Archive for ◊ June, 2009 ◊

And the gloomy weather continues…
Author: Measi
• Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

I think we’re up to day… 16? 17? of this gloomy early-spring weather. It’s getting a bit tiresome, even if my yard is loving it. San Francisco-like fog is rolling in over Boston Harbor. It’s pretty, but after two weeks of grey skies, I need a good dose of sunshine.

Random things…

Erich’s now the temporary guild leader of our WoW guild. The normal GL is on vacation for a month while her family visits her in Australia, so Erich’s taking over to maintain stuff while she’s gone. He’s already been having some fun joking about infinite power.

Our guild went through 7 brand new bosses in Naxx this weekend. All but two we destroyed on our first attempts, and we managed to clear Naxx for the first time last night. It was a great feeling. Amazing that we’ve learned the entire dungeon in essentially only 13 sessions max.

Support Stacie writing continues to progress. Still writing longhand and drafting. I’m looking forward to a relatively quiet long weekend to hopefully get the draft completed and ready for beta review. I think I’m just about there. Just a few transitional scenes to fix pacing and tie up loose ends, I think. (yay!)

Back to catching up on others’ entries… :)

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Sleepy Sunday updates…
Author: Measi
• Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Dunno why I haven’t been up to writing in my LJ these days. I suppose it’s just life keeping me busy. *shrug*

Support Stacie progress has been updated. I’m starting to feel much, much better about my progress: http://measi.livejournal.com/530017.html

I’ve been making a lot more progress for wiggiemomsi when I write longhand these days. Most of it’s been English-in-Cyrillic lately, which seems to shut up my inner editor. I suppose the editor gives up because it does take just long enough for me to mentally translate my own writing that it’s not worth it while I’m also trying to draft.

Of course – it makes for some funky spelling mistakes as I type everything in.

heh.

Anyway, I’ve been writing in 1 hour sessions using Reiki music as my background noise. With no lyrics and no real prominent melody, it just seems to zone me into focusing on my thoughts. Three sessions of that have resulted in the problem areas in the middle getting fleshed out. The story’s taking a different direction than I thought it would. Then again, with 10,000 words to play with as a minimum, there’s a lot more room for an actual plot. :)

So a bit strange and unconventional, but I’d rather write in a weird way than stare at the screen for hours and get nothing done like I was a few weeks ago.

* ~ * ~ *

The Zero Room supposedly all checked out for transition to my provider’s new platform, but then when it switched… it all died. *sigh*

Thankfully everything’s backed up on my personal webspace here: http://measi.net/fanfiction/. So if you are saving fic, feel free to continue there. You should have no problems.

I’m going to rebuild the Zero Room site from scratch via reinstalling the eFiction software. Then I’ll attempt to transfer the database from my personal site to the Zero Room one. Planning on getting to that next weekend.

Grrr…

* ~ * ~ *

Michael Jackson’s death (like so much of his life) is a bit surreal. He was a sick man, and hopefully his soul can straighten shit out now that he’s on the other side. I loved his music, but the public profile made it difficult to comfortably listen to anything.

That said, I’ve been enjoying waking up with MTV again this weekend. They’re actually playing… videos. And I’m remembering watching Michael as a kid down in the rec room in the basement, trying to imitate all of those amazing dance moves. Such good times as a kid.

My cat is oozing over my arms… so I suppose I should stop writing and give him he attention he’s craving. *sigh*

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At least I know I’m improving :)
Author: Measi
• Friday, June 26th, 2009

Old stat bar:

Hey! I’m improving! Lookie where I was:

And here’s where I am as of today:

Looking forward to tonight’s raid. Hopefully I’ll finally get my War Bear.

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Six degrees of Warcraft separation
Author: Measi
• Friday, June 19th, 2009

It’s one of those freaky situations that honestly writes itself, and it’s both weird and amusing and just… yeah.

Erich and I are on Warcraft last night, playing our Death Knight alts, trying to level them so they can start being contributing members toward the professions in our guild, make us some money, etc.

Out of the blue, Mono, who’s a member of the guild we’ve known since we first joined three years ago says “So Mel… I think that my sister dated your brother.”

Now, Mono’s the guildie who has no filter, and instinctively I’m waiting for the punchline of a random joke he’s setting up on me. It’s Mono, it’s normal for him. I’m curious, so I naturally say “What?”

“Scott.”

