Monthly Archives: April 2014

In Light of Earth Day, Watch me Point at Things.

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In light of Earth Day i am going to link a couple of videos that i made last Friday. I did tweet them so if you are a tweep and you already saw them then there is nothing new for you here. But if you haven’t seen them they are not bad.

The first one here is a little shaky but YouTube is “fixing” it as i write this so i hope that it wont be too bad for you soon.

Pre-Strawberries

Post-Strawberries.

Also the spinach has started to poke up in the purple bed and i did go ahead and fill the grey bed with peppers, yeah ghost Habanero. So much fiery goodness.

25 is Weaksause

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I have a window where i can write like a champ. I can’t spell a bloody thing but the werds just flow out of me. Unfortunately for me that time is about 5 mins after i crawl into bed while my brain tries to do anything but relax around the pain in my head until i finally pass out for whatever sleep i can muster. For some strange reason i feel it is trying to escape the pain and get my body to sleep regardless of the throbbing electric fire that is my skull 24/7. The real crime is i only remember about 20% of those werds unless i get up and make notes. Even so nothing ever seems as good in the morning as it does at midnight. Think it has to do more with werd choice, what i can spell vs what is in my thesaurus.

Anyway something was bothering me giving my brain a target to claw at both last night and most of today. And it is DDo related for a change. Oh, i am talking about the changes to grouping levels for quests.

I get it we don’t want to allow 19s in to epic quests because epics get out just too much xp for the heroic xp curve to handle. Which is bull shit! That is a rant best left for a DDoCtH or a While we are Playing, but if a 19 can handle him/herself in an epic quest THEN FUCKING LET THEM! If 99% of new content is built for 20+ level questing then let people play that content. Now if you want to impose party member penalties because someone is 3+ levels higher then the 19 then that is fine. Adding a minim level to the quests was just LAZY CODING. I can think of 3 better ways to keep heroic players out of epic content with out imposing level minims. Again another show.

I bring this up because this has burned me a few times in the last couple of weeks. Right now i am on a bit of a DDo break/TR tear… Can one both be on a break and on a tear? I am not playing much during the week as i am mostly focused on eTRing Samius but i am not really loving the epic levels solo like i was when i was able to catch people in the evenings. I don’t really love the idea of heroic TRing anyone as i feel that the current endgame is sewed towards ranged dps and Samius is all ready filling that role better then most. So while play anyone else?

So anyway some time in the last week i went to jump into one of the new quests with Tobril and the ladies but i was too low level to join them. No worries i will just do X, i need to go and do it anyway. In that case it was the “farm chores” but it has been quest Y or restocking or flagging or whatever. But i spent some time in the week and Saturday crossing into level 25 what i thought was the lowest minim level for doing the newer content so as to be a helper. Turns out that 26 is the minim level. Grrrr!

Could i swap and jump to someone like Butterz? Sure but i would have been more of a hindrance then a help. Not that bards aren’t great and lots of fun but again the end game favors ranged dps. Her idea of ranged is Dwarven Thrower. Are you a giant? Sweet take extra damage. No? Sweet take extra damage. If only 2d6 was sweet damage… And my arty is also rocking out at about level 25. So no help there either.

No i really thing this minim level is lazy and is a quick fix for what was an exploit that just should be the rule of law. If a heroic could complete an epic they deserve the xps.

There is one other thing that has been eating at me while we are on the topic of epic xps. Why if we now have these stupid minim level nonsense is there a penalty for having someone 3+ levels over you anymore? Why do you have both? Either the watermark is here (minim level) or here (someone 3 levels highter then you) not both? Again i would point to sloppy juggling to fix a perceived exploit. But hey even i can’t ride a dead horse.

Am i alone in this? Comments.

<3s

More Strawberries and other Trees?

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Last spring the wife and i bought a Pine Tree, not a huge one. It was somewhere in the 2-3 feet tall range with the idea that it would be mostly an inside tree and would also double as our Christmas tree. But it didn’t do so hot and died. But having that tree spawned the idea of adding other trees to the yard and house.

Rewind as few weeks back when we were looking at Cherry trees we also looked at some smaller inside/outside trees like the Meyer Lemon tree. The idea was that a patio tree would be ideal for our needs. But we passed.

