Bringing more than sexy back

What’s back? Lots of things!

For starters, this blog, which was in danger of going a full year without a new post. What can I say – real life happens! I’m going to try to post on at least a semi-regular basis. We’ll see… 😄

One thing I definitely need to blog about is Gen Con! This was my second year attending, and it was great! To the ones who gave me a good-natured hard time about not posting more on social media – hey, I was having fun, enjoying the company of some awesome people, and going to LOTS of events – I didn’t have time to keep whipping my phone out to update my Twitter feed! 😜

Also, OurDDO has returned! Between RSS feed aggregator scripts being, well, aggravating, and Photobucket deciding I couldn’t link images any more without ponying up a not insignificant amount of money, I was starting to think it wasn’t worth the trouble… but then I installed WordPress on my site and found a nifty plug-in that handles the feeds pretty easily.

I haven’t been able to get the carousel to work within WordPress, although I’m not giving up on it. And I need to get around to updating the blogroll and putting that on there.

But while stripped down, it’s fulfilling its purpose – bringing you EVERY post from EVERY* DDO-oriented blog, updated around the clock.

If you have a blog that’s at least partly about DDO and you want to be included, drop me a line at EvenNote (at) gmail (dot) com, and make sure to include your blog’s URL!

* – Blogs that violate DDO’s Terms of Service or OurDDO’s guidelines are not included.

And… SHROUDPALOOZA IS COMING BACK!

Get flagged, get your friends flagged, get your alts flagged, because we’re bringin’ Shroudpalooza back!

The original Shroudpalooza happened a few years ago and was amazing good fun. If you’ve never heard of it – basically we just run heroic Shroud as many times as we can in three hours!

This year’s Shroudpalooza will be open to all levels (so XP is unlikely, but that’s not what it’s about). We’re starting on Thelanis on Oct. 6 and will do a different server every other week, wrapping up with Cannith on Jan. 12.

For more info, ask me, BonnieBew, or Tholgrin – we’re all on Twitter – or visit our brand-spankin’-new website at http://www.SHROUDPALOOZA.com! I’ll be posting more info here “soon*”™!

But wait, there’s more – D&D Night has returned to DDOStream, AND it’s soon to become a weekly event! We’ll be playing Sunday nights at 7 pm Eastern time on DDOStream. Come watch – you might get to see DDOCast Patrick’s barbarian toss my half-elf bard across a ravine! … at least I HOPE she makes it all the way across.

Streamin’ with Even is not back, because it never left. 😉 The show is still Sundays at 11 pm Eastern on DDOStream. I’ll be posting an updated schedule for streaming on my own channel here in the near future.

It’s good to be back! 😄

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VoN 2 3/4

So our pre-stream Sunday night guild chat went something like this:

Me: Wow, the tablet’s cooperating, OBS is cooperating, I’ve got everything set up and ready to go, and still have plenty of time before the stream.

Comic: You know you just jinxed yourself, right?

Me: Haha, yeah, probably.

This is what I get for thinking everything was under control – after having various technical difficulties throughout the stream, the video froze an hour and 20 minutes in. I was going to chop it off after that point, but the audio continues. So if you want to listen, it’s all there; if you want to watch, you’re only going to see VoN 1 and 2 plus about 3/4 of VoN 3.

Just as it freezes, you can hear me saying something about my screen doing weird things. Those “weird things” involved flashing a few times. No idea what happened there. It may have been something to do with my lousy connection – if you watch the little box in the upper right corner, you’ll see it go to yellow a fair few times. Or maybe it was my video card, which was VERY unhappy; the fan kept kicking into Super Ultra High Gear.

Unfortunately I didn’t realize what had happened until someone brought it up in Twitch chat when we were nearly through Haywire Foundry. I had to reboot DDO after The Prisoner, but it was working fine once I signed back on… at least until it, y’know, wasn’t. We’re a bit shy of the beholder area when it goes out.

So you’ll just have to take my word for it that Comic and I were one-shotting mobs left and right with 200K damage rolls and 500K crits. Yep. That really happened. Uh-huh. *wink wink, nudge nudge*

I was actually hoping to pull a Seal of the Sword of Shadow, but – spoiler alert – I didn’t get one. Comic definitely expanded his scroll collection, though! And I don’t think I got too loopy (for me, anyway…); having a bit of a fibromyalgia flare-up after a busy weekend and took a muscle relaxant, which helps but makes me spaced out and groggy for a good 24-36 hours.

