And with a new hope, a new dawn, and the beginning of a bran nue dae – have I broken any copyrights yet? Shall I keep trying? 😉 Nah… prolly best not…

As you can see, I’m in slightly better spirits than I was yesterday – mind you, that wouldn’t be hard. Oh well. We were going down to Seaford, to Lisa’s Lacies, to see about getting some new bras.. but the pair I put on this morning were a lot less sloppy than some of my other ones (probably because they’re newer), so I decided to wait another week and see if I got any smaller in the meantime. That decision sort of mucked up our plans a bit so we kind of rattled around the house frittering away our time most diligently.

I did a bit of Rifting, and decided that I really didn’t like the area I’m in at the moment, and so started to plan on where to go and what to do next. The main trouble with games like Rift is that they’re fairly linear, in that you can’t go ‘here’ until you’re level ‘x’, and you can’t go ‘there’ until you’re level ‘xy’. In other words, you can’t really just go wherever you want to, and do whatever you want to do… well, you can, but you’ll either get killed frequently (and expensively! It costs gold to resurrect!) by higher level mobs (‘mobs’ – term used to denote either animals, monsters, or enemies), and you won’t get the (bulk of) the quests that give you the most XP (experience, which is what your level is based on). Sure, you get experience from killing things, digging up herbs, mining ore, and stuff like that, but it’s pretty negligible compared to the experience you get from completing quests, nor do you get the money and/or equipment that usually comes with the experience gained from questing. So… as I said, for an altoholic like myself, who has numerous ‘alts’ (characters), there aren’t really a lot of options as to what you can do, or where you can go, depending on your experience level, so playing can often become a rather ‘ho-hum’ exercise. I think this is why Trion regularly bring out upgrades and expansions. This new expansion that was supposed to have been released on the 8th October is going to not only raise the ceiling (the top level you can reach will go from 60 to 65; not a lot, but enough to excite some players), but also open up an entire new area of the world map, and introduce all sorts of nifty innovations, like the minions I think I told you about in a previous post.

Anyway, at the moment I’m organising my troops for the big expansion, shuffling characters between shards, and putting in ‘name holder’ beginners. It’s sometimes terribly difficult to get the name you want for your character – you can’t have anything that anyone else has got, or that is already in use by the game, and you can’t use non English letters in your name, or foreign accents… so when you want to start off a brand new character when the expansion is released, you can create a character, but not finish them off. All you want is to see if the name you’ve thought of is free to a good home. If it is, save the unfinished character with that name. When the expansion goes live, kill off that unfinished character and re-create it properly, giving it that name. It’s highly unlikely that someone else will snatch up that name while you’re creating your new expansion-ready character 🙂

Well, I reckon that that’s probably enough Rift education for tonight… (“Phew! Thank goodness for that!”, I hear you all grumbling! 🙂 )

Weigh-in this morning was much better… back down to 122.4kg. I’d be really nice if it went down to 122.1kg or lower tomorrow, but don’t hold your breath! I sure won’t be! 🙂

More tomorrow night, I guess…