Kay so...I did the Youmacon thang...really felt like I didn't do enough at the convention this year. I chalk that up to not being in the AA as much this year since I was helping Scott with Live Programming.

eh, meh.


I'm sick right now so I'll maybe post moar later.

The clearest and funniest memory I have from the first convention I ever went to(Acen 01), is Kawa corrupting me with the Penis Song.

I still can't get it out of my head at times....





oyah, NSFW.

Hokay, eensy review first since the images will require a bit of load on slower connections.

Facts: Beth played until lvl 16 this time.
Beth got to see what more of the community would be like in-game as they added global chat.
Sorcerers and Spiritmasters (Mages and Warlocks for those of you familiar with WoW) are the hands-down best class to solo with.
Beth got to see Eriny in-game finally!

Pros:
1. Game is gorgeous. It tickles my art fancy so much, even now. The graphics can look great (although perhaps not extremely sharp) on lower-end computers.

2. Character creation is the greatest thing ever, soooo customizable (as far as facial features go that is.)You can make characters as beautiful or ugly as you'd like.

3. Leveling is slower than WoW, but still manageable and enjoyable for a casual gamer. Quests are easy to plug out, and have margianlly good rewards in terms of money and exp...how long the money reward will remain good will have to be seen once the retail version opens up and the market kiddies zoom in.

4. Learning the UI is easy, and many of the controls share similarities with those in WoW. You can also customize it to move more similar to that of Lineage 2, or City of Heroes.

5. Storyline is fluid, and surprisingly deep. Some quest stories are surprisingly inspiring.

6. Flying without aid of a mount is a fun, new addition to the MMO genre.

7. The GM team actually seems to be putting in a bit more effort at keeping the community from completely exploding than they do for Lineage 2.

8. Channels. There are several channels in the 1-19 zones so if you find your channel overcrowded, you can switch to another and level in peace.

9. You can have either a private store or use the auction house to sell your items. While this creates congestion in towns, it fits both people's fancies. The game also will auto-insert a recommended price. If this will scale with the game's economy state, it will make selling things tons easier, but I have a feeling it won't.

Cons:
Oh how I wish I didn't have to do this. Unfortunately, combining both the closed betas and open, this is all that has been prevalent throughout.
1. Much of the community is shit. It's filled with bored kiddies that live in Warcraft's trade/barrens chat as well as the angry, always looking for a fight, PvP addicts from Lineage. I can't even count how many times I heard people bash WoW, or tell people with legitimate complaints of the game to "Go back to WoW." I won't go into details cuz it'll just turn this into a rant, but the general chat got so bad that they shut it down the last day of the open beta, and it stayed shut down until about six hours before open beta shut down.

2. The game is incredibly linear. You quest in a certain area around a town or outpost, move down the road to the next one that your final quest at said previous area will lead you to. As a result, you have to compete for everything from mats to gather to monsters to level on with no hope of finding your own little niche and running around in circles ala Lineage 2. A few maps are large enough to compensate for this, but you still get a very 'closed off' feeling, like you're playing inside a tiny little bubble. Some people may like this style of gameplay, but I enjoy my open maps where I can go hide in a corner and play. The linear-ness of the game also creates bottlenecks in lvl 20+ zones, where the opposite faction can sneak in and pick you off one by one as you try desperately to run past them and get to the next quest hub.

3. Rifts. This is a topic of great argument in every single Aion forum from America to Europe and Australia. Rifts open up and allow the opposite faction to enter your grinding zone at lvl 20+ (and they're usually 10+ levels higher than you) and pick you off as there is NO PvP toggle. The plus is, if it's your flavor you can go do the same thing to them when you find a Rift, and you have from lvls 1-19 to level in peace. The negative is, they can stay as long as they want on your side, and kill everything from your quest NPC's to repeatedly griefing you.

4. Killstealing and training. This is also a major complaint on the forums that a solution has not been offered for. The greatest hit gets the kill, and people will train large amounts of monsters into you if they can.