If you’ve been to OurDDO since Saturday-ish, you might have noticed that the icons look different, and not in a good way. Back when I still used a free server for it, I stored all my graphics on Photobucket so I wouldn’t have to worry about running out of storage.

Apparently Photobucket, with no notice (or at least none that I ever saw), has changed its policy and no longer allows linking from free accounts. So all of the icons now have a Photobucket message that says, “PLEASE UPDATE YOUR ACCOUNT TO ENABLE 3RD PARTY HOSTING.”

This did not make me happy, but I thought, well, I’ll see how much it is, maybe I’ll just pony up and get it over with.

Nope. Not gonna happen. If you want third-party hosting from your Photobucket, it’ll set you back $39.99…

A MONTH.

Sorry not sorry, I’m not paying $480 a year to be able to link a few dozen icons. So in the near future, I’ll be moving the OurDDO icons to my own server space. They’re icons; it’s not like they’re going to eat up a lot of storage, and I bumped the account up to premium anyway so it’s got scads of space now. Hopefully I’ll get around to that sometime this week. Sucks that Photobucket adds long random character strings to all your filenames; if not for that, I could just do a quick bulk upload and then search/replace the base URL. Wonder if those strings were implemented to try to keep people from doing that?

Oddly enough, the images on this blog that are linked from Photobucket are still working.

It’s been suggested to me, more than once, that I do some kind of fundraising to cover the cost (not specifically the Photobucket thing, but OurDDO in general), but… meh. No one asked me to put OurDDO together (well, OK, back when MyDDO was being taken down, people asked, but I was already in the process of doing it anyway). I used free servers for it for the first couple of years, and it’s really not that expensive for the account I have now. Plus, it was my choice to upgrade the account to premium. It would be, at best, not at all fair to ask my readers and/or viewers (all, what, two of you? ;)) to foot the bill. At worst, it would be… something I probably shouldn’t say if I want to keep this PG-13-ish. Suffice to say I will never be lazy or ignorant enough to beg people to bankroll any aspect of my DDO experience. 🙂

Streamin’ with Even is live every Sunday night at 11 pm Eastern time on the official DDOstream! The show is also hosted on my own Twitch channel, but if you’re watching live and want to chat, DDOStream is the place to be. Videos are archived on my YouTube channel and/or on DDOStream’s YouTube. I’m usually on Thelanis, usually/often/sometimes 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! 🙂

Getting stoned on the stream

No, I haven’t been engaging in illegal activities whilst livestreaming! But this week I did get stoned – soulstoned, that is – a bit more often than I’m accustomed to.

As I can be fond of saying, I have Even, and then I have 18 other toons with varying degrees of gimpiness. I can count on Even; her attitude is pretty much, “OK, I’m getting through this and so are you even if I have to carry you through and rez you on the other side.”

But for this past Sunday’s stream, I wasn’t on Even. Instead, I had level 7 Favored Soul Meren getting some much-needed third-life XP as Seki and I took our lowbies into Sorrowdusk.

For some reason that’s not an area I run very often, so I’m not that familiar with it. I kept thinking that at some point we were going to have to assemble parts of a turtle… in hindsight, I think that quest is actually in 3BC.

But I did correctly remember the bridges with the big scary traps. Miraculously I managed not to die in those despite my paltry 5 jump score (having exactly as many jump pots as I needed helped).

Unfortunately I did manage to get one-shotted several times by the mean, nasty, totally overpowered mobs. I mean, they killed me, so clearly they were overpowered, right? RIGHT?!

… OK, or maybe Meren’s just gimpy and a bit undergeared. Oops.

I think she ended up dying more often than Flower… kinda humiliating considering that Meren’s supposed to be a healery type, AND was the only one in the party who could rez. Seki got quite a workout running her stone back to the shrine!

Once we had the first leg of Sorrowdusk done, it was time for Seki to log. Several Twitch chatters suggested Tear of Dhakaan for Meren’s next effort.

She didn’t have the stats to get several of the shards, and her humiliation grew when Laerathor the hireling was able to pull the Wisdom rune she couldn’t get. Yes, Meren is dumber than a hireling, and now there’s video proof!

