“It could be witches Some evil witches.

Which is ridiculous ‘Cause witches they were persecuted

Wicca good, and love the Earth

And woman power And I’ll be over here.” - Xander in the Buffy musical episode

Hallowe’en is here. The night where demons, witches, vampires and zombies come out to play. In the recent celebrations that is. This day actually has a very ancient and different origin. It was originally a Celtic festival, the Samhain, which was a celebration of the end of the harvest season, and it’s sometimes called the Celtic New Year.

Instead of doing a rewrite of wikipedia’s entry I’ll leave you with a quote on Hallowe’en.

Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient Celtic pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, now known as Halloween, the boundary between the alive and the deceased dissolved, and the dead become dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, into which bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them.

It’s true that it’s being a comercial holliday more than anything else lately, but I enjoy the spirit of the thing a lot more than the Carnival event we have here in Portugal. I prefer the fantasy/horror theme of Hallowe’en, and love the pumpkins and other decorations typical of this time of the year. Plus, no carts filled with silly Portuguese semi-naked women in the Winter in an attempt to imitate Brasil’s Carnival. Hello? Brasilian chicks are almost naked in the Carnival in Brasil because it’s friggin Summer there. Winter here. Got it? Thanks!

Tonight I’m going to (well, co-throwing) a Hallowe’en party. I might be the only one wearing a mask, but I’m hoping I’m not alone in this. The mask I got was not the one I wanted but it will have to do. I would prefer playing a witch but the old-looking broom or a cool-looking staff was nowhere to be found.

We’ve bought candy, we’re taking some hallowe’eny decoration, although not much as we never celebrated the event in a party, and my friend Alma has even been baking us some evil cookies and cupcakes, and other friends are taking a home-made dessert. Yesterday after work I went shopping to the nearby mall with my fiancée and we bought most of the munchies and drinks for the party. I’m hoping we didn’t exaggerate much with the quantities we bought but better get more than not enough I guess. :P

Small detail: between all the running around and shopping I haven’t had time to spare with packing, so I will only do that tonight. No biggie, I only need a change of clothes. :P I hope next year I have the time to make some Hallowe’en-themed cookies and cupcakes also. :]

It will be a night of games, movies, music, eating, and most of all, of chatting and socializing. It will be fun!

It’s been ages since my last World of Warcraft-themed post, but now that Wrath of the Lich King, the new WoW expansion approaches, it’s unavoidable that I’ll talk about it.

We’ve already pre-purchased a Collector’s Edition and will do so also of a normal edition. The point of this is to not waste money to get duplicates of the art book, soundtrack and other items, and to same money in the process. Since my sweetie isn’t bothered not to have Frosty, which is the only in-game enhancement you get if you buy the CE instead of the standard edition, we’re content with this decision.

Anyway, I started writing this as I read Massively’s article, A WoW burnout’s guide to Wrath of the Lich King, which talks about what new stuff the expansion brings. I’m still suffering from WoW burnout, even though I liked playing with some real life friends the last time I had the account active. I think mostly because of all the problems that happened in my hardcore raiding guild (not the original hardcore guild, which was a decent one) which destroyed a lot of the enjoyability I felt when I played with nice people. Also, I burned through most of the content pretty fast, which now would mean if I played that I’d be reliving places over and over again.

The new areas that the expansion will bring, where we will level another 10 levels, up to 80, will be novel as will the instances. I’m undecided as to which class I should play as my main one, which is posing part of the problem for my return.

As much as I enjoy healing, I’m tired of the whole whack-a-mole concept of it in WoW. These past months I’ve played games like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, and I’ve played those as a healer, but with a catch - unlike WoW (as it was at that particular time), healers in both those MMOs weren’t merely healbots. They pew pewed mobs into oblivion and the more damage they did to mobs, the more they could heal. Melikes this concept. And yes, I am aware that Shadow Priests in TBC were pretty much doing doing something like what I’ve just described. Small problem: of all the three characters I have at level 70, none is a Priest and I couldn’t be arsed leveling yet another character from scratch. (this is the part where I say ‘Ohai, Blizzard, can I haz a /level command, so my char is at least 55 as Death Knights are?’)

Anyway, I’d like to change from a healbot to something else. Something more pew pew. I’ve been reading about the Paladin’s Retribution tree and I think Blizzard, after over three years has finally realized they might make it a bit more useful than it was before, and have turned them into something like a melee Shadow Priest. Now, this would be completely awesome for me as I like melee and I like healing, were it not that Paladins sadly can’t dual-wield, which is something I love. On the other hand a pure DPS class, like, say, my Huntard would be most probably easier and less stressful to play than a pew pew healer.

Not only this but I’m facing a dilemma, which most likely will only be answered when I try my first 10 man instances on WotLK. I need to know how much I enjoy the 10 man versions of the 25 man raid instances in relation to the 25 man instances. I need to know if I’d be most content (though not 100% content) if I played my Huntard as my main in my RL friends’ guild, or if I should be a back up raider in my hardcore raiding guild (HCRG).

The problem with the HCRG (focused on 25 man instances) is that their raids start at 19h00 GMT, which for me is not so great. It would mean I’d have to leave work early (though not earlier) and run home, then immediately sit in front of the computer, login, whisper for an invite to the raid and start playing. No room for dinner-eating, much less making. I really didn’t like this when I was raiding with the other guild, because it made my day a lot more stressful, due to the worry of not wanting to be late so I didn’t potentially hold the raid back. Also, at the time most days I was at my parents’ house, which would mean my dinner was already made and I didn’t need to worry about it.

