Maebius Musing

No Comments »

((FYI - New Moon muse for this month is online again ))

Just a bit of random news lately, and could not think of a better topic.

• Hung up the Acorn birdfeeder we got from our wonderful friends in PA. Can’t wait until the first wren sits at the Wren-gift and feasts. I’ll take pictures. It looks really cool hanging from the iron hook thingy in our front yard.

• The kid got his first report card this week from Pre-K. Of course he did wonderfully. Still has to work on fine-motor-skills like holding a pencil properly, but aced all the intellectual stuff like colours, counting, reading small words, etc. (He’s the topic of this subject I’m thinking)

• Today, I craved coffee. Lately I have been drinking it far too much, and noticed it was affecting my sleep patterns. I stopped. Today, I have the HEADACHE OF DOOM, but know from past experience if I refrain for another 24 hours, it will go away and I’ll be back to my normal self. I was up to 5-6 cups a day. It’s so easy for me to get into the addiction of coffee it’s scary.

• Dinged lvl 57 in world of Warcraft (speaking of addictions!), which means in one more level, (or as I think of it: 3 more evenings), I will be able to travel to Outlands and actually use the content provided in the expansion I got for Christmas last year. w00t!

• Started keeping a daily reminder at work on a steno-pad, since we have still not gotten our new 2008 calenders and I refuse to buy a cheap $5 one in the meantime. Grrr.. corporate office lifestyle sucks. m’kay?

That’s all for now. Just wanted to post something this week.

No Comments »

Feel free to ignore this post, if you are not interested in world of Warcraft…..I’ll be using game-terms here, sorry forfolks who may not play and be confused.
Recently, I have been playing world of Warcraft very regularly, slightly more than every other night and both weekend evenings. My new favorite character is a Troll Holy Priestess named Kanandi, on the Farstriders realm, and she is currently level 57 at the time of this writing.

The guild she is in, known as “The Refugees”, was one which had existed long before, and collapsed. After the collapse, it was three people around level 25-30, and I joined up with them after a really enjoyable dungeon run. The main folks I ran around with are a real-life couple (from Mexico & Canada, moved together to Connecticut!). We had a blast, quoting movies, being silly and all wiping after some crazy strategy like “lets fear the patrol and see how many we can get at once. Keep us healed, Kanandi!” All in all, the fun of playing the game became much more than the completion of quests and earning new items.

Time passes, a few other friends-of-friends and random great people joined the guild as a result of our quirky recruitment “rules”, which mostly revolved around knowing the meaning of ‘42′, and which positions Ruby Rod wanted in that movie. (you don’t know?! Be gone from this blog!… /sarcasm)

Currently, the guild is comprised of 61 characters (many alts), and around 35 actual people behind keyboards. We range from folks being online once every other week, to some hardcore PvP folks who chat infrequently, but enjoy the game as a game. I’ve been an officer for the entire time, and my progress in-game has slowed due to helping out others instead of completing (mostly green/grey) quests.

We have a few brand-new players, who received the game over the holidays. I never have encouraged running low-levels through high-level content, but will gladly answer questions and make suggestions on their particular situation, to help avoid unnecessary hassle (like hunters just learning how to tame/train their pet skills).

I have maintained the guild website as a sub-domain of Everthorn, out of my love for the game, and to help keep tabs of things for folks who are away from their home computers and such.
Last week, the leader decided to step down from the role, and passed it to me after what apparently was a unanimous vote from the other officers. I am honored, and yet, this has changed the entire game for me…not sure for the better or worse quite yet.

One one hand, I am now in charge of maintaining the guild bank, to consolidate the accumulated wealth of 20+ people. I am the de-facto mediator in all drama such as the recent invite of a very chatty, teenager who is a nice person but was irritating the others with constant babble about school and “Epic Lootz” he hoped to get someday. I am now in the process of delegating a few roles to other officers, which is something I had campaigned for with our old leader.

The issue is our founding principles, which are to be a casual, friendly group who likes to play the game. If we sometimes do things “wrong”, if it’s enjoyable, its “Right”.

We do not raid for epic loot (though when the high-level folks explore dungeons they do get nice new toys!).
We do not concentrate on dominating the PvP battlegrounds (though there are two or three folks who created characters specifically for this type of gameplay).
We do not enforce strict roleplaying rules, and in-character discussion (though there are a buch of folks, myself included, who are more in-character than OOC).

