Programmer, Analyst, Learner, Leader, Gamer

I’ve been blogging since 2005. Over the years I’ve run a personal blog, a professional blog, and some gaming blogs. I got tired of blogging in so many places that if you are a reader of my blog you know that about a month ago I merged everything “under one roof” so to speak. Now that I’ve merged so many of my different blogs into one place, I am now forced to ask myself… do I have an audience? Has the merging of my content into one blog helped or hurt my ability to advertise and get comments on some of the things I blog about?

I originally made my blog for my own memory keeping purposes, but I wonder if this has changed. Do people care about the things I’m blogging about? I’m sure my guild cares about some of the guild blogging I do, but does the general public care about some of the leadership blogging that I do or general gaming blogging. Should I blog about game reviews more? I’m not sure anymore.

So in an effort to answer the question “Do people care?”, I head out to WarhammerAlliance.Com to ask the writers out there for feedback. Maybe people do care and I just haven’t ever bothered to advertise my blog. Maybe I should. I await their comments.

So if you’re reading this. What’s your opinion of my blog and should I bother advertising it?

ESAK
http://www.guildcafe.com/zQuest.php
ESAK players often see the game world as a great stage, full of things to see and people to meet. They love teaming up with people to get to the hard-to-see places, and they relish unique experiences.
Achiever 20.00%, Explorer 86.67%,
Killer 20.00%, Socializer 73.33%

Funny because I’ve always through of myself a little more of an Achiever than this test rated me as. Although I believe the biggest achievements in an MMO at least revolve around exploration and building community (socializing). I really enjoyed the test, particularly the last question on my test which was Knowledge or Power. I of course chose Knowledge, for it is a stronger… more subtle power than direct power itself. There were many guild related questions and I continued to learn toward them. It really makes me proud of the group I’ve made and I am really enjoying gaming with them again. Can’t wait till Warhammer when we can all start playing the same game again though. Most of us are spread across several games.

Today hallmarked a new day in the lives of pen and paper geeks everywhere. When Wizards of the Coast bought TSR many many moons ago, many Dungeons and Dragons fans were skeptical. DnD 3rd Edition alleviated most of the fears people had with a slightly expanded core rule set, expanding the D20 structure to allow 3rd parties to write modules, and graced the rulebook with the art styles we’re accustomed to from the Magic: The Gathering team. DnD 3.5 made a decent step forward for the game witha lot of new  classes and again further expanding the game. With the release of 4th Edition next week, apparently the game is going to change in ways no one saw coming.

Victor Hermenzee, great friend/co-worker/DM, is apparently spending his evening tonight going over the new rule set. According to what I’ve heard to far, “This is a completely different game. A great, but different game.” From another friend of mind I heard, “The changes between 3.5 and 4.0 is like the differences between 2.0 and 3.5″. It will be interesting to see what this does for the pen and paper genre and hopefully, if we’re lucky, we’ll get another DnD campaign going.

Who deletes an account off of a website without telling the person why?
Particularly who deletes a friend off of your website without telling them why?

A day ago after watching more and more videos about Age of Conan, I was thinking about playing Age of Conan for a little bit. Particularly a Priest of Mitra. Why? Well because from a single player, story driven RPG standpoint, it seemed like that alone was worth playing. So I made an account on TheConclave.Org and posted on their boards letting them know I was thinking about playing. A lot of the Browncoats/HILYMI members are hanging out there until Warhammer launches and a lot of the other cool people I knew from Tabula Rasa. I said I had my doubts because I wasn’t sure if the healing was “up to snuff” for my taste, but there wasn’t anything horribly negative. Again, I am still at this moment downloading the client. /shrug

Well apparently somebody (I don’t know who… yet) thought it was a good idea to not only delete my post, but delete my whole damn forum account. Now I can’t even PM anyone asking why. I’ve had to go to PlanetTR and PM the moderators of TheConclave.Org, asking them why my account was deleted. Maybe it was a misunderstanding and someone who didn’t know me from TR nuked my account unknowingly (like a conclave member who didn’t play TR). Still though, it says a lot about their moderation policies if a potential friend of the guild can just up and get deleted out of the blue like that.

Over the last two days I’ve been busy importing my LiveJournal Blog (http://cyebrvic.livejournal.com), my Tabula Rasa Blog (http://victeonus.livejournal.com), and merging it with the concepts held within the old VictorLaurence.com. I wanted one comprehensive blog that A. supported my personal journal writing,  B. my game blogging, and C. my career portfolio. I think this new blog format will do that all in one place. Additionally it has a lot more features built into it than LiveJournal and instead of having to pay a yearly fee for multiple paid LiveJournal accounts, I’m utilizing bandwidth and server space already paid for through Dreamhost (oh and I’m experimenting with Google Adsense, forgive me if it’s annoying).

As far as my overall theme of this new site, I’m pretty happy with it. It’s simple, yet says “Oregon” all over it. It’s a bit modern, but not super modern. I think it fit’s well and I like how the date is displayed on posts. Originally I was going to go with a 2 column layout, but then went with a 3 column.

One of the new features I love about WordPress is the built in spell checker is better and the fact that I can assign single posts to multiple categories. This allows me, and my readers to read specific categories of posts they care about. For example http://www.victorlaurence.com/topic/gaming/hilymi is all posts related to Hit It Like You Mean It. I’ve spent an extensive time re-categorizing all my old posts. I still need to go through all the Warcraft ones and make sure that the ones that should and should not be classified for HILYMI as classified as such.

