Search Results for "secret santa"

Santa Baby..

I know, I’m a little behind this year Santa so I’m sending this letter to your wife. She not-too-gently reminded me that Scarybooster posted his letter December 3rd and how DARE I wait three days before responding but I’m pretty confident you’ll forgive me, because after all I do run a ‘Secret Santa’ every year for gamers, in your name of course. Speaking of which, I still haven’t gotten my paypal payments. Oh, what’s that? You’re upset because even MmoGamerChick, Rivs, Rowan, and Scopique found the time to send off their lists? Well. That’s just how this year seems to be going. I’ll make up for it by being extra good next year. We both know the goodness meter was stuck at full for the past twelve months. I hope you can find time to give me the things on my wishlist, at first I didn’t think I was asking for too much but well, after reading some forums. I think this may be one of the hardest wish lists to fulfill yet.

1. If you could remind people that games are supposed to be FUN, that would be fantastic. I think there are a few sour grapes who have turned this hobby into something like work and they feel the need to shower down their negative thoughts and opinions on the rest of the happy gamers who are content with playing a 15 year old text based game and don’t see anything wrong with the fact that their UI is completely outdated (do they even HAVE a UI?! What IS that?!) and the controls are garbage. On that same note, remind people that it’s O.K. to be having fun in whatever your game of choice happens to be. That’s right, games are choices. What we play are also choices. That’s how hobbies work.

2. Make everyone do one random act of kindness in game. That’s right, I’m complaining about the lack of community and friendship we feel with anyone outside of our own personal little bubbles. I understand that these days there’s very little ‘community’ that we want to be a part of, and finding a place to belong is even more difficult – but doing just one simple little thing can brighten up someones day. I’m not saying you have to be best friends with the person or even talk to them ever again, but if you could remind people that not everyone is bad, that would be great.

3. I would LOVE to see more games like Glitch, A Tale in the Desert, and Wurm Online. I’m a bit tired of smacking things around all of the time, and I’d love to see one of those types of games become REALLY popular. Just to prove all the naysayers wrong.

4. On a more serious note, I just want people to be safe and healthy. Whether I know them or not. More happy days than sad days would be a nice plus, too.

 

Sure, my Christmas list is pretty selfish this year, but that’s what I want. I think I deserve at least a few things off of that list, hmm? I’ll even leave out a can of coke for you, the white cans. Because polar bears rock.

P.S. Don’t forget to collect a list from Tipa over at West Karana.

P.P.S. Please tell Alfie I want to sleep for more than 5 hours a night.

 

December 6, 2011 December 6, 2011 By stargrace In 3 Comments

Priestpalooza Begins

With today marking the official start of Priestpalooza, I was both nervous and excited. I’ve never hosted a server event before (well, I hosted Secret Santa, but that was different) and I certainly haven’t had a huge gathering of people on my deed before. I wanted to provide food, drink, and a little bit of entertainment (fishing) for people between sermons.

We also set up a sign-in sheet where people could put down their names for sermons. They happen every 30 minutes, with each priest being able to sermon every 3 hours. When a lot of priests show up you want to make sure everyone can get a turn or two throughout the day.

So far everything is going pretty well. People are taking turns, most are around for when they signed up, and it’s smooth sailing. The stress I feel is something that is probably not necessary at all, but my anxiety ridden self doesn’t know of any other way to cope. GMs came by and dropped a julboard making it even easier for players to eat (and prevent disease). Gains were as high as .96 today – an amazing feat when you’re in the 90’s for faith.

Overall I’m pretty glad I decided to run the event, and I’m already looking forward to planning something new for February. My goal is to plan one “event” each month for the server of Sklotopolis. December was the Secret Santa, January is the Priestpalooza, and who knows what’s just around the corner. Something that doesn’t involve quite as much work, but is still really fun. Maybe some sort of play on Valentine’s Day. We’ll just have to see.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

January 13, 2019 December 27, 2019 By stargrace In No Comment

Christmas in Wurm Unlimited

This year I decided I would run a secret santa event on Sklotopolis for Christmas, and I had 40 participants sign up – I’m so excited! I’m hoping for unique and thoughtful gifts for everyone, and I hope everyone has a lot of fun with it. Little did I know that one of the first people who would receive a secret santa gift would actually be me!

My alliance got together and painstakingly gathered up four champion trolls (two breeding pairs) and hitched them to a beautiful wagon that Elfin created. a kind GM gifted me one of the skins of my choosing as a thank you, and the alliance filled the wagon with goodies, and left it on my deed. Taka, who is at my Liberty deed currently building on the property, contacted me and told me she needed me to log in to help with something. I figured it was placement of a bridge or something like that. I had no idea it was to reveal the champion trolls pulling a wagon!

