Bullet Time

This is going to be my attempt at a weekly round-up, post SoTG. I made a few other posts recently with the bullet style, with short snippets touching on individual points, and I liked the effect. It keeps me from rambling, and keeps everything a bit more condensed. This way I only make a few notes, and if I want to dedicate a post to something that I’ve touched on already, I don’t feel like I’m repeating myself. Perhaps I didn’t need the name change or the different format to keep that column going, but a change of pace/layout/format keeps the juices flowing, and that’s what’s important. I also want to notate that this won’t be solely game-focused, because sometimes I want to throw in a personal tidbit or talk about something besides gaming. We’re keeping it “a little bit of everything” but still maintaining a “whole lot of nothing.” With that said, let’s get on with it:

• I’ve been vaping for 7 months now. I’ve been meaning to write up some posts regarding the effects of vaping vs. the effects of smoking for a long time now, mainly because there still seems to be a negative stigma about it, but also because I wanted to satisfy my own curiosity. I smoked for a long time, and had mentioned trying to quit on several occasions, but switching to the vape has been the only thing that worked. The obvious answer here is that because e-liquid has nicotine in it, but also because vapor is still an effective substitution for smoke. The action is still there and that’s what I think most smokers are truly addicted to. We are creatures of habit after all. Recently I’ve become more involved in trying out new builds, building micro coils with cotton, and am looking into other devices that I’d like to pick up. This may provide some more blogging fodder, but I’d also like to share what I’ve learned so far with anyone out there who might be interested in quitting smoking, or just taking up vaping as a hobby. E-liquids with zero nicotine are available, so it can be picked up strictly as a hobby. Anyway if anyone reads this and would like to know more feel free to drop me a line.
• The Newbie Blogger Initiative is coming together, and it appears that a start day for the event has been selected. We are still trying to piece together the particulars, but it looks like I may end up being the curator of the main page’s blog and archives during the event this year. There are a lot of plans in the works here, and it looks to be a well put together event. More on this as it comes.
• Many of the bloggers that are involved with this event are also avid Twitter users, and have seemingly convinced me that there is more to the service than I once gave it credit for. I’ve actually said at some point or another that I’d never have a Twitter account because I never saw a point in it, but I suppose I said the same thing about Facebook before I left Myspace for it. Once you do see a point for something, then maybe it’s time to give it a shot. I haven’t set one up just yet, but when (IF) I do, I’ll make sure you guys know about it.
• I decided at some point in the last couple of months that I needed to brush up on Star Trek. As in the TV shows. I probably watched almost every episode of The Next Generation when I was a kid, but years will wipe your memory of most of that. I watched most of the other spin offs as well, but never in their entirety. It’s crazy how much TV has changed over time, all of the episodes are actually 45 minutes. There were actually less commercials during the course of a show back then. Seasons are far longer than today’s, coming in between 24-26 episodes each, as opposed to shows I watch today that are like 39 minutes long and a season lasts 14 episodes max. The quality of today’s shows are superior, but I’m amazed at some of the effects/camera tricks they pulled off in the late 80’s early 90’s. I’m also amazed that I still can feel a connection to these characters, that I have laughed out loud, and almost cried. I’m currently watching the fourth season, and I haven’t seen an episode yet that I’ve completely hated. That’s not something that many TV shows can do, let alone ones that are almost 30 years old.
• The current season of the Walking Dead ended in another cliff hanger, and though I always know that’s how it will end, it pisses me off every time. This is the point in the year where I drop down to only watching a show or two at a time. Mad Men’s final season is coming up next, and there are a couple other shows that are premiering that look interesting, but with new shows you never know.
• Gaming was pretty sporadic last week. Over the weekend I spent a lot of time in Norrath. I’m not sure if I mentioned getting caught up on all of the expansions I was missing, but yeah, that happened. Unfortunately my two main toons who were at the level cap are now 5 levels behind, and you can’t advance past level 90 without having 280 AAs. I didn’t have that on either, both were sitting just above 200. That meant a grind, but thankfully some of the older expansions had many dungeons that I never experienced, which meant that I could go back and do much of that content in just a group with my father and our mercenaries. So I popped some XP potions and we set to grinding. As of now I’m at 240 or so AAs, so I’ve made quite a bit of progress towards the 280 goal, but still have some work ahead of me. I have plans for a separate post, so more on this later.
• Hearthstone has been going pretty well, I’ve solidified three of my decks to the point where they are winning at a high percentage. I still need a few more Epic or better cards to round out some of my decks, and that has been slow going. At this point every time I run an arena and earn a pack, I’m disenchanting all but one of the cards at best. More often than not I’m just saving up dust to create the cards I need. I think I own every common. I’m getting close on rares. Purps and legendaries are the ones that are going to take forever to earn, so ultimately I’m just going to start playing ranked and see if I can make legendary rank. On a side note, I got my brother-in-law playing, but he’s still not built up enough to face me properly. I’m looking forward to seeing what decks he might come up with.
• Awesomenauts has taken up the remainder of my free time. I finally hit the cap, 115 ranks are necessary to do so, and then you can prestige ten times. The cap on the PS3 was 45, and I did all 10 prestige levels on that platform. I really wasn’t going to 115 ranks ten times, but then when the prestige notification popped up the other night, I said fuck it. Here’s to doing it ten more times. I’m in the 20’s now, and doing all 115 took me around a month, so I guess that will keep me playing the game for a long time. I still can’t match my rating from the PS3 on the Steam leaderboards, and if I did I’d be in the top 200 or so, as opposed to just within the top 1,000 over there. So the ranking works a bit differently, but I still feel like my skill level is improving, despite what the numbers may be showing.

I think that does it for now. Stay tuned, I have more stuff in the works for later in the week.