Raithe

Been puttering back and forth on a few things. Managed to slip in about an hour of Tor-play. And some running the dogs around. Tis being quite miserably wet and rainy outside as well.

Indeed. You only get three crew skills. You can however change them if you want to shift around, but then you'll lose all ranks in the skill you swap out. You can have three missions skills, or three gather skills, 1 craft skill and a combination of 2 others, or any similar mixup. But three is the max. And every companion you get will have bonuses to different skills. Of course, if you have skills other then the one a particular companion has bonuses with, it has no effect.

Had such an enjoyable bout of insomnia. Didn't manage to fall asleep until it had gone past 05:14 - Well, the last time I checked the time before I managed to achieve some modicum of sleep... The day has arrived with constant rain for the last few hours.. I am contemplating what mental gears need pushing to actually achieve stuff ..

I seem to be having that slight rest from Tor, only played an hour of it this morning.. and that was actually creating a couple of new characters. Put a smuggler and a sith warrior on the board as well to dabble with. Letting my Sith Inquisitor hover on Hoth at the moment, that is a serious amount of white expanse. But I have to admit, they've certainly managed to give it a certain aesthetic appeal and broken it up with a variety of icey wasteland type environments. I will say it's kind of amusing to catch up on flashpoints that you forgot to do. Going back when you're way over level you can run through them solo and pick up the lore, get to make the choices you want to see how things will play out.. Although you do lose some of that social aspect..but heh, both can be fun in their own way.

We have been getting various knuckle-bones and the like.. the trouble being if they're inside the house they stink up the carpets... If they're outside the house.. he's coming back in covered in mud...

Some of the American servers can get queues of up to 200 if you try logging in at the wrong time (usually around midnight gmt), but they're usually just 10-15 minute queues at the peak times. I use an east coast server and for most of the day I have no queue issues logging in.

Urg. And I think family peace might soon be out of the window. Mom had tears of frustration and anger because the 10 month old puppy chewed on the corner of a wall, got the paint off, damaged the wood. One more thing piled on, and the cat's being incredibly twitchy around him. I get the feeling it's going to reach an ultimatum point towards my sister soon. I kind of have this idea that my sister really didn't realise how much work an alsatian is. She used to get up at 7am to give the dogs a run around before she got to work, but as it crept into winter that slipped to 7.30, then 8... now she practically pushes them outside on their own for five minutes before she's running out the door. I can't really take the poor bugger out for proper walks, because I can't take him off the lead. The only person he will consistently respond to (at least , if you're calling for him) is my sister. So I can take him for short, on-the-lead walks up and down the hill and around the block, but I can't really give him serious runs and ball-throwing over the common. And he's suddenly decided he's not interested in those hide-bones you get for them to chew on..

Heh, thought I'd do a day without playing any Tor... and while catching up on various other things, reading some books I'd gotten over christmas.. I notice that TOR has spent huuge chunks of the day on downtime due to maintenance, updates and the first big patch. So I guess it was good I was juggling other things..

There are levelled tiers of missions, and they depend on the level of skill you have. The different tiers also reflect different "levels" of what gear is best for. So it's something like tier 1 takes you up to around skill ratings of around 60 or so, and then teir 2 missions/crafting tends to be "level 17-24" type stuff. Teir 3 is something like "level 25-28" things, and so on, At least, that's what it seems to me to reflect. Edit: And keep an eye out for that hot air balloon. It takes about 40 minutes to circle the dune sea, but you have to use it to find a couple of datacrons.. I keep meaning to go back to it, the one time I tried I spent about 30 minutes on the ride, and then it glitched out and dumped me in the middle of the desert.

Same problem, and I'm just lvl 22 with my sith warrior. I saw someone asking tips for getting credits in the official forums, and it had two pages of "lol noob" for answers. Apparently slicing would be a definite answer for being poor, but I rather not go that way. I just hope I don't have to roam around grinding credits too much, I hate grinding. Does anyone know why I don't always get more points in archeology when I use it? I get the crystals and what not, but the skill doesn't get better sometimes. It's around 145 now. I have to admit, I'm not sure if its something they've shifted since the beta, or whether it does depend on class, but the Trooper I played during the beta weekend was rolling in cash. So I half wonder if there's a reason that the force users don't find as much.... Oh, one small trick that can be useful, remember to take time to fly the spaceship missions, they can add a bit of extra cash to the pile, especially if you do them regularly.

I have to say, as a Sith Inquisitor I pretty much always feel as if I'm short of credits. I seem to manage to get a nice pile of money..and then I'll have a level up and find there are about 4 skills to pick up that wipe out my cash reserves... At the moment it appears to run around a rough 30-40k total, and having to spend around 14k for an ability advance. Of course, I just hit 40, and found I need 120k to get the "Pilot Speeder (Rank 2)" ability....

Well, am inviting the waifs and strays around tomorrow. Friends on their own or away from home for Christmas. I miss the buggers after about a week not seeing anyone, to be honest. Family are all well and good. But (and maybe this is boarding school talking) your friends are your real family, I think. Family now taken over almost whole house. So am kipping in my office. I have a sleeping bag nestled up beside a filing cabinet. I love it. It's like camping, only awesome. I am incredibly tempted to move in permanently. For some reason I thought you'd said that you were inviting over waifs and strays to be buggered. I'm hoping that says more about you than about me. And I was tempted to make a suitable comment regarding "the nature of public and/or boarding schools"...

