Vampires, you are sucking my blog life!

Ok, for all those Vampire Wars-fans who seem incapable of finding the help files: I will explain the skill point/favor point thing again. After that, go back to Facebook and look up some of those VW-groups. There’s about a half million, and most of them not only let you recruit free clan members, but also offer tons of advice on how to play better. Here’s a little side tip from me on how to increase your clan: if someone claims a bounty on you, often they will give you good judgement or leave you a little comment to be nice. Ask those people to join ranks. I’ve also invited two of my hapless victims because they bit me. Both accepted.

On to skill points: whenever you creep up one level, you get free refills on everything, plus one favor point, plus five skill points. Depending on which level you are at, you might want to use some of these skill points to increase your energy (for missions), your health (for getting beat up), for rage (for beating people up, but careful: one step up in rage costs you two skill points!), or to increase your defense or attack strength (though that doesn’t seem to make too much difference). You also receive one skill point for every fifth trophy you win. There are currently about 70-some trophies, so that gives you a maximum of about 14 skill points you can gather that way. I think you can now also purchase skill points for favor points, but unless you’re way up the ladder, don’t waste your favor points on this crap.

Which brings me to favor points… you’ve already seen how can get those. Every trophy you win also gets you one favor point. Therefore, you can max out your favor points from trophies at about 72, or however many there are right now. My advice is: save those for the good stuff. If you’re having a hard time increasing your clan, you can purchase more (under Elders) for about 20 points. Do NOT use the link to add members from your Clan tab! You only get one additional member for the same price.

Another good thing to save up for are special abilities. You’ll need 35 favor points to buy one of those (they vary), but they will make a huge difference in your attack and defense posture! Believe me, I’ve tried to beat up enough low-ranking, no-clan-owning vamps who had no trouble fending me off because of a (as in, one) special ability.

What does ranking do for you? I have no idea. Stroke your undead ego, I suppose. I’ve seen people online with an unreal number of missions completed and fights won. The only thing I can figure is that they’ve played VW since its early beginnings (which is way too long for me. It’s a bloody game! And not even a particularly engaging or interesting one). If it’s your goal to become the number one supervamp some day, you’re going to have to keep whacking people, stealing their blood, etc. to climb up the ladder. When you get to the top, let me know what it’s like. I have no ambition.

Now go and read those daggone help files already!

Up, up and away

Having reached my goal of getting to lesson 16 in the Welsh course, I can now look forward to my weekend trip to Hamburg. While I am blissfully offline, you may still leave me a note, if you wish…

See you next week.

All the Things She Said

Wow, it’s hump day again! Hamburg beckons in only a couple of days…

Let’s do a short wrap-up of stuff that’s been mentioned over the past week:

1. The Hairdo
Remains undone. Instead, I went to the river with my husband, our friends and our dogs (yes, it’s OUR river, too!). I will sacrifice my lunch hour tomorrow to get a trim at the place with the young woman who cuts hair like an old lady. C’est la vie.

2. The Movie
As yet unseen. We could not get decent seats for last night anymore, so we took a look ahead and booked for next Tuesday instead.

3. The Welsh
I have conquered lesson 13 and got halfway through 14 before a technical hiccup tried to force me to start over. I’m hoping to finish 14 today sometime. Only one month to go until the visit… if you googled “Wales” and “mixxt”, you were probably looking for -hold on to your seats now!- wales.mixxt.de. Come join us there. We have folks writing in German, English and Welsh; that covers all our bases and leaves nobody out.

4. The Vampires
Seriously, if you still haven’t figured out the basic rules like how to waste favorpoints on readjusting your stats, you need help. Read the Help section already! Here’s some advice: don’t fight anyone who’s got more clan and a higher ranking than you. Never be too cheap to have someone hitlisted, it’s good revenge for zapping your rank. Use your favorpoints for the useful stuff, play Santa to your clan members, gamble with Akem every day, spin the wheel and share the joy, and be prepared for LONG friggin’ stretches of no mission fun! I’m stuck in combat hell for three more levels. It sucks.