But she did get the completion, and was able to manage her spell points better than Laerathor managed his, despite her lower Wis score. And the evening yielded a goodly bit of XP – when she was done Tear, a few minutes in Searing Heights was enough to get her to level 8.

OurDDO is almost functioning at 100% again. I managed to fix a rather major cosmetic issue all by myself! Both HTML and CSS were involved, neither of which I’m overly proficient in.

There is still an issue with the feed aggregate script, which is a Google thing and waaaay over my head, not displaying any posts at all if certain blogs are included. Figuring out which blogs cause the issue is not difficult, but it’s long and tedious. If the site isn’t displaying your posts, I probably just haven’t gotten to verifying that your blog isn’t one of the ones the script doesn’t like; I’m adding the blogs back in one at a time and checking after each one to see if everything’s still working.

“Soon!*” ™

Streamin’ with Even is live every Sunday night at 11 pm Eastern time, now on the official DDOstream! The show will still be hosted on my own Twitch channel as well, but if you’re watching live and want to chat, DDOStream is the place to be. Videos are archived on my YouTube channel and/or on DDOStream’s YouTube. I’m usually on Thelanis, usually/often/sometimes 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!  🙂

Don’t fear the (giant) reaper

Another one of my gimpier toons introduced himself to Twitch and livestreaming Sunday night as Zak the super-squishy pale master rounded up some friends and headed to Gianthold for some reaper mode fun.

I think having five Flower Sniffers for the stream, including Comic Relief in his “Streamin’ with Even” debut, was also a first! And DDO blogger Luedwig Bait’Hoven joined us for the first time as well. Even Citi managed to make it on!

Two-skull Prison of the Planes turned out to be a bit beyond our reach, although Zak surprised me by being the last one left standing (mostly because he spent a lot of time RUNNING AWAY, which is a perfectly valid playstyle when you’re as gimpy as he is). One skull, though, turned out to be just about right – oh, we still died, and not infrequently. But compared to our two-skull effort, piece of cake!

Finally getting to be on the livestream was Zak’s reward for finally getting to level 30 the previous night. Now I need to get Laegonn, who is proof positive that not all warlocks are overpowered, or even powered at all, to 30 as well, because they’re going to swap – Zak’s going to TR to a ‘lock, and Laegonn will be reborn as a pale master in training.

I’m also considering TRing Jall. She’s pretty solid up to about EH, but she really needs some better gear to be viable above that. Plus, healbots are coming back into style thanks to reaper mode, and that’s always been her primary focus (although she did surprisingly well in the killcount running EE Demonweb for sagas tonight).

The prospect of trying to level up three newly-TR’d toons is a little daunting, especially since Char’s only gotten to level 11 since her TR and Meren’s still stuck at 6. But I think, in the long run, it’ll be worth it for all three of them. And I expect Jall in particular should have a pretty easy time racking up reaper XP as she levels up.

Got some cosmetic work done on OurDDO, still have a bit to do… mostly just need to redo a couple of things in Photoshop so the header isn’t encroaching on the slider. I’m trying to match, sorta, the general look of this blog.

Also still looking for feedback on the possibility of having some minimal ad space available at even more minimal cost to DDO blogs and fansites. So if you have any thoughts on that, please let me know in the comments, or send an e-mail to evennote (at) gmail (dot) com!

Streamin’ with Even is live every Sunday night at 11 pm Eastern time, now on the official DDOstream! The show will still be hosted on my own Twitch channel as well, but if you’re watching live and want to chat, DDOStream is the place to be. Videos are archived on my YouTube channel and/or on DDOStream’s YouTube. 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!  🙂

Lioness and kitties and OurDDO, oh my!

It took me about seven or eight months from the time I first started playing DDO until I went VIP. I’ve never regretted making the move to a paid subscription, but Monday night may have been the happiest of my VIP days, because…

LIONESS HIRELING!

Isn’t she gorgeous? And she looks so cool hanging out with my tressym!

I named her Zazzy (the lioness, not the tressym – can’t remember if the tressym in the pic is Fern or Charlotte; real-life Fern and Charlotte are sisters who look a LOT alike). “Big Bang Theory” fans may get the reference.

