Blog – Page 23 – Lise Fracalossi

D-d-doldrums

This is the worst part of winter for me. I don’t want to do anything but stay at home and do sedentary stuff. Mostly vidyagames at the moment. I know this doesn’t help the doldrums long-term, but I’m not sure anything does, except more light in the sky.

I don’t want to go to Cottington this weekend. I hate Ye Olde Commons’ monster camp; it’s basically someone’s basement and it’s cold and damp. I am only there Saturday, but I am stuck on desk most of the time, and doing crunchy or one-off roles when I’m not.

I don’t want to go to writing group this month. I don’t want to write. It feels incredibly pointless, like I’m shoveling words into a bottomless pit.

I’m feeling blah about Intercon. I’m actually cross-cast for two out of three roles — that’s not a bad thing, except for the part where I have to figure out costuming. And I’m so burnt out on costuming.

I’m even feeling blah about the Fifth Gate one-day this month, despite my excitement right after the last event.

I’m grumpy I’ll miss Arisia and Boskone this year due to LARP conflicts.

Things I am excited about: well, ESO, in large part at the moment, and the new friends that have come with it. New computer components winging their way to me. The Force Awakens — getting to see it again, and the glut of good fanfic that’s already out there. Cheese fondue. My fuzzy Hello Kitty pajamas. Getting to use my neat new LARP gear for the 5G one-day (even if the event itself doesn’t thrill me). The possibility of getting a tattoo this year.

At some point I should post about how I did on last year’s goals (exec summary: poorly) and what my goals for this year are (exec summary: have more fun).

I’m sorry I’m so awful at this whole seasons thing.

“Sorry, the Dunmer were having a Moment.” (ESO log, holiday break edition)

Screenshot_20160101_172825
Rampaging guar! Falanu Dren, my Dunmer Templar, is riding the very happy-looking guar on the right.

I… did very little productive this vacation.

I am okay with this! This is what vacation is for.

I did, however, get back into ESO, and play a lot of that with my wonderful guild(s). With Falanu, my main, I hit V12, finished Cadwell’s Silver (wicked overleveled, I know), and started Cadwell’s Gold. Currently Matt and I are blowing through Auridon, doing only the stuff we need to fill out the Almanac, not even reading the quests because I’ve done this zone twice before.

(But Razum-dar is still worth the price of admission!)

Surprisingly, Matt With the Hat (a.k.a. Matt who is not my husband) started playing last week! We suggested he make a Daggerfall Covenant character to pair with our as-of-yet unplayed DC characters, my Imperial Dragonknight, Corvus Duronius, and Matt’s Breton Templar, Ogier Montrose. He obliged, and so the Redguard Nightblade Nasir al-Qiteb has joined us. We tooled around Stros M’Kai and Betnikh together and did the public dungeon in Glenumbra (Bad Man’s Hallows); last night we did the trio of lowbie dungeons (Spindleclutch, Fungal Grotto, and Banished Cells).

Mostly I have been running a lot of dungeons, both normal and veteran, pledges and otherwise, with the UESP guild — in particular, a core of @Faunter, @Lurlock, @Sedrethi, @Deandra, @baratron, and @Wicked_Shifty. There was one day where I ran seven!

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how easily Matt and I have taken to some of the tougher veteran content. One of our first was vet Crypt of Hearts. We wiped a few times on the last boss, but the trip was more than worth it for the story — you know, your typical “guy meets girl, girl sets up adventuring school, guy meets Mephala, Mephala gives guy the Ebony Blade, guy goes batshit insane and kills his wife and everyone at the school, guy splits wife’s soul into three parts and tortures the souls of the three guys he thought she was sleeping with in increasingly inventive ways.”

(“Somebody get this couple some marital counseling, before Nerien’eth kills us all,” I may have said).

(Also after we had killed Nerien’eth and found his shrine to Mephala, Falanu, Brelyna, and Sedrethi all started doing the /kowtow emote in front of it. “Sorry, the Dunmer were having a Moment,” we told Shifty, the only non-Dunmer among us).

More impressive was vet City of Ash — where we realized, before the first boss, that since we hadn’t used LFG, Matt and I weren’t battle-leveled to V16. Somehow we mucked our way through, although there were a number of deaths along the way, especially to the final boss. That we made it through at all is more a credit to Deandra and Sedrethi’s DPS than Matt’s tanking or my healing.

