Three Unrelated Topics

I’m going to go with reverse-chronological order for this post.

My main character on WoW is a mage on the Dark Iron server named Chipple. She is a member of a guild called the Fancy Lads. The Fancy Lads is one of twelve guilds that comprise the Penny Arcade Alliance; which for those who don’t know is a group of guilds made up of Penny Arcade fans and was originally founded by Penny Arcade co-creator Mike Krahulik. Now I have on any number of occasions been quite happy to have Chipple a member of the Fancy Lads as its members have proved to be both friendly and helpful, but tonight (technically yesterday since it is now after midnight) was the first time I really, really appreciated Chipple being a part of the PAA as a whole.

I was running Chipple around a zone called the Thousand Needles working on some quests when a level 70 orc hunter happened by and killed Chipple in one shot. I panned my camera around to see if I could get a look at what just killed me, and got to witness a level 70 night elf rogue (unguilded and I never did make note of his name) give this hunter a little payback. Happy with the outcome I released my spirit and ran my ghost back from the graveyard to my corpse so I could resurrect and continue on with my quests. Sadly upon reaching my corpse I found the orc hunter wasn’t alone, he had been joined by another orc hunter, a tauren druid, and a forsaken warrior. The helpful night elf rogue was already dead, and these three horde were battling it out with two level 70 members of the PAA guild Kung Foo Roostaz (a gnome rogue and a human mage). With three to two odds the horde prevailed, but then they didn’t leave the area, and with the resurrection of the original orc hunter outnumbered the two KFR members two to one; thus when any of us tried to resurrect the results were predictable - we died. This continued on for around five minutes before the horde finally mounted up and rode off, after waiting a bit longer to make sure they were gone I and the two KFRs resurrected and started the process of healing and reapplying useful buffs. Unfortunately the horde leaving was only a ruse and as they came sweeping back in Chipple was quickly killed, and outnumbered and not fully healed my two PAA companions soon followed suit.

Once again the these four horde camped the area making resurrecting pretty pointless. During this time a few other alliance players (with levels lower than Chipple’s) had the misfortune to wander into the area and found themselves dead and corpse camped right along with the rest of us. Well a call went out to the PAA as a whole regarding our plight and a raid group of 10 or so PAAers was put together (most of whom were level 70, Chipple being one of I think 2 or 3 characters who weren’t). Once enough of the raid group arrived to even out the number of level 70s on both sides we launched our counter attack and emerged most victorious. Granted Chipple and the handful of characters in their 30s in the raid group were pretty much only useful as a distraction, but every attack one of the horde spent killing one of us was an attack not being directed against one of the alliance characters that could actually hurt them. With the horde all dead, and the remainder of the raid group was summoned courtesy of a PAA warlock, we settled down for the revenge portion of the evening. For the 15 - 25 minutes worth of camping they inflicted upon Chipple and the two members of the KFR, we (well not so much Chipple, but I hung around to enjoy the show and act a decoy) returned the favor about two to three fold spending somewhere around 30 - 50 minutes camping them in return as well as the two or three other level 70 horde who showed up to try and help them. It was very therapeutic, although I did feel bad for the three or so low level horde players (levels ranging from 25-37) who had the bad luck of wandering into the area while all this was going on (that I felt bad for our raid group killing them is further proof that I probably shouldn’t be on a PvP server).

Moving on to topic number two. I went and watched the Transformers movie tonight (again technically yesterday). Seriously what a ridiculous movie, but I mean that in a very good way. I wouldn’t waste time thinking about the plot, while the basics are quite easy to understand, there are some holes big enough to drive Optimus Prime through. However this movie was just too damn much fun for that to matter at all. I started laughing pretty quickly once the movie commenced, and didn’t really stop while it was playing, and continued to laugh about the movie my entire walk home. I know it is cliché to say you were on the edge of your set, but I quite literally found myself perched there on more then one occasion during the movie.

When I first heard about the Transformers movie, I refused to get excited about it. I mean a live action adaptation of the cartoon that existed solely to sell the toys (I knew that fact even as a child watching those cartoons, but that hardly stopped me from loving them), how could that movie be anything but awful? Then I read some reviews for it and they were surprisingly good, and then a few friends went to see it and came back saying it was a pretty good movie, so I started to get a little excited about it. I have to say Transformers is as about as good as you could ever hope to get from a movie based on an 1980s cartoon; which amazingly enough turns out to be a remarkable fun movie. Who knew?

Finally I should say a few things about last Saturday. It was a very fun time, it certainly wasn’t what I expected, as the only role playing that took place the entire evening lasted from 11:30pm until midnight. The vast majority of our time was spent playing the Order of the Stick Adventure Game (probably from about 5:30pm - 10pm). The rest of the time was spent actually working on characters for the anything goes/chaos campaign Matt has been talking about running for something like 2+ years.

For your consideration I leave you with two pictures one is another screen shot of Chipple, the other is a picture of the actor Sarah Chalke who plays Dr. Elliot Reid on Scrubs. I do this because I think Chipple looks a bit like her.