Possibly been over-playing TOR the last 9 days. Even ended up playing some yesterday afternoon... Hit level 39 with my Sith Inquisitor, landed on Hoth. Picked up my first "Legacy" level, which is kind of funny. When you wrap up Chapter 1 you get the "Legacy Name" that all characters you have on the server have access to said "Legacy". For all xp you learn, you get a percentage of "legacy xp". So far it doesn't actually do anything to have legacy levels, but you get a nice flashy message in the vein of "this is something we'll be developing and adding in soon, but what you earn now will count to the rewards later" sort of thing.

One of the few things we still actually do as a family is to gather around the tree, divide the presents up into various piles and then open them all together. Of course, this morning, as we divide up the piles.. the neighbour turns up, blithely ignores whats going on, sits down and talks.. and talks... and talks...

Hideous amounts of TOR. Seriously hideous amounts. I really should stop that. It still has that hunger to hit the quick save button, and I keep hitting decision points where I want to reload to see what happens if I go another way. Actually I think that could be a bit of a pain about it. While you can start up another class for a fresh class story, or at least interesting twists on things that everyone encounters, playing the same class again would mean going through a lot of samey content to reach those decision points.. even if there are a lot of them. It's kind of interesting on some of the setup, I mean, Republic side gets to Taris in level range of 20-24 or so and has certain story elements, the Imperial side goes to taris around 30-34 level side, and it appears that it's also later in the timeline to the Republic. So you won't encounter Republic players on the Imperial version of Taris, but you'll have a lot of the same areas, but developed in ways that you'd recognise from the world story you would have run into when playing as a Republic class. Lets you have an interesting shift in viewpoint and seeing just where some of that developing universe goes.

There's only been about 6 or so shows since Tom was on. Top Gear has turned into a weird phenomena where they do a single season of 6 shows, and a couple of "specials" a year. But apparently it still manages to turn into one of the biggest exports of the BBC to the world. You had a batch of american "big names" turn up on the show, but they were all the ones that were quite heavily "anglisised" or very big on the UK, such as Christian Slater or the like. In the last year or so tho, they seem to have started to have a few hollywood names who weren't UK born turn up to take the "reasonably priced car" around the test track and plug whatever they were currently doing.

Tom and Cameron turned up on the same week to do their lap when Night and Day was released. Tom actually managed the top track time which lasted awhiles.

For the random trivia, during the shooting of MI4, Simon Pegg turned up on Top Gear to do the whole "Star in a Reasonably Priced Car", and apparently Tom Cruise gave him some ribbing about whether he'd manage to beat his lap time on that course..

We decided to try the more relaxed route.. Ordered all the assorted food for Christmas and Boxing day from Waitrose. So basically it's all prepared, you pick it up a day or so before hand, and then it's pretty much ready to slide in the oven. Of course, for a "take the stress out of christmas" approach, it hasn't gone so well. Ever since we ordered it, every single day my father has done the "so where do I have to pick this up? when? will I have to pay for it?" We put it on a yellow sticky, and he still kept asking the questions. Then pick up day and boom, they'd misplaced a box of stuff. So all we had ready were the beef wellington for christmas day, and the duck for boxing day. WIth none of the other stuff. Chased them up, got the rest of it. Then at home, packing it away into the fridge.. and notice that the big platter of sushi for the post-christmas eating.. has got a "best before date" of the date we picked it up. So today was spent working our way through sushi.

Had an entertaining time leading a jedi padawan into corruption (so to speak) then ended up having to kill her master, and take her as my apprentice. Also, safety note for those Imperials who reach Taris. - If you find a "mysteriously dead jedi" body, don't click on it. You will be surprised and jumped on by a huuuumonguous worm-like world boss. Seriously. End safety announcement.

Most officers on Imperial vessels in WH40k? Because that's a stirring example of clean psychologically healthy folks...

Well, just to throw in the whole.. pseudo-science aspect.. but haven't they done the whole "Humans don't like being wrapped up in tin cans with no outside views" psychological studies? And Joker has a crudload of sensors and readouts on his console, and during battle those big shutters actually come down and cover the windows.. So I'm not really stressing over the thoguht that he looks out of the window to fly the ship.. To me it's more, he gets the damn good view when the ship isn't in combat. After all, how many people do you know who really don't like seeing clear images of stars and spinning, swirling gas clouds in space?

And Raahr! I made it through to the end of Chapter 1. Good gawd that takes time and effort. Every time I thought the story was getting there.. they'd suddenly hit me with more missions and mini-story-arc and send me off somewhere else. Still, hit 35, became a Sith Lord. Have my own cult on Nar Shaddaa, what looks like the beginning of a personal following on Dromund Kaas. And my companion, Khem Vor has I got caught up in the "I just want to get chapter 1 finished damn it, this looks like finally the final mission" and plugged away at it and achieved it at abou 0240.... yeesh, that was not planned. Put in my "Legacy" name and then shut down and went to bed. So I have yet to explore how things shift for the Chapter 2 arc of things...

You also seem to have a whole bunch of the early access folks, who even though they had their registration codes, waited until today at the last minute to do the "oh crap, if I don't put it in right now I'm going to lose the character i've spent hte last x days working on." Even though bioware have been flashing the warning that the pre-order / early access code was not product registration and you had to have it put in for the last couple of days... I even saw someone come on, complain that bioware hadn't been clear that the pre-order code wasn't a product registration, that their stupid website had taken two hours to successfully register and subscribe, and that now he had vented he was going to quit and go back to WoW... Yeesh. I'm trying to understand what is not clear about a "Your pre-order early access code is not product registration code". And a lot of these folks had their CE's and such for several days. I'm betting Bioware was expecting all these folk to have actually registered before hand.. as part of the whole concept of rolling access.

I picked up the "Complete Cary Grant Collection" some months back. There's a time and a place for classic screwball comedy and dry lines delivered in an impeccable manner.