I really wish the kittehs wouldn't sing along. Oh well, it doesn't get more 'authentic' than this eh?
Kittehs and I are going to have enough for a full Sogget collection at this rate!
Note to self: When giving a friend a furry Domokun bag as a present, do not leave your house keys in said bag. Take particular care not to do so when said friend is in another country, which you are only visiting temporarily. If you fail to follow this note, the following may result...
Tired nugget waddles along in cab queue after 12 hour (transit included) flight from Oz.
Tired nugget feels around in bag for keys.
Horror dawns upon the nugget of tiredness. There are no keys. THERE IS NO SPOON!
O.o
NOOOOOOOO!
Shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit.
People in queue begin to look at nugget strangely. Nugget ignores them and proceeds to grope both bags in fashion worthy of John Wilmot. People begin to move away from a nugget. Nugget ignores them and continues to grope baggies all the way to the cab... and back home.
Where the nugget admits defeat, and the fact that while there are indeed keys to the abode of the nugget, they are most certainly over thaar. In Australia.
*DING!*
The nugget remembers that the cat-sitter has extra keys! All that has to be done is to call her and pick them up! Yippeh!
...only of course, the nuggetphone is in the nuggetabode. Because the nugget sekritly hates bringing her phone anywhere, and she most certainly does not bring it overseas.
Patheticnug begs Kind Cab Driver for use of his cellphone. Patheticnug then proceeds to call kittehsitter! Who of course, does not answer. After manee manee calls, plus a poke at the pager, Patheticnug gives up, and gives Kind Cab Driver the only residential address she knows in this, her home country. (Yeah, yeah, I know just ONE.) For reasons that shall not be detailed herein, Patheticnug does not expect a warm welcome at said address, in fact, Patheticnug is not sure she will have enough welcome to even crash for the night on the floor, and pick up Kitteh Sitter Keys from Kitteh Sitter in the morning. Nonetheless, onwards!
Patheticnug then explains to Kind Cab Driver that should lodgings not be available at the given address, he should drive her back to her Nugabode which she Cannot Enter, and she will sit outside for the night.
Kind Cab Driver stares at Patheticnug, and it's clear that what he's actually seeing is Insanug. -_- He then suggests that Insanug might like to get a room at a cheap hotel in the area of given Address of Unwelcome, rather than sitting outside of the inaccessible Nugabode all night. Insanug is wildly grateful, the thought not having even started to grow within the juiciness of her now somewhat soggy batter.
Just then, the phone ringz! Aha! It is the colleague of Kitteh Sitter who, upon being informed of Insanug's tragic situation, doth report that illness has descended upon Kitteh Sitter, who may not answer her cellphone, but Insanug is welcome to the number with good wishes attached!
Alas, Kitteh Sitter, she does not answer.
Sadly does the Insanug instruct Kind Cab Driver to continue upon his way towards the Address of Unwelcome.
But then does the Supreme Bean smile down upon the Insanug, for before her conveyance doth reach the Address of Unwelcome, the Kitteh Sitter responds!
WHEE! And so it's off to the other side of the island, where keys are picked up, Kitteh Sitter is heartily thanked, Kind Cab Driver is heartily tipped, SplattedNug is delivered home, and Kind Cab Driver is also heartily thanked, and paid (of course).
And thus does end, happily ever after, the tale of How the Kittehs Saved the Nugget.
-_- And next year, you can be sure I'll check that I have my damn keys before leaving for my flight.
Great design resource covering the basics of typography, with a strong focus on practicality and readability. Although written (as shown) for lawyers, it's relevant to anyone who creates/handles/processes high volumes of 'boring' documents over the course of a work day, since its main aim is to make sure your Boring Documents are as painless (and perhaps even pleasant) to read as possible.
Sample stuff - lots more goodies where it came from!
Good typography is measured on a utilitarian yardstick. Typography that is aesthetically pleasant, but that doesn’t reinforce the goals of the text, is a failure. Typography that reinforces the goals of the text, even if aesthetically unpleasant, is a success.
Now that particular paragraph is something I wish more of the baby designers I've dealt with understood.
I wailed! I whined! I made lots and lots of squeeing noises! And then I whined some more!
As a result, my Oz-family were finally bullied into making me a Bacon Explosion... WOOTIES!
And here are da pictures for posterity.
No. 2 is my hand for a sense of scale. I'm 1.65m / 5ft 4in tall. DEATH BY BACON! WHEEEEEEEEEEEE!
(P.S.: The girl had a horrible tummyache the next morning. Exploded by bacon. O.o)
One of the worst things about being a monk healer/protter/hybrid is e-management. IMO, monks have the worst e-management in Guild Wars. When playing a Ritualist or (lol) Necromancer/Ritualist healer/protter, I never feel as if I'm constantly starving, or about to starve for energy. Even when I'm not starving for energy, there's still this energy-paranoia that I don't feel when playing non-monk healers.