That’s Charlotte in the foreground and Fern hiding behind her the day I brought them home from the SPCA. Normally Fern’s a bit more adventurous while Charlotte’s calmer but not as daring. I’m listening to them hold their 3 am chariot races up and down the stairs as I write this! 😀

*drum roll*

OurDDO is back! You can now find it here!

The lovely and talented grimorde was kind enough to take a look at the new scripts and figure out why adding any Blogspot blogs caused the whole thing to be blank, so that’s fixed! Thank you, Grim – it’s much appreciated! 🙂

Don’t get me wrong – I still have a LOT of work to do on it. Most of it’s cosmetic stuff – font colors and sizes and such – although there’s a bit of layout tweaking I’d like to do as well. The URL sucks, but after dealing with a lot of vet bills and Christmas, I really can’t justify spending any real-life money on this right now.

A friend suggested adding a PayPal donation button, but… I dunno. OurDDO is something I *choose* to do. If I expected anyone else to foot the bill, it’d be better for me to just not do it. I’d rather have it as is, in all its flawed “glory,” than ask others for money to fund it. Plus, I don’t feel as guilty about sometimes letting it slide a bit when real life crops up!

Reaper-ing what we sow

Forget cool gear. Forget fancy new enhancement trees. Forget goals and accomplishments. The ONE thing DDO could have done to absolutely guarantee that I’d want to run the hell out of reaper content was… to throw a cosmetic pet into the mix.

And DDO went one better – well, no. THREE better. Because there are FOUR new reaper pets. FOUR! Reaper mode, here I come!

To that end, the Flower Sniffers decided to cautiously get their feet wet with some reaper questing for Sunday night’s livestream. Even had already soloed a couple of reaper quests just to get a feel, and we’d done one-skull Vol for Friday’s guild night (and STILL no Mythic Emerald Gaze, dammit!). So Seki suggested continuing with our Orchard questing by trying out Inferno of the Damned, reaper style.

The 300-ish reaper XP we got was… a bit discouraging, LOL, considering that the reaper XP for the *lowest* reward tier is 625,000 (then 2.5 mil, then 5.625 mil). Granted, we were only on one skull since we were three-manning and were looking more to get a feel for what reaper would be like than anything else. I really hope the XP increases A WHOLE FREAKING LOT as the skull level goes up.

One-skull doesn’t seem, to me, to be much if at all different from epic elite, except for having to defeat the occasional reaper… and so far they’ve gone down pretty easily. I actually think that EE Vol was a tad bit easier on one skull than on EE. Even’s not had any trouble with her self-healing while soloing, although I’m sure that would change if she tried to, say, solo eight-skull What Goes Up. LOL

I normally am not fond of Inferno – with my penchant for getting lost, it takes me FOREVER to solo it. But Seki pretty much knows it cold, and when you get a couple of Flower Sniffers together, it’s pretty much gonna be a fun time whether we cruise or wipe. Fortunately, while we maybe didn’t quite cruise, we didn’t come close to wiping! 😀

Following Inferno, Slvr mentioned that he needed some High Road quests for sagas, so he and I duo’d Detour and escorted Bunsen Honeydew – er, Benson Virandsen – successfully to the end, despite Bunsen/Benson’s admonitions that it would have been easier with actual Harpers by his side. I don’t know why. All the Harpers ever seem to do is run their mouths a lot – case in point, Elminster. But at least Bunsen/Benson actually helps out in between his lectures. Plus, that scroll he’s carrying spawns DRETCHES!

Also, I’ll DEFINITELY be filking *Don’t Fear the Reaper.” I will almost definitely mention cowbell in there somewhere. And I’ll post it “soon*”™!

People who know me well might be going right now, “OMG SHE DIDN’T EVEN MENTION THE LIONESS, WHAT THE ACTUAL, ISN’T SHE VIP?!”

Yes, I’m VIP. Yes, I eagerly logged in to find my new lioness hireling tonight! And then I spent probably an hour taking screenies of her. But ’twas a long day and I need sleep soonish, so I’m going to blog about her probably Tuesday or Wednesday. LOL

I was hoping to have OurDDO up and running again by now, but… real life and all that. I have all the files, I have the server space, I just haven’t had a decent amount of time to sit down and get it all set up. Plus, still trying to figure out that pesky bug that prevents the new aggregator script from pulling any feeds at ALL if there are any Blogspot feeds in the list. Might have a workaround for that if I can’t get it figured out.

