Tag: city of heroes

Why don’t cats get bedhead and other musings…

Today, Saturday the 13th, has been a nice lazy day. Indeed, around 2ish I had a sinus headache and decided to go take a nap. When I got to the bed, the kitties had anticipated Nap Time and were already snoozing on the bed. As soon as I got in bed, they both moved to be closer to me. Awwww.

Anyhoo, we discovered that the bed had become something of a black hole because none of us could escape for over 2 hours. No matter, we all had nice sleeps. And I don’t think they were ready for getting up, but they did anyway.

It was as I was getting up that I realized that I had bedhead but the kittens didn’t. They never get it. Even Leo, with his long fur, never got bedhead. Lucky cats! And it’s not like they ever have to go out in public and embarrass themselves with bedhead. (Well, I wasn’t going out either, so it was all moot today.)

So, have you ever had a time when two of your “fandoms” overlapped in interesting ways? There are times when City of Heroes and Doctor Who overlap. Sometimes it’s just me. “So who looks at a Vortex Core Leonis and says ‘this could be more sonic?'” I ponder every time I see a Sonic Vortex Core Leonis. And I want to say “Are you my mummy?” every time I see Terrance Dobbs in City of Villains.

However, yesterday I had the option to rescue the Hand of Omega. (Or rather, Hand of 0mega – a zero instead of an o.) And since there have been times when I’ve been asked to beat up Davros (or was that kidnap?) I think someone in CoH/CoV might have a passing knowledge of Doctor Who.

I ended up not taking the mission, however, because I hate fighting the Circle of Thorns. In hindsight, I wish I had if only to see if the Hand of 0mega looked like a big black coffin… 😉

Pwned!

The things you see when you’re running around Kings Row in City of Heroes:

Yup, in between beating up Lost and Vazhilok, Mr Alabaster likes nothing better than stopping into the local Pwn show and kicking ass.

Computer techs are cursed

My dad has noticed that whenever computer techs do upgrades on their own equipment, all hell breaks loose. Upgrading 20 computers for a lab, no problem. Changing video cards on your home computer? Big problem.

When I bought my Sony VAIO PC last summer, it had everything that I wanted except a decent video card. Of course, I bought it all the same, despite the onboard video. But my main addiction, City of Heroes, didn’t play corrently on the VAIO. Bugger. No matter, I decided to upgrade the video. I couldn’t use the card out of my old PC – it was AGP and this computer only has PCI-E and regular PCI slots. So I found an ATI PCI-E card for the computer and installed it.

ATI and City of Heroes are not the best of friends, but my game played. Sure the video card occasionally crashed (well, the driver software did) and I’d lose picture. But it was a rare thing. And sure, sometimes after being off, the card wouldn’t send data to the DVI port and I’d have to turn off the computer blind. But I coped.

But then the fan started going bad. Bleh. I was afraid it would stop altogether and the chip would burn out, so I purchased another PCI-E card online. Yay for NewEgg.com! I found a nice nVidia card to replace the ATI. nVidia and CoH are lovers, you know.

Now, before I installed the new card, I uninstalled the ATI drivers. I know what a pain in the ass conflicting drivers can be. And I pondered, but only pondered, installing the nVidia drivers before I swapped out the old and installed the new. And did I even think about dropping down my resolution? Nope…

So I turned off the PC, uninstalled the ATI card and installed the nVidia card without a hitch. Then I turned it on. And it went into Windows XP without a hitch. Except that once WinXP opened up, no picture. Wrong resolutions for the card! 1280×1024 without drivers is very hard to maintain. So did WinXP automatically switch down to one that worked? Hell no. Incompetent piece of shit software…

No matter, says I, I’ll just see what keystrokes are required to run the driver software disk. I put the disk into the laptop to see what it does. But the piece of shit driver software doesn’t have nice alt-key commands for running it. Still, it does beep when you move over the options. I think I might be able to get it to work blind. But I can’t. Bugger.

What’s a girl to do? Well, go into Safe Mode and change the resolution, of course. Except that the VAIO has NEVER been able to go successfully into Safe Mode. And yesterday was no exception. Grrrrr.

OK, next choice is going into VGA mode. Except I get told by WinXP that it’s missing a key file to do that. Good news – my laptop has that file. Bad news – how am I going to copy it onto the PC? Didn’t have any luck doing it through the network – I never bothered to share the C drive and when I tried the hidden share, I, um, forgot my administrator password. (And bugger all if I didn’t remember it later on after I’d passed the point of no return. Stupid ass tech.)