And deadly pie, of course.

Random other stuff wot I did:

– Vaults of Madness, the group dungeon in Coldharbour. This one deserves a nod just for being visually stunning. When we got to the last boss, the Mad Architect, my groupmates took their time burning him down just so we could see the abilities he uses. (The glass-breaking, shards-flying-across-the-room effect was amazing — so cool I didn’t get under the bubble in time and died to it!)

– Imperial City Prison (normal-mode — not touching vet until V16). When Matt K saw we were in there, he said, “I see you got yourself imprisoned for stealing. You need to try harder not to get caught.” We told him we were staging a breakout.

– I joined a trading guild that a lot of UESP folks were affiliated with, Hlaalu Trading Company. Because Hlaalu, of course, but also just because I needed a trading guild. Of course now I’ve committed to selling 3k worth of stuff a week or risk getting kicked, but as it turns out that’s not hard to do. If nothing else I can sell a little of my backlog of Perfect Roe…

– UESP hosted a GUAR RAMPAGE!!! Where we all dyed our armor purple and gold, met in Cyrodiil, tried not to accidentally kill folks not in our faction, and took screenshots and ran around the lake on our guar mounts. Others went on to explore some of the PvE content in Cyrodiil, though I didn’t join them.

– I enjoy talking lore, trading character histories, and some light RP with Sedrethi, who’s as invested in his character Ravyn as I am in Falanu. Unfortunately, they don’t always see eye-to-eye; for one, Ravyn’s primarily a follower of Boethiah, and tries not-very-hard to hide his disdain for the Tribunal, while Falanu is Vivec fangirl, worships Mephala as his Anticipation, and would never speak ill of the Tribunal. Falanu’s also affiliated with House Hlaalu, and Ravyn is a Telvanni. As a result there’s a lot of “Imperial bootlicker” and “crazy wizard” sniping back and forth, and my telling him to shut his whore mouth when he suggests the Tribunal isn’t actually divine 😉

Also when I logged on with my Khajiit into a group we were both in, he unleashed his Dunmer xenophobia, calling Bri all kinds of Dunmeris insults (s’wit, fetcher, n’wah, etc). (I, alas, lack in my Khajiiti insults. In retrospect I should have called him “muskarse shaveskin”).

(The other night, in the midst of the sniping on TS, Matt interjected some comment about preferring House Redoran instead. “Is Brelyna a Redoran?” I said, shocked. “Our marriage is a sham!” [Our characters are married too, mostly for the XP bonus it gives in-game]. “Well, she is a warrior…” Sedrethi oh-so-helpfully pointed out.)

– As always, being in a guild with people who know the lore insanely well is delightful. There’s griping in gchat about the guild called “Nine Divines Trading” (“Talos hasn’t even been born yet!”). When Deandra first met Falanu she said, “At least you’re not Falanu Hlaalu.” T’other night in TS we were discussing the trippier lore books, like the Remanada and the 36 Lessons of Vivec. (Oh, Michael Kirkbride. You’re so special).

I’m sure that’s not all, but your patience is more limited than my ability to ramble about the Elder Scrolls 😉 In closing, have this picture of a guy I met at the enchanting station in Rawl’kha:

Meditations on ESO – Cyrodiil, Imperial City, and pledges

I had a great time last night with the UESP guild in ESO. They ran a “Kill Your Friends” event, which was designed to get everyone the achievement for killing 100 players in the Imperial Arena.

First of all, I’d never even been to Cyrodiil (the game’s PvP area), let alone the Imperial City (which was added as DLC back in August). I did not realize how FREAKING HUGE Cyrodiil is. I mean, I guess it makes sense for it to be sized relative to the rest of Tamriel? — it’s an entire province, after all — but I’m also comparing it to battlegrounds in other MMOs I’ve played, which are generally not that large.

(And can I say how creepy it is to see that giant Dark Anchor hanging over the city? Almost as creepy as that echo of White Gold Tower that is forever out of reach in Coldharbour…)

Because I didn’t quite understand how the Transitus shrines work, I rode from the North Morrowind Gate to the entrance to the Imperial Sewers, and met the rest of the Ebonheart Pact folks there. (Our group was about 7 EP folks at its height, five AD, and 1 or 2 DC). Our guide, Sedrethi, took us to a bunch of sites within the Imperial Sewers and the EP base, like the two dueling scholars, Lady Cinnabar and Phrastus of Elinhir. (Who I regrettably did not recognize. So much lore!)

