Driving Occupied.

There's been an important development to my life since I updated this blog regularly that I haven't really talked about yet.

I actually drive, now.

Yeah, I have a car and everything.  I'd been an avowed pedestrian for a very long time.  You can get away with that, living in a college town in the Midwest.  Living in southern California...good luck.  Places where you can afford to live aren't always close to places that can employ you.  The bus and train systems seem fine, but just not dense enough to really work for me.

Now, I get sleepy as hell when I'm in a car for any length of time.  Actually, mornings seem fine - it's that afternoon/evening drive, after the workday, that drains my consciousness.  Music, for the most part, doesn't help, and that seems really odd.  It doesn't matter how much nostalgia I feel for a song, or how funny or catchy or how much it incites the feels, music can't seem to compete with the hypnosis of the slow crawl home.

I found a solution to both this problem and the fact that I don't read books as much as I used to.  Audiobooks and serial podcasts.

I seem to subscribe to a lot more things, these days, and one of those things is Audible.com.  This was my initial solution, and I could not stop gushing about how good it was.  I checked out a couple of Stephen King novels I hadn't read before - Mr. Mercedes, then Doctor Sleep (after The Shining, because before I had only seen the movie).  I finally finished The Baroque Cycle novels by Neal Stephenson, and just recently revisited an old favorite, Good Omens by Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman.  And since each of these books are fairly lengthy, they managed to keep me awake for weeks of commuting.

It's weird to me that I can be perfectly aware of what I'm doing while driving at the same time as I'm giving a ton of attention to someone with an interesting voice read a good book to me.  How does this actually work?  I feel like I should have gotten into several small accidents or I should be missing huge gaps in the stories, but for some reason, brains seem to keep everything tidy.

From the intro for the first episode.  Hooked right there.

Meanwhile, my sisters had been hyping some podcasts for a while, and some of my nerdier friends had been hyping other podcasts.  I'm not (yet) into news or talk show podcasts - maybe I haven't found personalities that really interest me, but stories - stories hook me.  So I started checking some of those out.

My first, and favorite, has to be Welcome to Night Vale.  It's the ongoing story of a strange little city in the American Southwest, told by a local radio personality via his radio show.  Most episodes are, well, episodic, but that only helps highlight all the characters, all the stories going on there, and there is enough continuity to help me wonder what happens next.  It's not easy to sit on the edge of the driver's seat.

Other favorites I've found include Serial (thanks to my sister for that one), a much more serious, sobering, and less fictional story, and The Thrilling Adventure Hour, which is less serious, sobering, and...nah, probably equally fictional.  The Thrilling Adventure Hour is actually a number of more-and-less episodic stories, from space westerns to WWII-era adventures, all done in the style of, as they say, "old-time radio."

So, that's how I use my travel time wisely.  I ask you, theoretical reader - what totally legals means do you use to stay awake for your commute?  Do you have a favorite audiobook or podcast?  Do you just read normal novels while in traffic instead?


Disclaimer 1:  This post is not sponsored by Audible.  I just use it, because it is a thing I know exists.

Disclaimer 2:  Look for Welcome to Night Vale art on the internet, but be warned - none of it will leave you with less questions than you had before you searched.

Fooled Around and Fel in Love.

So, I mentioned once or twice that I've played World of Warcraft, right?

Since it's been awhile since we've talked about it, and update is in order.  The Cataclysm expansion saw most of the serious raiders leave our guild for guilds they could raid with - that expansion gave a lot of reasons for guilds to always raid as a guild, and so, eventually, our herd thinned.  And because our herd thinned, I became less interested in playing.  Other officers began to lose interest in the game, or in the guild, and we thinned more.  During the Mists of Pandaria expansion, we only had a handful of players who logged in, and were generally surprised in anyone else from the guild was around at the same time.  Ditto for Warlords of Draenor, even after a well-hyped launch.  I didn't log in regularly during either of these expansions.  Essentially, the steam was out of our sails, and without a certain amount of active people providing steam (analogy...breaking...down) we couldn't seriously try to recruit to get more steam providers.

Warlords of Draenor.  Pretty, but...where is everyone?

But we have a new expansion, Legion.  The storytelling is both literally and figuratively fantastic, the art is amazing, and the content is plentiful.  I've been hyped.  The remnants of the guild were, too.  So I started trying to recruit.  I'm back to playing WoW.

There's still a lot of recruiting to do - and I've been trying since May - but right now everyone is having so much fun with leveling and checking out the new systems and content that we aren't missing the number much.  We have a couple of great new members, and a couple of great vets.  It's a start that I'm grateful for.

On to Legion itself, though.  For one, loads of effort have gone into highlighting the individual classes and their specializations.  All "specs" have been reworked (as they usually do every expansion), but with a focus on making each spec feel different, special.  Shortly after starting the content, each character begins a quest line specific to their class, and part of that is choosing to hunt down a legendary (well, artifact - Blizzard has particular names for these things for reasons, I promise) weapon tied to one of that classes specs.  So yes, they have separate questing content for each of the 36 or so specializations in the game.  And this game has more specs now because they introduced a new hero class, the Demon Hunter.

