Horses

Laura Highcove

So we’ve had two foals born at the barn in the past month. The first was from Drifterella, who had her filly two and a half weeks early, though luckily she was just fine if not a might small. She’s a solid chestnut even though her mother is (minimally) colored. The second was out of She’s Cool Lukin, a rather colored mare, but ended up being another solid chestnut, though a colt. I should put up some pictures. Babies are cute.

We’re waiting on Diamond to foal hers in about two weeks. Hopefully she has a colored foal…

You Can’t See Us?

Laura Highcove

I know a lot of you long time readers are wondering where the heck the wonderful me went? That doesn’t matter, what does matter is that I’m back just in time to find out that I ‘wimpied’ my way out of a guaranteed legendary. Ah, such is life. ANYWAY!

I love this fight. I guess it’s the new mechanic, or maybe the awesome model, or maybe I just appreciate the RP of the poor little whelpling. The fight itself is kind of fun if not annoying. We did end up working on it for a week’s raids before getting it down.

Pokemon Black (and white)

Laura Highcove

So being the pokemon fan that I am, along with the convenience of it coming out mere days before my birthday, I picked up Pokemon Black this past weekend. I started playing it. First impressions. Okay cool, we’re back to planning on going on a pokemon journey instead of having to save the professor and just accidentally picking up the starter. Eh, not bad that you have two childhood friends that pick up the pokemon you don’t choose and then show up in many story things as you go. Pretty bad that there are not many decent pokemon in the starting levels unless you want to use those god ugly monkeys. (Munna sucks btw, usually psychic types have some sort of redeeming features, but he’s slow AND has no defense…this’ll be my first game EVER going though without a psychic type.) Horrible that the ‘rival’ role is filled by a neurotic green haired thing who talks too much and ends up having a castle later. (OMG SPOILERS) Beyond horrible that there are different areas in black and white. The Black City as opposed to the White Forest. Sorry guys, it was bad enough you making some pokemon exclusive to a game pack color, but a whole area? BAD. BADBADBAD.

I’m warming up to some of the pokemon though, which I didn’t really think I’d do, but in general I just see every way it’s not as good as HeartGold/SoulSilver and it makes me cry. I haven’t picked it up in two days. I will get through it, but I’m not really sure what I have to look forward to.

Left Behind

Laura Highcove

So I did something hard. I finally decided to quit raiding. It’s been four years, but raiding on Tuesdays was just killing me. When you get into a certain schedule and do it for four years, you get *used* to how things are. Before raiding ushered me out of my week, now it feels more like a roadblock as I come into a new week. Maybe it’s a weak excuse, but having everything crammed onto three days and then having my entire weekend just open really doesn’t work for me. I need ‘me’ time every day, time to work on my other hobbies and interests. I was spending quality time with my husband last night when I looked up at the clock and realized it was 7:30 and for a few moments all I thought was ‘I could get on. Look, it’s raid time and I’m just watching TV.’ but then I would be raiding, and unable to do anything else until 11 when it’s time to go to bed, at which time I would probably have to just leave raid because Koi’s been pushing past 11 *every* raid since we started in Cataclysm and I’m tired enough already without getting to bed late on top of it.

But whenever I think of raiding, I feel regretful because it’s a whole world that I’m feel like I’m losing. I have friends in the game and if I don’t raid, then we have no interaction. I could raid Wednesdays and Thursdays still, Wednesday might be pushing it, but then at least I could keep my schedule for Tuesdays. I went to Guild Ox this morning and realized that I wasn’t there for a single guild new kill, even when I was raiding because everything happened after I had to go to bed for the night or before we started raiding officially and I was doing other things, or after I stopped raiding. I’ve already been left behind and maybe it’s better to just stay that way.

But the time I would gain by no longer raiding, while hard to see right now. When you don’t have anything else to do, that’s when I could write, when I could play other video games that are piling up. It’s really a hard decision and I’m just not sure how things are going to go from here.

NaNo and beyond

Laura Highcove

Once again I have managed to be NaNotorious.

It was harder this year, for sure, since I had a full time job. Week three was the worst, I really wanted to just give up and get on with…well not doing this. But I managed to stick it out. Once again the book is not finished. I think I’m further through the book than the halfway of last year, but once again, we’ll see how that goes. I, of course, celebrated by starting work on my other book, The Trickster.

That being said, we’re less than a week away from Wow’s Cataclysm launch which will consume my soul for at least a month before I come up for air. Looking forward to the days off if nothing else. Though with the time, I really should get the ‘credits’ thing done to try and encourage other people to make their own so I can get that done before Cata launches.

