Today is the next installment of the vanguard_x campaign run by joshuwain. Last time, partly because several of the players weren't able to make it, members of the team were pulled 'out of time' by the maruading time traveller known as TimeSpan, who was making a bid to try and get information on his possible future-self Epoch so as to prevent the madman from destroying the entire universe! Doctor Chimera and Ami were yanked from 8 months in the past where they were on the Hluspeth homeworld known as Prison, where they'd been sent when the Hluspeth detected the use of the Warden's Staff by Ami! Goblin, Mesmer and Romeo were yanked from the 'present' of the campaign, merely days after they themselves had returned from an excursion into Fey which took a full years' time from them! They were nearly set to engage the villains known as FX (master of unimaginative illusion) and the Ace of Spades (A gadgeteer thief who models himself after the Red Baron, complete with high-tech biplane) when they too were grabbed; this episode will continue with the reappearance of the respective groups back where they'd been taken from...

And that's just Saturday!

Sunday brings the continuation of the Werewolf campaign, wherein the Warband has gone to face their possible enemy but likely ally-of-convenience Nevrix, the Lord of Vampires in Minnesota! Their quest led them to sneak into the IDS Center and up to the vampire's office via the Umbra, where they were faced with Nevrix in strident argument with a woman seated at HIS desk! They both face the pack of angry garou, startled, as the latter appear, and the bodyguards that are ALSO there attack! One short-and-sweet fight later Nevrix says, 'I'm so glad that you got my invitation...'

(pant pant)

Monday... IS THE START OF THE HALLOWEEN EVENT ON CITY OF HEROES! ...And I have to work the overnight shift. Poot. O well, I'll STILL get some trick-or-treating in. :)

And that's the weekend for me. Or so I hope. And in there somewhere I (desperately) have to start cleaning the house for the Halloween party, and get groceries- that last will happen Sunday morning.

Well, there I was, tired and sore after last night at work, having gotten up at 5 PM today so that I could play City of Heroes. I logged on, and two good things happened- first, I got NightCaul, my newest character transferred onto Virtue Server from Pinnacle. Yay! Then, I got into a team to do the Frostfire mission. And then, of course, things went left.

My supervisor called- 'Mike, can you come in early? X has a medical emergency with his wife- He needs to be out by 8:30... I said 'fine' because I want the brownie-points to make sure I can get the time off I want. So, I had to quit the Frostfire run, and lost out on getting to team with the Local Group, all of whom seem to have been on! Gaah!

So, I'm at work. 11 1/2 hours of... bleh. O well. I'll see if people wanna get together on Sunday.

At least I got the character transfer done.

Here's a general update on whats been up, as I've been posting less than usual here. First off, Happy Birthday wishes for ataramos and feezlekahn! Giftage is in the works! Next up, the actual news of life- Not much. Other than the 35W bridge collapse, life here has been pretty quiet. I got a couple of new pics done recently, and I may post them here soon- they're of my City of Heroes characters ShadowMatch and Genetic Blue. I've been playing a bit less recently, though the addiction is still in full force.

At work I've been able (in the nights that I've been in the 'sit on my ass' post in suite 300) to watch a few movies on the laptop- So far, I've rewatched 'Fight Club', 'The Quick and the Dead', 'Die Hard' and 'Die Hard 2: Die Harder', and a few others that I've forgotten at the moment. It's got me wanting to go on another DVD buying spree. ;)

In general Gaming news, the Saturday Vanguard game is on hiatus until mid-September for various reasons- I'm looking forward to the return to that game! In the Sunday group, we did the last of the set for Traveller; I'll have that written up either tonight (its 0210 as I write this, so I doubt that'll happen) or early this coming week. Next up would be Werewolf, but due to scheduling conflicts it looks like another 'filler' run of the Buffy Horror will take place.

Further- My roomie zxizaraxii has started a journal for the posting of Rikti War Stories; its at http://community.livejournal.com/invasionjournal/ I dunno if its open to all, so ask him. I might have something short for that soon.

And that's pretty much it for now. I'll post again if there's something else.

Edit: Damn, I got it done. Next post is the Traveller writeup!

Heres a quick update: ShadowMatch is my latest City of Heroes character, on the Virtue server. She's a level 19 Dark/Dark Scrapper, and I'm having a fair amount of fun with her. Image and background behind the cut!

( ShadowMatch! )

For those people on the Virtue City of Heroes Server, I wanna do the Hess Task Force in Striga On Friday evening- I don't know how long it'll take, so starting at 5-6 PM is desired. I THINK it can be done in under 4 hours... This means you, danshrugs, foeclan, feezlekahn, ataramos and joshuwain! I know two of you are out of town and unlikely to get involved, but what the hey- At least I remembered. :) Character level should be about 29-31; people can exemplar down or sidekick, however.

