Mages, cakewalks, etc.

Here are a couple of things I figured out yesterday:

1. There is, in fact, no way to make male blood elves look non-gay. (This is not, of course, intended as any disrespect towards actual gay people. However, if the choice is between playing a gay man or a woman in a virtual world, I'm afraid I must go with the woman.)

2. Mages are not fun to play.

This second thing is particularly disappointing to me, since I had high hopes for the class. But I (again) got to level 8, and realized...this isn't fun. I think the reason playing a mage-type characters in NWN and D2 was so much fun was because you could charge around while you were slinging spells, herding guys up and unleashing the fury on them. It was fun the way playing Quake with the rocket launcher was fun. But in WoW, you can't run faster than the enemies anyway, and you have to stand still while you're casting most of your spells, or they get interrupted! So there's no 'keep-moving-to-stay-alive' aspect of playing. In fact, there didn't seem to be a large 'stay-alive' aspect of playing at all, for that matter. My mage, an unfortunate blood elf named Trestle (yes, like a trestle table), died quite a lot.

So, I'm trying to decide what to do about this. I'm resolved to play this game at least for a month, or I will feel hardcore shafted by Blizzard. $55. Blah. I played my Paladin again for a while. She's alright. I've been trying to view her in the same light I did Reskar; I'm sort of hoping I can pull a story out of her. The real trouble is that the plot of WoW that you can participate in is so sparse that there's really nothing to fashion a character around; she's still just my awkwardly-female avatar. She's rather fetching, though, I suppose, and more pleasing to watch than the backside of an 8-foot-tall bipedal cow.

One thing that's been kind of disappointing is that I was going to play this game with my roommate, but it turns out he's been playing like 8 hours a day, every day, so of course his character is already level 20-something, and I'm not even 10 yet. So I think playing with him is not really going to be in the cards. A few of my friends at work play, too, but they're all also extremely high level.

I guess I'm going to cancel my subscription after 1 month. It's been a frustrating month for me, video-game-wise. First NWN2 was a massive disappointment, now this. Ah well, I guess there's always Three Towns, right? (And Civ 4 continues to rock.)

It's funny that I'm devoting so much thought to what video games to play, lately. I guess it's a testament to how much easier this semester is, so far, that I have time to think about stuff like this. I guess one thing about doing physics is that it makes everything else look pretty easy. (With the notable exception of Jake's insanely complicated quantitative genetics problems. Turns out I made some pretty serious errors in that analysis, and I need to get cracking on correcting them. Been waiting until I got over my infection, but I guess now that I'm feeling mostly better, I'm all out of excuses...) I figured my mathematical biology and bioinformatics classes would be pretty challenging, for example, and while they're interesting, so far it's a bit of a cakewalk. Quantum Mechanics II, though, is really difficult. (I guess that's not totally unexpected...) Since it's my only class, I'm able to spend adequate time on it that it's not such a huge deal, but still...my first homework assignment is due this Tuesday, and some of these problems are just ridiculous.

Well, I've got my Rockstar in hand (since Jittery Joe's isn't open until 1:00 on Sundays...what's up with that?), so I guess it's time to crank through another QM problem. Nothing like finding eigenvalues and eigenfunctions for coupled quantum oscillators to start off your day, particularly when followed by the promise of an impossible-to-understand quantitative genetics analysis!