The problem now is, that I feel this unspoken weight regarding the game.

This past week our officers have ‘been gellin’ and seem to honestly appreciate a rather forceful takover, to define our goals and provide contacts for various types of things like who can manufacture crafted items for the younger folks. I created a few more ranks with different permissions to access guild-related things in-game, so it was not simple “members” and “officers” like it had been. Basically speaking, trying to organize a group of thirty middle-age volunteers with a myriad of interestes, backgrounds, and playstyles who all enjoy playing the game in their own way.
I’ve even drained my own meagre gold-coin into making sure all our active and “member-rank” folks are outfitted with some bag-space for their inventory, and encouraged everyone to at least create a profile on the website so we can try to coordinate guild events, or provide help for the new players.

The thing I mostly want to do now is get back to our roots, hash out the drama that seems to be inevitable in any group that undergoes a change in leadership, and figure out where/if I want to continue leading. It’s tough to simply login and go kill some random critters to de-stress when I’ll get whispered chats from others for some reason or another. It’s usually good stuff, as the drama is starting to die off, but it’s a whole different level of meta-game that I was not quite prepared for.

Wish me luck!

1 Comment »

Sometimes you need to shake things up a bit in life, in order to really appreciate the little joys that make up your experience of this Reality.

Two Examples:

Recent ‘World of Warcraft Drama‘ has evolved into a sizable portion of the guild leaving over an argument regarding ‘proper’ group makeup for a specific dungeon (which I won’t go into details on), and the folks remaining much more focused on enjoying each other’s company, and a solidifying of Who We Are. Things are still in flux, but boiled down to requiring me to re-enforce our policy of “Casual-Social Guild” and not one to require every 5-group to include a ‘tank’, a ‘healer’ and such “standard” roles. We may not dominate the dungeons and often just scrape by…but by the Light, do we have a blast trying!

This fracturing of the guild has led myself (and a few others) to realize how much fun we have, and that our style of gameplay is not one driven by quest loot, and Epic Adventure. I believe now that things are calming down and the group is smaller, we can all enjoy ourselves much more, and just PLAY. There is a time and place for a proper group effort for certain in-game adventures, but we don’t make such things our priority.

Second example: The Maebius Bathroom is currently undergoing an overhaul. Our once-white walls have been painted “Happy Camper” green with a crumpled tissue paper texture, which does wonders to hide the old scrapes, nail marks, and general “oldness” of the walls. The lower portion of each wall now has a lovely Wainscoting of the oak-stained variety! While the whole project is still in-progress, already it has made me feel a bit more excited to clean up the rest of the house.

Amazing how much your entire day can be brightened up, your spirits lifted throughout work/home/etc….just from a simple redecoration and love poured into the project.

Hope you all are cheery, renewed after any recent Drama, and otherwise enjoying this wintery season as we creep ever-closer towards Spring.

1 Comment »

Those who know me well may have guessed my love of a good groove, and frequent tendencies to spend my late-evenings at home de-stressing by watching the Electric Sheep screen-saver, while ambient/techno/folk/goa/alternative/rock/pop/etc music fills my headsets.

…and thus, it is with a bit of trepidation and obsession that I share with you this link.

http://pandora.com/

Truly awe-inspiring, this service (free) allows you to setup your own station, with a number of ’seed songs’ and dynamically chooses additional music based on what they describe as “just shy of 400 musical attributes in the Music Genome Project.”

Each artist, title, etc is ranked and rated on these hundreds of attributes, which leads to a very nice listing, that includes a LOT of lesser-known (to me) artists with similar styles to what I enjoy. Much more indie-friendly than something like Yahoo Radio.

For example, using Tori Amos as a seed, it chose the following (awesome) song to play next: http://www.pandora.com/music/song/ashley+maher/blessed+rain

Some attributes of the song are:

folk rock qualities
great lyrics
acoustic sonority
demanding instrumental part writing
extensive vamping
intricate melodic phrasing
minor key tonality
electric guitar riffs
a prominent flute part
a smooth female lead vocal
prominent percussion
vocal harmonies

disco influences
rock influences
danceable beats
an emotional male vocal
explicit lyrics
a repetitive chorus
a repetitive verse
melodic part writing
a synth bass riff
heavy drums
synth tweaking
a highly synthetic sonority
trippy soundscapes
radio friendly stylings
prevalent use of groove

— Next Page »