Nobody Reads This

Gamer, Blogger, Student

James Reynolds

jamesr87[.at.]gmail.com

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Me and this blog are a love hate relationship because on the one hand I adore jotting down interesting and humorous events of my life for all to see but on the other hand when I take a leave of absence from it for whatever reason I feel incredibly guilty, almost as though I’ve left the dog at home and gone on vacation … Except the dog has no food and I’ve locked him in the basement.

Honestly though, two things have lead to a lapse in activity; I finished my work for Exrox and moved back to my home town ready for my final year of University and I’m playing a lot more WoW now. At some point in the not too distant future I’ll upload a few of my killshots which include – at last – a Yogg Saron and also my server first kill of Anub’Arak 10 man (and the looting of the awesome 10-man version of the Chieftain’s Caster mace).

In fact I’ve been away so long that I trialed for a guild, failed the trial, trialed for an even better guild and have now been accepted as  a full-time raider. Focus are a long-standing guild on Turalyon (EU) and I look forward to many successful endevours with them in the future … Even if they had registered over 150 wipes on Yogg and only 1 kill

But in all seriousness, I love this blog to death but at the moment I’m enjoying my time so damn much I just don’t float over here to tell you about it, so in case of huge silences again do drop me a line. I read all comments and emails that I get sent, so please do.

Lok’tar Ogar,
JamesR.

Oh, and I fucking hate Goblins and so does Mark :p

Gamer, Blogger, Student

James Reynolds

jamesr87[.at.]gmail.com

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More of a little tech test, I’ve installed the Powered by WoWhead script into NobodyReadsThis so hopefully any links will show up the Tooltip!

 

Lets try it out… So recently I’ve been doing my jewelcrafting dailies before I go to work in the hopes of facillitating skill-ups (and leaving me one less daily to do [Fishing, Cooking]) and building myself a nice stack of usable epic gems. I dinged 75 and treated myself to the two figurines: Sapphire Owl and Emerald Boar. 

Each of these is pretty good but I treated myself last night and this morning by spending four of my Dalran Jewelcrafter’s Tokens (handily stored as Currency) on the Brilliant Dragon’s Eye Recipe and the two Dragon’s Eye gems I needed. 

I put both into my Sapphire Owl, which now grants me a heinous amount of Intellect altogether.

If you’re reading this can you do me a favour and post some WoW Head links in the comments and see if they work there to? 

Cheers,
James.

Gamer, Blogger, Student

James Reynolds

jamesr87[.at.]gmail.com

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Wow! That was quite the impromptu gap in the blogger-sphere! I do apologize for my absence for all the 1 or so people who still check this regularly to get their fix of the glorious self-deprecating and fantastically ironic (all in one sentence I might add) Jaime. Wait … is that a Girls name? (<3 Elle)

Several things are accountable for my recent lapse in activity and in no particular order they’re WoW, Leslie and the Easter Holiday. I’ll run off what I got up to on my holiday for you but only because it includes some movies I wanted to tell you about:

Leslie and I treated ourselves to a visit to HMV which, since the credit crunch began kicking corporate fat cats in the balls constantly, has seen a substantial growth in their discount movie section. I kid you not, I saw a wrapped copy of Scarface for a measly £3 … What would Tony say? However, unlike most trips to HMV which see me leaving with a cheap horror flick and a terrible comedy (I bought Mum & Dad and 40 Year Old Virgin a few weeks back, will talk about them soon) we spent most of our time in the World Cinema section.

Leslie was struggling to decide between two movies, I forget what one was (perhaps when she updates she can tell you ;p) and the other which she eventually left with was Hansel & Gretel. Two things you should know about this movie; It’s a Korean Horror (and therefore instantly awesome) and it’s obviously not what you expect. It’s visceral, horrifying but delectably mellow for the most part. Offsetting the Christmas setting may seem like a cheap trick but every detail of this movie silently screams bloody murders whilst eating sweets for dinner…

Check it out.

Almost as if to prove a point I walked away from HMV with three movies also from World Cinema for the sum total of about £12 and at least one of those you will hopefully know of, they were; Downfall (Germany), Romanzo Criminale (Italian) and Brotherhood (Korea). So far I’ve only had a chance to check out Romanzo Criminale and before I say anything else go out and buy this movie. Buy it if you ever loved Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface or have ever watched anything even remotely gang related and though “Yeah, pretty cool” because trust me Romanzo Criminale will show you the Italians know mobs better than anyone.

It’s somewhat based on the rising to power of an actual gang in Italy who grew to power in the 90s before their ranks eventually thinned and “scores were settled”. This gang was linked to kidnapping, killing reporters, killing judges and perhaps most importantly they were linked to the Bologne Massacre. They also had ties to the Right-wing Government and it’s entirely possible they were all pawns of perhaps the most notorious Mason fraternities to have ever existed (and been known about publically).

The movie depicts the founding members of the gang and tells their story from their first crime (and imprisonment) all the way to the top of the ladder and down again, it truly is a glorious crime novel (see what I did there? What do you mean you don’t speak Italian?) with scenes that could almost have been substituted for those classics I mentioned earlier and you wouldn’t have batted an eye-lid. The most criminal thing you could do is not check this movie out.

I also watched Mum & Dad which I mentioned earlier, I picked it up for £3. The premise is: There’s a (presumably) inbred family living just outside of Heathrow Airport who live entirely off of whatever they can scavange including people. They abuct the lead actress and force her (through very nasty visceral acts) to become part of the family but just as you think the family can’t get worse … Of course they bloody well do. This movie called itself the British Texas Chainsaw Massacre and it’s bloody right to do so. If you can still grab this cheap then do it, you’ll enjoy it more than you enjoyed the last 36 Saw movies.

