At the end of it all was Kel’thuzad, who more or less ended up as the embodiment of all the bad memories I have from raiding back then with my priest. All the wipes, and all the guild drama irrationally chained to one servant of the Lich King. Haunting me, even if it’s just a little, every few waking moments. Pulsing, the memories flash in my head. The good ones, the bad ones. And each time, filled with some sort of regret that I could go back to those days… and then the sudden regret if that actually did happen.

But that ended tonight. With his demise, ends a long journey that started… somewhere. Maybe it was in that classroom, or that night in Azeroth. Maybe it started that night in Molten Core, or the day I had enough and quit my first raiding guild. Who knows. It really doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve moved on since then, and with a full-clear of Naxxramas tonight, am definitely ready to put all that away now.

After all of that, I’m left speechless. Not much to say.

I’ve taken screenshots and all, but since I just recently installed WoW on my new computer about a week ago, I forgot to change the settings from a jpg to a tga. The picture quality when WoW captures to a jpg is really bad, even when you’re playing WoW with an actual graphics card.

And so I named the laptop, Asako. And from then on, I’ve had an obsession with naming almost every piece of electronic device that isn’t a cell phone. Even four years ago, Asako wasn’t the best system. Certainly not for playing games, even one as old as WoW, but it still managed, even if barely. My laptop’s been there since the start of my college career, so it has been an important part of my life until now.

It’s because I’ve had Asako for so long that it makes it hard to get a new computer (aside from money, of course). Grades, games, social life… I can’t say it’s the most ideal way to spend one’s college life, but I’m glad that I had my laptop through all those years.  After all we’ve (or I’ve, if referring to an inanimate object is creeping people out) been through, it doesn’t feel odd at all to develop a fondness.

The time left with my trust old laptop has now dwindled down to hours. It’s a day I knew would come, just not when. There’s still a lot of setup to do on the new one, so there’s still time yet. There really is only one other thing I would like to do before I switch completely to my new computer, not sure if it will happen though.

Fresh from conquering the basics of PHP, now I’m taking a course on ASP.NET. We’re essentially being required to download and install Visual Web Developer. It turned out to be a great decision. It has one feature that I’ve been longing for a while now. Dreamweaver CS4 can do it too. No big deal. I’ve been using Dreamweaver since about MX2 or whatever it is, and tried out Expression Web and liked it. All of them had split-screen view, with the screens split top and bottom. CS4 only recently let you split side-by-side. Haven’t tried Expression Web 2 yet. But first install of Visual Web Developer, and the option is there. Hidden, but there. It’s so awesome that it prompted me to make a post about it right away.

-WoW

Safe to say I’m addicted to WoW again. Used to raid Naxxramas before TBC was out. It was easily the best raid instance out there. The content was very difficult, but a lot of the fights involved some sort of strategy instead of the “zerg that bastard and dps them into submission.” Naxx overall got nerfed hard, but virtually every boss still has their little gimmicks. Some are a lot of fun, but others not so fun.

Heigan – Nothing quite like watching 20 people die because they fail to “dance.” Then the remaining 5 people took him down about 25% before wiping.

Razuvious – Used to be one of the priests mind control tanking him. It’s amazing how hard it is for people to figure out when to taunt and not. It’s really not that hard. In classic Naxx, we also had to move Razuvious into a certain position cause his abilites were different. In WotLK, the idea goes like this:

• Bone shield
• Taunt boss
• Hit him
• When 5 seconds are left on bone shield, call for other guy to taunt
• Run your guy to far end of room and release
• Reapply mind control
• Wait for other guy to call for you to taunt
• Repeat

It’s impossible to keep the adds’ health up, but as long as they’re tanking Razuvious with the bone shield up, and the dps isn’t too slow, then it’s very possible.

Maexnna – Almost killed my old guild. As a druid instead of a priest this time around, Maex is much easier and one of the fights that I have fun on, mainly because of all the hots that I need to make sure they’re on. As well as the Abolish Posion during the web spray.

Grobbulus – One boss that comes to mind that got harder. Bad luck can cause an add to spawn (when he injects and sprays at almost the same time). His injection pace also increases. A real pain… might be easier on 25 though.

