Even my Near-Limitless Patience has a Limit…

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Photo #398: Lovely SkyLocation Taken: Just north of Yellowstone National Park, in Montana
Time Taken: October 2012

I’m a bit bummed right now. There’s a set of missions in Guild Wars 2 that your guild can do together. One of the options is the Guild Bounty, where you have to track down several rather tough enemies and kill them within 15 minutes. My particular guild has a participation rate where we can manage the top tier of the mission (where you have six enemies to kill in that time) only if we get the easier enemies in the list of possibilities.

Each time we try, we spend a good half hour trying to find some of the bounties before hand. Most of them are always on the map, even if the mission isn’t active, so you just have to head there and track them down before you activate the mission. Some of them are on very long paths, so finding them can take far longer than 15 minutes, so doing this makes many of the bounties possible for us to do with our smaller guild.

Yesterday, we tried to do the top tier. And failed. We got the worst possible one, Sotzz the Scallywag. He’s hiding in one of 300 barrels spread across a rather large map, some of them tucked in the most unlikely of places. And he disappears after a minute of you rousting him out of the barrel, so you can’t even find him in advance. It’s purely a matter of luck to get the right barrel quickly enough that you still have time to kill him. He’s not an easy fight either, since he can block most of your damage most of the time. We found the barrel with him about ten seconds after our 15 minute window expired.

The second time, we found all but one of the tough-to-locate bounties and decided that that was good enough. It was getting late, and well, there was only a 1/3 chance that bounty would even be on the list. Yeah, guess what, she was on the list, and despite the whole guild looking, we still couldn’t found her in time. Our guild leader later went and tracked her down just to see where the heck she had hidden herself. She was on a short little circle path far far from any of the places where we have ever seen her before…

Tonight, we tried again, but due to the bad luck last night, we decided to try an easier tier. Just three enemies to kill, far easier to do unless we got unlucky.

First attempt. We got Sotzz. We found his barrel with a minute left in the mission. We could not kill him in time.

Second attempt, no Sotzz! Instead we got Bookworm Bwikki, who is a pretty tough fight. He can put a debuff on you that prevents you from doing damage to him, and it’s really tough to get it off. Plus it’s tough to judge how many people to send. Send too few and all of them have the debuff up all the time and can’t kill him. Send too many and the in-game difficulty scaling goes nuts and his hit points go through the roof and you can’t kill him. We also got one we hadn’t had before, Yanonka the Rat-Wrangler. Since we hadn’t dealt with him before, we didn’t really know how bad his special shtick was. Yanonka is surrounded by a horde of pet rats and well, if you hurt them, they eat your face off. Unfortunately most of the skills of most of the players in this game have some sort of area-of-effect aspect (if only hitting something other than your target if that something gets in the way of your arrow). And this guy was surrounded with his horde of rats. And only two of them was enough to kill you. It hurt.

So yeah, four failed missions in a row. Some of them could have been managed with better organization, but the main fault was on the luck of the draw. It’s pretty demoralizing to fail so spectacularly, though.

So I’m just going to post this lovely picture of lovely clouds and lovely mountains and stare at it for a while until I feel calmer.

Ahh, such a lovely sky…

  

Does the Fog Become a Cloud or the Cloud become a Fog?

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Photo #397: Fog CloudsLocation Taken: Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park, Washington
Time Taken: June 2008

I love the times clouds become fogs.

The soft mist comes down from above, filling the world with gentle light.

Or perhaps it is you who goes to the clouds, heading up and up and up to the lands where the clouds dwell.

The air is thin, yet holds the clouds. The trees grow tall in the cold air.

And the snow falls year round upon the rock that meets the sky.

  

It’s not actually an accurate cannon, usually those only have one set of wheels…

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Photo #396: CannonTime Drawn: April 2013

Like most of my drawings, this one started as an experiment.

Ok, that’s not quite true. It started because I woke up one morning just really wanting to draw a cannon. The experiment came a little later.

On paper I usually start a drawing by sketching out the lines that define the shape, then I ink the lines and add color later.

This time, I did that in reverse.

Well, I did start with a rough sketch, but rather than sketching lines, I sketched shapes. A blob here for the cannon body, a blob there for that wheel, and so on. Then I started adding color and shading. And finally I inked it, using the already established color as the guidelines.

And then, thanks to the joy of working digital, I turned off the layer with my quick sketch, erased all the parts of the cannon that overflowed the lines, and tossed in a one-minute background.

And then wrote this post and put it online. But you might have figured that step out already.

  

Let’s see, that sign is in English, so that cuts out at least 90% of the possibilities…

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Photo #394: Seattle SkylineLocation Taken: Seattle, Washington
Time Taken: June 2008

I followed a link to a unique online game a few days ago, and well, my Mom and I have been somewhat addicted to it ever since then.

It’s called Pursued, and has a fairly simple premise. You’ve been kidnapped, transported via who knows what path, and now you’ve escaped and must figure out where you are. You’ve only got a limited amount of time to wander around looking for any clues, lest you be caught once more.

The really interesting thing is that it used the Google Maps Streetview images for the places you’re dropped into. These are real cities, with all the clutter and oddities that real life brings. And if you fail, they do not tell you the answer. The only way to figure it out is to look around for a while until enough clues fall into place to tell you where in the world you are.  It’s a real test of your navigation and perception skills.

And these aren’t just the big cities, like Rome or Paris (though both of those are certainly in there). There are also smaller cities, and even some times when you’re dropped into what looks like a rural area and the first step is finding the city in the first place.

I got through all of the basic set of levels without missing a one.

Some of them were very close though, and I have missed one in a later set. Only one, and only because I was tired and my brain was convinced I was in the country of El Salvador rather than the city of Salvador, Brazil, but still, I’m glad my geography skills are as strong as ever.

To add to the fun, people can create their own levels, so there are over 1500 places to be lost in. It’s not a game you can exhaust in 10 minutes. Heck, some of the levels give you 20 minutes to figure it out and you need every last one of them.

Well, unless you’re lucky and happen to turn down just the right corner to find the repair shop van that tells you the city in Spain you’re in is Madrid, which you had narrowed it down to because everything is in Spanish and that one website listed on that advertisement ended in “.es”…

It gives a really interesting look at how similar and yet different the lives people live around the world are, and hey, if you ever actually get so lost you don’t know what country you’re in, much less the city, these skills can come in handy! So give it a whirl and see how far you get!