I’ve been back from my vacations for a few days now and lots of stuff has happened, but I’m too lazy to write about everything and some stuff I’ll only be able to talk about later on. So I’ll just write about whatever else comes to mind.

My Kotobukiya 1/7 ARTFX Clone Trooper has finally arrived. Thanks to our crappy national smail system it took 25 days to get here, and we were already wondering if it ever would. The eBay seller, actually a nice guy who posted the thing asap (and the UK smail stamp confirms it) was ready to return our money if it didn’t get here in a month, but fortunately it got here safely and he got a very nice review on eBay. I’ve assembled it already and it’s happily overlooking my living room. I’ll take and post photos of it at some later time this week. Mister Vader and Mister Boba Fett will have to wait longer, but I’ll keep an eye out on eBay to see if I also get them at a bargain price later on.

Anyway, I found this article on morality stories in games, specifically BioWare games, and thought it was an interesting enough read.

While I’m on the subject of games, yesterday it came to my knowledge that there’s a Games + Music event coming up close by; MyGames ZON. The gaming event activities seem a bit poor in all honesty - Almost no game launch or preview events and it’s so close to the Warhammer Online game launch that I wonder why the Hell are they not having an event centered on that? You know… EA a.k.a. the owner of Mythic who’s WAR’s developer is one of the sponsors listed there. I guess it was very difficult to understand the high expectations surrounding the game. Also, The Force Unleashed is coming out next month and XBox 360, one of the consoles where the game will be available, is also in the list of sponsors. Again, too hard to bother doing a preview event of some kind? Who organizes these things? Oh wait, the name of the event is MyGames ZON. Zon, yeah I can definitely see why there are such huge and silly wholes are in the events’ programming.

I might go there anyway since it’s very unlikely we’ll ever host a decent gaming event here in Tatooine, erm– I mean Portugal. The geographically closest thing we’ll ever get is something like the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational which was in Paris this year, or if our Spanish neighbours ever host something like that. I wish I was rich just so I could happily attend the huge gaming/comics conventions we see in the US and in some European countries.

With this rant I leave you. Later!

Check out this artistic photography gallery, that centers around people dressed up as Star Wars, Star Trek and even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters. All look good, but the higher thumbs up goes for the one with the Imperial Guard standing in his living room with a cat at his feet.

Japanator put together a list of the top anime/manga characters who need to diversify their diet. While I was reading the list I was wondering why they didn’t mention any Yakitate Japan! characters. Turns out they did after all.

Your result for The Mythological Goddess Test…

Minerva

Take The Mythological Goddess Test at HelloQuizzy

Nice. Athena was always my favourite goddess.

Two new cinematics are out, one of Warhammer Online, timed with the NDA lifting, and today the opening cinematic of the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

Having watched both, I have to say Blizzard keeps doing their cinematics better. Arthas, the Fallen Paladin, turned Death Knigth, and Lich King owns the new Warhammer Online trailer.

Of course it’s partly a matter of personal taste, and I’m also very pissed at how GOA is treating their European Warhammer Online fans (no preview weekend for us and our open beta only starts on Semptember 7th… frakkers) and am pretty sure that if they do what they used to do to the European Dark Age of Camelot gamers, regarding patch delays and other crap, that my return to WoW, to try out WotLK will be a lot swifter than anticipated.

So see for yourselves, and share some thoughts on both.

Warhammer Online:

Wrath of the Lich King:

I’m back from my Internetless week, and as you may have guessed, I am catching up with zillions of news and IMing a few people that are online.

Speaking of this past week’s news, an Age of Conan GM was cybering a player? The things I missed out on. How do they pick their GM’s, I wonder? ‘Do you have one or more nostrils? Yes? Okay, grats you’re in’. Meantime, for the people who thought of this incident had a distinct smell of bullcrap, here’s a new article that includes screenshots.

What’s with the Final Fantasy XI MMO über bosses? It takes 18 hours to kill one of them? What. The. Hell? Are these guys insane? I was sick of Tempest Keep’s Kael’thas and he takes less than half an hour to kill (not counting the dozens of failed attempts while learning what to do).

Read more stuff after the cut:

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The rest of photos of my weekend in Porto Covo are up on flickr.

I’m off to Porto, so I see you all next week.

