My Wildstar Nest

I’ve been a bit distracted recently because there has been quite a lot going on in my own nest but I’ve finally managed to get to level 14 in Wildstar. Unfortunately I’m a bit strapped for cash  and will probably never manage to afford a mount because it’s all going on flowers. I am however having a lot of fun designing and playing around. This is very much a work in progress however.

Eventually I want gardens running almost seamlessly from one to another with plenty of plant life inside the dwelling too. I haven’t quite decided but I think lots of trellises might be used plus I need a massive pile of pumpkins.

Here is my relaxing outdoor area with it’s shaded patch underneath an olive tree, battered rug and book. The perfect spot for a cold drink when adventuring begins to pall. When my finances are a little sunnier, I’m going to try and build a tree house in the olive tree or at least a little platform and move everything up a level.

One of the first decorative items I got off a mob was this rather fetching bra, thrown at me by a Torine lady so naturally it had to make the interior of my nest. I’m using a mushroom as a bedside table just because and of course that’s my cup of tea sat next to the flowers.

My hedge of flowers needs some work and hopefully that garden fab kit will drop off those challenges soon before I have to slaughter an entire race of flying fish monster things but I have a plan, I just need money and more plants..

The Gnome Garden

When we bought our house by the sea, we inherited the most beautiful terraced courtyard garden along with it. Slowly but surely my fingers have been turning green as I’ve spent more and more time out there. We are growing strawberries, jalapeños, tomatoes and herbs by the pot full and nothing helps you relax after a tough week at work than sitting the sun, shadowed by your own sweet smelling roses.

Then a few months ago I got the idea to build a little Gnome Garden in a terracotta pot.

The lump of stone at the back was the stand in for the cottage I knew the garden had to have whilst I sourced something suitable. I looked at plastic Smurf mushrooms and at ruins for fish tanks before finally settling on something so simple I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me straight away.

The good old painted stone cottage which can be customized in any way you see fit.

Over all I’m pretty happy with how this has turned out and intend making a village full of cute little cottages to hide away amongst the herbs, roses and marigolds in the garden.

Where on earth is Erinys?

It’s weird, I sat down last week and came up with a brief posting schedule and drafted the bare bones of a bunch of posts. Then I got distracted by a variety of things and didn’t read a single blog post let alone write one myself. Instead thanks to a Facebook geography game my colleagues infected the office with, I’ve found myself getting nostalgic with this.

As it turns out, my geography could really do with some work.  What I find interesting though is that the first Carmen game was released in 1983. Now that I imagine is when a lot of the studio heads, developers and game designers we see now saying that women can’t be the lead characters in computer games must have started playing. I know my software developer husband absolutely adored chasing Carmen around the world when he was a kid. As villains go, I must admit I have a soft spot for Carmen. She’s a snappy dresser, thinks big and doesn’t give up when her latest plan goes awry.

 

On The Revolutionary Concept of Women Assassins – Charlotte Corday and Ubisoft

I read Ubisoft’s explanation as to why there would be no playable female characters in the next installment of Assassin’s Creed without surprise. I merely raised an eyebrow when I read a male commentator who refused to believe that women played anything other than facebook games and I didn’t blink when a male colleague of mine claimed that men never want to play female characters in video games. In fact I nearly let the fact that I’m so used to being told I have no place in this environment (other than healing my husband in games with cute graphics that obviously he only plays to indulge my childlike mind) stop me from saying anything on the topic. Then I realized just when Assassin’s Creed Unity is set ….

When I think of Assassins and the French Revolution, one person comes to mind. I studied the history of art at school and in particular we covered the French Neo-Classical style. It was through the work of Jacques-Louis David, I first came across the name of Charlotte Corday, the woman who assassinated Marat in his bath with a kitchen knife.

Posthumously nicknamed l’ange de l’assassinat  by Alphonse de Lamartine she was guillotined for her politically motivated act. After her death, her corpse was checked to see whether or not she was a virgin because the authorities refused to believe that a woman would act like this without a man pulling her strings. Just like Joan of Arc before her, they wanted to write her off as unclean, as a cancer which could be controlled before it spread to infect good docile women. Just like Joan, however, she was found to be intact and the regime had to face the unpalatable truth that women can and do kill.