On April 15th I asked the Browncoats and HILYMI for donations for our vent server. Pretty simple, I wanted to pay for a whole year of one of the best vent providers with best codec around for a 32-man server. Donations at first came in rather slowly, then I put up one of those donation Thermometers/Bats and an amazing thing happened.

As of today, April 25th, thanks to the donations from the Browncoats and Hit it like you mean it, we hit our goal. I’m so proud of everyone coming together to pay for a resource that’s outside my normal scope of things I pay for myself (the guild website I offer for free because it’s all lumped into my Dreamhost account).

Oh and we actually went a little above goal, but that’s ok. I’ll keep those funds in the account until we need them again.

So today I decided to resurrect HILYMI as a Warhammer: Age of Reckoning guild. I assure you, this is NOT an April Fools joke. Don’t ask me why this came to me on a day like this but continuing frustrations about TR and seeing posts on the HILYMI forums motivated me to do it today… /shrug.

I will continue to hate Warcraft, but I miss the guild. I don’t like what Blizzard has done to the game. It is not the game for me anymore. I’m not interested in going back to Warcraft, but I’m not happy in Tabula Rasa. It’s a great game, but it’s not the kind of game I want it to be and will never be. Warhammer, now with the big budget of EA, is shaping up to be an excellent game.

25 years of Games Workshop universe complexity.
Financial backing of Electronic Arts.
Realm vs Realm game play from Dark Age of Camelot.
Instanced PVP and PVE concepts from Warcraft.
Instanced raiding. World event raids.
Truly the next generation MMO.
I pre-ordered my limited collector’s edition copy on Sunday.
 

I was talking with Krommy in AIM chat and he mentioned “Isn’t Warhammer still in Beta?”. Yes, Warhammer is due in the fall. Yes it’s quite early to be discussing the guild’s future in Warhammer, but these things take time.

Discussions take time.
Revamping the website will take time.
Finding lost brothers will take time.
Gathering our forces will take time.
Re-forming the officership will take time.
Re-writing policy will take time.These things will take time.
 

I want all of it worked out BEFORE the game starts. That way we have time to enjoy the game and have a strong clean head start in the universe. We have a lot of lost time to make up. We can start that journey now.

An interview that Kevin Flick of Microsoft (aka Fhearl of HILYMI), conducted with me a few weeks back. He’s going to conduct a series of interviews with gamers for his blog with the sneaky and underhanded goal of helping to demonstrate that gaming is just like any other hobby we may engage in. The interview of me was the first of the series of interviews. He’s not to great with post production work, but it’s a greater interview. http://blogs.technet.com/immerse/archive/2007/10/19/gamer-interview-1-victor-f-laurence-aka-livistos-aka-soriathus.aspx

The interview itself covers my history in gaming and about half of it covers my leadership of the guild Hit it like you mean it. We really went into a lot of high level philosophical stuff in there and really put somethings I do for the guild in perspective. Sometimes I’m too humble about all the work I do.

I lost a week of journal’ing. I don’t know what happened in the last week. Time has flown by so fast.

Well here’s the short and skinny of what’s been going on. Got all my reports done last week for the CIA application. I got really sick this last weekend and I think that’s what caused me to ‘fall off’ the horse if you will. Been spending a lot of time helping Kerrie getting her website www.a-red-thread.com rolling. As a company we decided that we’re NOT going to VB.Net but rather C#, which is awesome. As response to that I’ve been converting CIA.Net to C# which currently is done minus a few things and testing. I got my passport turned in finally. Last but certainly not least (does that even apply in this case? meh), Kerrie’s serrogate little brother passed away this week. She’s been a pseduo mess, I think the only thing keeping her together is focusing on the stress of getting to the East coast in time. Once she’s there I think it’ll finally sink in, maybe even on the plane. Tonight I’m taking her to the airport and she won’t be back until the day I’m going up to Seattle for PAX. Life is going by fast right now, all this along with the economy going crazy right now, things are interesting. At least the drama recently in the guild has died down. I’m caught up on Math homework so I should be able to get some good WoW time in this weekend.

Today I woke up late, had some breakfast, and jumped on first thing to do some homework. I did all my CIS homework, posts, and my mid-term only to be interupted in the middle by hearing that Baliku had just /gquit. After putting an immediate band-aide on the situation I jumped back to my mid-term and kicked it’s ass.

I played WoW for a little bit helping my brother blow through STV quests with his alt, then proceeded to play some Paper Mario. That game is so fun and relaxing, it’s nice on Sunday to get away from WoW and just do something non-WoW, but gaming related. I think I’m going to continue to do this. I mean even if I’m together with Kerrie on Sunday, when I get home wind down with an hour or two of Mario before bed. Good times.

Ended up having a long talk with Brian about his health and his friendship with Amanda. It seems like she is putting undo distance between them amoung other things. I tried to give him as much advice as I could and tried to make him not feel “crazy” about what is going on. I just want the three of them to be in game again, drama free, and not hating each other. Regardless about what goes on IRL, it shouldn’t affect everyone’s ability to enjoy each other’s time in game and having fun.