A somewhat short Tuesday N00b Club this week, beset mostly by Technical Difficulties of the ISP kind, with two of us having connectivity troubles that pretty much ruined the evening, causing a great deal of waiting around and frustration.
It's such a delicate thing really, such a precarious existence, and one I've come to take for granted a bit, I think. Being able to sit down, connect, log in and carry out my affairs in any one of a dozen escapist fantasies, and a dozen alternate lives. Granted, a slightly alarming number of these tend to involve being told by one artificial person to go and kill another artificial person, usually for artificial money, but I enjoy it, and it does pay not to think about these sorts of thing too deeply!
But it's just there. I rarely find myself taking a step back and considering what's actually going on, and until it does all go wrong, there isn't much reason to. But just as we were getting somewhere, my DSL modem light started flashing in an unhelpful manner, and poof! Suddenly, I'm sat in my living room, myself again, and going nowhere fast. Somewhere along a tube over 6000 miles long, and in places less than a millimetre wide, my electrons are no longer getting through! A vital telegraph pole has fallen over, or a clumsy workman has dug in the wrong place, or as is more likely, an extremely unlikely arrangement of silicon in a big PC somewhere has burnt out, or hiccupped or is just plain 'too busy' to deal with my little packets.
It's a wonder the Internet can function at all when you think about it, and I'd imagine it's only due to massive redundancy and slack that most of it works as well as it does most of the time, and as ever, the most vulnerable bit, confirmed by my blinkey modem light, is my own DSL phone-line connection to my ISP, and the behemoth difference engine they have plugged directly into the other end of my modem line, which seems to be throwing more and more cogs of late. Not so long ago, in the UK, we were in danger of overwhelming the Dial Up capacity of our ISPs with our enthusiasm for this hip new 'Internet' thing. Of course the answer was to pay more, and upgrade to this fabulous new "Broad Band" Internet access, with fast files and even videos! Nowadays, it seems everyone is online and on ADSL, and we seem to be back to square one. I'm on a quite expensive package, via a much lesser known provider, and I have trouble...I can only imagine what it's like on the cheaper more widely known deals with the big TV ads.
Anyway, I gave up and watched DVDs in the end, realising that at this point, there is now no single-player offline game that I'm that interested in playing, even if I have no internet at all. I'm not sure whether I should be proud, or ashamed of that really.
Still, we did manage to get another mission done, Blacktide Den, in which we learned of complicity, double dealing, politics and IMPENDING DOOOOOM!, which to Adventurers, is rather like putting a bull in a china shop, only where the china is actually made of some hitherto unknown fluttery red kind of ceramic. In a breeze. In Rutting Season. I'm rambling. A particularly memorable mission, in that it involved a degree of subterfuge normally absent from our reckless rampaging, and at once point, we even got to dress up like pirates! Yarr!
The zone itself, Lahtenda Bog, is yet another example of Guild Wars consistently high standard of level design, and turned out to be a moonlit swamp of twistey overgrowth, hidden camps and bayous, and the ubiquitous large and ancient ruins scattered about the place, including a very photogenic avenue of crumbling pillars in which the final fight of the mission took place. Technically it was quite an easy run, although whether that's because we should be on to harder stuff by now, or if we're just quite a good team now, it's hard to say.
We even finished the 'Master' objectives too, which mostly consisted of going to out of the way spots in the swamp and exterminating one particular species of lizard-thing. Since our standard M.O. tends along the lines of not just genocide, but sterilization, this wasn't a particular extra hardship, I must say.
We were just starting in on the Keys area, described previously, to follow up on the next bit of the story, when my ISP decided I'd had enough and logged me off for the night. Ho-hum.