The Site
WordPress.com continues on its way to “improve all the things!” with its general philosophy of “if it is newer, it must be better, right?” One of the things announced this past was a new “high speed” editor, a tactic admission that their old “new” editor was complete crap.
I remain happy only because the old editor, the one that help convince me to pick WordPress.com over Blogger, is still available.
And I am not alone in this. I saw just this past weekend that Mabrick moved his blog back to the Blogger platform after tiring of the “improvements” to the post editor. See, I’m not just a solitary old crank! Somebody agrees with me!
WordPress has also introduced some new stand alone apps for using their site. I do actually use the iOS app, which has been around for a while and through several gyrations, on my iPad to check the site. I will say that they have at least figured out that when I go to the stats page it should default to the current day’s data and not their mildly interesting but not really useful “Insights” tab.
But Thursday at 7pm may not be the most popular point combined…
It also took me a moment to figure out this chart.
Posting Activity Chart
That is the last 12 months, by week, oriented vertically so that Monday is the top box and Sunday is the bottom, color coded by how many posts I made. Gray is zero, light blue is one, dark blue is two, black is three. Apparently I never post more than three times in a single day. That is probably healthy. The white boxes are the result of somebody’s OCD need to square off each month’s rectangle.
Again, I prefer the old stats page if, for no other reason, it doesn’t regularly error out with a script running in an infinite loop. And that is my WordPress.com complaint of the month.
On another blog topic, I actually had to dig deep this month to find a couple of blogs that had me on their blogroll and which I had not previously linked in a Month in Review post for the “New Linking Sites” section below. I eventually found two, but it took me a while. There was a lot to filter through. I had one site tell me that there were 19,962 links to the main page here.
So, if you have me on your blogroll and I haven’t mentioned you in a previous post, drop me a note and I’ll make sure to link you! I want to get one more month out of this, then I’ll probably swap to “who is still alive and still links me in their blogroll” or some such for 2016.
One Year Ago
Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire Launched.
There was BlizzCon, about which I made the usual predictions. I found the event itself vaguely dissatisfying. But those who were bitching about lack of focus on WoW at BlizzCon 2015, go back and look at how little attention it got in 2014! Otherwise we were in Azeroth collecting achievements and waiting for the expansion to hit.
Oh, yeah, the expansion hit… Warlords of Draenor and server queues and all that. Blizz was trying to fix that while I had to figure out who to play. Blizz eventually gave everybody 5 days free for the problems. But hey, they had 10 million subscribers on the hook again, up for the 7.4 million low point during the summer. Doesn’t seem so low now, does it?
In EVE Online the Phoebe expansion arrived, bringing with it Jump Fatigue and the 10 year/50 skill long training queue. Then they were on about removing other annoyances with the upcoming Rhea expansion.
In game the Reavers had finished up in Feythabolis with a bang and were off into Omist next, hunting the unwary before returning home again.
Rixx Javix was drawing spaceships. He’s still at it.
And there was the This is EVE video that became wildly popular.
I reflected on EverQuest II at its 10 year anniversary. Veterans of the game even got their own island. Over on the EverQuest side of the house, The Darkened Sea, the 21st expansion for the game, went live.
And, finally, the power supply on my computer blew out, taking the motherboard and drives with it. I had to rebuild, but was up and running again in a couple of days.
Five Year Ago
I was talking about group size and roles. That has come up again, especially since SWTOR groups seemed to be limited to four players.
On the retro front, I played some Total Annihilation. Still one of the best RTS games ever.
I took a look at the soon to be defunct EverQuest II Extended. It seemed quite busy. Of course, I went Station Access so I could peek into EverQuest II (with some issues) and EverQuest as well.
The rump instance group was wrapping up another Summer in Middle-earth at the far end of the Lone Lands as well as in and around Ost Guruth.
At the same time, Turbine was putting crafting materials in the LOTRO Store. Meanwhile, the OTHER LOTRO store, the real life one, wasn’t doing much for me.
CCP announced that they were removing learning skills from EVE Online. I hit 60 million skill points and was going to get to reallocate some.
The Cataclysm open beta was coming to an end at last. I think part of the problem with the expansion was how long people were freely talking about the expansion… and playing it… before it came out. We all knew what the hot new hunter pet would be and how much the world was going to be changed. Cheap copies of WoW were not going to fix that.
Back in pre-Cataclysm Azeroth, I was summing up my Wintergrasp experiences and moaning about missing the damn Hallow’s End mask quest achievement again.
On the Pokemon front, I finished the National Pokedex in Pokemon SoulSilver. In your face! And the march to the release of Pokemon Black and White was commencing.
