980511 - "How many OSI employees does it take to change a light bulb?" Correct answer: "21, 1 to fail repeatedly changing it, eventually dropping it so it breaks, and twenty to figure out (un)reasonable explanations of how this is 'Creative use of the darkness'". Remember how OSI called the gate house break-in bug for "Creative use of a gate spell". On a similar note, why don't we just call Designer Dragon an *sshole and attribute that to "Creative use of the English language?" Only reason I can think of why not, is because it would be unfashionable to do so. But the concept of fashion seems to be a bit - ehm - out of fashion in UO. I had another newbie mage running up to me today with the famous war-cry "I've been PK:ed, please gimme' stuff". I did not do that directly, I gave him a long lecture of the importance of making money on your own, took him to the Spinning Wheel tailor shop where I bought him 20 spools and a sewing kit, and told him how to make use of those. I'm not sure it helped in the long run, but at least it got him off my back for the moment. It is weird to see those fledgling mages out there imagining themselves to be able to support magery on begging from other people. And not only that, doing it in a manner that upsets most established characters. Not all UO inhabitants have the same patience that I have with newbies. I know several master mages who would rather lead said newbies out of town and help them improve their magery by having them watch while the master mage kills them with a vortex. It's a short but intense lesson, if the newbie stands close enough chances are he actually picks up a thing or two before dying (*LOL*). Other than that I had to scribe a lot of scrolls, and I still have a severe deficiency of runes in my rune vendor. I must take time to mark up some more. Oh one of the wedding dinner guests from last night forgot a polar bear (!) in my parlor and it had gone wild. Had to kill it, I don't want a wild polar bear running around there, it might scare other guests. Kal Vas Flam... Corp Por... Nice dead polar bear. The rest of the day I spent scribing scrolls and talking to people, mostly in the city-square. I was pleasantly surprised that a Dread Lord mule I had a conversation with, turned out to be a reasonably intelligent person, even though he described himself as a "fool" as a reply to my question why he called other "fools". Well, he's quite welcome to be so, I hope I made it clear to him that it's always bad to assume things about other people before knowing anything about them. Seems we had experiences from Real Life in common about a certain geographic area. No, no I'm not talking about Scandinavia, someplace else, very nice indeed, brought back a lot of old memories to me. Oh I also got to report an idiot who harassed me and called me things like "fucking whore" (and worse - mind you) today, and really, the counselor responding came quickly and scared him off. Very swift indeed, some of these new counselors seem to be doing a really god job... But if you see a character called No-Limit, please K.O.S him from me.

980510 - Had sold out on nearly all my runes. Saturdays and Sundays are very good business days indeed. I had to mark a lot of new runes so as usual I recalled all over the place. When I reached Magincia I accidentally hit my "I will take thee" macro instead of the more appropriate "Hail vendor, I'd like to buy some...yada yada yada", and wouldn't you know it. Out of nowhere there appears a little escort wanting to go to Britain. Ah, Britain city of idiots and thieves, as I arrived in the bank with my escort, there was a fight going on outside the premises. I saw some order shields and chaos shield, but I also saw some people with bows attacking in town - whoa - good reason for not stepping out - people with bows still attacking unhindered in town spells "bug exploiters" to me. After a while the fighting (and some of the people) died away, and I dared to look outside. What aroused my curiosity was a yellow staff - a unique item - carried by a certain Azure Dragon Bane - Great lady and Master Warrior. The discussion I overheard was not nice - first thing I picked up from Azure's mouth was "I will be a seer next week. And I can promise you his life in UO will be hell". I didn't stay to find out just what was going on or who she was going to mess up as a seer, we've had that "Neil Diamond" thing once too many already... *sighs deeply*. I'm actually glad I'll be over and done with this sorry piece of crap that DD praises as a budding virtual community. Naturally I recalled away to business elsewhere and some more marking... Dear god, what a sorry state this game is in, and I'm not just talking about the technical bugs as such, it's the people running this game who'd really need a moral overhaul / good spanking - cross out what you don't prefer. I did do something practical however, and that was to advice OSI about my farewell party, since I expect many guests I also expect lag. Forewarned are forearmed. This is a picture of me advising counselor Romeo on my tower roof. Now that's a turned table - isn't it?