Tangy yellow stuff.

Fast forward to yesterday, when the wife gets an email letting her know that the web site where we bought the cherry tree, http://www.fast-growing-trees.com/ was having a one day 50% off sale. So as we tend to do we started to put together an order.

The we started looking and we noticed that the sale was taking 50% more off then what we thought the sale price was…. So we started looking around for more things to buy, i mean there are always more things to buy right?

 

And we landed on 100 strawberry plants. Because we really love strawberries. …

 

Meaning that this weeks project is not xping Samius, but taking pallets and making an A frame planter.

Pallets! Aka transportation leftovers.

A few boards and some rain gutters. Seems easy enough.

I want something small enough that i can move it into the greenhouse this winter but tall enough to keep the chicks from eating all the fruits of my labor.

After all i need to end up with something that looks like this, right?

As usual i will let you know how things are going once in progress.

<3s

Gurobo Farm Update: 4.11.14

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So i am not 100% sure how it happened, exactly…. But now we have a bunny. A super sweet Angora Bunny. Which naturally leads to the next to pictures of the boys (Remmie and one of his friends) dissimbling some rescued pallets from work so i could cobble together the last picture. Aka, rabbit run for nice days outside.

So bunny.

So bunny.

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Yes my son is the one in red with the loooong hair and he is huge.

One Bunny Run

One Bunny Run

I hope it looks super rustic and cobbled together, because that was the look i was going for when building it. On the other hand i have gotten this (below Video) more or less ready.

Now i feel we are ready for the ducks to arrive in about a month. Might even put some fish in the duck pond for the summer. Not sure about that yet.

Stepping into the greenhouse lets do a tomato side-by-side.

I realize that the pick of the aquaponic plant isn’t so great but it was REALLY bright outside and i couldn’t see the screen on my phone… But it more or less looks like the ones in soil but bigger.

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About 4 inches tall.

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A head of Romaine we ate last week, placed in one of the dutch buckets. It is really taking off.

 

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Trying to hang a cucumber this year. My hope is it will climb the fence and help shade everything else some when it gets HOT.

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Swish chard is roaring back from its hard winter. So much so as it has been hot dog and brats buns for the last week or so. Along with a spinach and lettuce leaf. You can also see some of the straw berries plants, what you can’t see is that some of them are already fruiting.

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Grapes are waking up. The ones out side are still asleep.

 

 

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Garlic – Top – first year to try them. So far so good. Ghost and Devil Peppers – bottom – also first year. Not sure how they are doing yet really.

Last big news is we added our first fruit tree. It is a 4 breed monster cherry tree, i can’t remember the different kinds but there are 2 early fruiters and 2 late fruiters. We hope is that it will fruit this year (it should even if there will not be a ton) but if not this year it should next year. This weekend we will be getting some of those stone rings and getting it mulched real good.  I added like 8 or 9 eggs to the soil around the tree. I read an article how eggs are great time realize fertilizer as well as good eats.  I am testing that out with some tomato plants in the greenhouse as well but i wanted to go ahead and get some in hear as well as i really want to make this happen for the wife. Speaking of the wife now that we have one fruit tree she is thinking she might want another for the backyard. And the is more talk in the house about getting a lemon tree for inside. Think i might have made some growing monsters. 🙂

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The Cherry tree.

What are you doing this year garden wise? I know you have some room so don’t give me any grief on that one. Go plant something.

 

<3s.

 

“Rocking On Once Again” a MtG Deck

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I have talked about being a Magic the Gathering player in the past i am not sure if everyone even knows what that means, but some of you will and everyone else can look at the pictures and develop and interest.  But for now know that whatever nerdy topic you have come to read about will be back soon.

 

Mean while for you MtG players i have a new standard deck for you to look at: Rocking On Once Again.

RockingOn v1

I am a huge fan of Rock style decks and i think that this might just fit the bill for today’s standard.

Starting things off is the combos of Agent of the Fates ( A personal favorite card of mine at the moment) /Pain Seer plus Burst of Strength.  But truthfully, Burst of Strength is just real good and i am not sure why people are not running it.

