Words On Wednesday

On two occasions, Jagex has made the full paid version of Runescape available to all players for a 72 hour duration over “free” or “open” weekends . For free players, this has been a boon and truly valuable opportunity. The first “ Open Weekend ” spanned from June 9 to June 12, 2017. This was during a time when I wasn’t playing, so I wasn’t aware of it. However, had I been playing at the time, or at least knew about it, I certainly would have hopped on to play. The second, this time called a “ Free Weekend ,” was from November 24 to November 27, 2017. As I mentioned  soon after, I was actually playing for that membership weekend. I did some Slayer tasks, both solo and group. I ran some dungeons with the full gamut of p2p skills available to me. When I couldn’t actively play, I worked on Divination and managed to get it all the way up to level 50. Since Jagex normally charges for access to this portion of the game, it begs a few questions. First, why did they offer f...

Textbooks are unreasonably expensive, everyone is aware of that. But to couple an access code for course material with the purchase of a textbook? That just seems greedy to an unprecedented level. The Theory My opinion on textbooks is that they should serve as auxiliary material only. Tuition is expensive enough as is, and if I’m paying you to teach me, you should be able to teach me without banking on a book as well. Give me all of the course material, the assignments, the exams, and any other required material, all for the cost of the course itself. If I want extra help, the textbook should be there as an option. If you do need a book, bake it into the cost of the course. If both the class and the book are necessary, but only one of those is part of “tuition,” it’s like you’re selling me half of a product. You’re selling me a car, but it won’t run without the engine that I must purchase separately. I bought a house, but it doesn’t have any doors or windows to actually get in un...

After several weeks of grinding, I have achieved level 99 Runecrafting. When I got falsely banned for botting while training magic, I decided to take a break from my high level alchemy grind and do something else that doesn’t take much attention. The most afk training method I could think of was Runespan. It doesn’t yield any profit, but it only takes 1 or 2 clicks per minute, and it is considered by far the fastest Runecrafting experience. At first, I didn’t care about going for level 99. I wasn’t doing Runespan because I wanted to train my Runecrafting. I was doing Runespan because I didn’t want to get banned again. It was easy to do while working on other things because it didn’t take much attention. Even if I couldn’t pursue 99 magic, I could at least work on something without fear of getting banned. I started training at Runespan on December 5, at level 85 and around 3.5M xp, from when I started playing again in October. By December 6, I was up to 3.7M xp and got Rue, ...

I’ve never really been a huge fan of “the great outdoors,” but I really want to plan a camping trip. My past experience with camping has been… minimal. I went most recently around 5 years ago, a trip that I have described in slightly more detail before , but still never gave a full tale of, and probably don’t remember well enough now to flesh out all the details. I went with my now wife and a group of friends up to Pisgah National Forest . While I won’t say this trip was awful, it could have gone significantly better. I sliced my finger open while trying to to split some wood into tinder. We went hungry the first night, because I never got a fire going to actually cook dinner. The next day, we bought some duraflame logs to get a fire going, but we still didn’t really have all the supplies and tools we needed. It was an interesting experience, for sure, but a little preparation and expertise would have made the trip much more pleasant. Before that trip, I haven’t stayed outside overnigh...