To say I was stunned would be an understatement. I was absolutely floored. The thoughtfulness my Liberty alliance displayed was amazing and completely unexpected. Elfin thanked me for being such a staple to the community (I’ve only been playing on Sklotopolis for 2.5 years now…) and I am pretty sure I turned beet red. I am just another player, and while the community IS key to me, I don’t think I’m anything special. I just absolutely love the server (and the palyers). This generous gift is one more reason why. 

December 7, 2018 December 27, 2019 By stargrace In No Comment

Holidays and Games

It’s hard for me to believe that 2016 is almost over. This year has been such a mixture of emotions that I honestly don’t know if I’m happy to be starting 2017 or if I’m sad to be leaving the year behind. Even though I haven’t been posting very frequently here on MmoQuests, I HAVE been getting some gaming in daily – in between doing the whole new Mom thing which eats up about 99.9% of my time. I’m STILL recuperating from my c-section back in September. My hematoma isn’t completely healed, and I still have home nurses coming to pack and bandage the wound. I had hoped this would be over by now but apparently my body had other ideas.

Leo is now 13 weeks old, 8 weeks adjusted (because he was 5 weeks early). He’s thriving, and growing by leaps and bounds – but it’s also a difficult time as he has pretty bad colic and suffers from gas, so he spends a lot of his days crying every time he wants to fart or poop. It makes for a very tired Mommy and Daddy but we hang in there.

This Christmas is the first where I won’t be doing many of my traditions because I’m just too tired and there simply isn’t enough hours in the day. I have no family here, so I don’t have any parties or dinners to go to, but I still have simple traditions I like to keep up. I didn’t get myself (or Leo, too young) an advent calendar, and because money is tight we only bought Leo two presents and we’re going to hold off on anything more. I did send a few gifts as a secret santa exchange with my family, but I didn’t even get around to mailing out Christmas cards this year, and I only received two cards from others where I’d normally have 15+ displayed on my walls. I did put up the Christmas tree, but after a week the lights all burnt out and I haven’t replaced them. Sounds pretty pathetic, but I’m hoping that next year when Leo is older things will slowly get back to what I consider “normal”. I’m quickly learning that parenting is hard, and as much as I love kids I may not actually be that fond of babies. I haven’t had a lot of chances to vent (or places to vent) so.. there you have it. Now, lets get on to gaming!

After attempting to play on the EverQuest progression server I decided that it just required way too much time and attention, so I swapped over to EverQuest 2 and my old characters there. I quickly fell in love as I was reminded of all the joyous occasions I’ve had in game even though it has gone through some significant changes. I purchased the latest expansion, and my little guild of three people have been playing together once again.

Things have changed since Daybreak became a thing. Antonia Bayle is no longer the most populated server, and groups are hard to come by. Since I don’t really have time to do dungeons this doesn’t bother me too much. What I’ve been doing is working on getting my characters to 100, in both adventuring and crafting, doing the Kunark Ascended timeline, and then ascending my characters into their respective classes. I also created two new characters, a troubador named Mousical (ratonga of course), and a necromancer named Quails (also a ratonga). Add that to the 9 characters I already had, and it’s a pretty full house.

I haven’t started the crafting timeline yet, but it rewards a really nice cloak and that’s next on my list of things to do. There have been plenty of in-game events with Frostfell going on, and I may have spent a day or two crafting various housing items so I could decorate the guild hall for Christmas. My guild mates have been fantastic about my need to randomly go AFK, so I spend a lot of time on autofollow as we complete various solo / advanced solo dungeons, or just play around in older raids. We attempted a few of the “new” (a few expansions old now) fabled raids, but those kicked our asses, so they’re on a wait list while we gear up.

Inflation has become a HUGE issue. A krono sells for 300,000 plat, and people are not shy about throwing that sort of money around. I have a grand total of 40,000 plat, and thought that was a large amount. I often see loot being sold on the auction channel for 100-400k which is just insane to me.

Despite all of this I’m having a lot of fun. If you happen to be in game, please don’t hesitate to look me up! You can typically find me as the two characters mentioned above, or Stargrace, or some other rendition of me. Doing a /who all torrent knights will bring up either myself or one of my two guild mates.

I’m also contemplating diving back into EVE Online as it’s something I could play without too much trouble from my laptop, and hanging out in highsec doing mining missions or some such wouldn’t be that difficult if I had to randomly AFK. I spend most of my days with twitch on the television and I’ve had an absolute blast getting to know other streamers and refining what it is I like about some streamers vs. others.