5. Sudden toss into a classic korean grind. The game will start you off with a constant stream of quests that scale with your level until about lvl 15, when you have to start grinding out on monsters the classic Lineage 2/any Korean game way. Personally, I don't find this to be an incredible issue, as I played lineage 2 mindlessly for years and loved every moment of it, but it is a little annoying to have a great questing pace set up and then suddenly find yourself with quests much too hard for your level range.

6. bots. This is already beginning, people want to get to the top level to do the end-game PvP. I hear this is a major issue in China, and I'm already getting whispers about powerleveling sites.

7. Old grudges. People (mostly those from Lineage 2 I'm noticing) are carrying over old 'clan war' grudges and trying to start feuds in the new game. For instance, I got mob-trained repeatedly by a girl who I haven't spoken to for almost a year, who decided she hated me in Lineage 2 for a retarded reason that's so high school I don't even want to think about it. I left her and her grudge behind in Lineage 2, but now that we're in Aion she's trying to bring it back. While this is human nature, I think it's completely nonsensical to seek out people in a brand new game, or deny them help or inclusion in your groups simply because your clans were at 'war' in Lineage 2. It's a completely different game, you can't even kill your own side so there's no threat of 'betrayal' or 'spying' like there was in Lineage 2.

8. Instances have 8+ hour lockout. This means, once you complete it, it won't reset for 8 or more hours. the PvP monkeys are delighted at this, because they think it will give them more PvP since no one can go 'hide out' in instances. (Instances, for those of you not familiar with the term, are dungeons that are created privately for your group. In WoW you can repeatedly farm instances up to 5 times in an hour. These dungeons usually yeild great xp and armor/weapon rewards. The creativity level in some of them makes me feel like I'm going through an awesome funhouse.)

9. Flying is massively advertised, but very limited. You have a timer on your flight time, and while this can be extended past the 1 minute you start with, with gear and wing upgrades, it really goes against what people were expecting when the game was in it's advertising state. There are only certain maps, and the PvP zone called the Abyss, where you can fly without restriction--zone wise. You still have the time limit in the Abyss, which, IMO, kind of makes the aerial PvP difficult.

That's pretty much it....I know other people have had complaints about Gameguard and computer lag, but I haven't had much of an issue with either of those. My final thoughts: Make sure you know what you're getting into before sinking money into the game. It's not turning out to be everything it was hyped up to be, with one issue or another, but it does help with WoW/other MMO burnout a bit.
But unfortunately, I was already feeling a bit bored by lvl 16. :(

Ok, now the fun part, the screen shots from this beta. I added in some environment shots as well this time, Photobucket has re-sized them and for some odd reason you'd like them as a desktop wallpaper, I will email it to you or something.

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this is probably only funny to me since I play warcraft, but I think it well represents the song :)

:( Anyone interested in a kittun? Two have had their shots and have been tested for leukemia, the third just came into the house today. I'll post pictures if anyone's interested. ;_;

They're all super tame and cuddly, and they use their litter boxes properly. They will play or bathe your feet. T_T purese to be giving a homeless kittun a home, none of the no-kill shelters will take them.


/ end public service announcement.


Seriously...I'm done with stray cats and kittens after this. It looks like the Mama Cat (who still comes around occasionally) is pregnant again. Gonna stop putting food out and hope someone else takes pity on her. My heart can't handle it anymore, and my landlord is super angry that I've been messing with these three (even though he previously gave me permission to...>.>)

Edit: and if people are actually interested but don't live near WV or MI, I promise I'd work with you to find a way to get it. D:

Sorry for the desperate begging mode.

Beta weekend's over again. Next and last one is later this month. Character Creation display under the cut. If anyone is actually curious about how this game plays I'll tell ya...just ask...but it's not phenomenal or groundbreaking so I don't really feel like typing up a whole review just after playing a few levels through the beta preview. Might have a more solid review once they actually have us playing on the same patch update as Asia with the glitch fixes and content additions.
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Also: is it bad when the fictional characters you like the most are fast becoming the ones you make up?
D: Either I'm getting an ego or many characters in stories these days (books, movies, TV shows and Anime included) are just really, really bland. :(

aka: What I've been doing since last night.

