Ceri B.

"Ceri, it's a dreary rainy day in Seattle. What do you do for fun on a February afternoon like this?"

"Why, I kill neo-Nazis with kung fu!"



I don't do male characters very often, but I thought that some of the options for them in CoH looked interesting. I've got a female version of the same general power concept elsewhere, and both are great fun.

I can't say I'm surprised at having netted a seven-day ban for comments in the spirit of my last post here. Does make the stepping away easier, though.
 

Gut troubles the last couple days. Some of it's the diabetes medication, some of it the bouncing energy levels, some of it whatever. Fact is, I've got nausea, and also hemorrhoids from hell. So I get to stay close to home and pile a lot of padding on the desk chair.

Y'know, this is really not a great catastrophe. But damn if it isn't annoying.
 

Some things came into focus for me while browsing wow.com today, and in particular looking at an article about changes to the heroic instances in 3.3.2, forthcoming sometime soon. They're simplifying encounters. For instance, the priestess in Old Kingdom who calls acolytes for sacrifice will only do it once, and the mana entity in Nexus will only spawn void rifts once. And so forth and so on.

The problem for me is that there's no real level of challenge that is both interesting and accessible to me.

Below me (with my shaman, at least), there are the heroics. The thought of running enough to keep getting the emblems of frost needed for more tier 10 is, um, not appealing. And there are raids that I'm way, way overgeared for.

"Beside" me there are more raids, some of which I'm overgeared and some of which are really more tactically involved than I'm good at. There's stuff I want to see, but I'm figuring at this point that it's going into the hopper for some future zone after Icecrown Citadel stops being current, since it's absorbing attention. (And why not? Folks who can do the new stuff should.) There are hard modes for a lot of raid encounters, and they hold little appeal to me after my experiences with them so far. There's the Argent Tournament, but I hate jousting, partly because I'm simply bad at it. I've put in more than enough hours to feel comfortable asserting this: I genuinely wasn't any better after a hundred hours of trying. And like that.

And above me there are raid challenges that I don't see myself being able to rise to meet anytime soon. It's true that I have more energy now than I did a few weeks ago. But the problems facing me weren't ones of energy, but of coordination and timing, and those things really aren't any better.

The thought of leveling up an alt isn't especially appealing right now because it would hit the same gaps. There are loremaster and other achievements, but right at the moment I'm liking the thrill of discovery with CoH/CoV storylines. (I am well aware that they'll become old hat in due season.) The remaining quests offer a kind of bad mixture of tedium and difficulty—stuff I can do but is grindy and slow, or stuff I just walk through.

I don't feel done with WoW, at all. But I have a better sense of what needs to improve in me and/or in my interactions with the game to let me keep having fresh fun with it. That's satisfying—not a solution but a sense of what a solution will feel like.
 

I've noticed something as my energy and mood pick up some this last week and a bit. I've got a lot of unpleasant emotion sloshing around: personal stresses, rage and helpless despair about developments in US politics, and like that. Now, I don't actually want or even really wish to give up on trying to be a decent person in the midst of awful circumstances. Nor, come to that, do I have a life which would afford me much opportunity for PROFIT!!! even if I did, to be honest.

But sometimes the load just is awfully high. And it's at this point that firing up supervillains feels really, really good. They are free to choose do to terrible things, or to follow compulsions and imperatives I'm very glad not to have, and to look glamorous or sinister or excellent while doing it. This is, as nearly as I can tell, pretty much exactly catharsis in the classical sense: gather up and unleash the negative passions in the framework of an unreal world, and discharge them. I come out of a session with one of my villains feeling better, and am able to attend to various chores I've been putting off.
 

I'm mending. A week and a weekend off of amlodipine, and I'm clearer-headed and in significantly better mood. This isn't to say I'm free of weakness or mood drops, just that the baseline and my recovery rate are both up. I've got a nasty headache at the moment, but I'm expecting it to pass. Hoping for more good developments this week.
 