(Much was made of the fact that the Imperial City in ESO is rotated 30 degrees from what it was in TES IV, driving lore nerds crazy).

We eventually made our way to the Arena, and then had to defeat the Arena bosses. But then… it got more difficult.

There were three major obstacles to folks getting this achievement — one, other players (it is a PvP zone, after all); two, the fact that the arena bosses do keep respawning; and three: apparently it only counts for the achievement if you score the killing blow.

This happened… so few times for me. I think I ended up with 5 kills, maybe. And that was only because EP was the largest faction, so I had a lot of people backing me up.

But it was fun, and it was my first experience PvPing in the game. I came out of it with the Alliance War skill lines unlocked, a bunch of Tel Var stones (the currency for Imperial City), and several of the beginner Alliance War achievements, so I can’t complain.

Later on that night, Matt and I were brave enough to ask in guild chat if anyone wanted to do pledges with us. (Pledges are the daily dungeons of this game). Brave, because neither of us had done much in the way of group dungeons before; I think the last one we did was Fungal Grotto with Holly back when she was playing regularly. (For reference, that’s the first dungeon EP-side). We made sure people knew we were inexperienced; I hope we didn’t fuck things up too badly.

Our first battle was trying to form a cross-alliance group, as our other intended group members were DC and AD. Currently you can only do this through the LFG tool, however! Our method was to pick an unpopular dungeon (i.e. not the pledge dungeon), hope the group finder stuck us together, go there, kill a few mobs, and then go to the dungeon we actually wanted. It worked… moderately well? In that eventually we all ended up in the same group and where we wanted to be. But we all agreed this couldn’t possibly be working as intended.

(I hear they’re going to fix this Real Soon Now ™).

We did this first with the normal pledge (which was Tempest Island in Malabal Tor) and the vet pledge (Wayrest Sewers in Stormhaven) — which meant first going to normal Blessed Crucible, and vet Fungal Grotto. The latter turned out to be funny; we didn’t kill any mobs before trying to leave, and the group finder tool kept trying to port us back to FG when we were riding to the wayshrine, or while we were in the middle of zoning into Wayrest Sewers. Once we killed some mobs it seemed to work fine, though.

We finished both dungeons fairly easily, and got our silver and gold pledge keys. (I didn’t get much from it except the motif for Mercenary shields). I was definitely struggling with “no, seriously, you have to ONLY HEAL” and had a couple of deaths on my watch. Thankfully the penalty for it in this game isn’t too bad. Also, the fact that we had two well-equipped V16s probably helped — yes, the dungeons are scaled, but scaling only does so much.

One of the complaints I’ve had about ESO in the past is that the content doesn’t seem very challenging. This changed somewhat last night. While we could pretty much blow through normal Tempest Island, vet Wayrest Sewers was trickier, and actually required some coordination. That made me happy 🙂 (There was a lot of “don’t stand in the bad,” and my skills at that are… somewhat improved by my move to playing in third-person view?)

Overall, this is probably the most fun I’ve had in ESO in months. I’m weird — most of what I like in MMOs is the opposite of what everyone else does. I think leveling is just about the most tedious thing ever, even if I enjoy aspects of the individual quests, but I love PvP and dungeons and anything that requires group coordination. This is why I only have a V8 and a V1 character even though I’ve been playing since release. I’m just gratified to see there’s content to scratch that itch, after months and years of avoiding it due to inexperience.

If this sounds like fun to you, please do come join us! The game is B2P these days, and we have our own tiny guild of two, along with the UESP guild, which is one of the friendliest guilds I’ve ever been part of. (And it’s connected to the best ES wiki!)

Lise watches a star war, and talks about it

(There will be spoilers in this post, but the first part is not spoilery)

So I went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens this week.

How was it?

Tentatively, I say, wonderful.

Why “tentative?” Well, I’m old enough to remember seeing The Phantom Menace in theaters, and what my reaction was then. The hype was so strong that at first I told myself I enjoyed it. It took a long time to realize just how bad it was.

TFA is not a perfect movie. (What movie is?). I’ll talk about what bugged me later on in this post. But I spent most of the movie rapt, feeling glee and sorrow and nostalgia and awe — that all important element of SFF! — at all the right moments.