5. 4th Street Traffic
The boys are playing a gig in Cardiff in a few days. Check their MySpace site for tour dates. While you’re there, sign up for the newsletter. And download the toolbar, so you don’t have to check back all the time.

The weather is grand, I wonder why I’m here (*sigh*), and I think that’s all I wanted to say about that.

Off Road

On the off chance someone actually finds their way here to an unannounced blog post: I’m very, veeeery sleepy today… after three cups of coffee, that’s an accomplishment even for me. Let’s just sum up today as “feels like a Monday” and leave it at that. Tomorrow, I will tell you what I thought of Ice Age 3. Deal?

Werewolves, Vampires and Uncle Sam

Three days off are a splendid thing! Friday was spent doing all those things I don’t normally have time for, like almost re-registering my husband’s Jeep and soaking in the sun while the dogs splash in the river. Saturday was glorious, so the pigs and I kept the doors and windows open all day and enjoyed the warm summer winds while I frivolously whiled away the hours on the laptop, fighting and killing my way through one of two incredibly boring levels of Vampire Wars. I want my missions back!! On the slightly more bright side, I found a new way of killing time with pointless pursuits. Hatchlings is the name of the game, and all you need to do is click around and find Easter eggs hidden in Facebook pages. I really don’t care about ranking so much, but I love all the special edition eggs!

Sunday was gloomy and wet, so I got caught up on my reading and spent relatively little time online. I discovered, however, that whilst collecting eggs, I’ve also earned shells, which in turn can be spent at the Warehouse to purchase retired special edition eggs. After incubating my 4th-of-July egg, I now call a tiny Uncle Sam my pet, and I have to feed him eggs to keep him happy…

I rented my first movie from iTunes. It was really easy and didn’t take nearly as long to download as I had feared, considering a 45-minute episode of 24 once took me nearly two hours. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans completed the trilogy for me, but I have to say, this could have been a straight to video release without losing anything, mostly because there’s nothing to lose. The story is so predictable, I could have written the script for this film. An underchallenged Bill Nighy is stylishly menacing, although his most memorable feature is that he wears those creepy contacts all through the flick. Michael Sheen, although reprising his role as Lucian, was woefully miscast as the Lycan leader. Not that he didn’t act well, he’s just had too much exposure in other stuff in the past few years, in my opinion. I’m not even going to talk about all those rapid changes from day- to nighttime; it certainly is convenient that Sonya (the incredibly sexy Rhona Mitra) and Lucian get caught at night, she gets executed in full sun a short while later, and only a few seeming minutes after that, Lucian gets to try his luck fighting Victor in the full moon.

Fortunately, it turns out that this is something like a prequel to the other two, so we don’t really have to fear any more sequels…

Early Weekend Morn

Actually, my early weekend starts tomorrow, but why haggle over a few hours? I would like to take this opportunity to say hello to my visitor from Wales. I have a sneaking suspicion who it could be, but don’t you live in North Wales? The network showed up as being located in Caerphilly… oh well.

Lest you, my dear readers, fear I’ll be bored tomorrow, ’tis not so. I’ll be up for the early dog walk, as usual, then on to vehicle reg and the giant trash receptacles, where I’ll begin the clearing of my household. And daggone it, I’m going to the hairdresser’s, finally! I am looking forward to two days of not going anywhere for the actual weekend, because my house needs to be put in order, and I believe I promised someone to look for that mp3 player…

I think I’ll have a mini champagne, as well, for finally cracking lesson 12, though as expected, now lesson 13 has me stumped a bit. What’s that I’m saying? I’m talking about my free Welsh language course, of course. If you’re wondering what the heck it actually is I’m doing there, visit Say Something In Welsh and join the fun.

Speaking of joining, if you like traveling to Great Britain or if you’re a Wales fan or a Welsh person lost in Germany, come visit Annette and me on wales.mixxt.de. I hear we might have a celeb writer interested in doing a piece for us. That would be very cool if it worked out!

