Still slow, Jaina, nerd rage wins

So last night Cindy and I tried again at setting up 8 meters of timing mats as quickly as possible, hoping to improve on the 15 minutes it took us the first time around.  Well we did improve but not as much as I hoped, clicking in right around the 13 minute mark.  The cable routing is what becomes a quagmire.  As you get further into the process you are wrangling with a bigger and bigger rats nest of cables that you are trying to straighten out and lay in their assigned rubber channel in the mats.  Today Cindy is going to try another method for set up to see if it works out any better/faster.  Like anything, with practice it should improve.

Last night we once again had issues with Jaina wandering under the coop deck, squawking while all of the other chickens were inside ready for bed.  When she finally came out I noticed she had a blood spot on her back.  It came from one of two things, a particularly hard peck from Lucy or more likely from Jaina cutting herself on something under the deck.

Jaina is not only huge, she is also clumsy and not able to easily get down low like the other chickens to scoot around under the deck.  This problem is only going to get worse the bigger she gets.  I went inside and got some cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide so Cindy could treat the wound.  I also grabbed stipic powder which is used to stop bleeding in animals.  Jaina didn’t seem to mind Cindy attending to her injury.  Typically her breed has already been slaughtered for meat at this point in their lives.  She is going to have a rough time getting by for however long her life turns out to be.

The final part of the blog is a WoW issue.  If you have no interest in the virtual world of nerds you can safely close this entry now.  This latest expansion to WoW has had a bit of controversy surrounding it for quite awhile regarding the lack of ability for characters to fly.  Flying is an ability that has typically been granted to all players once they hit the maximum level for that expansion.  Gaining that ability only required you to hand over a large chunk of gold.  Being able to fly has a lot of advantages, especially when you are trying to get things done quickly.

Well with Warlords of Draenor Blizzard has not allowed players to fly, at all.  They have been vague about possibly allowing it later on.  Their main argument was they felt that flying cheated players from experiencing content in the way it was intended to be experienced.  Instead of having to fight your way through various obstacles on the ground you can simply swoop in on your flying mount, accomplish your objective and zoom back out.  The players argument has been that after they hit the maximum level the have already experienced a good portion of the content on the ground.  Withholding the ability to fly once you are max level just felt like an unnecessary shackle to many.  Plus generally speaking, taking something away that used to be standard fare is never going to be welcomed.

Well a couple weeks ago somebody at Blizzard made the announcement that there would indeed be NO flying in the current expansion, period.  Well that was like throwing a blazing torch into a wheelbarrow of dynamite.  Massive nerd rage ensued.  People were PISSED.  They were pissed not only for the reasons in the previous paragraph they were pissed because Blizzard has continued to sell fancy flying mounts in their online store for real world cash, despite the inability to use them with thier most current content.  There was already the assumption it was just a matter of time until flying was turned on. When you consider the most recent quarterly report from Blizzard showed a massive 3 million drop in their amount of subscribers you would think the last thing they would want to do is give their player base a reason to /ragequit. It was just dumb.

Well it appears that somebody at Blizzard had the common sense to realize this was a poor move.  Somewhere around a week later Blizzard did a complete 180 degree shift, saying flying in WOD will indeed become available soon, although gaining the ability is going to be quite different than in the past where you just paid gold for it.  Instead you need to complete various tasks in the game to earn the right to fly.  These tasks will require you to pretty much experience the vast majority of the content and travel to all corners of the virtual world.  To be honest it seems overly tedious, to accomplish everything required will take well into the double digit hours to complete. On the plus side, you only have to complete this slog one time.  After that any and all characters you have will be able to fly instead of each one having to hand over a kings ransom in gold to do so.

I have started on the arduous task of unlocking flying in my spare time, which there isn’t much of nowadays.  I would expect this will be the blueprint for how flying will be handled in the future.  If we would have known it from the get go I could have done things in a way that would have made completion of the tasks much more of an inline process instead of a large, annoying tacked on blob of work.