybe we’ll all meet again in another universe.

Yay! NaNoWriMo over for another year. Just got a foreword to write, explaining how my world was conceived and I’ll be chucking it in the direction of Lulu, to gather dust for 12 months or so until I decide if it’s worth doing something with. Of the previous three I’ve finished, I have one I want to clean up, one I never want to see again and one I’m not sure about.

This year I’ve been particularly annoyed by OpenOffice.org. What I’ve written this year has been particularly dialogue heavy, and there’s a bug in OOo’s wordcounter that counts opening quotation marks as words. So, having carefully planned my last 5,000 words, I wrote my ending paragraph, was over 50k and rejoiced. Then I copied and pasted the manuscript into the word count validator. 48,800. At that point I was ready to explode. How do 1,200 words disappear? Cue frantic skimming through the manuscript, find bits here and there that could be extended. Two hours later, it verifies as 50k. That two hours was the worst of any NaNo experience I’ve had to date, but at least it’s over now.

This was all complicated by the fact that what I’ve written was originally intended to be a prologue of about 5,000 words to a completely different story, so with regard to plotting it’s very tight and there isn’t a lot of space for adding waffle. In terms of setting up the next part, it’s all done very well, but I suspect that part 2 will never be written (I’ve tried sequels before; I become too attached to the characters and have trouble doing things like killing them off).

Ah well, I have 50,000 words of fiction, telling a story. It’s just not the story I originally intended to write.

Fresh Feeling

Originally published at Sleep Away The Afternoon. Please leave any comments there.

You don’t have a clue what it is like to be next to you.
I’m here to tell you that it is good, that it is true.

Birds singing a song, old paint is peeling,
This is that fresh, that fresh feeling.
Words can’t be that strong, my heart is real,
This is that fresh, that fresh feeling.

Ahh, bliss. As is traditional every November, I’m in the middle of a week off work ostensibly to catch up on my NaNoWriMo word count. This year, though, there isn’t much catching up to do. By the start of this week I was bang on target (and I’m now 500 words ahead, and will probably get some more down before the day is out). I’m satisfying my “primary” reason for this time off, but there’s an important secondary reason.

Since January 2nd this year, I’ve had two short breaks away from work and that’s it. A couple of long weekends away, a couple of odd Fridays (which were spent travelling up north for family reasons) and the strain is beginning to take its toll. So I have ten straight days without having to go to work and it’s bloody fantastic. There’s some stuff that I need to get done, but just doing bits and pieces as I get to them rather than trying to fit them around work and everything else that’s going on, it’s lovely just to do one at at time, no pressure, chilling the rest of the time.

So, yes. Rest is fantastic. A break from everything is just what I needed, and I’m enjoying myself immensely. May my newfound chilled-outness follow me back to work on the 1st.

Blueberries have more fun

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

As you may have guessed from my last post, I’d been feeling the burnout fatigue for a while. And while we did eventually get Anub down in hardmode, it was a long time coming. It annoys me that even (or maybe especially) in 10-man, raid makeup makes such a huge difference to the end result.

I haven’t been writing recently for a number of reasons, prime of which is having nothing to write about. There’s only so much you can say about a raid encounter that kicks your arse week after week. So I’ve been on hiatus from blogging, and from doing anything other than raiding in WoW. The other thing that’s keeping me busy(and I really should be working on now!) is NaNoWriMo. When you’re channeling all your energy into writing fiction around an ever-more demanding  job, something’s got to give, and recently it’s been this blog.

I’m still here, though, and some things have changed, while others stay the same. I’m still tanking, still cursing the overly hardcore, but I’m generally chilled out more. The other thing that’s changed is my race. That’s right, the gnome is gno more (groan) - I switched to the draenai race. There’s a couple of reasons, but mostly I was bored of looking like a gnome, bored of the line-of-sight issues that gnomes suffer from on sloping terrain, and just generally being short.

Historically The Hidden Circle’s tank groups have also lacked heroic presence in 25-man raids too, lacking a draenai tank as well as group arrangement not generally being kind to us on that front. So I picked my new race knowing that all of our tanks would get a potential threat boost from the change. Ironically, we also took on a new draenei Death Knight tank in the same week, so now we have two shots at the buff depending on who is around on a given night. The other consideration is that I liked the look of the Draenei most out of all the other options. I would always hope for the spacegoat race to come up when I experienced a transporter malfunction, as the animations always looked the best, and given I have to stare at these pixels every time I play I may as well make them pixels I want to look at.

