Archive for the ‘Entertainment’ Category
Just a few thoughts on garrisons for anyone starting in the new WoW expansion, Warlords of Draenor.
Your first large building should be the Barracks. This gives your followers access to patrol missions which level them up faster.
You should keep your followers running missions all the time. They will continue to work even while you are logged out. Take the missions which award garrison resources, rare items, and the purple experience missions. I didn’t think the missions that… rewarded gold were worth the cost in resources to accept the mission.
Your followers will gain experience from every mission, even if the mission fails (they just won’t get any bonus items or rewards), so keep them going all the time. Except that the gold missions are a waste, don’t worry about the cost in garrison resources, you’ll make it back later on.
Once you get a couple of followers up to level 100, change from Barracks to Dwarven Bunker. The bunker doubles your chance to gain rare or epic items as quest rewards, and increases their level. If you take this option you will end up with heroic dungeon level gear with no extra effort.
Your first medium building should be the Inn. At level one this gives you extra dungeon quests, not so thrilling, but at level two you can virtually make followers to order with the specs you require, while level three gives you valuable treasure hunter quests.
If you enjoy pvp your second medium building should be the Gladiator’s Sanctum. If not, it doesn’t really matter.
Your first small building should be the Enchanter’s Study. You will have lots of gear to disenchant, and the study lets you disenchant without being an enchanter. When you upgrade the building later, you (or a follower with enchanting), and this too applies even though you don’t have enchanting, can create enchants for neck and cloak.
Your second small building should relate to your crafting profession. This will teach you that skill up to 700, and give you a range of new recipes. If you don’t have a crafting trade, pick the building that relates to the gear you wear.
Simply questing through the zones will give you new followers, and some quests reward with garrison resources. Your garrison also generates resources on its own, so you won’t run out. You will need to save to cover the high cost of later upgrades though.
At 92 you get a couple of quests to access your mine (even if you don’t have mining). At 94 for fishing, and at 96 for your herb garden. Do these quests as soon as you reach those levels, and if you don’t need the resources they give you, sell them on the AH.
Have fun!
Just discovered this wonderful little app. If you have a Windows, Android or IOS based device, you can download and listen to music mixes compiled by people from anywhere in the world. Just search for 8tracks in the app store. It’s free.
Many of them are just brilliant. If you have a PC you can log in to the 8tracks site and create and share your own compilations.
The search facility is confusing, and you cannot access a list of tracks in each 8tracks mix. But it is still doubleplus good.
My latest article for Quadrant Online:
I am not sure whether Steve Kates is simply being curmudgeonly in his review of the film of the musical Les Miserables, or really does believe it to be “a two hour and 40 minute indulgence in the worst kind of socialist idiocies.” If the latter, he is wrong.
The film has several faults. Chief among them is Russell Crowe, who employs a single facial expression throughout; surly. He does surly very well, but one expression is not enough to cover the complicated character of Inspector Javert, who struggled with the same questions as Valjean but chose differently. Also, Crowe can’t sing, or certainly not well enough to convey convincingly the drama of Javert’s righteous conviction, or at the end, his inner struggle.
Hugh Jackman, by way of contrast, employs three facial expressions; happy, sad and troubled. Troubled also covers angry. Three expressions in a single movie prove that he is an actor of great depth, so it is likely he will win a Golden Globe in 2013, or perhaps some other plastic statue.
The real surprise was Anne Hathaway, whom I have always dismissed as an airhead. Her depiction of Fantine creates some genuinely moving moments in a film otherwise painted in lavish strokes of mere sentimentality.
Read the rest at Quadrant Online.
I don’t know what else to call it.
Someone, I assumed the dimwits behind the ESL – Eurosoft ripoffs, but I am not sure, signed me up for a casual sex dating site called rudefinder.
When I got the welcome email I went to the site to see what it was. Cor!
For a start, there is page after page of young ladies, many of them in the most absurd poses, showing off their naughty bits.
Maybe it is just me, but surely the normal reaction to seeing someone with her legs in the air, using her fingers to spread her vulva so her vagina and anus are exposed, is one of revulsion. I cannot imagine why you would find photos like that of someone you do not know attractive or interesting.
Unless you are simply an animal (ie, you believe the lie that “You and me baby we ain’t nothing but mammals”), the whole point of a sexual relationship is the complete, open, trusting sharing of yourself with another person, with openness to the possibility of new life. To my mind, this can only take place in the context of marriage. Sex in any other context is always and necessarily less than it should be, and ultimately harmful to those who participate in it.
It was plain within about ten seconds that rudefinder was a scam. Amongst the first few ladies listed as possible matches for me were about twenty who claimed to live in Muston. Muston is a tiny settlement of about fifteen people, most of whom I know. Others were listed in places such as Haines and Kangaroo Head, often with claims that they enjoyed going to clubs or bars in those localities. But those places are simply rural areas with small populations and no townships whatever, the closest thing to a club being a fencepost where some of the locals gather from time to time for a chat.
Curious, I uploaded to my profile a couple of photos which I copied from another website, and sent a message to about twenty of these purported young ladies, saying I was interested, and inviting them to message me back. A few of them had already messaged me or ‘winked’ at me, so if they were real, the chances were pretty good that at least one would respond. Nope.
To check, I created another profile with my place of residence listed as Dimboola. And lo and behold, the same sex starved young ladies, same names, same pictures, who were so desperate to meet me in in Muston or Macgillivray on Kangaroo Island had all now moved to such unlikely places as Cry Melon or Pimpinio. And some of those same young ladies also immediately sent me winks and messages.