OurDDO absolutely WILL be back, and I’ll definitely be working on it this week. 🙂

Unfortunately one thing I completely forgot when cancelling the old OurDDO account was our Flower Sniffers message board, which was also stored on that server. Oops! Sorry, my fellow Sniffers, but I’ll get us a new one set up in the near future!

Streamin’ with Even is live every Sunday night at 11 pm Eastern time, now on the official DDOstream! The show will still be hosted on my own Twitch channel as well, but if you’re watching live and want to chat, DDOStream is the place to be. 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!  🙂

The wonder of it all

This one’s been a long time coming. And it was TOTALLY worth the wait.

For probably a year or more now, the mighty Flower Sniffers of Destiny have been trying to get all of us on at the same time to have a wonder pot party – step into Chrono or Tempest’s Spine, pass a stack or two of Potions of Wonder to everybody, and start chugging.

The trouble’s been getting us all online at the same time. Shin, Slvr, Seki and I are on Eastern time. Citi’s Central time zone, Comic and Mizz are Pacific, and Keava’s in Australia. Plus Shin works about a bazillion jobs, Seki works a lot of hours, Mizz almost never signs on, and we all have lives, whether we admit it or not.

We still haven’t gotten ALL of us on at the same time, but Acanthia’s stash of wonder pots has grown so much that I had enough to have a slightly smaller version of our planned guild wonder pot party and still have enough left over for that happy day when we actually do manage to get us all online at once.

Seki suggested a run through Dead Girl’s Spellbook – just go in, start chugging, and see if we could make it through the quest in the alloted time.

It was a great choice. There were lots of nooks and crannies and even underwater parts for me to get lost in, which I’ve been told is entertaining stream material, haha. But even more – OH THOSE WONDER POTS!

I Energy Drained myself to death a couple of times, and we had plenty of Shroud blades appear to take us out as well. Plus pumpkin heads, ham, water breathing… the list goes on.

Slvr and Seki and I were partway through when Puffgranny made the transition from Twitch chatter to party member and joined us. Citi showed up later, and we did a bit of Delera’s before Seki and Citi had to log. We still had wonder pots left, and Mr. Puffgranny showed up as well as we wrapped up the livestream with a hilarious romp through the Pit, which is a pretty awesome place to drink wonder pots.

I actually haven’t watched the video yet, but I gotta remember to do that; in Dead Girl’s Spellbook, I’d swear there was a treasure bag that disappeared as I was running toward it, and in Delera’s, Slvr was about to disable a trap when the box – which he’d already found – vanished as well. Not sure if wonder pots can do that or if it was something else.

I always enjoy livestreaming, but I think that may be my very favorite show to date. And we actually did really well, considering two of us were only level five! I don’t think we had any “legit” deaths at all, but our wonder pot death count was rather impressive. LOL

I was lucky enough to be a guest on a very fun and informative DDOCast this past week. The topic was getting the most out of your UI (user interface). Not sure how helpful I was – my hotbars are infamously a mess – but Patrick and Cordovan had some really great tips! You can give it a listen here! 🙂

If you use OurDDO, you’ve no doubt noticed that it’s changed a lot in the last week or so. Some changes are for the better, like how it now has ALL recent posts from ALL blogs instead of just the most recent post for each blog. Some are… less desirable. Luckily that’s mostly cosmetic stuff, and I’m working on that.

It’s gonna change more in the near future. I contacted the support department of the hosting company about some stuff, and, well, let’s just say they were exceptionally NOT helpful – basically got, “Well, we can’t do that on a paid account, but you can delete that account and make a new free one” – um, WHAT?!

I’ll be porting it to a new site within the next couple of days – want to do it before my billing date, because after talking to “support,” definitely not chuffed about giving them any more of my money. I’m hoping to have the new site up and running before the old site goes kaput. Whatever happens, I’ll make sure all the info on the blog and Twitter and such!