Four Horseman – The most difficult encounter in classic Naxx made into one of the easier ones (on 10-man at least). In classic, some guilds ran with eight tanks. Taunts also resisted much more often. Two concerns about this fight… how would a 10-man group with two healers do this one? Assuming there’s really only two healers period. Another question, how would two pally tanks handle this fight?

If we’re under the assumption that it can’t be done like that… one of the things that turned me off BC was that a lot of encounters were class dependant (or at least, created an impression that got people to think you needed a certain class). Was like that in classic as well, but when you have 40 people in a raid, it doesn’t matter all that much. Encounters that depend on a class’s ability in any way are stupid. The smaller the group, the stupider it gets. See 25-man Instructor Razuvious for related details.

-Classes

Wow, it’s really going to be horrible when I actually start doing things in my classes.

I see WordPress.com has a new interface. It looks a lot less cluttered and feels more free. The old layout didn’t really encourage me to want to keep posting anyway.

As for feeling friendly, the first paragraph may or may not have implied that I didn’t become any more social. In fact, it may have gotten worse. My suite mates this quarter consists of an exchange student, and two guys who have never lived away from their parents before.  So far, they have proven to be hard to live with… and they’re hardly even around.

They don’t clean very often… I end up washing the dishes after they get piled up in the sink. Usually I find some empty cands/plastic wrap/food there. The shower got clogged up last month (though that was probably more of my fault), and the sink earlier today was littered with facial hair after one of them shaved. One of them doesn’t have a job, and the other has a job but seems to end up spending most of his money on either drugs, parking tickets, or fixing his car (the latter is a perfectly acceptable reason to spend money). So when it comes to the food, and a lot of it seems to “disappear” before I can eat it. Last night, half a box of taquitos disappeared, with some corn dogs, and looks like some pre-prepared chicken, and maybe a quarter of a bag of tortellinis disappeared.

I don’t mind sharing food with my suitemates. But it’s just kind of frustrating when I’m the only who buys food.

I guess I could try and talk with them… but that hasn’t really ever been my style. Even if I didn’t fear of an argument, it’s not like they’re ever around.

It just keeps getting worse and worse. I’m a little scared to see how what I’ll be like at the end of the year.

This is the first election I ever voted in, and I couldn’t ask for a better one for my first one to participate in. I never felt so strongly for a candidate before. Sure in 2004, I wanted Kerry to win, but that was really more of “I don’t want Bush to be President anymore.” As 2008 drew closer, it started off as, “Bush’s term is finally going to end.” Then slowly to, “oh, this Ron Paul guy looks interesting.” Then next to “well, this Barack Obama guy looks promising.” Last spring, I went to a caucus. It may have been the overwhelming number of Obama Vikings there, but after that moment, my thoughts changed to “I want Barack Obama to be our next president.”

Obama comes off as very charismatic. At 47, he can be considered “young” for a politican. Over the past eight years, all I seem to have seen in government are a bunch of old guys who seemed more interested on the numbers in their bank accounts. To see how he energized my peers at my college… well, it was certaintly different. It felt like the same old… but something was still different. It might be called optimism. There really hasn’t been much of that lately.

The president-elect is about to give his speech.

The big reason why I’m making this post is an attempt to map out all the events and circumstances in hopes of coming to a conclusion, or at least give myself an idea of whether I should buy a new laptop or not. Right now, it’s August, so all the “back-to-school” deals are happening, but probably only until September or so.

Let’s give a background on my current one. It’s a Compaq Presario V2000, and in a couple of weeks it will be four years old. It came with about 512 megs of RAM, and within its first year, the RAM is somewhere around 720 megs, or was it 648? Sometime after additional RAM was added, it started to overheat, so one of the new sticks was replaced. It runs on a AMD Turion 64 ML-28. It runs at about 1.6-8ghz right now. It has a nice widescreen display, 15.4 inch I think.

Wow, I sound kind of like an idiot. I guess that’s what I get for having someone else order my laptop for me. But, while it’s not even an impressive laptop when I first got it, it still runs unexpectedly well. Lasted longer than my friend’s super-duper ultra-power Alienware laptop. His lasted for maybe two months before he had to send it in for repairs, mine lasted about four months before the constant overheats, but I never had to ship it off for repairs.

