A simple smile would suffice

Sept. 2nd (Tues) – Sept 7th (Sun)

Another week, another blog entry. I had a sentence typed out about dying, but if I write about it, it’s just going to bother me (now and in the future when I look back at this), so I figured I would just skip that depressing stuff and go right into the stuff that happened this week:

Tues: We shoved our way through BT last week, downing everything including Mother, giving us a great head start on some Illidan attempts for Thursday. Nothing much else too exciting that I can remember, beyond it was Dad’s actual birthday, hah. Come to think of it, when I was out picking him up a card, this old woman working there (at least I think…she was up front talking with the cashier girl and I thought she had a name tag) was like “ooooh, you have such a nice smile *giggle*”. She proceeded to point it out, which sort of embarassed me a bit, and apparently making me blush, because she then had to immediately mention that as well, while rubbing her old hands all over my face (maybe not to that extreme, but ugh). Lol, she was a nice woman, I’m probably making it out to seem like she was some creepy old hag that touched random strangers. She complimented me, I should appreciate it. I’d like to say that I believe dad enjoyed his stuff (card, money, whatnot), but who knows anymore.

Wed: Headed over to Gavino’s on Wednesday as usual. I could tell it was going to be as it ended up being, another day of no filming. Because of this, I brought up the notion of an additional day of filming, especially if we wanted to get more things taken care of. April had agreed with me, saying that it would be a good idea to block off a full day for filming, since that’s usually what people do (and it’s more productive). So we agreed on Sunday’s for filming (not every Sunday, every 2nd Sunday), and continuing with Wednesday’s for discussions, podcasts, and whatnot.

We recorded a podcast, where we discussed a lot about video games (not just things that are coming out, but creativity, originality, and so on). Thankfully it was just an interesting audio podcast, because I accidentally forgot to rewind the tape and only got a few minutes of the video, but it wasn’t interesting from the video standpoint anyway. After that, we went and bought some chinese food (sesame beef is nasty, only chicken is good) and watched the original The Producers.

Speaking of Gavino and April, I wish I could discuss with them how annoying it gets when they start arguing. It’s funny / entertaining now and then when they’re just joking, but then it gets old and stupid. Not only does it make things awkward, but it makes me think like I have to push the conversation along so that we can move on with things. I’m positive it’s something that can be avoided, and it usually starts off with something so stupid like Gavino making a comment and April not approving of it or being offended by it, and it just spins into a downward spiral. Whatever…I should just start ignoring when it happens.

Thurs: Hopped back into BT for some Council downage and Illidan attempts. Once healers took their heads out of their asses and ranged were able to stop fucking standing on each other, Council became a cakewalk, which it should be since we’ve done it a few times already. Then it was on to Illidan. We actually mastered phase 2 pretty quickly, making phase 3/4 attempts more frequent that night. Amazingly enough, we ended up getting our FIRST Illidan kill that night as well. Everyone was so pumped up, and I’d have to agree, it was very exciting. Edub even got his car door. After the kill (and after the normal “first time downing” screenshot), a few of us lined up for Goochy’s banner idea. After playing with Photoshop for a bit, I came up with a few things that can be seen in this thread: http://crimsonguild.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=778

Fri: Went over mom’s for dinner as usual. During diner, it was time for Terry’s “Friday night political discussion hour” where he would rant and rave over why he hated the Democratic party. I couldn’t stand it, especially when he got pissed and started yelling at me because I couldn’t give a reason to NOT like Sarah Palin. It would seem, according to him, that if you don’t know anything about a person, you’re supposed to like them UNTIL you hear things that make you dislike them. Apparently the fact that she has a family is supposed to give me an erection. How about I watch more of the RNC and get back to you, until then, calm down about politics. That whole discussion (which usually the discussions aren’t too bad, it’s only when you disagree and try to counter his points, that’s when he gets mad) was the reason I spent the weekend listening to the conventions and will probably, now and then, load up some political podcasts.

We played UpWords and I finally won =D. Afterwards, I headed home for some delicious drunken Kara…at least, we were hoping it would be. I think it was whoever changed the GMotD to “Crimson > Illidan, let’s wipe more on drunken kara!” jinxed us…because that’s exactly what we did. I hadn’t respec’d back to holy on my paly, so they wanted me to tank again. By the time we got to Nightbane (which involved me being inebriated enough to BoP the tank at 5% ), I knew I was going to be hopping on another character. I think I finally switched after Curator. People need to understand that I don’t have a full tank set, GRR. Afterwards, we did some 3’s and then I went to bed.

