Suns and Faces

It feels slightly hacky that all I've had time to take pictures of lately are sunsets. It helps that sunsets happen no matter where you are or what you're doing. There have been some pretty interesting sunsets lately, too.

I took my math final last night and I feel like I did well. Assuming I did as well as I think I did, that'll probably be the last math class I'll ever have to take in my life. I can't tell you how sweet it is to contemplate that.

Last week I started playing Guild Wars 2 which I think I'm enjoying more than any other MMORPG I've tried, though I've only had time to play for about an hour a night and a lot of that time has been spent monkeying around with the exceptional character creation.

This is my highest level character, a level three thief called Frances Robie:

She takes her first name from Grace Kelly's character in To Catch a Thief and her last name from Cary Grant's character in the same movie. I feel like I managed something close to a likeness of Grace Kelly with maybe Cary Grant's eyebrows. I'm reminded of the face creation in Oblivion. I used to spend hours and hours in that thing--I'd decide one day, "Let's see if I can make Ingrid Bergman," or Hideko Takamine or Tori Amos or Ingrid Pitt. Usually I could. Of course, you had so much freedom in face editing that naturally most people complained about it and Bethesda's not given players such freedom since. Which is why it's hard not to make people in vanilla Skyrim who don't look like Christian Bale in The Machinist aged by fifty years. You don't have as much breathing room from the supposedly prettier defaults as you had from those you were given in Oblivion--which, to be fair, were hideous but it never mattered to me because the sky was the limit in editing. Turns out there are millions of strange people out there who just want to get on with the game. Weirdos.

Anyway, Guild Wars 2 manages to give one almost as much flexibility as Oblivion while starting from a genuinely pretty face. Which is more of a novelty than you'd think when you consider World of Warcraft's bulbous WWE aesthetic or the Play-Doh people in The Secret World.

I don't know why my thief is my highest level character--I seem to die a lot less using magic users. I also have a human mesmer named Cuenever:

And a Norn necromancer named Vakna Hinnan:

Twitter Sonnet #576

Restless Rolex robots arrest the sun.
Watch fob worlds falter in waning orbits.
Electric ether tricked the elfin gun.
Mindless moons leash mobs of little rabbits.
Screenwriters need to find words besides "burn".
Long dragon with the great voice, heed Tuco:
"If you're gonna eat, eat don't talk," do learn.
A good Hobbit is bricked behind stucco.
Mountains of cheap apples stole the grocer.
Molten blood streams prop up the thin mantis.
At fifty percent it's just a scissor.
But we offer the second blade gratis.
Moth eyed yeti spin a fungal tube web.
Plymouth Pop Rocks choke glutton Johnny Reb.