• As the Glitter Fades

    Posted on by suguay

     

    Many of us who have played games have at one time or another had moments, periods of time, when for whatever reason our favorite game loses its luster. We are no longer excited to log on and finish that next quest line, or mission, or attend the next raid. Usually what has happened is some new game has tempted us with something even more glittery and lustrous. Sometimes, it is life itself that tempts us away.

     


    I have a friend that discovered the demands of being a new father were greater than he expected. While blessed with a cute baby girl, she is not one of those babies with a quiet disposition. She is demanding of his time and attention. He found that devoting the time needed to World of Warcraft nearly impossible to maintain. In the interest of being a good parent he has let his account lapse, at least for now. Most mature gamers would agree that this is as it should be and not at all surprising. But perhaps it is not that the game has lost its pull rather that he has chosen to prioritize his daughter over playing a game.


    I have another friend with whom I share a bank guild. He had heard some people in another guild he is in have been playing a new game called “Rift”. This weekend he decided to give it a go. He hasn’t been on World of Warcraft for 2 or 3 or 4 days now.  He too has been tempted away by the shiny new toy, so to speak.


    Lest it sound as though I am complaining and lamenting the loss of my friends in the online world I should point out (fess up) that I too have been pulled away. What pulls me away is not, as it is for my one friend, a new family member. Nor is it the call of a shiny new or different game, as it has been many times before, it is not even the impending upheaval in my domestic circumstances. What lures me away is an old passion rediscovered. I have been pulled way by that most demanding of lovers, music. And, more specifically the guitar.


    For reasons not pertinent to this article, I have taken back up playing the guitar and I can tell you that for me the games do not even compare. The high, or sense of accomplishment from reaching the highest level, surviving a real tough battle, making it all the way through a raid or dungeon by the skin of your teeth just do not hold a candle to the sense of accomplishment, excitement, and progress that comes from playing an instrument. In the case of the guitar there is first, surviving the cutting of the strings into the finger tips and the cramping of the hand as you struggle to hold the strings tight so they make music and not some dull thwup. Then there is learning the notes and the rhythm or speed at which those notes are played. This part can require hours of practice and repetition, playing the same barre or two over and over and over again. At some point, you find you now have all the bits in your head and you can play the whole song, all the way through, without stopping and returning to some reference material. Now you will spend hours more playing the same song, the whole song, over and over again and again trying to get it just right. When you finally make it all the way through the song there is a feeling of triumph that you have, at least this time, survived and maybe even conquered.


    The satisfaction is complete. The pain and the gain both are real and physical. They are not some virtual repair bill or achievement or loot.


    While I have enjoyed my time playing online games and they have served me well in entertainment, making friends and things they have allowed me to learn about myself, they do not sing the siren’s song for me as does that object of sound and beauty that sits on its stand and harkens to me to pick it up and bring it to life even as my fingers ache and burn and scream. I will pick it up and play.


    And so as the glitter of the online world fades for me I return to reality, yet, unlike the princes and princesses of Narnia, this reality is not lack luster and less exciting than the world I just left. This reality is more like Sleeping Beauty awakening to find her prince, and my prince is a guitar.

     

     

    Support artists. Buy their music.

    Keep music and art education in our schools.

    Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.


    📂This entry was posted in Games Land

  • Blessings in Disguise?

    Posted on by suguay

    My internet went out.


    I know, you’re thinking, how can the internet going out be a blessing in disguise. Trust me, it is.

    So to clarify, my main internet went out. I still have my smart phone so I still get email, Facebook, Twitter and I can look up something if I really need to. It’s not the same thing though. I can’t play online games like ‘World of Warcraft’, working on my web projects is a challenge at best and in some cases not really an option, and it is a lot less inductive to pointless web browsing.


     

    I recently decided to start playing guitar, more regularly. I want to learn some specific songs and I really want to get a little more serious about it. I also play World of Warcraft and it is usually the topic of conversation or at least part of the conversation with one or two of my co-workers at lunch. My guitar playing has been eating into my WoW time. I get caught up playing guitar and forget, or don’t have time to log into WoW to run daily quests or whatever.  This causes me to feel like I’ve failed at some responsibility with regards my friends. We won’t go there. But it does.


    Anyway, I came home Tuesday evening to find no internet connection. After doing the normal reboots and resets,  I called about it. Supposedly there was just then a new service outage in my area. I’m thinking, ok, a few hours. No big deal, I can be patient and go do something else. The next morning, still nothing, but another call finds out that supposedly they are laying a new line and it should be back up by the time I get home from work. It wasn’t, and now supposedly the problem is with my modem. I am now thinking  I’m getting the run around. I schedule the service call. The best I could get without taking off work was Friday afternoon and it was going to cut into my work out. The service options for Saturday were going to cut into my time with my nephew. So I took the Friday time though I was not happy about it. At this point I am frustrated and very unhappy.


