Bleh

Has it seriously been an entire year since I even looked at this thing!?

I guess so. Hello everyone, and welcome to yet another installment of Samakhulis Moonflair's big fat bloggy-blog where we talk about anything Achaean. Or at least I do.

What's been going on? Lots, then again, not a whole lot. I've been away quite a bit. Can't put in a lot of full-day stints in-game, mostly because I picked up a new full-time job OOC in March, which has been keeping me very busy.

HOWEVER, been making new friends, finding old ones coming back and all sorts of things!

What to talk about? Umm..no idea. Garden's stalled also, due to the job thingy, though there've been new people ever since I published on some of the fun little sites like The MUD Connector and MUDstats. Most of them don't stick around. A few pop in every week or two. Others connect but never log in. It's...slow.

Sorry, if I'm in a tired mood, but I am. Perhaps I'll hang it up here for now and see you all again in another year!

Woo! Totally neat updates I bet!

Huh. Been forever, hasn't it? Ah well. I've been BUSY BUSY!!

Because I like mah ICanHasCheezburger stuffs, I created a profile there. Then I found that all my comments had some really dumpy avatar, so I created a Wordpress account and changed that.

Well anyway, I've decided to maybe possibly run a Wordpress blog in parallel with this one at http://samakhun.wordpress.com/about/.

Not only that but I've also been encouraged to open a Digg account (via Iron Realms's new news posty thing on their website and of course, the lure of a free credit per digg) and then on top of THAT I also got me a Tumblr account. Sheesh! I don't even LIKE Tumblr, but there was a few profiles that were posting pictures and I wanted to follow them kinda. Though I found an RSS feed from each of those accounts and am able to follow despite having my own account there or not. Whatever..maybe I'll just close it. If I can.

So yeah! I'm still here. Still alive and kicking.

TFG Update

Okay, so I assume it'd probably be worthwhile to go updating THIS old thing. There are a few things which I've done recently and not even mentioned!

1. You can view blogger in a whole new way!:
   • Flipcard: available at http://samakhulis.blogspot.com/view/flipcard
   • Mosaic: available at http://samakhulis.blogspot.com/view/mosaic
   • Sidebar: available at http://samakhulis.blogspot.com/view/sidebar
   • Snapshot: available at http://samakhulis.blogspot.com/view/snapshot
   • Timeslide: available at http://samakhulis.blogspot.com/view/timeslide
2. Huge TFG Website updates: I've changed the layout of the Fairy Garden website completely and done a few major updates, such as a twitter feed which I'm currently manually updating every time I make an in-game or website news post.
3. Achaea: Congratulations to Stephine for winning the freaking April 2011 Great Hunt! OMG!!!! Now she can get her pet, right? ;)
4. More Blogger: I'ma going to get some of the web buttons for MU*'s to put on the layout of this blog. It'll be kinda nice to have anyway, although a little meh maybe. Lemme know what you think if you want to.

Anyway, I know it was a fairly outline-based update, but I'm still here! -Samakhulis Moonflair

Tsol'dasi...a BIG surprise

Favonius. What a guy! This morning, I was puzzling over the Cabal of Life, a temple in the newly-discovered city of Istarion. You can't get into it unless you're an initiate of the Order of Life..of course the priestess will give you a quest to do if you want to become one.

I finished THAT quest and she pointed me to another person who only spoke the local language, Tsol'dasi. And I couldn't understand a word of it.

Later I asked Favonius about it and he said that there was a quest he did not figure out yet, but was in the process of. And he needed some help. So just tonight, I teamed up with him and we figured out the quest of the Two Trees! And you do not get hints. So HA!

What's the prize? It's a SUR-PRISE. But it is sooo cool. Long story short, now I'm in the process of becoming an initiate of the Order of Life, which involved first the Achaean quest and then the Tsol'dasi quest, both of which I managed to finish. I just hope this doesn't conflict with the Divine Order of Sleep and Dreams..we'll see. And if it does, I'll ask my Lady to fix it for me. Hmm..I really hope it doesn't conflict.

