The Witching Well

Go and see Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. See what Joss Whedon, Nathan Fillion, and Neil Patrick Harris did with their summer vaca… I mean, their free time during the writers’ strike.

Go now. It comes down tomorrow!

Mood: amused

Travian seems innocuous enough at first glance. It’s a war game with a dash of something that tastes a bit like SimCity or Civilization. The graphics are kind of cute, even. You develop your fields. You build your buildings. You train your troops. Slowly, very slowly, over days, you grow. You get raided by larger villages. You raid smaller ones. If you survive, maybe you join an alliance. And off in the distant future (months and months, if you’re playing on a new or newly-rebooted server) the end of the world is coming. Where will you be when it all shakes out in the end?

I’m on both Server 4 and Server 5, if anyone else wants to come and play.

Mood: enthralled
Music: the cat's snoring

Well, the new oil burner is being delivered today, which means that we can stop checking the old one every day to make sure it has water in it so that it won’t shut itself off.

Andy took a trip down to Florida over the weekend, to get the stuff we inherited from my father and stepmother organized and itemized as a preliminary step for getting it moved up here.

And while he was gone, I baked nisu. Which is always fun, but it’s a huge, all-day to-do, so I’m a bit pooped still from it.

Also, I’ve found a couple of new online games: Holy War and DragonFable. They’re both browser-based games that you can play for free but that have upgraded pay versions.

Holy War’s a bit slow but it’s fascinating. (One hint if you’re thinking about trying it: you can’t stop working and it happens real-time, so don’t sign up to work 8 hours unless you’re sure that’s what you want.) You can choose to be Christian, Saracen, or Pagan. Guess which one I picked?

And DragonFable is just plain fun. The Flash animations are just too cute and the world is full of wonderfully bad puns.

Mood: sleepy

Little things like the USB wireless adapter I’ve just gotten — and it is tiny, too, about the size of a portable flash drive.

This particular little thing means that I don’t have to choose whether to sit in my own office, in my comfy desk chair, and use (shudder) dial-up or move into my husband’s office, which is cold and uncomfortable, in order to get into the DSL.

Life is wonderful when your 6-year-old laptop is dying by inches.

But even though its card slots are dead, its CD/DVD drive only works sporadically, its battery no longer holds a charge, its C: drive is always on the verge of being too full, and it occasionally turns itself off for no apparent reason, it’s back to being able to do what I need it to.

Mood: content

Yes, I’ve joined Facebook. A few of my coworkers joined recently, and it’s been a topic in some of the admissions meetings I go to, so I broke down and joined.

You know what? I like the fact that you can’t put a horrid, loud background on your profile page and thereby render it completely illegible. Because that is probably my biggest peeve when it comes to MySpace. I like the little modules that you can rearrange as you please. And I really love the quirky little apps that you can add to your profile.

I’m starting to hear from people I knew in high school, too. Which is always cool.

Mood: amused

Yes, this no-wireless thing may turn out to be a long-term problem. Ah, well. I managed for years on dialup before we got DSL. It ain’t pretty, but I’ll live.

We’re shuffling off to Buffalo this weekend to attend a wedding, so I won’t be around until at least Monday.

And we found the cutest gifts for a baby shower I’m going to next weekend! Which I can’t specify, because while I don’t think the mommy-to-be reads this, I can’t be certain.

Mood: busy

My laptop’s wireless card appears to have died on me. It did this suddenly, without warning, and of course right in the middle of an IM conversation.

I only hope the problem really is the card itself, which can be replaced pretty easily. It’s also possible — and unfortunately rather likely — that the issue is the computer. Poor thing is almost six years old now and dying by inches. The DVD/CD-ROM drive stopped working quite a while back. The battery hasn’t held a proper charge in at least a year. It occasionally likes to just turn itself off, pop: gone. Now this? I wouldn’t put it past the card slots (both of them) to have simply given up the ghost.

Since this reduces me to dialup or sitting in my husband’s office at his really uncomfortable desk, I suspect I won’t be dawdling online much for a bit.

Thank all the forgotten gods that I do have dialup to fall back on — I get it free from my employer, so it didn’t have to be cancelled when we got broadband.

Mood: frustrated

Someone on a message board pointed me toward GoodReads. I’ve been poking around it this morning, and I think I like its interface better than LibraryThing.

Mood: chipper

There are times when I wonder why I’m paying for my own website, with URL registration and hosting fees, when all I really do here is blog. Then I read crap like this and I realize it’s totally worth the pittance I pay (less than $10 a month when averaged out) to not be at the mercy of idiots. My hosting company, DrakNet, is not only mondo affordable, but the owner is a sensible human being who actually talks to us on the customer mailing list.

I mean, really, people, it’s a blinking role playing game. Of course there will be villains. One of the fun things about LJ is that users can put whatever they want in their profiles as interests. And RPG villains will have interests in villainous things.

Six Apart/LJ has since been doing a whole lot of embarrassed backpedalling. It seems to me that they could have saved themselves a lot of grief if they’d just rubbed their brain cells together a bit more before they began suspending accounts and realized that giving their Abuse team authority to use discretion might be a good thing.

Via rabidsamfan.

Mood: sympathetic