The Horseman’s Reins

After more than 10 years farming for The Horseman’s Reins, it finally dropped for me today, on Halloween!

Soforah had hers on her first run, many years ago. This year, I killed the Headless Horseman with 5 different characters each day, and it’s on the last day that it dropped. It’s my RNG Halloween gift and I fucking love it!

It’s Happening!

I could not not write a post about this week’s best news: Shadowlands will be released on November, 24th and it couldn’t be a better date. Sof’ and I will begin a month of holidays at home (unrelated to the confinement, related to not giving a shit about the outside world) on December 4th. By then, the new expansion will have had 10 days to bug, lag and crash.

Remember when I said that it would be between Nov. 23th and Dec. 8th… Ok, I said it would be the later, but I wasn’t too far, huh?!

We were already prepared to not see WoW’s new expansion this year, with this nowadays’ general delaying trend, California’s wildfires and god knows what 2020 still has in stores (aliens, volcanoes, Trump?)… But it’s definitely coming, Blizzard has even moved WoW’s 16th anniversary to November 2nd so the two events wouldn’t overlaps.

Now, let’s start stock piling food…

Halloween 2020

As I am writing this post, Sof’ is preparing tonight’s pumpkin pasta dinner and we’re watching Frankenweenie on Disney+.

This is just another Halloween, yet it feels very different from the other years, not because of the second Belgian confinement that was announced yesterday (let’s face it, nerds are confined by nature), but because we didn’t take any days off for the occasion since we’re saving them to enjoy an entire month for Christmas and the release of Shadowlands.

However, we’ll still be celebrating this evening with decorations, pumpkin pastas (Sof’s special recipe) and 3 horror movies: Scare Package, The Wretched and The Mortuary Collection.

This morning, I stumbled on a very fitting video for a Halloween in confinement:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pwWFDaHDXVQ

So, enjoy the creepiest night of the year, even if you’re celebrating alone.

Timeline

I don’t usually advertise Youtube channels. Actually, I really wish that there would be a serious alternative to Google’s video hosting service, since getting rid of Google was one of the best moves I’ve ever done. However, there are some really interesting channels out there.

If, like us, you’re a huge 80s fan, you should really watch Weird History‘s Timeline. They’ve released 10 episodes, one for each year, about the best decade mankind has ever known and they’ve already announced the future release of a Timeline dedicated to the 90s.

Even if it doesn’t pack absolutely all that I love about the 80s, it does an excellent job at bringing back great memories, I even learned a few things. I just would have wished for a bit more pop culture and less American sports.

The Descent 1 & 2

Since we’re trying to keep as many new movies (and there are so few at the moment) as we can for our Christmas holidays, we’ve been doing reruns of our classics.

Years ago, we only had good things to say about the first Descent movieā€¦ This time was different, it felt slow, almost like psychological drama. I felt asleep before the end.

The next week-end, we watched the second chapter and we had a much better time. Even if the blood looks like ketchup on a hot summer day, the action was uninterrupted by unnecessary drama scenes. Even the characters were less annoying than in the original movie.

Are our tastes changing with the years? Does that mean that I would enjoy Alien 2 over the original? Well, there’s only one way to find out. To be continued…

The Magnificent Ferengi

In Deep Space Nine’s sixth season, Quark is tasked by the Grand Nagus to assemble a team and rescue his mum from the Dominion. To do so, he hires a crew of Ferengis and plans to negociate an exchange of prisonners. The Vorta in command of the Jem’Hadar is no one else than Iggy Pop!

The DS9 writers had actually wanted Pop to play a role the third season, but he was unavailable due to a music tour he was undertaking in Spain. Ira Steven Behr is an Iggy Pop fan and pushed for his casting as Yelgrun three years later. A few days before filming his DS9 role, he was injured in a mosh pit during one of his concerts but played the role anyway. (source: Memory Alpha)

This is the second time that we watch Deep Space Nine but, for some reason, I absolutely didn’t remember this amazing episode, one of my favourites!

Shadows Rising

Writing a prequel to a new expansion is not an easy task, the real plot will unfold in the game while the introduction story is mostly about the tensions that grow before the war. While there is a plot in Shadows Rising, the book focuses on the relations between the characters that will play a role in the expansion to come.

I won’t lie, I didn’t have much pleasure reading this book, it was often overly descriptive and slow. Also, I’m not a fan of Madeleine Roux’s writing style. Unfortunately, Christie Golden was apparently already busy with another project (which looks amazing)… I just hope that Roux doesn’t become a new resident writer for Blizzard.

What I did enjoy though was to read the book as I was completing the Horde campaign with my Paladin. It gave more depth to many characters that I was discovering in the game (like Talanji and Bwonsamdi).

I am now ready for Shadowlands. Only twice sleeping before the pre-patch, yeah!

Draenor Chat

With our recent faction change, we’ve also moved to another server: Draenor-EU. The chat is awesome, reminding me of the old Barren chat:

I hope that it never changes!

El Camino

This post is heavy on Breaking Bad spoilers. If you haven’t seen the show yet (how’s life under a rock, by the way?), you may wanna keep it for later.

So, Breaking Bad ended on Jesse driving away from the compound where he was held captive. At that point, we know that Walter is dead and that his final plan consisted in wiping out the people who stole his money.

To be honest, I was already happy with that end. But, since we’re fans of the show (enough to watch it several times), we had to see the movie. We watched it despite an horrible trailer that mislead us into thinking that El Camino would be a two hours psychological drama about Jesse. Never trust a trailer!

The movie takes on directly where the show left us. Jesse is the public enemy number one and he must find a way to escape Albuqerque. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have any money and disappearing costs a lot…

El Camino is a two hours grand finale that passes as fast as each episode and left us with the feeling that the show had reached the perfect end it deserved.

Shadowlands Delayed

Blizzard just announced that Shadowlands, the next WoW expansion which was set to be released on October 27th, will be delayed until late 2020.

Well, I didn’t see that one coming…

But, since we’re veterans of launches (and the mess they usually are), we didn’t plan a single day off for the release. Actually, we were planning to take some time off in December.

I know that November 24th and December 8th are the two most possible new dates for the release but I’m not sure that Nov.24th is gonna happen, since it’s right before Thanksgiving and the launch of an expansion requires most people to be at work. So, I put my money on Dec.8th.

I just hope that they won’t delay it until 2021 because I really would love to run in Shadowlands during the holiday season.