Preemptive Birthday Celebration

Even though today is the actual date of my birth on some calendars, for me the celebration was really last night, because yesterday my new iMac G5 and several new software titles arrived.

I couldn’t help but grin incessantly and dance around, in spite of the fact that my apartment was at the time 56° F due to bad thermostat wiring.

To celebrate, I got World of Warcraft installed, downloaded all of the patches, and started playing.

And playing.

And playing.

(Note that there is no mention of food, drink, or sleep here.)

Admittedly, that was pretty dumb to do on a weeknight, but that’s what massive substance abuse is for, right?

I am starting a new electronics naming theme: Star Trek Bestiary. My new iMac is named Tribble. Once I do some extraction and backup, my external hard drive will be named Sehlat. When I get a PowerMac tower at some point, it will be named Targ.

There is no Klingon word for “jolly”.

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Nicolas Ward

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10 responses to “Preemptive Birthday Celebration”

  1. uncleamos Avatar
    uncleamos

    Oh you fool :)

    Reply
  2. hankshiny Avatar
    hankshiny

    The iMac G5 is a thing of beauty.

    I wasn’t 100% aware there was a Mac WoW client until now. I may knuckle under and try it sometime and call it “research into virtual worlds.”

    Reply
  3. stormwynd Avatar
    stormwynd

    I like the Star Trek Bestiary naming theme. My Buffy/Angel theme is definitely out of date, but then again, I haven’t really bought any new hardware in a while either.

    And yes, I’m very jealous of your new G5.

    So just out of curiosity, how long was the inagural WoW marathon?

    Reply
  4. flurious Avatar
    flurious

    I’ve started using Cordwainer Smith’s characters. The only problem with it is all the apostrophes.

    Reply
  5. Nicolas Ward Avatar
    Nicolas Ward

    I think there’s some tricky thing where, if you get the CDs from somebody, I can give you a 10-day guest key.

    Reply
  6. Nicolas Ward Avatar
    Nicolas Ward

    All of Blizzard’s games as far back as I can remember (Warcraft II, because before that we only had an old DOS machine) have been Mac/PC in the same box. Personally, I think this is the way to go in terms of being seen as a cool company and making money, as opposed to the “let Macsoft make a port a year later” used by some game distributors.

    I guess it’s because the game data is the big part (graphics and sounds), and the binaries of the game engine aren’t really all that big. I would think that this is true of most modern games, but maybe almost no one wants to bother writing architecture-independent game engines.

    Then again, WoW is 5 discs, plus about 300MB of downloaded patches.

    Reply
  7. Nicolas Ward Avatar
    Nicolas Ward

    My parents read this. They would be concerned for my health/sanity.

    For my Gnome Warrior-Engineer, I made it to level 10 in about 8 hours. For my Tauren Hunter-Leatherman, I made it to level 11 in about 10 hours.

    If you consider that I also worked 15.5 hours over the last two days, and account for transit and eating, you can figure out that I’ve gotten less sleep in two days than I should get in one.

    I think I’ll be going to bed after dinner tonight.

    Reply
  8. hankshiny Avatar
    hankshiny

    I haven’t played a Blizzard game since Starcraft or Diablo II, whichever was more recent. But I do remember them being Mac/PC compatible then. I guess I just subconsciously assumed the trend of mac support for gaming getting progressively worse had continued since then.

    Reply
  9. Nicolas Ward Avatar
    Nicolas Ward

    I think Blizzard is basically the one holdout.

    EA generally distributes Mac ports of its big games through Aspyr, although there’s usually a big delay.

    Reply
  10. stormwynd Avatar
    stormwynd

    I’ve purposely avoided WoW and all other forms of online gaming for just this reason. The way I see it, I have enough vices in my life right now without adding to the mix.

    And yes, you should go to bed ASAP. :-)

    Reply

Nurd Up!