Okay… not a punchline…

The conversation progresses, and it’s pretty clear that yeah, he is talking about my brother, that the realization came through Facebook when I friended him a few weeks ago (several of our guildies have connected this way). His sister apparently saw my name, and asked how he knew me, and they figured this out.

Now – I’ve never met Mono in person. Aside from the offline friends like Matt and Tone that we’ve brought into the guild, we’ve never met any of our guild members offline. The odds of this are very, very low. 13 million people who play WoW worldwide, over 100 servers. On each server, you have two factions that cannot communicate with each other… and then on each faction, you have dozens of individual guilds.

Joking ensues on how Mono could have been a distant relation, crude Mono-typical comments about how “my sister fucked your brother-in-law.” And just amusing freakiness at the connection all around.

Seriously – what. are. the. odds?

So after we log out of WoW for the evening, I pop over to Facebook out of curiosity.

Not only is Mono correct – but I met his sister during my only visit to Arizona to see Scott… about 4.5 years ago… AND… there’s a photo of me with her and Scott. This would have been a year and a half before I ever met Mono online, and my brother doesn’t play WoW. The connections were made completely independently. I need to find the photo – it’s in the disaster that is most of my file storage after computer crashes and Diary-X crashes and whatnot.

So. Strange.

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Support Stacie auction news
Author: Measi
• Sunday, June 14th, 2009

My personal update on where fics stand has been updated: http://measi.livejournal.com/530017.html

And also – the dates for the next round of Support Stacie have been announced!

Friday, September 4th – Deadline for author registration forms
Friday, September 11th, 11:59pm – Auction opens
Monday, September 14th, 7:00-10:00pm – Auction ends (Times vary depending on fandom)

Author signup form and all up-to-date information can be found here: http://supportstacie.net/ and also at the LJ community: supportstacie

For those on my friends’ list who haven’t heard of this auction before…

Support Stacie is a huge fanfiction auction (and really, a festival at this point), with money contributing toward a fellow fan’s cancer treatment. Everyone wins – lots of fic, lots of love, lots of laughs, and one special fan gets extra help at life. It’s a great way to request that special fic from an author you like, and also a great place to learn about new fandoms (for me, for example, Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood is now on the summertime exploration list, simply due to meeting some fantasic members of their fandom through the auction).

Lots of fandoms are represented, both new and old, and all contributions, whether writing, bidding, or cheerleading are most welcome. The last round was absolutely astonishing with nearly $30,000 raised, and I don’t doubt that this upcoming round will once again shatter that.

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Protected: Yes/No Meme
Author: Measi
• Saturday, June 13th, 2009

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Warcraft thoughts…
Author: Measi
• Friday, June 12th, 2009

Burrito Bandits tabard
Originally uploaded by measi

So… my guild’s a bit slower than some to get into raiding. We had a bit of drama happen a few months ago, the quick-to-80 people left, and it put the 10-man stuff on hold for us.

BUT… we got there. And about… six weeks ago(?) we started with Obsidian Sanctum. Took us a few tries, but we got through it. And then a month ago, we began our way through Naxxramas.

We are absolutely rocking through it. To the point that with the exception of Heigan (and that effing dance), we’re managing to get every new boss down within a couple tries. We have spider on farm already, plague quarter may officially be on farm as of next week, based on how quickly we do it (but we cleared both spider and plague in 90 minutes last night… so… I think we’re there).

Second attempt on Patchwerk, we down him – and we were only 20 seconds over the 3-minute achievement on our first downing of him.

Absolutely psyched on how we’re moving. The guild is awesome now. We work together as a team. We joke throughout the raid both in the chat screen and over vent. It’s just fun, laid-back gaming where everyone knows his/her part, no one’s greedy. I mean hell, we don’t even use any sort of a point system for items. We just do straight d100 rolls for loot on the bosses. Half the stuff we wind up sharding at this point unless someone new is coming with us. Exactly what I envisioned for playing. I look forward to it.

And now that more people in our guild are getting to 80, we may actually be able to consider doing 25 mans soon.

I love my guild. I really do.

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Warcraft thoughts…
Author: Measi
• Friday, June 12th, 2009

Burrito Bandits tabard
Originally uploaded by measi.

So… my guild’s a bit slower than some to get into raiding. We had a bit of drama happen a few months ago, the quick-to-80 people left, and it put the 10-man stuff on hold for us.

BUT… we got there. And about… six weeks ago(?) we started with Obidian Sanctum. Took us a few tries, but we got through it. And then a month ago, we began our way through Naxxramas.