That is more than the sterile prequels ever did for me.

Okay, there will be actual
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S

… after this point.
Continue reading “Lise watches a star war, and talks about it”

Links and Accomplishments, November

This is what I looked like for most of last week…

… I guess I’m doing these monthly now? As it turns out, traveling for a week and then being sick for the next really saps one’s will to write blog posts.

Accomplishments

Writing
– Wrote 6,803 words on Lioness
– Wrote blog post: Return to the Sceptered Isles, part one: Dublin
– Attended writing group
– Submitted “Remember to Die” to Abyss & Apex
– Submitted “Powder of Sympathy” to Uncanny

Reading (one gets a lot of reading done on planes…)
– Read Valour and Vanity, Mary Robinette Kowal
– Read 21 Days To A Novel, Michael A. Stackpole
– Read Psmith in the City, P.G. Wodehouse
– Read Dickens’ Fur Coat and Charlotte’s Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England’s Great Victorian Novelists, Daniel Pool
– Read The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero
– Read/listened to Tremontaine, episodes 2-4
– Alpha-read chapters five and six of SC4 for Django

Other Media
– Watched Tales of Terror (1962)
– Watched The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
– Listened to Happier with Gretchen Rubin, episode 36
– Played/playtested Trade Empires
– Played several games of 7 Wonders
– Played several games of Kingdom Builders
– Played two games of Mysterium
– Played Among Nobles
– Reached VR8 in TESO with Falanu
– Reached 40 in TESO with Br’ihnassi
– Won a game of Beyond Earth on Mercury difficulty (Brasilia, Transcendence victory)
– Watched the RiffTrax of The Wizard
– Watched Rifftrax: Total Riff-off episode 6: Brazilian Bigfoot

LARP
– Wrote NPC PEL for Cottington Woods 3.4
– Attended Imaginary Consequences in the UK, where I…
– Played in Dying of the Light
– Played in Musþeof
– Played in Burning Orchid

Social/Travel
– Went to see Crimson Peak with Nat and Vik
– Visited Mel and Will for board games
– Had dinner with Alon
– Did a bus tour of Dublin
– Visited Kilmainham Gaol
– Visited Trinity College’s Old Library for the Book of Kells and the Long Room

Health
– Did 11am/3pm office exercises x 3
– Did Hacker’s Diet Introductory Fitness Ladder workout (rung 2) x 2
– 40m walk x 3
– Had a massage

Rejection Log

– “Remember to Die,” 24-day form, Abyss & Apex (thank god it didn’t take half a year, like I feared)
– “Powder of Sympathy,” 12-day form, Uncanny

Return to the Sceptered Isle(s), part one: Dublin

Last week I was in Ireland and England, doing some tourism and attending Imaginary Consequences, the British LARPing/freeform convention in the tradition of Intercon.

In the past, we’ve flown through Dublin on our way to England, as Aer Lingus, an Irish carrier, usually has some of the cheapest flights. This time, rather than spending hours in the Dublin airport in the middle of the night, we decided to stop for a couple of days and do some tourism and adjust to the time change.

We flew out from Boston last Monday evening, taking the usual transatlantic red-eye, and arrived, sleep-deprived, in Dublin on Tuesday morning. We shuffled off to a taxi rank and got one to take us to the Croke Park Hotel, right across from the stadium with the same name.

The hotel had been recommended to me by some FB friends who had stayed there, and it did not disappoint. I had contacted them ahead of time saying, “hey, we’re coming in on a red-eye, do you have early check-in?” They told me there wasn’t a formal process, but they’d try to have a room ready. Thus, when I arrived at their door at 9am, there was in fact a room ready! Delightful!

Did you know that some hotels in the British Isles have power only when a keycard is inserted into a slot by the door? Neither did we! Cue a few frantic minutes of trying to figure out why our room didn’t have power.

Tuesday was mostly a wash. We slept for a few hours, woke, and went out in search of food (in the middle of the afternoon, no less). It was rainy and windy, and there wasn’t much near us. I was hoping to find something like an Irish pub — because, goddamit, we were in Ireland! — but there was very little near our hotel except a closed Italian restaurant and a lot of sketchy bars. Bars are not pubs, as I learned, after I awkwardly walked into one, sat down, and then left, realizing this wasn’t going to get me food, since it clearly didn’t have a kitchen.

