So yeah. I’m speaking this Friday.

Popularity: 17% [?]

I don’t know about you, but I love it when I get Rick Roll’d. But there was a post on Digg today about how the original YouTube video that started it all got deleted. But by the time I had checked the link, it was actually back up. I wasn’t sure if I had gotten Rick Roll’d again or what. My love for 80’s music aside, it really showed how much reading other people’s comments sometimes makes my day.

From Digg:

And my favorite comment from the actual YouTube video:

pantlessknights:
i love getting rick rolled. everything else fades away…

I LULZED.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Last night I had an extravagant 2.5 hours of gameplay. I think I was making up for the fact that I won’t be able to play tonight due to Poker with some friends. But I’m glad to say that those 2.5 hours were choc-full of adventure.

Some highlights.

• Dinged lvl 13.
• Found out that I need to disenchant things in order to enchant other things. Also found out that it’s a pain in the ass.
• Got the VoidWalker pet.

All the writing that went behind each quest is very well done. The unraveling of the story behind the Blood Elves is paced very well with your discovery around the land where you start at. Essentially the Blood Elves have been getting the shaft for a long time.

Popularity: 12% [?]

The 1-hour a day World of Warcraft journey continues.

Reached lvl 10 and had the pleasure of choosing my first talent. That burned like 30 minutes right there. I was obsessing over which talent route I should take. I finally ended up going the DoT route and got the enhancement for the Corruption spell.

Other things I noticed was that the new patch was available, which lead me to read up about the whole SunWell deal. Fun stuff, but it will be a WHILE before I can get to those good things. For the rest of the 15 minutes I blasted through some more quests and got my second profession. So my professions are Tailoring and Enchanting. With a secondary profession of First Aid.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Update numero uno.

So a little background info before I proceed with the update of last night’s “hour of power”. I started a character on Saturday and played a total of about 5 hours from Saturday to Sunday. It honestly felt like just a bit here and there, but after summing up my time, I ended up spending 5 hours. Wowza. So during that time, I got reacquainted with the interface and the loverly artwork that WoW has.

A friend and I were having a discussion about the difference between artwork and graphics in gaming. And I remember stating that those were two completely different things when it comes to video games. The examples I gave were WoW and Everquest 2. Everquest 2 might have had good graphics because of it’s higher polygon models for the characters and more “realistic” looking textures for the world, but I always thought that everything looked very drab and ugly. Sure it was more realistic, but to me the artistry wasn’t there to make things look pleasant. Whereas World of Warcraft clearly uses its artistry to “cover up” for the lower polygon-count characters. The textures are a bit more stylized and charicatured, but never would you think that items looked “cartoony” within WoW. Also having very distinct characters that look great in lower-count polygons are much harder to achieve IMO.

So yeah, WoW still looks great.

Last night’s gaming was a bit hindered by a fruitful workout session but I was able to get in about an hour. Didn’t level, but was able to finish a couple of quests and prepare myself for a bunch of quests for tonight. I’m still soloing and enjoying reading through the back story behind each quest. On the tail end of level 9.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Intro

So for a long time now, I’ve been wanted to enjoy the full experience of World of Warcraft. Before I moved to NYC and before I got married, I gave it a go and for some reason the experience didn’t stick to me. I ended up creating a bunch of characters on different servers trying to get a good experience but ended up dropping WoW and carelessly defining it a “time waster”, with the idea that dropping the game was something that was beneficial to me as I can spend the time with other productive activities. This left me with some level 19 characters on a couple of different servers that act as my illegitimate gaming children. Signs of a previous gaming life when I was single and willing to try on different games on a whim. (I know lvl 19 is wuss-style, but I’ll get to that later.)

But things are different now. Being married, I need to carefully choose my games and the times at which I can let loose. I can no longer carelessly spend 10+ hours on raids and quests leveling up my character. And I know what you’re saying, “Sam, you know, if you can get your wife to play WoW, you can spend that time together.” Sure, I can try convincing my wife to play WoW, but you have to understand that that’s like trying to convince Tom Cruise to take an Advil. Near impossible. For games, my wife has an attention span of less than 30 mins. And that’s for games like Guitar Hero. And of course this is in no way dissing the fact that my wife is not a gamer. I infact appreciate that she’s not a gamer. I think we would both be in a very bad place if she was a gamer, because that would unleash the gaming beast within me. So you can say that she’s the equivalent of garlic juice that Blade injects into himself to prevent him from going balls-out VamPYREiStical.

