Return of the Gladdstone

   Hey guys! Wow, it's been a while since I posted. I'm really sorry about that, things have been simultaneously super busy and insanely boring at the same time here, and it's killing me. But now with things winding down a bit, I have a little more time to be posting.
   So to get you all caught up on what I've been doing the past two weeks, we'll start in WoW (because Blizzard). Monday or Tuesday of last week, I got an email in my inbox from Blizzard. I think to myself "Oh, a newsletter or something, let's see what they have to say..." WRONG.
   Guess who got their WoD beta invite?
   Awwww yeeeaaaahhhh.

BOOM

   So anyway, after completing the obligatory flipping of shit I immediately logged onto Battle Net and downloaded all the extra crap I needed (leaving less than 4gb of memory on my hard drive. I guess it's about time to do some spring cleaning). Several hours later, because my internet connection is terrible, I was logging into the WoD beta, and then promptly booted out. I struggled with that for about two days before finally getting in. I decided, because my main is on the Alliance side, I would check everything out on the Horde side so as to preserve the fun on my mains a little bit more (not like it won't be fun on my troll shaman still, but ya know). I chose to roll myself a level 90 orc warlock, because I've always wanted a warlock but never really put in the work for one. I figured maybe if I played a level 90 one in the beta that would give me the kick in the pants I needed to finally level one. Which it did, and I am now leveling Finwik, the gnome warlock.
   Anyway, after dealing with all that "how the hell do I play this class?" shit and getting a bit settled, I wandered around for a while trying to figure out how to get to the new content. About an hour later, I finally thought to turn around from the Warchief's Command board and noticed two gargantuan NPCs. Yeah. So I got the quest and went into Draenor and let me just say, everything about this shit is awesome. Everything looks fantastic, you can search your bags now and that is the absolute greatest thing ever, and the new quest log is just fantastic beyond words. I can finally look at the map and keep an eye on what's going on around me. The only thing I would still like to see with the interface is the ability to drag the windows around the screen so I can see certain areas and have more windows open.

Smell that? That's me soiling myself.

   I won't ramble on anymore about that because there is other big news to get to, which is the launch of the new Hearthstone adventure Curse of Naxxramas on Tuesday of this week. I nearly shit my pants in excitement and proceeded to complete all three bosses in just under 2 hours (I'm not very good). I still have both class challenges and the Heroic to do, but I've been saving those for this weekend. To be honest, I may not even be able to do the Heroics because I've been watching streamers like Amaz do them, and it took even him a solid 2 hours to beat Maexxna on Heroic, so we'll see if I can nail down that cardback ever. Suffice it to say, though, Curse of Naxxramas felt absolutely incredible to go through, and if Team 5 keeps up this quality of work for the (long) life of this game, I will be playing this game until the day they shut down the servers and the zombies take over the world.


   San Diego Comic Con is going on this weekend, so you can probably expect a giant news roundup on Monday from all of that, hopefully including some video clips and whatnot. I've never gotten to go, personally, but maybe one of these years that will change.
   I think that about covers everything I wanted to talk about for now, so I'll just leave you all with one last note for Java. Fuck you guys, I do not, nor will I ever want your goddamn Ask toolbar. No one wants it, no one uses Ask, just stop trying. All you're doing is inconveniencing your customers for a few dollars. #rantover.

Tacos,
Gladdstone

WoW and Tchaikovsky

   So I've determined there is just too little going on during the summer, and I am going to cut out Wednesday posts until mid-August when marching band starts-then who knows? I might need to add a fourth post on Saturday just to cover everything.
   It's been an exciting week in World of Warcraft for the newly sprouted Nerds Under Fire guild on Blackwater-Raiders. We just hit level 4 the other day and we say a big uptick in recruitment. With any luck, we'll be pulling together some raiders for a 10-man team soon. The goal is to have everything in place for the release of WoD, however.
   Big news coming out of Hearthstone as well, as the Curse of Naxxramas pricing has been announced. The expansion will be available in five parts with a new wing costing either $6.99 or 700 gold per wing. In addition, for the the first month or so, there will be a launch event during which the first wing will be unlockable for free, after which players can purchase the other four, either individually, or as a package. A guide to the bundle is posted right here.

   To break it down even simpler, all five wings will cost $24.99 for those who don't take advantage of the launch event. For the rest of us it will cost $19.99, $14.99, $9.99, or less depending on if you choose to use gold or not.
   It is important to note that although you may buy all five wings at launch, you will not receive them all immediately. Rather, they will be rolling out at the rate of one wing per week. Upon completion of the the normal tier raid, the Heroic tier will be unlocked for free.
   Back here in the real world, Tiana just returned from her week long art camp up at Pratt University. It sounded pretty amazing. I, on the other hand, have sat home playing WoW, and practicing violin. I'm not even kidding. That has been basically my entire life this week.
   Seriously, that's all I've got to say about that.
   ...
   Well, bye.

