Ordinary Day

This is the play session done for the wee hours of the morning of Sunday 1/8, in which I took out the undead General Falx Carius at Fort Frostmoth, helped the Redoran Guard slay a Revered Dragon, and then foiled an assassination attempt against Raven Rock's leader, Councilor Morvayn! Which won me the right to take over Severin Manor.

( Highlights, commentary, and screenshots behind the cut! )

This Skyrim post is for the play I did on Thursday 1/6, which happened to be the same day our internet went down. So I spent a lot of that night trying to deal with the fallout from that, which resulted in this play session being a lot shorter than I might have liked.

Main thing accomplished here was to get the quest to clear Raven Rock Mine and Bloodskal Barrow underway. I didn't finish it in this session, that was done on Friday 1/7, but I'm doing this post separately just because the 1/7 one will be long.

( Highlights, commentary, and a couple of screenshots behind the cut! )

Hi all,

Those of you who follow me on social media will have seen me ranting about this already, but in case you haven't: Murkworks net connectivity has been down since Thursday. Apparently our Comcast modem died, and it's taken until today, after 2 days straight of fighting with Comcast about this, that I finally got somebody to actually tell me that.

Two days in which we have dealt with multiple Tier 1 agents who tried the same diagnostic procedures, only to conclude by throwing up their hands and saying it's not Comcast's fault, it's clearly a problem with our equipment.

Or telling solarbird and me, "You'll have to talk to your local IT."

SPOILER ALERT: we are the local IT.

I got contacted by a Comcast person tonight only after receiving one of those "how likely are you to recommend our service to friends/colleagues" emails. So I dropped a big fat ZERO on that and blasted them in the comment box with reasons why. Shortly thereafter I got an anxious phone call from a customer care representative who was ever so anxious about fixing my shitty customer experience, except for the part where he couldn't actually do the one of two things necessary to actually get my service back online, namely:

1. Get me a Tier 2 person to speak with immediately, or,
2. Commit to shipping me a replacement modem by Fedex before Monday, so I could actually do my goddamn day job

So at this point Dara and I are fucking done. We're changing service providers ASAP to the only other viable option we have in our neighborhood, Ziply. Dara is in communication with their sales and tech people to get the ball rolling on this.

Meanwhile we have had to throw a bundle of extra money at AT&T to turn on emergency extra data on our phones. Dara has jury-rigged a solution that allows us to at least pipe the connectivity of our computers through our cell phones. It's slow as fuck, but it does at least let us limp along to look at social media, stream stuff, and play games. Dara's email is down, but I have email external to our house net, so I can be reached still.

Unfortunately though our house servers remain down. All resources hosted on them, including web pages and mailing lists, will remain unavailable until further notice. Including but not limited to:

1. My personal web page
2. Dara's web pages
3. Community site for the Uplake neighborhood
4. Community site for the University Park Community Club
5. Site for the Lexington Fantasy Association
6. Emerald Forest Filk site for filk in the Puget Sound area
6. All our mailing lists, notably the ones for LexFA and for Emerald Forest Filk

And, unfortunately, my current Skyrim posts. :~( My ability to play Skyrim is not impacted, Skyrim does not require Internet access, but the annathepiper.org blog does live on our home servers.

Those of you following me who are involved with Puget Sound filkdom, please spread the word as you can that the filk list is down for the duration. I will periodically post updates here as well as on my social media.

Those of you following me who have any connection to LexFA (notably stickmaker), please likewise spread the word.

Those of you who have been reading my Skyrim posts, I will see about at least continuing some version of them for the duration on this blog as a backup. I won't be able to do the fancy screenshot galleries but at least I can do the same playthrough writeups.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes. And in conclusion: fuck Comcast.