I sold some sets I had manufactured too today. Very good, turning my goods into cash makes things easier. And, yes, today was the wedding of Winter and Damien, I am getting so confused mixing up days and things. It was a very nice little wedding in the Lycaeum in Moonglow. Counselor Rob led the ceremony and it was very nice and solemn in all ways. One of the bridesmaids however learned what happened if you cast meteor swarm upon yourself in town when other people are nearby. There were a lot of mages there who competed for resurrecting her. Guess who won? Yes of course I did, there is a slight advantage being a grand master mage:) After the wedding I hosted a small reception on my tower roof. It was also very neat but the lag was tremendous. And of course the guests had a lot to drink and eat, mostly a lot to drink it seems. While the guests where leaving we saw a dread lord prowling the area. When cleaning up I took time to occasionally cast a vortex on him from my tower wings until he obviously didn't find it funny anymore and left. I have two small pictures for you from this event. Enjoy the images.

980509 - The little I played yesterday was done "remote", and because of this little was done and updates were impossible. I only did one thing of any noteworthiness, and that was that I found an unlocked ship, that I took for a joyride, suddenly feeling obnoxious. But since I'm generally nice most of the time I left it not that far from where I first found it. Not that this day was any more exciting to begin with. I did what I did yesterday, put my shop back into working order, and talked to people. I even showed a fledgling mage my tower and displayed the full range of summoning spells. I also showed him how to cast nasty spells from the tower roof down onto the ground, I even managed to make my blade spirits and my vortex to hurt each other (!). It's tricky to show a vortex to another player in any other way, chances are that the vortex turn on them, and believe me a vortex is a voracious killer. I was also planning for the gift I had to manufacture for Winter's wedding tonight. I like to personalize my gift and yet promote my shop in the process. I also scribed scrolls for customers for free today quite contrary to my normal behavior, this must be a sign that the end is near. Oh dear me. I filled up the 6th "pile of 58 000 gold pieces" in my bank box too, now this will definitely take some time to give away, considering that I normally cannot carry more than 5 000 gold pieces at one time. Yes I know, I could give away my master rune set first but I probably won't. Anyway I finally got Winter's gift ready and it looked real nice. Several resurrection scrolls, gate scrolls and recall scrolls, runes to my shop, com crystals, many different greater potions, some magical jewelry and a couple of useful wands. I suppose that's what you need when you get married, isn't it? Now where did I put that rune to Moonglow's Lycaeum?

But it turned out I must have been mistaken about the date. The Lycaeum was all empty at the time given to me. Maybe it is tomorrow? I checked a few times more, during the evening but no sign of life there, even less a wedding. I did a lot of good community service in the square of Vesper while waiting, including managing to return a missing rune to a certain guild without having them kill the person who found the rune in the first place. That's called diplomacy. I also managed to scribe a lot of scrolls during this time, but it seems that no matter how many Resurrection scrolls I write; I still have a deficiency with my vendor. Not money wise however, my scroll vendor Bryant sold for more than 15 k today, and Dulcie sold for another 8 k - a good day indeed business-wise. I also helped Leafbeach train sword fighting by repeatedly healing the grizzly bear he was fighting, doing so constitutes good training but requires a lot of reagents. Finally I got tired and logged out, but not before chasing off an obnoxious newbie with a vortex, some days I can be in a dangerous mood...

980507 - What did I do today? I scribed a lot of scrolls, marked a lot of runes and demonstrated the correct and appropriate way of training magic to several fledgling mages. And, of course, I talked to a lot of people, yes I always do that. This is however not a good time to try to request a private conversation, I far too busy preparing different things at the moment. Other than this I killed a "OSI programmer", a.k.a. a headless, which was roaming around outside my Main Office. God almighty, if OSI can name a creature a "J.Wilson" (a slime if you remember), then they should reserve the attribute "OSI programmer" or maybe "OSI employee" for the headless. Reading Designer Dragon's so called editorial of the 5th made me real nauseous, he even exploits the tragic car accident of a Norwegian Player to hype the game, it's so distasteful and disrespectful that words cannot describe it! Maybe they should rename the dungeon "Shame" into "Designer Dragon" instead?