Sarita is now the third to learn the Tsol'dasi language, Favonius being the second.

October

Wowee! I haven't posted here in quite a while. And I started about this time last year it seems. Anyway, I -would- make this longer if I had time, but I have to leave like right now. Just searching through Google for stuff on IC players. Not to cheat on quests or anything, just to read up and find stuffs. Anyway, hopefully more later!

An even newer herb guide! And more.

The Herb Guide is now updated to version 3! This includes a nice script that will price up groups of herbs for your shop's stockroom. It also gives you a line to paste in for a 'drop all groups of this type and number and price them all at the price calculated.' Note that the cells that concatenate the paste-string together are multiple-line cells, and will be injected with quotation marks at the beginning and end, so those will need to be stripped off in a text editor before pasted into your stockroom script. Also, note that the gdrop alias I wrote is a client-side script that drops a number of groups all in a row without balance loss. This is the best thing for stockrooms, as someone can break in relatively easily if someone is inside. https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkNBf7ic_0CMdDN3RXRPZjAzSHl2bEdLQmhDN3FiR3c&authkey=CNSwvbAI&hl=en

New Herb Guide

Now that Firien's found my herb guide, I got to thinking about it a bit and came up with a great new idea! How about if I make it calculate prices by using a discount percentage!

So I did. I added another page to the price guide that will allow you to enter friend discount, house (org) discount, and everyone discount from the Oakstone minimum. And this will ripple all the way through everything in your list.

Also, I added another column that lets you set an absolute minimum you will be willing to part with the herb for. For the economist, this is a price floor. If the discount pushes the final price below the minimum, the minimum will kick in and force the price back up. Of course, this is a requirement in the case of Mending and Restoration which require Rurin-set diamond dust and a set gold value respectively.

In addition to all this, I did a few minor edits that prevent you from selecting and editing the grey areas. However, I haven't done this for copyright reasons and so the sheet protection is without a password. In Excel, you can just Tools/Protection/Unprotect Sheet and everything will be normal.

Anyhow, these new features have been added to the whole file. The old one is still included if you don't like the new features.

I suppose you still want it, eh?

Here it is: http://cid-95ca1e074aa3e174.office.live.com/view.aspx/.Public/Tools/Herb%20Price%20Guide%20v2.xls

Kongregate

So I was playing on Kongregate a bit and ran across this link!

http://www.kongregate.com/games/kingk/dream-world?kv_refuid=99459

Yes, it's a dumb RPG game, totally under-par with Achaea and horrible with graphics, but I find it kinda fun and I like having something easy to come to after a long hard day of losing out in Achaea or some other crazy ordeal.

Happy times and not so happy times

Heh. It was amusing, really, in reality. Recently I had a run-in with a member of the Qashar clan, some weird new Shallam-fighter club. Anyhow, one member had prism'd into my house in Ashtan not long ago and just kinda hung out for a while before he finally left. Then about a month or two later, he prism'd in again, but this time was gated to by members of his clan. Well, there was a nice little duel/fight right in my house, which the city of Ashtan did not like. Of course, the whole time I had no idea what was going on and why MY property was being targetted for trespassing. But of course, Ashtan didn't take it lightly and thusly boarded my house up. So now I have numerous assets tied up in the Ashtan subdivision which I cannot get to. It's okay though. I've finally calmed down, as I was pretty upset before. But honestly, if I were ever able to get in, I would demolish the house, build a few more rooms elsewhere, move my bed artifact there and finish destroying the Ashtan house. Of course, moving the bed costs 250 credits, which is something like 5/6ths the original cost, and destroying the entire house would give me somewhere around 390 credits or so. So I'd be left with 150 or so, maybe less. It's depressing, really, but I'm finding big houses are difficult to maintain.

