One big blue candle and a messy “cake-face”
Posted: April 2, 2013 Filed under: Off Topic | Tags: blog, hunter, World of Warcraft, WoW Leave a comment »(with no screenshot, which is par for the course with me – so unprepared!!)
Today – April 2 – Mushan, Etc. is one year old. **Yaaay!!**
This blog, for all of its shortcomings, has been a massive success for me, and I’m so glad that a) I started it, and b) I’ve been so blessed by it. In spite of several droughts, I managed to write 105 posts and draw over 22,200* page views, which is nothing to sneeze at, I suppose!
*And it smokes my previous two blogs’ yearly bests for page views by more than 55%, which is awesome!
It’s been wonderful to be in touch with people in the WoW community, meeting new people here and on Twitter, seeing bloggers in-game, and getting to share some of my humble huntering adventures, opinions, etc. with all of you.
Thanks to everyone who has read my posts, commented on them, encouraged me, and befriended me this year. It’s been very rewarding. Here’s to more fun in Year 2!!
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Thanks for reading this belated blurb that Mushan forgot to post in a timely manner earlier today at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!
Off-Topic: If you haven’t subscribed…
Posted: March 19, 2013 Filed under: Off Topic | Tags: blog Leave a comment »In the wake of the news of Google Reader’s demise…
Almost everyone who uses Google Reader knows that Google announced last week that it is killing Reader as of July 1st. In fact, most of us probably learned of it by reading a post about it in Google Reader. At least, I did.
I was disappointed to learn about this last Thursday. I’ve been using Google Reader for years, and when I looked for an alternative last year, I wasn’t all that happy with what I found, so I’ve stuck with it. However, like everyone else, I now have little more than three months to find a new RSS feed.
There are already a ton of articles out there listing alternatives, and people are already flocking to new RSS sites. I won’t list them all here, because it’s been done many times – use your favorite search engine to look for Google Reader alternatives, and you’ll find an abundance of articles suggesting sites along with their pros and cons. Here’s one of the articles, an excellent post from Marketing Land entitled 12 Google Reader Alternatives. Keep in mind that you can use Google Takeout to migrate your feeds to a new RSS site or app.
In the meantime, here are some alternate ways to follow me. Every person reading this blog is important to me, and I want you to know that there are many ways to keep up with the latest posts at Mushan, Etc.
…Subscribe!
There is, and always has been, a Subscribe button on each page of this site. If you normally read my posts in Google Reader, you may not know this. It’s at the top of the right-hand column, just below the header image.
Subscribing is simple and totally free: just enter your email address in the box, hit the Subscribe! button, and whenever I post something new, the post will appear shortly afterward in your Inbox. It’s not necessarily the optimum choice for most people, but for some readers, subscribing to their favorite blogs is how they stay up to date on the latest posts. I already have a bunch of subscribers, and would love to have more!
…Follow (for WordPress users)
Additionally, for those of you who are WordPress users/bloggers, there is an option to follow other people’s WordPress blogs. If you’re logged in, whenever you are on a WordPress site the WordPress Toolbar will be at the top of your browser. You can click “Follow” toward the left side of the toolbar, and it will add the blog to your WordPress reader. Just another option.
One of the reasons that Google is killing Reader is that RSS never caught fire to the extent that Twitter and Facebook have, as far as being aggregators of content. I prefer reading with Google Reader, but I also have a Twitter account in order to a) throw up a link whenever I publish a post; b) read other posts that people that I follow have tweeted (or re-tweeted, which exposes me to new writers and podcasters – awesomeness!); and c) communicate directly with other WoW players/bloggers (even more awesomeness!). The signal-to-noise ratio is much lower on Twitter than it is in an RSS feed, but I’m still glad to be on Twitter because it has exposed me to information, friendships, and readers that I would never have known without it.
I don’t have a Facebook page for Mushan, Etc., and I haven’t decided if I will create one. I’m not a big fan of Facebook, and I’m not sure how impactful having a Mushan, Etc. Facebook page would be. However, if a ton of people told me that they would like to be connected with the blog/me via Facebook, I might consider it.
