Whoops! It looks like you forgot a title! Don't you think it deserves one?

A nice view from the surroundings of the hotel my sister is staying at during her visit to Indonesia. Sadly, most of her pictures are rather fluff, like pictures of breakfast buffets, tourist traps and a, quite probably, financially crippling pedicure... Not really environmental impressions worth sharing with you guys. But she's having good fun, which is way more important than appreciating the local flora and fauna. I mean, her pictures are showing all the reasons why people take these kinds of vacations in the first place. I would prolly go on a spiritual journey looking for my roots and laying my travelpartners low with insisting on visiting the old palace where my grandfather would hold court before WWII happened, or see the estate where my family lived before they were ousted during the redistribution of wealth after the Dutch were send packing. In al earnesty, I think that my sister is doing the right thing. Afterall, when she returns home, she also returns to the titanian task of teaching today's numbskulls Social Sciences. Regular downtime is required!

PSU

The event is still running and is flooding the game economics with high-end crafting recipes and mats. One of my PSU friends has managed to collect 10 Psychowand boards over the last five days and he is no exception. Pretty soon, the Psychowand will be dime-a-dozen prized item and everyone with a passing interest in Powerteching will be wielding it, linked to level3 fireballs... Since my acrotecher is fully high-end equipped and her skills maxed, there isn't much reason for me to enter the event other than for shits and giggles. The event itself though is meh and two missions really aren't that fun to do as the Arms Race of last year was.

SWTOR

I didn't do much in SWTOR besides a quick log on to wish my fellow guildies a happy new year. I did roll a Bounty Hunter and made some progress with her and I still have to move her into the guild. Yet I'm still having trouble deciding on what I want to do in the game as I find that the Star Wars theme of the MMO by itself is not enough to keep me interested. Maybe it has to do with the comparative ease in which you can get your mittens of relatively high end gear with relatively little effort. For my taste, the absence of a carrot to keep me moving forward, which is at the heart of any good MMO, is not helping me finding motivation to play for more than a hour at a time. SWTOR is telling for how fin-de-siecle Bioware really is. ME3 will probably show that Bioware has dropped all pretense that they actually still care about what they're doing and their hinting at the fact that ME won't be a trilogy at all is an omnimous sign of things to come...

WoW

My hunter is now questing in Darkshore, having completed the Draenei and Nelf starter areas. Now the Kalimdor Loremaster and Explorer achievement hunting starts in earnest. I'm looking forward to build the archeology profession, which I have tentavely tried on another toon before. I like the idea behind it, though the actual profession has no real practical use for your toon. But not everything in a game should be directly benefitting, as long as it benefits the reason why you play; to be entertained in a relaxing and fun manner. And that's what WoW-archeology does perfectly. I got some minor achievements during my latest sessions but they required little effort to get and where more the kind I remembered I got could right now, like fishing in a school, or buying cheap cooking recipes to get the Lunchlady achievement. (I was in Stormwind anyway.)

Rockband

I'm working on the goals for my new band, imaginatively called Java Monsoon. The goals in Rockband are addicting and for a while I was entertaining the idea to go for "Completionist". But that requires a Madcatz Mustang and the cymbals to turn my drumkit pro. And yeah, that's not going to happen. I also can't sing worth shit and my level of tonedeafness and the lack of ability to hold a tune should be a criminal offense. Needless to say, "Completionist" is not realistic for me, financially not and most certainly not due to my absolute lack of musical talent. I'm smart enough to realise that playing a rythm game doesn't magically enhance my musical talents to such a level I can 100% flawless "Painkiller" on vox-expert. The world is not ready for my level of musical suck, though a cursory glance of the latest popular offerings might indicate that I still have a shot at Rock Stardom if would be totally oblivious to the fact that I'm utterly without talent in the musical realm...

Have an awesome 2012! May you have an awesome apocalypse! =))