The problem with the real life friends guild (which I’m guessing will focus on the 10 man instances) is that, although the raid start schedule is a lot better - 21h30 GMT, it tends to prolong itself past 23h30, which is not that great for us as we need to get up early the next day. A couple of days my boyfriend needs to get up before 7am, so he’d get less than seven hours of sleep. And I’m pretty sure he was pondering to join this guild with his main character, which I think is something he was pondering it recently. I guess we would have to try it out to see how manageable it would be.

This past weekend was the first in many that we had just to ourselves.

Saturday was basically shopping day. Not only did we shop to refill our almost empty freezer/fridge and food pantry, but we shopped for some very cool-looking decoration items for our house. I also bought half of my sweetie’s x-mas gift, which ended up spoiling the surprise, but hey, best to buy it before he did. :P The other half we will have to go back there to get sometime soon. Plus I saw some other cool things there, which are potential x-mas gifts.

We had dinner out over at Pizza Hut and went out later with some friends to the movies. Unfortunately ‘Max Payne’ is damned boring. Not horrible like people were saying. But very, VERY boring at the exception of a couple of scenes. I hadn’t been this close to falling asleep at the cinema since ‘Aeon Flux’.

Anyway, on Sunday we visited the Pena Palace and Park in Sintra. The Palace is really beautiful, and it has a patio with one of the most beautiful views I’ve seen. The park is quite large but we didn’t manage to see it all. Funny story though (funny now, not so much then), the park closes at six o’ clock, and we were aiming to get there on time, bue miscalculated by four minutes and ended up being trapped inside.

Luckily we had the map of the place, which has a phone number and after a whole FIVE phone calls (yes, five) we finally got one of the security guards to come down and open the gate for us. Seriously. What idiot replies ‘go to the other gate [one that’s not that close] because that’s the only one open’ repeatedly when it’s dark already and you can’t see frak? Only after the fifth phone call, when I asked if we had to call the fire department and then take the security people to court did they realize that they had to move their slacker butts and go open the gate. The one that’s less than 2 minutes away from the security place if they take the car.

The next time I’m there (won’t be too far from now since we were planning to go to the Moir Castle soonish), I’m going to file a report on their yellow book, describing what happened and how unacceptable their attitudes were. And how dangerous it is to not keep a guard over there, or at least doing rounds there to see if there’s a problem. Okay we miscalculated the time it would take for us to get there from where we were in that huge park, but a four minute difference and there was NO ONE there. No one. Imagine if we didn’t have enough battery on our cellphones, or if we hadn’t taken the map which had the phone number. Hypothermia is not my idea of a night well spent.

At least we’ll have a story to tell.

Have you always wanted to learn the Star Wars alphabet? Well, this cute/funny Star Wars art sequence might help you with that. Some of them are really cute. Nice to see Asajj Ventress there.

More ABC here.

A recent study shows that gamers are more likely to do a lot of things, including have a social life, than their non-gamer counterparts.

Listing the statistical data, it looks like this:

55% of gamers are married

48% have children

single gamers twice as likely to date

average age of new gamers: 32

average household income $79,000, better than non gamers’ $54,000

are more socially active than non-gamers

13% more likey to go to the movies

11% morely likely to play sports

9% more likely to go out with friends

Suddenly people realized we gamers have a life. Wow, I never saw that one coming!

I’ve been playing video games since I was a young girl (maybe 7 years old? I can’t remember), and have kept playing them while growing up, still play regularly (when my busy life allows it) and, wonder of wonders, I have a life. A real world, social, work, family life.

I have a healthy amount of friends, I share a house with my soon-to-be-husband boyfriend who is also a gamer, we go out with our friends every week, sometimes several days a week, we have jobs we generally enjoy, we go to the movies, we go to bars, we organize dinners and social encounters, we go for walks in forests and beaches, we travel and visit places in leisure, we help out our families and friends.

Summing it up: we spend a lot of our time away from our PCs and consoles, in the real world, talking with real people.

If anything, we socialize more than non-gamers. We keep in touch and talk to each other in online games when we can’t physically meet, for instance on weekdays, generally there is no availability to meet after work due to having to work the following day, but we use online games as a complement to the real life meetings. We chat about real life stuff, and everything you can think up, really, while playing other in-person games, like board games and pen & paper roleplaying games at someone’s house.

We use games as complement to our real life, not the other way around, and it’s about time everyone else started realizing it.

People have only recently started to see that gamers aren’t nerdy-looking guys, with thick glasses, suspenders, awful haircuts, and a horrible fashion sense. Gamers are every single kind of person. Gamers are young, old, career-driven, social-life-driven, fat, thin, caucasian, of african ascent, asian, *insert every other ethinicity you can think of*, straight, gay, bisexual, religious, agnostic, atheist, tall, short.

We’re not people who live in our parents’ basements. We’re regular people just like non-gamers. And…

We’re everywere! ;)

A japanese guy made a gadget that announced in which train station he wants to exit, so he can sleep on the train and not be worried about missing his stop.

Just really had to share this.

BioWare and LucasArts have announced Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’d be squeaking like a fangirl, but we all saw it coming ages ago and my squaking was already done.

It’s still nice to see official confirmation of a new Star Wars MMO. There isn’t much information up on the official site yet about the playable races and such, but (obviousy) you’ll chose to be a Jedi or a Sith. You can check out some screenshots, concept and some basic info there.

Bunch of links from all over the Interwebz:

• Star Wars: The Old Republic Revealed As Ambitious MMO [ Kotaku ]
• Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO unveiled [ joystiq]
• Star Wars MMO announced as The Old Republic [ Massively ]

I’ll be anxiously awaiting more information and pretty images on this project.

EDIT: on the downside, I was signing up to the Star Wars: The Old Republic community and by saying I was from Portugal I didn’t meet the requirements to have an account (excuse me?), so I had to say I was from the US.

Uploaded some photos to my flickr account.