Stop it.  I love antiheroes.

Then there are 4 leveling zones, so far one max-level zone that has loads of content that I'm nowhere close to finishing, 10 dungeons (well, 8 classic difficulty dungeons, and 2 more that are only available in the new "Mythic" difficulty).  The first raid just unlocked yesterday, and there's a new difficulty system for dungeons that keeps that content challenging and rewarding even past the normal, Heroic and Mythic modes.  And they've also introduced World Quests - a system that basically replaces static end-game daily quests with randomly selected quests out in the new zones that may stick around for 4 hours to 6 days, and are then replaced by different quests.  Oh!  And crafting and gathering professions also have large, immersive quest lines, too!

Warlords of Draenor was heavily criticized for it's lack of content.  Does it show?

Let's see how much you like green after a couple years.

The main plot at the start is that the demonic horde of the WoW universe, the Burning Legion, is invading Azeroth for the third time, and they seem to know about charms, now.  Invasion warships, protals, and evil green fire are everywhere, and we're in trouble.  Heroes are lost.  The factions are reeling.  The classes are banding together across the faction lines of Alliance and Horde even as some old faction tensions flare up again.  We take up our awesome new artifact weapons, and rally our factions, or classes, and the populations of the new zones - the Broken Isles - against villains who can now respawn almost as fast as we can, thanks to a giant, open portal to the demons' home, the Twisting Nether (basically, evil space).

I'm back on my warlock, my "main" since Mists of Pandaria.  And even though I want to play through all the class-specific stories on all of my other characters, there's just so much to do with my main.  It's a great problem to have.

I'm sure I'll gush about my experiences in game a bit more in later posts, but for now, I'd like to share a few WoW-playin' YouTubers that have helped build the hype for me.


You May Also Enjoy:

• Preach Gaming
• BellularGaming
• Taliesin & Evitel Do Games

...I'm not sure why my list is full of British people, but run with it.

Welcome Back / Getting Out There.

Hallos again, players.

It's been a while!  I've been planning a return to blogging (see the last post, over a year ago, suggesting just that thing!), so here we go - a weekly blog, published Wednesdays, talking about a variety of games, movies, books...basically whatever nerdy thoughts I have that week.  I really want to get back into a regular writing schedule - a writing groove, if you will.  If you somehow find this blog, feel welcome to comment - my hope is to have real interaction with other people about there about these topics, in a way that isn't lost in a comment thread with eleventy-thousand other people.

Unless, of course, we get eleventy-thousand people reading this blog.

Besides writing, I've also been playing around with a few other ways to talk about and show off my nerdy interests.  Now, you may know I play video games - particularly MMORPGs, but since the last time I wrote regularly, I've picked up a few other games, like Minecraft (of a few modded varieties), Overwatch, and a smidgen of Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone.

Yes, I seem to be a Blizzard fanboy.

Fanman.

Whatever.

The point is, I have new games to talk about, but also new games to STREAM.  Yup - I've got myself a decent microphone, an alright webcam, and a Twitch account.  The experience has been...different.  I haven't often had people interact in chat while I've been streaming (so far just Minecraft, WoW and Overwatch), but when they do?  It's usually just to spam abusive, racist or sexist crap.  I did have one awesome interaction with someone from Europe who decided to check me out.  This is mostly awesome to me in relation to the others, but also in the fact that it was someone who shared an interest with me from half a globe away.  Striking up a conversation with a stranger about anything has been a terrifying idea for so much of my life, so it's amazing that I could randomly, casually chat with someone from such a distance away about a thing we both found fun.  I like Twitch, but I must confess that even after streaming several times, I'm still a bit shy.  I need to stream more.  Maybe I should work out a schedule for that, too.

And after streaming, I've been uploading the videos to my YouTube channel - partially in order to save the streams I've done (Twitch only holds onto them for a month, maybe?), but also because I myself have been going to YouTube a lot more for geekish news and content.  What started as a way to get info about the alpha for World of Warcraft: Legion ended up introducing me to a host of channels from content creators about games, comics, and general nerdy news.  I'd like to venture into the world of YouTube videos myself soon - proper videos of me talking to a supposed audience, rather than just copies of my streams.

Baby-steps.  Let's just get the writing thing down for now.

So, since I lost wrote regularly, my life has changed drastically, and got itself sorted out again.  I'm not really going to go into all of that here, but old posts may refer to situations and people, and new posts may refer to different situations and different people.  Crap like that can happen when I forget to update my blog for 4 years.

I'm also currently running another Nobilis campaign with a fantastic group  of players - most part of my old group, with one newer player - as well as playing in two D&D campaigns - one 4e game that I've talked about in the past, and one 5e game that's going pretty well.  I have tons more to say about all of that, so I'll save it for later - just wanted to keep you all in the loop.

Related articles

• Twitch co-founder discusses the site's efforts to move beyond live gaming content (techcrunch.com)
• Azeroth Burns With Excitement for Legion! (blizzard.gamespress.com)