Three things, doods:

1) Dinah dinged lv. 80. Awesome! And… literally the day after? The aging laptop she was named after was replaced by a MacBook. Now, before you Apple haters get all up in my face, I’ve had the Apple taint on me for quite some time— since junior high school, in fact— and this was bound to happen at some point. I’ve used ‘em off and on since then and had wanted one of my own, it’s just that until now they were either ridiculously expensive and couldn’t run everything I needed to. I just happened to pick a really good year to make the jump since the ‘10 refresh is several hundred kinds of win. (I originally wanted a MacBook Pro, but the only difference between the 13-inch MBP and the MacBook of the same size was… oh, $300, a firewire port and a card reader. (2gb RAM, too, but I can fix that on the cheap later.) Once you get past how MacBooks look like toys— and I promise you that thought lasts less than five minutes— you would agree that they are stupidly adorable. Of course, this means I will have to overhaul her “Avatar Dinah” design to give her white ninja gear… :D

Really, to get a Windows machine with everything I wanted would have cost just as much (many of the so-called “cheap” laptops have crap for graphics chipsets… lol Intel “integrated” garbage). So… why not? I’ve been able to get Mac versions or suitable replacements for just about everything I’d pack on Blastoise or Yggdrasil (though Painter proves to be a little… elusive *cough*).

Dinah’s new body can run WoW VERY well… in fact, she can go to Ultra with almost no lag, but I keep her at the next notch down since I tend to have podcasts and such playing in the background.

2) I am… amused by how Blizzard has been rolling out Cataclysm— dripping it out in small glops rather than one huge hammer to the face. INTERESTING. To this end, and because I love space goats…

Enter Hynderia, space goat warrior!

That name had been bugging me for weeks. As you can tell by the post title, it sounds like something out of a “Tales of” game. But it isn’t… I’m not sure if she’s supposed to be a Draenei port of Hikaru or a WoW-exclusive, but she’s a badass freaking space goat who will smash you in the FACE. >:} She’s using Rei’s old BoA shoulders for now until I pile up enough tournament seals to get the plate versions.

Sitting at level 28 as of this writing, playing the new lowbie quests… strangely reminds me of the earlier parts of the very first Breath of Fire, in which HOLY CRAP you actually had to solo a couple of dungeons, and afterwards you’d get this hokey-yet-cute little party in your honor before moving onto the next city. :) Hynderia is very much a “I chop things and we win? I can handle that!” sort. While she’s not like Leslie in that she can’t quite heal herself (well, outside of Victory Rush and Gift of the Naaru), I’m hard-pressed to recall how many times I’ve faceplanted so far.

3) I never did get Kingslayer. Booooooo. It’s possible that after the expansion drops, provided enough people come wandering back we might be able to try a 10-man ICC as a guild… I’m not holding my breath though.

I got very very close through a “friend of the guild” run, though… but it wasn’t meant to be, on several fronts. Turns out they were secretly “auditioning” me and two other guildies who were coming along so they could draft us. I want Kingslayer, but I don’t want it bad enough to ditch my brother’s guild over it, even if I knew that I could go back. It just feels evil that way. :( (Plus, it would totally bork up guild rep when that gets switched on.)

First, “third-zerging” Sindragosa = no, does not work, ohgod my repair bill. (“third-zerging” in this case being “only let one person at a time be an ice block, don’t bother dropping stacks and just nuke the everloving smoo out of Sindy in the meantime) Oddly enough, this runs counter to all my previous Sindragosa posts that painted her as the Ridley of WoW.

…well, she IS, but more like Meta Ridley than X-Ridley in that the fight is not a clusterfwegh of DPS and you actually have to think about positioning at some point.

ANYWAY…

Hello, Frozen Throne. I’ve only seen it once before, on Leslie… and very briefly at that. This raid group wants Kingslayer as much as I do, to the point where we’re considering extending the lock until we walk away with that title and Mr. Lich King’s ice cream. That bastard, walking around with tasty chocolate chip scourge-y dough!

Phase 1 is simple enough… somewhat reminiscent of Rotface with the having to hoof it over to the OT when you get slapped by Necrotic Plague. With this group, the first transition is more like “everyone pile up and DPS the crap out of the adds ASAP,” also pretty easily done. Phase 2, though…

DEFILE. At last we meet. The bane of a Kingslayer’s existence… and literally a pool of gray goo. Seriously, what is it? Scourge poo? Rotten ice cream? Melted tire rubber?

My brother is often on an alt but able to listen in on the shenanigans. I’m convinced he’s eating popcorn. Munch away, you smug fool… even if I have to share my Kingslayer title with two (awesome) guildies, you shall pooh-pooh me no more! :P

Finally: Dinah the Ninja Jeweler. At last, raking in a small profit on a daily basis. Not only will this get me MOAR PROFIT, but will also pay for her next flight training and her second Sky Pop (seriously, Engineer flying machines are freaking Sky Pops from Super Mario Land). >:D

*putt-putt*

Hi. Dinah dinged 60 earlier today (she’s now almost 62). And as any self-respecting robo-night elf ninja would do, she built herself a little flying machine. It’s so cute. :D It reminds me of the Sky Pop from Super Mario Land, in a way.

Once Dinah hits 65 and can max out Jewelcrafting… ohh yes, she’s gonna be raking in the profits for sure. Bwahahahaha~

I’d left Dinah to charge for awhile so after I’d finished my randomsauce (and even got in on my first raid since 4.0.1 hit), it became NINJA HAPPY HOUR. She went from 47 to 50 (mostly in Searing Gorge) and, more importantly, I binge-leveled her jewelcrafting and engineering. Oh sweet mother of SMOO I always forget why I should never do that… I was supposed to go to bed around, what, 2am and now it’s almost 7. Ouch.

I’d a huge pile of adamantium ore piled up on Leslie from when she was doing Netherwing dailies, so I dumped it all onto Dinah for prospecting so now she has a happy little stack of lesser BC jewels to play with and turn around for a tiny profit. Wee~

Really, though, what I should be doing during the day is drawing (or better yet, cleaning my room in preparation to move my bed so I don’t tweak my neck to use Yggdrasil the Media Server… who himself is more than a decent WoW box). Otherwise I idle in trade waiting for raids that don’t happen and I end up falling asleep at the keyboard. That’s not good on several levels. I leave Painter open on Blastoise as a sort of ribbon-on-finger but then when I come back later, I forget why I had Painter open to begin with, click out and log into WoW anyway. Boo this Yoshi! :P

My brother finally wandered back ingame. I thought it would make me happy… now I don’t know. He had oral surgery and didn’t tell me, and probably would have canned his account without as much as saying goodbye if it weren’t for the surgery (which will have him off work for awhile) and impending Cataclysm. I should really cut him a break because oral surgery is a bitch, but at the same time, I have very, very serious issues with people who cut and run without a word. Yes, even if you’re family, going perma-AWOL gets you on my bad list VERY QUICKLY. If you can’t even be arsed to say farewell, did you even care in the first place? How little are we worth to you if that’s the case…? And this on top of finding out my brother more or less foisted me on Boss so he could go raid with some other guild… It’s so depressing…

(Hi, I’m Yoshi and I have abandonment issues.)

Hallow’s End starts up this week, though! I can get that item that Boss likes to fling about, the one that gives people pumpkin heads. Man, he must have a ton of those piled up, given how casually he throws ‘em around. XD

I can’t leave well enough alone. I was going to let Dinah charge to maximum rested EXP before I trot her out for levelling, but I had this ridiculous compulsion to crank up her Engineering and Jewelcrafting… which are REDONKULOUSLY expensive to level. :| Not only that, it’s also soooo time-consuming when you factor in having to log other alts to pass materials and such around. Ah…

And what do I have? A crapload of Elemental Fires. This is where I go all Beavis and Butthead and… yeah. (I’m trying to imagine a Night Elf chick doing the whole “Fire! Fire! Fire!” chant… I can’t. XD)

Welp, she’s at 300 on both and therefore sitting pretty until I ding 50 and can unlock the Outland recipes… that will actually be somewhat useful to me and other guildies around that level.

As for my 80s, I’ve been lazy in raiding this week, mostly so I could pile up monies and make ICC shoes for guildies. There is talk of trying to, at long last, put together something resembling an ICC guild run— yes, Shattered Knights, which has issues filling 5-mans, doing ICC 10 guild runs! Hah! (Well, guild runs as in “still half-PuG but at least the other half will be us!”) Leslie did, however, get a new hat… which of course you can’t see because I turn off helmets for everyone but Dinah, but that’s pretty much it… Hm. Maybe this week will be more productive on that end.

No, really. See? Look at my horse, my horse is AMAZING.

I pulled more than an all-nighter blasting through… what, 5 levels on Dinah (the Night Elf Rogue, not the ninja laptop) so I could get her to level 40 and unlock the better ground mounts. I’d passed a mess of Wintergrasp honor tokens over from my 80s so Dinah could therefore pile up enough honor points to get the black war horse… not, of course, that she PVPs or anything, but it just looks that awesome.

She’s packing the BoA shoulders and sword+dagger… haven’t decided if I’m going to get her the body armor yet. So far I’ve only upgraded the rest of Dinah’s armor if I can do it as one of those pseudo-set pieces, and they still look pretty awesome and ninja-like. One thing’s for sure, though… that red Defias mask? I’m freaking wearing that until 80, stats (and Boss bitching) be damned. >:(

And now to let Dinah charge her EXP bars for a nice, looooooong time.