Divine Light mana cost has been increased by approximately 10%.
Flash of Light mana cost has been increased by approximately 10%.
Holy Light mana cost has been increased by approximately 10%.

Hmm. Well, that kinda sucks, but okay. I haven’t been having any trouble with mana recently, and they WANT me to have trouble with mana, so I get it.

But then I saw this:

Aura Mastery: This ability no longer increases the benefit granted by Crusader Aura.

WHAT THE FUCKITY FUCK. SCREW YOU BLIZZARD I’M CANCELLING MY SUBSCRIPTION. NO LOVE.

So I responded to her post of pictures… with my little Corehound. This is what I posted:

I have no whelpling. I have a corehound.

Core hounds are the vicious but faithful servants of Ragnaros and his minions. The beast has the appearance of a massive bulldog with two heads, each equipped with a mouth filled with rows of flaming teeth. Its body is covered with armored hide and studded with bony spikes. A streak of flames runs down its spine from head to stubby tail. The oldest and most powerful of the core hounds is Magmadar, the alpha male and sire of the entire current pack.

Core hounds use simple tactics, attacking the most obviously threatening target first. They will typically attempt an improved grab or bull rush to push their target into nearby lava. A core hound with flaming breath takes hold of a victim before using its flaming breath, thus preventing the victim from escaping the effect. Core hounds grow and gain power throughout their lives.

Source

(Special thanks to Jasper, my parents golden retriever puppy — currently 9 months old and at about 90lbs, he’s turning into quite the corehound himself — for assisting in my corehound demonstration.)

Until now! The game has been released, and everybody can play it, so … yay! It’s mod! It’s .. a nation! and it races! And now, my initial thoughts:

I’ve been bugging Nick to let me visit him at work so I can play for a while now, but it seems that he’s been busy with, you know, working or something. I mean, honestly. So I think the last time I fiddled around with ModNation Racers was sometime last fall. It’s a heck of a lot more polished now (who knew? they HAVE been working hard!) and tons of fun. I find the controls a little twitchy, but I come from a Nintendo background, so most Playstation games feel a bit twitchy to me. Too many buttons, for one.

I’m a huge Mario Kart fan, so I was expecting to compare it to that, and … eh, they have the same basic genre in common, but that’s about it. Yes, they’re both kart racer games, and they both have an emphasis on drifting, and both allow weapons on the course… and that’s pretty much it. Actual gameplay is pretty different.

And, of course, the big thing for ModNation is the customization, and holy crap that’s fun. I didn’t play around with the track building tool, but I did of course build my own custom kart. Lawnmower body, white with blue spots, with two crown decals on the hood. It’s powered by a pumping heart on the back, has a license plate wrapped with christmas lights, has a bunch of vintage suitcases strapped to the back, a sword sticking out of the engine, a wheel of cheese as a steering wheel, and a wooden deck chair as a, well, chair.

It’s possibly the tackiest thing ever, and I love it. I grabbed one of the default racers (he had blue viking horns, so he matched my kart) and off we went.

And … I drove off a cliff. Oh, hmm. Cliff. Ok. So I ran around the track again, and … I drove off a cliff. Ah, yes. That’s where that cliff was. Okay. So, around the track again, and here comes that cliff, and … oh, off I go. Shit.

I think on the 6th lap, I managed to avoid driving off the cliff, but only just. Stupid cliff. On the 7th lap, I managed to warp past it. Muahaha. Weapons that let you warp are awesome. I think I even managed to get the hang of drifting at that point. 8th lap, I fell off the cliff. Argh.

Nick kept giving me suggestions. “Hit square.” “WHERE THE FUCK IS SQUARE?” Yeah, have I mentioned that I’ve never played on a playstation before? Square? What the fuck is square? Hell, I barely understand the trigger buttons. And what’s with all the little joysticks? In my day, we had A & B, start/select, one d-pad AND WE LIKED IT.

Ok, so it’s fun, despite my total ineptitude. Nick, can we get a Playstation?

Luckily, by the time I was done designing lawnmowers and throwing myself off cliffs (and Nick was finished fixing the stuff he was trying to fix — you know, doing his job and stuff) we wandered off to go do Olympic things.

…and that’s where this post ends, because I wrote about other stuff then that I actually posted.

Anyway, ModNation Racers. It’s fun, bitches. Just ask Kevin Butler.

We’re funny. (Warcraft knowledge possibly required.)

Anyway, so we’ve got some pretty awesome people in our guild. One guy in particular I just adore, he’s funny as hell, a good player, and always amuses me. We end up chatting a lot while we play and just generally just goofing around. There’s some mild flirting, mostly in the way of very mild innuendo. (In YOUR endo!) But really, nothing excessive — Nick is also in our guild, and that would just be weird. I actually very purposely DON’T talk about sex very much, because there aren’t a lot of women in our guild, and I don’t want to be thought of as “that girl” who only gets to come on raids because she’ll show you her tits. But I’m very much me, which means I run my mouth off at times, and my humor is occasionally a bit dirty.

