I’m sorry your fish are dead. I still like you, though.

Or I would, if I had any fish left.

Goodness knows I never want to do the damned Argent Tournament rigamarole again …

But I have to admit, at this point in my MMO career it just sometimes strikes me as … weird. Creepy, even.

I logged out of Mania (my Horde main), switched realms, and logged in my Alliance main. And suddenly I’m seeing battle pets on my mini-map. What!? But I didn’t train Pet Battles on this character!

… Oh, yeah. Right.

Then I logged into an Alliance bank alt and did the exact same thing again. And then again with the Horde bank alt.

I like it, no question. But it’s going to take some getting used to.

Dire Horns have been added as a tamable species for Hunters that have learned the required skill. Aspiring Dire Horn owners should seek out clues regarding these auspicious beasts.

Now the note leaves some questions open. Learned the required skill implies an Exotic family, or possibly a special new ‘tame dire horns’ skill. And seeking out clues? Sounds like a quest to me. But whatever the details, there is one underlying fact to remember:

New hunter pet family!

The intrepid hunters at the WoW Petopia forums have some beautiful visuals on that. The detail above is from this screenshot of Melissandra and her brand new dire horn, complete with new pet ability Reflective Armor Plating. And Quivering got some great size comparison shots of a worgen hunter with a pretty purple dire horn. (Both images are posted in the thread Isle of the Thunder King tames.)

MMO Champion has posted a few shots of similar beasts, including a couple of mounts that show other possible dire horn colors including green, blue, and red.

With Wain’s invaluable help, I hope to have a preliminary page for these majestic beasts up on Petopia ASAP.

As always, you can find more info and discussion courtesy of the vast panopoly of amazing hunters on the Petopia forums. Check out the Patch 5.2 sub-forum for all the details.

(Although Blizzard has gone to calling them pets or companions, I’m still more comfortable with the term ‘mini-pet’. It’s less ambiguous, especially when everyone knows that ‘pet’ very clearly means a real pet – a hunter pet.)

Mousing over the item told me that I already had two of the damned things so I decided to spend a few minutes cleaning out my mini-pet list.

Now you have to understand, I am just a tad bit obsessive about some things. (But at least my therapist says I lack most of the compulsive aspects of OCD.) Since I don’t have any real interest in pet battles in and of themselves but I do consider myself a mini-pet collector, it’s important for me to have a nice clean list with one and only one of each mini-pet that I have collected.

This was the first time I’ve logged for more than a quick mail check in rather a while. And even right after MoP launched I was much more interested in hunter pets than in mini-pets, so I hadn’t done anything at all with the pet battle system yet. I found out pretty quickly that I needed to learn the basic Battle Pet Training skill in order to box up my extra mini-pets and get them out of my list. And since learning that started a quest chain and I had a few extra minutes, I figured I might as well get to the point where I could trap wild pets. I mean, after all I am a collector.

And that, as I am sure you know, is always how these things start.

I randomly chose my Tiny Sporebat to represent Mania in the battle pet arena, so to speak.  Then I went after a Dung Beetle. Then a Water Snake. Then a Spiny Lizard. Then a Toad. That seemed to do it for Orgimmar so then I headed out into Durotar where I found a Creepy Crawly. Then a Hare. Then a …

Yeah. You know how it goes from here.

I only ran into a couple of problems: namely that my Sporebat quickly became bad-ass enough to kill the low-level stuff too quickly to trap them if I wasn’t paying attention. I also kept forgetting to heal the poor thing. And I was briefly very confused when I realized that summoning a mini-pet doesn’t change your battle line-up, but in context it makes a lot more sense that way.

Long story short, I had a lot of fun puttering around collecting mini-pets that I will (mostly) never think about again. I should log in more often!

(Incidentally, I didn’t think of this until it was too late but I suspect it would have been a lot smarter to box up the Horde-leaning mini-pets on an Alliance character and the Alliance-leaning mini-pets on a Horde character. As it stands, I have way, way too many Dragonhawk Hatchlings on my (undead) main. Ah, well.)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the year has done a number on my mental health as well. I battled creeping depression for much of the year – and lost all too often. Those of you who still bother to follow this blog know that I have only posted a handful of times this year. Those of you who follow WoW Petopia or Warcraft Mounts or WoW Tabards or Dark Urban Fantasy know that I have been sadly MIA on all those sites for much of the year.

Those of you who have been helping me hold things more or less together deserve every particle of thanks in the universe.

