I’m still trying to get in shape. Kristi picked up a scale last time we were in Target, so I can reliably benchmark my progress. I currently weigh 178 pounds, and I’m about 20% body fat. Being 5′9″, this is on the high end of acceptable of the BMI scale. To be honest I’d like to keep my weight in the high 170’s-low 180’s, but drop about 5% of that fat. Yes, that is a huge goal, turning something like 15-20lbs of fat into muscle would be a significant change in my appearance and not all that likely. I’m still going to shoot for that though. Who knows, I might get close, and that would be a coup.

I’ve found a pretty useful webpage full of tips about exercise. It is a large help with my squats and push-ups, I have to say. I’ve so far noticed that I’m dropping too low with my squats and letting my shoulders rise too high with my push-ups. I’m now working on proper form rather than adding reps/weight so I’ll be stagnating in my current routine for a while. I’m also trying to stick to the dang thing, recently I’m degrading to six times a week (sometimes five). This is particularly bad because I skip working out on Thursday, as it is Kendo Day, and I don’t count it as skipping. If you jump around for an hour swinging a two pound sword then you can call it exercise, I think. So that means I was exercising four-five times a week. It was having an impact, but not the impact I want.

So my routine will stay the same for a while. Start with 25 push-ups, then do 25 sit-ups, then 15 more push-ups “wide” with my hands out further than my shoulders, then 15 crunches of the left-center-right variety, then fifteen squats, then 100 compressions of my hand exercisers, then 50 twists of my wrist exercisers, then 15 bicep curls with 25 pound weights, then I finish up with 25 shoulder exercises with 15 pound weights. I’ve modified my sit-ups to work like sit-ups I saw a Foreign Legion dude doing on a Discovery special, where you have your hands in front of you (elbows by your side and fists against your chest) then when you sit up you punch with your left then right. It cuts down on “cheating” with your hands behind your head and it makes you twist a little when you sit up and works your abs. Side-abs… whatever. Then I’ve also changed my squats so I squat down then pop up and kick my left leg to my right hand, then squat and kick right to left. This means I’m actually doing 30 squats. I try to do that approximately 30 minute routine once a day.

I’d like to get a timer and start my Chi Kung again, but I’d need to space those out so I’m not doing all that at once. I could do it while I watch TV, I’m sure Kristi would love my grunting while we are watching Sara Conner or something. Its always a work in progress. Now that I’m working an hour of OT a day, it eats a surprising amount of time.

I still haven’t hopped on WoW to hit up AV. I don’t know why, I just don’t feel the pull. I’ve got a huge list of dungeons to run, but that is a post for another time.

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I hate to say it, but I might have hit the Burnout wall I mentioned last time. I’ve long since hit 999/1000 exalted with the Skyguard and Ogri’la so the dailies have lost a bit of luster. Sure the money is good and the quests are easy, but if I’m no longer gaining rep then it just doesn’t light my fire. I like the Skyguard, don’t get me wrong. It is one of the coolest factions in the game (C’mon, the Holy Outland Air Force? What could rock harder?) but I’ve got both trinkets, and really there isn’t anything else that I want there. I wear my Ribbon of Gallantry because I love spell crit. The on kill bonus is situationally gravy because as a healer I don’t often get killing blows in instances, though it is pretty sweet. I’ve got the cross in case I want to go Ret in the future. And I like the design of the quests, I’ve just been doing them for a month now and frankly the repetition is getting to me.

I’m VERY ADD. Sorry to say (and to lean on a “disability” to try and explain it) but it is the truth. I can’t stand when the game starts feeling like a job. A few weeks ago when me, Lylah and Damear partied up and stomped some big bads and it was an incredible day. Not so much because of the rewards (though the Hands of Fate are still my Go-To gloves) but because the quests were well designed and felt suitably epic. Running the same bombing run as 8000 other people just didn’t. Yes, I can knock out eight quests in less than an hour and get almost 100g for it. However, seeing four other people pelting these eggs with bombs just makes me wonder how Skettis is still standing. If we actually made an actual impact on the world that place would be a smoking hole in the ground unable to threaten the world in any meaningful way in less than a day. It is everything that the game tries to get away from with the instance model writ large.