980506 - A good strategy to crash your mailbox is to announce that you are giving away things for free. Especially things like real estate, now that the prices are doubled again. From all the letters, and I got a lot of them, I received I can make a classification into three categories, and dear me I got enough to make certain statistics on this. First of all the kewld00ds who wants stuff, this type of letters are ignored. Then I got a lot of long and well-written letters applying for my property for various good reasons. Be advised, I only own 5 houses so no matter how good your reasons are, chances might be slim that you get one anyway. Then I also got some surprising letters not asking for anything at all, just lamenting the fact that I'm leaving UO. Those letters were a nice surprise. But even if you can't get one of my big buildings, I still have plenty of things to give away. I still own more than 350 000 gold pieces, many very, very nice weapons of power and force - yes - some of these pre-patch weapons. I haven't even mentioned my large wardrobe, my collection of crystal balls, my scrolls, my huge set of personal master runes, a large box of hair dye in all colors and many more weird and fashionable objects. Today I didn't do very much in the game but putting my shop in order and talking to people. I had the pleasure of casting blade spirits on a thief who didn't know where the town limit ended. I used the blades since the thief stayed blue no matter how much he stole from people, a little bug exploiter I suppose. There are a tremendous amount of bugs in the game, I wonder what that notoriety update will be like bug-wise. The NPCs were back in their shops today, but there is still a severe shortage of reagents, I don't like this at all. I went with Leafbeach and Sherazade to her keep today too (see the entry 980428 for a picture of this). I summoned elementals for them to fight and to amuse myself. I summoned a lot of different things today, I even gave away a pet daemon to a newbie. Yes I know that's pretty reckless but summoned creatures do not last all that long. I figured the daemon popped back to Hades or wherever it's from before the newbie could figure out how to command it. But otherwise very little happened. Oh you might figure out that it is going to take me a lot of time to look through all the e-mail and ponder things...

I then went out on a hunting trip. There were lots of monsters. While standing and watching a trapped ettin on a tower roof hearing him roar, I didn't hear the ettin on the ground sneaking up on me. I didn't see him either since this was in that maze of houses and towers north of Vesper. Accompanying the ettin were two orcs, and orc lord and an orc mage. A harpy and a reaper nearby made the fight troublesome, especially so since the monsters were already on top of me when I detected them. But in the end, well rather quickly actually, they all went down. The rest of the day was spent in preparations waiting for Lord Kugelblitz' and Lady Lizarda's wedding in the palace in Nujel'm. Holy cow, what a turnout! There must have been 50 players, and the lag was horrendous. The ceremony was led by seer Amber. I have a small screenshot for you today, there will be more pictures in my photo album later. Oh yes, the happy couple did get a little nice gift from me, but in the mass confusion there, I'm not sure they realized who they got it from. Cleverly enough I enclosed a little book (with my name on it) in the box so they can check later. It always pays off to advertise.

