Wow on Evan Hoffman

World of Warcraft on a 13" Retina Macbook Pro

Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:46:27 +0000

I stopped playing WoW in 2008, and since I didn’t need Windows for gaming, I ended up putting Fedora (and ultimately Ubuntu) on my old Core 2 Duo desktop. After years of fighting with slow computers, I recently bit the bullet and bought the 13" Retina Macbook Pro (MGX82LL/A). Even though I hadn’t played WoW in years - or any other PC games, for that matter - the gamer in me was still reluctant to go with a computer with no dedicated video card. I’d read up extensively on the Intel Iris 5100 chipset in the Macbook but I couldn’t find anything about its performance in WoW, which was the least-taxing game I could think of.

Sleepys Is Amazing, aka The Power of Twitter

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:08:43 +0000

About a year and a half ago we went shopping for a bed. We went to the Sleepy’s in Deer Park and tried out a bunch of the beds. They had some computer where you lay on it and it recommends firmness, and we ended up getting a Kingsdown based partly on the recommendations of this computer (it was also a really comfy mattress). I forget the model of the bed but it had different firmness on my side and my wife’s, which seemed like a cool feature.

When the admin of your online community dies

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:57:05 +0000

In 2000 or 2001 I started playing EverQuest. I was relatively late to the game, joining after the 3rd expansion (Luclin) was already out. I played it for a few years, at one point obsessively. In truth, I was never really that good, but I was in a guild that I loved and for the most part we all had fun. Like in other MMOs, when you start playing EverQuest you need to choose which server to play on. Basically I picked a random one to create my character on: Tarew Marr (most servers in EQ were named after the deities in the game). For anyone unfamiliar with MMO games (as I was at the time), your server choice affects almost every aspect of your gameplay experience. Each game server is essentially a parallel universe with the same buildings, NPCs (characters), quests, and items, but completely different sets of actual human beings inhabiting them. Servers develop their own personalities as a result of the players inhabiting them. Like any community, there are nice people, morons, trolls, elite players, people who totally sucked at the game, grownups, children, racists and any other variety of person you can imagine. This, of course, is exactly the appeal of any MMO. You can play a single-player game in complete safety, but when you add 2000 random strangers in to the mix things get pretty interesting. There was plenty of drama, and Tarew Marr was actually one of the crazier servers.

I abandoned WoW

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:04:32 +0000

WoW got boring so I let my subscription expire again. Rogue was an amazing class to play through Burning Crusade but with Lich King the game got pretty stupid and while Wintergrasp was awesome, it got boring too, so Khal is in mothballs again. I picked up my druid a bit but that got repetitive too - I’d just get to 80 and the same thing would happen.