Tag Archives: info

Quick Logistical Post

I get a lot of spam comments. A lot of it. I clear out probably five or so spam comments a day on both of my blogs combined– and that’s not counting the several thousands that Akismet has caught in its spider-web.

Yeah.

Most of the spam tries to cleverly disguise itself as not-spam, which is how it gets through the filters. But it’s still not something I want to deal with every day.

As a result I have decided to auto-close commenting on all posts older than 14 days. I hate to do this, because I know some people have a lot of blogs to catch up on and don’t get around to individual posts for a while, but it will help tons with the spam situation (as 90% of it happens on old posts).

You are, of course, always welcome to contact me via e-mail, Twitter, or by commenting on more recent posts, though!

False Alarm

As it turned out I picked the worst time ever to return to WoW/Blogging. I am going to be moving at the end of the month (nowhere exciting; just the dawning realization that “moving back home” makes the best financial sense when you are trying to find a new job) and the next few weeks will be spent packing/cleaning/etc., not to mention working on the book that I am still working on. As such, don’t expect any blogging miracles for a little while. C’est la vie.

By the Way

I’ve been doing one LFG PuG every morning on Tawyn, just for the heck of it. By “morning” I mean somewhere between 5 and 6 am Pacific Time (which is the time zone of my server). Yeah, it’s pretty early, but ya know.

Anyways, why am I saying this? Because if you happen to be in roughly my gearscore-level (I think I am sitting right close to 5000 but honestly I don’t pay attention) and are Alliance in the Bloodlust battlegroup, and you queue that early too, well, you just might see me around.

Hey… it could happen!

So be sure to /wave if you see me, unlike a certain Shy Moonkin who, by the way, was the impetus for point six on my last post, regardless of what said Shy Moonkin says.

*taps mic* This thing on?

Can you hear me in the back?

/waves

Okay!

So folks, here’s the deal. The Boy wants to play alts with me and bought me a game card to prove it. As such, as of a few days ago, I am back in WoW. I do not know for how long. I do know that I want to be Super Casual– I still have too much to focus on outside of game not to be. I have no real plans to raid right now or really do anything outside of leveling alts with The Boy as an occasional social activity. (And dink around in Wintergrasp, which I have never done before, but is far more fun than I expected.)

As such, I have not yet determined whether or not I’m going to return to updating this blog. I am having tons of fun over at my new blog, as the freedom to write about whatever-strikes-my-fancy is exhilarating. If I do eventually choose to rez this blog, I imagine it will really only be for the rare occasional Really Hilarious PuG Story or something. I don’t think I have it in me to write much in the way of hunter guides when all I’m doing in game is leveling my warlock and feral druid, or getting the vehicles as soon as I possibly can in Wintergrasp *cough*

Nah, just wanted to give you all a headsup because I figured it was only a matter of time before somebody realized that my Armory profiles were suddenly mysteriously being updated again.

As a parting gift for reading, have a Lady ChuChu!:

<3 you guys! -Pike

Be Vewwwy Quiet…

We’re hunting clockwork hares!

So yeah, http://www.clockworkhare.com/ is my “new blog”, wherein I will ramble about whatever strikes my fancy. Originally I was going to make a separate blog for Linux rambles, but frankly a.) getting a blog all set up takes a surprisingly long time, and b.) my Linux rambles tend to be less techie and more pseudo-philosophical anyway, so might as well just throw it all into one Big Blog.

You can subscribe to it if you like, or you don’t have to and you can just wait around here for my return, whichever strikes your fancy!

Don’t think of it as me leaving… think of it as Summer Vacation at the hunter school.

*turns out the lights and bangs the chalkboard erasers together*

I Suck at Professions

My department manager at work– who is in my guild– is really awesome at professions. He has pretty much every profession ever spread across his alts, he sends billions of stacks of raw materials to a central bank so they can all share them, and he’ll have something leveled to 300 by the time his toon is level 22. Seriously. He just rocks those professions.

Me… not so much.

Now, I DO have a love affair with herbalism/alchemy. I love it. I love having buffed and long-lasting potions/flasks (though I miss when flasks lasted four hours /pout), I know herbs like the back of my hand, and I’ve never felt that this was a difficult profession combo to level.

Everything else though… yeah.

Lunapike was leatherworking/skinning until I got bogged down in the 150-range of leatherworking and dropped it for herbalism and turned her into a pure farming machine. The same exact thing happened to Tamaryn, my druid, except I never picked up a second profession. Eventually I dropped it for mining but got tired of running around Arathi Highlands looking for nodes. Recently I was inspired to make another attempt at leveling leatherworking but I’m stuck again, around 190-ish. I don’t know why it’s such a big stumbling block. It just IS. I’m not going to spend five billion gold on Heavy Leather and I don’t feel like going out and farming it when there are more fun things I could be doing with my time, you know?

Althalor was doing pretty good with Enchanting for a while. Then I started to fail again. I think he’s sitting at 155 or so. At level 60. u_u

I am off to a good start with Tawbree, though. She’s tailoring/enchanting and I think I’m actually managing to keep up thus far. 154 Enchanting/135 Tailoring — not bad for a level 36 character. I think a lot of it is because my leveling strategy with her is “Queue up for LFG, then sit around in Stormwind working on professions until I get a group, rinse and repeat.” And I get a lot of ‘chanting mats doing nothing but instances. Of course, I’ve probably jinxed myself now… hrmm.