My laptop costed about 600 dollars back then. For rougly the same amount, I can get a new laptop with these specs: Intel Pentium dual-core T2390 or AMD Turion 64 x2 TL-56, 2GB DDR2 RAM with 1meg L2 cache, 15.4″ widescreen, 120GB hard drive. Give or take one notch. Those are the specs I’m looking at the most, there’s other things too, like a network interface card that can support wireless N, built-in microphone, and video card. But, unless if it’s a gaming laptop, the video card is going to suck anyway.

Anyway, the extent of gaming in the near future I plan on doing goes as far as Wrath of the Lich King (and that can change for the lower end), with StarCraft II somewhere in the farther horizon (could be time for an upgrade when that happens anyway). Want this new computer to be able to play videos in high-definition. Lastly, I also do a lot of heavy browsing, with stuff like Office, and Photoshop running in the background at the same time. I don’t think my requirements are anything top of the line, and finding something under a 1000 should be really easy. But under a 1000 isn’t necessarily in my budget.

In the past month, I’ve spent about 300-400 dollars on a vacation to Las Vegas, about a 130 dollars on a DS Lite, plus rougly 40 dollars on a Japanese dictionary, which was the reason why I got the DS Lite in the first place. For me, it’s a lot of money, luckily I can be a bit of a compulsive saver at times. I saved a lot of money during my first two years of college, but when I transferred to Western, it seems as if a lot of those savings went away. Even after all of that, looking at just the amount of money left in my bank account, I can buy a new laptop.

But with every new academic year comes with new costs. The only thing I can think of right now are textbooks, but that’s because I haven’t moved in yet and figured out what things I need to for my dorm.

I also feel very bad, like I said, I also recently went on a vacation to Las Vegas. The people I traveled with paid for most of the meals, and didn’t expect anything back. I spent about 200 there, and another 250 on the tickets+room. Then, I bought a DS Lite shortly after coming back.

I mean… there are people out there who never even been on vacation, much less even own an electronic device. Also, the US economy hasn’t been all that great lately, people are cutting back on spending. But here I am, writing a whole post on whether I should get a laptop that I can probably afford. In the past twelve months, I bought an iPod Classic, a 500GB external hard drive, a Nintendo Wii, 5 games (2 at retail price, the rest used copies) for the Wii, a DS Lite, a Japanese Dictionary for the DS Lite, and a vacation to Las Vegas. I am also suffering from Guitar Hero withdrawal, and want to purchase either the new Guitar Hero or Rock Band coming out later this year. After a quick and dirty sum operation, all of those amount to about 1300 dollars. That total easily overs over 2000 after you add in all the school expenses (cough, textbooks) that financial aid didn’t cover. I never spent this much in a 12 month span ever in my life.

I’m still new to this whole “living away from parents” thing, but is it normal for people to spend this much at my age? Something just doesn’t seem right. I recall my freshmen orientation at Central, saying it’s good to be unique and all, but I don’t think this is what they had in mind.

A new laptop is inevitable. The upgrade to a new machine from the one I’m using is like upgrading from an Outland green to a welfare PvP epic in WoW (ie, very big). But the laptop I’m using, while it’s not even close to meeting today’s standards, it still works. Just for the reliability I can count of my notebook computer, I grew particularly fond of it.

Or I could wait. It’s ridiculous how fast technology advances, even for the casual shmoes like myself. By next summer, for the same prices, I can get a computer that’s even better than the ones being offered right now.

But almost everything wrong with the world can be found in this news article.

Anyway, here are some random thoughts:

Mariners – Wow, do they suck or what? The good thing about having a bad team though, is that you can make fun of every other team they do manage to beat, because you must really suck if you lose to a bad team. Like how the M’s keep losing to bad teams.

Macross 7 Dynamite – The sequel to Macross 7. I kind of like this one better, maybe it’s just because it was four episodes. Basara is a lot more mellow in this one, but then again, not having Mylene around probably helps keep him calm. The last Fire Bomber song is probably my favorite from the bunch. The big highlight though, is definitely episode 2. Where, for seemingly no reason at all, Mylene almost became the victim of a lesbian rape. At the sametime, Basara and the other (very young less than 16 years old) female lead go to the hot springs naked, and then her father turns out to be using a waterfall as a shower of sorts.

Clannad – Found the ending a little disappointing. Maybe I was expecting too much. Haven’t seen the movie as of yet. Overall, it was an entertaining anime. After watching Da Capo Second Season, I basically gave up on harem anime types. Clannad then said that wasn’t a good idea. It later said, “it wasn’t a good idea, but yeah… whatever. Oh by the way, be sure to look into Kanon.”