At any rate, I’m on Twitter, so follow me on Twitter!
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As for me, I haven’t decided which RSS reader I will migrate to. I’ll make the decision soon, but I’m not excited about immediately moving to a reader that can’t handle the increased traffic yet. I’ve got time. In the meantime… Subscribe! :)
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Thanks for reading this post by Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!
I pretty much don’t do WoW holidays any more
Posted: February 9, 2013 Filed under: Leveling, Off Topic | Tags: achievements, holiday, Mists of Pandaria, questing, World of Warcraft, WoW 4 Comments »So we’re almost six months into the post-5.0, account-wide achievements era, and I have to admit something…
Ok, I guess I already admitted it in the title of this post.
Occasionally, I see people on Twitter talking about working on holiday stuff, and it occurs to me that I would like to work on some holiday stuff too. And then I remember that I’ve completed everything that I want to complete, achievement-wise, for that holiday – which, to be honest, for some holidays like Love is in the air, is “nothing at all” – and I decide to do something else instead.
I’m not a mount-chaser, so I’m not after the meta. There are so many mounts in the game, and I have enough that I’m completely content with what I’m riding (which, at this point, is some type of gryphon or hippogryph on virtually all of my toons – and the reasons for that would make up another short post altogether).
The Lunar Festival is ending today, and I realize that it’s been about two weeks long, and I haven’t even bothered to check it out. Since there was really nothing new, and I have the achievement for completing it, and have done it several times over several years/toons, I had no desire to get involved.
At first, I blamed this personal trend of omission on the account-wide achievements. Stupid account-wide achievements; whereas, in the past, my pals and I would faithfully work on holiday achievements on multiple toons, driven by the achievement bug or whatever, now we all already have it, and so there’s no point from that perspective. (Stupid account-wide achievements. Mumble-mumble-mumble.)
However, while the change to achievements is certainly partly to blame for my apathy toward holidays now, there’s also the fact that not much has changed when it comes to the holidays themselves. Perhaps that’s just the nature of holidays – we have our traditions at Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving or Halloween, and part of the fun is living those traditions each year. But I guess it doesn’t really feel the same way in-game. I have no desire to visit the all of elders again. If I see one, I will generally honor him or her, and it’s a small, special occasion. But I’m not going to trek all over Azeroth and Outland to honor the elders for the Xth time.
I guess the big problem for me is that, after so many years, most of the holidays haven’t changed much at all. For Winter Veil, they changed Metzen the Reindeer, and the Greench so that I don’t even care to try to kill him anymore. The only thing that is remotely interesting is opening the presents under the Winter Veil tree to see what this year’s cool gift will be. And yes, I have the footballs. They are fun to use in short spurts. Freezle and I always like using them after we kill the Spirit Kings, when Loremaster Cho starts going on about how “these halls have not seen footfalls in many years” or whatever. It really, really sounds like he’s saying “these halls have not seen footballs…” and so we get out the footballs and start rapidly kicking/passing them back and forth between each other for a couple of minutes before the trash pulls to Elegon. That’s fun.
But almost everything else is the same. There aren’t lots of new holiday activities to do from year to year, and my desire to revisit the same old same old seems to diminish each year as well.
The other factor is something that Blizzard probably considers a success: there is so much to do in Mists of Pandaria that holidays fall by the wayside, particularly if you have alts. I have three toons that I play regularly: Mushan, Modhriel, and Droignon. Each is generally raid-ready to varying degrees, and that has taken a lot of time to accomplish. With little-to-no new holiday content, there is little incentive to interrupt my regularly-scheduled gearing/dungeoning/raiding program to revisit (what feels like) stale holiday content. Since Pandaria, the only non-Darkmoon holiday activities I’ve participated in have been Direbrew-farming and opening my new footballs.
