Not much has changed since I last checked in to the good old Recycle Bin. I now have a 70 priest on the Arathor server. Haven’t explored a lot of the instances yet because I’ve been working on my tailor skills. There are a lot of nice healer patterns available for mooncloth tailors in The Burning Crusade. So I check in during the day, kill a few spiders for netherweb silk, and wait for the four, that’s right FOUR, day clock to reset so that I can make two new mooncloth. I need about 30 or so to finish my robes.
Typical OOTP hype is swirling through the forums. I pre-ordered because wasting $28 is better than wasting $35. Everybody is telling me it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. But we’ll see. One of the loudest beta critics on the 2006 team seems happy with 2007, so keep hope alive.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it on this site before, but by far the best thing written about gaming is found at The Escapist. Other than a few blogs and forums here and there, it is the only other gaming writing that I read these days. The site has gotten fancier over the year, or so it seems, but I don’t visit the site that much. Instead, the magazine is emailed to me every month. If you don’t like intelligent writing and would rather see flashing women in bikinis ads, don’t bother with The Escapist as it’s bound to disappoint.
Clay Dreslough contacted me out of the blue about reviewing the next version of Baseball Mogul or the current Football Mogul offering. Normally I refuse to do such things, but Mr. Dreslough is one of the baseball career text sim founding fathers, so how can I refuse him? I told him I’d put the review here, so we’ll see if he follows up, hehe. With PureSim’s demise I’m softening up a bit on baseball reviews since who knows what Sports Interactive will cough up with Out of the Park Baseball? Plus Mr. Dreslough worked on Tony LaRussa Baseball 3 and that’s baseball gaming royalty as far as I am concerned.
In other news, I dusted off my 35mm camera and initially decided to get into digital photography. I was thinking about this today – I used to be a photography nut. I worked in dark rooms, I knew which chemicals did what, I rolled film, all sorts of stuff. At some point I just forgot about photography. My wife would say it was when girls started to notice me (and I them), but that’s another conversation. I wanted to pick it up again a few years ago and purchased a Nikon N70 35mm camera. I shot two rolls of slide film with the camera and put it away for a long time.
My youngest daughter is a soccer phenom (known as “sweet feet” to her friends and the reporters on the U7 beat). You’ll get that joke if you know what U7 is. I wanted to start recording her assent to the women’s US National Team and thought a digital camera was the way to go. The more I played with my film camera, the more I decided that digital just wasn’t for me right now. I’ll probably try and find a Nikon D50 body at some point, however, I just enjoy film photography too much.
I’m afraid my World of Warcraft time will suffer. Such is life.
I never got into the dark room that much but I did have a lot of gear for my SLR.
I purposely eschewed cameras for a long time when traveling.
Now, I’ve been capturing a lot of stuff on digital, even paying for things like cable car rides just on the anticipation of opportunities to take scenic pics.
One thing though, the digital camera I paid for was way more than my old SLR but it doesn’t take the same quality of pictures inside of places like cathedrals and such.
Problem is lack of HDR (high dynamic range) meaning if there’s a light source like a stained glass window in a cathedral through which sunlight is streaming in, all the details of the interior in the shadows are lost.
But the flip side is the convenience and no cost to take pics in volume and then weed out the worst ones. I’ve accumulated thousands of pics in just a year for instance.
Reviews? Did someone say review? Shocking developments …