We are absolutely rocking through it. To the point that with the exception of Heigan (and that effing dance), we’re managing to get every new boss down within a couple tries. We have spider on farm already, plague quarter may officially be on farm as of next week, based on how quickly we do it (but we cleared both spider and plague in 90 minutes last night… so… I think we’re there).

Second attempt on Patchwerk, we down him – and we were only 20 seconds over the 3-minute achievement on our first downing of him.

Absolutely psyched on how we’re moving. The guild is awesome now. We work together as a team. We joke throughout the raid both in the chat screen and over vent. It’s just fun, laid-back gaming where everyone knows his/her part, no one’s greedy. I mean hell, we don’t even use any sort of a point system for items. We just do straight d100 rolls for loot on the bosses. Half the stuff we wind up sharding at this point unless someone new is coming with us. Exactly what I envisioned for playing. I look forward to it.

And now that more people in our guild are getting to 80, we may actually be able to consider doing 25 mans soon.

I love my guild. I really do.

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Protected: Gloomy Tuesday
Author: Measi
• Tuesday, June 09th, 2009

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Zero-Room update
Author: Measi
• Sunday, June 07th, 2009

Okay… so, I think I have just about everything settled (i.e. the internal version check appears right to me) but I’ve opened a ticket to see if support will just do a double-check to make sure things are right.

Turns out that the zero-room database was still housed on measi(dot)net. So if you go here to the original trial of the website: http://measi.net/fanfiction/index.php Everything transitioned to the new servers perfectly there. Including the entire database. EXCEPT the most recent person to join the site and her two stories, which was right around the time the site went down.

I’ve emailed her, apologized for the confusion, and asked her to rejoin and repost (thankfully it’s only two very short stories). Hopefully she’ll be cool, and things can just move on.

If not, then since it’s working, I may be making a temp link for the site to the archive above that *is* working, wipe the Zero-Room on its new host server and reinstall the software, and then move the database over manually. I just have little ability to do anything right now because with the site in transition, I can’t use FTP at all on it.

VERY annoying.

EDIT: No… now it’s saying I co-authored a ton of stories that I didn’t. DAMMIT. *headdesk*

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Being a Warcraft whore…
Author: Measi
• Saturday, June 06th, 2009

One of the things that I collect during my Warcraft play are the little companion pets in the game. Apparently Mt. Dew is in on the action and anyone who participates in this advertising scheme will get a free pet.

So… here’s me contributing. :)

Mountain Dew Game Fuel Horde Banner

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Protected: More psycho workmate comments
Author: Measi
• Thursday, June 04th, 2009

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Serious geek humor
Author: Measi
• Wednesday, June 03rd, 2009

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=984
;)

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Zero Room update
Author: Measi
• Tuesday, June 02nd, 2009

*sigh* The Zero Room is currently not taking new fic submissions due to webhost stupidity. Updates on the status will follow… but here’s the situation right now”

So after the site came back up last Tuesday, I thought all was well. And then today, I get this gem of an email:

Dear Melissa,

Your account has not yet been moved
to the new hosting platform because it has not yet passed
our quality assurance testing. At this time, you need to get
involved! Our original servers are scheduled to be taken
offline on June 22, and we need to make sure your site is hosted
on the new platform before that happens.

(whole lot of linky stuff… all of which go to annoyingly vague pages with no real info of what to do, or how the process works)

We apologize for the difficulties this situation may present,
and we will try to help you as best we can. If you have
questions, please call us at 877-xxx-xxxx or submit a new
support request.

A couple things -

It took me a farking WEEK and several threatening emails to get my sorority’s website cancelled. I never could get through on the phones.

The entire transition has been a confusing, little-information-given scenario. Access to my files has been limited, and while they’re now claiming I need to get involved, there’s no clear hierarchy of files shown so I know I’m actually moving anything. All I see is ONE server screen, and an unhelpful “your migration is in progress” button. Problem is that I have no information given on how to do things the logical way (you know… FTP my files). Everything’s through this stupid process that, since I don’t work for the webhost, I don’t get to know what paths are going where.

How the FARK am I supposed to get involved here if I get no information to work with?!?

*sigh*

I’m seriously going to start shopping around for a new webhost, I think. Everything was running fine for years, and the last three months with this unknown and unexplained “transition” has just caused headache after headache.

In the meantime – anyone strong with MySQL databases that could lend a hand with some error checking? It’s the one part of my website setup that’s still a bit confusing.

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