Then we have the sweet pile of fatties/removal/closers  in Reaper, Polukranos and Scavenging Ooze. I had Deathrite in that list for a while and while he has some reach, he is not really a closer all alone. But i can see him teaming up with a burst to push the last 4 damage through some board states.  And I feel that the Caryatid is the best fixing available at the moment, but i can totally see Astral Cornucopia going in this slot if Burn Decks die down some.

I have the normal removal/discard setup available to B/G with Downfall, Abrupt Decay,Vraska and Thoughtseize plus i added a sweeper in Gaze of Granite just in case.

The Bow is just a sweet utility card that adds a ton of power for the slot. I mean how can Burn ever beat this card?

Sideboard is just a lot of what you might expect, answers to Blood Barons and other blue/white cards. I added a Puterfy because call it a feeling that an odd artifact or two will start seeing more play soon and i want an answer that also hits Master of Waves.

 

I don’t know if it is good or not but i have been tinkering with a Rock style deck for a while now and this is my current happy place with the deck. Now i just need to gather some Pain Seers and a Vraska.

 

Leave the Feedbacks,

<3s

Back on Track?

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I more or less took last week off from DDo. When my current project wraps up (and this is on anything real world or not) i either need a new project or i hit a new level on the old apathetic meter and i need to find a new project right away. And i am just not an end game grinder but no one other then Samius seemed worthy of my (ddo) time at the moment and i wanted to epic TR him but i wanted to save him for raiding with the guild this last weekend.

Guess on the bright side that keeps me moving. The Samius Shark can’t stop doing something…. somewhere….

Insert the go to image for not making any sense.

Insert my go to image for not making any sense.

So instead of finding something in DDo  last week i focused on the “farm” and i will have and update later in the week on how things are growing.

In DDo news Samius Epic TRed on Sunday once it was clear that there would be no raids and talked the other 2 guys that were on into helping me farm up a copy of the Guardian’s Ring so i epic tred as they started the quest. Forgetting that Turbine forces a re-level up from level 1 even when doing just an epic TR it took me a min or two. More or less naked and enchantment less i keyed over to Evening Star ran to the first quest and locked out… Under Quest level… DAMN IT!

No xps. NO LOOTS.

 

Oh well, so now i am just leveling up again. I just need to get back to 23, shouldn’t take all that long but i feel silly not have much in the way of gear from 20 to 23. Thinking i might try and find a gear setup from 20 to 23 (like including a heroic Guardian’s Ring) where most of my good stuff starts to come back online. Might even have to do a few Lobs and make a little throwing star after all for 20 to 22, i don’t know. But at least i have a project in game again.

Wish me the fast xps!

<3s

Random Encounters, 4-3

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You find yourself tired and hungry after your encounter with the dogs and your ratios are gone. In the distance you hear the sound of running water. Approaching you see a small waterfall flowing in to a small pool before heading of into a small stream. A quick (and low) Knowledge:  Nature points out the abundance of fish, frogs and other easy to catch and cook dinner opportunities.

A quick hour later you have gathered yourself a small feast and you know that your survival instructor would be pleased. You start a fire and get ready to clean your catch when you see:

 

 

Roll a Knowledge:  Nature check!

Doesn’t matter what you got you know you are screwed! She is way out of your league. Time to hope and pray for a fast death if things go down hill.

 

The Nymph explains that this is her pond and she doesn’t care overly much for those that would take such a bounty. But she offers you a choice you can let your catch go and answer her riddle or let your catch go and run.

She giggles and your heart skips a beat, “Or i guess, you can just die and i can let your dinner go….”

Quickly you let the fish fall into the pond, she smiles and gives you the following riddle.

“Give me food, and I will live; give me water, and I will die. What am I?”

 

Options: Run, Solve, Fight

Run: You get away earn 100 xp end up eating some tree bark.

Solve: Write the answer down and then check the comments where i will post the answer on Monday. Get it right earn 300Xp and score a free dinner as the nymph summons you some tasty Fried Chicken and a Mountain Dew!  Get it wrong earn 100xp for trying and the nymph summons you a bowl of grubs and the sugar ants and does the worst “Crocodile Dundee” impression ever “Well, you can live on it, but it taste like shit.”

Fight: You die as a lighting bolt flies down from the sky and fries you up real good. Roll a new character.  What? I never said i would killz you just cause. Dangers of playing dnd over the internets with a crazy DM….

 

<3s