Update on the Fairy Garden! I've been building building building! And I added a few tools found on mushcode.com, plus a few more that I developed by myself. And besides that, I'm in the middle of uploading zMapper images to Skydrive, so those should be available sometime later tonight.

That's all the interesting things for now I think. If I've forgotten any, well let me know :P.

Conversation with a Tsol'aa

So I was talking with Skegonga last night and the conversation kind of veered in a certain direction. The gist of the conversation was about microbiology, and later I was reading some of Gary Larson's comics and thought this one was awfully ironic, because I had mentioned exactly what this one entails (in a realistic sort of way, of course).

Three comments shoves the druid into action

So I got three comments from Skegonga and I decided that now would be a beautiful time to say something, as I haven't for a while! So...what am I supposed to say? Oh! I explored some and got my new explorer ranking and I am soooo excited. It was about one or two weeks ago in the Griesly Manor. Unfortunately though, the entire populous near my ranking has been upity-ing up the scale WITH me, so I didn't actually gain any rank points at all. Instead, Terran Master just kind of floated on down to me *sigh*. Still, I got it, and that's fun fun fun! Besides that, not a lot has been happening. I almost have level 82. I'm VERY excited about that. Less than 10% to go maybe. I haven't been finding enough time to do quests or hunt anything very nice as of late, just because I been out and busy so much. But besides that, everything's well. Hmm...I'm not sure what to say now. Maybe I'll leave and come back when something interesting happens. -Samakhulis

Thoughts on Roleplaying and PK

Over the recent months, I've noticed an increased amount of PK, especially in my area of allegiance. Of course, it is acceptable and allows for a bigger player-base. However, it seems as though much of the PK that occurs is due to spite and grudges. None of it, in my opinion, is roleplayed very well. As I've been working on my own MUSH, I read through the PennMUSH developers' writings on roleplay, factions and things. And I have to say that they brought up some very good points.

From what I see, and from what I perceive, those factions specifically aligned against my own seem to know when our defenses are low and make gigantic and harmful attacks at those times. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how it seems to be. Javelin, or was it Raevenos, or someone else..I don't remember, said that factions and roleplaying should be best brought together with agreements by faction leaders. It seems a little backward from the way things are, and I admit that true underhanded playing adds a LOT that you would not have with roleplaying agreements. But the idea was this: HL1 gets together with HL2. House1 is enemied to House2. HL1 says to HL2, "I want to try a roleplay where our houses fight it out and do such and such" and HL2 says, "Okay..but make sure you do it around this time, because my members will be around then and you won't have an unfair advantage." And so it goes on and the house leaders make some sort of arrangement.

I really like this idea, simply because I'm horrible at PK. And it seems more enjoyable to me and I'm sure to others like me. I mean, I'm not into PK. I'm into roleplaying and monster-hunting. If I experience an unexpected and unfair attack by an enemy faction, well, it pretty well depresses me for days on end, because I can't stand how I'm not that good at doing what I'm supposed to be good at doing (specifically DEFENDING Nature). So this idea of agreed roleplay between factions seems like a very nice idea.

Of course, I know most people will disagree with me, and even -I- might disagree with me, because, like I said before, underhanded and unannounced roleplay is so much more exciting than a planned out war.

Okay. I'm done! And it's late. And I'm tired. And I don't want to wait for the Fairy Garden to shut itself down (which it now does at 3:00am EST).

9-28-09

Oh..my. So, it looks as if I'm finally being 'discovered' here. Nixxe just found it and went crazy..well, I don't know if CRAZY is the right word, but it was sure funny. So that makes four or five people now that have commented at all...maybe more see it.

So there's this staircase in Pandora's temple. And the railing disappears right up there at the top. And I discovered you can jump off..but it's not very nice when you jump off. I was going to say something, but then I figured I'd get in trouble for saying anything AGAINST Her, so I didn't. But this isn't THERE, is it? I hope not. Because Mischief is trouble...and when you can't get rescued because of mischievous kill rooms, well, praying is a HUGE hit on one's experience. So I've been spending the last three months trying to get back up to where I WAS in my level. How annoying. How perfectly annoying. Still..it DID do some good because I've made about 25000 gold out of it all, which is really really nice.