The news seemed to be confused as to whether or not flying cars had come at last.
And, finally, in the completion of a boyhood dream of mine, the San Francisco Giants won the World Series, officially releasing me from caring about major league ball ever again.
New Linking Sites
The following blogs have linked this site in their blogroll, for which they have my thanks.
Extra-Vehicular
One Opinion.
Please take a moment to visit them in return.
Most viewed Posts in November
The power of spontaneous blogging. A half-assed, spur of the moment blog post two days before the end of the month climbs to the #2 spot on the most viewed posts list. The only thing that topped it was the LOTRO server merge post, which Google is favoring of late.
LOTRO and the Great Server Merge
Dating My Daughter – The Star Wars Test
BlizzCon 2015 – Announcements and Need vs. Greed
Legion in September 2016 is… about Average for Blizzard
EVE Online, Kickstarter, and The Fountain War
Quote of the Day – The Power of Fallout 4
Finishing the Great Northern Road
Of Sinks and Faucets and What People Do in New Eden
Quote of the Day – The First Rule of Subscription Club…
The Fountain War – Not Winning Fast Enough and Other Issues
BlizzCon 2015 – Scoring Need vs. Greed
In Which We Blob
Search Terms of the Month
world of warcraft banned for no reason
[Oh, I bet there was a reason]
trion rift is dead
[Not yet, though having to install Glyph killed it for me]
windows 95 dell
[Isn’t that the tech equivalent of saying “All your bases?”]
civilization 2 windows 10
[Civilization defeated in something of a blow out]
wow classes for couples
[How sweet!]
EVE Online
The Reavers deployment down to Curse to spar with TEST in the adjacent Wicked Creek region wrapped up. Then we were into Pure Blind and pushing back on NCDot and the then current residents of Cloud Ring who were busy plinking at our sovereignty. I participated some in that, but took the last week or so of the month off from the game, so skipped the push to bring the fight them.
Lord of the Rings Online
I am tentatively back into LOTRO. I am going to try to press through, re-learn how to play my Captain after two years away and a skill revamp by Turbine, get through the lukewarm tedium of Lothlorien… no wonder the elves think immortality is a burden, I would too if I lived there… and into Mirkwood, an expansion I bought… six years ago maybe? We’ll see how that goes.
And then there is server transfer dynamics as Gaff is playing, but his highest level character is on a different server from mine, and mine is on Brandywine, the only server you cannot transfer TO, so do I move stuff from Brandywine to Landroval, which characters do I send over, what do I do about various guilds, and so on and so forth. Have to come up with a plan for that.
Minecraft
As noted, I finished up the Great Northern Road so that you can now ride a horse from the spawn point all the way to the Mesa biome about 6km north. I then spent the the rest of the month building things along the road. Tourist attractions and what not. I did build a small tower and some stables in an area I am now referring to as “the horse fields,” since it is an open grassland area with more horses (and donkeys) roaming about than I have seen any place else on our world.
Xyd, Skronk, and Enaldi haven’t been on much, though Minecraft is a very project focused game for most of us. When you finish building something you feel “done” until you figure out the next thing to work on. Aaron though, he has another project lined up. We’ll see how that turns out.
World of Warcraft
I bought a WoW Token, so I had 30 days of WoW time at my disposal, and yet little real inclination to actually play WoW. After squandering the first week, I resolved to see if I can earn my gold back through garrison missions and a bit AH work. Fortunately I invested in getting followers with the Treasure Hunter trait on my characters, so every mission for gold is multiplied by 2x or 3x. I should be able to recoup my WoW Token given that.
Coming Up
Well, it is the end of the year. That prefigures at least three standard, I do it every year, posts. So you all have that to look forward to.
There is a new Star Wars movie coming out, episode VII of many. While that doesn’t really have much to do with video games directly, judging from Saturday’s post, wrangling over the relative merits of Star Wars movies is a popular topic. I might go there again.
In EVE, there is the eternal question of, “what are we going to do now?” It isn’t as much of a sandbox as Minecraft, but the game does depend on being able to set new goals, lest you burn out. At least we have a new Proteus doctrine to look forward to, and some new ships with the December expansion. I don’t want to put too much weight on Asher’s shoulders when it comes to finding fun for me, he does a lot of work for us already, but I do hope there is something for Reavers in December.
With Minecraft I am wondering what I should build next. In WoW it is a matter of making back by gold. In LOTRO, the quest to get to Mirkwood will continue. Meanwhile, 2016 looms and I keep chanting to myself under my breath, “No, really, 1990 was just 10 years ago, the calendar is wrong.”