WoW – A week’s away from getting my third 70. But, also my first 70 that isn’t a relic from those “pre-BC days.” For the first time in over a year, I finally been able to play WoW just for fun. My rogue and priest were revived to play again because of old memories, and leftover bitterness (my character is better than yours). Another priest was created because I miss that first priest, and some others were created sometime during my depressed and emo time when I still played. Ironically, I rolled a druid, a class I didn’t have a high opinion of when I quit, but this time I re-started WoW for all the right reasons. Or reason, actually. That reason is to simply have fun.

Smash Bros Brawl – How is it possible to lose to a guy playing Wario, who uses like 3 moves, who is also drunk (both Wario and the player)? Currently my top three favorite to play as are Dedede, Snake, and Peach.

Dedede is probably the first character I ever used where I fully understand how important tilts are. His smashes are all powerful, but very slow. His tilts on the other hand have a variety of uses. His up-tilt has surprisngly great KO potential and faster than his up-smash. His forward-tilt has great range. Usually I mix that with his foward-B, and I call that “long-range.” It’s also very satisfying to chain-grab any annoying Ike players.

Snake is very unorthodox, and very out of place. But the fact that he is out of place also means he fits in. Isn’t that paradoxical? I tend to have a lot of success playing as Snake against my friends, even better than Dedede or Peach. He moves decently fast. His jump is horrible, but his up-B gives him amazing vertical distance. All of his explosives hurt a lot. Like Dedede, it’s very difficult, but satisfying to hit someone with the forward-smash.

There two very gratifying things about Peach. One is her side taunt. The second? When you win a match, and hold left on the wiimote-nunchuck combo (what I play with), then on the results screen she will go, “Aw, did I win?” And then everyone in the room goes into a collective groan or “f*** Peach.”

As for characters that I find annoying… there’s Diddy Kong, who seems to either be fast, or have a lot priority. Marth, why? His counter. And Ike, because “IKE IS SUCH A BADASS WITH HIS SWORD.” Otherwise, any one who fights for his friends is an admirable guy. Ike also does a great car impression.

Academic-Related Stuff – Got an A- in a class I perceived myself to be struggling. So that is a good thing. Another class I’m stuggling in, I won’t be able to get any lower than a C unless if I completely bombed the test. In addition to that, got things like financial-aid and housing sorted out. Which means I can concentrate on finals, and other stuff… like WoW.

Macross F – is amazing.

The first time watching, it was interesting. The second time however, well… since at least last week, I have the opening theme stuck in my head. Now, the ending theme is starting to get stuck in my head as well. Of particular note was the “first” episode. It’s the one that’s a movie within an anime, “The Adventures of Mikuru Asahina.” When I first watched it, it raised some chuckles, but for the most part, there was this feeling of “is this ever going to end?” This episode was in the old 4:3 screen ratio, film quality was pretty poor, and its mockery of all cliche anime plot elements and themes was evident. I finally got around to watching that episode again, and I found it very funny this time around (much like the rest of Haruhi).

While watching that episode, it reminded me of another debut episode of another anime (yes, I watch too much anime nowadays). This one is based off a video game, and is being streamed for free to people outside Japan. It’s called The Tower of Druaga -The Aegis of URUK-. The first episode was not in 4:3, but widescreen. Most of the episode was someone’s dream, and that dream had every video game and anime cliche in it. Like the Adventures of Mikuru Asahina, it was really painful to watch the first time. “I got the jokes! Can we just move on already?” And then the second time I watched this episode, I also found it very funny.

Speaking of other things I do too much, I seem to rely on the Seattle Times as a source of news too much. Anyway, they have this article about a record number of rejected applicants to the University of Washington. One of the poor saps… I mean, one of the prospective students they mention did far better than I ever did at any point in my grade school career. His application includes boy scouts, swim team, AP Physics, and climbing Mt. Rainier; an application that got at best, wait-listed. My 3.5 GPA, AP U.S. History, Key Club got wait-listed as well.