We returned to the hotel defeated, and visited the hotel bar instead, where I fortified myself with a cider and an egg mayo (egg salad) sandwich. I’m not sure why I thought cider was a good idea, but I was in a land where cider was taken seriously, and I was going to have some. (Orchard Thieves — good stuff. It has foxes on the label! I liked it a lot better than the Bulmer’s I tried later in the weekend. But I freely admit I have no taste, and prefer a sweeter cider).

There was more trying desperately not to fall asleep in our hotel room while watching RiffTrax on Matt’s phone, and then dinner at the hotel. I knew if I walked far enough I could probably be in the center of Dublin (I would later prove this true), but I had no energy for that. And I needed to stay up until midnight, I knew, for Intercon signups. (We managed).

Wednesday we did a little tourism. Our hotel stay came with tickets for the Dublin Bus Tour, a hop-on hop-off circuit of the main attractions of the city. We did the whole tour (and parts of it twice), getting off at Kilmainham Gaol and Trinity College.

Kilmainham brought up a lot of Shadows of Amun memories — it’s where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were imprisoned and executed, and there are plots around that in Shadows. Matt referred to the experience as “Bradford Reilly tours Kilmainham.”

Overall experience was sobering, but strangely beautiful — especially the panopticon, with its late 19th century stylings. (Used, apparently, for a lot of movies).

Here’s a photo, though it’s not my own:

Another photo that I wish I had taken:

The second place I went was Trinity College’s Old Library, to see the Book of Kells and the Long Room.

I found the Book of Kells experience … kind of underwhelming? There’s a lot of lead-in — you go through a whole exhibit about the life of a monk, other contemporary prayer books, pigments, symbolism, and practices in illumination, etc — before going into the Treasury and viewing four pages of illumination.

(I expected the pages would be laid out side-to-side, but nope, it’s bound, so you only see what pages the book is turned to at the moment).

That’s fine; I learned a lot, which is all I ask. Also, the title of the exhibit — “turning darkness into light” — is from the Robin Flowers translation of Pangur Bán, so hey, cats!

Here, have a public domain image of the famous Chi Ro page, which we only got to see pictures of (the book wasn’t turned to that page):

“KellsFol034rChiRhoMonogram“. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

Upstairs from the Treasury is the Long Room of the Old Library, which is a beautifully-architected mausoleum of books. I wish I could have seen more of the old, calfskin-bound volumes from (at latest) the 19th century, instead of the exhibit about YA lit inspired by mythology. There’s something beautiful and haunting about a room full of people’s lives’ works, lying forgotten and dusty.

Possibly I am just weird.

“Long Room Interior, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland – Diliff” by Diliff – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Commons.

Other than that we followed the bus tour around, hearing about attractions only glancingly seen. Twice we heard about the Duke of Wellington’s birthplace, and his attitude about that (“just because you’re born in a stable doesn’t make you a horse”); blessedly, we only had to hear once about James Joyce consummating his relationship with Nora Barnacle (or about a character in Ulysses buying something at Sweny’s). (I have no love for Joyce. Sorry-not-sorry).

We got off the bus for the day on O’Connell Street and wandered aimlessly for a bit, in the wrong direction for food. Finally we found ourselves in a restaurant called Flanagan’s, where I had fish & chips and Matt had beef & Guiness pie. Then we made the long-ish walk back to our hotel.

We had an absurdly early flight to Gatwick on Thursday, so that was pretty much the end of our Irish adventure! There was still much I would have liked to visit — Dublinia, the national museums, the Teeling Whiskey Distillery, etc. — and that’s not even leaving Dublin.

Next time I’ll talk about my time at Consequences itself!

Links and Accomplishments, 10/18/15 to 10/31/15

Witness my sad crying glitter pumpkin…

Links

I love the Victorian era. So I decided to live in it. Apparently this article caused a kerfuffle when it first came out? I dunno, I unironically loved it. Yes, the tone comes off a bit condescending at times. Yes, I’m sure there are many, many ways they are still benefiting from the advantages of the 21st century — how did the author write this blog piece, after all, without a computer? But I would love to be able to do this for a few days, a week, a month — just to get a taste of an era I find fascinating.

Friendship’s Frequency. This rang very true for me. I have been Busy Betty in many friendships, and I’m still learning how to manage the thinly-cut slices of my social pie.