I think that’s it for the movie summary and now I’ll spend a few minutes talking about WoW before actually getting on with work. I dinged my Paladin level 72 which was a long hard journey of procrastination and I’m sad to have left the Howling Fjord. I’ve moved on to Borean to enjoy some nice easy questing and hopefully pick up some instance runs as main tank, so far I’ve had a generally ok time of it as I’ve done Utgarde Keep a few times. The mobs hit pretty hard and my avoidance really isn’t up to scratch but I have to make the decision of either having stamina gems which contributes something silly like 800 Stamina to my pool (bringing my total up to circa 11k) but also additional damage and ergo threat or going the avoidance route which is obviously better for healers.

So far I’m mostly gemmed for Stamina with a few Defense gems but I’m going to do the research a little later and probably change that up a bit. I did spend pretty much ever last copper piece I had catching my Jewelcrafting up to my level, now I can craft rings and trinkets I can’t wear but at least the gems are great!

Leslie dinged 61 recently and I put some gold towards her epic land mount, she’s doing really well to have gotten this far and now she and I are enjoying brief levelling sessions in Outland with the occasional booster run from me. She desperately needs a good robes if anyone can recommend anything, I think she’s dying to look better

Anyway, I think that’s enough from me, I’ve got no reviews from XE given that they’re now getting the scraps from the XCN. Kind of a shame really that the last couple of reviews that went up were from the weak writers, I’m guessing that probably didn’t help much at all.

If you’ve got anything interesting to talk about then hit me up or @me on Twitter, I’ve been crazy busy so not checking it but now I’m back at the desk I probably will.

Gratz if you actually managed to read all of this!

Peace,
James.

Gamer, Blogger, Student

James Reynolds

jamesr87[.at.]gmail.com

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Good Morning and welcome to next week, the week that followed the previous week but is before the week after next. Oh yes, welcome. Today is going to be a particularly hard day, I told myself yesterday to make up for my truly lackluster performance on trying to catch up with Uni work that I would do a programming task every night this week. I will surely want to kill myself by the time the week is out but it is very much a necessary evil.

Most of my 2 (3?) readers will already know what I’ve been up to this week with WoW taking up an usual amount of time but predominantly the indomitable domineering title that is Call of Duty 4. Been blasting through my 2nd prestige and i’m up into the late 40s now with a Deagle in one hand and an RPD in the other.

I do love that Game and as much as I complain about some aspects it’s still amazing fun! For example, I love leveling up the weapons even if I’m using at utterly terrible one! There’s something innately rewarding about being given experience to punish yourself by running around Bloc with an Uzi but at the same time you can totally “click” with a bizarre gun on a bizarre map.

The number of times I’ve utterly mullered a group of people because my RPG with Deep Impact just decided to shred a squad into pieces is unbelievable and yet it happens with a degree of regularity. There have even been games where, as a sniper (and I’m an appalling sniper) I’ve got into the 20s for maybe 3 or 4 deaths, usually running out of sniper ammo in the process.

I did enjoy a rather glorious game of 28-1 on Downpour where I sprinted into the shed in the middle of the map and just held it. If you need help picturing what it was like, imagine a tin-foil shed with 3 windows and 2 doors and you can shoot through all the walls. 28-1.

I was bloody amazed.

After tiring (lol, tiring of COD …) of this Rob, Leslie and I rolled into WoW for another Retro levelling run, we went first to LBRS where I grabbed all four gems for my UBRS key (which I don’t think you need anymore, but still…) and it was fun although that place is a bloody maze! After that Rob and I decided … Why not? and rolled into UBRS where we enjoyed a relatively easy success. We failed by about 10 whelps to get the Leeeeroy achievement but we did incredibly well for a 71 Prot Pally and a 68 Feral Druid.

We blasted through everything with relative ease all the way up to Drakk. The Beast was a pain in the ass but not difficult and everyone else was relatively easy to crush under the combined weight of imba DPS and an utterly indescructible paladin.

But Drakkisath I knew was going to be hard. Standing tall at 95k Health with 2 25k Health friends he was going to be no push over. I knew what to expect, I’ve only ever seen him killed twice in my 3+ year WoW career so I was fully expecting to Wipe.

Remember, this is a boss where the standard tactic was to have a hunter kite him and run away until we had killed his guards! Serious business indeed. Conflag hits for 3k Damage and drops your aggro, so if you’ve only got two people prepare to share the pain.

In reality we needed a healer, we pulled and I did a decent job with threat and mitigation, but Conflag meant that Rob on his drood took a lot of punishment and ultimately with near zero-mana effeciency he went OOM in a matter of seconds into the fight.

At the same time I wonder if bringing a DPS with Rob in Bear form for the fight would work, say an Enh Shammy who could Maelstrom Chain Heal throughout the fight … Another tactic would be to give Rob Blessing of Sanctuary instead of Kings and have him Main tank with me Off Tanking, he soaks up a lot more damage than I do and with Sanct he’d have a much more stable amount of Rage to heal himself with.

Morale of the story, UBRS was fun. Made a tidy profit I know that much, saw no Pally set drops though :<

Next on the Agenda is trying to level, dinged 71 over the weekend and did another 20%~ XP questing but 80 seems like a long way away. I’m thinking the next 1000 gold I have saved up (I think I have about 700g right now) will go towards Dual Spec Resto/Prot and in the long run probably Ret/Prot. People need healers, I just cba with Respeccing to get groups.

I’m out of time, gotta work, question of the post is … errr … How do you eat them? ORLY?! YARLY.

I’m outtie,
James.