FanFiction

I'd like to write a little bit about fanfiction tonight. I have some time on my hands while I wait up until the new episode of Doctor Who airs on BBC America.

I have been reading fanfiction since high school, which is half a decade in my past now. I have seen how technology on the internet has allowed fanfic to grow. When I started reading fanfic the options were fanfiction.net and private sites where authors posted their work (usually in addition to fanfiction.net). FF.net is where I read all of the fic in my Stargate SG-1 days. When I got into Stargate Atlantis fanfic had expanded and LiveJournal had become a place for fandom. Communities and private journals alike were filled with fanfic (and the SGA fandom has amazing fanfic). LiveJournal was my fanfic treasure trove for many years.

Now that I'm reading X-Men: First Class fanfiction I find that most of the quality fic has migrated to Archive of Our Own (AO3). FF.net and LiveJournal still have good fanfic, but most of it also ends up posted on AO3. I really like this because AO3 has the option to download fic. This is my favorite feature. I love that I can download a fic in the correct file type for my Kindle and just drag it over there. In addition to the many books I have on there to read, I also have around 20 fanfics ready to read. They have their own fanfiction collection. And then once I've read them they move to a read fanfiction collection. This, paired with the stories that I keep track of on my iPhone's reading list, means that I always have some spare fic to read even when I'm not at my computer. I found it especially nice during my trip to Boston in early August. I downloaded several of the X-Men Reverse Bang stories to my Kindle and read them while I waited to trains and on longer trains. It made the commute from my home to Boston (and then from my hotel to the city each day) much more fandom filled.

And now I'm off. I've still got an hour and a half until Doctor Who, and there are fanfics on my Kindle just waiting for me.

Back to Blogging

I had a conversation with a friend of mine a couple days ago. We both like to write, but seldom find the time to do it, even though we both have blogs that we could be updating. And that got me thinking about this place. Obviously it's been a while since I posted, but I do really enjoy blogging. With the amount of interesting things that I find on the internet everyday that I just really need to share with someone, or even just put somewhere and talk out my feelings about, blogging could be really good for me.

So, I guess the point of this is that I intend to start posting here more. I do not promise high quality everyday. And it won't always be one thing or another. I hope to post a mix of videos, my writing, pictures and just talking about links or something happening in my life.

I'll start right now with an update on my life. I have the same Dunkin' Donuts job that I've had since I graduated high school. Except now instead of working nights, I'm the Assistant Manager and I work a dark o'clock early in the morning. It's been an interesting transition for this night owl, but I still enjoy it. I am still working my way through college with online classes. I do participate in NaNoWriMo every year (I think I'm pretty good at keeping my sidebar updated with that). I tried Camp NaNoWriMo in August this year and didn't even break 7k. I am still very much a James McAvoy fangirl. I would appreciate it a lot if TPTB would release one of the three movies he filmed last year and early this year (or even Arthur Christmas! Give me anything.). I am still in love with X-Men: First Class. I have grown this love by attending a fan meetup for XMFC and starting to read X-Men comics. I am of legal drinking age (I was the last time I posted, but now I've found people that I can be around and drink and just have a good time). I like drinking, but I'm responsible about it. I saw Train in concert on Saturday. It was fantastic.

I think that's it for tonight. I've got comics that I really want to read. Expect the layout and design to change.

Nice to talk to you again, blog people. Have a good night!

New Found Love, WoW, NaNoWriMo 2011, Work

I have fallen in love...again. It happened when I bought the X-Men: First Class DVD and watched it for the first time in the living room with Mom. See, there's this actor in it (a bunch actually) and he caught my eye. His name is James McAvoy, and he played Charles Xavier. I have liked the previous X-Men movies (though I think I've blocked out 3 and never watched the Wolverine one) and have quite the crush on James Marsden (yes, it is tiring being in love with this many men at once). But First Class... Oh man, I've never been so keen on Professor X. Yeah, Patrick Stewart is cool (he's got a 'sir'), but I mostly watched the first too for Cyclops. I absolutely adore the relationship between Charles and Erik in this movie. It's like the tragic love story of Charles and Erik, and there are some other people there too. I love how McAvoy played Charles. It's very fun, but the character still seems wise beyond his years. The flirting and partying was great (very funny and made the character feel more real), but he's also very adept at filling this role of mentor (parent?) that all the kids (and Erik) truly need.

Also, James McAvoy is adorable. I have a couple videos. I can't share them with the friends that I talk to the most because they haven't seen the movie (for the first one) and I don't want to keep throwing random McAvoy videos at them (the second one, I can only get away with so many before they start to get annoyed).

I advise that you do not watch this video if you haven't seen X-Men: First Class.

This one is from the press for the Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I just adore how much he's paying attention while she speaks.

Looking at my YouTube favorites to find these, I realize that I have several more to share.