Sat: Taking a page out of Luke’s book, I went and picked up herbalism and mining on my druid. I figure since he’s got an epic flyer (like mah priest), I might as well get some gathering professions. The priest has fishing/cooking/tailoring/alchemy and is my current main pve class, so he’s all maxed out and ready for the expansion. The druid has pretty damn good pve and pve gear, epic flyer, and is super fun to play, but had no professions up to that point. So why not give the class that has the quickest, easiest way to get around some gathering professions. Sure, my rogue is maxed out in herbalism, but I play him NEVER.

We did another ZA bear run and it went as smooth as it usually goes. Supermassive finally put another rule up where people will be allocated bear mounts depending on how often they’ve done the runs, which is fine. I never really cared much about the bear mount over badges (for gems and gold), gear (got the helm which is comparable to T6 until I have 4 piece; need trinket and haste caster ring), and the quickness of the run. I’m sure I’ll get one soon, I think I’m in the next bracket or so.

Sun: Went over mom’s early to help her work. I woke up at around 8:50am to get ready (wanted to get there by 10am so I could get the stuff done earlier), but my stomach was killing me. I ended up finally leaving (after making a cd with McCain’s speech) at 10, got to her house around 10:40. She had me cut some branches down, rake up leaves, dig some holes, move the canoe, take wheelbarrows of stuff and toss them at the pick-up area, mow the lawn, etc. By the time we were done, I was sweating (there’s a surprise), so I took a shower, had some lunch and was on my way home.

Played a bit of WoW, but nothing too crazy. Read some more Bone, almost done…I’ll probably read The Watchmen next. Hopped back on WoW closer to raid time and we did a full clear of Hyjal. Lost T6 helm again, sooner or later ~_~ though it’ll only really be good once I get my shoulders cause it’ll give me my 4 piece (current helm is comparable), and the shoulders alone will be a great upgrade.

What’s to come this week? I still have yet to watch Big Dreams Little Tokyo, and besides that, there’s some other movies I think I got that I have to check out as well. I gotta look into 24 Hour Party People and Hamlet 2. I’ve heard good things about them, so I should keep an eye out. I keep saying that I have to upload podcasts and then get caught up in other stuff (procrastination? lol). I’ll get them up soon, probably tonight. It’s just a matter of converting them to flash and uploading them. I’ll probably also edit the podcast page and make clickable links to each podcast, so there’s not a whole page of flash files loading up when it’s clicked (same thing with the “Show” section probably).

To get ready for Wed, I first have to take the latest podcast off the H2, I’ll rewind and check all my tape stock (to make sure there’s nothing on them that I might want to take off), though we probably won’t be recording much on Wed. I also have to try playing with the “dancing in front of the green screen” footage we took weeks ago. It was in front of the old green screen and I had problems with it when I tried last time, but I might as well give it a go…and it’d finish off the first episode ><. Wednesday we’ll probably be discussing what we’ll be doing this Sunday.

I have 2 random w00t shirts coming, should be here in a few days hopefully…I’ll probably get the BEST ones (lol). Debating on restarting my Gamefly subscription. It’s not like I need Netflix, and I do want to continue playing other games besides WoW. It’s a shame I couldn’t use it to get Braid / Castle Crashers, which I would like as well. So I’ll probably restart it up and get back into the swing of things…and maybe TREAT myself to Braid . One thing about Gavino, he’ll say he doesn’t have money for things, but he’ll keep his Gamefly subscription, buy Castle Crashers, and tell me to do both because he wants to play with me, but when it comes to WoW, it’s a big “NOPE, NO MONEY OR TIME HERE”, ugh. Probably the reason I’ll get the Gamefly subscription (can play some games w/him), but not Castle Crashers over Braid (though I did enjoy the CC demo).

I hope I get some sort of response to this stupid $400 tax payment thing that I got. I don’t wnat to pay it…and I constantly get “we’re sorry, due to a high call volume, we will be unable to answer your call at this time. lower call volume is usually before 10am, try calling back between the hours of 9 and 4:30″ and that’s with me calling at 9:30am a few times. I still have the email I’m waiting to hear a response from…ugh I’m gonna end up paying this SHIT aren’t I?

Lastly, I’ve been watching the lynda.com flash cs3 tutorial vids and they’re great, just what’s to be expected of lynda.com stuff. I’ll be jumping between flash and photoshop tutorials to broaden what I already know of both. Also, iTunes podcasts are great. Some are just awful to listen to and I can’t even begin to comprehend how they have so many fans, but it’s great to have stuff to listen to besides just music or mega64 horrible podcasts when grinding / doing dailies.

That’s it for now, be back with the Friday update most likely!

One Step Further

August 25 (last monday) – Sept 1st (yesterday/monday)

Keeping with the swing of things, work wasn’t very interesting last week, so the chance of it being mentioned is very little past this opening paragraph. I don’t wish to bash my job, and it’s not a very hard one at that. I just hope that I can make something of myself with my film career. Do I have a career? I mean, I guess I put out some stuff that people enjoy, but I don’t know past that. I want to do more. I want to do a documentary, or make a movie! Speaking of documentaries, that Second Skin one comes out soon I think. It’s that MMO documentary playing in NY I believe. Would be awesome to see it.

I’ll put days that I can remember things happening:

August 25th (last monday) – Mom and I were going to go to some festival around her area, but when we got there, it looked pretty lame (at least to me). So instead, we first drove around to different areas where she grew up (which were also in the area). Afterwards, we went to this resturaunt nearby, and god help me remember the name…can’t fucking remember for the life of me, lol. I’ll have to ask her and edit this at some point. Anyway, it was right near the water, and the place was really nice inside. I ordered the special house margarita, but it was too strong. Mom got the creamscicle, but it was kinda meh. So, drinks aside, the food was ridiculous. The burgers we got were HUGE, and delicious. Was a good day all in all, and mom had a lot of fun.

August 26th (last tuesday) – Our normal BT push. Didn’t do so well, but we got up to RoS. Didn’t down the stupid 3 faced creature, but it was mainly due to stupid wipes on bosses like Supremus and Bloodboil.

27th (wednesday) – Went to Walmart to pick up some green cloth. Got around 4 yards of it (for future projects, may need more) and brought it to Gavino’s. We cut it in half and April proceeded to sew it up, giving us a nice green screen to work with. With the screen tacked up to the wall, we had a much wider area to film with. Not the biggest thing in the world, but for the price (like $1.50 a yard), we can definitely get more. AND it’s a million times better than the old blue/green folding screen we used.

Speaking of that screen, we ended up busting through it for the site. What does that mean? Well, right now it’s just the static splash image to our site over at bsofdeath.com, but hopefully in the future I’ll take the video of us breaking through it, and (using the idea of breaking through the blue screen of death code) make some flash intro of sorts.

Gavino whipped out a guitar and started singing some ridiculous songs he made up, and it was all pretty funny. Ended up using the footage (with some older green screen stuff) to make TV Gavino (http://vimeo.com/1634668). It came out pretty well I think, and with some more effects, we’ll be adding the character into the show soon. We also were able to record (some) podcast stuff for the week. It wasn’t the best, and mainly was us talking about pizza. Hopefully this week will be slightly better. I want them (Gavino especially) to be a bit more interested in the whole idea.

28th (thursday) – Back into BT. RoS went down in one shot, Mother in a few. Council, on the other hand, was a night of fun. Thankfully, by the last attempt of the night (right around midnight) we got the stupid boss down. It ended up being a much longer fight than last time (ended up around 30 seconds or so away from enrage, so it was like 14 1/2 minutes). Hopefully this week is much cleaner.

29th (friday) – Went to mom’s after work. Got to leave early due to the fact that not only did the plotter die halfway through the day, but since everyone had the upcoming Monday off due to Labor Day, a ton of people took Friday off for a 4 day weekend. So, at moms, we had dinner, played some Upwords (Terry won 3rd week in a row, grr), and chatted it up for a while.

When I got home, I knew it was time for some drunken kara. I just barely made it this time, and interestingly enough, they wanted me to come on the paly. What’s so interesting about that? Well, the fact that they wanted me to spec prot. I’ve tanked stuff in the past, and I really enjoy it mind you, but the stuff I usually tanked were regular 5 mans, and the ocassional heroic with the guild. Main reason behind that is because my paly has terrific healing gear (and tons of resilience), but only half an epic prot set. They cared nonetheless. So I spec’d prot and began to main tank Kara (LOL, never thought I’d see the day).

