DDO is like Jell-O…

… there’s always room for it.

When real life gets overwhelming, often the first things we cut are the “frivolous” things that make us happy. We drop the things we WANT to do to have more time for the things we HAVE to do.

With one very notable exception and a couple of moderate note, 2016 has been pretty damn sucky for me. Family obligations now take up – well, pretty much any time my family notices I have. I’m short on patience and time and oh yes, sleep.

The past few weeks have been exceptionally bad. Found out my pesky cough was a bit more than pesky; nothing life-threatening but something that will be slow to improve and chronic in nature.

Then my kitty Victoria, who turned 14 in September, got VERY sick. Victoria’s gotten to know Dr. Dave and Dr. Stephanie, her vets, pretty well over the years; she’s had chronic allergies/sinus problems, thyroid issues, and now a tumor on her thyroid that was about the size of a pea six or seven months ago and is now close to golf ball proportions. So when she got very, very sick Tuesday night, I wasn’t optimistic. I said my goodbyes, just in case, and got her to the vet first thing Wednesday morning.

Turned out to be a bad but treatable sinus infection, and I was so relieved that I think I asked Dr. Dave about half a dozen times if I was really going to be able to take her home. So Wednesday was shaping up to be pretty good…

… and then Wednesday night, I was watching TV around 9:30 when my other kitty, Callie, walked through the living room, sat down, and started to pant.

When a cat is panting open-mouthed, something is very wrong. I wasn’t used to that with Callie; in the nearly 13 years since I adopted her, she’d never needed to go to the vet for anything other than routine checkups, vaccinations, and the occasional butt trim (seeing as how she’s made mostly of fur).

All the vets in the area were closed by that hour, and since the next day was Thanksgiving, that was pretty much out too. There’s an emergency vet about 40 minutes from here, but Callie is terrified of car trips – she panicked and hid when I got the carrier out to take Victoria to the vet earlier that day. And the few times I’ve taken a pet there, they basically just told me to see my regular vet in the morning.

So I had to wait until Friday morning to take Callie over. Dr. Dave checked her out and then put his arm around me and said, “Brenda, this is bad. This is REALLY bad.” Her kidneys were failing, and he suspected that she also had a large mass in her chest. Even under the best of circumstances, I’d be lucky if she lasted another week.

I didn’t want to put her through that, so I let her go. It’s been beastly hard. Callie followed me EVERYWHERE. She loved to sit on the arm of my chair, stretch out one paw, and just hold onto my leg.

Suffice to say that Sunday night, I didn’t think I was really feeling up to doing a livestream. I even debated signing on to DDO at all. But I did… and once I was logged in, I thought, hmmm, maybe a livestream would be fun after all.

I’m so glad I did. We did a Flower Sniffin’ run through Portal Opens followed by Murder by Night and The Riddle, even though I completely forgot about updating my overlay so it says we’re running Schemes of the Enemy. While logically sleep may have been a better option, it felt good to be on Reera, swashing and buckling and Coup de Grâce’ing my way through driders and Drow. I was still sad, but the upswing in my mood was considerable. It probably helped at least a bit that I had my calico tressym – named Callie, of course.

If DDO all by itself could make me less sad, imagine what DDO with DANCING DRETCHES could do! I wasn’t super in the mood for questing tonight, but wilderness areas are often good stress relievers. So Reera took a spin through Demonweb (where I managed to find all but five explorers without checking wiki!). She had a wonderful time finding dretches to dance. And c’mon, it’s hard not to smile when you’re watching dretches dance! “Dretch, I’m a dretch-y dretch, and I dance dance dance and I dance dance dance…”

Victoria is doing better. Still kinda sneezy, but definitely much improved in the last few days. She is going to be one VERY spoiled only child. I thought she had lost her appetite at first, because Friday night when I gave her dinner, she turned away and walked over to where Callie’s dish normally was. Turns out she won’t eat from her own dish unless I put it in Callie’s spot. I guess that’s her way of paying her respects to her companion of nearly 13 years.

And just gonna leave this here, because even though I’m grieving, this makes me happy too.

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Ermagerd! Mernsters!