So last night, we’re both running around doing insanely boring quests, and chatting about nothing in particular. At one point, he mentions how he’s going to college in the fall. I pause briefly. “So… you’re 18?” I say, thinking oh fuck, I’ve got to watch my mouth a bit better. “No,” he says. Phew, I think.

“I’m seventeen. I’ll be eighteen in may.”

Aaaah! I’m going to wind up on Dateline. I SWEAR CHRIS HANSEN, I THOUGHT HE WAS IN HIS 20s!

On the upside, it’d be totally legal in Canada. Just very, very squicky. I kind of felt the need to go have a very hot shower, you know, to scrub off the shame.

He’s still awesome, I’m just going to have to watch my mouth a little better, methinks. Eep.

Our xmas eve party was awesome. Many friends, much fun, a lot of Rock Band (and apparently I need a few more mics, the harmony part of Rock Band: Beatles is awesome) and even some Space Hulk…

Yeah, it was good. We should do this more often.

A few points of awesome: Nick gave me an awesome gift: A new video card. Score! No more will I be frantically jamming buttons in a hope that a few spells get cast in Warcraft because the extra effects on the screen have caused my poor computer to cry tears of pain. I’m now getting 30 fps (frames per second, for the unwary) in Dalaran & busy instances, and 55-60 fps elsewhere. SIXTY FRAMES PER SECOND. Honestly, the game looks so smooth now, it makes me a little dizzy. I’m going to have to get used to that.

He was also absolutely wonderful, and when a Battered Hilt dropped for him on Christmas Eve morn, rather than running the quest himself, or even selling it for several thousand gold… he gave it to me, as the end result was a HUGE upgrade for me.

Along with the in-game pet, Lil’ K.T., this Christmas was surprisingly Warcraft themed.

But that’s not all — he also got me a gift card for Amazon, so that I might fill my new Kindle, part of my gift from my parents. I’m totally in love with this thing. I purchased Philippa Gregory’s new book about the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, The White Queen. So, I have a device with wireless access to wikipedia, and a book by an author who has me constantly running to wikipedia to fact-check & read more history. This? This is awesome.

Also? Socks. I have to be the only person who actually WANTS socks for Christmas. I love socks. Knee high socks with bumblebees on them? Totally awesome.

Am spoiled.

Anyway, this is about migraines.

Fucking sick of them.

One of the things the doctor suggested was possibly looking into migraine prophylactics. Well, I do love me a good prophylactic, although the idea of taking a pill every day has me balking a bit. But… I miss WAY too much work due to migraines, not to mention ouch, migraines! So it’s definitely something to look into. She also made me realize that I need to do another series of “find out what causes the migraine!” food elimination diets. Since the recent discovery that red wine gives me a migraine, and I know it didn’t used to… well, evidently I have new migraine triggers since the last time I did the elimination diet to see what might cause them… 10 years ago.

Awesome.

But first, I get to do a headache diary. Since I mentioned that not only do I get pretty frequent migraines, but I often get headaches as well, she wants me to keep a record of all headaches, not just migraines. This’ll be fun. Hard, too — I often don’t even think about headaches, I just … get them a lot, and ignore them and eventually they go away.

But, she made me a bit nervous when she mentioned the N-word. No, not that one. In this case, it’s “neurologist”. Bah. I prefer to think that I’m just fine, thanks. Except for those pesky migraines… *sigh*

The worst part will be cutting caffeine out again. I like caffeine, and it’s a pain in the butt finding caffeine-free versions of the beverages I enjoy.

Edit: Upon further reflection, I decided to research what migraine prophylactics are available: No. No no no. I’m not going on beta blockers, antidepressants, anti-seizures, or botulism. I’ll stick with the migraines, thanks. If I can find non-medicinal ways to prevent them, great. I’ll work on that and see if I can find anything else other than avoiding red wine. But ANTI-SEIZURE drugs? Seriously? Antidepressants? Jesus christ, the side effects are worse than the initial problem.

Fuck. That. Noise.

So, we’ve been slacking off on the working out aspect of our weeks, since Nick was laid off… he’s not too into getting up early in the morning with me, and god knows I’m not going to do this horrible shit without him pushing me harder than I want to go and me yelling back at him about how much I hate him. It’s our together time. Why, it was just the other day that I called him a sadistic fucker who should rot in hell. Relationship building, you know.

I kid. I bitch and whine and moan but that’s because I think I’m being funny, even when I’m not. Especially when I’m not. But regardless, we needed to get back into this. Nick kept making noise about how he was going to start working out again during the day… when I’m not there. No! If he gets in better shape and I don’t, then I’ll be left behind and one day I’ll be too fat to move and he’ll be all bronzed-god-like and I won’t be able to convince him to bring me Nutella anymore…

Nah, I’m pretty sure he’d still love me, but I’m slightly competitive and while I don’t need to WIN, I at least need to be in the running.