The Prisoner is a particularly egregious example of that. One of the things that made WoW so much better than iRO or EQ was not having to camp a static spawn point with a thousand other people playing Click-race to see if I can grab the mob/objective before another player. Other than the plain Jane mechanical reasons this looks silly (I just mentioned those) it does detract from the “Epic-ness” of being a hero. It seems to strip the “Us against the world” feeling that exists because of the fiction of instancing. For my grandparents and my parents who read this webpage and don’t know what I’m talking about (and have probably stopped reading already) instancing is where the game creates a copy of the dungeon for each party in it. If my group goes into The Deadmines and there is already somebody in there, then we both enter parallel copies of the dungeon. So both groups go through identical separate copies of the same dungeon. It sounds silly when you think about it, but it stops the two parties from having to fight with 70’s or other annoying people (gankers/griefers) like in iRO where Payon Caves would be slap full of people. I mean it was standing room only in the Munak zones, becuase of the loot and XP. With the Skettis prisoner, people are literally lining up to free his silly ass.

Not to say that the instance system is perfect. I heard a plan for a hybrid PVP/PVE instance the other day and despite my (well documented) loathing for PVP I find it compelling. See you would have two groups start at opposite ends of the instance and progress to the center (or along a common path after a join) to fight a central enemy. It would be cool if there were big open areas where you could see the other team like the open areas in BRD. I’d love the feeling of competition. And heck if the instance was hard as hell it could actually foster cooperation in the first few months before people get geared properly. The only issue is if you could fight a boss and then a party of the opposite faction could come in and grief you that would suck. Rogues would be a pain there. It might be a cool concept though.

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I’ve finally gotten my marks after one night of constant WSG running. I’ve got to say my fiancee became rather annoyed with my constant trash talking. And not all of it was toward the Horde, quite a lot of it was at my own team for silliness. I realize you have to hide the flag sometimes (whenever the most horrible thing ever happens and the two teams capture each other’s flag.) but seriously, you can tell people what you are doing. It is called general chat, use it. Also, if you are going to AFK, try to do it in a less conspicuous location than the top of the dang base.

I still need 8,000 of the 12,000 honor I have to get for my bracers. That’s something like 16 successful runs of AV though, so it might take some time. Or the Gods of PVP could smile on me and make AV the daily PVP frequently and I could get leet bonus honor. That would be almost too nice though, so I’m not holding my breath.

I still can’t stand PVP, don’t let me fool you. Healing in BGs is still like pulling teeth with no resilience, and I hate PVP too much to put a ton of effort into building a resilience suit to make healing not a pain. I can try to do some damage and leech honor off of people who can actually get Killing Blows, but that doesn’t feel particularly heroic. I’m still a lore/instance guy. Anyhow, I’m off: and trying to get that honor. Here’s hoping I don’t hit the burnout wall.

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Here we have Jeopardy’s Alex Trebek saying his name backwards. It is supposed to send him back to his home dimension, but sadly it doesn’t. I think it is because the choad that does it cannot actually say the joke properly. Lame.

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I really do. I mean look at Global Arena Rankings for everybody over all brackets. Look at the bottom four classes: Mage, Shaman, Paladin, and Hunter. All four are Line of Sight or cast time based classes, and those are the big killers for PVP combat. With everybody running around, if your class is based around standing still you are toast. You can get around this in a few big ways. The first and most important is coordination. If your teammates know what you are doing (and if they give a damn) then you can get around this. I am a Holy specced Paladin, which means that I heal. I heal particularly well and I heal forever. Both my mana regeneration and my mitigation are high, so I can heal through most things. Most things do not include level 70 PVP: the fact of the matter is with no resilience, I am still toast. Resilience is a stat that reduces the player’s chance to receive a critical hit and also reduces the damage that critical strikes cause. Crits are the name of the game when it comes to PVP, where huge numbers are king and burst is the god we pray to. If you can’t do huge amounts of damage quickly, you’ll be eaten alive by those who can.