So, a whole new me. And I’m happy about the change, even if the changes were mostly for cosmetic reasons.

Go Team! (A tale of woe)

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

Like many guilds, at the moment we’re struggling for new content. Ulduar is dead and gone, and all we have left to entertain us are Trial of the Crusader and Onyxia.

After a few too many “close, but no cigar” moments on the 25-man heroic Northrend Beasts encounter, it’s been suggested a couple weeks’ more gearing up is needed. I can’t honestly find a reason to disagree with that decision, given the number of times things have happened that could be avoided with just a little more practice. And how are we practicing? In 10-man heroic mode, of course.

It’s worked rather well – we breezed through the first four bosses in our first twenty-five attempts or so. None of the held us up for too long. However – then, along came a spider, in the shape of Aub’Arak.

70 attempts, and several changes of strategy later, things are getting… somewhere. We can get to phase three much of the time, and then things just fall apart. And there’s the gist of the problem. Raid makeup.

And I don’t mean the classes we’re bringing along. I mean the players.

Raiders are generally one of four archetypes:

• Excellent at doing their jobs, but impatient with others who aren’t so excellent
• Excellent at doing their jobs, patient with others
• Reasonable at doing their jobs, but able to improve
• Bleeding awful.

Now, fortunately, we don’t have many of the latter (and they don’t generally get invited to raids). Most people are somewhere around the second, and unfortunately we have some people who fit into the first category. Ordinarily this isn’t a problem as progress can be good enough to keep them satisfied. Unfortunately, sometimes, things don’t go the right way fast enough. It just takes a few words. In this case, the words were:

“Guys, I don’t think this is working. I want to give up”

Of course, no-one paid much attention to this. After all, the hardcore player expressing doubt is something that most of us have come across at one time and another, and we try not to pay it much mind. Unfortunately the subconscious isn’t so easily fooled. The next attempt, our DPS was down a full 15%. Not so much as to stop us getting to phase 3, but enough that phase 3 was now more of a problem.

It didn’t get better. After a few more goes, the raid was (not unexpectedly) called. The few negative comments made (not directed at any one person) had been enough that on some level raid performance was predestined to fail.

Next time, I hope we will have a different raid makeup, one where everyone is at about the same level of improvement, or able to be patient enough with the others.

Bosses aren’t the hardest thing a raid has to face. No, that honour goes to the raid’s own members and their expectations of each other.

What content glut?

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

A lot of people have complained that Lich King doesn’t contain as much raid content as Burning Crusade. Personally, I think the problem is elsewhere. The first thing to do is dispel the myths surrounding the number of bosses available:

So, overall, we have about the same number of bosses in Lich King than in Burning Crusade (and I haven’t even counted the loot pinata that is Vault of Archavon). Admittedly, that includes a number of recycled bosses, but in the case of Naxx almost nobody saw it at level 60, and Onyxia is only a single digit drop if we discount her.

No, the problem is this – difficulty level. Those raids who worked hard because they want to see the content now have to work less hard, and get through it more quickly than they did before.

Normal modes are about pitched between the old bosses and the new hard Modes. Many see the content, they see no reason to do hard mode, they get bored. There’s no less content, it’s just easier. Perhaps a little too easy. By allowing more people to see the content, perhaps Blizzard have shot themselves in the foot. Those who wanted to see it before now do it in half the time and get bored. Those who stood no chance before for whatever reason still haven’t.

There’s more content than ever before. The trouble is it doesn’t last anywhere near as long.

A Long, Strange Journey

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

Silliness is part of life, and it doesn’t get much sillier than the bright purple Violet Proto-Drake, a testament to the insanity of doing all the holiday achievements (though I note that a new one based on the US’s Thanksgiving has been added since).

Of course, I’ve always gone for the sillier end of the spectrum. I play a gnome warrior, a class that never should have existed if there was such a one, ride around on an elekk or a mammoth. I’ve always liked the look of the proto-drakes, and I’ve not been lucky enough with the RNG nor sufficiently hardcore in PvE nor PvP to get hold of one up to now.

