Randomness
Long time since I posted. I keep saying I'll do it more often but it never happens.
I'm still in college, and hopefully graduating at the end of Summer semester. Working hard to make it happen, started with 18 credit hours and ended up with 15 after one of the departments shot down my request for one of the classes. They didn't wan me to take it and the pre-req at the same time. Luckily the 3 credit hours keeping me at 15 instead of 12 was a class hedging my bets and will replace the lost class. Then a full Summer Semester and I get my B.A.S. should all go well.
Video game stuffs.
I did play the Closed, and part of the Open Beta on Star Trek Online. Overall It got better with time and updates. One thing that I still didn't enjoy when I stopped playing was it really didn't have what I'd call true 3D ship battles. You get to circle around an entire freaking planet on the XY grid, but you get maybe 3 kilometers of Z movement overall, and when you hit that invisible wall there it makes it such a pain to turn your ship it is ridiculous. SOme battles you can get a bit of elevation on a target and move in, but it is like someone else said kind of like flying a helicopter. You can cover a whole city that goes for miles, but you only get a couple hundred feet for a ceiling.
On to SL. I almost quit it a few weeks ago. There was a leak of the private website from a group I used to belong to. I got kicked out of Group B for essentially doing what I was needed as Owner of Group A, to someone who was also in Group B and needed to be stepped down a rank in Group A. After my departure from Group B, accusations were made against me that I had been leaking information from Group B, and since that leak stopped when I got kicked out, there was proof it was me. What they didn't want to face was that since I had demoted the cross member of both groups on the Group A side, that person who was the actual leak was no longer in a position of power to put such information to use. Here was someone I'd called friend trying to make me out as the bad guy and giving me a bad reputation, all to help protect the view of Group B as being pristine, and protecting that one member's ass. The betrayal I felt as I read some of what was posted about myself and my friends by those I had thought of as friends for years just really cut me to the core.
One of the reasons it hit me so hard is, honestly, I have no real social life except through the computer anymore. I don't travel to play D&D with a group of friends each week anymore. I don't have a social circle of co-workers like I'd had in the past because I don't really work with anyone except my direct supervisor at the school. Group A there holds most of my online friends, and though I have a few people offline that I count as friends, pretty much all of them live or have moved out of state. Group A takes a fair mount of my time and effort, and has been stumbling a bit of late in the leadership department. This makes it more important in theory for me to put some more time in and shore it up with a few others, but honestly I need to and am pulling back from my time investment in it.
So I have been reducing my stress in SL by doing other pursuits. Like enjoying my Lifetime membership with LotRO. I just started Skirmish last night, and it was a blast. I am only doing some solo stuff since no one in my kinship is on at the times I am, but it was still a lot of fun. And yes, I did play in the closed and open Beta. Yes I have played siince launch. And yes, my main is still only level 38. I just don't play enough because I never have the people on my server to group with anymore to do the big stuff.
I also have been in the test server for SWGEmu again. They enabled ground vehicles like the X34 landspeeder and the speederbike. They also turned Harvesters back, on even though they are buggy, to help deal with the sudden need for resource gathering. It takes 4800 units of steel and 1200 or so of any other kind of metal to make a speederbike, and similar numbers for the X34. I can grab 100 every five minutes given a good resource node, while a harvester gets more like 5-8 per five minutes. I finally gathered enough to make a speederbike, I just haven't gone into town to assemble it. It also spurred me to finish Master Artisan just to get the schematics to make these things.
I have been doing more Scavenger Hunt and Mafia Wars on Facebook as well. Finishing in the top 10000 most seasons of SH, and in the top 5000 when I can. I haven't been as happy with MW since they changed how energy packs work. I know on other sites it is still the old style, even though those places have at most NY and Cuba enabled on them and not the full development support they have for it on FB.
I also spent a bit of time in DDO during the holiday for Festivult. My account has been downgraded to Free to Play and it hasn't affected me too much. I got a pool of Turbine Points before I downgraded to unlock most of the stuff I used anyway. I'll probably spend some time here in the near future when the 4th anniversary celebration comes along.
Running into people...
I ran into Nathan a month or more back at Walmart. I wasn't expecting it, nor was he. I know he probably thought I didn't recognize him at first, but I did. I was just sort of dumbstruck. It was late, I was tired and in need of food, so my brain was running on slow motion. I will say dude got tall since I had last seen him, and at that time I was still married to his sister, so it had been a while since I saw him in person. I had kind of checked up on news of him from time to time, his becoming the DJ he'd been aspiring to be, getting married, etc. He'd reached more of his goals by far than I had at his age. He was always a good person, and I know things haven't always been the best for him of late, but I'm still sure the world is a better place with him in it, and his fiends better for knowing him.
Other stuffs
I had to give a presentation this evening in one of my classes. It was for Interpersonal Communication. We had to do a Johari Window presentation on ourselves. Look it up on Wikipedia if you like. I used an online friend or two to do the "Blind Spot" ones, the things I didn't seem to know about that were associated with me by them. I figure since we have never met, pretty much all they know about me is my personality. :) It went well enough, and even though I am not good at being in front of groups like that, I got quite a few compliments after class on it. Made me feel better. And with that, it is time for me to step away from the computer for a few and accomplish a little more tonight before Supernatural.