But things change. The calendar flips. The world moves on. This too shall pass. Yadda yadda yadda. I’m hitting the reset button with the new year. Not in a big showy everything-is-great-now doomed to fail way, but in a quiet ‘I’m going to stop obsessing over the failure that was 2012 and start picking up the pieces when and how I can’ way.

I hope to post here more often. Well, I hope for a lot of things … we’ll see. In the meantime, enjoy the new devilsaur-flavored blog theme. (And for gods’ sake, do not get me started on how badly WordPress has screwed up child themes!)

As you may know, I had surgery this past summer to remove a cancerous tumor from my leg. As cancer went, it was pretty low-key: I was only in the hospital for two days, I was able to walk more or less normally within a few weeks, and I didn’t need chemotherapy. I recently had my 3 month check-up MRI and there was no evidence of cancer. (There were, however, some weird spots that the doctor thinks were probably left over from surgery but which he wants to watch carefully. I’ll have another MRI at the 6-month mark – and another every 3 months for the foreseeable future – so we can see then if they are still suspicious.)

As you may also know, I live in the US. I am self-employed and I pay for my own health insurance. I opted for what is called a high-deductible plan: in other words, I pay less per month for health insurance, but it doesn’t kick in to pay much until I have already spent about $10,000 of my own money. It’s a plan that makes sense for reasonably healthy people who don’t get many colds but need to be protected against a nasty car accident or, say, cancer.

So although the total bill for my bout with cancer is $50,000+ and still climbing, I was theoretically only liable for about $10,000 of it. As always with insurance, it doesn’t quite work out that way – but suffice it to say that we had enough savings to cover our part, more or less. (We don’t have savings any more … but we’ll figure that out. We aren’t about to starve and we have a roof over our heads, which is more than I can say for some of our friends and family.)

But. Getting here – where most of the bills are paid – has been an amazing hassle, and it’s not near over yet. I’m going to set aside that first month where I was often completely unable to deal with people in a coherent manner (Vicodin FTW!) and focus only on the very recent past: namely, this morning.

I’ve been getting nasty letters from a collection agency in the mail for a few weeks about a bill from June that I paid in July. This is a bill for $78 that represents one office visit to my oncologist. I have had many of those to this office and paid them all promptly (I thought), but this one bill from June would not die.

The medical group that includes both my surgeon and oncologist maintains a billing website, so I checked my account there. It said that I had four unpaid bills, one of which the website also marked as paid and one of which I paid through their website and was marked as confirmed. (More on that later.) So I ditched that idea and called them.

I had already called the doctor’s billing office about this bill last week, but after waiting on hold for almost an hour, they hung up on me. (I believe it was an accident, but that hardly helps.) So today I called in at 8am, the minute the billing office opened. After 20 minutes on hold (I timed it!) with the electronic voice telling me that I was “Number. One. In the queue.” every 30 seconds, I got to talk to a person. Yay!

She looked up my account by name and birth date, then very helpfully let me know that I had been paying all of the bills with the wrong account number – which is why they were not applied to this bill. Had I waited, I would have started getting overdue notices on *all* of my visits to this doctor because they had all been paid to the wrong account number.

Wait, I said. How can I have two accounts? I am one person and I have only been seeing this doctor since June.

Ah, she explained: ‘account number; doesn’t mean account. I actually have seven account numbers because you get a new account number – helpfully listed on the bill in several places as “Account Number” – for each individual visit to the doctor. It’s actually an internal code that tells their computers which particular incident the bill is for.

If you pay with the paper mail voucher they send, or pay through their atrocious website, it uses the correct account number automatically. If you pay via online bill pay from a bank (as I do), then you have to change the account number with each bill or the payment will be posted to the wrong account. I filled out the account number when I created the account for bill payment at my bank, so I have been using an account number from the beginning of June. Every payment since then has not been applied to pay any bill.

Well what happened to those payments, I asked. Shouldn’t they have been refunded to me (thus tipping me off about the whole fake account number thing)?

No, she explained. If you overpay on any particular account number, you have to call in to have them cut you a refund check. Otherwise they will hold the money until your actual overall account (under your name and birth date) is fully paid … which wasn’t going to happen for me since the payments were not being applied to my actual bills.

Now that I had called in, she helpfully sorted out all my accounts, applied the overpayments to the two outstanding bills, and cut me a refund check for the remainder; it should be here in four to six weeks. Then she helpfully suggested that I pay more attention in the future. I wished her a good holiday season. (Yes, I am that mean.)