If you’ve ever run with the Flower Sniffers of Destiny, you might have noticed that we sometimes often like to talk like kobolds. Lately, though, we seem to be having an upswing in a certain kind of memespeak – or should I say mermsperk?

I blame Citi, who got me started on this with his idea for a toon name recently, and Seki, with his “ehrmegehrd sner” weather report. Suffice to say that none of the Sniffers seemed overly surprised when I typed, “ERMAGERD BERHERLDERS!” in guild chat tonight (I was running VoN 3).

My own weather report also included a fair amount of sner, which mostly didn’t stick around, and a rather daunting amount of wind, which caused mah perwer ter kerp gerring ert Sunday night. I was just thinking, hmm, haven’t had an outage in nearly an hour, think I’ll go ahead and try to stream… and naturally no sooner had I thought that than it went out twice in the next 10 minutes. So I decided to forego my weekly Sunday livestream, but I did manage to get on DDO enough to get some playing time in on a couple of alts.

Germpy swershberkler Reera, when not working on the Eveningstar quests with Seki and Citi, has done a complete S/R/E run of the Underdark, which is one of mah favrit plerces in all of DDO. It was a rather productive run, too – besides clearing her map, she got 13 of the 19 rare encounters. Micahrastir, the red dragon, is probably my favorite, and I was glad to see him since he’s been afk the last few times I’ve taken a toon  in there.

Wander Demon Lord Ilhazur tried to make Reera’s perwer ger ert (I’m starting to feel like the Swedish Chef on the Muppets…) by chasing her into his Magical Portal of Spell Point Drainage. Kinda made her wish she’d gone spellsinger instead of swashbuckler so she’d have the SP regen song, but at least there was a shrine on the way out of his little corner of the Underdark.

Genniah, my F2P rogue alt, has been summoned from the mothballs where I left her to hang months ago so that she can run lowbie stuff with Citi and Slvr. It’s a good thing she’s cute, because her rogue skills are somewhat lacking. She’s definitely in need of a much better Search item, and her Spot has proven to be completely inadequate. She’s had no problems disabling traps once the trapboxes are found, though, nor has she ever failed to pick a lock. I think as she runs more stuff and loots better gear, she’ll get to where she should be… although so far I think the best thing she’s pulled was a blonde hair dye. Makes her look a bit younger than her previous snow-white tresses.

Genn owns NO adventure packs at all, so I’ve dropped a few guest passes on her. I have a love-hate relationship with those things. On the plus side, most of them are fairly inexpensive, so if a friend or one of my F2P alts needs one, it’s usually not a big deal. But I really wish they would stop counting down in public areas – I completely forgot about that and had Genn hanging out on her dinky little ship (she’s not in Sniffers, sadly), and her Delera’s pass expired. We still had the last quest to go because Citi’d had to log (bedtime, pffft, what a wimp), and she ended up needing another pass to complete the arc the next night (which Citi graciously bought for her).

Besides Delera’s (where she got not just her Voice, but also two of The Best Damn Weapon In The Game because Slvr gave her his so she could dual-wield them) and a couple of F2P quests, we also ran Sentinels, and I was reminded again that Spies in the House is a right pain in the arse. And then we ran possibly mah merst favrit querst ERVER – THE PIT!

That’s always fun for me because for once, I’m usually the one leading the way. Trust me, this is not something that happens often. Sunday night’s run was no exception. It was Genn’s first time in there, and she did… acceptably well. Found all the sekrit doors, solved the puzzles, and was the one who went up to the top of all three furnace rooms to pull the switches and encase the fire eles in their blue bubbles.

Hopefully this Sunday will feature an absence of sner and any other weather conditions that might cause mah perwer ter ger ert, so I should be livestreaming again then… and possibly talking like an ERMAGERD KERBERLD!

Streamin’ with Even is live every Sunday night at 11 pm Eastern time. Videos are archived on my YouTube channel. I’m usually on Thelanis, usually on Evennote, and usually have room, so feel free to send me a tell if you’d like to join! I’m also definitely open to suggestions on what to run next. You can send ingame mail to Evennote on Thelanis, or email me at evennote (at) gmail dot com. Thanks for reading and/or watching!  🙂

Scheming our way from golems to ghouls

Welp, looks like I’m back to livestreaming again, and in my original 11 pm Sunday slot, no less. Only on my own stream, of course. Just wanted to make that clear, don’t want any more grief over that.

