Monday, November 15, 2010

One Sector at a Time

My hard drive still seems to be surviving. It hasn't given me any trouble since yesterday morning, either. It hasn't even made the grinding noises. But a new hard drive is on its way anyway--I managed to get a good deal on a highly rated, 650 gig drive from New Egg. Considering my two current drives are only around 120 gigs each, I'll be swimming in space. I was tempted to get one of the new terabyte sized drive, but I kind of share Tim's trepidation about the potential stability of these drives.

I've also got dental stuff to take care of this week. I went in for an early appointment to-day to see about getting a new false tooth--One of my front teeth is missing, and I've had the same ridiculously fake looking and uncomfortable tooth on a retainer for something like fifteen years. To-day the dentist held up a whole series of fake teeth next to my remaining front tooth, muttering, "No, that's not right, that's not right . . . too yellow . . . too light . . . too grey . . ." He had around fifty different colours of model teeth, and none of them seemed right. Finally he directed me to drive to the lab down the block where the teeth are crafted.

It took me a few minutes to find the tiny, cluttered office inhabited by only a small, stout old woman with a thick Russian accent. She seemed both like a character from the Dostoevsky book I was reading this morning and somewhat like Chew, the old Chinese man in Blade Runner who alone in his lab just made eyes. This woman just makes teeth.

She held up a few model teeth of her own to mine while I stood in the doorway leading outside, finally saying, "It'll be lighter than other tooth. Your teeth all different colours anyway."

"Anything's an improvement, as far as I'm concerned," I said.

I played a lot of World of Warcraft at Tim's house yesterday, and I've been playing a lot more of it lately since it's the only activity I have now to do while listening to The Howard Stern Show. I still haven't gotten the Burning Crusade expansion, so once I got my Rogue, Galatea, to level 60 a couple weeks ago, I made a paladin, Dormouse, whom I've already gotten to level 32. I seem to get two level ups every time I play--the recent updates to WoW have made the paladins even more overpowered than they already were. I found I needed to go after enemies whose levels appeared in red to me just to get a decent challenge. I even managed to kill a raptor whose level was so much higher than mine that only a little skull showed up where his level normally would. I only had to use one potion. The key is the paladin spell Word of Glory, which, as WoWWiki says, "in tandem with Crusader's Strike, can be used to sustain a Retribution Paladin's health indefinitely, to the point where the paladin can solo a normally 5 person elite mob [monster]."

Aside from Word of Glory, the Retribution Paladin also as a number of other ways to heal, and I've been learning Herbalism, Cooking, and First Aid, so I tend to find myself with an overabundance of means for healing myself. I've been weirdly enjoying Cooking--I hardly ever use any of the food I make, but I like seeing what new recipes I can get. I liked making blood sausage from bear meat, boar intestine, and spider ichor, and I can't wait to see what I can use the "Mystery Meat" for.

Of course, I'd really like to play Fallout: New Vegas, though I think I'm going to wait for it to come down in price a bit. But apart from the bugs people are complaining about--and which are likely to be fixed with patches, if they haven't been already--I've really been liking what I'm hearing about the Role Playing element. It sounds like the way factions work in it is much more intricate than in Fallout 3, the dialogue is modified more by your characters stats and, best of all, in my eyes, is that there's a "hardcore" RP mode that makes it so your character has to eat, drink, and sleep regularly. I thought I was the only person in the world who wanted a game with something like that.

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