I been getting ideas about updating my affliction list. There were a few comments as to how nice it is to have. But I haven't touched that thing for a VERY long time. So I'm not sure..it's been so long in fact, that I'm not sure I can get everything there is to get.

8-7-09

Hmm...I'm not sure what to say..any ideas?

8-5-09

Hi everybody (all two or three of you)! Are I crazy or what? I feel totally nuts. So I found some time to spend in the Realm, which has proved very exciting. Of course, hanging out with friends sure kills the hunting and harvesting and exploring time I like so well, but that's to be expected and besides, I think I find my friends to be a whole lot more interesting.

Oh, I suppose you want an update on all my exploration activities and things. After all, nothing useful has been posted here since like March..except for the comic and the inspiration from Alynia..

So a few new places opened up (mostly islands) such as Lothos, Meropis, and some island south of Meropis. I managed to go to Lothos a while back and also was able to complete my attestation of the Marque of Unquestioned Seaworthiness (or whatever it's called when you complete it). So yeah..now I can sail and everything, although nobody's let me yet.

Maybe someday I'll buy my own boat and be happy sailing all by myself.

As for quests, I discovered how to find the Skolef in Green Lake. It's some wierd tentacle creature that can wrap you up and pin you against the wall. Nasty. Anyway, it's Green Lake and that's all you get for finding him. But either way, he's really cool.

Anything else of note? Not really. Actually, there IS some things such as Kongregate and how much I like it. But that's OOC and irrelevant.

OH! Another OOC-ish thing. Did I mention PennMUSH? I think I did..however, I've discovered a TON more on how to develop stuff. In fact, I discovered a whole website with a bunch of examples and tools and I can break them down and find out how things work and...well...things like that. I'm loving it!

Loreen? She's well. Have I mentioned Loreen? She's the BEST Xorani gal a little fairy like me could ever dream of. All my friends like her too, I think. I hope...

Anyhow, I think that's it for now. Maybe I'll also include PennMUSH tools and tips here. Or not..but maybe I will. Still I want to keep some of my ideas to myself, y'know. But with the amount of support (or lack of, I should say) I see online, SOMEBODY'S got to have SOMETHING on that whole system. And it might just have to be me if I can't find somebody else.

Okay. I'm done. Take care, ya'll!

-Sama M.

CUTE picture

Okay, so I'm a big fan of Calvin and Hobbes. After spending time with Sevilla (a kitty friend), I came across this one and found it to be rather relevant.

8-2-09 - Part 2

So it is the afternoon here. And I am now more awake than before.

Whee!!! First comment! By my dear friend, Alynia! After all, she IS the one who inspired me to get this thing going again, so I was excited when I saw an un-approved comment waiting there. And I approved it, so I'm so excited.

Anyway, on other notes: I was looking through the previous posts and realised that most of them were written back when I was in my twenties. I'm now 54 or something like that...is it a bad thing to feel so old? I mean, I found a TON of mis-information, such as Valnurana's Temple still being at Mesmerium or calling Xhaiden Dale the Dakhota Hills. Of course, now that I am more informed on names of places, I've gone back and edited those to display correct information, so none of you younger ones get confused by my incessant babbling.

Other things: Not really. I don't have much new information, except that my time in Achaea was cut about a month ago, so I haven't been around as much as I usually was before. Instead of, say, nine hours a day, it's now down to two. And people I know are a bit down about it..missing me and all. I mean, I WANT to be in more, but it's just not wise at this moment in time because I'm fighting over my Internet connection with other family members and what-not (dialup..bleh).

So, in conclusion, don't miss me TOO much. I'm still around and stuff. Just not as much, so I'm hard to find. Maybe I'll re-evaluate it after a while and see if I can't work something out.

Take care! -Sama M.