But anyway! Gave Even the night off and dragged out newly-20 Shareerad, aka Reera, my semi-gimpy swashbuckler, so that we could finish flagging Mock for the House Cannith raids.

We’d done Blown to Bits and Power Play earlier in the week, so all we had left was Schemes of the Enemy… and while Slvr didn’t need any Cannith boots, Mock and I both did. Plus, collectibles!

Reera astonished herself – and me – by being able to Coup de Grâce the named spider early in the quest. Of course, she also underwhelmed herself – and me – by not having a smiting weapon. The only smiter she’s got is an ML 21 dagger, so she’s got a few more XPs to earn before she can use it.

I don’t remember the path through Schemes nearly as well as I used to, but that kinda made it more fun to run. Anything in House C is good for working on your Monster Manual constructs, and the whole area is graphically interesting – lots of metal and turquoise. The artis with their flame blades and lightning are pretty to look at… and since they’re so very, VERY good at stunning you, you get to stand around dazed and look at them a lot.

Did we survive? Did we get boots? Hey – watch the video to find out! 😉

After our House Cannith escapades, Mock logged for the night, but by then Citi was on with his lowbie. Slvr grabbed his lowbie as well. I didn’t have a toon on my main account in that level range, but I do have Genniah, my severely undergeared, underplayed F2P rogue.

We’d run nearly all of Delera’s previously but still had the capstone, and Genn still had time on the guest pass Even got her, AND she doesn’t have an ooze weapon, so I somewhat reluctantly decided to stick with Delera’s and not try to make a case for running the Pit.

One thing Delera’s and House C have in common – while one’s undead and the other is constructs, both of them have mobs that can be hard to kill because of their DR. Poor Genn was dual-wielding Clubs of the Holy Flame (best damn weapon in the game!), which were… OK, kind of, against the skellies, meh against other undead, and pretty darn useless against everything else.

Not that she or Citi got much of a chance to kill stuff – Slvr’s ranger, using Strimtom’s Acid Arrow build, was mowing stuff down before Genn could even s-l-o-w-l-y run to it.

There’s some kind of glitch – can’t remember the details, something to do with a ship buff that shouldn’t be happening but does sometimes. Whatever it is, it makes you run (and possibly attack) faster. Trouble is, it wears off at odd times. I’m not sure if that’s what was going on with Genn; one second she’d be booking along just fine, and the next she’d look as though she was trying to slog her way through quicksand. Didn’t equip or unequip anything, she wasn’t burdened, didn’t have any pots or anything that wore off. Weird!

Also, her trap skills suck. Want to see how badly they suck? Watch the video! LOL

Slvr and I jumped on an elite raid train this past Saturday as well. Shroud, Defiler of the Just, Mark of Death… thought there was at least one more. Shroud and MoD went quite well. DoJ was… interesting, LOL. For one thing, I decided to bring first-life rogue Vic. She generally does OK in EE content, even high-end EE, but DoJ was a bit of a struggle for her.

Our first attempt lagged out so badly we had to restart. There was a bit of lag in the second, but it was at least playable. The main problem Vic had was invisible blades. I’ve never run into that on Even, or maybe I just haven’t noticed because Even doesn’t take damage the way a rogue in light armor does. Got hit by a set of blades I didn’t even see; ran to the safe spot and stood in the middle of the group to take the rez, and immediately got chopped up again. Kinda wondering if it might have been a latency thing – maybe where I was seeing Vic on my screen wasn’t where the game thought she was.

But she hung in there, and her nine deaths (three of those, possibly four, coming when she was trying to rez other party members) weren’t the most in the group.

Alas, Even lost the roll for a Circle of Malevolence at the end of MoD. As much as I’m not fond of Abbot, MoD’s not quite as bad… and Even really wants that ring. I s’pose I’m going to have to force myself to run it more often. Tried to solo it once, but the Abbot gets lonely when you leave him alone on the platform, so he teleports you back… it CAN be done, but all that teleporting makes it incredibly tedious.

