I’ll be right behind you… that armor, it is in good condition?

My computer crashed two weeks ago. The blue screen of death was nearly fatal. it usually takes a few hours to reinstall a new operating system. it took us just a little over two weeks. Why? My computer is not a standard computer. The first problem that arises is that I need programs like Dragon to be able to use my computer. Keyboard and mouse is a hazard that had me in tears more than once. Upgrading to Windows 7 turned out to be the easy part. Reinstalling and reconfiguring all my customized settings is still a work in progress. Dragon was by far the biggest headache. My version doesn’t work with Windows 7 and so we had to order an upgrade. The upgrade took forever to arrive and was delivered during the one hour I left the house all week and so had to be picked up at the local depot. Once here, it then needed to patch which took all night to download as everybody is online on a Saturday night and my net connection drops to snail’s pace. Chris got up at the crack of dawn to install it before setting off for the morning shift at work.

I’m almost done. My joystick still requires recalibrating, the new version of Dragon has to be trained all over again, World of Warcraft addons still require some work and my GlovePie scripts were corrupted along with my gaming files and so require rewriting. The heartbreaking losses: my Steam game save files. I was two missions away from completing the call of duty modern warfare 2 solo campaign, I had unlocked almost all the co-op missions, psychonauts were coming along slow but well, Half-Life 2 was almost done and Batman had been beaten but not completed. And yes, I did have back-ups, but my back-ups kept on an external hard-drive were corrupted too. Whilst my computer was slowly being recucitated, I played Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, tried Bayonetta, bought Assassin’s Creed and played Mass Effect 2 again. The Mako had me in tears and I rage quit more than once, something I hadn’t done since my first month of trying to play WoW. My personal assistant tried and failed, Chris tried and failed and so I was stuck, usually around 4-5 hours at a time on each vehicle enabled mission. If it wasn’t for a friend who kept me calm, focused and motivated by giving advice and suggestions over the phone whilst I played, I never would have finished the game. It was whilst struggling through yet another Mako mission that I realized I had one of two options. I could simply struggle through, save well and hope to hell I never ever ever have to do anything like this ever again, or I could try and learn the skill rather than relying on luck and throwing hours at it to eventually succeed once by accident. I opted for the second. And so when I realised that my game files were lost, it was a setback, but not a tragedy.

I can play FPS now. Not well and not quickly, but having taken the time and accepted all the help I could get, I learned a skill, I didn’t just persevere through a game. I can do it again. As for psychonauts and co-op missions, I learned and even more important lesson. I have friends who will help. Not just as a one off, but as much and as often as I need help. All I have to do is ask. Asking isn’t something that comes easily or naturally to me. If I want to take a shower, I have to ask someone to open the shower door for me. If I want to brush my teeth, I have to ask someone to put toothpaste on my toothbrush. I have to ask someone to open bottles, open taps, open doors, pour my coffee, slice my food, tie my laces, turn on a light, adjust the sound on the TV. I spend all day asking for things and every request sometimes feels like it comes at a cost paid in dignity and independence. But it doesn’t, not really. When I was a kid, I used to help my uncle who was a quadriplegic arrange things occassionally. He’d ask me to tidy his desk just the way he liked it or to move his remote so that he could press the buttons. I didn’t mind. In fact, I felt honored that he liked and trusted me enough to allow me to touch his things. I was rather clumsy and most people prefered that I looked and didn’t touch. I’ve been sick the last two weeks and without my computer, even more dependent on other people than usual. But for the first time in my life, I haven’t felt as if every request came at a cost. I’m finally learning to ask for what I need and be more open and honest about why I need it. And sometimes, the reason is luxury rather than necessity. I still have to ask for help with all the practical stuff, but somehow, it suddenly feels okay to also ask for help with the fun stuff. Particularly when I’m sick and miserable and all I really want to do is loose myself in a good story.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

I’m using a Razer mouse with an eXactMat and a Nostromo N52te game pad to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It was going terrible and now it’s going a little less awful, but not good yet by a long a shot. It’s taken about 6 0 10 hours to learn the settings, program the game pad and practice how my fingers need to move so that I don’t get too hurt whilst playing, generously about the length of time it takes the average player to finish the whole campaign. It would’ve taken at least twice as long if I didn’t have help. I’ve never really played a first person shooter other than a little dabbling with Half-Life 2 and so it is a rather big learning curve for me. It took a while to realize that I had different limitations in this game than in others and was imposing limitations when there is none.