So I suffer through PVP. This week it is Warsong Gulch because I need 20 marks to afford my bracers. If there were viable plate healing bracers available anytime before Kara I’d be all over them, there aren’t though so I suck it up. I’m not great at PVP and I don’t plan on becoming “great,” just good enough to get 20 WSG marks and 12,000 honor then I buy those bracers and I’m so out of there your head will spin. I’ve never been a fan of bunny hopping around like a moron.

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This was too awesome to pass up. It is Off-Road Velociraptor Safari:

The best part (other than the slo-mo ball and chain Velociraptor shanking) is the fact that the jeep is being driven by another Velociraptor. That’s just perfect.

And finally Kristi and I got the morning thing down. I’m early for work and everything is running like clockwork. Good times. Especially since yesterday was Hell on earth.

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I just finished watching the History Channel special, Life After People and I’d say I found it interesting and a little creepy. I think that Jason would have liked it, were we still talking to one another. The scenes of urban and suburban decay are right up his and my alley. The show covers the gradual breakdown of all artificial human creations and the fate of our legacy in a world without humans. The global catastrophe that lead to the world’s depopulation is never looked at; this being the Nostradamus and WWII channel, the most likely culprit is The Rapture. The special then casts its speculation forward along an increasing time line to try and forecast the effects of nature on the things we leave behind. It also cuts to experts in the fields of engineering and speculative fiction along with eyewitness testimony from depopulated areas (among them the areas effected by Chernobyl) to illustrate its points. The vast majority of the film is given over to CG composites showing the destruction of London Bridge and whatnot. There’s nothing wrong with that, the CG is actually pretty well done and doesn’t really look all that bad.

The thing that really got to me was that most domesticated animals wouldn’t make it out of the first week. Owing that to their being locked in our houses. I definitely couldn’t count on the cats breaking out, and Emmie probably wouldn’t jump through a window. I never thought about it, but wouldn’t probably have to rig up some kind of “Dead or not” switch on a dog door that would pop it open if I didn’t hit a button once a week. I tend to think about how to fortify my house against Zombies (not that I actually think that the dead might rise, just that it is a good mental exercise) but I never really spend any time thinking about what would happen if I was to be taken out. I might have to think about that in the future.

Then as the special forecasts further and further into the future we get an image of a world covered in vines and rust. It is actually quite chilling. I’d recommend the special to any post apocalypse buffs among my readers. So that’s everybody really. Just go grab a torrent and you should be good to go.

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For a bad motherfucker!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is the best thing that MadTV ever did. Actually the only good thing MadTV ever did. You can quote me on that.

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Here we go. Even the bird chick couldn’t decide who to flatten first.

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Exactly what the title says. I’m proud of the girl. She’s started getting up with me in the morning to walk the dog and when we get back and I head off to the shower, she stays and plays DDR for the 30-45 minutes it takes me to shower and get my food for the day together. Sure, its a little rocky right now while we’re getting the routine down; but soon we’ll both be rocking out. Also, don’t ever let me start talking down about DDR, that stuff looks stone cold difficult. I haven’t ever played it, but still.

Prot is over, I’m all Holy again. And it feels so good! I’m not talking down about prot or anything but my gear doesn’t support actual tanking, just reflective damage dealing. I wish Retribution Aura had a coefficient, even 1% would be cool, I mean I have something like 500 +Spelldamage. Martin seems to still be Retribution, speaking of, and I wonder how that’s going for him. His gear hasn’t changed, but having finished most of the quests in Outland new gear is hard to come by.

I downloaded two Kino’s Journey movies the other day, I really should sit down and watch them. I like what I’ve seen of Kino, and I should finish that series.

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