This is a very cleverly scripted scam site. Whatever your postcode, you will find dozens of lonely sex starved young ladies within a few miles. They are so desperate to meet you they will message you as soon as you join the site. All you need to do to get in touch is hand over your credit card details. Except the young ladies don’t exist, and the winks and messages are computer generated.
A google check revealed that rudefinder and justhookup are the same thing. Same profiles, same sign in credentials work on both. Both scams.
Of course, if you sign up for a site like this you are an idiot anyway. But that doesn’t mean you deserve to be ripped off.
Finally, I wonder whether there is a link between the CFS ESL Eurosoft scams and these websites. The same thinking motivates both – greed, a cold lack of regard for others, and the belief that if people sign up it is their own fault and they deserve what they get.
Also, this guy, prominent on both rudefinder and justhookup, looks vaguely familiar:
Rudefinder/Justhookup Another Branch of ESL/Eurosoft?
And then of course there is Larry Pickering’s talent both for smut and for stock trading and sports software scams.
Just saying…
Michelle Jenneke easily wins her heat at the IAAF Junior World Championships last week. She’s got personality too!
She came fifth in the final, a not discreditable result. On to Rio in 2016.
Well done Michelle!
I often post videos of ungrateful idiots. This is a refreshing change:
Amen to the thanks to the monks of Mt Athos, and to everyone who is faithful in prayer.
First trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby:
Visually impressive, in the usual (except for the dire Australia) Luhrmann style.
It will be worth seeing, but it is not Gatsby.
Just for a laugh:
The Australian Labor Party is the girls’ team on Celebrity Apprentice, and Lisa Lampanelli is Kevin Rudd in drag.
Kevin Rudd / Lisa Lampenelli
Lisa Lampanelli / Kevin Rudd
Siri on the meaning of life
A month or so ago I outlined the reasons I would never play World of Warcraft again (mainly, Blizzard’s hostile attitude to its players).
But I checked in a few days ago to see what was going on. A new expansion pack has been announced.
WoW has a billion dollar a year income stream and some of the best game designers in the business.
And this is the best the WoW team can come up with? Kung Fu Panda?
WoW is becoming a Wii game.
For anyone not familiar with online role playing games (RPGs), while it is possible to complete much of a game such as World of Warcraft or Rift on your own, players frequently form groups to win fights or complete quests which would be impossible for a single player.
People take specific roles in a group. DPS (damage per second) players are the most numerous, usually three players out of a five person group. Their job is to kill the enemy.
Healers heal other players in the group.
Support players, usually found only in larger groups, provide enhancements (buffs) to other players, increasing their strength, spell power, health, etc. DPS, healer and tank players may also have group buffs.
Tanks offer themselves as targets to enemies. Their job is to draw the enemy’s attention to keep the healer safe, and to let the dps players focus on wearing the enemy down. The healer’s job is primarily to keep the tank alive.
If the tank is doing his job well, the enemy’s attention should stay on him, and dps players should suffer little damage, except for unavoidable aoe (area of effect) attacks.
The key task of any tank is make himself the most attractive target. In an RPG this is called threat generation.
Threat generation is largely a product of how a player is specced. This means how players distribute the talent points they accumulate as they progress through the game. Rift has a maximum of 66 talent points, reached when you get level 50. Sometimes players talk about ‘build’ when they are describing how they have used their talent points.
Although any class except a mage can act as a tank in Rift, there are very few circumstances where a cleric or rogue will be as effective as a well geared and properly specced warrior.
This is especially so since the new 1.6 Ember Isle update, which gave warriors several enhancements to threat generation.
The most common complaint about a tank player is not that he is hard to keep alive, but that he cannot hold aggro. This means that the enemies keep attacking the dps players or healer rather than the tank. The reason this happens is (usually) that the tank is not generating enough threat to hold the enemy’s attention.
The number one ability a tank needs to spec for is threat.
This is a link to my endgame rift tanking build.
This is Paladin/Warlord/Reaver build.
My pre-raid HP on this build is just over 12,000. With the Paladin’s Touch of Life, this effectively means an HP of about 20K.
This build takes every possible threat enhancement except the 20 point Warlord skill Promise of Steel, because that ability gives only marginal overall threat enhancement, and reaching it would mean taking too many self-healing or block abilities out of the Paladin or Reaver trees.
The only thing besides threat a tank should be concerned about is the best possible balance of armour, endurance, self-heal and block enhancements. A tank is not primarily concerned with group buffs, hence points in Tip the Balance, a self-heal, rather than Reverent Protection, a group protection buff, in the Paladin tree.
It is worth going up the Reaver tree to get Master of the Abyss, a superb aoe damage ability that heals for 100% of damage done, and for Soul Devour, an enhancement to the self-heal ability Soul Feast.
Where a tank needs to put points into damage to reach other skills, the total damage done is more important than the tree looking tidy, hence 1 point into Wasting Away rather than another point into Planar Attunement in the Reaver tree.
This build also gives you Intercept, which enables the tank to transfer threat from another player (often the healer) to himself.
Just a couple of notes for dps players. The point of your participating a group is not so you can gloat over the size of your dps. It is to get the group safely through to the end of the raid, dungeon or rift. This means you may need to sacrifice some of your highest dps abilties if they are also high threat. If you do pull aggro, don’t automatically blame the tank. Apologise to the group – it’s a pain for the healer as well as the tank. Think about which ability you used that was high threat. If you must use that ability again, let the tank know first so he can throw a threat enhancement like the Warlord’s Imposing, or use Intercept.
And remember, it’s a game, people!