I get hurt when I move without thought. My joints aren’t stable and I can’t keep track of them very well and whenever I employ that auto-pilot everyone else uses to walk and and talk and eat and drive, I loose control and move too far or too fast and things fall apart. I have to think about what I am doing when I am doing it all the time. As such, I’m hesitant to move quickly. Pain is a pretty effective deterrent. Fortunately, holding down or hitting a key to run is much less complex than actually running. As a result, my character in-game can move a lot faster without any risk than I ever could. It was both frightening and exhilarating to realize this as I ran up a pipe in-game, jumped across a gap and crouched down for cover, immediately aiming. I have been slow and hesitant moving in-game. At first I thought it was because I was paying so much attention to my hands and that my reflexes were too slow, but then I realized that when running is reduced to a single key press, it shouldn’t be that slow.

I’m finding CoD: MW2 a very realistic game to play and that has both advantages and drawbacks. It’s a thrilling escape from the daily grind, but it also means that I bring more real life baggage into it than is required. I changed the single player setting from recruit to regular last night, forcing myself to stop sitting back in my comfort zone and watch the world go by as I take my time to act. It’s difficult, for now, and challenging, but it’s also the reason why I’ll keep going back to it. I enjoy the challenge. I love the learning curve. And one day, maybe, I’ll really get the hang of it.

Flatland, lineland, spaceland, pointland and GearScore

I live in my own little universe or maybe it’s more a rural cottage in the middle of nowhere. Although I try to look out the window occasionally, that doesn’t really give me much of a view of the big wide world beyond. It’s not that I’m completely oblivious to the world out there, I’m just not quite as up to date as I really ought to be. But that’s okay with me. I’m content with my little corner, but sometimes my pursuits takes me further afoot and I quite enjoy that too. Pugging is one of those things that stretches my horizon. I have to interact with strangers and sometimes it’s a positive experience and sometimes it isn’t. I have a tendency to maintain my bubble, I’m not the type of person who makes friends easily and neither do I interact with random strangers beyond the point of necessity. I’m polite, but reserved. I don’t mind if a heroic goes a little slow because some members of the party are in blues and gearing up. I don’t mind when the dps pulls the aggro off the tank. I don’t mind the odd mistake, or clumsiness or laziness, within reason. I do mind rudeness and will quite happily tell other players off if they start picking on any member of the party, including myself. I also mind if I take the time to mark for good reason and nobody still pays attention. And I definitely mind when players afk or fake a dc just to return in time to ninja the loot, which happened once with the CoS drake and now I’m more ruthless with a party kick. I don’t have recount or any other damage meter running anymore, mostly because I dislike the dps race with a passion and I don’t care what players are wearing. Unfortunately, not paying attention seems to be a bad idea here too. As a result, I’ve installed GearScore rather than recount.

It’s one of those addons that remind me of the saying ‘guns don’t kill people, people do’. It’s easy to use it to try and gauge whether a player makes the cut in your opinion, the same as recount stats can be useful but is often misused, but the fun part is that it’s also easy to use it well. It includes the gear score in the tooltip and so by mousing over the members in my party, I can quickly get an idea of what their gear is like and usually, after the first pull I can also tell quite well what their skill is like. It makes it easier to anticipate and avoid the classic pitfalls. When tanking, I know who are most likely to churn out the highest dps and it’s easy to spot whether they pay attention to threat or not. Also when tanking, if the healer isn’t well geared, I have my own healing buttons at the ready to help out as much as possible. When healing, those with lower scores take more damage and so I’ll throw and additional HoT their way at the start. Sometimes it quickly becomes obvious that skill outweighs gear and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a useful tool that I’m happy to enable when pugging. It’s easy to use, all the slash commands are listed here and it’s also been very helpful to assess where my alt slots in as I’m starting to gear her up. I’m not sure if it’s a keeper, but for the time being, it’s definitely accompanying me into my regular pick-up groups.

