Awesome kitty Kestine likes to rub his face on freaking EVERYTHING. Doorways, table legs, MY legs, box corners, and ninja laptop Dinah’s wifi parts.

In the case of the wireless-N card, it was just one facerub too many, because the fat purple end of the card snapped off and the card shut down. Thankfully Dinah didn’t freak and go all Blue Screen of Death, but her wireless-N card is now officially dead.

Oops.
I don’t blame Kestine enirely, though… old card is quite old (I think I got it a few months after I originally got Dinah) and it was starting to flake out. I’ve ordered a D-Link* Wireless-N card off Amazon (yay having enough rewards points to slash off half the price!) and also a Logitech lapdesk (combo cooler fan/speakers) because ninja laptop has been running VERY hot as of late.

For now I’ve fallen back on using the original onboard wireless-G… and remembered WHY I boosted Dinah to N in the first place. Wireless-G sucks! :P Actually, wireless sucks as a whole– mind you, this is coming from someone who loots podcasts left and right and at any given time is either running YouTube, Slingbox, Netflix, South Park or the TWiT Live stream– and I moved as much as my crap as I could over to wired mode earlier this year. Wireless-N is the closest to wired mode as I can get, and is the only form of wifi I’ll stick on a machine on this network ’cause I’m spoiled on my awesome gigabit ethernet that I use to pass things around inside the house network.

As for Kestine… well, he’s a bit frustrated that he can’t rub his face on Dinah for now. XD It’s funny that he goes specifically for her wifi stuff– the card and the corners of her monitor lid, which are supposedly where the wifi receiver bits are. I wonder if they emit some low-level EM wave that cats find interesting enough to facerub?

* = old router and wireless-N card were Linksys (obtained at the same time), new router is D-Link, which has been AWESOME thus far, so may as well go D-Link for the card too.

Bigger is still better: Pizza Wednesday, doods. The weekly tossup between Pizza Hut and Papa Johns is complicated a little more this time around; the former rolled out a new event pizza type (the Big Italy, yet another attempt at an extra large… dude, why can’t they bring back the Big New Yorker? THAT was awesome!), yet with the latter I’ve piled up enough rewards points to get a free pizza. Ordinarily free pizza would trump everything (because seriously, what’s better than free?), but when it comes to new/event rollouts, I gotta try it. It doesn’t help that I’m a wing addict. >_>;;;

Live from Azeroth: Yoshi now has as much of the t10 Mage armor (“Bloodmage’s Regalia”) as she’s going to get, and there’s nothing more I can pile up Frost emblems for… so any future emblems I’ll just convert into Primordial Saronites so I don’t need to kill my gold buying ‘em up to make the ICC craftables for my alts or guildies. :P Any future gear upgrades Yoshi will have to get through ICC, most likely in 25-man mode. (That said… while inferior to the Frozen Bonespike that Yoshi’s packing now, I want Halion, Staff of Forgotten Love since its essentially the WoW version of Planet’s Burden, Yoshi’s signature weapon everywhere else).

I will slug that Lich King in his noobish, ice cream-hoarding face, yes I will. >:D

While old man Phil would be next on the gear supply chain, I need to throw in Rei stat, to unlock the craftable leather/mail pants. I’ve, uh… lots of rogues/druids/hunters/shammies in the guild who could use those things and I’ve kept them waiting for quite awhile (with Robert on break, I’m the only in-house ICC crafter-dood, after all). And, of course, Rei can use ‘em too.

No Kon Do: BOOOOO. :( I liked Paranoia Agent (or, “what happens when Japan turns Law and Order into headmessy anime”) and Paprika (which I definitely need to revisit for the dub, hehehe I’m terrible). If you’ve no idea as to who this awesome dood was, do yourself a favor and watch either of the above. :O

So I couldn’t write off the entire day as being a crock because of lame-o front panel wiring blah, I went and cut higher-res individual pieces of the Avatars from that earlier group shot.

The wonky thumbnails? Blame Gallery2 (the server software for on-site Instant Ramen Sketchbook). >_>

Taking another crack at Yggdrasil’s FP wiring tomorrow. Hopefully it will end in me being hideously bored while waiting for him to patch stuff (also pizza).
For now, I’ll fall asleep to disaster flicks. >_>;

About a week, two pizzas, and a crapload of inking and painting later and these punks are DONE.
Individual and team wallpapers forthcoming, for now you guys get the dA group shot. After I cut the wallpaper versions, I go onto the next phase of network customizing… which involves sprites and seeing how much Flash ActionScript I can remember.
And this is on top of prepping the AP podcast graphics. But that seems laughably easy compared to this, since those are mostly a ton of variations of the same thing (much like drawing skit portraits for RT).

And now… I really need to go do something else for awhile.

Nin nin~

…and old man is ooooooold.

That finishes my side of the network. As far as mother’s side goes, only Jin (ink and paint) and Tsunami (paint) are left. Unless the rest of Yggdrasil’s parts arrive today (I’m sure to at least get his mobo), I’m going to see about plodding through the last two Avatars so that I can distro to wallpapers. Individuals, two teams of 3, and one with all six.

First, an update to the Yggdrasil situation.

I tweeted this earlier but didn’t get a chance to elaborate further.
Thanks to some… unexpected assistance from mother (who cannot fathom the thought of leaving a system incomplete until January), Yggdrasil will be brought online next week. Yeah, she actually wants Iggy finished faster than I do. WTF, right?

I am surely overthinking this and should be squeeing my pants off over getting the coins needed to get the needed replacement parts sooner rather than later. I guess I’m just too used to these things being giant traps. Which, of course, this PROBABLY IS, but mother insists, so…

Bonus awesome: I had enough Wells Fargo rewards points piled up to generate a $25 Amazon eCert. Awesome because I could use it immediately. I was literally seconds from submitting the Amazon order when at the last moment I raided my rewards status to see if there was anything I could do to slash the grand total further. That eCert dropped the total from $206 to $181, w00t!

So, if all goes well, I’ll have a Yggdrasil on the network sometime next week. :D

—

And now, time for some more Avatar WIPs!

Onyx is colored! Again, a full-size version will be released when all six are done.

Dinah gets inked. I have to move the layers to get all of her because of her high ponytail.

Tsunami got inked too. Ah, this makes me miss archery class…