Streamin’ with Even is live every Sunday night at 11 pm Eastern time, now on the official DDOstream! The show will still be hosted on my own Twitch channel as well, but if you’re watching live and want to chat, DDOStream is the place to be. 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!  🙂

From flagging to firsties

 

Our efforts to get all the Flower Sniffers flagged for all the things continued with this past weekend’s livestream, when Citi, Rayne, and Even (who was already flagged, but likes the area) headed out to Thunderholme to get flagged for Fire on Thunder Peak and Temple of the Deathwyrm.

Naturally, I got lost and ended up leading them to Sarva first when we’d intended to start with Dagan. Along the way, there was much laughter, a  sprinkling of DPS, and far more bad 80’s songs than one usually finds during late-night groups. And we ran, we ran so far away, we just ran, we ran all night and day-ay-ay… couldn’t get away from the Song That Never Ends, yes it went on and on my friends, one night we started singing it even knowing what it was…

You get the idea.  LOL

Also this past weekend, I was Patrick‘s guest on DDOCast #439, New Player Tips, along with the lovely BonnieBew and Propane. There was some really excellent advice for new-ish players handed out – it’s well worth a listen!

And it got me to thinking. As excellent as the advice was, a lot of it would have been completely over my head when I first started. So I started pondering the idea of doing a second livestream each week, with accompanying blog, aimed at the really, truly new and inexperienced player. Talked it over with Keava, who was totally supportive, and then, purely by coincidence, Citi made a great post about rolling up your first character.

Probably should figure out what else I need to do to get on the official stream list first – already had to bump my start time an hour later to accomodate another stream that IS on the list and wants to bump its time forward an hour, which would lead to an overlap with the start time I’ve been using for the past few months – but what the heck, I’m gonna be streaming whether I’m on the list or not.

So, plan is, pick a night – probably somewhere between Monday and Thursday – and a time – probably midnight – roll up a brand-spankin’-new 28-point free-to-play (something). Probably a rogue, ’cause Citi’s making a paladin, and despite his assurances that his paladin will be fully capable of finding traps via face, it’d be nice to be able to disarm them. No twink  gear, no loans from other toons – 100% newbie compatible. Start with the character creation screen and go from there. Should be fun!

In other news, you might have noticed that OurDDO has been UPDATED! Tried to streamline it a bit, and the blogroll should be pretty current. Removed a couple of blogs that no longer exist or violated the rules. AFAIK, other than blogs in violation, it now has every DDO blog in existence.

Streamin’ with Even is live every Sunday night at 11 pm  MIDNIGHT Eastern time. 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!  🙂

Real-life lagging

I’m really not lazy.

Well, OK, maybe I kinda am in some ways. But the lack of recent blog posts and the backlog of new blogs to be added to OurDDO have nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with a bum shoulder.

So I’ve been months in pain with no doctor (I don’t do doctors – until this happened, the last time I had a regular doctor was in 2005, and that was only because I’d been in a car accident).

I’m OK with typing for short periods of time (or typing left-handed). Clicking a mouse button once is uncomfortable, twice is painful, more than that is excruciating. I thought this was odd considering the problem is in my shoulder (actually, my new doctor thinks the shoulder problems are because of neck problems from that 2005 car accident – how about a rousing round of “The knee bone’s connected to the hip bone?”)… anyway, among other things that include a bone spur, rotator cuff tenditis, and an unusual amount of arthritis, there is apparently a nerve impinged somewhere between my fingers and my shoulder/neck area. So when I move my fingers, my shoulder hurts. When I use my shoulder muscles to move my upper arm, my fingers hurt. And my entire arm, from the fingers to the elbow up over the neck and down to the shoulder blade, is swollen (and so far no one seems quite sure just where all the swelling is coming from, or why it won’t go away).

This makes it hard to play DDO. I’ve barely played Even and about 3/4 of my other characters at all; the few I’m playing on a semi-regular basis are the ones who can be at least somewhat effective with little or no mouse clicking. As I’ve tried to explain to a couple of friends who’ve been all, “Just don’t click!” when I tell them I can’t run something with them, it’s not that easy. There’s the small matter of feeling pike-y if I’m not contributing up to par, and the (for me) much larger matter of clicking without thinking and ending up in serious pain. So I mostly solo or run with the guild, or run toons who can go on auto-attack and not need to do much more than tab around for targets. Or, I just hang out on the guild ship and take screenies of my bank bard in her mushroom cap.