Even got past the beholders and death knight through the center portal, but got tired of the Abbot dragging her butt back to the main room over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And… you get the idea. Suffice to say she flipped the Abbot a very rude gesture and did a /death back to the ship because it was way past her bedtime.

Look out, world… Streamin’ with Even is back, and right where it started oh so long ago, where no other DDO streamer had ever gone at that time. If you enjoyed the videos in this week’s blog post, or at least didn’t find them too terribly annoying, tune in Sunday nights at 11 pm Eastern!

Nightmare on Main Street

I wasn’t going to blog tonight. Particularly at 4:30 am. And especially a post that has nothing to do with DDO on a blog that’s got everything to do with it.

But when the world feels like it’s ending…

The scary part is that “the world feels like it’s ending” isn’t a metaphor or hyperbole. Somehow, the United States has just elected as its leader a man who is so racist, so sexist, so narcissistic, so xenophobic, and so utterly incompetent, one wonders how he ever managed to get into the election at all… and now, we can’t help but wonder just what he’s going to do with his new power.

I’m deeply ashamed that my country has chosen this bigot to be its next Commander in Chief. I’ve been reading my friends’ social media. I have friends who have spent the night in tears. This is a man who mocks people with disabilities, wants to ban all Muslims from the country, encourages violence at his rallies, thinks he can do anything he wants to women with impunity because he’s famous, and was supposed to go on trial next month for the rape of a then-13-year-old girl… who has suddenly dropped her suit against him, citing threats on her life.

Little wonder that the Canadian immigration site crashed tonight, or that New Zealand has received more immigration applications from Americans over the past seven days than it usually sees in a month.

This election was bitter and divisive. I saw friends split with other friends over their political views. I heard more and more stories of hate toward blacks, Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, LGBT, trans, women, the disabled… pretty much anyone who isn’t a blond, blue-eyed, white male candidate for the Aryan brotherhood.

Tough times are coming. Our economy is already crashing. Calls to suicide hotlines are skyrocketing.

I’m scared. REALLY scared. Most of the people I know are scared. But now, more than ever, we need to prove that, regardless of the election results, hate will NOT win.

Let’s stick together, be there for each other, and fight for change when we can. Stand up to bigots when it’s safe to do so; walk away when it’s not. Our new “leader” seeks to divide us and turn us against each other. Don’t let that happen. If you believe in peace, love, and equality for all, I’ve got your back. Please have mine.

United we stand. Divided we fall.

Reveling in the Night

Hey, I streamed again. Been a while. Might do some more – not promoted, don’t wanna have to move my time slot again and all that. But ’twas fun.

I figured, last night of the Night Revels, I might as well get some video, so Comic and I headed out to Delera’s Graveyard to tackle hordes of undead. (Not “hoards” – that’s what I do with cosmetic pets. Speaking of which, I finally got the rustie, so now I have ’em all!)

We had a grand old time slashing our way through the four original Revels quests – Under New Ravagement, Snitch and the Lich, Haverdashed, and The Kobolds’ Newest Ringleader.

Found out shortly into questing that my voice wasn’t coming through over the stream; turns out that when you disable talk in OBS, your voice over DDO won’t come through either. And I really didn’t want to leave my mic open because I’m still fighting the Rocky Horror Superflu that went through our cast, so I was coughing and sneezing a lot, plus the mic picks up every last rattle and rustle every time I open a cough drop.

But it got to be too much of a pain to remember to push-to-talk both places, so my apologies for any flu-ridden sounds… and the fact that I didn’t talk much. I usually try to keep the witty banter up to make the stream interesting (whether I succeed is a matter of opinion), but sore throat + weak voice made that kinda tough.

Anyway, we were plowing through undead and raking in ings… and then, suddenly, I couldn’t move and my connection status went yellow, midway through Getting Ahead in Lordsmarch Palace. I told Comic that I thought I might be crashing. He didn’t answer, so I thought maybe he couldn’t hear me. Typed in guild chat that I thought I might be DCing, and found that all seven* Flower Sniffers currently online were having the same issue.

* – Actually five of us, but Shin was tri-boxing.