Of course I have a Zealous Benediction and Word of Healing bar (or two, or three), but then, every monk does. ;) However, Zealous Benediction encourages you to wait until your target's almost dead for optimal use, and for reasons of latency, poor reaction time, bad luck, or a combination of all three, this often results in either a target that's too dead for optimal use, or not dead enough.
Word of Healing bars, which tend to be hybrid bars, lack a certain synergy within the bars themselves. They try to cover all bases, which they do to some extent, but at the same time end up covering none of them particularly well.
All that, and I just like tinkering. So - enter the Air of Enchantment Prot-Infuser.
An almost pure Protection build based around Air of Enchantment, it lets you spam Reversal of Fortune as often as you like on a single target, for only 1e per cast. Use Infuse Health to catch spikes / when your target is below 25% hp, then Watchful Healing on yourself to regain the hp lost. The +3 regen from Watchful Healing lets you continue to spam-prot your target, and if it gets stripped early by a siege turtle, no worries - you get healed for +90hp - win/win situation. Mighty Was Vorizun in tandem with correctly used Air of Enchantment and Reversal of Fortune means you should always have the energy to Infuse Health, all while giving you a passive +15 armor. What's more, the recharge for Air of Enchantment is shorter than the duration - meaning you can renew Air of Enchantment on a target for only 1e. Plus, if you have any other healers with you at all who use enchants, they'll love you. Even if they don't realise why. ;)
And to top it all off, this build, used wisely, can hold a gate against a siege turtle by itself.
Fort Aspenwood (Kurzick) Air of Enchantment Prot-Infuser
Skills
Air of Enchantment {Elite}
Reversal of Fortune
Guardian
Infuse Health
Mighty Was Vorizun
Deny Hexes
Dismiss Condition
Watchful Healing
Stats
Protection Prayers [11] + [4]
Divine Favour [10] + [1]
Communing [10]
Gear
- Superior Protection Prayers Rune
- Minor Divine Favour Rune
- Survivor Insignia
- Superior vigor rune
- Vitae runes to finish off
- Any sword/spear/axe + shield with hp or energy mods
Campaigns Needed
Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall
How to Use
- Cast Mighty Was Vorizun, renew it before it runs out. This build should not have energy problems - what Mighty Was Vorizun does is give you just that little extra energy pool to use infuse as and when you need it. If facing e-denial, switch to low-e set, and do NOT use Mighty Was Vorizun. You can also cast Mighty Was Vorizun when you need an extra hit of energy.
- Reversal of Fortune as mini-prot for minor damage
- Guardian on targets taking consistent physical damage
- Infuse Health to catch spikes, then Watchful Healing on yourself to recover hp. Watchful Healing has the additional benefit of healing you for +90hp if a siege turtle strips it from you before it's done.
- Deny Hexes to remove hexes from yourself, or target. Deny hexes is great against hex stacks - it counts *itself* as a recharging Divine Favour spell, which means it removes at least 2 hexes, 3 if you have Watchful Healing on cooldown
- Dismiss Condition to dismiss pesky conditions - also packs a decent heal, because it's a prot build
- Air of Enchantment on any target you'll be protting consistently. Air of Enchantment allows you to spam Reversal of Fortune for just 1e. Additionally, Air of Enchantment recharges faster than its duration - meaning that if you overwrite an old Air of Enchantment with a new one, it costs only 1e. Stack Guardian on top (i.e. Air of Enchantment > Reversal of Fortune > Guardian) if a turtle is around - this should allow you to continue spamming Reversal of Fortune to your heart's content, while being able to renew Air of Enchantment as and when you need to renew it
Variants
- None There's nothing on this bar I would drop or change. I've tried this with Patient Spirit instead of Infuse Health, but that requires too much investment in Healing Prayers, which the stat point spread doesn't allow for. Mighty was Vorizun is there so that when the time comes to use Infuse Health, you have the energy to do so. One of the original versions of this build had 10 Healing Prayers, no Communing, and Patient Spirit in place of Infuse Health, and Healing Breeze in place of Watchful Healing. The result was much more inefficient.. Healing Breeze is ONLY efficient if Air of Enchantment goes on first - and very often, I'd find myself using it even alone out of desperation, and then having low energy. Patient Spirit heals for a good bit, but it isn't fast enough to reverse a spike, and shouldn't *be* used to reverse a spike, anyway.