Tacos,
Gladdstone

Thanks, Geico

   Happy Wednesday, everybody. I was going to say happy hump day, but that stupid damn insurance commercial has pretty much made it a crime to use the phrase "hump day." Thanks, Geico.

The true face of evil.

   Today was my first official day of summer break and it felt pretty good. It was nice, although I did have to work. They haven't scheduled me to work a Wednesday night in a while, and I forgot how freaking busy it is. I go from work, to my violin lesson, then I come home, write this blog, then there's usually an update to be done on the Nerds Under Fire site, and then there's audio editing to be done, and then I get to go to bed. Today was made even busier because I had a rehearsal before I went to work. So as you might imagine, I'm a bit drained at this point. 

   Regardless, I'm feeling pretty good. If you've been on the site during the day this week, you'll notice things will start to move around every couple minutes, and don't stop for two to three hours. I've been trying to find a layout I like, but I just can't quite seem to nail it down. I've been trying to set up a slider to show my recent posts, but Blogger has been thwarting my every attempt. So if anyone has some helpful tips, or just the code that would be great. 

   In light of the recent lull in Azeroth, I've found myself in Telara in the past few days. For those not familiar, that would be the supposed "WoW killer" Rift which went free to play within a year. 

   Now don't think that I'm slamming the game. It's an excellent game, but I don't like the term "WoW killer." At this point, I really think the only thing that will kill WoW is itself. From my point of view, the only way it will ever die is it will just slowly dwindle out over the course of the next decade or two. Moral of the story-WoW is here to stay for a long, long time.

   Back to Rift, I must say it's really quite good, and they really have an excellent free-to-play model from what I've seen so far. You can pick between two factions, each with three races. From there you can pick from the four base classes-warrior, cleric, mage, and rogue. Now that seems like a small amount to choose from, but from there you can select your "soul." This essentially determines how you play the game. There are four roles in the game-tank, DPS, healer, and support. What's really fascinating about this game, however, is any class can be any role (that is, if you purchase the expansion). Without the expansion, for example, mages can support, DPS, and heal. However, if you purchase their expansion you can tank. 

   Now I'm just going to take a break here to let that sit in.

   Yeah, you read that right.

   Mage.

   Tank.

Remember what happened last time?

   I nearly purchased the expansion right there and I hadn't even gotten into the game yet. 

   Once I was in the game, itself I was quite impressed. Everything runs very smoothly, and the art style, while a little darker than WoW's, it's quite pleasing, and the graphics are extremely good looking, even on the lower settings. 

   I haven't even leveled beyond the starting zone yet, so you can expect a lot more to come, but I certainly expect to play a lot more of this game over the summer, especially seeing as it's more accessible to my friends that can't afford the $15 a month to play WoW. I highly recommend this game.

   Hope to see everyone back for Friday!

Tacos,

Gladdstone

Geek Council

   Ah, what a week. Busy, busy, busy. But here we are at long last, the promised day-Friday. And what a glorious Friday it is, because I am here to announce my latest project, several weeks in the making.
   But first, let's get y'all caught up with what I've been doing since Wednesday. Thursday was an exciting day, although not much went on during the day itself. I went to school, went to work, blah, blah, blah. But later that night I was invited to join some of my guildies in Reported For Awesome in some flex raids. I had never healed with my shaman anywhere but LFR, but I decided, why the hell not? And all in all, I think it went pretty well. We did it a bit backwards, but we ended up clearing about half the raid (we actually started with Garrosh) and I got two 540 drops, which were pretty good upgrades for my shaman, seeing as he's only existed for a few weeks. Either way, it was a ton of fun, so shout out to them, and I hope I get invited back soon.
   Today wasn't the best day ever, at first, but it got better. I got woken up by the sound of my mother barreling into my room. Apparently she had been locked out of the house for a half hour, and her knocking had not awoken me. She was therefore forced to call my grandfather to get her in. So that was fun.
   As you might imagine, I was pretty irritable all morning, until I got my hands on a computer to do some work on this blog. As you may have noticed, I have a new page up called Overheard Poetry. Essentially, what I intend to do with this is take little snippets of conversation I hear going about my own life, and sew them together to form brief poems. I find it fairly exciting, and a fun way to get myself more into people watching. That page won't have set update days, though so be sure to check back often to see what I've overheard. Could be profound, could be poop jokes. Most likely the latter.
   That was basically the highlight of my day until I went over to Nate's house to hang with the group for a while. I got there as they were finishing a Halo match (Charlie proved quite proficient at this, surprisingly, despite lack of experience) and we decided to play Cards Against Humanity. You can imagine how that went.
   We were also gonna play Munchkin, but it got late and we decided to call it a night. We may do that tomorrow night, actually, but we'll have to wait and see. Either way, it was a really great night, and I enjoyed getting to spend some time with my friends who, because of my schedule, I don't get to see very often.
   Well, now that you're all caught up, I think it's time for the big unveiling. Airing tomorrw will be the first ever episode of my new podcast, called Geek Council.
   I'll break it down for you. It's going to be a rotation-based podcast in which I will act as the host. Every week we will rotate in a new guest from the usual suspects, possibly with the occasional guest you may not have heard of on here before. The podcast will feature some really excellent news, and geek related topics, as well as spoiler-free (mainly) reviews of all the things you hold near and dear! Also featured will be a segment that will change depending on our guest that week. I'll leak one now, as it is participation based. We will have an advice segment, so what we want you to do is send us questions, and my guest and I will do our very best to try and not make it worse. Pretty sweet deal, right? Yeah it is!
   That's all I'm telling for now, so you'll have to check it out tomorrow night to see more!