[Out of breath] I’m fine. I just need to die for a minute

It’s been a difficult week. I used to think that there was a limit on how much pain one can tolerate, but there isn’t. You can tolerate as much pain as your body can create; there isn’t a tipping over point. Pain is not unbearable, it’s only that bad if you make it so. Don’t get me wrong, it certainly feels as if you’d rather die than endure another second of it and knowing that it’s not a second, but hours that stretch into days and maybe even more, is torture or feels a lot like it. Life isn’t easy and there is a difference between enduring and thriving. I can lie in bed in a pitch black room and find my way out of the night, but that’s it, that’s the most I can do. I can’t move, very literally, I can’t lift my head enough to drink from a glass, the sound of chewing hurts my ears and my jaw and as I’m going to throw it all up anyway, there hardly seems much point.

A lot of people get headaches, migraines are common, but not to sound selfish or egotistical, they’re not quite like mine. I’ve torn bones out of sockets and the pain doesn’t come close to that of a bad headache. I have had stitches without anaesthesia (local anaesthesia is ineffective in some with EDS, i.e. me) and that doesn’t hurt nearly as much as dislocating a joint. Pain isn’t intolerable, but when it reaches a certain point there is nothing one can do but endure it. Bad headaches cloud my judgment a little and in a dizzy haze on a day my personal assistant called in sick I decided to get myself some lunch and took a tumble down the stairs. Back injuries aren’t fun, they’re not as bad as the headaches, but bad enough that I still have issues moving days later. And when you dislocate joints falling down the stairs, it’s worse than when you do so spontaneously. As a result, it’s been a pretty bad week.

In between some of the bad, I was playing castle crashers until three in the morning and there was this one part where you had to run your character through a series of plummeting weights that move at different intervals, but they were moving pretty fast. I looked at it, thought about my reflexes and said no way in hell can I do this. So the obvious response from my co-op partner was “Don’t say that, try it first.” I toggled run as best I could, close my eyes and ran. My character took quite a few bumps, but he made it to the other side battered but breathing. “You always say you can’t do it and then you do”, my friend said and I just said “yup”. It wasn’t until later when I was lying in bed, thinking about those few hours of fun that I realized where I get it wrong. I wanted to do it perfect. I didn’t think about my character surviving as success, I wanted him to survive without taking any damage. It didn’t even occur to me to think of a solution that would have me on the other side alive, I simply looked for solutions that would get me there perfectly. I am a perfectionist at heart, but most of the time I keep it well in check. I know that perfect isn’t an option, and once I realize that, I will consider alternative options that are less tha perfect yet still workable, but somehow settling for less still often feel like failure. I want to get it right and right means right not right often enough to survive.

