5/16 What I Accomplished Today

1. This morning's project: first character, level 25 Night Elf Priest, through the Dead Mines. This shouldn't be as hard as it is. Finding a group wasn't bad, but finding an appropriate group of people with a clue was excruciating. Because Dead Mines is in a relatively low-level area (Westfall), if someone announces a group, everyone decides he, she, or it has to participate, even if they're nowhere near the right place in the quest cycle. People were also vague on what a priest should do; in this particular instance, baddies often sneak up behind you, and some of the experienced players knew that and would lag behind to clean them up--but the less experienced people couldn't be held back in their enthusiasm, so they just charged willy-nilly into the fray, ignoring the fact that the people who knew the instance were lagging. This made two groups of fighters, both facing enemies--and a priest in the middle, trying to stay with the vanguard (lower-level characters), but this meant our experienced guys would wash, and I had to rez people more often than was good. Impossible situation. Blech.

On the plus side, I finished four of the five quests for priests associated with the Dead Mines, finishing the Defias Brotherhood sequence and beginning the Unsent Letter sequence. I turned in Underground Assault and Oh Brother (I eventually abandoned Collecting Memories; I think my other characters will be okay in the undead region, but the priest was just too puny for this to work).

Last night, I couldn't remember what I'd spent my Level 25 talent point on; the reason for that, it seems, is that I hadn't spent it yet, and right around now is when I noticed that. I spent it on Searing Light.

I was done with WOW for awhile at that point (Dead Mines had been really maddening), so I logged off.

2. This month's Literary Society book is The Bill from my Father, so I read about a third of that and am enjoying it. (I usually do a better job mixing up serious books and fluffy books; I've been reading mostly serious stuff recently.) I also read two issues of The New Yorker.

3. My Department Chair called; it doesn't look like my scheduled summer classes are going to go, so we discussed alternatives; right now, it looks like I'm doing an eight-week 102 and a six-week online 100. I'll need to start making adaptations to those courses for the abbreviated term.

4. My Co-Vivant didn't feel great this evening, so we ended up watching both movies we had out from NetFlix. The first was The Thing About My Parents, Paul Reiser's film. I don't remember this hitting theaters, and I don't know why not; I can't tell if it was made to be a TV movie and never aired or what. It's a perfectly charming movie; a little talky for about 20 minutes, maybe, but that's not a bad ratio. Peter Falk and Paul Reiser as father and son were really fun to watch. The family in this also looks very much like the Mad About You family: two sisters, one so business-oriented she scarcely exists, the other a lesbian; spunky wife, older child a girl (Mabel apparently got a sibling in real life).

Then we watched It Happened One Night because I'd never seen it before. This is going to look like a digression, but it isn't: for awhile (two or three years), we spent a lot of time watching the black and white shows on the Game Show Network,and when my Co-Vivant's mother would ask us why, we would say that it was like a living history lesson, and she would look at us as though we were too stupid to be allowed to waste the oxygen. "That isn't history; I was alive." But it is. People moved differently. We can see pictures of era-appropriate clothes, but that's not the same as seeing how people interacted with their clothes, how the clothes draped and moved. People of different classes or self-esteems or other characteristics wear their clothing differently. People also talk differently; Colbert and Gable sound perfectly fine in a 1934 black-and-white film, but if they showed up and started talking that at the bus stop, they'd get looks. Perfectly understandable, but just not quite how we talk.

It Happened One Night illustrated that beautifully; it also illustrates very well the subtle ways in which tastes in humor change. The Clark Gable character seems to have come off to contemporaries as a witty man-of-the-world with an answer for everything; he came across to us as an irresponsible alcoholic jerk, at least for the first half or so of the film. It was nice to see the hitchhiking and room-sharing-with-the-blanket scenes in context (I've seen them as clips several times), and of course, the scene that single-handedly required the American T-shirt industry to reinvent itself as leisurewear and not underwear should be required viewing.

5. My Co-Vivant and I agree that the Fictitious Name form should suffice for the website business; we'll try it, anyway.

6. Back to World of Warcraft. It occurs to me that I should probably explain the schedule here because this will look odd. I am a terrific insomniac; I can't really sleep before 4 or 5. I think I've mentioned that. My Co-Vivant is running a business that requires her to function during business hours. She goes to bed about 11 or so. No matter what we're doing, if we're both home, we stop from 8ish-11ish and spend the evening together unless something urgent needs to happen. (We also differ in our quiet-and-dark needs while we go to sleep, and this sleep staggering lets us both have what we need to sleep.) So she goes to bed, and I quietly amuse myself in the evening.

Also, I could move really quickly moving this character from level 20-25; as I said, this is the ninth character I've done that for. However, she's the first character to move from 25-30, so I haven't done most of these things before. This is going much more slowly.

Yesterday as I ran from Darkshore to Zoram, I saw an Alliance questgiver I hadn't seen before; I got Ancient Statuette and finished it and then Ruunzel and finished it. I worked on the Tower of Althalaxx, but I seem to be missing a turn or something because I never found the bad guy.

7. Today's BigFishGame looked very like Poker Pop, which is fun, but I didn't want to play a Poker Pop clone. I happened to check Playfirst to see if they had anything new, and they had something called Nanny Mania which is very like Carrie the Caregiver but requires housecleaning as well (which sounds odd). It was fun. I might buy this.