There’s also the pesky issue of my lost SoulSilver game, and with it all of the Pokemon I have collected over the past, roughly three years. I have reached the last gym of the Diamond version of the game (which I hate as a game, but made better by sending over eggs from my husband’s Heart Gold game for a familiar team) and am playing with getting White when it comes out in March. However last night I looked over the pictures of the pokemon from Gen V and am sadly (but expectantly) disappointed by the horrible designs in most every respect. Most of my problem being that a lot of the pokemon don’t *look* like pokemon. The style seems incorrect. The starters are fine along with a few random pokes, but even the legendary dragons don’t really fit the style of pokemon designs I’m used to. I still desperately cling to the original 151 with some passion, with only tiny cracks for some pokemon from the later releases. By the time they hit Diamond’s pokemon, I was thoroughly disgusted, and think I hold no love for any of those pokemon (I’d have to check to be positive.)

So what is the point of going into Gen V? The possibility of at least good gameplay. I did not dislike Diamond only because of the unfamiliar, unimagined pokemon, but because the gameplay itself was terrible as they took a Game Boy game and spent five minutes making it DS compatible. (I also didn’t like it because of the storyline. While Team Galactic was cool for once again having a PLAN, the idea of being able to put the world’s creator in a ball in my pocket really pushes past even the suspension of disbelief one must have for being able to put something the size of Onix in a ball in my pocket.) SoulSilver was everything that I could possibly want in a game. All of the pokemon. A huge world. Fabulous gameplay and an actual (fabulous) use of the ds screen. In my mind they improved the game in almost every way. (Even the pokewalker was so cool.) So I’m hoping that Black and White will be worth it. If not, I suppose I’ll get another SoulSilver game at some point and complete my Gen IV collection and be happy with that.

Holidays

Laura Highcove

I think I should be able to say Merry Christmas without fear of persecution. Sure, radio stations, and TV stations, and TV programs, stick with Happy Holidays as they generally represent a number of people with a number of religious beliefs, but *I* have my own religious belief, and that is in Chritsmas.

I don’t believe that wishing someone a Merry Christmas is offensive. It’s not me shoving my religion down your throat. It’s me saying this is my religion, I wish you well. I would not be offended to be wished a Happy Hanukkah or a Happy Kwanzaa (Kwanzaa isn’t even a religious holiday…). It just seems these days that people are so scared to offend people because there are some idiots out there who go out of their way to be offended by everything they possibly can.

Lololololololololololololol

Laura Highcove

I’ve always wanted to server spam. Like always, and I finally got to. 😀

So our trip down Lich King Heroic started long long ago, in a galaxy where Halion did not exist. Then we took like three months off and downed the stupid pink dragon. Yeah Koi, that was fun. >.> BUT THEN we came back to the Lich King and promptly began having attendance issues. YAY! Many nights we had anywhere from 20 to 24 people in the raid. It was frustrating, but the reason we’ve stayed together as a guild for over three…four…? however many years now is because Koi is the most stubborn person in the world. (Case in point, this version of word press hasn’t been updated since we got this website…)

In a last ditch attempt to down Lich King before Cataclysm, we appointed Levo…iknorite? as recruiting officer. Lo and behold he worked some sort of magic and we managed to pull in three new initiates which pulled us up to the standard 25 man raid. We went into raiding that night and not only got to p3 for the first time, but got the boss to 22% with two minutes left on the enrage timer before we just ran out of living people.

And then you can guess what happened. We had a record number of people on Friday night. We stumbled around the boss for a few attempts, and then in the one attempt where some really crazy stuff happened, we managed to turn it into a kill. Many that kill vid that I get around to doing in December after NaNoWriMo is over is going to be great!

Edit: So we of course celebrated as soon as we all died, but Koi in his insight and wisdom was like “omg gais, wut if the server crashes?” And we all laughed, and we got our achievements, and I passed out all the loot, and Koi was about to call rolls on Invincible when…the server actually crashed. We came back in to a soft reset instance with valk’yr and no Lich King body with Invincible still on it. qq

So we rolled and got double 100s, out of which Azshane, our resident shirly aussie came out on top. And she got to hope that our tickets to the GMs would prove fruitful in receiving Invincible. Oddly enough, I got a response by the next day. iknorite? Asking who everything was going to go to, and I went into ZG thinking it would take a while for a GM to get back to me. Nope. He popped in while I was killing the tiger boss and said Invincible was in the mailbox for Azzy and I got the two worthless tokens for the 10 they are worth. He also clarified the problem with the servers.

And Azzy finally got out of her own ZG run to come show us the much improved Invincible model.

I saw a full rainbow

Laura Highcove

NaNoWriMo has started and it’s going okay except for the one hiccup where I thought my only file of my story got corrupted, and yesterday’s late raid which made me so tired that I’m napping instead of writing. But then I should’ve have any trouble catching up this weekend. Of course I need to get ahead since next weekend I have to go family visiting.

Blah, it’s so cold out today. About time to pull out the heavy layers so as to stay warm in the barn. All the horses are getting frisky in the cold and of course there’s the lazy sleepy feeling cold weather brings in general.

And tonight should be our Heroic Lich King kill assuming we get the numbers. Hopefully with how well we did last night, people will be excited and come tonight as well.