I’ve been playing wow for a while now and I was tanking Old Kingdom (yes, OK again, what’s up with that?) and first the mage pulled a second set of trash, then the tree backed up a little too far and pulled a third about 35 yards away from me and didn’t walk them in and just as I ran across to be in range, the fury warrior and wanna be tank not noticing the two additional pulls in the back chained pulled the next set before the first was done. Where all the trash came from beats me, but suddenly there were a whole bunch and so I hit challenging roar to save the healer and try and establish as much aggro in six seconds as possible, not thinking that maybe even though I used all my self-healing/mitigating options, it was possibly a bit too ambitious a move. It wasn’t because the healer was great. The second I pulled aggro off him, he stop panic self-healing and instead just healed me. It worked out fine, we all survived and when everybody started apologizing, I didn’t bother. I said what I always say, we didn’t wipe, so no worries. (Not that I complain when we do wipe, then I usually say, everybody makes mistakes, don’t worry about it, it’s fine. Unless we wipe again for stupid reasons, then I get a little impatient). I don’t expect perfect runs with perfect pulls, in fact, I wouldn’t learn how to tank if that was the case. Good players are the ones that don’t panic and act quickly when things go wrong. Although I still prefer those perfect runs and perfect pulls and perfect saves, most of life is mediocre and mundane and I no longer frown upon it quite as much. Better yet, I no longer see it as failure. A win is a win and when you loose, you can always stand up, dust yourself off and try again until you win. There is a beauty in perfection that I will always appreciate, but in realizing that perfection is a rare gem not a daily occurrence, something to treasure when it happens unexpectedly rather than something to aim for, life is much sweeter.

There is the end of a road that sometimes is just the end. No amount of willpower will make a difference. I learned that the hard way. And often, the harder you try, the more damage you do and you will fail, regardless. Putting your heart into anything doesn’t automatically make it any good. But the end isn’t always a dead end, sometimes it just feels or seems that way. Sometimes it just takes a little longer or a different approach or more than you have to give right now, but may be able to at a later time. It’s easy to quit when things seem too difficult and even easier to just persevere because it’s the right thing to do and I’m stubborn, but finding the mid-way is really difficult. Knowing when to push just a little harder and when to give in and take a break is not as easy as it sounds. But not impossible either.

I want to be my best

Everybody goes through cycles of loving wow, slowly loosing interest and then getting that spark back that serves as motivation to take another crack at it again. I never quite stop playing, but I do play less and more, depending on how much I enjoy playing. At the moment, I’m getting back into the ‘can’t wait for the raid to start’ mood with my potions, flasks, reagents and buff food in full stacks and different varieties and my bags crammed with various trinkets and other pieces of gear to swap around as required to buff certain stats at certain times during the night. I wish I had more time to play and when I’m stuck in bed, like I have been for a while and unable to lift my head, like yesterday, let alone run the daily random heroic or even contemplate raiding on raid night, it gets a little frustrating. It’s at times like these that I’m reminded that there’s more to raiding than just showing up for a raid to get a nice upgrade or two. On most days, I can fish, craft my epic gem of the day through alchemy, do my Jewelcrafting and/or cooking or farm a few herbs until I have enough frost lotus for two (A raiding mage with a full-time day job also needs his flasks). A very nice post on my guild forums recently has made me think again about all the things outside of raiding that I can do to keep up. It made me realize that even when I feel as if I’m doing nothing to contribute because I can’t raid as many nights as I would like, I can do quite a bit to keep my character in shape.

I’m obsessing about haste at the moment. My crit is too high and my haste is too low and has been for quite some time. The reason for that is that I choose upgrades regardless of stats. If an item has +int, +stam, +spirit, I’ll take it if nobody else wants it even when it has crit and no haste, particularly if it’s an upgrade of an item that already only has crit and no haste and a lot of my items fit that bill. Should I spend DKP on this? I’ve always thought so, because I feel that every little extra bit helps the raid and I’d rather not hold out for a better upgrade when one is about to be disenchanted. If someone else rolls, I’ll skip, but when nobody does, it always feels like such a waste of good gear. I know that as long as I follow this policy, my stats are going to be skewed and so for the first time, I’ve made the decision not to. I didn’t buy the level 264 crit cloak with badges because it doesn’t have haste. It’s a big upgrade, but n haste, no buy. I bought the trinket and will hold out for a +haste cloak, however long that may take.