Tacos!
Gladdstone

Steampunk Curious

   SAT scores were released the other day, and I'm not sure how I feel. I didn't quite break 2,000 and I'm considering retaking it. Call me a perfectionist, but my writing score was kind of pitiful. Didn't even break 600. I don't have far to go, either. And I won't be going in blind this time (I didn't study, sue me) so I think I could probably break through to the 2,000's fairly easily.
   Yesterday was a busy day. After school I had to get down to the C-Lab for a robotics meeting. Nik and I are in charge of the website (we're not really hardware guys). For the past week I've been working on an animated rectangular prism that displayed a different picture on each side which is connected to a button. You hit the button, it displays the side. It took two hours to integrate, but I finally managed to get the damn thing working properly and I simply couldn't have been more excited. It is easily the most complex thing I've ever coded (not saying a lot).

   This was, of course all in time for the robotics team director to inform us not 5 minutes after I had everything working that next week we were to begin work on rebuilding the site. From scratch. Now, I know I can just cut and paste the code, but seriously. I've put a lot of work in these past couple weeks. Of course, I can't really be upset about this. Truth be told, it's a great opportunity to learn more about coding and how it works, because as it stands, my knowledge is still fairly rudimentary. All in all, should be at the very least an interesting experience, if not a downright hilarious disaster.
   Today was a fairly busy day, to say the least. I managed to completely miss lunch working on a project for English, and then I was beaten in arm wrestling by a pretty girl in my math class. Thoroughly emasculating. I ended up eating my lunch in the band room 9th period during my study hall (I should have been practicing, but food), and reading Christie Golden's new book War Crimes. I must say, that book is shaping up to quite possibly beat out Arthas for my favorite book of hers. Once I finish it, I will of course post a full review (I'll give some warning at least two days in advance for those wishing to avoid spoilers). I also had a presentation to make for a research project I've been working on, followed immediately by a violin lesson. It's been determined I will most likely need a new violin for college auditions.
   Now, I must say, there are some who might call me sentimental. I love my violin dearly, and I've also named him-Watson. For I am his Sherlock. He's my first instrument I've ever owned and we've been through a lot together. I can't say I'm not a little saddened knowing he won't be able to see me through my auditions, but I certainly won't be trading him in. Not only is he not a particularly expensive violin, but I just can't bear to part ways with him. He'd be lost without his blogger. So with me he shall stay. Maybe not on the front lines, but always there for practice time.
   I've found myself getting into steampunk recently. A few years ago I started to dabble, but never got much farther than carrying around a couple pocket watches. I do love pocket watches, something about them is so elegant and lovely to look at. Now that I think of it, I really should get my good silver one touched up. It's gotten a bit scratched, and I think a little love would do it some good. Maybe I'll even start carrying it again. Might be fun to mix up my wardrobe a little bit, at least.

Maybe not this much

Tacos,

Gladdstone

P.S. Don't forget to check back for my exciting announcement Friday!

Wicked Cool Weekend

Celebratory Bulbasaur!

