It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

[michanna]

Well, it's near noon on Sunday and having just spent 3 hours reading Jacqueline Carey, I am in the mood to wax poetic.
I feel languid. Part of me thinks I should feel guilty for having wasted half of my day in reading when I so badly need a job, but the greater part of me knows that guilt and self-recrimination are extremely destructive forces in my life.
For books that are such a guilty pleasure, I find the Jacqueline Carey books contain a lot of healing for me. Sometimes it's extremely unfair that I do not live in Terre D'Ange.

Yesterday morning my dog had a seizure. He shook violently for at least 2 minutes. I tried to do something then, feeling ineffective, ran to get the phone number for the vet. It was 8:20 am. The vet scheduled me in for an appointment at 10:30. The hour from 8:30 to 9:30 was hard as Lucky tried to regain his bearings. He couldn't connect his limbs to his brain and kept running into walls and falling over. I couldn't get him to settle; I could see he wanted to walk it off. By the time I got to the vet, he was fine again, if still a little shaky and confused. The vet didn't see anything to be concerned about and set me to just watching. There's a high possibility that it's the start of an escalating problem but the vet didn't see the point of running further tests at this time. He did say we're very lucky to still have Lucky and that he's lucky to be as healthy as he is at his age (that was a lot of luckys for one sentence).

I still feel like I'm walking on eggshells waiting for something else to happen with Lucky; the first time I didn't have any choice but to react. I feel like it'll be harder next time. I was quite restless when I got home and cleaned the kitchen, but it's still so cold down there that I had to do it with my jacket and hat on. There are still a number of chores I have to do before my parents get home but it's supposed to warm up tomorrow so I'm holding off. I've haven't been eating properly because my kitchen's too cold for me to want to bother hanging out in it to cook properly when I could hang out in my room and eat crackers, cookies, vegetables and hummus instead.

narikalen came to hang out with me and she painted my nails. I'm kind of fascinated by them. They're just long enough to actually look pretty instead of stubby with the polish on them. I wish I had my garnet rings here in Calgary because it would accent the purple polish nicely.

I applied to a number of jobs on Friday. It probably won't go anywhere, but I felt accomplished enough to take a break and catch up on NCIS and Castle yesterday. I also finally started playing Dragon Age, which mostly consisted of playing with facial structure for hours. blademistress and the_antichris will appreciate that I couldn't decide on a backstory, so I rolled a dice and ended up as an elven mage, which probably started as my second-lowest choice. Didn't get much playing in because it was 11 pm by the time I finished the character creation.

I'm feeling a little light-headed. I maybe should go find myself food despite the temperature of my kitchen. I think it is a little warmer today. There were other things to talk about, but I'm attending a distance Con-G meeting now and can't remember them. More later.

Comments

[the_antichris.livejournal.com]

<333 I'm sorry about Lucky. I hope it turns out to be just one and not the start of something.

Let me know how you go with the elven mage! I'm all about the rogues usually, but I was reading an LJ post about mage strategy and it got me all excited to roll a mage when I get DA set up again.

[michanna.livejournal.com]

Me too but yesterday I started noticing that occasionally his legs give out ... not sure what that means.

The beginning backstory was hard! I didn't know who to trust! I ended up just being brutally honest with everyone and now my character's kind of a Vulcan in my head.

What have you read about mage strategy? Any wisdom to impart? I feel like I'm floundering in the dark. I keep getting TPKed and then going back to the same fight and having no trouble with it without doing anything really that different. My DnD wisdom is not helping me pick skills and spells either.

[the_antichris.livejournal.com]

This is the thread I was talking about with the mage strategy discussion. Mind Blast and Sleep are priorities for defence, and after that, pick a couple of spell branches you like the look of and work on those. My favourite thing to do with mages is suck it up and get the useless frozen weapons so you can then get the freezing spell and Cone of Cold asap. Then just freeze everybody and get your rogue to do a crit-hit skill on them and they shatter. It is awesome. Even if they don't shatter, they're out of the fight for a few crucial seconds. Crushing Prison is also fun (and shatters frozen or petrified enemies), as is Petrify. Basically I enjoy immobilising people. After the Cold branch, I like a lot of the entropy skills and also fire. And Mana Clash is useful enough against spellcasters that it's worth getting its slightly crap prerequisites, but you can wait till the midgame to get it.

You do need some non-cold offensive spells if you're planning to fight revenants. Regular undead can be frozen (I think) but don't take cold damage, and revenants just shrug it off.

I set up a lot of tactics for my mages because mostly I was babysitting myself and Alistair, but that'll work a bit differently if you're actually playing your offensive mage. My favourite was to get Wynne to automatically do Fist of Stone or whatever it's called on frozen enemies (Wynne smash!) and also I set everyone except Morrigan to wait and not attack if an enemy was sleeping, to give her a chance to hit them with Horror, which does mega damage to slept enemies.

/tl;dr. Obviously I need to roll a mage myself.

[michanna.livejournal.com]

As suspected, most of that went right over my head. Clearly I'm going to have to open my game and take a good look at the spells you're talking about. Doesn't help that right now my party's only me and Alistair; I met Morrigan in the forest and was all 'no, pretty lady, don't leave me!' but I know she's coming back so I shall be patient.

[the_antichris.livejournal.com]

Where are you? It's tricky before you get a full party, but Morrigan comes back soon and you should pick up a couple of companions in the first area after Ostagar. When you get to the quests, I always do the Circle Tower first to pick up Wynne for healing, so unless you're going to be a healer yourself, I recommend getting Wynne asap.

[michanna.livejournal.com]

I'm about to enter the tower where I have to light a beacon while everyone else gets slaughtered. Yeah, I hate healing. Wynne it is.

That's the other thing; it's hard to know what skills to give my character without knowing what skills the other party members are going to have. It's frustrating me right now that no one has lock picking and then there's the healing abilities and trap setting and stuff ... I don't really want them but someone in the party needs to be able to do those things.

[the_antichris.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's one really good thing about starting with a rogue. Leliana (whom you pick up in Lothering, pretty soon now) starts IIRC with a point or two in lockpicking. I can't remember who sets traps in the party but pretty sure someone does.

You can get a lockbash mod. I'm planning to get that when I reinstall.