Insane Kitties

We have 3 cats...correction, we have 3 insane cats. They are much like children in their craziness, constantly doing things they shouldn't and getting themselves into trouble. A run down of our nutty ones.

Sidney (or Sydney depending on the way I feel that day): Probably the most laid back of the cats, but skittish. Sneeze and he looks terrified and runs away, he's huge (about 15lbs). Jet black with just a touch of white on his tummy. The outdoors is a scary scary place.

Babydoll: she's technically my sisters cat, but guess who she sleeps with? yep that'd be right, me. She the pissy one, she "talks" with a lot of growls and love bites, and sometimes hate bites. How does she love me? let me count the scars.

Arabella: she is truely the idiot savant of catdom. She uses what little bit of grey matter she has to do two things. Get into trouble and beg for food. She loves to look for the "treasure troll", we haven't quite figure out what that is, but apparently its buried someone in between couch cushion's, behind tall bookcases or inside the speakers of the TV.

All of our cats are rescues, Baby from a pound, Sid from a grocery store parking lot when he was barely old enough to survive away from mamma, and Bella when she showed up at our backdoor looking like someone threw her from a car. Maybe that's why thier all nuts, bad experiences in kittenhood. Who knows, but they make us laugh a lot...when we don't want to strangle them.

**Just a bit of inanity since SM was fussing that I hadn't updated /thpttt**

My Cable Hates me

Or it hates me playing EQ2...one or the other, not sure which :) For the second day in a row it decided to die on us while in the middle of something fun and cool. Maybe its Sari...maybe my cable company doesnt like Erudite Bears or something. I might be calling the ACLU or something to fight the man about giving me my rights to play...Maybe the world just needs to defrost more so that ice doesnt cover the land here. Maybe I just need to wake up before I post.

Guys Night Out

I have a love/hate relationship with Guys Night Out. There's a part of me that gets jealous and wishes I was there, and another part of me that relishes the solitude of alone time in the attic. I don't think I really miss out on a lot, and the whole itching scratcing thing I'm sure gets curbed when I'm around. At least I have yet to see the guys involved in that particular activity. So either I'm unobservant or they move to a different part of the room to "adjust". Its just strange being alone :)Quiet and stuff, and there's no one to laugh with. I think perhaps I'm just to used to him being around :) Of course it majorly cuts down on stuff to talk about...not a lot to discuss when someone is there all the time. And its not like trips to the grocery store are that interesting :)

Taking up the slack

I was reading a group of blogs today called "The Blogfathers" most of which are pretty humorous...one of them was discussing books in America. I find these numbers pretty disturbing...

58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.

42% of college graduates never read another book.

80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.

70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

compiled from here

80% didn't buy or read a book last year??? How do they survive? There were probably 50 or more books purchased in this household alone last year. Albiet that most of them were used, but still they were books, and pretty much all of them were read. I have a few series that I'm trying to finish "collecting" before I read them, mostly because I know the series (having read them before) that if you miss one or two in a row, you lose some of the subtleties that the author writes about. It's not like if you miss something you're totally screwed and don't know whats going on, just missing little things that I like to catch up on. (So that's why her hair is so short! It got burned off in the last book while chasing a shark infested bomb)

Of course if we were to take that poll, we would probably have to invite the person to our house just so they would believe we like books as much as we do :)

The bad the worse and the suck

The Bad: Not eating until 3pm

The Worse: getting a headache because of not eating

The Suck: having to leave the concert you've waited for 15 years to go to because your heads been hurting for SEVEN HOURS and your brains are leaking out of your ears...

A special Valentines

Tommorow will be a quiet day in the Ennis ranch, well at least at the inside of the ranch, as the older members will be heading out for a rock and roll evening. Not that kind of stuff but real rock and roll, well okay real OLD rock and roll.

At 15 my favorite band in the whole world was Bon Jovi. My best friend aquired tickets ...3rd row, center stage tickets...when tickets were almost impossible to get...and my mom wouldn't let me go because it was a school night. It was the only time of my teenage life that I actually thought about sneaking out of the house.

