the Leopardess and her cubs are led into an enclosure. the lead vet comes in and inspects the cubs; checks their ears, eyes, nose, heart, etc.. soothes the slightly uncomfortable mother and then leaves. later a team of vets come in. one of them picks up one of the cubs and leaves the room. another picks up the other cub and sits down on the exam table with her, pinning her arms and legs down. two other vets prepare 5 syringes: 3 for one vet, 2 for the other and then both vets give the cub a shot in each leg. the cub is in distress. the mother is uncomfortable. another 2 shots, the cub screams and fights her captor, the mother is in distress. the final shot is administered, the cub is soothed and taken out of the room. the mother prowls the enclosure and chatters at her cubs. the second cub undergoes the same routine and both cubs are returned to the enclosure with the Leopardess. she is unable to soothe the cubs satisfactorily after this.

later the last vet comes in to take blood from each of the cubs, at this point the cubs are very wary of vets with instruments. the first cub yowls, avoids the vet, and emits a high-pitched scream when the pinprick is made to draw the blood while the second cub cowers in a corner and cries. the mother is very obviously restraining her natural urge to protect her young. the second cub avoids the vet and wails at the pinprick while the first cub is increasingly distressed at the sight of her sister’s discomfort.

the leopard family is allowed out of the enclosure and slinks away back to their den where the Leopardess prowls and threatens every last moving object in her sight down to the smallest blade of grass, to be sure that her cubs are no longer in danger. the cubs sleep off the distress; not so easy for the Leopardess.

every 10 minutes at the moment:

disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED)

exactly 11 days, that’s how much useability i had. i’m calling WD about this 3 month old HD.

mowing the lawn today i found out that the wild blackberries in the back yard have ripened. YES. there were only a few at the moment, but very tasty.. although i don’t deal with the brambles as well as i used to.

this LJ post here is a good synopsis of what left me fuming yesterday.

monday i canceled my WoW account in favor of Guild Wars. Guild Wars, YES. let me point out some goods and bads:

good:
Guild Wars does not have a subscription fee. you buy the box, you play the MMO. if you want more, you buy the expansion packs. this is how $DEITY intended MMOs to be. the set i got costs roughly two months worth of WoW and some change, and has the original game and one expansion. without the subscription fee there’s no pressure to push as much time in as possible to get the most bang for your buck in a month, and the gameplay itself reflects this… there is grinding if you want to grind, but it’s not a main feature of the game, and the quests do depend on you reading the quest log.

GW tells you how long you’ve been playing, on it’s own, for example:
You have been playing for one hour.

class-mixing. i can’t tell you how awesome that is. my main character is a Warrior/Necromancer, good deal.

no weapon/armor damage to repair.

cleaner interface, you see what you need to/what you want to without any modding.

your RP/PvE character’s leveling unlocks those abilities/levels for a PvP.

travel is not dependent on a mount/flight path. once you go to specific places you can open the map and click on it to teleport back to it. it is a fantasy game, after all. cutting down on travel time makes for more play time.

international communication: you identify yourself by continent and in the main towns there are districts (channels, effectively) for your region, but you are not limited to your own region, you can switch to any of the international districts available.

there are no inns, you will not log in dead if d/c in the wilderness.

and most importantly:

the Henchmen System means you’re not dependent on other players to play the game. you are free to choose whether you want to play with other players or recruit NPCs. what that means is that your group is not utterly destroyed by a jackass warlock or a bad tank, or a teenager with an attitude problem.. you’re not stuck waiting on the right healer/tank/mage/whatever to finish the group, you can get an NPC and just go. that also means that when you’re a newb player you can actually enjoy learning to play the game without being a ‘burden’ to that other person in your group who already has 6 70s.

bad:

no jumping? yeah, no jumping. and sometimes the map feels a little restrictive, the places you’d think you could jump off you can’t because.. there’s no jumping.

there doesn’t appear to be an ability to be a different race (at least on the non-expansion version, i could be wrong on that later, but the guildwars site says that GW2 will have playable non-human races).

if you kill something, and then go into a city, then come back out, it’s respawned in the same places.. although i think this has more to do with the gameplay mechanism itself… rather than the world being open and instances being on their own servers it’s the other way around. cities are on their own servers and going out into the world opens up an instance for just your group, at least in PvE…if that makes sense. on the upside that means no griefing and quest frustration. i’m all for that.

there is a miniscule amount of quickslots, 8, to be exact. although there’s probably a way around that by now.

things are loaded before you go to them: in WoW when you go to a new region your machine will render the stuff on the fly, an once it’s rendered it’s in there. in GW, when you’re on your way to a new spot it downloads the map from the server before you can play.. which means sometimes waiting a few minutes, but again, once it’s there it’s in there.

it’s windows-only, which means that for me to play it i have to use crossover. i was afraid it would be a problem, but once i remembered that i also run Steam games (Half-Life 2, Portal, TF2) without a problem i figured i could do this too. as it turns out Guild Wars puts about as much strain on my system as WoW (native), even though it’s running in an emulated environment.

so you take the good, and the bad.. and there you have the Facts of Life.