Perhaps that’s intended. Perhaps the holidays are new and exciting for newer players, and not intended to be a big deal for veterans or raiders. That doesn’t seem 100% correct, though. At a time where the developers are concentrating on keeping us busy, holidays seem to have taken a back seat, but I don’t necessarily believe that they intend for us to forget about holidays.
But generally, I do just that.
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Thanks for reading this post by Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!
A change in habit-tude
Posted: January 28, 2013 Filed under: Off Topic, Raiding & Dungeons | Tags: blog, hunter, Mists of Pandaria, progression, raiding, World of Warcraft, WoW 1 Comment »When I created Mushan, Etc., I did so because I felt a personal desire to have a place to express myself on WoW-related subjects.
While friends, both in-game and out, are an avenue for that, there are small elements of creativity that I can indulge in here that I cannot do elsewhere – at least, not in the format I enjoy. Not least of these elements is that I’m free to be long-winded without worrying that I’m boring someone to death – someone who isn’t interested in some long bullcrap story of mine doesn’t have to finish reading it here, whereas in person it’s not the same.
So I conceived of the blog, decided on the title (which is hardly clever or remarkable, but suffices), and proceeded to write.
To an extent, I’ve been very happy with how it has turned out. I enjoy writing the posts about transmogrification, soloing old content, funny stuff I encounter, talking a little bit about the class (although I don’t, and likely never will, write guides), alts, lore and quests, and so on. And for such a modest little blog that doesn’t have a strict focus or a consistent posting schedule, it’s been very well-read, which has blessed me more than I can express.
However, there is one area that has turned sour for me here. It corresponds with an area that has been a source of much frustration for me in-game, which is raiding and the lack of progression we’ve been able to make, post-Dragon Soul.
In private conversations with friends, I’ve confided that I don’t like the situation we’re in mostly because it makes me feel bitter about people that I consider friends. We stopped raiding Dragon Soul last June at 5/8 Heroic, and after 12 weeks of raiding in T14, we can’t keep a consistent roster from week to week, and we’re 7/16 in Normal modes. I have to be honest: I wasn’t expecting it to be like this, and as such my general reaction has been bitter disappointment. It’s very likely that my expectations were too high. That’s my fault if that’s true.
Anyway, raiding has made me consistently feel like an asshole beyond even my normal cantankerous nature. It’s a terrible feeling, and a frustrating one, because I don’t know how to solve it. I can’t quit or change guilds/teams, and I don’t want to, because I’m playing with some of my favorite people in the world right now, and we enjoy playing together, and that’s what it’s all about, right?
Well, not only does the subject rub me the wrong way, but writing about it has been a fairly negative experience for me (and readers) here at the blog since a few weeks after MoP launched. From the beginning, raiding has been mostly frustration, and it seems like that frustration has been splattered all over the place here.
However, whether or not people find such posts interesting or entertaining, I’ve come to the conclusion that bitching about stuff doesn’t make good copy – at least, it doesn’t make copy that I want to read. I realized this recently while reading several negative posts on various blogs, reading all the bitching and whining and bullshit that the devs and community team at Blizzard have to sift through and answer on Twitter/forums, and seeing a lot of general bitching on Twitter. I don’t like reading it, and I don’t like when I do it myself. And I do it way more than I am comfortable with.
There is more to Mushan (the author behind these posts) than being a whiny bitch. It may not seem that way here lately, and for that I apologize.
Therefore, I’m changing the way I think about what I want to write about. I’ve decided to be more creative when I blog, and to focus on other areas of the game in order to do so if necessary. I’ve decided that I’m going to take a hiatus from blogging about raid progression. This doesn’t mean there won’t be posts with the “Raiding” tag, but the ones that do will be more micro-focused on me, or on some mechanic, or will celebrate something, but won’t dwell on my disappointments. The “progression” tag, which has generally been about my team’s progress, will be on the back burner for the most part.
This change won’t solve any in-game raiding problems, but it will help me to enjoy my own blog – and the experience of writing posts – more than I do now. It also doesn’t mean more or less frequent posting. I’ll just be blogging more about the other topics.