I'm still in college, and hopefully graduating at the end of Summer semester. Working hard to make it happen, started with 18 credit hours and ended up with 15 after one of the departments shot down my request for one of the classes. They didn't wan me to take it and the pre-req at the same time. Luckily the 3 credit hours keeping me at 15 instead of 12 was a class hedging my bets and will replace the lost class. Then a full Summer Semester and I get my B.A.S. should all go well.
Video game stuffs.
I did play the Closed, and part of the Open Beta on Star Trek Online. Overall It got better with time and updates. One thing that I still didn't enjoy when I stopped playing was it really didn't have what I'd call true 3D ship battles. You get to circle around an entire freaking planet on the XY grid, but you get maybe 3 kilometers of Z movement overall, and when you hit that invisible wall there it makes it such a pain to turn your ship it is ridiculous. SOme battles you can get a bit of elevation on a target and move in, but it is like someone else said kind of like flying a helicopter. You can cover a whole city that goes for miles, but you only get a couple hundred feet for a ceiling.
On to SL. I almost quit it a few weeks ago. There was a leak of the private website from a group I used to belong to. I got kicked out of Group B for essentially doing what I was needed as Owner of Group A, to someone who was also in Group B and needed to be stepped down a rank in Group A. After my departure from Group B, accusations were made against me that I had been leaking information from Group B, and since that leak stopped when I got kicked out, there was proof it was me. What they didn't want to face was that since I had demoted the cross member of both groups on the Group A side, that person who was the actual leak was no longer in a position of power to put such information to use. Here was someone I'd called friend trying to make me out as the bad guy and giving me a bad reputation, all to help protect the view of Group B as being pristine, and protecting that one member's ass. The betrayal I felt as I read some of what was posted about myself and my friends by those I had thought of as friends for years just really cut me to the core.
One of the reasons it hit me so hard is, honestly, I have no real social life except through the computer anymore. I don't travel to play D&D with a group of friends each week anymore. I don't have a social circle of co-workers like I'd had in the past because I don't really work with anyone except my direct supervisor at the school. Group A there holds most of my online friends, and though I have a few people offline that I count as friends, pretty much all of them live or have moved out of state. Group A takes a fair mount of my time and effort, and has been stumbling a bit of late in the leadership department. This makes it more important in theory for me to put some more time in and shore it up with a few others, but honestly I need to and am pulling back from my time investment in it.
So I have been reducing my stress in SL by doing other pursuits. Like enjoying my Lifetime membership with LotRO. I just started Skirmish last night, and it was a blast. I am only doing some solo stuff since no one in my kinship is on at the times I am, but it was still a lot of fun. And yes, I did play in the closed and open Beta. Yes I have played siince launch. And yes, my main is still only level 38. I just don't play enough because I never have the people on my server to group with anymore to do the big stuff.
I also have been in the test server for SWGEmu again. They enabled ground vehicles like the X34 landspeeder and the speederbike. They also turned Harvesters back, on even though they are buggy, to help deal with the sudden need for resource gathering. It takes 4800 units of steel and 1200 or so of any other kind of metal to make a speederbike, and similar numbers for the X34. I can grab 100 every five minutes given a good resource node, while a harvester gets more like 5-8 per five minutes. I finally gathered enough to make a speederbike, I just haven't gone into town to assemble it. It also spurred me to finish Master Artisan just to get the schematics to make these things.
I have been doing more Scavenger Hunt and Mafia Wars on Facebook as well. Finishing in the top 10000 most seasons of SH, and in the top 5000 when I can. I haven't been as happy with MW since they changed how energy packs work. I know on other sites it is still the old style, even though those places have at most NY and Cuba enabled on them and not the full development support they have for it on FB.
I also spent a bit of time in DDO during the holiday for Festivult. My account has been downgraded to Free to Play and it hasn't affected me too much. I got a pool of Turbine Points before I downgraded to unlock most of the stuff I used anyway. I'll probably spend some time here in the near future when the 4th anniversary celebration comes along.
Running into people...
I ran into Nathan a month or more back at Walmart. I wasn't expecting it, nor was he. I know he probably thought I didn't recognize him at first, but I did. I was just sort of dumbstruck. It was late, I was tired and in need of food, so my brain was running on slow motion. I will say dude got tall since I had last seen him, and at that time I was still married to his sister, so it had been a while since I saw him in person. I had kind of checked up on news of him from time to time, his becoming the DJ he'd been aspiring to be, getting married, etc. He'd reached more of his goals by far than I had at his age. He was always a good person, and I know things haven't always been the best for him of late, but I'm still sure the world is a better place with him in it, and his fiends better for knowing him.
Other stuffs
I had to give a presentation this evening in one of my classes. It was for Interpersonal Communication. We had to do a Johari Window presentation on ourselves. Look it up on Wikipedia if you like. I used an online friend or two to do the "Blind Spot" ones, the things I didn't seem to know about that were associated with me by them. I figure since we have never met, pretty much all they know about me is my personality. :) It went well enough, and even though I am not good at being in front of groups like that, I got quite a few compliments after class on it. Made me feel better. And with that, it is time for me to step away from the computer for a few and accomplish a little more tonight before Supernatural.