Fast Forward 15 years (and as many years of teasing my mom about how the band never came anywhere close to Florida...at least once I started talking to her again) she conspired with the Geeky Spouse to obtain for us 2 tickets to the Bon Jovi concert in Nashville. On Valentines Day. So tommorow we are going to a place that I've been waiting for 15 years to see. It's my first rock and roll concert. Just like it would have been when I was young.

Part Duex...

Heres one that happened to a friend of mine: lets recently fired and homeless friend crash at his house for a while, comes home one day to find a hooker sleeping it off on his couch and the "roommate" in his bed with another hooker and the remnants of certain types of illegal substances. Now you may ask how did the "roommate" pay for all this "entertainment" why by PAWNING the others FIRST EDITION D&D BOOKS (a complete collection mind you) several which had been signed by the authors and Mr. G himself.

Insist on having a certain die color scheme for a particular PC

a female player was about to be executed for committing diablerie on the princes favorite childe, after nearly an hour of begging and pleading (RT) she finally offers to do him a "favor" and the GM agrees, the rest of the PCs sit there rather stunned as the two go off to a side room and..... well you know, I waited 5 minutes just to be sure its not a joke (it wasn't), and left never to play or invite them to play in any game I am involved in.

She was in character all the time, even during...naughty time.

The worst player i had to deal with was one of my best friends at the time. Every other character he rolled up would be a female elf. I have everyone write up a back ground about their character including their favorite food, drink or what not. So, he rolls up this female Elf warrior type character. Well before the game starts i read everyones background, and his has "exotic drink" towards the end. So, i make the mistake of asking him what he meant by that. He then blurted out that since he was female he thought having his favorite drink be semen would be perfectly fine.
Well we thought he was just messing around, which he wasn't. So, the games going pretty good and when they make it to a town to resupply.
This is how it went.

PC: I'm going to the bar.
ME: ok no problem (after dealing with the other guys i get back to him)
PC: Are there any hot elven men around?
ME: (rolls dice) Nope, there are few rather good looking humans though.
PC: They will work. I go and start hitting on one of them.
ME: (a little weirded out) Yeah, ok, whats your PB?
PC: 27
ME: Damn! ok hold on. (deal with other players for a while)
PC: I ask him to geta room with me.
ME: (just remember his background) Why????
PC: I have a need for my drink.
ME: This is a good stopping point! See everyone next week.

The next week he died and tried the same thing with his new character only this time it was a male elf. When asked why he picked that for his drink his response was. Why not?

The Game is Afoot...

So the Geeky Spouse has finally battened down to start a pencil and paper game. The threats of being "cut off" never worked, but I found the opposite to work really really well :) So now that I'm in the gaming mood for some tabletop stuff, I wandered over to the Palladium forums to just look around...oh there is just about the funniest thing in the GM forum "The worst players ever"...here are some of the gems...

PC: "I pick up the gnome and wield him like a mace."
GM: "I am not giving your any bonuses from W.P. Blunt... nice try though."
PC: "How about from W.P. Innocent Bystander?"

Quote - "I don't care what you planned for the plot, I'm only going to do the stuff I planned for my character." (TWICE! to the same GM, and once to the other....)

"I read the list of restrictions, but decided to break some of them. You'll see why."