No matter, I’ll just use a Win98 boot disk and copy it that way. Oh yeah, SATA drive. Duh! The DOS on the Win98 disk hadn’t a clue how to view a SATA drive. I decided I had to go to school and get BART PE and a WinXP Pro disk. And to comfort pissed off treen, I also went to Taco Hell for take away. (I’d been working since 3:30 on this gathering disaster and it was after 5pm by then.)

My first thing to try once Leo and I had eaten supper was BART PE. I was able to copy the file that the VGA mode said that it needed. Only the bloody file was already there. *sigh* But attempts to boot into VGA mode still resulted in black screen, and worse, now when I tried booting into Safe Mode, it rebooted instead of just sitting there showing off all the drivers it loaded.

I’d done some research online and suggestions were to do a WinXP repair if you can’t successfully go into Safe Mode. I follow the instructions and things are going OK, until it reboots and goes into Windows – black screen! Still hasn’t dropped down resolution. I haven’t a clue if it’s asking me to type stuff or key buttons or just wait for it to finish. When it gets to a point of inactivity, I turn it off and try going into VGA mode. Ah! Now I can see a picture. And it says that Windows upgrade is restarting. And just sits there. Bugger all.

A second attempt at the upgrade leads to the same results. No way to get into VGA mode while its installing. And when rebooted, it just sits there. Of course, I later realize why this might be so. My computer had Media Center Edition. XP Pro with bells on, but still no XP Pro like I’m “upgrading” it with.

So now I’ve borrowed a computer from school with a SATA drive and copying my documents, videos, and MP3s onto that computer’s HD. And I’ve just wasted $35 to get the Sony VAIO recovery DVD shipped to me overnight (which really means I’ll get it Tuesday since it’s the weekend now). So hopefully on Tuesday I can get my computer back to where it was when I first purchased it. And then get all my stuff back onto it.

Man, I’m gonna miss City of Heroes while I wait for this. I did try installing it on my laptop, but the graphics on here are so bad it’s black & white. Heh. If all goes well, though, I shouldn’t lose any data in this fiasco. At least, I hope not!

A Fine Day Out

Tis been a lovely spring day. Temperature in the low 70s (F), sunny, pleasant breezes. Prit’near perfect. And I actually spent some of the day outside!

I, of course, walked to the post office in the morning for mail (all junk, except 1 bill). But once I got home, I realized that I’d forgotten to get cash at the gas station (they have an ATM machine). So another walk there. And when I got home, I realized that I really wanted to ride my bike. However, the tires were a little flat from the long winter storage. No matter, another trip to the gas station for some FREE AIR (that’s what it says!) and I was good to roll. I rode over to Becky’s house to chat with her, the little ones, and Deanna. Then I rode more (actually almost wearing myself out – go me! Oh wait, I didn’t ride that much. Bad me!)

Leo and I had lunch after that (mmm, haystacks! Taco salads for those of you who dunno what haystacks are). Leo got a smidge of meat & cheese, I also had lettuce & onions & crushed nachos with mine. A little bit of City of Heroes (yay – my new build for The Dominie rocks – he’s a kick ass defender-controller now! And doesn’t get tired!) But then Leo and I were bucking to get outside.

We went out for about an hour. I read more of Wicked while Leo flopped about in the garage and on the patio. Then he decided to investigate more of his yard. By the time I was done reading, he was trying to see what the neighbors (the ones that aren’t mom & dad) were up to. That was at the edge of his leash, so I unhooked him from the long lead & held his little purple leash. He walked me up and down the fence as he sniffed & stared at the goings on. After a few minutes, I picked him up and we returned to the house.

So, all & all, a lovely day. (This is Trina in Work Avoidance Mode. The house really needs a good cleaning & I have other things on my list, but I’m doing a great job avoiding all of that. Go me! I mean, bad me!)

Goofing Off

I had intended to do more useful stuff around the house things this weekend. But you know, it’s Spring Break, so goofing off has been my priority. And my main goofing off point has been playing City of Heroes. Yesterday, I did two Task Forces (which are big long-ass missions that you do with multiple players) with two of my heroes and got a lot of badges for my BadgeWhore, Icy Hot Man. Today, I’ve mostly been working on my MP3 database/tags. I hope to have the correct album art and song release dates for each of my MP3s. I have over 30GB of MP3s from my music collection.

I’ve noticed that I love having catalogs of my collections. I think it’s the anal in me. But I have a database of my MP3s (thanks to MediaMonkey), a database of my DVDs (thanks to DVD Profiler), and even (the start of) a database of my books. I still don’t really understand why I like having catalogs of my stuff, but I live with it. 🙂

GIP – CoH/CoV related

Instead of cleaning house and doing other useful things this morning (hope to rectify that shortly), I’ve been making/improving some userpics. I’ve now got all 10 heroes that I regularly play (OK, so I haven’t actually made one of those heroes yet, but that’s what I intend for Mr Alabster to look like) into two icons (5 per). And I have my two villains in another icon.