Counters
- General Caster Hate
- Not stacking enchants on top of Air of Enchantment
- Party-wide damage - this build is strictly single-target protting. If for some bizarre reason you have huge party-wide damage in FA, this build will not be able to handle it
- Heavy pressure on you - Air of Enchantment cannot target self - this means that you are more defenceless than those you are protting, because it costs you more to defend yourself. You'll need to be able to kite smart and try to stay out of trouble - not always possible
Additional notes
Where have you tested this?
Fort Aspenwood, Kurzick side. That's what I wrote it for. I might test it in other places, but this is essentially a Fort Aspenwood, Kurzick build.
Let’s construe the notion of “virtual economy” quite broadly: If you receive an experience by yourself through a machine that runs on digital technology, without doing or buying anything physical (other than press a few buttons), it’s virtual. To download a song and listen to it on your iPod is virtual; to go to a concert is real, to buy a CD and play it is real, to play your own instrument is real. The difference I want to highlight is in the physical nature of the economic transaction. The virtual transaction does not require the movement or alteration of anything physical. Not even physical money changes hands. The real transaction involves material being created, moved, consumed, all by human hands.Using these concepts, there’s some evidence that an exodus from the real to the virtual is not only already underway (as I argued in my second book) but that’s it’s gotten big enough to affect our sense of a whether the real economy is healthy or not. In support, here’s a series of random judgments about the state of the real world. TV viewing is down among 18-34 year old males, and movie attendance is flat. Meanwhile, more and more time is being spent online or playing videogames. If you want to get 80 hours of fun watching movies, you need $1000. You can get the same fun from a game for $50. Spending time online or playing videogames simply involves less expenditure in the real economy. Human eyeballs see a lot fewer ads than they used to. As noted, some people are watching less TV. For most others, the TV they’re watching is increasingly DVR’d or Hulu’d, that is, stripped of ad content. On the internet, we avoid ads easily – they are usually in the periphery, and if not we can click them away, or surf to something else. Advertisers have made an industry on the presumption that ads make people buy things. If they are right, it follows that fewer ads would result in us buying less. Ads are less and less a part of our daily experience. HBO’s success with a show about evil advertisers is perhaps apt now, because we feel we finally have gotten the upper hand on these miscreants. The net result of our power over advertisers, according to their own model, would be a weakness in general real-world consumption. Facebook is a great way for people to connect. In some FB games, you can buy someone else a beer. You can poke them, write on their wall, friend them. None of this causes anything in the real world to be moved or changed. There are 500m people on FB, hundreds of millions more on other, similar social networking sites. If you’re friending people on FB, you’re ever so slightly less likely to be sending them a real Hallmark card, ever so slightly less likely to write them a note on paper, ever so slightly less likely to give them a call. That’s probably not going to turn around, either. Our ability to socialize online puts a crimp in our general need to move stuff or change stuff in the real world.People who spend time online don’t have to worry about what they are wearing. Suppose that some percent of a given day can be spent in pajama’s, the rest must be spent in decent clothes. For decent clothes, you need a whole and varied wardrobe. For PJ’s, you need a few comfy ones. Now increase the amount of time that can be spent in PJ’s. The demand for decent clothes falls, if ever so slightly. The internet allows us to do all kinds of stuff in our PJ’s – so it must have an ever so slightly dampening effect on the market for fashion.One could go on. It is possible, slightly, that there’s a general weakness in consumer spending simply because, to get our social, emotional, informational, and needs met, we just need fewer movies, fewer beers, fewer trips, fewer shoes, fewer things in general. What if the world of human beings suddenly became converted to the idea of consuming less stuff? Why, there’d be a recession, of course. Less buying means fewer jobs and less investment, which means economic contraction. It would mean a general pessimism about the prospects of business.
Really interesting and balanced post on how the move to virtual goods and services is influencing economies, complete with a highly intelligent (and answered!) comments section.
One of the things that makes it so convincing is that Castronova isn't running around splooting blood like a headless chicken (!the sky is falling!), but rather emphasizing how little things can add up.
Hate being a Junundu?
Loathe the Bonus Mission Pack because it's mindbogglingly boring with the exception of Gwen's story?
Then you'll dislike the first two quests in Hearts of the North.
Just like a nugget.
*sigh* I hope the whole questline isn't like this...
[Edit: It appears the entire Keiran part of the questline is like this. Luckily, there's only 5 of them. -_- After the 5 quests, he's going to marry Gwen, and surely players won't have to help him with that. I hope. O.o]
The style was intentionally done like Bill Watterson's stuff (Calvin and Hobbes, to those few who don't recognise the name). It seemed appropriate for Tragic Snowpeople.
This year, I've brought it back to life here (ooh a rhyme!) in the hopes that it will make people spare a moment of silence for all the snowpeople of the world, destined to go down the draaaaaaaaaaaaaaains.