A Musical Interlude

And now, Herbie Hancock makes a song with John Mayer in it:


And now, Aquanote remixes Zero 7's old tune:


And now, the European intro to House MD - different due to copywrite law.


.....what, you want text too?

I'm Writing My Brother A Letter

Edit: DON'T BELIEVE IN YOURSELF.
BELIEVE IN ME WHO BELIEVES IN YOU.




Music comes first this post because these words go with sound.
For lack of proper subject matter, I've just been writing till I run out of things to say.

Anyone who claims to either read or write while using public transportation has obviously never ridden the Maui Bus.
This will not be a diatribe railing against public transportation - The majority of my experiences on buses have been pleasantly neutral. Even my short 2-hour forays up to Bellingham via greyhound bus were never anything more than tedious.
In fact, I actually like taking the bus twice daily. It is a step up from being driven (which is nice, should I require feeling independent), and yet it requires zero effort on my part. I count on the half hour down the hill to provide spare time for rest or homework, both of which I get in small quantities. I am more ambivalent about the return trip. The bus system is new and still working out kinks - The only route from downtown to Hali'imaile passes first through Pukalani and Makawao. It is twice as long a ride up as down, and I'm usually tired and bored.

I am somewhat disappointed that I have yet to experience true public transportation horror stories. Not once have I been struck in the ribs by a chinese grandmother. A hobo has never accosted any of my five physical senses. No drunken brawls, or even drunken passengers.
The buses are all relatively pristine, new as they are.
The seats are padded, with seat belts. The air conditioning functions. Not one thing smells of urine.
I'm only complaining a little - I'm more reliant on this boring system than I'd like to admit.
It's a dollar each way, which means either I've spent.....over 200 dollars on travel in half a year, or my cribbed math is incorrect. I'm not sure which one would bother me more. 200 dollars is a lot of money, right?

The lore I could go into pertaining the World of Warcraft Dragonflights would take up a hefty few pages. My interest has increased after immersing myself in the quests of the Dragonblight, an area where ancient dragons came to die (Go look back at my Red Drake pictures. Lotta bones. Heavy stuff.), and after pledging myself in the service of Alexstrasza the Life Binder in order to be gifted with said drake -
OH GOD IT'S SO FUN THIS GAME I LOVE IT LIKE CRACK
Anyway, uh, I got another one. This one is also rare. Shit happens to fall in my lap in WoW this time around. This time it's from the Bronze Dragonflight, Stewards of Time.
Yeah, see, the Dragons of WoW were created by the Titans, the makers of the world. Each Flight, each Aspect was assigned a specific concept of Azeroth to watch over.

Like I said, the lore is long and potentially tedious. Don't even get my started on PROTO drakes. What IS important is naming conventions, now that I have a real goddamn drake collection forming. See, most full Dragons follow certain naming conventions, taking after their leading Aspect. This isn't always guaranteed, there are plenty of unique named dragons, but the "royalty" -so to speak- form a pattern.

Red names tend to end in -strasza if female, or -strasz if male. (Alexstrasza, Korialstrasz)
Blue males end in -gos, females in -gosa. (Malygos, Tyrygosa)
Bronze dragon males end in a variant of -mu, females in -mi. (Nozdormu, Soridormi)
Green is more shifting, but usually follows females ending in -ra, males ending in -us or -s (Ysera, Itharius)
Black dragons, fickle as they are, follow little pattern, but high ranking males end in -ion and females in -ia. (Onyxia, Sartharion)

GOD HOW COOL IS ALL OF THIS SHIT.

There Are 95 Dollar One Way Tickets To Australia

This will be exciting.


This will be sweet.


I am keeping busy.

Epi(c)logue

I made a new friend.

And by "made" I mean "ground out this reputation for a solid week". And by "new friend" I mean giant fucking red dragon.










I have a giant fucking red dragon. Like, as a mount.

P.S. By The Way I Totally Lied.