WoW? Huh?

So why WoW? And why now? Both very good questions. I did have a chance in 2004 to be completely nut-sacked about WoW. But why didn’t I? I think it was a combination of things. The timing opportunity was there. I had a pretty chill job in Louisville and being single allowed me to spend A LOT of time with games. And I did. But I was into City of Heroes at the time. And that was my first love with a MMORPG; and like a first love, you tried to stick with it. But then WoW dropped and everyone was raving about it, so I decided to make the jump. I bought a copy of WoW installed it and gave it a go. But the people weren’t friendly. Forming a group for quests seemed a bit sterile and I never “grooved” with the other members of the party. I certainly might have been biased because of CoH, but I half-expected things to be FANTASTIC for WoW. Then I tried again on a different server because I thought “well maybe the people on this server are just a bunch of cock gobblers”, but NYET. Same experience on two different servers. Grouping never came naturally, people were dicks, and the game eventually felt better as solo play. I even reconfirmed the “friendliness” aspect by creating a new character on City of Heroes and I was amazed to find how people just got along better in groups.

Now why do I want to go back and experience that again? Firstly, I feel like I never got the whole World of Warcraft experience. People that know me, know that I can be pretty nutso about certain things. Games are one of them. The fact that I was never nutso about WoW has been bothering me ever since the first attempt. The fact that it has over 10 million subscribed user tells me that it’s an amazing game. And that’s something that I want to experience. It’s arguably one of the BEST games EVAR and to miss out on something like that is unacceptable to me.

The Rub

BUT!!!1111 Now here’s essentially the catch of this entire post. I think it’s pretty unrealistic for me to be spending 4+ hours a day playing WoW. I would most probably have to cut corners in my job, my responsibilities at home and my QT™ with my wife. That’s a no-no for me. Not because I’m bitch-whipped or anything, I simply do not think that’s responsible for me these days. OK, maybe just a little whipped. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Shut up.

1 Hour a Day

So I started an experiment over the weekend. I downloaded and installed WoW with the Burning Crusade(took a fricking day) and created a new character. The main part of the experiment is to try and limit my WoW gaming to about 1 hour a day, and to see if I get a full and rich WoW experience. Of course the 1 hour a day won’t allow me to do raids which is easily a 10+ hour affair. But I’m giving myself the opportunities for such time allotment for vacations and random chances; much like any 10+ hour gaming sessions I have these days if/when I have a chance to have them. One example would be on a night that my friends are over, drink and play games until 5AM. The point of this is that if WoW is truly a well made game, I should get a full experience from my 1 hour a day experiment.

I will be updating this blog with updates on my Horde character Shinzou on Gul’Dan server. If you see me, say “hi”.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Popularity: 12% [?]

Popularity: 13% [?]

I have been in the market, recently, for a new Wacom tablet. My current tablet has served me well and it’s about time ti upgrade. So I’ve been scouring their site and noticed their new logo.

With the left being the old and the right being the new. While I really like the vibrancy of the colors and the modern font treatment of the word “Wacom”, I’m not sure I’m really digging the “clip-art” logo. The symbol looks like it took someone ten minutes on Illustrator who recently found out how to use the linear gradient fills. Badly.

After doing some research, I found out that the team that created the new Wacom logo is Wolff Olins. And looking through their portfolio, there are a bunch of campaigns that I really like. For example, the WaMu campaign. The (RED) campaign. Unilever’s new logo.

Obviously, I’m not very pleased with the new Wacom logo. But I really think it deserves better. Wacom is a product that’s used by serious designers everywhere. I’m sure the people of Wolff Olins have a bunch of Wacom tablets in their studio. I really think that they got some serious marketers that know how to sell the logos that are generated by the different teams within their studio because I also found out that Wolff Olins is also responsible for this campaign:

Now that is some serious sweet talking.

Popularity: 36% [?]

One of my guilty pleasure is watching very sitcom-like sitcoms. One of them is How I Met Your Mother (trust me, it’s pretty funny). Anyway, they have this ongoing thing from the last season where one of the character (played by Jason Segel) owes another character (played by NPH) two slaps at any given time. Here is the slap countdown from the show.

Popularity: 15% [?]

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