I Actually Would Like to Set the World on Fire

So ... I remember why I quit Farmville. And Vampire Wars, and all of those Facebook timewasters, actually. Plainly speaking, I hate being told I have to do something.

Employment aside, of course.

Now, what this means is, I like games that offer me branching paths, and choices and such, because even the illusion of free will is better than nothing. And I hate games that basically devolve into a routine of "plant twenty dickberries and come back in ten hours."

Which ... is one of the unfortunate side-effects of daily quests in the old standby, World of Warcraft.

What's even more frustrating?

Starting back over at the beginning, through anything other than my own volition.

So, what relevance does this have to anything whatsoever?

Apparently when you perform a faction transfer, you lose your status with a neutral faction (The Argent Crusade) and have to build your way back up from scratch. Now, this is almost understandable since the faction that actually 0's out is the Sunreavers/Silver Covenant, not The Argent Crusade. Except ... none of the other factions, like, at all, do that. Even the ones that, like the Silver Covenant or Sunreavers, are just equivalents, not truly neutral.

And you lose all your achievements, and your titles, and access to the special crusader vendor.

Which means 28 days - at least, assuming you miss nothing - of building your way back up from the very bottom rank for ... apparently no reason.

Very frustrating.

It's not even current content, but it's important to my character's RP.

So ... I feel obligated to do it.

Bastids.

Winter Driving

Whoever came up with this idea should have been shot.

It is 7:45 when I leave my house, snow shovel in hand, to greet the day. It isn't actually that cold, but the snow has been falling continuously since last night. Mom is helping me dig out both of our cars.

Speed is of the essence: we both have to get to work this morning. On the radio, I heard that all the area schools have shut down for the day, but that hardly matters to our employers - or our wallets. Our street has not bee plowed, so Mom warns me that I should just take it slow. Going too quickly is an easy guarantee that something will go wrong.

I should have listened.

I can feel myself losing control before it happens, first a little, then a lot. I end up sideways across both lanes of traffic over a small curve in the road, and I felt my tail end plow sideways through a snowbank.

I am lucky; I am still on the road, and I did not hit anyone. I get myself straightened out before someone hits me.

"I can see the road."

It has become my Survival Mantra and a happy lie. I can see two strips of pavement where others have come before me - until I find myself following a vague black shape. It kicks up a cloud of snow so thick I cannot see the road - or anything else, for that matter.

It is a tense drive. The road wasn't especially well-maintained, and my job is actually in the next town over.

It is an incredible relief to see buildings again, and I find myself laughing when I see on a bank sign how early I am.

When I finally get myself parked, I call Mom to let her know I'm okay.

I have no idea how I'm going to get home: the sun will be down before I am allowed to leave.

Cooking Travels

So today's rant springs forth from my epic quest to level my cooking skill.

What. The. Fuck.

Okay, so firstly, I discover that everything trainable or even easily purchasable goes green at around 225 cooking skill. Which means that I'm going to have to buy recipes at the far ends of Azeroth, a nuisance in itself given that I've been Horde for this huge old chunk of playtime, and I have no idea how to get from Point A to Point B as Alliance - the problem being exacerbated by the whole problem caused by The Shattering.

Hello, wowhead. So my first excursion into purchasable cooking patterns reveals the other problem caused by The Shattering, which is to say removed NPCs and patterns.

What.

Well, apparently the things that made leveling this skill tolerable from 225-300 were utterly removed with the loss of the one NPC in the game who sells them. Namely, say, Nightfin Soup and Poached Sunscale Salmon.

And the NPC who sells those patterns also sells a few others, and all of them helped to get over a rough, awful patch of cooking levels. Why should these be removed? Because Blizzard saw fit to kill off a few NPCs just to drive home how inconvenient the end of the world is. That's all well and good, but I'm sure the knowledge they alone possessed has been spread about somewhat by the recipes they sold all that time!

So, I went to Tanaris for an NPC who is dead. Well, that's awesome.

This leaves Fishing as my only source of cookable materials - even the Auction House has nothing for me fully half the time.

So I go to learn Fishing, and that's annoying enough.

I discover that those removed patterns are the only use for half of the fish I'm catching. Fully half of them. Then there's the Plated Armorfish, which isn't even useful for obsolete cooking quests: it's an item for a removed Argent Dawn quest. Hooray.

And the one fish I've caught that's still useful for cooking has the lowest drop rate of all the fish in the game, as far as I can tell.

Well done, Blizzard.

Well done.

First Snow

I shove my way out the screen door, pushing snow aside with it as a makeshift shovel, while in my other hand the real shovel hangs useless.

I can't see my neighbor's house; everything is white, and besides that I've left my glasses off for now - they'd be useless before five minutes was out.

I'm wearing two layers of everything - two sweatshirts, two sweatpants, two pairs of socks, even two hoods over my head, with my thick winter coat. Inside I was boiling - out here I'm only barely warm, and snow is stinging my face, the wind whipping the second hood off my head as I struggle to hold it up. No, I think to myself, this isn't Northrend. At least I won't see any zombies.

We have about four inches of snow drifting in places, while others show bare ground: the snow is falling sideways, winds tearing at everything and creating unpredictable patterns. I suppose that evens out to two inches, after all.

The storm isn't over. It's just begun.

Seeing my neighbor, bundled up so that he's unrecognizable, I call out to him. "Nice weather, huh?!" He seems to like long walks. I can't imagine this one's pleasant, though.

He laughs, and I can hear him call back a faint, "Yeah!" before he's gone.

I dig out our small porch and down the front staircase, scooping off each stair carefully. Snow here now means ice here later, though trying to clear anything completely is a losing battle.

Making it down the sidewalk, I discover our newspaper buried halfway into the drift. Rain, sleet, snow or hail, I suppose - that's postmen, but our newspaper carrier seems to have a similar philosophy, so I run to throw the paper inside. I had only one thick pair of winter gloves, and my fingertips are starting to hurt from the cold. I have to remove my winter coat to peel the gloves I have off, then put a second, thinner pair on underneath. I should have done this from the start, I think.

Bundled up again in all of my clothing, I make it down to the front gate. The latch has frozen together, and it's difficult to pry it open. The chain link fence groans eerily as I drag it open.

Mom is seriously thinking of driving ten miles or more to make it to work in this. Apparently the interstate is completely closed, and no one knows how the back streets look. Given the wide stretch of open country that path runs through, I suspect it fares no better.

It takes everything I have to get the front walkway cleared, and a path out to our car as well.

The snow is still falling when, defeated, I run back inside, and the paths I've cleared before are already filling up.