Interestingly enough, given the current debate she caught the imagination of male artists en masse. The painting above is by Paul  Baudry and the perspective is definitely on her, not Marat slumped in his bath with this papers. Does she look like a killer, no and it’s impressive that not a drop of splatter marrs her dress. Edvard Munch came up with a rather disturbing work on the subject in which Charlotte is naked and Jules Aviat has her hiding behind the curtain looking like a lamb to the slaughter. Then we have Jean Joseph Weerts’s focus on her arrest and other works of her being interrogated. There are paintings of her just after the act, paintings of her in jail and sketches and cartoons of her en-route to the guillotined. Perhaps it was the nature of the crime which thrilled them, a vulnerable and one assumes naked man in bath stabbed (or penetrated) by a woman in an age where such behaviour would be deemed unnatural. In some, like the above she is portrayed as the victim or as France herself (implied above by her proximity to the map of France and her shadow falling across it) and in others, she’s barely human.

I’m currently playing Wolfenstein and I have no issue whatsoever with the fact that my character looks like this:

Character customization is not a thing in the game, killing people in many different ways yes, choosing what colour shirt to wear whilst doing so, no, Everyone who plays it will look the same and that’s fine, after all Blazkowicz and I have a history together. Do I need a female character to play a game, no anymore than I need a female protagonist to enjoy a book or a film but when a studio pushes the customization aspects of it’s game especially in cooperative mode, then I expect to be able to pick female if I want to.

That becomes especially true when I can’t help feeling that they’ve missed a trick. Would Marat have let a man into his house whilst he lay defenseless in a bath? Somehow I doubt it. It’s not about complaining that Ubisoft chose to make their main character in the story based aspect of the game male but that in this particular time period it would have been perfect to let an assassin called Charlotte loose on the people of Paris backed up by historical fact. Regardless of what the Ubisoft supporters say the French Revolution did involve debate about the role of women, did involve women who wanted to bear arms, who wanted the right to vote (which incidentally they didn’t get in France until 1944) and who, like Charlotte Cordray participated in the violence.

Fanciful Friday – Wildstar Screenshots

I’m well on my way towards a house and have already acquired my cup of tea in readiness of having a table to put it on. However I have a new graphics card and to say it’s slowing me down would be an understatement. There is just so much to see as you wander around.

Fragmentary Blue – June’s ROYGBiV entry

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)–
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

Robert Frost

Given the beautiful azure blue of the sky today mirrored off the sea, this poem seemed so perfectly appropriate to introduce this month’s entry.

I have a love hate relationship with the Glacial robes. Love in that they are beautiful, elegant and oh so delicate looking but hate the fact that there aren’t any shoulders which match perfectly. Vestia’s Pauldrons of Inner Grace is another item that I’ve always been partial too and so having given the matter some thought and indeed tried multiple other options, I thought “why not….”.

• Helm – Collar of Command
• Shoulders – Vestia’s Pauldrons of Inner Grace
• Chest – Glacial Robe
• Gloves – Toad-Slime Gloves
• Waist – Glacial Waistband
• Boots – Falling Blossom Treads
• Staff – Greatstaff of the Nexus

 

 

Wildstar – My Beginnings

Having had a fairly depressing week at work I thought I’d reward myself with Wildstar so this weekend I’ve been alternating between sunning myself in the great outdoors and exploring on my Aurin.

My plan is to take my time, Teasel my little Esper is after all an Explorer and therefore needs to climb every tree and swim in every pond, lake and sea. No hill is safe from her bouncing and every single mushroom will be used as trampoline. This naturally slows down the leveling process but should allow me to get a good grasp of the world I’m currently inhabiting.

Not only am I getting ideas for the sort of decor I would like in my house to be but I’ve also been hit by a fairly naughty bug. When I was younger, I loved Dolls Houses decorating them and also making them from scratch for myself but also for friends and family. Therefore the urge to try and recreate an Aurin house as a Dolls House is too much to ignore. The devil as always is in the details so I’m grabbing as many screenshots of things I feel might be useful to recreate like those lovely flowers in their plant pots which is slowing me down even more than climbing mountains.