I do everything I can down to defragging my computer regularly, reviewing my addons, macro’s, UI layout, spell rotation, reading up on new content as it comes out and paying as much attention when playing as I can. I practice running around whilst healing for specific fights outside of raids, oh man do I hate Rotface with a passion when I’m trying to heal whoever is kiting the oozes, but I know I’ll get there and one day, hopefully sooner rather than later, I’ll do it perfectly with ease and think back with a chuckle on how I struggled to master it at the start. I’ve been lying in bed and between learning how to say ‘restaurant, hotel and I don’t speak Spanish and I don’t understand’ in Spanish, I’ve been thinking about the ICC and ToC hc fight mechanics, trying to familiarize myself with the movement and play style required whilst all the time trying to find ways to make it easier and me a more effective player.

It still annoys me that whenever new content is out, I’m scared to sign up for raids, knowing that I’ll be crying at the end of the night. But that’s life. No matter what I’m doing, bad things will invariably happen. I was trying out the Brutal Legend multiplayer content with a friend a few nights ago and when my wrist dislocated, I yelled over my mic, stop playing, which ironically didn’t work so well as my mic wasn’t working, but the sentiment remains. If I can’t play, neither should you. We later swapped to co-op mode in castle crashers so that when I stopped playing, he could pick up the slack for me, which worked well except that my poor character falls further behind in xp, keeps dying despite hogging all the food and has no money, but I’m sure we’ll balance that out with practice. I’d better get better, but I am sure I will. It is easy to let someone else do more for me when it’s just one person that I spend a lot of time with and trust with my character’s life, fame and riches, it is not so easy when it’s 9 or 24 other people who owe me nothing. In both cases though, I don’t want to be the baggage. Allowing myself time and space to learn is really difficult, but I think I’m finally getting there. I’m signing up, whether it’s for a raid or a duo in castle crashers, I’m not sitting on the side-lines any more just watching. I’ll never be an excellent player, but then that’s not really the point of playing. And there is always room for improvement. I’ve been playing wow for two years now and I am still getting better at it. And that’s the fun part.

Trine

Trine is a fantastical side-scrolling puzzle platform game. The extent of my experience with this type of game was watching my best friend play Donkey Kong when I was five and trying to catch up on decades of games in a brief few months. Whilst the rest of the world seem a little in two minds about the resurrection of old school platform games, I’m eternally grateful for it. Trine provided the perfect opportunity for me finally experience this type of game first hand, by playing it.

The story is a fairy tale that begins with Once upon a time, in a land far, far away and thankfully ends with And they all lived happily ever after. Fairy tales are charming, captivating and beautiful and this one is no exception. I’m not sure how many hours I spent playing over the last few weeks, but it’s quite a few and although there were a few moments of frustration, I was never stuck at any point for very long and progression was there, even when it was slow going. The soundtrack was perfect every step of the way. I quickly found myself logging into the game and leaving it open whilst I did other things just so that I could listen to the music. There definitely is something magical about mystical graphics, mysterious haunting notes that wove a story which took me deeper and deeper into a troubled magical kingdom.

The tale is that of three companions thrown together by fate and bound to pursue a magical quest. The first and my least favourite is the Knight. He favours food and ale over fighting, but comes in handy with a sword and shield. I struggled in-game particularly with large rolling, swinging and falling mines and that’s because I didn’t pay attention to my knight who could have shielded himself if I’d only given him the opportunity to do so. Instead, I jumped, grappled or levitated things to overcome those puzzles and lesson learned, use all the tools you have if you want to make your life easier. The mage is a mage who cannot create a fireball and desperately wishes that he could. He’s not much of a fighter but his levitation and conjuring skills are vital to overcoming certain puzzles and even more than that, he’s the comic relief that staves off frustration. Whenever I did get stuck for a while, I’d switch to the mage, make him jump ridiculously, which is the only way he can, and watching his robes waft like an old lady in a blue dress, well, mature man in a blue dress, made me laugh and happy to keep playing. The thief was by far my favourite. I’m a girl gamer and naturally prefer female characters because they feel more natural and comfortable to play, but I liked the thief for more reason than she was a girl. She had a bow which took some practice to master, but once I did, it was more versatile and potent than the knight’s melee combat skills with the added advantage of also being out of range and thus taking much less damage. I learned quickly that the skeleton army archers were slow and by the time they fired, they’d either be dead already or I could move out of the arrow’s range with ease and still not take any damage. The grappling was fun and useful, even though I never got the hang of grappling and then swinging up onto whatever surface the hook was attached to. I spent the vast majority of time playing my thief, Zoya and will definitely continue to do so.