   BAM. Friday post! Lookie what I did! I am here, it is a Friday, and this post is happening right here, right now.
   The past two days have been really nice, quite relaxing. Thursday was the junior class trip, and I elected to stay home (my classes were going to be empty, anyway). I got quite a lot done. I practiced Beethoven's 5th Sonata quite a bit, as well as my double stops.
   I also played a fair amount of Hearthstone, but I didn't make much headway in the ranks. I'm still fielding the same general shaman deck as I was before. I'm not sure what the issue is with it, but it seems to have a 50-50 win rate. I just need something to bump it into that 51-50 win rate, so that I can at elast move forward, albeit slowly. If anyone's feeling particularly like helping, contact me on Twitter or the like and I'll be happy to share my deck list with you.
   In the World of Warcraft, my troll shaman finally broke 500 item level through LFR, and I'm into Siege of Orgrimmar at long last. Not to say that I don't enjoy that raid, but honetly, it feels a little underwhelming. Let's just see what it's competing against. Last expansion, during the final raid we rode on Deathwing. We rode a fricking dragon and busted armor off of him! We then stood on a lava, rocky terrain and fought off all kinds of massive evil monsters until we finally slayed an ASPECT. Now let's back up to Wrath of the Lich King. The Lich King. Arthas. He had some of the absolute coolest backstory in WoW. There is no feeling that could compare to the first time I brought him down. WotLK was the expansion that I first came in during, and I worked really hard to get to Icecrown Citadel. The whole fight, vent was just on fire. People were screaming at each other, tensions were super high, and we were just channeling all this rage at the Lich King. Suddenly, BOOM. He's down. The server just completely explodes. It was just insane, nothing has ever been able to compare to what I felt in that moment.
   Today I actually got out and did some stuff for a change. Hahaha. No, seriously! I helped my grandfather open up his pool for the season. It was pretty nasty when we first started, but there was something really pleasing about scraping the algae off of the pool because it covered literally the entire pool, so there was just little streaks of light blue (the pool lining). I also had to work tonight, which wasn't too bad, surprisingly.
   But now to the big news. Guess who's going to see Wicked tomorrow? On Broadway???

This guy!

   That's right! Tomorrow morning, I will rise at 7am and drive to New York City. I will have lunch, and then my mother, my grandmother, my sister, and I will all go to see my all-time favorite musical. I can't wait!

   Speaking of which, it's getting late, so I should be off to bed. 

Tacos,

Gladdstone

My Homie, Vivaldi

   Ugh...Mondays. Never fun.
   It doesn't help that my apparently incredibly sadistic chemistry teacher always schedules his quizzes for Mondays. I mean, it's not a difficult subject, but come on. Common courtesy, am I right?
   Anyway, interesting weekend. I went on that community college tour, and as much as I'd like the extra two years with a couple friends, it's kind of a crap hole. I don't think it very likely that I go there. I didn't even get a chance to check out their music/arts building. Not only could we not find it, but we couldn't even get a second to talk to the arts representative at their little presentation area. She just stood there for 30 minutes talking to these two guys, so eventually I gave up and we left.
   Nik seems pretty excited to go there. Despite the crappy school itself, they actually have some pretty cool activities going on there. His dad works at the college and runs the paintball club, so there's always that if I do choose to go there for a year or two. I really need to meet the violin teacher there before I do, though. I can't risk getting stuck with a teacher who is going to make me hate my instrument.
   So just tonight someone introduced me to the musical genre of alternative rock. I did not think I would care much for it, as I tend to be a bit of a Vivaldi, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, etc kind of guy, but I do really like the bands Fall Out Boy and Sleeping With Sirens. Dance, Dance by Fall Out Boy really struck a chord (ba-dum tsss) with me. Not sure why, but I liked that song, as well as the music video. As I type this, I'm listening to Pandora and The Anthem by Good Charlotte just came on, and damn I really like this song.

Antonio got all the bitches.

   I did get quite a lot done in WoW this weekend. I decided to finally use my 90-boost on a troll shaman on Wyrmrest Accord. Currently I'm gearing him up to be an alternate healer for my guild's raid teams. I've never healed outside LFR before, so this should be an interesting experience.

   I'm really enjoying the resto shaman play style, but I must say, I was really overwhelmed when I first boosted. They just sort of drop you in. I really wish there had been some sort of Death Knight like area to learn your class in, and I imagine we'll see that when the expansion is actually released. It seems like they would have to, because even as a veteran on Azeroth I was intimidated by the amount I had to learn. If the purpose of this is to help get new players in the game, the learning curve could prove a massive obstacle.
   My only other complaint regarding the 90-boost is you don't get any flight paths. You have to go run your freaking ass off and pick them up as you happen to wander by. This drives me nuts because I am incredibly lazy and use flight points instead of my own mounts quite a lot. So that is a gigantic time suck. The Timeless Isle has proven my best friend these past few days, as it has really helped me get geared and basically jump straight into LFR after just a few heroic dungeon runs to learn my rotations.
   More on this will be incoming as I start to get settled in. Until Wednesday!

Tacos,
Gladdstone