All in all, things are going. It’s not always bad, it’s certainly not always good, but the days keep passing and we all keep trying our best.

Happy holidays, from my little family to yours.

December 24, 2016 December 27, 2019 By stargrace In 3 Comments

Lets Give Away some Steam Game Keys (Contest Time!)

steam giveaway sites

Since I’m not running my Gamers Secret Santa this year, I decided I would do something a little bit different. I have quite a few steam game keys I’m going to be giving away, all you need to do is enter a valid email address to be put into the draw (plus you’re going to want to have a steam account so you can redeem them if you win). The keys will go out randomly on December 25th at 1:30pm PDT, and the games I’m giving away include the following (and more that are not listed here):

  • Fez
  • Starseed Pilgrim
  • Neighbours from Hell Compilation
  • Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection
  • Sid Meier’s Civ. III Complete

Plus many more. You can only enter once, and the rewards are random. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from me, Stargrace, here at MmoQuests.com!

December 8, 2015 December 8, 2015 By stargrace In 2 Comments

More Steam Screenshots – and Steam Sales

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[36/50] We’re winding down for IntPiPoMo – and I’m so glad I got the opportunity to participate, because I have revitalized myself with some amazing screenshots I forgot I even took. Each one comes with a memory of whatever game I happened to be playing. It’s wonderful.

Yesterday the latest Steam sale started, and this time they’ve removed a lot of the hustle and bustle that you used to see from it. There’s no more “vote on what goes on sale next!” type of deals, nor are there any “this deal is only around for 2 hours and then it will be new sales!” deals either. Instead, what you see is what you get. I found this to be both good and bad. Good, because now I no longer have to wait during a sale to see if a 50% off game will drop to 75% off sometime throughout the sale, and bad because I also have a lot less hype for things.

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[37/50] Even with the new version of doing sales, I still ended up making a few purchases. To begin with, all of the DLC for Tropico 5 along with two expansions I was missing were on sale for 75% off. There were 11 DLC in total that I didn’t own and I love Tropico 5, it’s an awesome game, very relaxed.

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[38/50] I didn’t buy any more games (yet) but I did add a few more to my wishlist. Don’t forget you can always add me to steam! Anyway, I added Life is Feudal to the list, along with StoneHearth, two games I’m very interested in but just don’t have extra funding right this moment. Life is Feudal of course being the more exciting of the two for me at least.

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[39/50] Then I spent a bunch of time looking through the activity section of my steam. I love this, it shows me what everyone is up to, what purchases have been made, what items are hot on wishlists this year. Don’t forget to add a wishlist guys, you never know!

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[40/50] There’s four days left of November, and 10 screenshots left to post – so I think I’ve done pretty well on IntPiPoMo. Even with my sporadic blog posts. It even encouraged me to write a bit more than I normally would have. With NaNoWriMo going on this month, and holidays coming up, I know everyone is pretty busy. One thing I’ve learned from working at home, is how to manage my time to make sure that “all the things” end up getting done. Of course this year I also had to let some things slide (Gamers Secret Santa, I’m looking at you) but I know it was for the best.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

November 25, 2015 December 27, 2019 By stargrace In No Comment

ExtraLife Ends, and Games Begin

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Now that the excitement from ExtraLife is over, it’s time to relax a bit. Thank you to everyone who supported me through my streaming endeavors and helped to keep me awake. It was awesome. I played through all 24 games in 24 hours and had a lot of fun doing it. Hopefully everyone had a lot of fun watching me, too.

I’ve been trying to learn how to create more things in minecraft. I started out by trying to create an enchanting table. Unfortunately it uses a few items that are really hard to get. I’ve got the diamonds for it but I don”t have the obsidian, I found a mod that will help me create obsidian except that requires steel. So far I haven’t found a way to create steel. I created a blast furnace, but that creates a different type of steel which doesn’t happen to be the one I need. This is how things typically go for me, I choose something I want to learn to create, and then I have to follow the path backwards making all of the items that will let me create the main item. The reason I want to create the fancy enchanting table is because I made a force sword, and I want to enchant that. At least it’s a project for me to work on, and I have a fancy blast furnace.

November is going to be a busy month for me. For those who are familiar with my events, every year I run a Gamer Secret Santa, and I’ll be running that again this year. Registration should open around mid November, so don’t forget to check back! There’s also NaNoWriMo which begins the first of November. I’ll be writing horror this year, a genre that I have absolutely no experience in. Why? Because I like to challenge myself of course! I haven’t decided if I’ll be posting the story public or not, I may decide to post it chapter by chapter, or I might just keep the embarrassing moment to myself, we’ll just have to see.

