Marija Gimbutas Honoring the Goddess

wandering lost ...

without a capable working pc, I am not gaming very much these days

I have a lovely new mac, but as great as a mac is for design work, there are not many games that I can play on a mac. I can play WoW, -big sigh-, if I want an mmo. I researched using other ways to play pc games on a mac, but it seems that in the long run, it is better to leave the better part of gaming to a pc.

using boot camp, I could load a version of windows, but from my reading up on it, it seems that the going is a bit rough, with installing patches and updates to make gameplay smooth. there is also another thing called CrossOver, but it seems that in using it, a mac runs VERY hot, and people have easily burned up their graphics cards by using it.

I got a notice from my friend that Elder Scrolls Online will being creating a free to play Neverwinter Nights, and it will eventually (supposedly sometime in 2013) be creating a mac version.

I was spending some time with my nephew last night and he showed me minecraft. it looks like great fun, if I can reasonably play it online, as I think it is also pc only.

I am still waiting for my laptop to come back to me. A friend's partner took it to get it running again. I look forward to its return.

We Brake for Shinies

Beatriza, dark elf defiler, pausing to gather a Shiny for her Collections.

Anyone who playes EQ2 knows about Shinies - enticing, sparkly little beacons of ... Shininess! For those of you who are not familiar with them, Shinies can be gathered - you will receive a Collection item, such as .

Collections are yet another fun feature of EQ2. As shown above, Shinies are found on the ground. Once you have gathered all the items of a Collection, you turn the Collection in for a reward - often a decent piece of armour, sometimes house items.

(This image is an in-game screenshot from within EverQuest II.
Copyright is held by Sony Online Entertainment and is used here under Fair Use. Commercial use of this image is forbidden. Thank you, EQ2 wiki)

June City Festival - New Halas EQ2

Norrathian Express Box, New Halas Branch  is the reward for the Halas Postage Collection. This item is for your home, and it is a working mailbox. I love them. It is nice to be able to read one's mail in the privacy of one's own home. You collect purple Shinies around the festival area until you have a completed collection.

The items are of this collection are:

• Halas letterhead
• Halas stamp
• Halas envelope
• Halas notepaper
• Halas postmark
• Halas sealing wax

All the New Halas City Festival items are pictured very nicely on everseek.com. This is an excellent website, which features all the housing items. There are other great sites for this, too, which I'll mention in other posts, as well as putting up a link list of EQ2 housing info sites, one of these days soon.

Towel Day minus 3 and counting ...

picture of Douglad Adams from Wikimedia Commons, by Michael Hughes

Yikes! I guess I am not enough of a Douglas Adams fan to remember that since May 25, 2001, every May 25th is Towel Day! Wear your towel proudly!

from wikipedia:

Towel Day is celebrated every year on 25 May as a tribute by fans of the author Douglas Adams. On this day, fans carry a towel with them to demonstrate their appreciation for the books and the author, as referred to in Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The commemoration was first held in 2001, two weeks after Adams' death on 11 May 2001.

The origin of this tribute comes from D. Clyde Williamson in his post at "Binary Freedom", a short-lived open source forum:

Towel Day: A Tribute to Douglas Adams
Monday 14 May 2001 06:00am PDT
Douglas Adams will be missed by his fans worldwide. So that all his fans everywhere can pay tribute to this genius, I propose that two weeks after his passing (25 May 2001) be marked as "Towel Day". All Douglas Adams fans are encouraged to carry a towel with them for the day.
So long Douglas, and thanks for all the fish!

Following is the passage from The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy that was Williamson's inspiration:

 "A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)"

Towel Day countdown and headquarters
Chris Campbell and his friends registered the website towelday.org to promote the day, reminding people to bring their towels. Towel Day was an immediate success among fans and many people sent in pictures of themselves with their towels.

Wending my way back to EQ2

I've not been playing EQ2 much, hadn't touched my old subscription accounts in two years. Now that EQ2 has gone free to play, well, it has been for a while now, I thought I'd take a look. I'd been playing Lord of the Rings Online, I love my friends there, and I love crafting and outfits. It is great to have housing, and in LoTRO I had my first virtual house - a cottage, really. I remember it well. The thing is, LotRO housing is quite limited. I grew frustrated at the housing item placement system, it is a "hook" system, whereby you can only place certain types of items in certain places. When you have never had housing, it is Heaven ... but once you've experienced open placement housing, you'll forever be disappointed by the hook system.

My gaming system is down, has been for a while, so it has limited my game time greatly. I also deal with certain physical conditions, which at times keep me from gaming at all. I was experiencing terrible lag ingame, due to having to play on a system with lesser capabilites, so getting into LotRO, crawling and jumping and lagging into things, on top of not feeling well, I almost stopped getting into the game. I would get into the game, look at my lovely home, and sigh at my full bags, full house chests and full bank, as well as all my alts being full to the gills. I'd chat with a few friends and then log off. I'd force myself through the festivals, though. -grin- Thus my overflowing bags.

So ... all this chatter leads to the fact that I tried EQ2 free to play, to see if I could still have housing, and what that housing involved. Since I knew no one in EQ2, it was easier to play, since I could come and go as I wanted, and as my health permitted. As with any game, free to play is not ultimately free to play, but hey, it gets a lot of people into a game who might not otherwise try it. It is essential to upgrade to a Silver account, which is a one time $5 fee. The next step up is Gold, which is $14.99 a month if you pay monthly, with discounts if you pay for 3 months or more at a time - pretty standard fee.

Even without a Silver upgrade, you can own a starter home. It is two rooms, and quite sufficient for satisfying my decorating and collecting penchants. I started crafting basic furniture - and then I found out about City Festivals and Moonlight Enchantments! Both occur once a month, and both have plentiful housing items that can be gotten through bartered tokens which are obtained through the events' quests. If you happen to hit a holiday or festival period, there is often a crafting component to it, where festival themed recipes are offered. These contain many housing item recipes. What more could I ask for?

I was able to do Moonlight Enchantments in May, and I look forward to the next City Festival in June ... and I am going to get my little carpenter busy furnishing my homes, as well as getting my tailor working on some lovely rugs and pretty outfits.

Zam.com City Festival Guide
Zam.com Moonlight Enchantments Guide

Merry gaming, wherever your bliss leads you!

Mounts Spring Festival 2012 LotRO

I popped up to Hegstacer's Farm to see the new Spring 2012 mounts. I don't know if I will have the time to get them, but they certainly are pretty!