Main Set of Heroes

These are my top 5 heroes (for now). Icy is my main with Evah & Dom in their 20s.

Second Set of Heroes

These are my smaller heroes. Some of them very small indeed.

Villains

And finally, my two villains. Jack is my main villain, but poor Chrysanthemum just hasn’t been played all that much. I do prefer being a hero, which accounts for the few villains that I play.

Yup, definitely more than you wanted to know about my gaming habits. But there ya go. 🙂

The Battle of the Addictions

Well, there’s not too many days left of the 2006 Winter Olympics. So sad! But one good thing about the end of the Olympics will be returning to my other addiction, City of Heroes/Villains. 🙂

Even though the Olympics have been winning out over everything (except work and picking mom up from the airport), I have been able to be on my laptop during much of it since Friday. This has allowed me to do other things. Like work on my City of Heroes related sites.

My two main characters, Icy Hot Man (level 50 hero) and Jack Dodger (level 40 villain) are both badge collectors. So one site that I frequent is City Information Terminal. With this site, I keep track of how many badges these two characters have collected. Icy currently has 168 out of 234 badges, while Jack has 77 out of 220. If you click on those links, you can even see all of the badges they’ve gotten. (Unfortunately they put the badges I don’t have first, rather than the ones I do have. I’d kind of prefer to have the bragging rights first, then look at what I’ve got to do next second. Heh.)

Another CoX related site that I’ve been working with is City Game Tracker. This could actually be rather useful (and judiang needs to install the program too) because it shows when I’m actually on and playing.

So, if you want to know if I’m with my other addiction or not, you can check that image out. (Actually, I think I’ll put one of the smaller images in the sidebar of my journal, just for grins.) When I am playing, it’ll say which hero/villain I’m currently playing, too. 🙂 Eventually, all of my heroes/villains will be registered with this program. And I’ll create little icons for each of ’em. Heh. To see who’s registered already, click here.

I’ll probably play around more with my screenshots from the game while watching the Olympic Games. My goal is to eventually create a page devoted to my little heroes & villains. 🙂

Typing some stuff in…

Well, so far, no contributions to Light the Night – the walk for Leukemia & Lymphoma that I’ll be doing on Thursday. Alas! You folks really are all donated out, aren’t you? 🙂

So anyhoo, my poor addiction is sucking at my very marrow, but I don’t care. Gonna play more City of Heroes after I finish this post (and catch up on my FList). Yesterday, work, CoH, supper & Monk, CoH, bed. Today, work, CoH, supper & Monk, CoH, bed. Tomorrow, work, CoH, supper & Monk, CoH, bed. It’s coming to be my schedule. Thank goodness I’ve scheduled myself to walk on Thursday. Might go back into safety mode after that, however. (It’s weird how I get into an antisocial funk for awhile. Not disagreeable to be around or anything. Just prefer to return home to my kitty and bury myself in my computer. Then I’ll get into the “must go OUT AND DO STUFF” mode for awhile.)

The other night, I had another celebrity filled dream. This one starred Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy. Davison was playing the part of a businessman on a space station who’s killed his wife and trying to get away with it. Sylv is playing the guy who runs the space station & is trying to discover who dun it. A key clue is the reflection off of Davison’s bald patch… (Yeah, didn’t make any sense to me either.) Some of the time in the dream, I’m watching the movie, in other parts, I’m watching the making of. And then there was a scene with a guy who looked like a VERY old Davison and I’m telling dad how amazed at how badly he’s aged.

My brain – see, it’s warped! Must go have a replacement. Maybe one that doesn’t get addicted to City of Heroin. 🙂

Hero of the City!

I’ve been playing City of Heroes since Christmas when I got it, though more ernestly starting in February. judiang, meanwhile, got into it thanks to my freebie trial I gave her around Valentine’s Day. She’s had a level 50 character for MONTHS now. But poor Icy Hot Man was languishing way behind her. Until tonight! Yes, tonight, Icy made level 50! YAY! (That’s the highest level you can attain.) To celebrate, I created a new hero, Hercules Jones – a Warshade (something you can only make once you’ve got a level 50 character). Dunno yet if I’ll keep him, but if I do, he’ll probably wind up on my new CoH userpic.

Way to go, Icy Hot Man!

(I guess this means I can play with my other heroes again!)