Trine was the perfect Christmas present and I think will remain the gift that keeps on giving. Although I’ve finished it on normal difficulty, I missed quite a bit of the content and consequently play style, right off the bat. I struggled to find my feet, but now that I’m starting to, I know I will go back again and again to find artifacts in chests, emancipate little green experience bottles for upgrades and make it harder once I start to master the play style better. And then there’s also the co-op option, which gives it a whole new flavour and appeal. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of play time, even the dozens of hours I spent not playing and just listening to the music and doing what I have the annoying tendency to do, i.e. using a game as a glorified screensaver. The opening cinematics grabbed my attention and I’m not sure it will ever really let it go.

I’m in, but I have to be back by eight

With all the cold and snow, not surprisingly, I’m sick. I don’t do sick very gracefully and so I’m miserable. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep and breathe and having spent a few days in a sleep deprived haze of mild head-achy confusion, I’ve abandoned any thought of a normal routine and going  back to bed. Life in bed doesn’t look that much different from normal life. Books, movies and gaming is still my main form of entertainment. I sometimes aspire to reduce my time spent in front of a computer, but as I lie on the couch covered in blankets and cat watching old episodes of Chuck, my phone beeps and vibrates. It reminds me a little of the Meg Ryan movie You’ve got mail and how novel I thought that to be when I saw it the first time, not being familiar with anything like it at the time. Chris asks text? and I say nope, I’ve got mail. Chris says, I thought we were spending time away from the computer. We are, dear, I say and pick up my phone with a smile.

When your whole life is just a computer away, it’s harder to be sick and miserable, but much easier to get be easily distracted. I was going to rest my hands yesterday as having slipped and fallen over in the snow onto my wrists did bad things, but then Dragon was acting up and I got frustrated again and so I typed, much much more than I should have. I was going to get an early night, but I tanked my daily random heroic, caught my sister and a couple of friends in-game and then got distracted by just one more level of Trine.  I finally went to bed in the early morning hours only to lie awake all night, thinking that breathing really should be easier than it is and why does being sick always come with a smashing headache.

I vividly remember coming down with the flu as a child. It more often than not went into my chest and then I had either chronic bronchitis or pneumonia for weeks. It wasn’t fun. My mom used to hold me upright most of the night so I could sleep without stopping to breathe, my dad would come home from work in the afternoons and spend some time reading to me, but mostly I’d just be in bed, by myself, trapped with my thoughts; alone. My friends would stop by with less and less frequency as it’s rather boring visiting someone that’s sick. They can’t do anything, they’re too miserable and tired to really get enthusiastic about any conversation and mostly they just complain about bright lights and loud noises. I didn’t mind. It was rather depressing to listen to how well their daily lives were going on without me in it.

It’s nice that some things have changed. It’s nice that I can be on-line as much as I want and keep doing the things that I love doing. I can play a little, particularly platform games like Trine, pausing whenever I need to for as long as I have to. I can watch TV in bed, read a book or listen to an audio book when I can’t hold an actual book and mostly, I can keep talking to the people that I care about. I can log into WoW for a short while just to do the daily stuff that I seem to enjoy doing again. I can access my email and chat from either my desktop, laptop or phone and stay in touch. I no longer feel as if life goes on without me when other people tell me about their lives. It’s now more a feeling that I get to live a small piece of their lives as they regale the sometimes interesting and sometimes mundane but to me still interesting dialogue of their day.

I haven’t slept at all in more than 24 hours and although I still spend a few hours at night lying awake, trying to finding something calming and soothing and mostly failing miserably, it’s no longer most of the night and most of the day. Life doesn’t stop, it most definitely slows down, but that’s okay.