All of that said, it makes me feel better at the fact that I never got accepted to UW the two times I applied there. UW isn’t the only one though, Western is experiencing this trend as well. This sort of trend really does reaffirm my belief that I got really lucky in being accepted as a transfer student here. In the end, I’m overall happt to be here at Western. Despite the supposedly high amount of people from my graduating class in high school that go here, I have only made rare contact with three of them. I’m also just adequately far enough away from my family so that I can visit them easily, and still not have to live with them.

Pre-2.3 it would take most of the level 50 areas to hit 60. Perhaps some parts of one of the upper-level areas would be left mostly untouched. However, my druid only did very few quests in a lot of the level 50+ areas. Barely touched Un’goro, Felwood, very little of Winterspring. Haven’t even been to Silithus. There’s still tons of quests in Azeroth to do, whereas all my previous 60′s, there aren’t very many quests to do in Azeroth anymore. It took about 157k worth of experience points to hit 60. To hit 61, it takes 494k points. That’s about a 314% increase in experience points.

Personally, I don’t really like Outland. Not to say Outland was poorly done by any means. Outland was partially a result of the concerns and complaints about 1-60 leveling pre-BC. A lot of those complaints came from lots of running around, quests were not enough, or too hard to find, among other things. Many of these were taken out, so the quests in general were numerous, and generally all centrally located. If they weren’t, then there would be a quest directing you towards that area. In addition, most of the quests that involve running from place to place, or ones that span 10 or 20 levels were kept at a minimum.

This was great, as it made leveling simpler. There were really no surprises in how quests were given out and such. I think this format made it easier for casual people to get into, which I think is a good thing. But a lot of the content in The Burning Crusade didn’t have that same sort of feel as a lot of the quests in Azeroth. There aren’t very many notable mini-plotlines in the TBC quests. Most of them have one of two over-arching themes. It was either something realted to the Burning Legion, or Illidan. I can’t think of many other quests that involved something else. Maybe something in Blade’s Edge Mountains, but that zone seems to be generally viewed unfavorably among players.

I’m sure my whole jaded outlook towards WoW had a factor to play into this as I explored TBC content, but I never really felt all that immersed in the environment in Outland as I did in Azeroth. It was either the Burning Legion this, or Illidan that. If it wasn’t either of that, it was some generic “collect food cause all the nasties are making it tough for me”, or “kill these random beasts and I give you moneyz and candyz.” Vanilla WoW had that too, but vanilla WoW also had other elements in those quests.

The “big” storylines I saw in pre-BC WoW generally were related to the end-game raids. The first one ties into Molten Core, with Ragnaros, the Dark Iron Dwarves. And Rangaros’s minions were also fighting a battle against the next one–the Black Dragonflight, which includes both the schemes of Nefarian and Onyxia. Those Onyxia attunement quests were pretty epic (on the Alliance side, at least). There were other little plots as well. This includes the story around Hakkar, of which has some ties in two 5-man instances, and a 20-man raid instance, and other places all over the world.

There were also great content outside of raids. The whole matter with the Defias, which got partially revived with Dustwallow Marsh’s revamp. And Duskwood is just full of juicy lore, the dark riders, the Embalmer. Granted, most of this is Alliance biased, as I primarily play them. I should go back one day and re-explore pre-BC content as a Horde character.

In addition, while the questing in the Burning Crusade was more centralized and routine, which helped make the leveling process easier, it didn’t allow for as much autonomy. Sure, Outland is a smaller zone, but basically it felt like, at times, that I had a hand to point in the direction where I should go next to level. Of course I had a choice to either quest in Blade’s Edge Mountains or Nagrand at level 66 or whatever, but the choices just seem so limiting and it’s not just the fact that Outland is smaller. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of encouragement for exploration in Outland. You won’t find an abandoned raft in the swamps of Zangramarsh for example. Perhaps this is a result of people trying to snoop around restricted areas, and Blizzard wanted to put an end to that. I find that disappointing, and contrary to one of the things that makes RPG’s fun. If I didn’t want to explore, I’d go play Tetris.

But the point I’m trying to get at is that all these little things, the quests, the exploration, made Azeroth seem alive; especially in comparison to Outland, which is… a floating chunk of land in outer space, a piece of land sitting in the middle of nowhere. It’s like a side-story almost. It’s interesting how Outland is just a floating piece of land sums up how I feel about the place. Don’t take me wrong, there were many parts of Outland that were well done, some of the environments are great. What was lacking was the content, it just didn’t feel as alive as Azeroth did for me.