Thursday November 29, 2007

Damnit, stupid lobster

375 fishing (for a few months now): check.

Fishing Highland Mixed Schools every time I see one: check.

Mr. Pinchy: yay! Finally.

And of course, the first wish spawns a Furious Mr. Pinchy on me. Bah. :|

Here's hoping I get a Magical Crawdad Box out of either of my two remaining wishes - while I'll keep fishing those pools whenever I see them (Spicy Crawdad and Golden Fish Sticks are good money for not much effort, especially now that I can make Aquadynamic Fish Attractors on an alt rather than buying them off the AH), I would be rather grouchy if I had to fish up another Mr. Pinchy to get the vanity pet. Especially since the boyfriend, lucky him, fished up his Mr. Pinchy and got the vanity pet off the first try a bit ago.

Fingers crossed.

Thursday November 22, 2007

Teaches him not to listen to me

So the boyfriend wants Argent Dawn reputation - not for any specific reason, just because he's a bloody perfectionist.

So he asks me to help him with Battle of Darrowshire, which he never ended up doing while he was levelling.

While we're doing Battle of Darrowshire, a conversation starts in his guild about some person on the server having Deathcharger's Reins, and how it's such a rare drop, and so on and so forth.

Boyfriend goes, "oh, I hate the bastard, I want that mount so much".

We finish Battle of Darrowshire and figure, hey, let's go poke Stratholme, get some Argent Dawn reputation and maybe we'll see the mount drop. (Please note that we're both level 70 and haven't been to Stratholme in forever, and we both ran it countless times when we were level 60 and never saw the Bony Pony of Much Coolness™.)

The following conversation ensues:

Me: "If the mount does drop, what do we do?"
Him: "It'll never drop, don't be silly."
Me: "Right, if it drops, I'll just pass to you, there's no way you'd ever forgive me for outrolling you on it."
Him: "It won't drop."

Flash forward half an hour, kill Baron, guess what drops?

So now boyfriend is a very happy Night Elf on the Baron's mount. Teaches him not to listen to me. :)

Saturday November 10, 2007

Showing item tooltips inline

Obligatory "isn't this nifty?" advertisement: Phaelia of Resto4Life and Valenna of Parry! Dodge! Spin! have written a program to pull HTML code out of Wowhead and display item tooltips inline in a blog post (or any webpage).

It's very nice, and I'm using it (as of last post), so I thought I'd give credit where credit is due. The program is called WISP, and can be found here.

Stealth farming: Sanguine Hibiscus

With patch 2.3 on the horizon (next week!), both I and my boyfriend have been focusing on items to get and reputations to grind in preparation. We both collect vanity pets, so with the addition of several new ones in the upcoming patch, we've been trying to figure out ways to obtain them as soon as possible. Some are obviously impossible to prepare for (being droprate-based), so we focused on the only one we can pre-grind for.

Tiny Spore Bat
Binds when picked up
Requires Sporeggar - Exalted
Use: Right Click to summon and dismiss your tiny spore bat.

One main problem emerged pretty quickly. I'm a feral druid, and was starting the grind from pretty deep through honored with Sporeggar (thanks to all the Primal Life farming I've been doing on the Zangarmarsh giants), so it was easy enough for me to kill enough Naga to hit exalted.

Boyfriend, on the other hand, plays a holy priest. And doesn't have much time for grinding. Argh.

The solution?

Continue reading "Stealth farming: Sanguine Hibiscus"

Flour + water = disaster

The first time I ever tried making bread, I ended up having to add an enormous amount of flour due to adding too much water. (I was following instructions.)

The first time I ever tried making pizza, I ended up having to add an enormous amount of flour due to adding too much water. (I was following instructions.)

The only reason that has not happened the first time I ever tried making a cake, I believe, is cake-making employs no water.

I really should know better by now.

But no...

No-knead bread 1, me 0. Reason for failure: too much water.

And this time I couldn't even really rescue it, since I noticed the issue far too late in the process and I didn't have enough flour besides. And I was following instructions.

Did you know how hard the "stick to everything" type of goop that comes from not enough flour and too much water is to throw away? Yeah. I could almost imagine it growing a multitude of tentacles, clinging to the bowl... and my hands... and the table... and the garbage bag... screaming "nooooo, I want to liiiiiiiiiiiiiive!"

Thing is, I can cook far more elaborate dishes with little trouble, and without even really paying attention to what I'm doing. But there's something in the very simple act of joining flour and water that gets me every time.

I'll try again when I have acquired more flour. And this time, I swear, I'll add water drop by damned drop.