A lot of other people say that you shouldn’t worry about professions until later or what-have-you. I dunno, I kind of like them. I think they could be much better implemented/integrated, but they add a fun aspect to the game. And I’m really jealous of people like my department manager who has one of EVERYTHING. Gawsh.

I apologize I haven’t been writing much in the blog lately. I’ve been doing a lot of non-WoW things lately– mostly writing and drawing. I think my art may actually be improving (instead of stagnating) for the first time in years, so that’s got me excited. Speaking of art, I’ve opened up commissions for things-that-aren’t-just-avatars, so if you always wanted a cutesy Pikestyle full-bodied portrait of your character, head on over to the Commissions Page for info.

And yes, it’s February and I’m still working on my NaNoWriMo novel. (In the middle of the editing/rewriting stage at this point.)

Good News, Bad News

Good News: I was going to go to Icecrown Citadel for the first time tomorrow!

Bad News: My hard drive seems to have exploded.

Good News: I have my laptop!

Bad News: My laptop cannot play WoW.

Good News: Once I get a new hard drive I’ll get to install Linux and that means spending a good few caffeine-, frustration-, and thrill- filled days tinkering with it, and like the geek I am, I really enjoy doing that.

Bad News: Between that and fifty bazillion patches, it’ll be a little while before I have WoW access again.

Good News: I can at least blog up some RP stories and the like, right?

Four Good News points to three Bad News points. I’m gonna look at this from the bright side, then. I need a new hard drive anyway, it wasn’t particularly sizable and over time it became filled with more bad blocks than a satanic Lego factory.

…do not question my choice of comparison.

Avatar Time Is Here Again (Commissions + Contest)

I have opened up avatar commissions again! I’m sorry it took so long for me to do so. $10 will get you a vintage World of WarCute avatar personalized for a character of your choice, and yes, I am open to most non-WoW stuff also: try me!

If you want an avatar but are low on money or you’re feelin’ lucky, (well, do ya, punk?) then you are free to try for the 5th Annual Sitemeter Screenshot Contest. As you can see by the Sitemeter widget on my sidebar, I’m currently sitting at about 485,000 hits, which is 15,000 away from an unbelievable half-a-million. If you e-mail me a screenshot of the meter saying 500,000, you are eligible for a FREE World of WarCute avatar, which is the prize this time! I am currently getting about 1,000 hits a day so the ETA for this is in about two weeks, just to give you an approximate timeframe. (Do note, though, that this is subject to change if I get WoW.com’d or something similar, which basically triples my daily page view. I know that happened last time; I got WoW.com’d when I was within a couple thousand of the big number, and it may have tripped a few people up. So be prepared!)

So prep that Print Screen button or head on over to the Art Commissions page for details if you are interested!

Not Bad… for a Human

So it’s “Aliens” quote day, so sue me. (Best Movie Ever by the way.)

ANYWAYS! For those who missed it, this blog has been infected with a nasty little bug the past few days, so I nuked the site from orbit to try to kill it. Backed up my posts/comments/images, deleted everything, and spent the last six hours trying to bring this back online again after some issues.

Everything, for the most part, should be back– obviously some of the stuff on the sidebar and some theme stuff needs to be fixed, and images are in the middle of being uploaded and probably won’t finish for quite some time, since I have a truck-full of them… but all posts and comments (aside from those comments that were posted in the last few minutes before D-Day, after I’d backed everything up) should be good to go.

Since I’ve pretty much been working on this all day, though, I’m gonna go relax for the rest of the night and finish polishing up the blog tomorrow!

I would like to thank everybody for their patience and for doing things like leaving cheery or silly messages on various phases of the reconstruction process when I was frustrated as all heck. I would also like to thank everybody for your patience regarding the fact that the blog post content here has been pretty craptacular while I’ve been dealing with this problem. =P Hopefully, though, it’s behind us now (if not, it won’t be pretty). Onward and upward~

We're Gonna Take Off And Nuke the Entire Site from Orbit

It’s the only way to be sure.

Newt

So, soldiers, here’s the scoop. I thought I got rid of the nasty bug causing site redirect issues and the like last time, but apparently I’ve yet to root out the Queen Alien, so the issues have returned. I spent some time searching around but to no avail, and since I don’t want to waste my time on this crap when I’ve got stories to write and pictures to draw and WoW to play, (to paraphrase a wise man, “I’ve had it with these motherfrackin’ snakes on this motherfrackin’ plane”) I’m gonna attempt something crazy.

Namely, I’m gonna back everything up, delete EVERYTHING, and reinstall WordPress from scratch.

Then I’ll make all my passwords like three times longer, which means they’ll probably take about ten minutes to type out, but ya know.

If THAT doesn’t fix the problem, then… well, I’ll probably lose it, but we’ll deal with it when we get there.

AS SUCH, you may, over the course of the next few hours/days/whatnot see reduced site functionality, missing themes, the site not loading entirely, random 404s, etc. while I try my best to completely reboot the blog. All comments and posts, as well as the entire site itself, will be backed up in multiple ways so I can always revert it if I mess something up entirely.

Until then, wish me luck– I’m takin’ this thing to the airlock.