8-2-09

Okay..for a special request from Alynia who is the second person to discover this thing and actually TELL me, I'm posting.

Now to get back in the mood...I was writing these in first person, was I not? I think so. So I will.

Things have been quiet. I got HR5 in the Druids, which is the BEST! Also, Alynia, a long-time friend of mine has come to stay permanently at my house as a sort of house-keeper you might call it (thanks for the inspiration, Alynia. I almost forgot this blog existed!).

So I made HR5, Level 81 and reached 2 million sovereigns in my bank account. What else? Not much. A huge credit and crown sale just started and I can't do anything because my soul is penniless.

It's late, and I'm tired..almost a zombie..and I must get going. Hopefully I'll remember this thing a little more so I can get it updated more often than not.

Take care and sweet dreams (which reminds me.. I also joined Valnurana's pre-Order - The Emnia Ecstasia).

-Samakhulis Moonflair

P.S. Where'd the Moonflair come from? I was bloodlined to Aohara, if you didn't already know.

3-23-09

Okay, so I'm kind of mad and at the same time upset. Who wouldn't be? I mean, our house head, Kaiya, just retired, dormanted and disappeared seemingly forever. If I thought swearing were ethical, I'd swear right now! Kaiya, I must say, was the best head I've ever seen in the house. Of course, up until now, she was the ONLY head I have seen in the house, so you can see where I'm coming from. But golly! If it weren't so sudden and if she hadn't went so darned DORMANT, I might be in a bit of a better mood.

Okay, I must confess..the previous paragraph is written in anger, because for the first month after the announcement and actual leaving, I was depressed. But depression was no good, as it was making me loose sleep IRL and all other kinds of problems. I figure being angry is better than being depressed. At least brooding in anger seems to feel a little better than brooding in depression. Either way, it still makes me really sad to see her leave, especially in this manner. That's all for that. Except I wish...oh never mind.

On a happier note: between now and the last post, I have gotten married (Loreen), gotten a bloodlined mother (Aohara) and almost finished my schooling in the Druids. So HA!!

I'm not done with the Kaiya issue though. Between the first of the year and now, it seems that she's been spending less time in the realm, and I suppose that's to prepare all of us. Still, her departure was rather sudden and heart-wrenching. I SO want to swear. Darn it! I'm so mad. Of course, when something like this happens, you kind of lose your motivation for anything, as I have. I mean..its not like she hawked over my shoulder on everything, nor did she have much of a personal relationship with me as she did with others, so I felt pretty much on my own anyway, but the leaving has still killed my motivation. There. I'm done now.

So what else? Um..I won a few arena spars against Soopay. And boy do I get ribbing about that!

Oh! Another thing! On an OOC note, I downloaded PennMUSH from Nick Gammon's website and that is pretty darn cool if you can figure it out. It's not as customized as Achaea, but hey..twelve years makes for a pretty customized game, compared to a month of figuring out a whole new MUD engine. Plus, this one doesn't seem to MUDdy, as you can't really kill stuff all that nicely. Just one "kill" command and that gives the target a bit of gold and sends them to their set "home." That's all..pretty boring if you ask me. Of course, all the forums say that the only real way to customize is to know C++ and to edit the source code and recompile. But there's only a few problems with that. 1) I don't know C++, 2) I don't have time to learn, and 3) I don't have a compiler, nor do I have the time to find one and learn IT! So I'll live with the base engine. Good note is that I've created a world of about 2500 rooms so far. No..not 2500 rooms. But 2500 THINGS including players, rooms, exits and objects. And exits are a lot more plentiful than rooms..for obvious reasons. Each apparent exit is two exits as you have to have a return path for normal travel. Of course, you could do the Lady Eris thing and go north to one room and south to a completely different room, rather than returning to the one you just left..if that makes sense. One more rambling..I created something called the Font of Life and if you @pemit #110 = help (That's YELL TO FONT, "HELP" in semi-Achaean) you are transported INSIDE it which exists in the Room 2, which is the starting point. Pretty cool if you ask me. That's the most in-depth I've been with object customization. I can't figure out how to do the delayed-reset on objects. Nick's example was wander into a bunch of shops and if you have objects in your INVENTORY, then you can enter, otherwise the shop owner snarls at you and throws you out. It didn't really work too well for me, but I suppose if you want to get really IN-Character, that's the best way to do it. I DO prefer the IRE method of GIVE OBJECT TO THING and get gold back...but again, I don't have time to do figure that out yet.