That’s enough advertising for one morning, I think… I can’t help it, between Vampires and Taffies, there’s not much else but the guinea pigs, and they’ve gotten quite a bit of blogtime already…

Anyway, don’t expect to read from me until Monday, and have a great weekend!!

Kinotag: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

It’s come to this: I’m at the point where I’m enjoying the movies more than I did the books. I suppose that’s not necessarily a bad thing, although I’m still wondering why the drawn-out, partially quite dry and boring last novel warrants a two-parter.

Anyway, HP was a thorougly enjoyable, well-directed and well-acted (even by Daniel Radcliffe) film. Especially the ups and downs of teenage love were portrayed in a sensitive manner. Dumbledore’s demise was dramatic and sad. Really, the only critique I have is this: where the heck was the half-blood prince in this? He appears in name when Harry receives the potions book, but even after Draco is nearly killed by the mysterious spell (in a POTIONS book?), nobody makes any effort to unveil the prince’s true identity. Now, I’d be curious who this master student was who concocted such a deadly weapon, apparently while doodling in an unchallenging class. And even when the prince reveals himself to Harry, we get no backstory at all! So, this movie could have been called Harry Potter begins the Search for the Horcruxes or Harry, Hermione and Teenage Romance, and it would have been more on point.

Still: if you’re a Potter fan -or even if you aren’t, but like dark movies- go see this.

Satisfy the Reader

I would like to take this opportunity to satisfy two recent reader inquiries.

1. 4th Street Traffic’s album Kick the Habit can be purchased online at amazon (mp3), amazon UK (download or CD), from iTunes, at Tesco stores in Great Britain, in person at any of their gigs, and I’m sure at many other venues I have not investigated. It’s been out for a couple of months now and contains these seven songs:

Second Thoughts
Astray
Friend of Mine
Perfect Circle
White Lies
If You Go
Giving It Up

2. In Vampire Wars, you need blood to purchase things like abilities and minions (which in turn give you more blood). You also need it to enhance your abilities, which you can do once a day. To protect your blood from assailants, stick all of it in the bank and draw out only what you need when you need it. You can also win trophies for depositing certain amounts of blood or dominating a certain number of minions (mostly applicable to college frats, law firms and escaped mental patients).

Whenever you receive a trophy, you also receive a favor point. Every fifth trophy gets you a skill point, as well. Use skill points to enhance your health, energy, defense, attack strength or rage. There is no point in hoarding skill points. The best practice for favor points is to save them for important stuff like additional clan members or extra blood. Don’t waste them on health or rage refills, especially since you can use blood to refill your health! There are currently 71 trophies, with more being added whenever the designers come up with a new idea.

After the Fires

Were I to find only one word to describe the weekend, it would have to be… barbecue! Saturday afternoon took me to Stuttgart and the backyard of friends who were firing up the grill for some homemade cevapce and don’t ask me what those burger-thingies were called. As always, the food was plentiful, and a great time was had by all (although Max and Rufus had to go home early because Rufi decided he wasn’t getting enough grilled food).

On Sunday, I was invited to a surprise birthday party in Wiesloch: more great food, more good company, and the end result was one very tired Party Queen. Good thing I have a week to rest…

TGIF Once Again

Honestly, I don’t know if I will have any time to post at all this weekend. After all, life beckons. Tomorrow, I have to get ready for my sister’s visit, do some shopping and go to a barbecue (possibly featuring the visit of a friend I haven’t seen in a few months). On Sunday, I expect to spend the morning with my sister, visit another friend in the afternoon, and watch that video my colleague thinks I need to get scared by. And after that, it’ll be Monday.

But I have confidence that you all will survive for a couple of days without me. Just in case you miss me too much, you can help me review some music for our Celtic dinner in August. Tell me what you think of The Rough Guide to Celtic Music and the Chieftains’ Celtic Wedding.