This also makes it all but impossible to update OurDDO, because adding a new blog involves copy/pasting the blog address in several places, as well as making an icon and pasting THAT address. Clicking a mouse is difficult. Click-dragging, as one must do to copy/paste, is near torture.

For now I’m in physical therapy for the next few months and get to wear an oh-so-fashionable compression sleeve from wrist to shoulder all the time (I’m allowed to take it off to sleep and shower). I have two more doctor’s appointments (regular and orthopedic) in the next two weeks, and will likely be getting referred to a neurologist as well.

I’m debating E-mailing the OurDDO files to a suitably trustworthy person along with a list of blogs to add, then having them mail the updated files back so I can upload them, but that’s a lot to ask. We’ll see.

Just wanted to let everyone know that the new blogs – and I do have a fairly long list – will be added… hopefully someday soon!

Quick OurDDO update

With the Mimic Hunt over and a fresh set of completed sagas under my belt, I dragged myself out of DDO a bit early (for me) tonight and did some much-overdue updating of OurDDO.

Mostly I added some links I was missing and updated a few that had changed  (one of these days I should probably take some time to check all the links and make sure they all still exist). It was tedious and time-consuming, but not particularly difficult.

Finished all the editing, did the icons for the blogs that were added, and uploaded all the shiny new files… and now my RSS aggregator script – the handy little thing that goes out and gets all the blog posts and puts them on the page – is dropping posts like crazy. Again.

As far as I can tell, it’s only picking up the most recent post from each author. So if you posted a blog yesterday and then post a new one today, only the new one will show up.

I’ve changed nothing in that script (I wouldn’t even know how). Hopefully, as last time, it will resolve itself over the next few days.

The 411 on OurDDO

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m not sure where the hosting on the original OurDDO site stands. To bore you with the personal details, I was using a domain and server space I’d bought from my brother, who’s owned a small web design company for several years. He’s since taken another job and didn’t have time to run his company, so  he sold it almost a year ago.

 

As of this writing, my domain and hosting are still intact, but most of his former customers have had to move their sites elsewhere. I have no idea if my site is sticking around or if it’ll be gone in the next five minutes, so I’m in the process of changing all of my links to the backup site I set up a while back (which, thanks to the lovely grimorde, is now displaying everything properly).

 

If you don’t already have it, you can reach the backup site – which is now the main site – here.

 

Meanwhile the issue with the feed script dropping posts seems to s-l-o-w-l-y be resolving itself. As feed aggregator scripts are notoriously unreliable, I think that’s the best I’m going to be able to do with it for now.

 

After talking to a number of people, I’ve set up a forum on the new OurDDO site. It’s blank so far, gotta get some basic stuff set up, but I did change the boring default bluish-grey theme to green because, y’know, priorities.  LOL

 

I actually had set up a forum probably a year ago or more on what’s now the old OurDDO site and had a couple people help me get stuff set up, so I’ll probably copy a lot of stuff over from that and then recruit some beta testers before opening it up to the public. The new forum is mostly aimed to augment Players Helping Players.

 

As always, feedback is appreciated!  🙂

Players Helping Players launches

As promised, Players Helping Players is now up and running! It’s still in its infancy, but I have big plans for it.

Friday night I happened to be on Thelanis at the same time as Dean from DDO University. He’d seen my earlier post about getting Players Helping Players started and very kindly offered any help I needed, including the use of his content. He also has guilds and teaching characters on every server.

As part of Players Helping Players, I’ve been debating adding a forum to OurDDO – not to compete in any way with the official DDO forum, but to provide an alternative source to get help. Unlike Turbine, I don’t have to deal with the issue of offending paying customers, because I don’t have any. So I’ll have much more freedom to edit or delete posts that troll, grief, or bully, and to sanction users who make such posts.

If I add the forum, it will undoubtedly be a much, MUCH smaller community than the official DDO boards, so the pool of knowledge will also be smaller. But I’m hoping that the smaller population will also mean a more friendly and welcoming experience for players who want help with DDO basics.

I’d really love some feedback on this. Do you like the idea of adding a forum to OurDDO? Why or why not? If implemented, what features would you like to see? What features do you think should NOT be included? Would you use the forum, and if so, for what?

A big THANK YOU to everyone who’s been supportive of OurDDO and Players Helping Players – I could never undertake either without the help and support I’ve gotten!