THE AGE OF MADNESS
What I failed to mention is that some time in between WotLK dropping and me losing my Death Knight, I convinced William (Sealgaire/Kazimier) to roll another DK with me - Thats the thing about this new Hero class, you want to do all three specs at once. Blizzard sort of realized this, and made all three fairly equal in terms of DPS and Tanking, with a few specializations. Blood is, naturally, focused on melee combat and self-healing. Frost is all about control, mitigation, and insane burst DPS. Unholy is probably some gay shit like diseases, AOE, and spell control, but you couldn't pay me to go Unholy. Too much micromanagement. No, my DK Nemain was Frost all the way.
Anyway, William rolled Zekiel, the undead troll motherfucker from hell. I think he was going blood, or unholy, he couldn't make up his mind because he's a tool who doesn't play as much as he should because he has this, like, girlfriend, or job, or something, i.e. he's a big queer.
This was the only real part I felt bad about regarding losing my WoW life. I had basically convinced William to buy WotLK and start playing again, mainly because we could be partners in crime - only to get shit on by fate a week later, leaving him stranded.
And infected. Welcome to Northrend, Zekiel, you'll be staying for some time.
Yeah, the poor bastard decided to actually just keep playing WoW, and soon he got his DK to 80 and began transforming him into a sort of hardened crystal version of Frost, like in X-Men 3 when Iceman turned all awesome. The point is he's a tank, he takes hits like a tank should.
(Authors Note: For those of you who don't WoW, warriors, paladins, druids, and death knights can all tank. This requires having high HP and Armor, some aggro generating abilities, and any pertinent mixture of Dodge, Parry, Block, and Expertise - along with having enough Hit Rating to never miss the boss. Typically each class has their strengths - Warriors are the most versatile, with many abilities. Druid tanks could reach insane levels of dodge and armor, Paladins could block six mobs at once, etc.)
Here's the problem. Here's how Deathknights hold aggro: They do so much damage the mob gets angry. No "taunt", no shield blocking. They just go fucking crazy. When I was in ConOver, if you fell below the tank on the damage meters, your ass got gkicked, and then you got made fun of for being so goddamn terrible.
Anyway, with Djinn and I gone, Zekiel was the only one of us playing. Every now and then he'd say something like "lol tanked a 10-man VoA", and I would get a shock realizing I had NO IDEA what the hell he was talking about. There were acronyms I didn't know. When I went on World of Raids to read patch notes, I was completely lost.
I felt like an old man, shaking his cane angrily at the neighbors kids.
My entire vault of knowledge - primarily as a warlock - was nullified. The spell rotations I knew were outdated, because there were new spells. Now Affliction did more damage than Destro, Haste rating changed everything, and the felhunter was worth a good goddamn.
It was a terrible feeling, this slow loss of relevance. So I just didn't think about it (my favorite strategy!)
Until now, of course. It was only a matter of time before I got ensnared again. I had never even seen Northrend - there was a treasure trove of new content merely a zeppelin ride away.
I mean, I still had Firenz....
But that was it. I had Firenz, this druid I was sick of, with a bank full of outdated mats and no gold. Everything of value had been sent over to my other account, which is probably servicing some guy in Saipan as I write this.
And I was, to a certain extent, spoiled fucking rotten. I had been the fucking BEST, god damn it, I killed Illidan! Like, 20 times! I had 13,000 gold, I had the fastest mount in the game, I had it all!
Starting again from the bottom was unthinkable. Even levelling a new DK - I had literally just done that, grinding mining skill and all. I couldn't even sacrifice Firenz to the gods for a new account, because he was 70, and people were already trading 80's around.
So I did what I always do in situations such as these: I let my natural aura sort of suffuse around the globe, and waited for someone to provide what I needed for me.
Did I mention that Caleb's roommate Tyler had an account a few years ago? Oh, he stopped playing after a few months, but it was long enough to level a warlock to 60 - on Tich, no less. A Forsaken Male Warlock, name of Silthris. Somehow we all got the account info to it, and it never went unactivated, so it just became the group pack mule. Needed to run your alt through WC? Dualbox on Silthris. He was a green machine to be sure, but he was a warlock - at 60, thats really all you needed.
When TBC came out, whenever William was a poor ass and couldn't afford Sealgaire, he'd go level Silthris because it was free. I'm sure he had big plans for a warlock, or something. Anyway, somehow, he got to lvl 70. Still had greens, no gold, and no flying mount.
And then, because William's a glutton for fucking punishment - I honestly have no recollection of when/how this happened, it might have been last year during my initial time in Pandora or something, he levelled a male BE Paladin. On Tich. From scratch. Like, to level 67.
It was just one day, I logged on, "Oh hey Will, how's that paladin of yours HARTICUS IS IN ZANGARMASH WHAT?". I think he secretly logged on while all of us were asleep, or maybe he just had a lot of Rare Candies stockpiled. It's a mystery.
Eventually he got tired, or the real William returned from Dimension X and deactivated his robot doppleganger, and left the account to rust - with two shit geared, piss poor near-70 characters, a lock and a paladin.
I may have had something to do with this, what with my sinister whispering in his ear at night telling him to "trade Sealgaire for a horde-side hunter, man, come play on Tich again, don't be a faggot". I convinced him to trade, netting him an Orc Hunter that he named something unpronounceable like Kazimier. So he played that for a while up until levelling the aforementioned DK.

I think you can see where all this is going, so I'm going to skip some boring paragraphs.
Anyway, 10 days since reactivation/purchasing WotLK, Harticus the paladin is lvl 80. Thats the fastest I've ever levelled.
I'm fucking back with a vengeance. My eyeballs are sore and my skin is translucent. My computer is warm and my room filthy. My work goes neglected while I kill massive and mysterious new foes.
I've completed every single quest in four of the eight areas of Northrend - thats something along the lines of 400 quests. Oh yeah, and I got my epic flyer and then some.

Because I'm ruthless. Turns out some people still want a 70 druid, when he's astride a Fucking Armored Drake. Those are pretty rare nowadays. I had that bitch staked out on my bloodstained altar faster than you could say "No wait Griffin don't sacrifice your only remaining link to the past!". Firenz the druid became Firenz the Nine Thousand Gold Pieces.
You better habeeb it.
Oh yeah, and I went ahead and bought Zekiel's mace so I could have it to.

Northrend is an amazing new addition to Warcraft. Every aspect of the game has been influenced, and changed because of this. The things I've done so far are too numerous and remarkable to chronicle in some blog post. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some dragons to sla-AhaahahahAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

The End.