Blizzard has decided to forgive me, I think - Naxxramas went amazingly tonight. We one-shot eight bosses, and two-shot a ninth, and I got two awesome upgrades. Hopefully the Construct Quarter and Frostwyrm Lair will go as smoothly tomorrow.

In other gaming news (as gaming is the only interesting thing I do - everything else would be whining about school), our Hunter game dissolved because one player left, and we didn't have a very cohesive group, and has been replaced by GURPS Alpha Centauri. When we left our party, the Spartan bioroid and the decommissioned Peacekeeper cyborg were about to get into a bar fight, with the small, angry, humanity-hating ex-University computer genius caught in the middle, while the empathic, electrokinetic detective meets with a client at another table. We'll see if we get through session two without party deaths.

My Earthdawn game is set to finally start this week - I'm both excited and very nervous, because ED is such a story-heavy system and I am not always so good at story. So, fingers-crossed. I've also decided to keep an in-character log of our Tuesday night Earthdawn game, mostly as a characterisation exercise, as I've been having trouble finding a voice for Isak. It's up here - there will probably be some exposition in the next few days, as Isak is aware that he's writing for an audience as well,given that his IC reason for keeping it is to provide a counterpoint to that pack of lies Dawnstrider calls a journal.

Things That Make Me Happy Today:
-Not actually being late for my midterm, despite snow
-Sailor Moon Stars
-Realizing I have potatoes, cheddar cheese, and sour cream (=delicious baked potatoes)
-Pants for Rufus are almost finished!

Also, I went to see Watchmen yesterday with two friends - it was kind of interesting, because none of the three of us had read the comic, but the two of them came out with a much different opinion of the movie, I think in part because they were going in with a much different sense of what the movie was going to be. They were expecting Batman, and I was expecting V for Vendetta, and well, I was closer to being right. So they were disappointed when it wasn't a gritty action film, and I was pleased to find a rather good dystopian social commentary film. They also both thought Rorsach was the only 'cool' character - while he's certainly one of the most interesting characters in the film, dismissing everyone else as boring/weak is...kinda fucked up. Mostly because Rorsach is fucking insane and isn't in any way a hero figure (although the dichotomy is interesting - he's one of the least 'human' characters save Dr. Manhattan, but in the end, is the only one who won't compromise his beliefs). So yeah, there was some epic Missing The Point going on there, which I suspect is probably unfortunately common with this movie.

Dear Blizzard,

Fuck yoooooooooou.

-A Mage

(I am cranky about many things in WoW right now, but I have already done far too much whining about them and should probably just step away for a bit)

Question for more techy people on my flist - desktops and wireless networking, how do you do it? I expected it to be an add-on card, but after searching New Egg, I can find no such thing. My last experience with desktops and networking was something like seven years ago, installing a ethernet card in an old Dell, so I'm really behind the times.

The reason for this is that I'm planning on using my income tax refund to build a media box/NAS, because I have 250 GB of disks scattered across my desk, and am tired of my roommate's PS3 refusing to play any of my older AVI files and mucking up sound decoding on some of the newer ones. My basic plan is to install MythBuntu to provide a video front end, and then use Samba for file sharing - if MythBuntu won't let me install Samba, I'll probably go for a normal Ubuntu build, strip out the extras and then toss in MythTV and Samba.

The two biggest planning hurdles so far are aforementioned wireless networking - I have absolutely zero access to the router in the house, so wired is basically out of the question - and trying to find a motherboard/CPU/graphics combo that's both cheap and space-efficient. The big flaw there is that this system will run fine on a 1.8 GHz single-core CPU and integrated graphics - but I need an S-video or composite video out. And it seems like integrated video + s-video or composite = nonexistant. Which means putting in a cheap dedicated card, which is 1) more space and 2) another $30.

Also, another sign that I haven't touched desktop stuff for a while - my jaw dropped when I saw that you can buy a DVD burner for $25. Mostly because I remember being excited when I bought a CD burner for $60 in like...2001.

-Spilling warm bacon grease all over your hand feels really gross (I though it had solidified, okay?)
-I have a microwave now \o/ It was a Christmas present from some friends, and has already been used to great effect.
-I know this labels me as a sad ultra-nerd, but I would totally cosplay my belf mage in Tier 6 (mine has different hair, but the model viewer's response to mage tier 6 textures is to choke and die right now). I know I'm frequently known to mock it for being TK on your heaaaaad, but it's actually very pretty once you get passed that.
-Got my bottom two wisdom teeth out last Wednesday, doing pretty well aside from the fact that the left one is still bleeding just a touch, and the dissolving sutures have not yet dissolved and as such keep getting caught on food I'm trying to eat.

I have various Real Posts(tm) laying around half-written or half planned, but this week is kind of a Hell Week - two science papers due last Friday, two midterms tomorrow, two English papers due Wednesday - so I have spent my free time inbetween studying and writing playing WoW and looking at prettyboys on Y!Gallery, instead of doing useful things like cleaning the house or psoting here.