"Never chipped in for the pizza". Now thats grounds for a kick out of the house

He's not a good roleplayer, he keeps wanting to do everything like anime characters in movies do, and he actually uses sound effects - graphic ones, very specificly delineated - when describing what his PC is doing.

if you shoot up a gang member in front of his notorious gangs equally notorious hang out at 11:30pm on Friday night with a half a drum of .50 cal machine gun ammo then put your guns away only to walk into the same bar to have a beer. you see what i'm saying here? dumb is dumb.

one person i gamed with would basically sleep until combat starts then wake up long enough to fight then go back to sleep

Actually, the worst player I've ver seen was also a GM...but his NPC play was the WORST.
First off, every freakin' character we ran into ended up being...a GASP!....demon. OK, it was a shocker the first time, but a few weeks into it, we were all like "Demon, yeah gotcha--not kindly old shoemaker...demon...yep".
Not only this, but his characters were so skewed towards what he wanted, it was ridiculous.
An average encounter would go something like this:
PC: Excuse me, I'm trying to get as far away from here as possible. I notice there are over 200 ships in this harbor. May I book passage on one?
NPC: Er....it costs 10,000 Mithril...one-way
PC: (counting) 9,999, and 10,000. Here you go.
NPC: Er...there's a curse on these boats.
PC: That's fine. I'm an atheist.
NPC: I'M A DEMON! ROAAAAARRRRR!
And so it went on.
Also, every single one of his NPCs were lifted directly from a Terry Goodkind or Ann Rice novel.....and the ones that weren't were all level 50 alchemists/wizards...disguised dark elven alchemist/wizards....immune to whatever we had handy.

there was a guy who showed up fairly often who cheated at his die rolls... very very stupidly. he would roll the dice right there in front of everyone and if he didn't get what he needed, he would pick them up and roll again and again until he got a good roll.

Named his character "Big Head."
Repeatedly tried to have his character buy weed.
He read out the names of his weapons...every time he used one. ("Alright, I am going to fire with my Northern Gun NG-p7 particle beam rifle.")
Repeatedly executed or attempted to execute a body slam, at least 3 times a battle.
Never learned what a D20 was. Actually picked up a D4 once, three hours into the session and stated: "Roll strike? I use this one right?"


"So you all wake up.... cept Bob" *all the players look over at Bob, yes he's alive, turns back to the GM with that dumb look*O.o
And the moral of the story is?
Don't get drunk, kcuf a goddess and expect her hubby not to kill you in your sleep...

I have a button I use to wear sometimes when I ran games.
It says, 'If I want your opinion, I'll read your entrails.'

The best Valentine ever

Courtesy of Pookaliscious in the SA Forums...

A bit of Clarification...

Some of my EQ2 friends have found this blog and were confused by the State of the Game post. Mostly they seemed worried I was giving up on EQ2. Not so my friends not so. Yes I'm suffering from some burnout and a great deal of frustration at some of the changes, but I am sticking. There is only one constant in MMO's, and that's that they change. Sometimes the changes are great, sometimes they aren't (at least in your own opinion). But to me its not a reason to quit. I might quit crafting for a while, until the prices on the broker drop or our guild as a whole get's high enough to help get the stuff needed, but I'll be sticking with the game. And if I were to quit I promise you that you wouldn't find out from a blog.

I think the most important part of that post got lost in my whining. The part that I play for my friends, not for the game itself. The game is a medium in which to interact with people, and when that stops assisting in the hanging out of people well then no its not that much fun. If all my friends bailed on me to go somewhere else, well hell I'd probably follow them, if the game they went to had anything going for it at all :) I don't have a lot of real life friends, they are stewn to the 4 winds, so the people I hang out the most are in the game. Lord knows I don't have any female friends close, and I miss them. So the only girls at all I talk to other than the kids are in EQ2. I can't give that up. I like guys they are fun to hang out with and talk to, but mostly you have to censor what you say around them. They aren't interested most of the time in your boobs hurting or just the general female blah's. They don't want to know if you and your spouse (who was thier friend first) are fighting over stupid stuff (and though they would listen, they wouldn't know what to do about it) or what to do when your kids are dating someone you don't like. Its a man thing, and its normal, but sometimes as the only girl hanging around guys...well you need something different. The ladies in game help with that, we have something in common already. And a couple of them I wish lived a lot closer, I think that we could be great friends if they didn't live so far away. The kind where you sit around the living room eating chocolate and talking about everything, and its just fun. No pressures nothing just friends.

