I know the pain of pieces not fitting in with their colours at all, so I can feel your pain there. They do all the fancy stuff like 3d models in the sets and so on yet they still can’t make a proper green mask! Odd, isn’t it?
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Doing alright and liking the new forums, much smoother functionality than the old ones imho.
Too bad you can’t post with all your characters
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Welp, guess I was too quick to claim that I can post on any character. If I try to change character, the Reply button disappears and the forums prompts me to log in, and if I click the Log In button, the page refreshes with Marika selected…
Just when I finally got some inspiration to post - on other characters. Oh well. It’s a bit sad how little I actually do RP-related things on my main, admittedly.
We can only maintain roleplay on a few characters at a time at most and even then it depends on other people showing interest as it’s both an exchange and a collaboration over the simplest of things.
My mage hasn’t seen much ingame action in quite a while now. Neither has my shaman. Some of my characters are just these profoundly dull people at a glance but have a rich internal cogwork. Roleplaying an introvert is hard in an environment that rewards extroverts. I’m sure that sort of subject could even be its own thread.
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Dream Diary chapter 51; it’s all a waste.
We follow two people on their journey. One is a man seeking employment, one is a woman seeking to complete her work.
The man struggles to get by and knows that he may have to resort to desperate measures. Just short of something truly awful, he is hired by a bald man to do what seems to be menial tasks about his employer’s richly appointed mansion but as the days roll by he feels eased into notions of doing more and worse, seemingly losing his coherence and independence while fully aware of it.
In a suggestible state, he is told by his employer to rob a local mechanic and complies without fuss. Entering the mechanic’s office, the situation turns dramatic as an intended warning shot gravely wounds the mechanic who takes it all in a stride and scoffs at the man. He knows who sent this “robber” and it wasn’t for money. The mechanic seems more irritated than distressed at his injury as if this is common and expected, pointing out that the mysterious employer, going by “the hungering” is after lives and not coin. The man has become a hitman as his employer feeds and grows stronger by each death, the man’s ability to resist the call having evaporated entirely.
Onto the woman’s story. Working as a programmer and designer, she is part of making a new and advanced type of computer. The new design is little more than a monitor with all the powerful tech inside it. Mention is made of advanced AI for the operating system which demands a lot of power and a self replicating learning algorithm. It’s all so advanced that while individuals working on it understand their part, the whole is a vauge mystery beyond any of them.
The first prototype of the new computer is activated and immediately causes a power outage. Awkward but expected, power is restored but the computer then does its self replicating more akin to mitosis and a second computer pops up, demanding twice the power. By the time they figure this out, the supercomputers have reproduced several times and consume all power around them. The AI also shows a sinister awareness of all this as it mocks their attempts to get power for anything else like lamps and appliances.
The woman understands that the only way to stop this is to be rid of the prototype and its offspring so she grabs them one by one to be dumped in large underground sewer pipes much like those in mario games. The pipes and tubes are full of something that certainly isn’t sewage but the computers are drowned and power is restored in the town.
As if demanding a price for services rendered, the pipes start emerging from the ground into streets and people’s homes, snaking their way through buildings like a new parasite worse than the computers. The world at large quickly collapses as nothing can be done to stop this, pipes coiled around every corner as they leak their alien substances.
The sinister consciousness behind the pipes reaches out to the woman as she tries to hide. All that she knew is lost but she can have it all if she simply accepts the new normal. At the verge of madness in her grief, she accepts.
We cut to a scene where she sits in her living room with relatives and a wife thought lost resting happily in her lap, all seeming normal but for the pipes all around, their bubbling contents on display like witches’ cauldrons. The implication being that she surrendered to madness and pretends all is well as the world is drowned in waste pipes.
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Dream Diary 52, till death do you part.
For the longest time, a family has owned a strange little sculpture. A thing of pottery, it depicts a man in a long coat with arms raised. Turning it around, there is a woman behind him, wearing a dress, fitted into the back of the man as she is somewhat smaller and so slots right into the raised arms and coat. They both look very stylised but generally reflect how people dressed in the 1800’s. It’s typically regarded as symbolising the mutually supportive marriage of some relatives in the past.