Didn’t take long before we crashed, one at a time. And then some real fun started. I rebooted DDO and decided to fire up the stream again too… so the second video features numerous unsuccessful attempts to log back in. I also played the intro video, because it seemed like that would be less boring than making people watch Even stand around on the login screen. And I introduced all of my toons.

Turned out to be a Thelanis thing; Khyber had a bit of a hiccup, but not nearly as bad, and the other servers were fine. Waiting for everything to come back up again seemed to take forever but was actually maybe 15-20 minutes, and when it did… strange things were happening. Upon logging back in, only Comic ended up back where he’d been at the time of the crash. I was next to get in and found myself on the Bridge Between with a no doubt very confused Life Shaper. Seki’s wizard was next, landing on the Heart of Wind. All three of Shin’s toons wound up on Korthos. And Slvr never made it back on at all.

I had to reset my bind point – somehow in the kerfuffle it got changed from the airship to the Faerun Hall of Heroes – but Comic and I were back in Lordsmarch Plaza shortly. This time, things went off without a hitch, and we traded in our ings for some goodies afterwards. Of course, the only thing I really wanted was the Doomspherelet, and I’d gotten that the first night (thanks, Abs!).

In totally unrelated news, I was both glad and sad when I read in the U33 release notes, “Numerous minor typos have been corrected throughout the game” – glad because editing is what I do, so typos are anathema to me… but sad because I feared for the future of my very favorite typos in the game.

Tower of Despair just wouldn’t be the same if Horoth didn’t try to summon his Soliders of Shavarth. So Slvr and I ran ToD tonight, and I’m happy to report that Horoth’s minions are still Soliders, and still from Shavarth (which clearly is a plane that’s solider than Shavarath). I was also pretty happy that, while Slvr played with Nyth, Even killed the shadows so fast that she spent a lot of time just kind of hanging out doing nothing while she waited for more to respawn.

And in totally unrelated but VERY IMPORTANT news, it’s Movember! That means that the DDO team is raising money for men’s health. You can meet the team, find out their motivations, and donate at the DDO team Movember page.

Turbine Senior Community Manager Cordovan is participating in Movember again and also raising money for Boston Children’s Hospital via Extra Life, which benefits hospitals in the Children’s Miracle Network. You can support his efforts, along with the LotRO team, via their page on Extra Life.

Remember, no donation is too small! Both are GREAT causes. And if you can’t afford to donate, you can still help out by sharing the links!

Casting Rocky Horror, DDO-style

As a few of you may know, I’m in an annual local production of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” I play Dr. Scott, a role I fell into accidentally when the guy who was supposed to play him stopped showing up after a few rehearsals and the director discovered I could do a German accent. (Actually mine’s more Austrian, but close enough for our purposes.)

We just wrapped up five shows in three days, and my voice is pretty much nonexistent – Dr. Scott’s voice is about five octaves lower than mine, LOL. But while I can’t talk very much right now, I can write.

So I was pondering what to do for my weekly blog when it occurred to me that it might be fun to cast Rocky Horror… with DDO NPCs. And since I couldn’t think of any better ideas than that – well, here you go. The Rocky Horror cast, DDO-style.

Cast of Characters

Brad Majors (A Hero) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Talbron Tewn
Janet Weiss (A Heroine) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cellimas Villuhne
Riff Raff (A Handyman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inquisitor Gnomon
Magenta (A Domestic) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Malicia
Columbia (A Groupie) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eveningstar Villager
Dr. Frank N. Furter (A Scientist) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lolth
Rocky Horror (A Creation) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Belashyrra
Eddie (Ex Delivery Boy) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Coyle Lovell
Criminologist (An Expert) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Amskar
Dr. Scott (A Rival Scientist) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bensen Virandson

Ralph Hapschatt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elminster
Betty Munroe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ana Brabener
Photographer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Truthful One

The Transylvanians

Jeets Shimis and the Tidy lasses
Arraetrikos, Horoth, and Suulomades
Zuggtmoy
Roderic Nettle
Cholthulzz
Scrag, Arboth, and Snutch
Velah
Lucy Lawful
The Eveningstar Villager
Jack Jibbers

Now I kinda want to cast some more movies with DDO characters… and I wanna filk some RHPS songs.  *evil grin*

Also, Lolth looks kickass with those lips, doesn’t she?