A Pirate Seeking Time Instead of Silver?

Where is all the swashbuckling pirate stuff?

Crossbones - John Malkovich
John Malkovich a Blackbeard in Crossbones

I watched the premier episode of Crossbones last night and I am a bit confused about the whole idea. I appreciate the fact that the show is about Blackbeard, and I thought John Malkovich played a great role, but I kinda thought that there would be more ship fights and swordplay in the first episode. As it was, the episode was mostly about some chronometer that is supposed to end piracy by allowing the British Navy to more accurately position themselves on the high seas. While I understand the historical significance of such a device, I did not see how this being the focus of the episode provided anything other than a means of getting Tim Lowe (Richard Coyle), a spy for the British onto Blackbeard's island. The thing was destroyed in the one ship battle in any case.

I plan on giving the show more chances to impress me, primarily because I love John Malkovich and the concept of a show about pirates seems interesting, but I was not feeling it with the first episode. If I had to rate it, I'd give it a C, with a + only because of Malkovich.

If you get a chance, check out The Wil Wheaton Project's coverage of Crossbones on Hulu – it was pretty funny. It was about minute 16 and then 19:50.

Core Challenge Day 3 and 4

Four days in and I am still keeping up with my Core workouts. I think giving myself a extra motivation by getting my exercise done before I play any games is going to help in the long term. It just seems like a bit of a reward after working out, although when I get a crummy League of Legends game, it could also be considered punishment.

Week 1 Day 3:

  • 12 push-ups
  • 15 second Plank
  • 14 Plank Reaches

Week 1 Day 4:

  • 60 seconds Plank
  • 10 Plank Reaches

The 60 second plank was a bit tough, but not anything too difficult since only about a month ago I was doing so much more.

The downside of League of Legends

Speaking of LoL, I continued my promotion series trying to get into Silver V, but my next two games proved much more difficult than my first 2.

League of Legends - Ghost Bride Morgana
2 more games a Morgana

In the third game of my series, I ran into one of the typical problems of ranked play – connection issues. While I had no problem connecting and playing the game, my teammate – Cassiopeia was AFK for the first 8 minutes of the game. She was supposed to go mid while I had selected Morgana as my support champion. During those 8 minutes, I tried to cover mid with a Spellthief's Edge (support item) while Draven tried to handle the bot lane by himself. We both played safe until Cassiopeia showed up, but she was level 1 when everyone else was level 6 or 7. Trying to catch up when everyone has their ultimate is not the easiest thing to do. I also got to experience Sion's Q-W combo first hand – something I had never seen before. Having not built for as much defense as usual, his combo was knocking me down over 50% hp 10 minutes into the game – and he liked targeting me since I had bugged him mid lane at the start of the game. While we put on a good fight for 30+ minutes, we never recovered from the AFK, and I think I accounted for 8 of Sion's 12 kills.

The fourth game of my series presented another of the common problems of ranked play – trolls. I got my favorite Morgana mid lane role and felt good about this game until I realized we had no ADC. Or rather, we had Nocturne, Me, Wukong, Karma, and Garen. I originally thought Garen was trolling, but it seems he was going top and Wukong called ADC. Wukong CAN snowball and carry a team, but he is a melee champion while most ADCs (I think all?) are ranged champs. So our bot lane was Wukong/Karma against Varus/Soraka. So while Wukong struggled to get 60 cs during the game, Varus easily killed 199. This allowed Varus to build a 5k gold lead on Wukong and there was no snowballing for our team. While I managed a 2.6 KDA and Garen collected 9 kills, it was not enough to overcome a dominant Kha'Zix jungle assassin who raked up 14 kills.

So after a promising start, I was now 2-2 in my promotion series and needed to win my last game to make it to Silver V. I put the game aside and moved on to the Wildstar headstart.

Wildstar Headstart

I joined in on the Wildstar head start and while I did not stay up till midnight to be the first to start leveling my character, I did get a couple of levels under my belt. From what I experienced, there were not too many problems with the launch, and they even threw out a couple of patches. One issue I did see was that I chose the exact moment to log in that one of these patches was being pushed out. I guess it was around 4pm PDT, but when I fired up the launcher, little did I know Carbine was in the middle of rolling out a patch and I got a message indicating that the version of my client was not compatible with the version of the game running on the servers. Perplexed, since I had just updated my client earlier in the day, I tried again…and was told that no servers were online. I figured they had some serious launch issues, but after trying a couple of times, I got in and had no problems creating my character and getting things rolling. From my point of view, I'd give the launch an A-, not prefect, but much better than some I've gone through. Hopefully they'll survive the official launch on June 3rd.

#Wildstar #LeagueOfLegends #LOL #HeadStart