The day comes to clean out the house, perhaps to move and the clay figure is removed from its honoured place on the shelf where it has stood for decades. As it is moved, the pieces of the statue come apart since the two weren’t as solidly joined together as it was assumed. With dawning discomfort, the man is lifted off the woman to expose that the female figure is actually a container that the male figure was sealing up.
It is then revealed that the female sculpture is actually an urn, containing a long dead person’s ashes. Through various bits of research with antiquarians and old news archives, the true purpose of the statue is revealed. Many many years ago, a man murdered an innocent woman and the body was never found, meaning that in those days, charges were ultimately dropped and he went on to live in peace with his good name stronger for the ordeal. Putting some other details of the man’s life together, we learn that he had an interest in the occult and the truth of the sculpture is revealed.
Far from the symbolic joining of a successful and loving marriage, the statue was designed to house the woman’s remains with the figure of the man sealing it in to trap her spirit, binding her to him and allowing him to draw on her for power and wealth. This man, this distant relative had bound a woman’s soul for almost two centuries, accounting for his family’s success. The decision is made to free her even if this means the family’s prosperity crumbles with it.
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These new forums are weird.
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They sure are, and a nightmare on mobile. In other news I keep having odd dreams with too few details and stories that aren’t that interesting.
Example 1:
Main character steals from a shop, feels bad. Confessing to the shop owner, played by a person from my workplace, he already knew and reported it. Main character is banned for life but it’s a relief to have confessed.
Example 2:
Main character lives at a hospice with a lot of rules that take adjustment. Gradually used to obeying but then mostly staying in the cot while listening to just slightly odd music, the surly abbess(?) who runs the place begins instructing the obedient workers in open embezzlement. Knowing nothing but to comply, they do.
Example 3:
A fantasy world comes to an end in cataclysmic war. Among the doomed races left after the evil foe is gone, the elves hold on to a peninsula. Think constantinople. Previously divided into typical subcultures of high, wood, dark and other superflous elves, they reform society around the survivors in this tiny state. Becoming something new altogether; a grim mixture of all with a cold and cruel view on the ravaged world, they begin to rebuild. Their primary explorers are young elves called Pilgrims, ostensibly seeking the places that the gods desire for their people. The story ends before it really starts, a khadgar-like character seeing this unfold and withdrawing in dismay.
Example four:
An alternate history where Sparta, by being more egalitarian but even more militaristic manages to do actual conquest and statecraft rather than being a single minded highly conservative slave state. They conquer all of Hellas and Anatolia, holding on to it against all comers. Straddling the passage between Europe and Asia, they grow wealthy and prosperous even if most of it goes into their strict elite army and bland, utilitarian fortress cities. Time to replay rome 2 total war?
Example 5:
Imagery and names of WoW character ideas to make or race/faction swap into. Some ideas get written down for later in the event of some character’s demise, retirement or just idle fancy.
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But why is example four written in letters, and the other examples are numbers?! >8O
That is a question for the ages. The simplest answer is that I was still waking up from a nap but is it the fact of the matter? What is truth, really? What do numbers arbitrarily assigned to experience tell of their worth without a value?
My brain keeps thinking that the three links of chain icon to link on the forum interface is actually two small arrows in circles, pointed left and right, one above the other and my weary brain immediately interprets that as a “share” button before I catch myself and feel stupid again.
The new forums are clearly influenced by the Old Gods.
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Fnalgh ngkthar zhur kyshh. Agnh nhaktarr, hlud’ruud igulek vydh l’hyrr dagh.
Furthermore, the Devouring Eye isn’t yet in the Seventh House so it’d be an inopportune time to lay the cup with the membrane still quivering from the earlier premutation of the dial.
Onto less distressing matters; I’m trying out new character ideas and with five days left until the undelete button cools off I’m going to need a bit of feedback. Also, is there any hint of when the patch is coming? Some things need doing quickly either way.
This damn new forum has broken how I formulate my IC posts. Great.
kicks a bucket as he grumbles
December 11, 2018 according to one of the WoWpedia wiki things.