    After some thought, I decided I could make the Saturday service call work, I’d just get more time with my nephew. So I called back to reschedule the appointment only to find out Saturday was no longer available and I was now looking at Sunday afternoon. No, I did not decide to just keep my original appointment. I took the Sunday one.


    Really, what’s a few more hours? I won’t have to miss out on any of my workout on Friday, I will have more time to devote exclusively to my nephew on Saturday, and since I won’t be able to get on the internet to do any number of things I “need” to be doing, “should” be doing, or just do, I won’t have to feel guilty or anything like that about playing my guitar from the time I walk in the door until my fingers won’t move any more.


    Permission to do something I really love and enjoy? Now that’s a blessing.


     

     

    Support Artists. Buy their music.

    Keep music and the arts in our schools.

    Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.


    📂This entry was posted in The Blog!

  • I Let My Inner Child Out to Play

    Posted on by suguay

    And now I may never get her back in her room. But is that really so bad?


    One day while working out I came to some songs on my iPod that suddenly threw open the door to my inner child’s room and she came charging out. The music is a live version of an LP that I had in my teen years and the songs are songs I really liked then, and, while I have heard them since I was a teen I guess I just forgot how much I like them. Until this one day.   They just sort of came out of the player and smacked me in the face and said, “Hey! Wake up! You love this stuff. It’s not too late.” 
    And then my little inner child just came charging out of her room. Sort of like when a kid is so excited to see a person and they run from the house or wherever so fast and with so much enthusiasm and fly into the arms of the person that is coming up the walk, and if the person isn’t ready for it, when the child gets to them they can be hit with so much energy that they a bowled over.

     

     

    I am already excited about changes coming up in my life and when my little inner child came running through that door, she just added even more happiness and excitement to things for me. She is so happy to be able to come out and play.


    Do you know what it turns out my inner child likes to play most? Apparently, I didn’t. I had thought she just liked to do a lot of different things. I mean she really likes drawing and is pretty good at it and gets compliments and all that. She likes to read. She likes to do things with her hands, like build things or fix things and such. Over the years, I’ve given her art stuff, and tools, and books, and toys, and games and I don’t remember what all else. They would make her quiet for a while, I thought they were making her happy, but no, just quiet. Like when a parent buys the screaming child in the store that toy that they only really want just to want it, and the parent is only really buying it so the kid will shut up instead of taking the time to really figure out what is going on and what the child really wants. As it turns out, my inner child really, really, loves music. She likes to listen to it, sing along with it, play it, hang out in places where it’s sold and played, she likes to buy it and watch it and talk about it.


    In letting this child out to play I decided I was going to go learn to play one of these songs that had struck me and that quite honestly I have wanted to be able to play since I was a teen. (Trust me that was a long time ago.) So off to the music store I went in search of music for it. I found the music and even someone who could play it and they explained some key parts of it. That was incredibly helpful. I play guitar and this song has a rhythm that has given me a bit of trouble and it gave me some insight into not just this one song but also another song by the same group.


    I have been working on learning this song over this past month. First I learned the notes to the intro and then into the chords. And as I would go along and get one part down and then realize that I could play that bit and then work on the next bit and get it, I’d get just a little more excited and it would keep me enthused to work on the next bit. Learning to play this song is not like learning songs I have learned before. I’m learning to play the rhythm guitar section that the rhythm guitarist plays on the recording and in the live shows. It’s not like learning just the chords so you can sing along. It’s cooler.


    It’s given me confidence that I can really do this. It been a big step in my learning to play an instrument I have been learning to play since I was a child. I am now hearing the rhythms in other songs clearer and am able to play them better, even if I haven’t worked out the chords and fingerings. For the first time I actually believe I will be able to pick up some songs without needing sheet music, something I never expected I would be able to do. And my inner child is deliriously happy. She’s dancing around and rocking out and spinning in circles of delight.

    And now if you will excuse me she’s asking me if she can go play now.



    Support artists. Buy their music.

    Keep music and the arts in our schools.

    Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.


    📂This entry was posted in The Blog!

  • Still Progressing at 85

    Posted on by suguay

    Ok, so I hit 85 and promptly and temporarily lost interest in playing my Death Knight. Sad, pathetic, but true. I don’t rush to the top level just to get to “end game” content. It’s all a by product for me of watching the progress/experience bar fill up, gain a level and repeat. When my bar went away at 85 I had nothing to mark my progress and so it felt like I was just putting in time.