So, last Saturday, we bought memberships and a month pass at Britannia Community Centre, which has a pretty decent gym and a rather nice pool. The idea (and so far, execution) has been that on Sundays/Tuesdays/Thursdays, we get up at the godawful hour of 6:45am, haul ourselves over to the community centre, work out until 8ish, then do lengths until 8:30ish, and then drop me off at work for 9. Well, except weekends, in which case we go whenever we feel like it.

We started on Saturday this week (switching to Sundays from now on) and so this morning was our third trip.

I. Am. So. Sore.

And tired. Being used to cutting it as Close as Humanly Possible as far as time I get up for work, especially since I’ve been leaving the morning dog-walk up to Nick (Justice likes to sleep in most of the time anyway) … 6:45 is EARLY. Like, a full hour before my alarm even starts going off, and I usually hit snooze a few times…

No such luck. 6:45, we get up, check our email, pat the very-confused-dog who stays in bed because SHE’S not the idiot who’s getting up that early and head out the door. For PAIN.

Interesting thing learned: I’m not actually a very good swimmer.

I took swimming lessons as a kid, and I’ve always enjoyed splashing around in a pool, and have absolutely no concerns there. I always assumed that I could swim just fine. And, in that way, I can. However, I suck at lengths. The last time I took swimming lessons was … about 20 years ago, and it seems I’ve totally forgotten how to breathe properly while doing a proper front crawl. I’m starting to figure it out — inhaling a lungful of chlorinated water will teach you REAL FAST — but I still occasionally feel like I’m flailing about moronically.

On the upside, the only people who are in the pool with us at 8am are a group of somewhat ancient asian seniors, the guy who WALKS his lengths (and only goes as far as he can walk out, then turns around and goes back), and a couple of people who look FAR too serious about swimming to be paying even a little attention to me. Oh, and the ridiculously hot girl who was in the gym with us doing things with the free weights, but she wasn’t swimming, so I won’t think about her. Much. Rawr.

*cough* Ahem.

Anyway, I feel a little ridiculous, but luckily I’m not overly worried about feeling a little ridiculous, so I’ll keep it up.

Oh, except for this: So, on Saturday, Nick was bench pressing something or another. After he’s done, he motions to me like it’s my turn. Well… no. That’s not really an exercise I have much interest in, I’d rather not. I don’t have a lot of upper body strength, and I have a fear of dropping the damn thing on my neck, spotter or not. (Likewise, I’m a little afraid of spotting for Nick, but he keeps telling me I’ll be fine, I don’t have to do much, just take a little weight off… Easy for him to say, he’s not the one who’d have to live with himself after dropping the thing on his neck. WHY? Because he’ll be DEAD and it’ll be MY FAULT. Ridiculous, me? Nah.)

Anyway, so Nick suggests that I try just bench pressing the bar without any weight on it. Surely I won’t worry about that.

…

No. No no no. I’m okay with feeling a LITTLE ridiculous, but THERE IS A LIMIT. Being in a room STUFFED FULL OF ‘ROID MONKEYS WHILE BENCH PRESSING AN EMPTY BAR is WAY beyond my limit of humiliation.

So, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, I was perusing the Uldaman (aka, the Warcraft server I play on) forums, and came across a thread about who the “best Death Knight is”. I skimmed it, expecting to see mention of a particular DK who’s crazy damage just amazes me, and was not let down — he got a nod. But way, WAY better was finding this:

Blacktusk, hands down and away is the best tps tanking DK I have seen.

That’s Nick. I’m insanely proud. I know it’s totally dorky, but screw that. As his pocket healer, he IS a great tank. I’ve healed a lot of good tanks, a lot of jackasses, a lot of undergeared tanks, and a lot of people who simply have no idea what they’re doing. Nick’s good. That said, it helps that we play in the same room and can tell each other off for fucking up. (But of course, we’re perfect, and NEVER do that. Right? Hello? Whatdya mean I’ve got crusader aura up? IT HELPS ME GO FASTER.)

So… you may (or probably won’t) recall a post I made last April, about very definitely NOT researching flights to LA at 1 in the morning. Of course, I had a slew of people asking me WHY I was (not) researching said flights, and what was so important in LA?

The answer, of course, was Nick, who was working on a film shoot for the intro to Skate 2.

Anyway, so the game is released, and sure, they might have laid him off, but he’s still been keeping an eye on how it’s been doing, and of course is fascinated by all the user-made videos that have been coming out, using his camera system. He’s so bloody proud, and I can’t help but be twice as proud as he is.

Me, I just love the intro. It’s funny as hell, and even more amusing when you’re watching it with Nick, who’s saying “I was standing just out of frame there… I was sitting behind that counter there…” Yeah, I admit, I’m a fangirl.