Men friends of mine don't get all hurt and offended, cause I love you guys and your all special in your own way. However if any of you want a sex change, that would work really well /grin evilly.

The Name Game

Yesterday I finally came up with nicknames for my friends/family, at least for purposes of this journal. There was one person who was giving me definate issues (they probably would have been Mountain Man, but they got a haircut /grin). They now have a nickname thanks to the Geeky Spouse's subconcious...

Apparently he had a dream where this person not only got down with me, but with my mother as well...so they are now Da Player. Even though this person is so not a player lol. So now we have Blanket, Amishman, The Quiet One, Da Player, and Geeky Spouse. The kids will probably end up being Gryffindork and Mafalda, due to thier Harry Potter affection. (For those of you who don't know officially Mafalda is "the lost Weasley cousin" who was supposed to be in Book 4, but got overshadowed by Rita Skeeter, so she was cut. She was a Slytherin who was really smart and probably the child of the 2nd cousin who was an accountant.) In our house she's either that or the by-product of a drunken night with Lucius Malfoy and a Muggle. After reading that statement I probably should be Gryffindork....

My EQ2 friends are easy, thier character names work. Except for the one that reads this journal...who is affectionatly known as "Studmuffin" /grin.

I need more wit...or to have coffee before I think of these things.

Blame Canada

I was wandering around the net today and found this gem from OGHC. And all I could think of was wtf? The white background red cross theme has been on every first aid kit I've ever bought. Hell its on just about everything medical related, but not "red cross" related. Don't they have something better to do than mess with something that everyone in the world just about recognizes as help? I mean gee let's just dump some money into lawyers and lawsuits, those guys over in New Orleans/Gulf Coast/Iran/wherever will be fine for another couple of months...

State of the Game...

Most of you know that I play EQ2. Most of you know I met the Geeky Spouse on EQ1 (now named EQlive for some weird reason). It's a fun game, or at least it has been.

I think I am suffering from burnout, or just the addiction of Tradewind's Legends on real arcade (I am a multimillionare on 2 different characters now! whee!). But its just not as fun, and with the new expansion not sure if its going to continue to be fun at all...

Let me clarify (and state that the NDA on the expansion has been lifted so no fussing!) The adventure side of the KoS (Kingdom of Sky) is brilliant, its lovely in its tone and lots and lots of fun stuff to do for the 60+ crowd. Being that I'm not 60+ it will give a little time to fix any of them bugs that will come when it hits live. It always happens, I played with the Frostfell stuff on test and never had a problem with the pots, but when it hit live servers it was a disaster.

Tradeskills on the other hand...well lets just say they need more work than a 1950's automobile stripped and left in the woods for 20 years. While I was initially hesitant with the changes for no subcombines, I was willing to give it a whirl. Eventually...after bitching about it for a while...I was willing to give it a whirl. Now I have and as a concept I understand what they are doing. Make tradeskills fun! Make it viable! Make it so more people do it!...What they seem to miss is that people did think it was fun, and viable and people did it without these changes. Sure there was bitching, but there was more bitching about the lack of T6 Advanced Carpenter recipes (which btw, don't get your hopes up...still none as of this date), and the cost of fuel than any idea that the whole thing was so broken they had to change it. Crafters (and rightly so) feel like red-headed stepchildren. This expansion isn't going to make them feel any better.

Geeky Spouse and I were talking about the changes the other day and in his great programming knowledge said "seems like thier trying to make thier jobs easier". By taking out subcombines, and all the "extra" things you had to do when creating a recipe, its an easier change from a programming status. Create harvests, design final recipe. Done. Finished. Go for coffee. But for the people who play the game that's not fun. Sure some will be thrilled that there is no more work involved in crafting, but the marketing of the game was that there was supposed to be work involved. If someone told adventurers just kill these 2 mobs over and over again for 2 gold a kill and the only experience your going to find for this level, I guarantee there would be an uproar like was never heard before.