This one has nothing to do with what I've been typing about. But I love this guy's voice.

And one last thing on the topic of James McAvoy (for now) is a link to a tumblr that has gifs showing James as the 12th Doctor (Doctor Who). This does not yet exist in canon for Doctor Who, but I would love it. http://thetwelfthdoctorandhistardis.tumblr.com/

Moving on, WoW has been going well. New information about 4.3 keeps coming out, so we're in a bit of a slump in terms of staying excited for the content that exists. We have finally conquered the Zandalari heroics. They are still a challenge and we mostly queue up in groups for protection, but we can do them now, and that is fantastic. We gotten some new members. Someone I recruited from the Guild Finder offered to be a recruitment officer for the guild, and it's nice to see another person so excited about us doing stuff as a guild.

NaNoWriMo is coming. I have the 2011 badge up on the sidebar, and I've logged into the new and improved website. I, of course, don't have a plot idea or characters (though if previous years are a sign then my male main character will probably look like James McAvoy).

Work is going well for me. I'm really tired and ready for a day off. This is day 9 of 11 without a day off because I'm spending the weekend with my sister at college. We're also trying to transition to a new way of doing some of the chores and to fall (as opposed to summer), but the weather is confusing people and we're still doing summer business, instead of slowing down for fall and winter. It's making everything quite hectic there, but we're all surviving so far.

Hopefully that is all from me for today. I have one thing I want to look up. Then I have to get my butt in gear and get ready for work.

Camp, Typing and Guild Stuff

If you’ve noticed the new badge on the side of the site (or you know me in real life), then you know that I am participating in the first ever Camp NaNoWriMo this month. It is very slow going as I am learning to touch type Dvorak at the same time. I know where all the letters are now, but my typing speed is around 15 words per minute, and that is hella slow. So my writing is going crazy slow and it probably doesn’t help that I’m not out of the ‘oh god, who are my characters?’ stage of the NaNo writing. My goal for today is to just reach the day two word count goal, which by my math is 3226. I’m at 2729 right now and I am counting this blog post. I figure the easiest way to improve my typing is just to keep doing slow freewrites until my typing improves. I do truly enjoy Dvorak and knowing that I am capable of touch typing, since I’ve never done it before. It’s just very frustrating that typing a hundred takes me so damn long! My problem used to be that I would get stuck with story ideas (that problem definitely isn’t gone), but now the bigger problem is that typing takes forever.

I think I’ve been working on this blog post for at least half an hour. I handwrite things faster than I can type them right now.

However, my characters are cooperating with me when I do get to writing. Which has been in bed with my ‘all things NaNo’ notebook, then I type it the next day. It’s been pretty nice because my main character looks like Matt Bomer. And my main female character, who was the main character before Mark (Matt Bomer looking) decided he was far more interesting, looks like Piper Perabo. They aren’t a bad looking couple for my novel couple, not that they’ve actually met yet. I’m still working on introducing Mark , but I did already introduce Jessica when I thought she was going to be the main character.

Outside of writing, things are going well with my guild. We ventured into Blackwing Descent last week as a guild. We only have 8 interested raiders so we had to pug two healers to help me keep people alive. One of the healers we got was a 15 years old and extremely annoying. We had a shaman healer the first night who was very quiet in vent but seemed to be a competent healer. The second night the shaman wasn’t online so we pugged a paladin healer who we since gotten an alt of into guild. She’s pretty cool. I’m very pleased by how we did in Blackwing Descent. Most of the people from guild had never been in there. Magmaw took three tries to kill, which is not bad for our first Cataclysm raid boss aside from Argaloth. We one-shotted the Omnitron Defense System. That one was surprising and a lot of fun. We really didn’t explain the fight very well, but it was apparently well enough. Maloriak was a one shot as well. After that we went to Chimeron where we wiped for several hours over the two days. We switched to Atramedes to see how we could do on him. On the first night we were winging it and wiped on his trash several times. By the second night I had done some research and we were able to one shot his trash. Atramedes took several tries, but the blind dragon finally dropped! We weren’t able to take down Chimeron but there’s a ton of time for that. For a first Cata guild run it went really well.

The only thing I would like to improve on is my guildies talking over me in vent. It was very frustrating trying to lead a raid with several people talking over me. Or even offering to explain a fight that I just explained “better.” It’s something I can work on with them though.

Well, other things to do tonight! Thank you for reading.

Paladins are Still Fun!

A little over a month after my post about starting to play my level 33 paladin again, she is 85. Not only is she 85, but the game keeps trying to put her into heroic dungeons and I don't think I'm ready for that. I need to be completely comfortable on regular dungeons on her before moving up to heroics. That's why only my priest and warlock have ventured into heroics so far (and excelled) even though my DK and druid are both geared for heroics.
I'll definitely spend a bunch more time in regular dungeons (healing, and maybe some dpsing too) to get rep and justice points (and random drops) for more gear for XxThingXxTwo. then when I'm ready I'll try a heroic (especially because the H Grim Batol that I got conned into earlier ended for me at the first boss when I was kicked (not my fault the shadow priest stood in every Blitz and I couldn't keep everybody up).
Aerialynn, my mage is level 68. I moved her over to Northrend two days ago and left her there. And Brylen, my hunter got two levels tonight and went from 51 to 53.