Hopefully, this change in attitude toward my blogging habits will allow others to enjoy my writing more than they do now. I think it’s a change for the good; a much-needed self-correction.
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Thanks for reading this post by Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!
Merry Christmas!
Posted: December 25, 2012 Filed under: Off Topic | Tags: blog, holiday, Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft, WoW 3 Comments »Working retail at the holidays sucks the life out of my posting frequency. As such, it’s been quiet around here lately, but that’s ok – I think that many others are going through a variety of similar situations, as it’s a busy time of year anyway.
At any rate, I just wanted to pop in and extend Happy Holiday wishes to all of you who stop by this blog. There are more posts in the pipeline, but today I am exhausted and looking forward to some low-key relaxation time. Then I work the rest of this week, and after that my work hours will revert to something more normal.
I haven’t necessarily worked a tremendous amount of hours these last few weeks (due to our company’s strict ‘no overtime’ policy). However, the particular hours that I’ve worked have been very early ones, because I chose to take the super early shifts – rather than the super late ones – at my store. As a result, I haven’t been getting quite the amount of sleep I should have been – taking naps usually doesn’t help how I feel, and further messes up my sleep schedule, so I’ve all but eschewed them this past month or so, opting instead to go to bed earlier than usual. However, I’m still somewhat sleep deprived… but yesterday, I got up for work at 5:30am for the last time this year, and so things should soon be getting back to normal.
In all, I’ve been blessed to have a job this season, to work with good people, and to feel useful again, and also to have remained relatively healthy this whole season, which can be difficult to do when sleep is at a premium. Yay orange juice!
Future posts will probably include more stories of my raiding experiences, my current hunter transmog (which I love), gear (there’s always more more more!), the upcoming patch, random stuff about alts, and posts inspired by what others are talking about – the usual fare for this place and this blogger. For now, I’m still here, and I’m still reading everyone else’s posts… I’m just also very tired.
Anyway, Happy Winter Veil (and holidays of the season) to each and every one of you!
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Thanks for reading this Season’s Greeting from Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!
Skipping what I never skip
Posted: November 24, 2012 Filed under: Gear, Off Topic, Raiding & Dungeons | Tags: hunter, Mists of Pandaria, raiding, World of Warcraft, WoW Leave a comment »
Stone Guard guild first, 11/17
I’ve been quiet here lately.
Then again, I work retail, and it has been particularly draining for me lately with the holidays beginning. This week, it’s highly likely that I will even skip Raid Finder entirely in order to relax and be able to focus my in-game energy on our raids tonight and tomorrow.
I did run Mogu’shan (RF) earlier in the week, but otherwise my work schedule has prevented me from going to the places that, up to this point, I have run as soon as they’ve become available, and every week thereafter, and sometimes two or three times a week depending on when others the guild were running them. While my luck has generally ebbed lately, as far as drops go, I’ve been enjoying seeing the new content and having the opportunity to win some gear, if nothing else.
As such, it feels like I’m failing my team this week by not at least trying to get something new.
However, this is the reality of my situation: by the time we gather to raid tonight at 9:30, I will have gotten less than eight hours of sleep in the previous sixty. Working midnight to 9:30am – on Black Friday – just killed any semblance of a normal sleep schedule that I had, and I’ve been having trouble catching winks when I am home. I’ve certainly had the time, but my body’s clock is a mess right now. Thankfully tomorrow I have the day off, so I’m hoping to re-regulate a little bit.
I’m generally at peace, mentally, about the fact that this week will essentially be a wash. I’m still going to cap Valor, since I’ve been slipping into dungeons from time to time for some quick-and-easy points, and doing a few quests on occasion. So I should be ready to upgrade my weapon when patch 5.1 drops, whether that day is 11/27 or 12/4.
