WoW, Love and Videos

I had previously shared a video called re: Your Brains from creater "Spiffworld" who creates WoW videos from Jonathan Coulton songs. Interestingly, if you go to www.jonathancoulton.com/ you can see some posts about how the whole Viacom thing somehow caused the re: Your Brains video to be taken down until it was cleared as having nothing to do with Viacom.

Real world aside, today Love is in the Air begins, so I thought I'd throw in some topical videos by Spiffworld and Jonathan Coulton. Enjoy!

Code Monkey


Just as Long as Me

Wowio

I just came across this video at play-girlz.com. Wow, that music! I cannot tell you how many memories this dragged up for me. I spent many hours in college playing Mario when I should have been studying:

World of Warcraft Super Mario Theme


and while I'm at it, I don't think I've ever posted this video before: (be warned though, that it I'm having a really hard time getting this little ditty out of my head.)
World of Warcaft - Im An AssHole


Update 5/8/07 with a Dark-Legacy WoW/Mario Comic.

Off Topic - Harry Potter Book 7

Well this is interesting - it looks like July 2007 will be chock full of Harry Potter stuffs!

Previously it was announced that the movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, (Official Site) will be released July 13, 2007. (Can't wait to see Umbridge & the DA.)

Well the BIG news is that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book, will be released July 21, 2007. Here are links to the pre-orders for the Hardcover and Deluxe Editions.

Sorry, but I'm a big fan and just had to share. I'm now trying to figure out how I can take my vacation to take advantage of these dates.

2007-February Events

From the Events Calendar for February:

Event	Dates
Darkmoon Faire (Elwynn)	Mon Feb 5 - Sun Feb 11
Love is in the Air	Sun Feb 11 - Fri Feb 16
Lunar Festival	Fri Feb 16 - Thur Mar 8
Call to Arms: Arathi Basin!	Feb 2 - Feb 5
Call to Arms: Eye of the Storm!	Feb 9 - Feb 12
Call to Arms: Alterac Valley!	Feb 16 - Feb 19
Call to Arms: Warsong Gulch!	Feb 23 - Feb 26

Calls to Arms occur during most weekends, starting on Thursday night at midnight and continuing until Tuesday morning. During a Call to Arms, emmissaries from that Battleground will be found in the major cities, and honor/faction rewards for performing objectives in that battleground are increased.

Burning Crusade Comics Await

Some Burning Crusade comics have been popping up lately - here are a few:

• Badasshunter has to go out of the house to buy the expansion.
• Dark Legacy Comics takes a break from leveling to notice the Exodar are Out of this World.
• GU Comics notices how hard it was for Blizzard to Date the Burning Crusade and Design the Blood Elf Model. They also commemorated 8 million served.
• PVP Online makes new Male and Female characters.
• And is it any coincidence that Foxtrot stopped doing daily comics (Press Release) right before the Burning Crusade came out? I wonder how he's spending that extra time?

The Fun of Character Design

I believe most players are racing through quests trying to level. I'm trying to soak up as much of the experience as I can. To start, I have to admit how much I enjoy the Character Creation Process. Nothing, of course, will ever beat City of Heroes for that. And WoW is at the complete other end of the spectrum with its limited choices, so I'm enjoying the fresh new hair and styles.

This is a compilation of hairstyles available for the female Draenei:


This is a compilation of hairstyles/combinations that made me think of specific types or people:

Burning Crusade Installation

Timeline -
January 14th - Ordered the Regular Edition from Amazon.com in the evening on January 14th (2 day delivery is free with Amazon Prime).

January 15th - Surprisingly receive an email that says I should get my copy tomorrow. Gotta love the new trend to compete with brick and mortar store - online retailers now ship early so we receive our products on launch day.

January 16th

• 2:30 pm - Delivered by UPS.
• 2:35 pm - I start installation. 4 discs. Read through the slim "Game Manual" and "Product Catalog."
• 2:47 pm - Completed installation of discs and account upgrade (entering the key).
• 2:48 pm - Watch the Burning Crusade Cinematic (first time for me, I hadn't seen any of them on YouTube). Lol at the sheep; I did not see that coming. Definitely worth seeing more than once to catch everything.
• 2:51 pm - Downloaded an update (159 MB) which read as 2.0.3.
• 2:55 pm - Reboot the game.
• 2:57 pm - Download another update (2.82 MB) - 2.05.
• 3:14 pm - After fighting with the firewall finally rebooted again.
• And now the fun begins - creating new characters!

300 Posts!

Casual WoW is now on the new version of Blogger. A nice improvement. Blogger is a great blogging platform because it's free, easy and it hosts its own pictures. However it had a couple of drawbacks. One of them was the lack of post categories. But the new version allows for them via "labels" and I've been updating the old posts. Please bear with me if it kicks up a bunch of new posts in the RSS feeds.

Post Labels
The good news is that now if you see a post you like, you can see others like it by clicking on the label. For example, click to see past posts about Videos, Commercial Breaks or WoW Tourism.

(Another problem with Blogger is/was the inconsistent reliability of loading pictures. I think I've figured out that this was because I was loading HUGE .png files. Since I've switched to smaller .jpg files it's been much easier. )

Post Count
An interesting side note is that this new version also showed me that we hit 300 posts! In fact, the last post of 2007, just before I took a break from posting was the 300th post. Woot!

Winterveil Pictures

Here are some pictures left over from the Feast of Winterveil that I'd like to post to commemorate the ingame events and decorations.

Greatfather Winter




Winter Revelers



Wonderform Machine


Other

Yawn

/stretch.... /yawn....

I just haven't been interested in playing for several weeks now. A light bulb seemed to turn off right around my 2 year mark (coincidentally, there was also a "2 year itch" in SWG too, but mostly caused by the advent of WoW).

Winterveil was the icing on the cake. It was just the same as it ever was. And the Burning Crusade is going to be more of the same - group stuff.

I hadn't even ordered the Burning Crusade until tonight. But in the end I did order it. I haven't been with this game for 2 years to not at least give the expansion a try. I'm looking forward to my baby Draenei (definitely want that Elekk mount).

So I guess this means I'm going to have to spend the next couple of days actually firing up the game client and making sure those pre-release downloads I've been reading about come through (I think I'm two minor patches behind).

There should still be some more fun for a solo-player to squeeze out of this game yet.