One thing I have found really interesting so far is that in quick succession, I met not one but three potentially interesting female characters in the shape of Queen Myala Evenstar, Avra Darkos and Belle Walker all in the start zone. Sure they might suddenly develop boyfriends or die in strange circumstances but it was a refreshing beginning, especially after the whole having to save someone’s wife as a hors d’oeuvre.

I am still playing WoW albeit currently rather offhandedly. I have my various projects lined up that I want to finish which include getting my Warlock to 90 and green fire before the expansion hits as well as farming myself a spot more gold and sorting out transmogrifications to go with those swords I mentioned a little while ago. The lure of Alpha information is also whetting my appetite for Orcs ever so slightly but everyone needs a vacation and this is mine.

On boxes for Toys – Thoughts on Toyboxes in Warlords

This is my toybox. It’s traveled across Europe and the UK and is currently housed in our attic. These days it no longer holds toys but it’s one of those pieces of furniture which encapsulates so much about my childhood, I don’t see myself ever managing to throw it out. I’ve hidden inside it, turned it into a massive dolls house and stored my study notes for my degree in it. It currently holds winter clothes and is just waiting for me to finish scrapping off all those stickers.

Therefore it’s perhaps not a huge surprise that one of the things I’m most interested in with the Warlords Alpha is Blizzard’s long promised toy box. So far we have only seen screen caps but just having a fraction of the items currently littering up my bags safely stored elsewhere can only be a massive upgrade for the game. I did a bit of testing across various characters and discovered that I have far too many bag slots taken up by vanity items, with the vast majority of Snowflower’s bank slots being consumed by items like Gnomeregan Pride and Direbrew’s remote. On Dulcamara alone, my Monk made a year ago I have over 16 slots filled with fun but mostly pointless stuff.  Obviously until the game goes live and we get the final list, we can’t be sure how many of these items will vanish from our bags but I’ve reached the point where I’ll be grateful for any returned bag slots.

The other reason I’m looking forward to this feature is a slightly more practical one, there are plenty of these items out there, whether quest rewards or random drops that I might not know about and having a handy list whilst taking that serendipitous feeling out of acquiring things, helps ensure you track down everything you are interested in.

Obviously this is still the Alpha and we are potentially along away off the final toybox, I would like to see quest rewards like Jin Warmkeg’s Brew and the Cooking School Bell make it onto the list. However having a place to store all the Archaeological items and the items from the Timeless Isle will be a massive advantage alone. I’m also glad that items like the Mushroom Chair from Cataclysm and the Rituals of the New Moon from Wrath have also made the box because it would have been too easy just to put in bits and bobs from MoP onwards. The fact that the first engineering transportation trinkets have made the list gives me hope that the rest will follow suit and with any luck between now and launch, we can work with Blizzard to put together a comprehensive list of things which should be tucked away in the toybox.

A complete list of items encluded so far can be found in this thread on MMO-Champion or here on WoWhead.

Wild nights – A Wildstar Decision is made

I’ve finally managed to make a decision and it looks as I will be testing the waters by trying out Wildstar. The reasons for this are three fold, first off I’m barely playing WoW at the moment and secondly it’s just so pretty, I can’t resist.

The third or final straw was Rob Pardo’s dismissive comments on how diversity ruins fun and still annoyed,  I found myself randomly running around looking for things to kill. Somehow serendipitously I found the Torine Sisterhood and promptly fell in love. The backstory of Tresayne Toria in particular sounds interesting for the right reasons.

They say everything happens for a reason and I guess it’s true. All that’s left is to decide whether or not I wish to play an Esper as I have been doing on the beta or to try something else. I know whatever I end up with, they will definitely be an explorer but can’t quite nail down class.

In terms of race, I think I might go Aurin again purely because it’s the closest the game comes to Elves plus I rather like being able to have wings for ears.

Will it be a “forever” game, probably not. Mr Harpy has no interest whatsoever in playing and whilst I will have a lot more time on my hands come august onwards, I need to be self disciplined and do more than play games when I’m home alone.

Will it “pollute” this supposedly Warcraft blog? Most definitely.

Am I doing purely because there is player housing? Pretty much. I want a cute little mushroom house with details like these:

I didn’t pre order and might wait until the end of June or possibly later before purchasing simply because I want to get the most out of my first month and that fits in better with my own schedule than starting straight away but I will definitely be dabbling.