980504 - "Something funny happened on my way to Compassion today..." Yes, I know it sounds like a bad joke, but this was an interesting thing. Plodding along peacefully at my own speed, marking shrines for my sets, I came to the shrine of Compassion. Suddenly a gate opened outside the little island, and hordes of monsters poured through. At first it was just a couple of ettins and a sprinkling of giant rats as can be seen from today's screen shot below. I killed those with judicial applications of Walls of Stone and Blade Spirits. But when I went out to loot, more gates opening and many more monsters came, among these an ogre lord. Now discretion is the better part of Valor (I marked that shrine previously, so it was not a top Virtue at the moment) and true to my self-defense guide, I ran around and screamed for a while until I was forced to Recall away. Back in Vesper I rushed down to the main square screaming "Hordes of monsters at Compassion". There were some takers, so we went outside town, Maria, Jedi Noli, the brave King Crimson and me. There I opened gates to Compassion, while King Crimson ran through trying to get the monsters to lock onto him and run back through the gate. It succeeded very well, many times there was these big creatures follow him through the moon-gate, where we awaited on the other side to kill them. Even the ogre lord met his untimely demise on the road between Vesper and Minoc, but an ogre lord is one tough cookie, I can tell you that. But it turned into a slaughterhouse out there on the road. Me, myself, didn't do much besides opening those gates, and trying to heal those who got hurt. I don't know how many monsters we killed, maybe more than a dozen of them big ones, and countless lesser creatures. But still Compassion was filled with monsters. When both Maria and King Crimson went through the gate without coming back, despite me opening the gate 3 times for them so at least their ghosts could get back, I realized I had to give up. Wow, that was a new experience, so many monsters that they overwhelm you no matter how good you are and how smart you fight. I guess someone at a dungeon had great fun gating out all those monsters, and we had great fun too killing them. Hopefully we are able to do it again later. The picture I promised you is entitled "A nasty welcome at Compassion" - look at that advancing horde to the right and enjoy. This is moments before I block the small entrance with a Wall of Stone and start to summon my Blade Spirits. And if anyone should meet up with a stray ettin or troll wandering outside Vesper today, it's probably my fault...

After all this excitement I finished marking the rune kits to the shrines. Then I started to scribe scrolls, all those high circle scrolls take forever to write. I also did a lot of good community service, gating people everywhere, answering questions, directing people to the right vendor (mine included of course - I'm not that altruistic - I'm a businesswoman), even Resurrecting a ghost. It do look impressive to the bystanders when you raise that ghost on your first attempt and then cast two quick In Vas Mani to fix them up completely. One thing though when it comes to ghosts, look before you resurrect, you really don't want to resurrect someone with bad notoriety, taking a hit on your own in the process. Finally after a long, long time of this, I managed to fill up my shop to an acceptable level. Oh I forgot to tell you, Winter invited me to her wedding on Sunday, very nice of her, now I have the pleasant problem to think up a suitable wedding present, I like doing that, it's great fun to put something nice and useful together. I probably will have the honor of hosting here wedding party too, I must do some preparations to handle that.

980503 - Today I didn't do very much, and yet I was busy all through my playing session. Mostly I talked to other players and scribed scrolls. My plan to mark some more runes was thwarted by the need to renew the supply of high circle scrolls. It seems that I'm one of the very few persons in Vesper who actually sells the Gate Travel scrolls and the ever so popular Resurrection scrolls at a regular basis. This means that my shop see a lot of business, I can tell from asking my vendors for status. I also got a few more crystal balls donated to me by various people. Since I now have filled up my tower with crystal balls, I have started to decorate my old Main Office with them. I will have nothing there but crystal balls and some bookshelves I think. Then I rename it Crystal Palace. If I could get all those objects locked in place it would be a nice testimony to leave behind after I quit. Once again, I do not want to hear any premature requests for my estate until I announce that you can apply for parts of it, and I mean it. But altogether it was an interesting session. I bet I know a lot more of the general picture of what's going on than most players do, since I speak with so many people. It should be a remainder to you that I'm still very convinced that I will quit, isn't that a depressing thought? What I'm saying here, is that things aren't as bad as you think they are from your local horizon, they are much worse. By the way, it seems like those anti-social Dreads are going to get an amnesty again, since the highest murder count you can start with after the reputation change is 4, one short of being labeled murderer. It's so ridiculous that words fail me... I have gotten a lot more feedback from people who just learned that I'm quitting, all of them, without exception, asking me to reconsider. But once again, please, don't say this to me, go tell OSI that they are idiots, I can do very little unfortunately, only response I ever get nowadays on my e-mails to them are canned pre-fabricated letters, if I get any reply at all.

