Hunting Wabbits

So I’ve just spend a good portion of my alloted time on WoW for the night chasing after various female NPCs in Dalaran, current mingling grounds of WoW. It wasn’t until a couple of minutes ago, after finding a female Tauren and Orc and chasing them around while waiting on the cooldown of my flower basket to run its course, that it struck me: I’ve spent the better part of an hour stalking female avatars in WoW, waiting for my chance to put bunny ears on their heads. I realise that part of the difficulty of the associated achievement lies in effectively finding and ‘tagging’ players of the opposite faction without being able to talk to them, but that lack of communication is also part of what made me feel not so comfortable with what I was doing. Following someone around town without talking to them, with the purpose of showering them with unwanted attention, doesn’t seem like a good thing to promote in-game. The fact that the players behind those avatars might have been women who, chances are, have had to deal with some form of sexual harrassment in real life as well, that just nails the lid on the coffin.

Ah, the weird things these games make us think of. ..

 

A little bit of everything

I felt it was kinda sad that Life on Mars got cancelled, but at the same time, I think they did a great job wrapping up the story. While I did manage to do a good job of figuring out the story arcs for each individual episode, the ending was a pleasant surprise, considering that they had been dropping a lot of clues that hinted to what was really going on. All in all, good stuff. Might have to watch it again.

Changeling was eye-opening, and the themes portrayed really hit home. We’ve come a long way since the 1920’s, which is a good thing, but there’s still a long ways to go, and there are still people who are seen as second class citizens all over the world. Perhaps that too will change in due time, preferably sooner rather than later.

With Scrubs ending sometime soon too, we’ve been checking out some of the new shows that have been premiering recently. So far, everything we’ve checked out (Castle, The Unusuals, and Cupid) all seem like good shows with interesting premises. We’ll see how things pan out. I think I managed to figure out each and every one of the cases in Castle so far, but the interactions between the characters, especially Castle’s semidisfunctional family, are endearing. I like the characters in The Unusuals too, they all have secrets/flaws/skeletons in the closet, so it will be interesting to see how things evolve. Cupid too is interesting, with a strong pilot episode; I’m hoping they manage to work a few twists into the tired romantic comedy formula and shake things up a bit.

Final Fantasy XIII looks pretty good, I’m glad the demo doesn’t play anything like the beginning of FFXII. It remains to be seen where they are going to go with it, but I’m willing to give it a try. The trailer for Agito XIII also looks good.

Finally discovered who the band that play the song from the Prince of Persia commercial are – Sigur Ros. It’s ironic that the song first appeared in Vanilla Sky, which I saw in it’s original Spanish incarnation and then passed on the Hollywood remake version, because I love the song. The lesson here is don’t let your own snobbery rob you of the possibility of discovering a hidden treasure.

Also in the music department, last.fm is pretty cool. I recommended it to Mrs. Destral after her Yahoo online radio got bought out by someone and they did away with commercial-free subscriptions in favour of the traditional commercial supported free radio experience. While it might not entirely fill the void left by Yahoo Online Radio, it does have a distinct advantage for someone like me, in that last.fm features music from all over the place. It’s nice to get reacquainted with my favourite Spanish and Japanese music. Definitely a good discovery.

I’ve reached the glass ceiling again in WoW. While I do the occasional raid, my schedule clashes with my guild’s raiding objectives, so I’m stuck at doing heroics, dailies, and levelling my army of alts. Patch 3.1 also brought the usual nuisance of having to relocate and update UI addons and respec. On the upside, speccing my kitty druid for 6k critical shreds with only crafted epics and no dungeon gear is nice when that big payoff hits. On my rogue, Adrenalin Rush + Blade Flurry + Fan of Knives is insanely satisfying, and I much prefer combat spec to mutilate. Mage and Warrior are currently both 74 and questing in Howling Fjord. The Argent Tournament looks like a lot of fun, but some of the dailies are irritating in that the travel:activity ratio seems rather weighted towards the former and not enough to the latter. Plus, having people steal your chunks of rock while you’re fighting off mobs is not fun.

Finally, it’s crazy how many ideas for fun games/content can spring forth from playing a game you normally wouldn’t even look at twice while browsing for a game to buy.