v-s.net v0.6

Wednesday, 11:23 am in Life

Bleh, bit of a lazy week here at the ol’ v-s.net.  No real reason I guess, just haven’t really had anything interesting to post about over the long weekend.  Queen’s Birthday or something, I dunno; all I know is I got Monday off.  Mum decided we were all going to go for a picnic to Corin Forest, which is a little blip on the map just above the snowline.  So we went and ate rolls on the grass and watched the kids play in the first dusting of snow for the season.  We don’t get much snow here in Australia, I think mostly because the majority of our landmass isn’t high enough above sea level (our mountain ranges are very low).  Canberra gets cold during winter – -10�C at night, which is nothing by international standards I know – but it rarely ever actually snows here.  I think the last time we got ‘real’ snow I was a week tyke and it was the middle of October.

Anyway, after Corin we stopped by at the Tidbinbilla Tracking Station for a while and looked at the various assorted space memoribillia the’ve got out there.  Tidbinbilla is a dirty great big satellite dish used to recieve signals from deep-space (it’s also part of the US’ defense network, though they don’t advertise that bit; however it’s pretty funny to see the sign on the way out saying Please Drive on the Left in big letters).  Contrary to the film, The Dish, I believe it was Tidbinbilla that broadcast the signal for the first moon landing.

All the area around Tidbinbilla and up to Corin is still pretty desolate after the fires.  For those who don’t know, we had some massive bushfires come through Canberra at the end of my first year at uni; black sky in the middle of the day, air raid sirens and evacuation lists over the radio, that sort of thing.  The fires decimated all the softwood plantations around Canberra; where they came through real bush the trees have mostly regrown themselves, but the old plantation areas are just dead and gone.  Still, Tidbinbilla got off lightly compared to the Mt. Stromlo Observatory, which was burnt to the ground; they’ve got the huge lump of molten glass that’s all that is left of its lense at the National Museum.

I also started ‘playing’ Ragnarok Online again on the weekend.  Since I am on WoW-hiatus, and levelling from scratch in FlyFF was boring, I decided to see if my old RO account was still around; it was.  The last time I used the thing was back in 2004, so I paid up for a month and logged in to have a look.  My Monk, the original Yareth, was waiting for me, as were my two Blacksmiths (I’ve got no idea why I’ve got two; one is a pure-DEX crafter and the other is mixed-stat and as far as I can tell only used for vending) and a FS Acolyte I didn’t remember making.  He is JLvl 48, which is annoying; only two levels to go and I don’t have Notanassassin to leech off anymore!

I also had my 45 million zeny and 300,000 Empty Bottles waiting for me.  Back when I was first playing RO, I discovered the wonders of modKore, which is the RO bot client. modKore is fun!  It’s more fun configuring the damn bot than it is actually playing the game, and back in ‘04 ~Mat [h] decided to go for broke in the en masse botting stakes.  He used to run 15 free-trial Swordsmen bots for their 15 free days through a series of maps, mostly collecting low-level cards, dolls and blacksmithing mats.  I still have a dozen +7 Very Very Very Strong Main Gauches in my bank that my smith made for the bots (though I’ve apparently sold off all the Lucky Cotton Shirts).

It’s fun being rich with ill-gotten gains.  I remember for a while I was obsessed with overupgrading Magicians Hats (for those not familiar with RO, you can upgrade armour to +4 before it starts getting a hugely high risk of being destroyed).  Yareth’s currently got a +5 hat, as well a upgraded elemental fists and bucklers and a Mocking Muffler and a Martyr’s Leash and all the other ‘uber’ Monk equips (not to mention a pet Bongun).  Being rich with ill-gotten gains is also fun!  Plus I still have a shitload of botted stuff in my bank, including more elemental mats than you can poke a stick at.  Though it’s not like there’s much else I really need to buy; an Earth and Wind Fist, maybe.  Some differently carded bucklers; openKore’s (the sucessor to modKore) item switch stuff is leet.

So I sit there in the evenings and work on my website with Yareth running in the background, doing his thing.  I’m wary of actually leaving the bot running when I’m not there (lest he go the way of Notanassassin), but sitting there watching him rack up 3,000 HP combos is pretty fun.  The bot plays better than I ever could, seriously.

The point?  Meh, who needs one.

Finally, a belated good bye to last week’s renter, Miss-a-Beat.  I was a bit of a poor hostess last week, what with the not much postage or pluggage.  Bleh.

I been so slack, in fact, that I haven’t even thanked my two hostees for the week; YaYa and the Newsbitch Chronicles.  I don’t like renting out multiple blogs at a time, but when I saw Newsbitch was open for bids I couldn’t resist; she’s got One of Those blogs.  You know, the rare ones with a witty writing style that I really enjoy.  Plus she is a serial hair dyer, and I can totally sympathyse with that; it sounds so lame but having to keep my hair ‘natural’ this year (I promised myself I’d grow all the dye out) is painful.  Especially when people come up and compliment me on how lovely blonde looks on me.  Bleh.

There’s a lady here at work who has this amazing blackish-purple hair; unfortunatley she gets it done in Sydney, which is a bit far for someone on an APS3.  Need.  Good.  Canberra.  Hairdresser!

Pointless random end-of-post thoughts:

#1) I found a Furc client for OSX the other day.  Unfortunatley it only works on 10.4 (cough~braken [h]cough).

#2) ~Mat [h] is taking me on a holiday to the Blue Mountains next week. ♥

• Tags » botting, family, flyff, life, modkore, ragnarok online