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Amazing that I’m doing any blog posts at all, the long anticipated expansion to World of Warcraft , The Burning Crusade, turned up in my mail this week. The Collector’s Edition no less. It sold out ages ago but then Blizzard, at the last moment, released a number of them through their online store. The lands are beautiful. The expansion created two new races, Blood Elves (a more evil version of the Alliance faction Night Elves) and Draenei (good, nature loving peoples who look half demon, ie goat). The males of the two races couldn’t be further apart, the Draenei are a huge chunky broad shouldered lot while the male Blood Elf would put the models in Zoolander to shame, they have the most hiLARious haircuts ever. It looks as if the artists watched too many 1980s New Romantic video clips and the armour is so very Lord of the Rings (which, if you will remember, featured the guy from Frankie Goes to Hollywood). It’s all quite camp, but I think marvellously so:

Meanwhile, the females of the two new races are practically the same build, small and very narrow of hip and thigh. Probably as a reaction to my own real world petiteness, I do wish a little that they had been made bigger, they don’t really feel very substantial, the Blood Elf especially. The Draenei girl isn’t too bad. It’s a bit strange that they went with a more, for want of a better word, mundane body ideal given the interesting sizes and shapes of the previous female builds. But to be fair, these are races who are primarily magicians and healers respectively, so their slightness makes sense. Blizzard actually made the male Blood Elves bigger due to public complaints that the they were too feminine (which then provoked anti-gay complaints) but I haven’t heard any comment on the females.

If it doesn’t mean a general move to smaller and more normal characters in the future, I guess the new additions do expand the range of shapes available. You have the option of having quite pinched faced and evil looking female Blood Elves and I think if you go down that route, the skinniness emphasises their creepiness while the male Blood Elf characters, even with their weight gain, are certainly a bold departure from all the other super-pumped male races in Warcraft.

Here are some screenshots of my Blood Elf, Rubresca and my Draenei, Nubida

More illustrative is this random Blood Elf, skinny as!:

Compare them with my Night Elves, Carmine or Florette (they’d tower over Rubresca)

or the battle-stance loving hips on my Human Mage, Beliandra

The above are the prettiest of the races, but what I like about Warcraft is the ability to play not just pretty characters (thought that IS fun), but strong ones. Check out my Orc, Banca, and my Tauren, Loranda. These be some damn powerful females!

While I was collecting screenshots, I picked up one of Rubresca overlooking a river with her imp (she’s a Warlock). The foggy autumnal tone of the scenery is so lovely. It really is such a beautiful game to play. (As with the others, you need to click on the thumbnail to see it in full size.)

More biblical jollity, Brendan Powell Smith put out a series of scenes from the Old and New Testaments rendered in lovable Lego. These small hard cover books have made their way into many a Christmas stocking since they were released, but they are also available freely from the creator’s website: The Brick Testament. They are very silly and very funny. Note the frequent use of Stars Wars Lego figures.

According to the ads at YouTube, you can now “record from your webcam directly to YouTube! No upload needed!”. Yay! That’s all we need, YouTube making it even easier for people to upload their crappy webcam videos.

This, on the other hand, is a quality video. Don’t know what reminded me of it. The title is a mashup of one of my favourite trashy films, 10 Things I Hate About You (which itself was a retelling of Kiss Me Kate/The Taming of the Shrew) and one of those family Easter Biblical Epic standbys The Ten Commandments (was I the only one who felt sorry for the Pharaoh? Oppressive dictators can have their soft side too…). Anyway, it is a hilarious “comedy 3,000 years in the making…”

I’m doing a week of Latin summer school this week and it’s great fun. I’m totally rusty and can barely string the most basic sentence together, but it’s really wonderful how (some) things are coming back. The class is very relaxed so I’m just listening and learning, peeping up now and then when I actually know something.

I doubt I’ll ever be extremely skilled at it, no long-term patience. I also have a tendency to forget things way too quickly which makes it all quadruply hard if I take a break from it. I’m hoping that I will keep it up after this week is over though. It’s really fun, translating sentences, they’re like little puzzles. I imagine it’d be like Sudoku or acrostics if I were into them.

One of the best things about the summer school is the extra stuff organised. Yesterday, I went to a lecture on Roman values and today, I did a class on scansion which was brilliant. Hopefully, I’ll get round to writing up some of my notes. The scansion class also kindled a bit of a desire to get back to English poetry again. So much stuff to learn (and relearn, damn my terrible memory!), so little time.

This story is a lot nicer, though the child is considerably younger. A friend’s young nephew went to see Walking with the Dinosaurs on the weekend. He was eating onion rings, but didn’t finish them. When asked why not, he said he was keeping them to feed the dinosaurs. Later he got upset when the dinosaurs went away in the break and asked his mother where they had gone. She replied to the bathroom. He believed her. Apparently the dinosaurs were very impressive.

A young strident blonde was overhead, presumably to a parent, on her mobile phone:

If you can’t provide for my every need then you shouldn’t have gone and had children then should you?!

Charming.

I meant to post this about a month ago so hopefully they have all found homes now. These have to be the most character filled kittens I have ever seen. If you are interested in seeing if they still need homes (and can provide one if so) please email me at admin AT bloodykitty dot com and I’ll pass on the details of the people trying to rehome them. Love the little grey tabby’s eyes, they are like Hamish Blake’s or Shirley Manson’s (from Garbage).

I found this ad through my gmail: Yoga Booty Ballet.

Yoga Booty Ballet is a dynamic fusion of yoga, booty sculpting, and dance that will make you feel strong, confident, and beautiful! The workouts are so fun, you won’t believe you’re also losing weight and sculpting long, lean muscles.

Poor yoga, it’s the exercise equivalent of the even poorer poodle, bred with anything and everything because nothing sells like a prefix/suffix. So like the labradoodles and schnoodles, we have Yo-chi (yoga/tai chi) and Yolates (yoga/pilates). At least they didn’t call it Yollet.

A friend once made me seriously jealous of Germans when he described their perfectly designed windows and moderately priced but sexily utalitarian cutlery. How wonderful to live in a country where quality is evident in everyday basic gear. They are so the Japanese of Europe (without the cool craft books). Okay, I have a bit of a “basics” fetish. But check out this VW factory in Dresden, aren’t the Germans just the coolest?.

I think that is where they probably film all their “we’re in the VW factory” commercials (and maybe some of the IKEA ones too!*), maybe all the other VW factories are dank and dingy holes.

For more cool worksites: 10 seeeeeriously cool workplaces and Eric Staller’s Conference Bike! (workcover incident waiting to happen?).

* Swedes, Germans, same diff.

Unfortunately, I’m not on holidays anymore, but if I were then I might be doing fun things like making charming papercraft structures like this Superaurus, this Wild Boar and this sweet thing called “Lucky cat (Beckoning for money)”. Or even this E-type Jag, once my favourite car in the world, or Japan’s Himeji castle. There is even a paper model of my cat, Simby (he’s a Abyssinian). All this is courtesy of Canon and their 3D PaperCraft site, I found the address in a PDF printer brochure trying to clean up my Desktop/Documents/computer/life. I imagine there will plenty more strange links in the next month as I spring clean my digital files and the scary scary pit that is my Firefox bookmarks. I might even get round to tagging the last twenty or so entries.