Alexx's Journal

A scientific study shows that Games Workshop dice roll 1s 29% of the time!

http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/That%27s_How_I_Roll_-_A_Scientific_Analysis_of_Dice

I haven't written in a while, but life has been, on the whole, good. The hole in my mouth is, after two weeks, finally healing to the point where I don't need painkillers just to stay sane, at least during the day.

( Cut for length )

On Saturday, kestrell and I went on our annual date to the MIT Press Loading Dock Sale. Last year had been something of a bust, but this year we scored major loot. Two books for Kes, 2 presents for friends, and way too many books for me. And that was after we put several back.

At one point, I was reading Kes the back cover copy of a book, and some snippy man said, "Why don't you take it *home* and read it. Kes shut him down pretty quickly: "He was reading it to *me*, because I'm blind." "Oh."

On the lighter side, we ran into a few of her ex-classmates from CMS. There followed much tossing of books back and forth.
"Hey, I found another copy of that Babylon 5 book!"
"Did you get the Star Trek one?"
"I got the one about the Computers of Trek..."
"What about the Biology of Trek?"
"No, I have to draw the line *somewhere*."

While checking out, I glanced down at the cash register, and saw a total readout of $7,988.98. I remarked on this, as the clerk tried to figure out what went wrong and what to do about it. The fellow behind me in line said, "That doesn't say 'sale' to me!" Kes was like, "Hey! Does this mean we bought *all* the books? Cool! But -- where would we keep them?"

On Sunday, I played some WoW, and had a few notable things happen. Rumpelstilt (my Gnomish Mage) finally reached level 60, and bought himself a shiny new Epic Mechanostrider. That left him feeling a little cash poor, but the situation was soon fixed, as an Auction House sale for just over 300 gold went through. It had been a large investment, and took a few weeks to sell, but was still over 200 gold of profit.

Now I have an odd dilemma. There are lots of quests left for Rumpelstilt to do, but now that he's level 60, he won't get XP for them. But in a few months, the expansion will come out, raising the level cap to 70, and allowing XP growth again. So the min-maxer side of my personality wants to hold off on adventuring until the expansion comes out. But adventuring is *fun*. Ah well, there's no real "lose" scenario here, whichever way I go. Maybe I *should* take a break from WoW and play some of the other games I've not been playing for the last year...

Work continues busy, but good. Milestone day tomorrow, after which the craziness level should settle down a bit (at least for a month).

Well, lost Saturday, anyways. Spent it all in a GTA:SA haze. Finished the bulk of the San Fierro content, and moved on to the desert outside Las Venturas. Currently going through one of the few annoying sections, mandatory flight school. Planes and helicopters are fundamentally much harder to control than ground vehicles, and I'm annoyed that they don't give the player more assistance here, or make it optional. The bulk of the missions are still fun, though, and the characters and story are consistently silly.

Had an "I've got to tell kestrell about this" moment, when I realized that the head of the local Chinese triads was (who I had met in the midst of a drag race) was blind. This being the sort of game it is, his other senses are enhanced to the point where he doesn't actually have difficulty performing tasks like, say, drag racing :-)

High point of emergent wackiness: I'm in the middle of a car chase with an enemy of mine on the freeway -- and a completely unrelated police/criminal car chase happened to occur on the same highway at the same time. That made *my* car chase a *lot* more challenging!