Okay, here's how Lupi now looks, sans hideous coat. CoH NEEDS better tails and more skincolors and better fur and nonhuman skin/scale textures... (Sigh) and som more less humanoid models... Hee. O well.

( Lupinar, Revised )

First the good- I made another beef roast tonight, this time it was 2# and I had carrots. ;) It was great, and much devouring occurred. I'm (of course) still playing City of Heroes, and I'm currently hunting down all of the Exploration and History badges in the regions up to and including Faultline. Last night I got a TON of 'em.

Now the relatively minor bad- For the last week my neck has been feeling tight, and all day today I've had a headache since I got up. Its partly neckstrain, but its mostly the weather doing a number on me. Asprin and caffeine are keeping it in check, mostly, but its definitely still there.

Next week if all goes well I'll have a five day weekend starting on the first; I really need this... And for at least some of it I'll be stringing cable-runs for the computers and claeaning. :)

Okay... Today and last night now decidedly do not qualify for my list of 'the best' for times. The shift went fine as far as I knew, with me getting a nice score in that someone is throwing out a VERY nice corner-desk unit; the Account Manager has okayed it, so I'll be picking it up Thursday afternoon with dad and his trailer. It'll end up in the front room, prolly with my old computer setup. In any event, I went home and got a call almost right off the bat- one of the radios was missing. No biggie, it was misplaced and I miscounted last night.

And so, it began. I went in and played some City of Heroes (Yay! Servers stayed up!) and had breakfast; at about 9:30, I got a call from the Account Manager- there'd been a break-in on MY shift. 4th floor of one of the buildings; I think its prolly safe to say that much. According to the report I just read, there were few signs of forced entry. What ticks me off is that I saw NOTHING. Zip. I hate that. Not that there was anything I could really do other than call the police. I'm gonna start doing a few extra little observational walks through the buildings each night, just to try and improve the situation.

After that, I had trouble sleeping; this wasn't from the work-stuff. I had problems yesterday, too. Minor insomnia-bout, I think. Not a bad one. I'd made tentative plans with joshuwain and zxizaraxii to do a little City of Heroes teaming on the Valentines Event special missions... Due to bad timing, bad planning on my part and misunderstandings it kinda got cocked up. We did the first two missions with WILDLY different difficulties, due to the characters used and the bizarre level-spread; I'd done the first mission solo in the morning (just to see if I could) and it was pretty easy; the second mission was a bizarre cakewalk, WAY too easy with me as the mission-bearer lowering the difficulties for everyone.

Then we re-did the first mission, for joshuwain with zxizaraxii taking the mission lead... BAD choice. Where everything was ignorably low-level before, now it was ALL red and purple (read: higher level than all but one of us!) and we got stomped. I ended up in a cell when I got whacked and tried to hospital out!

With a character-substitution by zxizaraxii the mission was salvaged, but it still was a cluster-fuck. We broke off after that, and I finished off some non-event stuff, then napped.

I'll plan better the next time.

And finally, the details of my new computer. :)

GIGAN!

Case: Antec NSK 4400 case with a 380 watt power supply.
Motherboard: ECS EliteGroup HT2000 CSIGM-M Motherboard, socket AM2
Processor: AMD Sempron 3400+ socket AM2
Graphics: ATI Radeon X1310 Pro, 256 megabytes DDR2
Memory: 1 gigabyte Buffalo DDR
Hard Drive: Seagate 160 gigabyte Serial ATA/300 7200 RPM with 8 megabyte cache
CD/DVD: Generic CD-RW/DVD-RW drive
Monitor: Acer 17" AL 1716B LCD
Keyboard: Belkin Standard Keyboard (this $9.00 piece of work is gonna get replaced...)
Mouse: Logitech Marble Trackball
Speakers: Logitech R-10

Future mods will prolly be a faster processor and more memory. Other than a better keyboard that is. ;)

So... Damn thats an addictive game. :P

Goblinn is now level 18, and I get to try and get into an area for a mission... The mission I can do. GETTING to the mission... For those who understand, I'm on the other side of the dam, and the mission is essentially inside the perimeter of the Arachnos base. To me, EVERYTHING is purple. That means, I die in seconds. :P

I THINK I can get in. Maybe. With luck. I REALLY should have taken Stealth instead of Jump Kick... O well. Of course, surviving to get in doesn't mean I'll live through LEAVING.

I'm gonna give up on my villian. Just not all that much fun to play. I might try again later, but I'm not really villain material, I suspect.

I'll get to posting pics of my characters soonish. And I WILL get the specs of the new system up soon too!