Lately I’ve been preparing things my upcoming holidays. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be going to Porto for around a week, and I’ve been checking train schedules and ticket prices. I still have a 20% discount over the thing, but am wondering if it stacks with the 10% discount we get if we buy a two-way trip ticket. Anyway, I’m also planning what to do there, though not with any precise schedule (hey, it’s a vacation :P), and among other things I’ll be visiting some comic book stores there. I’ve mailed one of the stores asking what is the best way to get there via public transportation since the store is in Boavista and my grandfather no longer drives. They’ve been kind enough to reply with the information I needed. Seems I’ll be using Porto’s cable car… er, pardon me, the Porto subway system for the first time to get there. :)

I’m inviting some friends over to have dinner over with us this Saturday, but I’m waiting on input from a couple of them to see if they can go. It would be nice to catch up with both, since I hardly see them in the flesh. I’ll probably be making chicken teriyaki, since it turned out yummy the last time I made it.

On other news, I might be participating in a comic book creation contest with a friend, but we’ll have to see how it goes in terms of creative inspiration for the thing’s theme.

I bought a couple of new T-shirts recently. Not really work-friendly clothes because they’re those cutey kinds of things with silly drawings and stuff, but alas I have some laundry issues so I’ll be wearing both this week at work (am wearing one today :P). What I’m really looking to buy right now, are new summer tennis shoes. I love mine, they’re very confy and they look nice, but they’re getting old and starting to tear apart. Unfortunately, wherever I go that has decent looking tennis shoes, only has them for guys and since I have really small feet I can’t get them for myself. What’s with all the crappy designs and colours used in female shoes? It often feels like fashion designers make contests on who draws the least ergonomic and more horrible piece of clothing for women.

I haven’t been playing much of anything. Just a bit of World of Warcraft. I decided to take the dust off my hunter and take her to Karazhan with some friends. As much as I enjoyed using my feral druid for DPS, it can only do so much, and this way I won’t be taking some other DPS’s spot when I can’t keep up. My hunter allows me to participate and not be a dead weight. Even with not so great gear I’ve managed to keep up and last night I was above 740 DPS, following my friend Rafa’s advice and using his hunter macro and using some consumables to make up for my lack of gear. meantime I’ve won four items that are making a difference, along with the gems and enchants I got on them. I think I’m ready to go with her to ZA since he mentioned he usually set 550-600 DPS as a minimum for people who go there. I’ll have to take a look at my BM spec and maybe change a few things around, and also I need to train my pet so he doesn’t die so damned much (needs avoidance desperately). Anyway the runs have been fun, and I’m really enjoying relaxing while going trigger happy on mobs. And I don’t feel as useless as I thought I would, by playing a Hunter - I even had a few moments of trapping lose mobs that were killing healers and other people, plus using miss direction, etc. I want to go with her to Magister’s Terrace sometime. I haven’t been there yet on any character and there’s this über epic mail chest that would be an awesome upgrade for her.

I haven’t been using my Paladin or Druid except to do the daily PvP quest when it’s AV, and since my work schedule doesn’t’ allow me to get to the raids on time, and I prefer to go to later raids with RL friends anyway on my Hunter, I’ve asked to be a social there. Besides, I’m more than sick of TK, SSC, and even not too interested in Hyjal (I’ve finished it) or in doing anything in BT other than Illidan, who I’d like to kill even if just once. I’m going to make a large donation of buff food to my raiding guild’s gang so I contribute in some way to their efforts. Been fishing a lot lately and I have no need for all that food, nor for the gold I’d get by selling it. I’ll sell some along the way but for now, I’ll stack up on yummy fish treats and the sort and then donate.

I’m back from a relaxing weekend in the lands of the very beautiful (and very very hot) Alentejo. Many photos were taken but yesterday I lacked the patience to go through them all to select the best ones. I’m hoping sometime this week I’ll upload them to flickr.

I went to visit Porto Covo, where I used to go on vacations when I was a kid, and I also took a tour to Ilha do Pessegueiro. Unfortunately, I ended up having the top of my head sunburned while on that trip since I was silly enough not to wear a hat (I have one at home… somewhere). It was double silly since I was really careful about always wearing sunscreen. Bleh.

It was nice to revisit all the places I used to go to, though Porto Covo is so different now that I hardly recognized anything at all. I couldn’t even find the house where my parents used to rent a room in all those years back, between the zillion new houses, bars and restaurants that have been built meantime. I did manage to find the beach I used to go to, and even that was slightly different than before.

Anyway, I had a really good time, and I am now one week away from going on two-week vacations.