Anyway, our guild finally downed Stone Guard on Saturday last week (our second week of raiding) with four melee DPS, my hunter, and no Time Warp since our mage was unavailable that night. We then got in a bunch of decent attempts on Feng, and we’ll pick it up there if we can down the Stone Guard again this week. Last week we lucked out and got the Jasper-less combination, and I think that definitely made things easier. Hopefully we can cope with more difficult mechanics tonight, which will certainly include chains…
With Feng, once some of the learning was sorted out, we hit a wall when we couldn’t force Phase 3 before the fourth Draw Flame, even with Time Warp. It’s a DPS issue – mostly gear – and I believe that it will take care of itself shortly.
Things are moving slowly in-game for me now. And it goes even more slowly when my body and brain are numb with fatigue. However, I’m still here, still playing. In addition to capping valor and raiding on my hunter, I’ve gotten my mage up to level 88 from 85 in the past week-to-10-days. He’s no hunter, but I’m still having fun with him. I also finally got my Cloud Serpent mounts this week on Mushan, and won 1st place in the race. Now that was fun! I’m glad I didn’t rush through the Cloud Serpent rep. Doing Cloud Serpent dailies occasionally has made for a nice diversion during the Valor grind.
More soon!
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Mushan, part 2: the proof is in the screenie
Posted: October 1, 2012 Filed under: Leveling, Off Topic | Tags: humor, hunter, leveling, Mists of Pandaria, names, questing, World of Warcraft, WoW 3 Comments »One of my recurring experiences this week has been the constant reminder that Blizzard named a large lizard after my toon and those of a couple dozen other players, a situation I’ve alluded to before.
This weekend, for instance, a friend of mine and his wife, who recently finished questing from 85 to 90 together, were working on their last few bars, and got a quest requiring them to pick up Full Mushan Bladders. At the time, I was smelting ore on my warrior, and logged out to switch over to my hunter. Apparently, they mentioned to one another that it was time to get the bladders, or that the drop rate on the bladders was low, or something. And right then I logged in on Mushan, and it was apparently hilarious! Of course, they told me about it right away, and even asked me for a full bladder, to which I replied that I was, sadly, unable to help them.
Everything that’s been said to me has been good-natured – it’s been referenced in guild chat a fair amount, but not an annoying amount.
And I haven’t really noticed it much while actually killing them, or passing them in the fields on the way from one place to another. For example, on Sunday night I was farming leather on my druid, and I killed hundreds of them, and it never even crossed my mind that I was killing “my namesake” or whatever. I was in Vot4W, killing foxes and mushan and stags in big stacks, and it was all good. I feel like I’m killing kodos when I kill them, to be quite honest.
What I have noticed, on the other hand, has been the large number of new players named Mushan this week.
When I checked the US armory a couple of weeks ago, there were the usual dozen or so Mushans. I wasn’t the first, and I won’t be the last, so that’s fine. However, checking last night, there are 44 players named Mushan. It’s been in the back of my mind that this would happen; and I didn’t know how I would feel about it. While my name is, as I said, not unique, I did make it up on my own back in mid-2010, and any reference there to anything else, before or after, is purely coincidental.
Here… I’ll show you.
Mushan in October 2010, the week before patch 4.0.1 hit and Tirion Fordring disappeared from his hovel-in-exile along the Thondroril River in the Eastern Plaguelands.
What I hope is that I will not be lost among my friends, you, who read / follow / enjoy this blog. I won’t be changing my name, so hopefully I can keep my identity and uniqueness by virtue of my character and personality, as it comes across in my writing and online conversations with you.
Anyway, please remember little old me, when I am but one of the soon-to-be hundreds of players named Mushan.
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PC update #2: What’s inside (the final update)
Posted: September 22, 2012 Filed under: Off Topic | Tags: DIY, Mists of Pandaria, PC, video games, World of Warcraft, WoW 2 Comments »
The Rosewill Challenger case comes with a blue-LED fan light, although that’s not why I chose it!
The PC is built, WoW will finish patching by the time this post is published, and things seem to be coming together. Once I finish tweaking my UI, I will be ready for MoP!
