busy busy week ahead
Jun. 24th, 2011 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat_sochoSo I'm looking at all the stuff that's going on next week, what with P coming back to town, the projected hegira to Newport News and thence to Otakon with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
onsenmark, and whatever the heck is going to happen over the 4th of July*. P will be arriving in town on Monday; not sure when she's shipping out to Minneapolis for Convergence, but I would assume Thursday since that's when the new five-day version kicks off.
Piled onto this will be a flurry of bill-paying and shopping in mid-week, since (hopefully) I'll have my unemployment payments resuming on the 29th followed by the big check from the Alexandria City Public Schools the next day. Most of that will go for rent, of course, phone payments and other utilities, but there will be a little extra cash to do fun stuff (like a.f.u. no Breakfast) which is all I really need to keep my head away from the Slough of Despond.
One of my friends hasn't been so fortunate. It's been a tough stretch for her lately, what with ongoing physical and emotional problems even before her pet died, and I'm going to make the effort to reach out and at least say hi; since she lives on the other end of DC, I don't know that I'll actually be able to stop by in person, but on the other hand, it looks like I'm going to be driving up to Baltimore a couple times next week, so stopping off in between isn't completely out of the question.
I've started A Feast For Crows and am already wishing I'd waited to read A Storm Of Swords first; there's been quite a few references to things that have happened in the South, which is the half of Martin's original third book covered in the latter. As for Gormenghast...wow. It's certainly living up to its dual forewords by Anthony Burgess and Quentin Crisp who bang on for about a dozen pages in toto about how unique Peake's work is. I don't think I've read anything quite like this before. Not even Lovecraft comes close to the sheer weight of descriptive prose used on the COMPLETELY FUCKING BATSHIT inhabitants of this here castle. I'm going to keep plugging on; it makes good reading while I'm playing Farmville In Space and trying not to get ganked by random assholes wandering through Goonswarm space.
CCP made a fair number of changes to EVE with their latest revision, yclept Incarna; the one that affect my gameplay the most are the Captain's Quarters, which is a lame simulation that lets you walk around your ship's cockpit. This basically gets in the way of doing things smoothly and efficiently in your hangar, and is annoying. The other revision is a change to jump bridge rules to toss a bone to the "elite PVPers" who like to hang around and gank freighter pilots and other people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time.** Formerly, you could have no more than two jump bridges in each system, which made it pretty easy and relatively safe to get from one end of the region to another, but effective Tuesday, this dropped to one per system, and things suddenly got much more interesting (lethal) for jews like me, because now you have to jump through at least one gate before you get to the next jump bridge. So they're going to force me to dual-box and scout for myself, making generous use of the alt-tab shortcut and playing it as safe as possible.
What has a lot of people really pissed off, though, is the introduction of hideously overpriced accessories one can buy by trading PLEX licenses (virtual 30-day game time cards you can buy in-game for the EVE currency of isk) for Aurum. There seems to be a fear that CCP will move from selling gewgaws like monocles and clothes for your character to things which actually affect game play. That's very common in free-to-play games like the ones Zynga runs on Facebook, but not at all common in subscription-based games like EVE, and there's quite a few players seriously pissed off about it, especially after an internal CCP e-mail was leaked indicating that they expect the furor to blow over after a while as people get used to this. And we thought CCP was out of touch and delusional before...
*Hint: Not Otakon.
**This is usually me, every other month or so. A Badger A Day In DKUK, Hey!
onsenmark, and whatever the heck is going to happen over the 4th of July*. P will be arriving in town on Monday; not sure when she's shipping out to Minneapolis for Convergence, but I would assume Thursday since that's when the new five-day version kicks off. Piled onto this will be a flurry of bill-paying and shopping in mid-week, since (hopefully) I'll have my unemployment payments resuming on the 29th followed by the big check from the Alexandria City Public Schools the next day. Most of that will go for rent, of course, phone payments and other utilities, but there will be a little extra cash to do fun stuff (like a.f.u. no Breakfast) which is all I really need to keep my head away from the Slough of Despond.
One of my friends hasn't been so fortunate. It's been a tough stretch for her lately, what with ongoing physical and emotional problems even before her pet died, and I'm going to make the effort to reach out and at least say hi; since she lives on the other end of DC, I don't know that I'll actually be able to stop by in person, but on the other hand, it looks like I'm going to be driving up to Baltimore a couple times next week, so stopping off in between isn't completely out of the question.
I've started A Feast For Crows and am already wishing I'd waited to read A Storm Of Swords first; there's been quite a few references to things that have happened in the South, which is the half of Martin's original third book covered in the latter. As for Gormenghast...wow. It's certainly living up to its dual forewords by Anthony Burgess and Quentin Crisp who bang on for about a dozen pages in toto about how unique Peake's work is. I don't think I've read anything quite like this before. Not even Lovecraft comes close to the sheer weight of descriptive prose used on the COMPLETELY FUCKING BATSHIT inhabitants of this here castle. I'm going to keep plugging on; it makes good reading while I'm playing Farmville In Space and trying not to get ganked by random assholes wandering through Goonswarm space.
CCP made a fair number of changes to EVE with their latest revision, yclept Incarna; the one that affect my gameplay the most are the Captain's Quarters, which is a lame simulation that lets you walk around your ship's cockpit. This basically gets in the way of doing things smoothly and efficiently in your hangar, and is annoying. The other revision is a change to jump bridge rules to toss a bone to the "elite PVPers" who like to hang around and gank freighter pilots and other people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time.** Formerly, you could have no more than two jump bridges in each system, which made it pretty easy and relatively safe to get from one end of the region to another, but effective Tuesday, this dropped to one per system, and things suddenly got much more interesting (lethal) for jews like me, because now you have to jump through at least one gate before you get to the next jump bridge. So they're going to force me to dual-box and scout for myself, making generous use of the alt-tab shortcut and playing it as safe as possible.
What has a lot of people really pissed off, though, is the introduction of hideously overpriced accessories one can buy by trading PLEX licenses (virtual 30-day game time cards you can buy in-game for the EVE currency of isk) for Aurum. There seems to be a fear that CCP will move from selling gewgaws like monocles and clothes for your character to things which actually affect game play. That's very common in free-to-play games like the ones Zynga runs on Facebook, but not at all common in subscription-based games like EVE, and there's quite a few players seriously pissed off about it, especially after an internal CCP e-mail was leaked indicating that they expect the furor to blow over after a while as people get used to this. And we thought CCP was out of touch and delusional before...
*Hint: Not Otakon.
**This is usually me, every other month or so. A Badger A Day In DKUK, Hey!