Slander and lies!
An observation; blood/void elf males have the best casting animations for Priest as they mesh smoothly into the class idle casting pose. Their belts are still bugged, though and that sort of thing really presses my cider.
“So there I was, escorting some supplies in that blasted Darkshore. We were ambushed! I’ll give one thing to those country elves, and that’s they know how to catch by surprise. Of course, they didn’t last too long. I took atleast 3 of them down… before one of those cowards got a lucky hit with their arrow. I presume it was poisoned, things went woozy… eventually it went black, I thought I was dead… but then I woke up and heard a voice I will never forget” Thuldrell takes a large swig of his arcwine, forgetting all courtesy
“Hey! You! You’re finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into that Imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there.”
“It was at that moment, I cursed to the skies! That bastard Todd Howard had done it again!”
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Okay guys, I’ve had a couple of drinks, not enough to randomly post Thrash, but … enough to post, well … I guess that I’m just trying to say …
… SLAANESH PATROL!! >83
Dream Diarly number 53; “Summer of snakes”.
Due to unchecked climate change, the heat causes the population of adders to explode and mutate with new subspecies appearing to fill evolutionary niches. This is bad news for humanity because the snakes swarm and slither from place to place like hungry zerglings.
We cut to an isolated cabin where a few people are hiding to wait out the storm of serpents as the things crawl along the lawn and outer walls like a carpet. Everything feels very apocalyptic with stockpiled food and cramped accomodations. A couple of people are still outside by choice, a Steve Irwin-ish snake expert among them, culling the deluge of adders as he comments on the danger to warn them.
Two particular new mutations of adder crawl around and must be avoided. A nondescript brown snake and one that’s bright red with a cobra hood and rattlesnake tail. Being bitten by these new strains typically means immediate doom. The snake hunters do what they can, myself among them, but we willingly take many bites to the legs so as to fight and reach the cabin, saving two stray cats from the snakes.
Once inside, I feel the venom from the dozens of bites take hold and get dizzy, Expert Irwin saying it’s not fatal but something to ride out. The pain is intense, the news announcing the snakes are passing, due north like a weather report. The snake swarms are just that common that it’s treated like a typical storm. We also get news that there are a lot of missing cats this summer and since this is set in the future, the news update also has a segment on the orange president of the US smugly getting to see his wall finished to keep the snakes out rather than people. He’s old, in a wheelchair and barely sapient in deep dementia. It’s 2037, but of course he’s still president. The agony of the venom in my legs wakes me up.
Dream Diary part 54: The Ark.
Set in the style of a disney CGI movie we begin in the distant past with a teenage boy wandering the tundra, all dressed in furs and carrying a bow. He is guided and supported by a big bird, an eagle(?) who tells him where to go and to hurry up. The Cold creeps further south each day. It’s implied to be the onset of the ice age.
Reaching the edge of the known world implied to be the mediterranean coast (the boy was probably crossing the alps), the eagle tells the boy to start building. He will need a ship to cross the water to safety. He doesn’t know anything about shipbuilding but the eagle, seemingly all knowing and wise, teaches him.
Much toil and struggle later, a relatively large ship for its time sits on the shore. It becomes as much home as salvation as the weather gets worse, its shape providing shelter. The eagle in all her wisdom tells the boy to wait because others will come and will need his help to cross the water. Eventually, a ragged remnant of a small tribe comes walking down the slopes. Eager to help, the boy calls out but is hushed by the eagle. She knows and he does not and he mustn’t help these people.
Watching in grief and dismay, the boy sees the small tribe being pursued by sabretooth cats and he has to hide on his ship to save himself as the beasts kill his fellow humans. The eagle comforts him and it’s increasingly clear that she isn’t a bird at all but some manner of wise ancestor spirit or the face of some goddess. The Eagle reassures him that more people will come and they will cross the waters to safety but he cannot save them all. The world is changing and danger is everywhere. In making the ship, he has done all that he can and is expected to.
As an educational narrative it’s all about doing your best and picking your battles.
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