With that in mind, I thought I’d share what I put together for this project.
Case: Rosewill Challenger Black ATX case $49.99
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z77-D3H Intel Motherboard $119.99
CPU: Intel Core i5-3450 Ivy Bridge 3.1GHz Quad-core processor $194.99
GPU: ASUS HD7750-1GD5-V2 Radeon video card $109.99
PSU: Rosewill Green Series RG630-S12 630W 80 PLUS certified power supply $59.99
HDD: Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB hard drive $89.99
Memory: Team Elite 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 SDRAM 1333 Desktop Memory $33.99 -15%
Disk Drive: Samsung 24x DVD Burner (etc.) $17.99
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium OEM 64-bit SP-1 $99.99
All links are to Newegg, because I was able to get everything there for a reasonable amount, and I liked the idea of getting everything at once because I’m lazy, and so on…
After shipping fees and discounts from promo codes, the setup cost came to $766. I already had a mouse, keyboard, monitor, speakers, and a headset, so I didn’t include those in the cost since I didn’t purchase new ones.
For someone like myself, building on a budget, I was able to put together a pretty sweet computer. I didn’t pick up a Solid State Drive to install the OS on, because that would have made the project impossible with my budget, but it’s certainly something I can add at a later date, along with a sound card, if I choose.
While I was doing research on components, compatibility, and so on, I had to use a bit of discretion when it came to parsing through customer reviews of certain items. The video card and the power supply reviews, in particular, tend to vary widely, and everyone claims to be a tech genius, so I had to take things with a grain of salt. There tends to be a lot of elitism, too – lots of epeen-stroking out there when it comes “this sucks, you can’t build a good gaming PC for under a grand” and stuff like that. However, for my purposes, which are admittedly somewhat modest gaming-wise (while also having standards – I want to raid, and raid well, after all), this PC has plenty of computing and graphical power, storage space, and memory (which I can expand by a multiple of 4 from what I have) for playing WoW and any other MMOs I’ll likely play over the next few years.
Thus, on many levels, building this PC has been extremely satisfying. I made a computer for less than $800, learned how to build it myself (and was successful), and, arguably best of all, it’s better than the iMac that I previously used. That iMac was the first model to come with an i5 quad-core processor back in late 2009, and it cost me more than three times as much as this one. Yes, I had the money for it back then, but it was generally a disappointing machine, and had issues that frustrated me early on (and ultimately it died with a fatally corrupt HDD and a mess of a motherboard). Just eyeballing the iMac’s specs the other day, I noted that the processor is much stronger in the new one (obviously) and the GPU in this PC rates much higher performance-wise on Passmark Software’s Videocard Benchmark site than the one that came from Apple.
Anyway, I’m excited about it, and, as I said in my previous post, I can’t wait to take Mists of Pandaria for a spin next Tuesday with it. It also allows me to blog whenever I want to, since I will no longer have to share my girlfriend’s computer, and to take screenshots again, and do everything else I enjoy. It’s great to be back!
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Select resources I used:
Newegg – “How to build a computer” videos: Part 1 – Choosing Your Components; Part 2 – The Build; Part 3 – Installing Windows
Tom’s Hardware – “Build Your Own” resources
Passmark Software’s benchmark resources
Lissana at Restokin has a great post about building an MoP-ready PC that has several resources as well, and I used several of those. (Thanks again Lissana!)
Of course, I also talked with friends and family, as well as Google-ing various other things in the process…
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I was a complete PC-building baby when Sombramuerte first suggested that I build my own, and a lot of thought and research went into this project. I’m completely not an expert, but I was able to accomplish this nonetheless. If you’re thinking of building a new PC, feel free to follow links from here, but talk to others and look up anything you can think of. Building a PC that is capable of handling WoW very well for a decent price is extremely possible – you don’t have to pay a grand and a half to get something that can make for an enjoyable gaming experience.
Next post: back to writing about World of Warcraft!
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PC update #1: I finished building it!