This is how it is: over the years I've had plenty of opportunities to watch friends play MMOs besides World of Warcraft and tried out a few myself, but I always ended up finding them too much of a drag for one reason or another. Back when it was new, several of my friends really got into City of Heroes, and I had fun watching, but at that point I didn't have a computer that could run it anyway. When City of Villains came out, I did, and I gave it a shot, and had some fun, but found it too grindy after a while. Too much the same old same old and such slow advancement. So I dropped it.

Now there's a Mac client for it and I have a great new Mac, and friends who've always wanted me to try it with them, so...I signed up again. And y'know, I'm having a lot of fun. There are things I think it really does better than WoW, and some just plain differently, and I like the change of pace. (I will have a separate post on these thoughts.) I got to the end of my trial period and signed up for a regular account.

My global handle there is @Penumbri and I'm playing on Virtue server, since that's where I have friends and also where there are some roleplaying opportunities. For me the game works in two modes: assembling as a team to vigorously beat up exotic targets more or less at random, and exploring alone or with a very few allies to actually follow storylines and learn how the world works and what's up. So I have some characters for each mode. I've also learned that while I love meleeing, I'm really too easily disoriented right now by rapid swings in viewpoint and prone to some sensory overload from too many powers' effects in close proximity and right up close on my screen. Fortunately, that still leaves me a lot of options.

• Penumbri, magic defender, dark miasma/dark blast. Yes, my most advanced character is a magical type with shadow powers. This is presumably not a surprise. She's in her mid-20s and advancing well with a very congenial roleplaying group, the Incognitus faction of Paragon Universe. She's a former rationalist, which means in a superhero universe's context that she always figured all "magic" was psionics and misunderstanding. Then she committed suicide and ran into really inhuman entities in the abyss, who've been talking to her ever since, all through her recovery and building a new life.

• Ada Phoenix, technological mastermind, robotics/traps. Yes, my next most advanced character is a robots-and-gadgets person. This is presumably also not a surprise. She's in her high 10s, hanging out some with a couple different villain groups, and being pure soloing delight most of the time. She's a likely candidate for turning neutral or even heroic when the Going Rogue expansion comes out, as crime is for her simply a more moral alternative than being a military-industrial cog.

I've also got a rotating roster of experiments. Currently active: Accendi, a magic fire/fire blaster, and That Medulla Girl, a mutant illusion/radiation controller. More masterminds are probably next.

And that's what I've been doing while on WoW hiatus. When I'm in position to pick up WoW again, I expect to continue this too.

I moved my laser ablation surgery date. I'm just not ready for it on the 4th - I need to recover from this exhaustion and get back on track. And then they have some closed time for building renovations, and like that, but they can see me in mid-April. I asked if there were risks of degeneration or other complication from waiting, and they said no - my system's already stopped the major leakage, and this will be to prevent future episodes. Good to have that set.

I'm feeling ongoing ambivalence about WoW. But I don't have make any decisions about it, either. This is a medication adjustment week, and I can see how I feel next week, and so on.
 

I haven't even been on the scale today, and don't plan to. Between detoxing from one medication, starting on another, and all that stuff...my weight's up some, I think, but it's erratic and this is simply not a representative situation. I'll be back at it next week.
 

Disclaimer: This is not one of those medical posts. No squickiness here.

One of my long-time friends, one of the few folks I've managed to keep up with in person some lately, pointed out to me that I've been even more slumped lately than I really realized, and wondered if it might be my most recent medication. I hadn't thought so, but we sat down with our e-mail and chat logs, my calendar and journal, and miscellaneous notes...and yes, it turns out that there is a clearly documentable slump in my energy in the two weeks after I started amlodipine that's never let up. Less walking, slower weight gain, more erratic sleep, a whole bunch of stuff, including more just plain misery.

Together we boiled it down into a succinct overview and sent it to my doctor Saturday. Bless him—and I don't mean that frivolously—he sent me a reply Saturday night. He agreed there's a problem, told me to stop the amlodipine right away, and wants me to call on Monday for an appointment to review options. He may be able to see me as early as Monday afternoon. Sometime this week, anyway. 

I hope for good news soon, and in the meantime, I really appreciate every single one of you who's had words of encouragement in the last few months. You really do all make a difference. Thank you.