On the Beach | Attack of the B-Team

 

Beach house bordering a jungle biome, created in the Techics modpack Attack of the B-Team.

Games for mac

Minecraft and Guild Wars II work fine on a mac.

I played Guild Wars II, aka GW2, for several months, starting last September. Maybe a few months before that, I tried Minecraft, which was suggested to me by my nephew. I was so disappointed at not being able to return to Everquest 2, and also Lord of the Rings Online that I just lost interest in posting here.

I do have some screenshots floating around somewhere, and may post some of them.

I am now just playing Minecraft, and have some recent screenshots. For a "basic" game, with simple graphics, Minecraft is really very engaging. The game dynamics, if that is the proper term, are what makes Minecraft so entertaining, as well as the features of the game.

I like that I can play in either Single Player or Multiplayer mode. Also, being able to choose either Survival or Creative mode is another great feature, as well as world interaction modes from Peaceful (Passive) to Hard mode.

Many very creative people play Minecraft, and have produced a number of great mods. There are also many great videos of Minecraft tutorials and gameplay. "Vanilla" (unmodded) Minecraft has much to offer by itself, but adding mods gives many, many more options for gameplay.

Being able to interact with and alter the environment in Minecraft in many ways can provide endless hours of game play.

I can raze a complete forest or jungle, demolish a mountain if I so choose. Make a lake, grow a garden, tame wild dogs and cats, and breed cows, chickens and sheep. I can create new materials from gathered materials. Then there is redstone technology, a way of making "machinery" and circuitry to animate aspects of the game. Amazing!

I didn't have as many screenshots as I thought, however I am including one. Below is a picture of my original ostrich farm. This is from a modded version of Minecraft 1.5.2, using MultiMC to create instances of Minecraft, customized as I choose - either vanilla Minecraft, or any combination of Minecrafts mods. I am using Dr. Zhark's Mo' Creatures mod, which adds ostriches to the game. Ostriches can be gotten as tamed pets by gathering and hatching eggs from wild ostriches. After you hatch an ostrich, you can ride them by equipping them with a saddle. Additionally, ostriches can be equipped with armor, to protect them and help them to survive better.

I'll post more info on Minecraft with links to some helpful youtube videos, as well as screenshots of some of my Minecraft world adventures.

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.