Posted: September 21, 2012 Filed under: Off Topic | Tags: DIY, hunter, Mists of Pandaria, PC, World of Warcraft, WoW Leave a comment »Sorry, this is not a ‘built-your-own-PC’ tutorial. This, however, is.
The parts arrived Wednesday.
I finished building it Thursday morning.
I loaded Windows and the WoW disks last night.
Now, I’m in the middle of downloading the massive gob of updates that is the bulk of what we see in-game today. This is going to take a while.
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So my excitement is tempered very slightly – but only very slightly.
I was originally planning to start the build today or tomorrow, since I didn’t know how soon the parts would arrive. As it turned out, I ordered Monday afternoon, the boxes shipped Tuesday, and I had them in my grubby hands on Wednesday evening when I got home.
I was able to tide my excitement over into Thursday morning, when I proceeded to finish building it before work. My mind was blown. Test boot: success. Complete build: success. Then, work (oh the pain!). The Windows install was relatively painless, and now I’m experiencing the true test of patience, which is all of the WoW patches that will round out the core experience.
With the project finished, I was hoping that today would be a day to download addons and set up my UI, but I’m not going to tackle that before the updates are finished, both because downloading stuff from Curse takes a crazy long time when you’re already downloading something, and because I’m not going to be playing yet, so it’s no big deal. Still, it’s difficult to contain the excitement.
I was able to log in for a short while, although I currently still sit at more than 13GB to go. The game looks amazing, as I expected. I curtailed some of the settings (it wants me to play everything on “High” by default), because I’m not interested in pushing it right now. It looks great at “Good” for most and “Fair” for things like water detail. For now, I’ll run with that, and adjust upward if I decide to. Regardless, considering that the monitor I’m using is a five-year-old flatscreen, the game looks absolutely phenomenal.
I took the hunter down to Crystalsong Forest to kill some wolves. Crystalsong Forest looks phenomenal.
Yeah.
I can’t imagine what Mists of Pandaria is going to look like, but I’m prepared to be blown away, now that this thing is really finally sitting in front of my face!
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I’m building a new PC this week, and not a moment too soon!
Posted: September 17, 2012 Filed under: Off Topic | Tags: DIY, Mists of Pandaria, PC, World of Warcraft, WoW Leave a comment »The end of my computer-less-ness is nigh.
It’s been more than two and a half months since my late-2009 27″ iMac had its fit of apoplexy. In that time, my computer-related entertainment has basically consisted of playing with no addons on my girlfriend’s laptop – and that needs to be replaced as well – when she isn’t playing, and of tweeting from my Vita.
The prospect of replacing the iMac has been complicated by the fact that I needed to find a new job, which is difficult in this economy. I was extremely fortunate to be hired by a friend of mine in late August, and I’ve got some income now.
Back in July, one of my guildies, Sombramuerte, suggested to me that I could get the best value for my money by building my own PC. During the Ulduar days, he built himself a sweet system, and had a blast both building it and using it. And when he found out that my old one had died, he told me that he had recently built a PC fairly cheaply that could handle WoW for his girlfriend to use.
This put the bug in my brain. I spent hours researching the possibilities, because I’ve never built a system from the ground up before, and I had no confidence that I could pull it off. But those hours of study, and several videos, helped me feel better about the idea. So I’ve been putting together a project over the past several weeks, with some advice from both Somb and my father, as well as a well-timed post by Lissana with some helpful resources for building an MoP-ready PC. After some final tweaking this weekend, I was able to order the components today for my project.
Lissana told me that she received her components fairly quickly from both Newegg and Amazon, so I’m hoping they arrive by Thursday; if they do, I can build it on Friday, which is my day off, and start getting software loaded and so on. If I don’t screw up the build or the OS install, it shouldn’t be a problem to get WoW loaded and start configuring addons.
I’m pretty excited about this, even if it doesn’t make for an exciting post, because it will be extremely nice to play on a PC with good graphics and power again. I’ll write an update when things get moving!
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Thanks for reading this post by Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!