For now, I'll stick with Achaea and I'm done rambling and Kaiya, you'd better either get back in the groove or give a good explanation for leaving, including some encouragement. I so need an explanation or encouraging word. The 'rememberances' are NOT encouraging one bit. Like "she WAS.." or "remember the time when she..." I mean, just leaving WITHOUT explanation is, in my opinion, uncalled for. I'm sure SOMEBODY got an explanation, but the only thing I heard was "I'm gone, not coming back, and here's the keys. See ya!"

Okay, Sama...shut up now.

10-24-08

I freaked myself out! While searching on lore about the Ka'ahlen Swamp in Xhaiden Dale, I saw my name pop up on a Google search! Well, I'm one to try and follow directions and not give away quest solutions, so I went in to the link to see what I had given away. Turns out it was just a hint that the quest described existed. Whew!

Anyway, big news!! I've killed my first grizzly! I'm so excited! Actually, they aren't that bad, except when they take a bite of your head. Now THAT hurts. I'll have to go back in the logs to see how much one of those types of attacks hit for. I don't quite remember. But it was something around 600-800hp. A lot when they've already worn you down to 1200hp total. And they're a little quicker than you might expect. Probably 110-120% faster than I am at regaining balance as an Atavian. So they can hit two times to my one every once in a while.

Eww...it's almost Mayaween (obviously to correspond with Oct. 31) and there is festivity decor to be sold in New Thera. Well, I bought a jack-o-lantern and a scarecrow for my grove. Well, the scarecrow is going to last through the holiday, but the pumpkin is only good for 5 days, meaning that it will decay before the actual holiday rolls around. So I'll have to buy another. Anyway, I was just resting to regain endurance here while typing this out and I saw the jack-o-lantern grin dark and wickedly. Even though it didn't move. Freaky. I suppose waiting around in one room for a long time will cause things like that to happen.

Okay, update - I turned 31 about 6 months ago, and I'm on level 75 (Almighty) and 55% through it. Wow! I may hit 80 pretty soon here, in which case I will gain stability while flying! I can't wait. And I'm 1606 lessons in to Groves, which means I have 130 left! I've never gotten this far in a skill before. I haven't gotten my hypercure yet, but it's coming soon. I mean, 8.5 lessons per regular credit = 16 credits to trans in groves, with a few lessons left over! Woo! And I can probably get 2 credits per day if it is a good day, and one if it is slow. And on top of THAT, there's October's lesson bonus of one lesson per credit-lesson conversion, meaning that each unbound credit is worth 9.5 lessons! Which doing the math again, comes out to 14 credits instead of 16! A HUGE savings of 2 credits worth. Haha.

I'm thinking...I have a spreadsheet I use to budget my Achaean bank account. Maybe I should attach that somehow. Put it on a public drive somewhere or something. It's really useful, actually. I have categories for lesson credits, artefact credits, housing, credit sales, mounts and general spending. Plus there are a few columns to allocate where free or unallocated credits will go (if I win or buy one not from either the housing, lessons or artefact funds). It's not perfect, but it's really quite useful, as I know that I can't just pull all the gold from my bank account and spend it frivilously on lessons. I used to, and I still don't have any artefacts. Of course, the way to do artefacts is to buy them online, but I don't want to do that just yet. I don't have enough stupidity to waste real money on that sort of thing.

Okay. I think this is getting long enough. Ta-ta for now!