Paladins are Fun!

Started playing my level 33 Paladin last night after a guildie asked about holy paladin rotation. And I haven't really stopped. I've healed several dungeons and I'm now level 41 (and well on my way to 42). I enjoy smacking things while healing my group...a lot. I'm leveling pretty quickly for being at it a day. Probably has something to do with all the heirlooms she's wearing.

Well, more leveling to do.

CATACLYSM!!

First off: please excuse any horrible spelling errors in this post. I'm having trouble typing tonight. I'm pretty good at catching my mistakes , but it's like my fingers don't want to cooperate with me tonight (5 typos caught and corrected already).

I know it's been a while since Cataclysm dropped, but it you've read this blog you know that I often forget about this blog for months at a time.

So, 4.1 is out now and 4.2 is rockin' away on the PTR. My priest, Zartia (I race changed her to worgen at Cataclysm launch and added an "i" to her name) is 85. Not only did she reach level cap, she's geared for the Zuls (though she's only been in Zul'Gurub and it was terrifying). I switched her to Holy one night after reaching level 85 to try it out and fell in love with Chakra. She has a disc off-spec for PVP and it's alot of fun to mana burn Horde healers and smite them while throwing bubbles and penance at my Alliance teammates. We still lose almost every BG, but it's still fun.

My warlock, Aevelyn, was the first of my characters to 85. It was a death-filled couple of days, but she was the first character in guild to ding 85 (by like a couple hours). And that was cool with me because Aevelyn is the guild master. She's been sitting in wait pretty much since she dinged 85, and I just started playing her again this week. I've spent the last 3 days reading everything I can about destruction warlocks, respeccing a couple times to get talents in the right places. The target dummies have been my friends (though I've beat them up a bunch now). I even downloaded SimCraft to see how far off my 6k dps was from what my character could theoretically be doing. The number that SimCraft spit out for self buffed moving dps was 12k average. I balked for a bit, then installed ForteXorcist and PowerAuras and set back to work destroying a target dummy. With just ForteXorcist keeping track of my buffs my dps went up to 10-11k on the training dummies. Pleased with myself, I took my warlock and her newfound DPS into a random heroic with a guildie. We got Halls of Origination, and I amazed even myself when I pumped 16k DPS into Rajh. Since then I have configured Power Auras to remind me when the Improved Soul Fire buff has fallen off so that I can recast it. It also reminds me if Bane of Doom or Corruption has fallen off my target. Those are the three I noticed myself having the most trouble keeping track of. I feel far more comfortable with my warlock in random heroics now that her DPS has made it to the Cataclysm standard.

Melaenah, my DPS DK was the second to 85, and is now tanking. She's not a full-time completely confident tank, but it's doable. She's got tanking gear and is okay tanking most of the Cataclysm regualer 5-man dungeons. She's geared enough to get into heroics as a tank (with no dps gear in her bags), but I'm not a skilled or confident enough tank for that.

My druid, Gnavie, is 85 as well. I do not enjoy her. I like leveling her as heals, and even 80-85 healing was super easy. But as soon as I hit 85 it's like all my heals got nerfed. She's always oom and her spells feel tiny. I avoid playing her as much as I can, but I need to get her rep with the guild because she's an alchemist and it's the only profession out guild is missing for a guild achievement.

My next closest to level cap is my mage, Aerialynn (formerly Erylie). SHe's level 65 and I'm playing her right now. Three of us mid-60 level characters are being pulled through Coilfang Reservoir dungeons by a level 85 warrior in guild. It's really nice because I really dislike playing my mage. Mages are like warlocks, but not nearly as cool. Sorry mage people, I don't have a problem with you. I just prefer warlocks. Leveling my mage is annoying and boring. I'm going to try respeccing her to fire or arcane, because she's frost right now and I don't enjoy it at all.

I do have one of every class on my main server, though not all of them are very loved. Some are still waiting to get some attention. My hunter has been pretty busy. She's level 46 now. She's been leveling with four other guildies. We get on at the same time and run dungeons. It's a pretty sweet group and we've been leveling together since level 15. It's an easy way to level the characters, a nice distraction from our high level characters (and sometimes soul crushing 85 pugs) and it's a fair bit of guild experience. We already have Classic Guild Dungeon Master, but it's been really easy for us to get our seven dungeons for the guild challenges.

So that's the rundown on my characters since Cataclysm. I've been pretty busy playing as many of them as I can.