Decisions, Decisions

I spent most of yesterday trailing my many characters around Tyria opening up the necesary waypoints so that each of them could hop to any of the Big Chest events at an instant's notice. I had a great time and while I was on auto-run I had time to come to a few decisions:

• I am not stopping at eight. Even with a Mesmer not yet finished and a Guardian barely started I am already itching to make a new character. I have two free slots and they are both going to get used.

• My next two characters will be an Asuran Ranger and a Charr Engineer. Yes, I have two Asuras and two Charrs already. Yes, one of them is a ranger and the other an engineer. That's not good enough. I want them both ways round.

Ignore me at your peril

 

• The Asuran ranger will level up mainly south of Lion's Arch. I have barely touched Metrica Province and Caledon Forest and it was apparent running through them several times as I did yesterday that they must be fascinating places to explore. My Asuras should know their adopted homeland as well as my Charr know theirs but both of them have barely set foot there. The new one will be different.

• I've been toying with the idea of writing some "Potterer's Guides" for a long time. Nothing serious, as befits the title. Just a surface skim of MMOs or parts of MMOs from the perspective and for the benefit of players whose motivation is mainly to wander about and amuse themselves without having to put themselves out very much. I will turn my whimsical thought-project into something a little more substantial.

The first of these decisions to be acted upon was the last. I've drafted the first four Potterer's Guides, one for each of the low-level, chest-dropping meta events. The first, The Frozen Maw, is finished and I'm posting it immediately after this. The rest should be up in a couple of days. After that I plan to do the dragons. Yes, all this information is already widely available, but never mind that. They were a lot of fun to write and that was why I wrote them although I hope they are also entertaining to read. If anyone finds them useful, well that's just sugar.

Or Google Head Office as we know it

That seemed to be more than enough decisions for one day. Then I read Syp's post on the demise of Google Reader, followed by a whirlwind of similar outraged, upset or glumly blog posts found, ironically, in my Reader. The whole sorry show has been discussed enough so I won't go on about it, other than to say that it prompts me to more decisions:

I will fully archive Inventory Full. I was doing this but I got out of the habit when it began to take days rather than hours. I will run HTTrack for a month if need be but I will get it all stored away out of the cloud.

I will begin to move anything that matters away from Google. I wouldn't give twopence for Blogger's long-term survival. I'll hang on here while it lasts if only because when it goes maybe there will be some deal made to carry history over to other platforms. I will look into the possibility of migrating before then, though.

I will also look into alternatives to Gmail. I don't care about losing it as an email service. Those are ten a penny. The issue is that most MMOs now require an email address as log-on ID and I have lazily created a seemingly endless series of Gmail accounts to satisfy them. If Gmail goes, so do most of my MMOs.

Like many, I used to positively like Google. When it wasn't all that well-known in the UK I recommended it to people often. I still like what it does but I can no longer trust it. There are plenty of alternatives and I will make an effort to find and use them. Eggs in a basket? Not so much any more.