980502 - I had a lot to do with my shop today too. Somehow gate scrolls seem to be extremely popular, I can probably sell more than I can write from those. I suspect it has something to do with escorting becoming so popular among power gamers. Power gamers, by the way, obviously many of them aren't even good at that seeing some of them trying 5 or 6 times to open a simple gate - ha. I also marked a lot of runes today. I completed a few full sets of shrine runes, one of them pre-ordered but the other sets I put out with my rune vendor. All 8 shrines plus 3 complementary recall scrolls for only 1199, a real bargain. If I'm in I will even tell you how to overcome that gap in the bridge at Spirituality as a bonus. By the way, you really need those recall scrolls, you know, even a grand master mage like myself can (and will) run out of reagents at an inopportune occasion. I also marked 2 dozen runes for Leafbeach's shop so that he would have some to give away as promotion. 24 runes take a while to make, but so does cutting all those logs I expect as payment so it evens out I suppose. I also met a fellow rune salesman in the square and despite the fact that he announced his business as "Best runes of Britannia", with a fairly large selection of nice places to recall to, I was still able to show him one or two locations he didn't have. But when the bards are out in force, it becomes unbearable to stand and scribe in the city-square, better to retreat to the shop then and entertain customers and friends there. One more thing, watch my site closely the upcoming week for the announcement of the time and place for my farewell party. Preliminary planning places this event in the evening of the 16th, Swedish time (a Saturday), but as I said you must watch this site for more information. And, as I promised, I will keep the diary, as well as my shop, in good order up until the very end. I also managed to scribe a large amount of Resurrection scrolls today; I always seem to run out of those. Come to think about it, there aren't that many wizards or scribes around that are able to write them consistently in the first place, my shop is said to be one of the few places where they can be found regularly. One more thing, I still haven't figured out how to split my estate, and I do take a dim view of premature requests on this subject... I'm not dead yet, goddamit!

What else happened today? As I said I said I sold out a lot of things, and had to spend a lot of time scribing new scrolls. I went and had a look at Leafbeach's vendor, nice but I hope he advertises well since the location is a bit from the main roads. However, since he sells Recall scrolls he should see a lot of business as soon as its existence is known to a sufficient number of players. When I'm scribing Resurrection scrolls, I usually stand in the city-square in Vesper looking at the "nightlife" there. Unfortunately this convinces me even more to quit, there sure are a lot of idiots there. A nice player I met there, however, was Lord Eomer. We went to my shop to talk, and then I showed him my tower. After that he showed me his guild's tower. They had a nice and useful tower, with many rooms decorated with those checkered carpets that are so popular nowadays. The little house, they had just beside the tower, was full of sheep, I suppose the guild tailor can use those. Other than this I resurrected a ghost who had been killed by a tame dragon. All in all a quite uninteresting day, but probably very profitable.

980430 - Sometimes when I pick up escorts it turns out to be an evil adventurer who wants to go to a dungeon. Now in my opinion there are already far to many player morons and idiots in the Dungeons a.k.a. PK:ers, that there is really no need to add an evil NPC to that sordid pack. I usually take them out into the forest instead and show them some nice and lethal magic. When I was travelling around Magincia today with such an escort, a town crier was speaking some news for a change. I got a nice screen shot of it. After having disposed of the escort and transporting myself to Britain, where I had to search a while for the library, I finally found the wake ceremony for Sage Humboldt. Now it should be obvious that eating a liche's heart could be hazardous to your health, but I suppose it was all for a good cause, and I paid the dead sage my respects and entered a little memorial in the book that was around for that purpose. The screenshots of today depicts this little event.

I also scribed a lot of scrolls. I seem to sell a lot of those rolled up pieces of paper. When scribing, Elana recalled back to my shop from Deceit badly hurt. Four PK:ers have attacked her there, but since she was fast with the recall she managed to get back with her loot. A fast recall spell is worth 10 swords of vanquishing in my book. I also did some more decorations on my tower, I must have it look the very best for my own upcoming funeral party, it would be unfashionable otherwise, and I will try to look good to the very end. What about those crystal balls? Well, you can never have too many crystal balls, they are a fashion statement you know, how many times do I have to tell you that? I really like to collect those.

I'll be back with more news at the situation warrants. Until next time - stay safe from PK:ers

Even a tailor can walk around semi-nude in UO

/Sincerely