Hero and WoW

Hero

Watched Hero (the Jet Li one) at Moonlight Cinema with seedy_girl, kirmish, another MUCSter, her friend from uni, and a few hundred other quiet individuals. Sponsorship ahoy this year... Booth people handing out all sorts of stuff, a "SMS to win" competition, all sorts of bits. Anyway, that's not really the point...

I've seen the movie before, in the cinema, and loved it then. Loved it this time too. I've seen a fair bit of commentary about this movie, people liking and people not, for a variety of reasons. I think the biggest one boils down to "it's not a standard western story form", usually expressed as "it's not got much of a plot". Really, it does have a plot. Plenty of plot. For the story form that it is, which is a quite common form of Chinese morality tale.

( ...possible spoilers... )

And, in the end, it's just visually and aurally gorgeous. Utterly. Beautiful. The whole thing. Every moment packed with gorgeous detail. Nice.

World of Warcraft

Well, okay. I wasn't going to get this game, but then, I read some reviews, and also decided that Blizzard, being dedicated to bi-platformness (MacOS and Win32) since forever, deserved support. So, I'm Thorfi, Thorf, and Thorfy, on servers Proudmoore and Bronzebeard. Mostly playing Thorfi on Proudmoore, a human female priest, currently Level 23... I use CosmosUI and CTmod simultaneously, as well as having written my own semi-automatic spellcasting aide interface. The latter is not actually useful to anyone except me yet, because it's non-trivial to configure (as in, you have to get down there and hack any logic for new spells into the raw LUA code - hrm, another language to put on the resume), but I'm making improvements as I go. I have an Orange Tabby purchased from a Crazy Cat Lady, that follows me around and watches amazedly at the ultra-violence being perpetrated around me... I have a 10 Pound Mud Snapper that I keep in the Bank Vault, but which I sometimes take out and wield in my off hand as a shield, just for kicks... And earlier today I got chased by my first Horde aligned NPCs (Tauren Barrens Guards), as well as now being in a zone (Ashenvale) that is filled with lots of Horde PCs too. I've joined a guild with patchworkkid and blithespirit... Generally, it's quite a lot of fun. Oh, and yes, I extracted the game music out of the MPQs and have loaded 'em into iTunes.