I can hope that maybe the removal of subcombines is a preview to adding more recipe's, like the one's that were taken from the merchants about a year ago and were never returned to the game (qeynosian stove anyone?). I won't beat my chest and scream that I'm going to cancel my account, because really there's nothing else out there. SwG doesn't appeal to me, WoW would be great for 60 levels and then poof, DDO I;ve heard horrible things about, and all my friends are in EQ2. People I like and want to spend time with. So I'll do what I always do, take a few days off and then head back in. But I don't know if I'd count on me making your boxes for you.

Thanks for the dorkitute...

As if anyone had any doubts about my birthday calender not being updated yet, let me put them to rest. It's not. Somewhere in the miasma of mail on my computer is a list of important peoples birthdays. I remember looking at it, and going really need to get those into a form that I will notice.

So suffice to say I have missed an important birthday, someone who here for today only will be known as "The Nameless One" because I'm embarressed and grumpy about missing thier birthday. ESPECIALLY since they were at my house ON the day of thier birth and didn't mention such. So now I feel even more embarressed that the birthday calender isn't working, cause you know there's nothing like hanging at someone's place and waiting around for them to say "Happy Birthday" and stuff and it never happens. You feel a little like Molly Ringwald.

Yeah so now I feel like a complete ass...(I don't even know if you can say that here, but I'm assuming you can.) I'm going to go drown myself in some coffee and try and figure out how to face "The Nameless One" the next time I see them.

Only on Guam...

Many of you know that I used to live on the lovely island of Guam. For those of you that don't know anything about Guam, let me fill you in.

1) Its tiny, approximately 12 miles wide and 35 miles long. There are two military bases one on each end of the island, that take up pretty much the large part of the north and south ends. Not that that matters much as there are lovely beaches along the sides.

2) Its quite near the Marianas Trench. This makes the beaches unusual because there are no breakers hitting the shore. Probably a good thing with an island this small. Strange though to live on an island and not be able to hear the ocean. There were only 2 or three places I could access (not sure about the bases) that you could hear breakers hit shore.

3) The food...oh boy the food. Great food, yummy food, really really bad for you food. Half of the island is overweight and has diabetis. To much coconut milk :)

4) Its hot. You have two seasons on Guam, wet and dry. It hovers around 90 degrees or so even when its wet. The only truely cold place is the movie theaters. Or falling asleep on concrete at 4 in the morning. Stepping out of the airplane the first time, I literally lost my breath, it was that hot.

5) The place is so laid back that they have something called "Island formal" its for weddings and funerals, basically it means you wear long pants. Believe me is that temperature you need to be specific when you want someone to wear anything that goes past the knee.

6) You have typhoons (hurricanes rotating backwards) AND earthquakes. Nothing like living in a place where drowning or falling into a pit are possible depending on the weather conditions. But it's handled like anything else. Stock up when the warning comes and prepare for a few months without power or running water. When Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of Alabama, one of my Guamish friends looked at her husband and said, "Well I don't quite remember where Tasha is but I guarentee she's got food and water for the next 3 weeks if she's anywhere near that." If we didn't live at the north end of the state she would have been right. On Guam everything comes by ship, so it could literally be weeks before a shipment of food/water/gas would be available. Where I live we have tornado's (the only natural phenomenom I haven't personally experienced) but I figure if your house is in a tornado path, its not gonna matter to much if you have a month's worth of water hanging out, cause you know the HOUSE is gone.

You can find a lot more I'm sure with a little research :) but that hits some of the high points...or hot points if you can stand the pun. (And you have to since I'm the one typing and not you, so nyah).

Yes all of this has a point, and I'm not just waxing nostalgic about my time on the tropical isle. This morning my stepdad sent a "OOG" picture. That translates to Only On Guam. There are a few of those, Guam is also the only place where you will find a Mercades in the driveway and chickens in the yard. Yes, really I've seen it.

So for your viewing pleasure.



Looks kinda normal right? Yeah...and now you see why it qualifies as a OOG...