I hope everyone else had a fantastic weekend, no matter what you ended up doing. Happy gaming!

October 27, 2014 December 27, 2019 By stargrace In No Comment

Playing EQ2 and Raising Money for Sick Kids #EQ2 #EverQuest2

EQ2_000044On November 2nd (which is coming up faster than I had expected) I’ll be participating in Extra-Life, raising money for local children’s hospitals. My hospital of choice is CHEO here in Ottawa, it’s the Childrens Hospital of Eastern Ontario. While I don’t personally have children of my own, many of my friends and their kids use these hospitals on a daily basis, and I wanted to be able to help.

I’m taking donations on my fundraising page, and I’ll also be livestreaming the 24 hours of gameplay on my twitch channel for the duration of the event. I won’t be playing EQ2 for the full 24 hours, but I will be playing it for the majority of the time. I’ll be starting my livestreaming at 4am EDT on November 2nd until 4am EST on November 3rd. That’s right, there’s an extra hour in there due to daylight savings – which gives me an hour ‘break’ to spread out through the day for stretching and bathroom breaks and what have you.

A huge thank you to everyone who has sponsored me this far, and who has provided support. I’ve really appreciated it. November is a pretty busy month, I’ll also be participating in NaNoWriMo and writing a 50,000 word story, in December I’ll be publishing my second book, and also running the 2013 Gamers Secret Santa (look for details regarding that to follow).

Other games I’ll be streaming during the fundraising include Sims 3, Civilization V, Terraria, Hearthstone, and some smaller titles from my steam library. I’ll also be tweeting about my gameplay on my twitter account, so there are plenty of ways to get a hold of me and show your support or suggest a game for me to play!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

October 23, 2013 December 27, 2019 By stargrace In No Comment

Happiness, Sparkles, and Puppy Dog Tails #GW2 #GuildWars2

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Lion’s Arch, in all of its holiday glory.

I logged in today to explore some of the Winter events before they vanish for this year. I got a handful of neat items including a 15 slot backpack which went straight to use, and a few items for my alts. I didn’t want to feel rushed into doing the new dungeon or opening presents around the land, so I continued leveling my mesmer and naturally stumbled into these events as I went along.

One thing I discovered was that you can now add rare craft items to your collection slots in the bank that you couldn’t add before. This includes things like shards and spheres, as well as mystic coins and even corn candy from Halloween  I must have emptied out about 15-20 slots of space from my bank happily adding everything to collections.

I even managed to craft myself a pair of fluffy ‘giving’ shoes, that have an elf-shoe like graphic. Cute. Plus who can resist that toy bag that you wear on your back (that one I handed off to an alt as I’m wearing the Halloween book item still).

The holiday events should be winding down in pretty much everyone’s game of choice within the next week or two I imagine. I hope you all had a safe and happy holiday, and I want to thank everyone who participated in this years Gamers Secret Santa, I’ve seen a lot of pictures of gifts up on twitter and I think it was a fantastic way for people to remember that no matter what game we’re playing, we’ve still got things in common.

January 2, 2013 December 27, 2019 By stargrace In No Comment

A Little WurmOnline, NaNoWriMo, Sims 3, EQ2, and WoW

I made my 50,000 words for this months NaNoWriMo, but it was a very difficult run. I would start a story, get interested with it, get bored of it, and then write a new story. I even gave up for a week or two. After some consideration I decided there was no reason for me to give up and so I started again. I’m very glad that I did. I’m not really sure why this year was so difficult compared to others, it was my 5th year attempting it so there really no surprises, but it seemed like everything hit this month, and I really felt it so maybe that’s why.

Of course in between writing I still played games. Wurm Online being my main choice these days as far as MMOs go – but I’ve also decided to pop back into WoW now that 5.1 has come out. I’ve been playing a little EQ2 (have you seen the incredible new house they added that’s a ship? Much love) and I’ve been playing some single player games like Sims 3. During the black Friday sale EA had some fantastic deals on their Sims franchise, so I picked up the last expansion I was missing, and now all I’m missing are three “stuff” packages that I don’t exactly care about getting. The base game was going for as low as $9 which was really great to see.

TODAY is the last day to register for the 2012 Gamers Secret Santa. I’ve gotten over 150 replies so far from interested parties, and I’m really happy that people are still interested in this. I’m also doing a card exchange this year, so if you’re interested in exchanging your address for that, please email me!

What has everyone else been up to this month? It feels like it went by so quickly! Before we know it, Christmas will be here!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

November 30, 2012 December 27, 2019 By stargrace In , No Comment
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