It wasn’t the worst thing ever. We actually didn’t wipe on any bosses up until Prince, surprisingly enough. We only wiped on trash, and on trash did we wipe…multiple times lol. But it was all fun, we were all drunk or high. Many humourous things were said that night, namely one part where someone discussed a woman with a bottle in her ass, and Carl interjecting with a quote along the lines of “doesn’t she know the ol’ lefty loose-y, righty tight-y saying”, which had us rolling.

Afterwards, we treked into ZG, downing the snake boss for fun and Bloodlord / tiger boss for mounts (Which didn’t drop /sad). Then we rushed to MC (all guild run only stuff) for some ridiculousness in there. Downed Gehennas, Garr, Baron, Shazzrah, and I think that was about it. Failures led us to stopping around there. We didn’t wipe on the bosses, but on our way to the next group of bosses, we kept wiping on trash. All in all it was a fun retro night for the guild (and Carl, hah).

30th (saturday) – Relaxing day. No plans, just worked on the site, played WoW (nothing too out of the ordinary, maybe a ZA bear run, dailies, and the like), and just hung out.

31st (sunday) – First day of dad’s 50th birthday celebrations. Lucky guy gets 3 days for his birthday. Today was the horse race track, which I loathe. I sucked it up and went, and it wasn’t bad, though I still hate the place…I made the best of it. We lost every single bet we played except for one, which for me ended up being a loss basically because it was a $6 bet and gave me $3.50 in return (dad won the same bet, but he only bet $3, so he won $0.50 hah). He was pretty upset that he lost, but he said he had a good time. We had tuna sandwhiches, snacks, ice cream, and I bought and shared a cigar with dad (yuck, lol). I think I lost $60 that day.

Almost forgot, we did Illidan on Sunday. When I say we did him, I mean we attempted him. We actually finally got him to his phase 3/4 shift. It was really cool to see his demon form, which is incredibly badass. We didn’t do too well, only getting him there once, but that’s progress.

1st (monday/yesterday) – Played WoW and hung around until 2:30-ish. Headed over mom’s for a Labor Day BBQ. Matt, Brenda and the kids (Haley & Bobby) were there, with Joan as well. We had clams, hot dogs, chicken and beans. I made some malibu baybreezes and we had a pretty good time, although it was hot as anything that day. After everyone left, I stuck around w/mom and terry, enjoying some conversation, some Dirty Jobs, and some tea & cake.

After I said goodbye, I headed back to dad’s. We headed to the boardwalk for dad’s 2nd day (night?) of birthday goodness. We walked around, played some games (inside and out), had some yummy food (funnel cake for me), and had a good time (at least I think so, hah). I ended up going on this big slide with Jewel, which was sorta fun, even though I hate heights.

That night, I continued to read Bone. I think I’m around 550+ pages into it. Great stuff, glad I got it. Also, we ended up selling our Illidan to Noto, but with some interesting results. They ended up letting some (3-4) of our guys join them, but after 5 or 6 attempts, the closest we got Illidan down was 35%. It was great to see more of phases 3/4, but sad that we couldn’t down him. At least now the guild downing will feel more epic

I think that’s mostly it for now. I’m sure I left something out here and there, but that’s why I have this blog…to try and remember and write down all I can. I have a terrible memory, and hopefully this will help things. And it’s always nice to look back months from now and see what was going on (as awfully boring as my life is, heh).

Anything exciting on the plate this week? Tonight is BT push again, get as far as we can so we can have more Illidan attempts. Also, it’s dad’s last birthday night, so I think it’s some special dinner and cake. Tomorrow (Wed) is filming fun with Gavino and April. Hopefully he has some ideas, I think we’re leaning towards working on the next episode (which I think is #3). May or may not have to refilm the dance scene (I’ve gotten better at using chroma key, so I may be able to use the footage we already had w/the sucky screen). Either way, should probably film what’s left in episode 2 so that I can finalize the first two eps (HOPEFULLY). After that, I’m hoping we get a podcast and work on the next episode.

That’s about all I can think of. Don’t think I’m taking classes this semester, so I need to somehow get that check mailed back to Wachovia (and probably start making payments on my $1500 loan…yay more payments!). That, besides this tax thing that’s going on, is all I think I have to worry about. Just keep paying bills and get through life, one day at a time. I try not to think I’m living paycheck to paycheck, I don’t want to be one of those people (no offense, though I know I currently am that way). Hopefully one day things will work out.