    And so I went off to anther toon that still has plenty of progress bar to go, and played that for a while. Not that I had finished all I should with my DK. Far from it. I had half the quests or more still to do in Hyjal and Uldum, I had barely started Twilight Highlands and my Jewel Crafting wasn’t even 500 yet, not to mention First Aid and Archeoloy. Oh, and I hadn’t even bothered with the ultra fast flying skill. 

    I don’t remember what got me to spend the time on my Death Knight again. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the progress I’ve made since then. I found a couple of ways to measure my progress that has kept me coming back. 

    First thing I did was finish off Twilight Highlands and get that acheivement. This also gave me the Exploration acheivement for exploring Cataclysm. Then I set about figuring out where the missing quests were for Hyjal and Uldum. I wanted the Cataclysm Loremaster acheivement and I had to finish off those zones to get it.

    I found the one in Hyjal and was able to finish it off. I got a lot of mining in with that one. For Uldum, I had to spend a lot of time flying around the zone and going back to places I thought were done before I found it. I probably ignored it originally or saw it, meant to get it and forgot about it. Anyway, I was then able to finish off Uldum and get the Loremaster acheivement for Cataclysm. Along the way I got my Jewel Crafting to 500+. 

    Now what to do about Deepholme. I had missed a quest there too. Because I had a dungeon quest that turns in with Therazane, I missed that she also had another new quest. Once I picked up that quest and finished it and just a few more, then all was well in Deepholme and now I have Dailies there as well as the quartermaster.

    Now that those are all taken care of you might wonder if I’ve lost interest in my Death Knight again. Actually, I haven’t. I still have my Jewel Crafting to cap. I’m at 522 right now. You’d think I’m close except I’m a Draenei so I have the racial for Jewel Crafting which means cap for me is 535. I have Archeology to work on as well as First Aid which is around 513, 515 or something like that. My item level, while improved from the raid is still only 327, just 2 points from being allowed into Heroics through the Dungeon Finder.

    I found the quartermaster in Twilight Highlands and have been doing some dailies there like I do in Deepholme. I still have Northrend and Cataclysm cooking recipes to collect and there are a few other acheivements I’m working towards. Oh yeah, and there are the Dungeons. I do want to do those as well.

    Even at 85 there’s lots I can do and still have that sense of making progress.

    Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.


    📂This entry was posted in Games Land

  • I Did My First Raid

    Posted on by suguay

    A couple of weeks ago I was invited to do my first raid. Yes, I’ve been playing a couple of years and this truly was my first 10 man raid, or raid of any kind for that matter. We won’t go intothe why’s of how that is the case, we’re just going to skip ahead to the good stuff.

    It was a wipe fest. As expected. We did Twilight Bastion and most of us were horribly under geared for it. I know my item level was only 314 at the time. One of the other DPS said Player Score ( the new Gear Score) was tellign him that it would be “formidable” for him and he was one of the top 3 in gear. So it was a challenge. And everyone expected that.

    We even had trouble with the trash. It took us a while just to get down the first group and stay out of the puple/black puddles on the floor. After a while I adjusted my approach to doing damage and instead of standing right next to the mob and wailing on it like I normally do, I let my ghoul do that and I would run in, hit it a few times and then back off. This approach meant I wasn’t doing as much damage as I otherwise might because my auto attack wasn’t contributing. However, it did mean I quit taking as much damage. And since our healers were having a hard enough time keeping up the tanks, I figured this would have to be the trade off.

    We did finally manage to get through the trash and to the first boss. This was about 2 hours into it. The first time we tried we lasted about 48 seconds. A little reasearch and we tried something else and we lasted 38 seconds. I think we tried about 5 times and wiped every time and our first attempt was the best we did, or longest we lasted. We finally gave up when the trash at the entrance re-spawned.

    I was really glad we were done. It was very late, at least for me, and I was rapidly running out of steam. Not that I didn’t have fun. I did. No one expected us to finish it and I thinke we all expected to die a lot and so there was no drama. Would I do it again? Sure. Though I would like to start earlier and I think for that to happen I’m going to need to be on a server in my time zone. I’m currently east coast United States and the server I’m playing on is on Pacific time as were the raid leaders. 

    I was invited to the second attempt the following week. It didn’t happen for a variety of reasons and my not being there wasn’t even a factor. Now I hear the healers for that group, one of whom invited me in the first place, well they are likely to be taking a hiatus from World of Warcraft. So it will probably be quite some time before I get to raid again. 

    Guess I better get to running dungeons.


    Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.


    📂This entry was posted in Games Land