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Ok so...I watched this movie when it came out in the theaters last year. The ending made me bawl uncontrollably. I hated it. There, I said it.
The reason why I bring it up again, is because it was on TV and I tried watching it a 2nd time, to see the movie keeping in mind the collective opinion of everyone else who watched the movie, I even skipped past the parts of horrid bloodshed and warfare so I could only focus on the fantasy parts----I still bawled, and I still hated it.

Here's why. And why I really freaking hate discussing this movie with people. If you haven't seen the movie you'll want to skip this because I'm openly discussing the ending.
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tl:dr--Pan's Labyrinth is not a fairy tale in the end...not even a dark one. It's a statement about the cruelty of war and what it does to the innocents involved.

First of all, I got a Beta Key for the new MMORPG Aion from Erin and her man Justin, who got it from a friend? (I think? I OWE THEM EVERYTHING I AM FOR GETTING ME A KEY ANYWAYZ) I dinked around a bit in the game, and it's certainly very diverse with character creations. It's got lots of quests, and a very pretty environment. Not sure how the end game will pan out at this time though, cuz I didn't get past lvl 11 before the beta server went down.

Anyway, under the cut you will find my screenshots from the game (not resized, sorry. I was being lazy) and my second interesting story of the day.
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so a couple of weeks ago I talked with my mom and asked her about my dad and my ancestry n stuff...since I didn't know anything about it.

Apparently my dad's side of the family is...Dutch. 100% dutch.
......



FRIGGEN DUTCH.


WTF AAAH.



and then there's the standard mostly british and irish from my mom's side of the family.

I am so fricken white I blind the world. :(

-waves goodbye to the slivers of chinese and native american heritage that held any hope of making her less white-


kbye.

so wait...the whole point of the quest for this portion of the game is ONLY to..
...............


I almost went out and BOUGHT this game because the soundtrack was good...


.....maybe I'll just go try to locate the soundtrack on the intrawebs instead....

http://www.asylum.com/2009/05/20/fly-turns-fire-ants-into-real-life-zombies/?icid=main|main|dl4|link5|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.asylum.com%2F2009%2F05%2F20%2Ffly-turns-fire-ants-into-real-life-zombies%2F


also: wtf, where are people finding these things and why am I being sent them????



OH I DUNNO, YOUR FIST IS IN MY CUNT SO IT QUITE POSSIBLY COULD FEEL LIKE A CUNT PUNCH.

And apparently she likes it so much that she showers him in an inhuman amount of wee-wee.


Cuz y'know...in Japan...if she pees...she likes it.

In case of emergency, hug mass.





I REFUSE TO BELEIVE IT'S A SHOOP. DON'T HASH IN ON MY MASS OF KITTEN MELLOW MAAAAN

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

any beauty I have is now categorized by numbers!
YAYE JAPAN

http://anaface.com/


and my serial adder LJ friend is baleeted T_T RIP spam pyramid scheme LJ nonfriend


edit: one photo I loaded up put me as a 7.something and the 2nd put me at a 6.something. It says my face is too wide, and my ears too long for my nose. THUS I AM GEOMETRICALLY UGLY.

nothing interesting to report here.


Found this test and I'm pleased to announce that despite several claims that a few of my characters are "Mary Sues" this test claims they are not, although still reflect some part of my life that I wish were real. In fact, the Lineage 2 character I've written about for the longest time seems to be a well-developed character with zero Mary Sueism and that makes me a happy chippy.

http://www.katfeete.net/writing/marysue.html

hey y'know....



.....I really can't handle relationships after all. With people..
I always get hurt. My intentions are always misunderstood, and by the time I explain myself, people don't want to listen.

I don't understand....why am I still stuck in the crapshoot of the world? I thought that was over when I left the years of teenagehood.

EPICS.

I woke up with splinters in my fingers and I have absolutely no idea how they got there.


Oh yeah, I suck at April Fool's D: