O hi. I almost forgot I have this, but, uh, yeah.

Last month, I was levelling my cow priest via random dungeon finder, and idling in Org while waiting to get dropped into another group. I had Gurren Lagann running on my secondary monitor as background noise, and I tabbed over to check TweetDeck when all of a sudden everything froze up and closed, and I see something that resembled but clearly WASN’T Windows Security Center throwing a shitfit over “blahblahblah.sys can’t open, please click to activate Privacy Protection” while running some sort of scanner. What the hell was this and why wasn’t AVG crapping its pants, too? One groin-kick reboot (my term for pressing the tiny restart button on Blastoise’s case) later… and, yeah, still in “lolololol Privacy Protection” panic mode.

Oh crap. Blastoise just got torpedoed. Nothing I could do but to shut him off.

I could have just dug up his Windows 7 disc and did an OS reinstall… but why? Since August, when I cashed out my crappily-performing CD from the credit union (which I NEVER should have let my stepfather talk me into because the interest rate sucks ass), I was already planning out Blastoise’s rebuild. Dood was already past his 4th year and that’s historically been as long as I could stretch a machine between rebuilds, but I was hoping to do the rebuild after Black Friday so I could take advantage of the sales. The timing of Blastoise getting torpedoed sucks, but I opted to wait until Black Friday rather than order his parts on the spot. It would leave me without a true gaming rig for a week or so, but I was sure I could repurpose Yggdrasil (my media server) as a temporary gaming rig for any raids that would go down until I could get Blastoise’s new body rebuilt.

That worked… to moderate success. There was a Firelands raid for Kopii Yoshi and I logged in from Yggdrasil. Imagine, if you will, FF4’s FuSoYa borrowing Kain’s helmet and spear, because that’s pretty much what I had to do— transfer over Blastoise’s keyboard/mouse (because nobody in their right mind would ever think of using a Logitech diNovo Mini for gaming) and headset, and slap Vent on the old man. It was awkward to cram the huge keyboard and mouse on this weeny little rolling table (which is barely big enough to hold my MacBook, mouse and a small drink) and Yggdrasil had what I would call “senior moments” in which his framerate would go to crap for a few minutes. But at least he could hold things together.

As Blastoise’s new parts came in… well, there was something I’d tossed in for Dinah the MacBook— a RAM upgrade. As part of the Black Friday sales, some types of RAM were given very generous price drops, and Dinah fell into that pile. It costs more to order pizza than to boost her to 4 GB. XD And, well… that upgrade is invisible in terms of effects on normal operations (firefox and such) but it was a HUGE shot in the arm for her WoW installation. Before, it was barely usable: I could, at best, use the auction house and mailbox and MAYBE wade through dailies, but forget about even 5-mans.

BUT… after I shoved the 4GB into Dinah? Holy cow crap. 5-mans? No problem! 10-mans are fine too! And as I would find out tonight, even 25-mans in Raid Finder didn’t kill my framerate much, even with spells flying everywhere. MacBooks kick ass! This really made me glad that I decided to go this route last year when I replaced Dinah the aging Windows laptop. :D Although Blastoise will no doubt be taking back his role as my main gaming rig, I now know that Dinah can easily step up in the future if I should be away from home but need to log into WoW anyhow.

Now all of Blastoise’s parts are here… it’s just that I keep getting interrupted or that I oversleep… or both, really. And then I end up running out of daylight, and I would really prefer not to be staying up to babysit installations. Tomorrow (Saturday) I don’t have anything booked, so I should be able to unbox, build and boot Blastoise all in one go.

—-

RAID FINDER. I was skeptical about this, but… well, having waded through a bunch of PuG 25-man ICC groups on Draenor, how bad could it really be? And this run was going to be dominated by Lazy Peons anyway. It went very, very smoothly, and gave me flashbacks of Pikmin. XD

Speaking of Draenor… I need to yank my brother and boss off Skyrim so we can run this stuff. I also need to reverse-copy my talent build and chants from Kopii Yoshi onto normal Yoshi. :P

I’ve not played around with transmogging and void storage yet, though… Kopii Yoshi doesn’t have much old tier gear, but normal Yoshi does… but I don’t really care to transmog either of them. Rather, I’d much prefer to transmog Phil and Kopii Phil when the latter is ready. BC-era priest tier sets look badass!

On Khadgar server, a Kopii Yoshi wanders in the Bastion of Twilight. Two successful runs thus far— three if last week’s raid hadn’t been cancelled, boo— and this time she got a minor upgrade to her offhand (Book of Binding Will). Still need a new hat like crazy, and the shoulders could stand an upgrade as well, to fix my bothersome low ilvl. :P

I started to doze off shortly before my raid group reached Cho’gall, though… and while this group normally does BoT and BWD back to back, that was not the case this time. In this case, this was probably a good thing, ahaha. Dood, I managed to stay normal-coherent enough to make it through the last boss fight without botching anything, so I can call that a win, I guess. (Bad enough I’m “Yoshi the Narcoleptic” on Draenor… I’ll not have that title follow me to Khadgar >_>)

Also: RealID grouping for the Dungeon Finder widget is going to remain free. Yessss. Now… I just need more friends who consistently play Alliance, because like hell am I throwing Yoshi (or Phil… or anyone else) in alone for LFD, especially for ZA/ZG groups. Not with how Draenor (well, the Cyclone battlegroup as a whole) tends to breed impatient boo jackasses that go and clog up the queues with their jerkface nonsense. :| I should bug Pigeon and others about dragging me with…

Derp. With boss gone for the foreseeable future, and my brother being just as flaky, I’ve been alt-ing it up as Kopii Yoshi on Khadgar server. Nice guild is niiiiiice. She’s already raid-viable, I just need to get her foot in the door.

…and wow, has it really been 8 months since I last did current-content raiding? Still kinda miffed I could never get Kingslayer. Maybe when boss and bro and others wander back we should try to 5-man ICC. (ahahahahaha)

But yeah, in the meantime I stick my finger into the Horde pool. Once I reload my magic coin block I’ll probably punt my Tauren twins (Mauriska the DK and Auriska the druid) over to Khadgar too, since it doesn’t look like bro plans to roll any Horde alts on Draenor. :|

Horde quests are pretty damn hilarious. So many instances of Grand Theft Everything. (ESPECIALLY when Goblins are involved.) Alliance is good if you like lore and drama, but if you want to laugh? You know where to go. :)

Summer is boo right now. I have this awful mystery bug that has given me a cough, the headache from hell and has further dropped my stamina. Oh, what I would give for a RL “Cure Disease” power right now… especially because I need to get to the credit union to break out a crappy CD that I stupidly let Evil Stepfather talk me into. (“They don’t have a website… it’s just some tiny building with a couple doods in the back, this makes me uncomfortable for some reason.” “Oh, they’re too good for websites!” Way to make phone-phobic me feel a LOT better, boo jackass.)

Ahem…

The other reason summer sucks? Everyone decides to just bail. Boss has vanished yet again without explanation, and bro doesn’t log in as much because it gets too hot where his computer is. The latter is forgivable (well, to a point… it’s EASILY fixed by coming over and taking one of our portable air purifier-what-zits, which has the added benefit of making the immediate area EXTREMELY COLD), but boss’s frequent disappearances is starting to bug me on an administrative level. He and a couple other guildies are of the mindset that they don’t need to monitor their account status to stay aware of when their game time is about to expire… which is fine, except boss is the freaking guild master, and if he’s going to do that and disappear for long blocks of time without telling anyone, he should at least put measures in place to make sure at least one other person has nearly-full access to the gbank and guild admin so we won’t be entirely screwed. (Of course, this also assumes my brother stops acting like a skinflint dumbface and either gets a freaking Authenticator or lets me buy him one so boss will give all his alts their rank back.) Can you tell I really have a thing against irresponsible people who don’t plan ahead? Especially those in positions of leadership?

Maybe I should be a bit more forceful in asking for promotion… like that will work. Boss will just “Lulz” and go about his business. -_-;

So, in the meantime, and mostly because I got sick of dealing with jerkasses in LFD ZA/ZG groups (good lord I’ve never seen people get so pissy, not even in raids!) I wandered over to my Blood Elf alt on Khadgar, Koyoshial! (Or, as her “true name” would be, Kopii Yoshi.) I’m finding that LFD groups over there are… actually nice people! Maybe it’s just luck? On top of that, the guild she’s in (Lazy Peons) is awesome; a couple doods who duo lowbie raids for lulz and profits have been carting me along for the past couple days and also running Northrend instances. :D She dinged 80 yesterday, so it’s just a matter of slogging it up to 85 and loading up on gear so I can finally make myself useful. :P