I’d been planning this since before Achievements were even released. Joined the Brew of the Month club, kept all my seasonal clothes in the bank, and waited. Most holidays weren’t an issue, the two big issues being Christmas, where I didn’t log in at all between 14th and 31st December, and Childrens’ Week and that ridiculous “Capture a tower in AV” achievement. I managed all the RNG achievements long before they were toned down too.

Now though? To be honest I’m a little burned out on holiday achievements. I’m not honestly sure if I can force myself to do it all again on my druid. Maybe I’ll give Brewfest a miss this year and start again with Hallow’s End. Part of the appeal was it was all content that was new to me, and that just isn’t the case any more.

Eyes

Originally published at Sleep Away The Afternoon. Please leave any comments there.

Missed the last train home,
Birds pass by to tell me that I’m not alone.
Over pushing myself to finish this part,
I can handle a lot,
But one thing I’m missing is in your eyes.

All in all, my 10,958th day on the planet hasn’t thus far been ay different to all the rest. A pleasant start to the day, good-natured teasing from my colleagues when they found out (and even one who got my reference to Carrousel!).

A new decade spans before me – what to make of it? I can only guess. Interesting developments abound in more than one direction, some good, some not so good. But – I’m alive, and like (almost) everyone who got here before me, surprised to discover that.

Koralon the Faceroller

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

This isn’t the much-awaited second post on how to tank. I’ve had a lot on my plate recently out of game, so blogging has had to take a bit of a pushback until everything else. In any case, Kadomi appears to have written an excellent post on pretty much the same things I was going to cover, in Tanking School: The Pull. Have a read, it’s good stuff.

Anyway, back to the matter in hand. Two new bosses this week, and then we have to wait until Onyxia (and then Icecrown) before there’s any more new gear available. And, to be honest, they were both somewhat of a disappointment. First up, Koralon the Flame Watcher. I knew vaguely what he was capable of, and went into the encounter expecting something straightforward. I wasn’t quite prepared for how incredibly straightforward it was going to be. An air of definite anticlimax accompanied the kill; all the more because it felt orders of magnitude easier than the Coliseum bosses. The gear just didn’t feel earned.

And then there was Anub’Arak. Also quite straightforward – one-shotted in 10-man, got him second go on 25. The sole problem was too many DPS on the adds rather than the boss himself. Admittedly the entire encounter feels epic thanks to the lead-in to the boss, but, still, Faction Champions feels like the hardest boss in there by a long way. Doesn’t feel right.

In any case, killing Anub means that we can now attempt hard mode. And we did – to say it was hard would be an understatement. I’ve not done badly out of gear from normal Trial of the Crusader, but … well, insane isn’t really the word. At times we had 60k+ damage coming in to tanks in half a second. Given I have 48k health raid buffed, there’s just a smidgeon of difference there. By rotating cooldowns, we managed to down Gormok, but only just. I have no clue how we’ll see Dreadscale and Icemaw through. There’s scope for improvement, but… damn, perfection as a requirement I haven’t seen in a long, long time.

Now I know how people raiding Sunwell pre-nerf felt.

Forever Autumn

Originally published at Sleep Away The Afternoon. Please leave any comments there.

The summer sun has faded as the year grows old
And darker days are drawing near.
The winter winds will be be much colder
When you’re not here.

What’s this? A genuine blog post? Not sure what’s going on here, but I’d like it to become a habit so we’ll see.

Autumn is my least favourite time of year. I’m not sure when that happened, but I tend to get overly reflective of what I’ve done in the preceding 12 months, the evenings noticeably drawing in at the same moment that I turn a year older. And I look at what I’ve attained over the past year. As always, there are things I wish that I’d done differently, or not at all, and I start to plan for the next year. What’s up first? NaNoWriMo.

Last year’s successful attempt, The Logic Bomb I’m still as attached to as when I finished it. This year, I’m starting to fill in the blanks for Thinner Than Water, what I hope is a very different take on the often-clichéd vampire genre. I’m still also attached to another, very different, idea I call Simplicity, but I don’t have a good story to fit it into (yet).

After that, I aim to spend a good amount of time fixing up The Logic Bomb so it’s fit for someone other than me to read it. That should take up a few months. Maybe by this time next year I can show something more than just a fifty-thousand word pile of words worked on over a single November.