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Lost in Translation


Movin’ on upSeptember 22

Tonight we concluded our second Karazhan run. We took everyone but Shade of Aran and Prince Malchezzar in one shot, and took two tries on each of them - and then were stymied, for tactical reasons, on Nightbane.

However, Theande’s now wearing the Mender’s Heart-Ring and the Light-Collar of the Incarnate, the latter of which is her first piece of Tier 4 gear.

Who knew it was this much fun to raid?

A quick guide to the Brewfest boss fightSeptember 21

Blizzard’s changed the way Brewfest works this year. Like Hallow’s End and the Festival of the Summer Flame, Brewfest now has its very own boss: Coren Direbrew. Last year, he just completed a Brewfest quest for you; now you have to defeat him in combat in order to claim your prize.

We had the most success yesterday with a group composed of a tank, two healers, and two DPS. This is a DPS-heavy fight, and the more DPS you have without sacrificing healing, the better off you’ll be. We tried with three healers, one DPS, and one tank, and had no success at all; we didn’t try with one healer and three DPS, and I’m not sure it would have worked well, since the DPS are also taking damage from the adds in the fight. However, a sufficiently skilled healer might be able to keep everyone up, and three DPS would mean that the fight would be over that much more quickly. (With our group, I think it took us about 5 minutes to down Direbrew - a little faster once we got the rhythm of the fight down.)

Direbrew is located in the Grim Guzzler, the tavern in the middle of Blackrock Depths, which seems like it ought to be a deterrent for groups headed to take him out… but Blizzard has thoughtfully provided us with a teleport to the Guzzler in the form of Mole Machine Consoles, which summon a Dark Iron Mole Machine - of the sort you see in the Brewfest hourly attacks - to take you directly to Direbrew’s room in the Grim Guzzler. The Mole Machine Consoles are guarded b

Found it!September 16

This is a post that nobody is going to care about but me -

- but -

Long ago, I read a Roger Ebert column that made reference to films where the only music is that which is part of the film’s narrative sphere - if there’s a song in a scene, it’s actually playing on a radio in the scene, or being played by someone on a piano, or something. There’s nothing on the score that the characters aren’t hearing.

Ebert used a term for this kind of music that I liked and then entirely forgot. I’ve spent years - literally years - trying to figure out what the term was. I’ve pored over his website and his books, and every time I guess I’ve missed the article in question. But tonight, I ran across it on a random TV Tropes page.

Music that is part of a film’s narrative sphere is diegetic.

AlexSeptember 15

I asked for adventure, and I got it.

It was Friday, August 22. Holly and I had spent two full weeks on the road, first at my parents’ house in Michigan, then at the Detroit airport to drop Alex off so he could go back to school in California, then to Holly’s parents’ house in Delaware. We were heading west on I-70, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike was about twenty miles behind us. We’d just started talking about places we wanted to live or visit when finances and obligations allowed us to do so. Then the phone rang.

Oddly, although I remember all of that, I barely remember the details of the phone call. The basic content, however, was what was important, and it was that Alex’s mom is in the hospital, and he needs to move in with you.

This came, I should stress, as no small surprise to us. Just a week and a half ago we’d sent Alex home to his mother to spend the year there; Holly and I had looked into the future and seen summers and every other Christmas with Alex. The revelation that Alex would be here, in Richmond, living with us, on a full-time basis was a little much to handle. (Speaking of stress, that revelation did nothing good for Holly’s stress levels - she was already having trouble wrapping her mind around her thesis, and being a full-time mother was, perhaps, a very large last straw on an already-unsteady camel’s back.)

So we bargained for time. Can he live wi

Holy priest talentsSeptember 13

I love priest healing in World of Warcraft. I’ve tried healing as each of the other healing classes (paladin, druid, shaman) and it’s just not as fun for me. I have a pair of healing specs that work very well for me; one is for leveling and soloing, and the other is a more healing-oriented spec. They differ by only a few talent points.

Here’s how I recommend you distribute your points, level by level. This is an odd sequence, because while it’s a Holy build, you won’t put any points into Holy talents until level 20, and you’ll be piecemealing between Holy and Discipline the whole way up.

  1. Spirit Tap 1/5. (Shadow) Spirit Tap doubles your Spirit for 15 seconds after you deal the killing blow to a creature or player that yields XP or honor, and allows 50% of your mana regeneration to continue during casting for those same 15 seconds. Each point in the talent gives you a 20% chance to proc the buff. Spirit Tap is strictly a soloing talent for Holy priests; in groups, you’ll almost never get the killing blow, and so you’ll never have the buff.
  2. Spirit Tap 2/5
  3. Spirit Tap 3/5
  4. Spirit Tap 4/5
  5. Spirit Tap 5/5
  6. Wand Specialization 1/5. (Discipline) Again, this is largely a soloing talent. Since you want to conserve mana as a priest, you’ll be using your wand a lot. Each point in this talent gives you +5% wand damage, and increasing your wand damage means that mobs will go down that much f