Next, I logged back into their website to match the account numbers on the two unpaid bills to the four (or possibly two) unpaid bills on the website. I found that:

1. One of the marked-as-definitely-unpaid bills had been paid with the wrong account number and so was definitely unpaid.
2. One of the marked-as-definitely-unpaid bills was to my surgeon (in the same medical group, remember) and not the oncologist. The payment used the correct account number and the money has been deducted from my account, so why this one is still marked as unpaid I have no idea. I haven’t gotten any overdue notices for this bill so I think I am going to leave it for now.
3. One of the actual unpaid bills to the oncologist was marked as both paid and unpaid on the website. On the same line of the same table.
4. The last of the bills, marked as both paid and unpaid, was the only one I paid through the doctor’s website instead of through my bank. This was the largest single bill – $8000+ – and the one I didn’t have enough in my online bank to pay in one swoop. So I put it on my Visa to pay off in chunks. (*cringe*)

Now here’s the thing. I paid with Visa through their website. This automatically filled in the right account number. They confirmed my Visa account at the time of payment. I know, because there is a handy confirmation number listed on the doctor’s website. The money was deducted from my Visa account at the same time; I saw the charge on the next Visa statement and have started to pay it off. So why, exactly, is this bill marked as unpaid in their system?

And more to the point, how long will it be before they send the collectors after me for that $8000+?

Unfortunately, that isn’t all for my health bill headaches today. I still need to call a different billing office about the bill they just sent me for visiting the ER a few weeks ago. My doctor sent me there to have an ultrasound of my leg; he thought I might have a blood clot and it was Friday after 5pm, after his normal ultrasound place closed for the weekend. Although the chances that I had a blood clot were small, and the chances that if I did it would break loose over the weekend were small, if it did it might have caused a stroke or death. He was very emphatic that I have the ultrasound that night at the ER.

So Saturday the bill for the ER came in. $650 with no insurance coverage – it says that my insurance company rejected the claim. Now I have insurance and I know that this is covered, and even if it wasn’t they would have accepted the claim and then declined to pay any of it – they’ve done that before. So it seems likely that the hospital messed up the claim. I wouldn’t normally jump straight to that conclusion, but I spent nearly as long working out the insurance info that night as I did waiting for the ultrasound tech. It eventually took three billing staff and one on-call billing supervisor to get the information entered. Apparently I have weird insurance.

(Note to those who may not know: pretty much any non-employer-provided health insurance in the US is considered weird.)

So today I get to call the ER and try to get them the correct information over the phone when I failed to do it in person before. My one hope: that the staff working Monday during office hours has more experience with my insurance company than the staff working Friday night did. My other hope: that they agree to hold off on the bill until this is straightened out.

So.

So why do I say I wanted a single payer system? What does one doctor’s office with screwed up billing and one mistake with my insurance info have to do with reforming the entire health care payment and insurance model? Because this isn’t unusual. This is a description of my entire cancer experience – hell, my entire lifetime health care experience! – from beginning to end. I haven’t even touched on lost records or my mental health coverage (none – and I’m bipolar) and I don’t really think I want to.

The fact is that profit drives the core of this mess, and the private insurance industry drives the need for profit.

Gah. This is just a rant after all. I’ll just wrap up by saying this: If you are in the US, and especially if you don’t have employer-provided health insurance, the best you can do is pray for health.

I will be praying with you. I knew it was bad. I had no idea how bad it really was until I had to deal with it myself.

But we’ve also been working on a game of our own! Project: Gorgon is a 3D fantasy MMO that’s grown out of our desire to run our own game, plus our love for some of the older MMOs like Asheron’s Call. It’s a little old-school, a little modern, and rather … shall we say, quirky?

For the past three-ish years, we’ve worked on Project: Gorgon in between contracts, in a careful balancing act between keeping a roof over our heads and keeping some momentum on the project. And we’ve come quite a ways: we finished a pre-alpha testing phase with a few dozen players that stabilized the server and client, and we’re very close to a true alpha phase with several hundred players. Most of the game systems are fully designed and many are already complete (if slightly broken) in code. Content is well underway with zones and dungeons and quests. And -

Project: Gorgon Combat Debuff

Well, look. It’s coming along well. You can read more on our main development blog, ElderGame.com.

Point is, we need art. (You have to giggle at some of the art we are using now.) Plus more audio, especially sound effects for the skills. Plus, if we could devote more time to Project: Gorgon and less to paying contract work, we could get this baby out the door that much faster! (And as you may know, I’ve had some setbacks lately that cost us some of our savings.)

So long story short, we’re running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money.

"Bruiser mantises wear more pedestrian hats, like this bowler."

If you aren’t familiar with it – Kickstarter is a pretty cool idea. Basically, people post a project they are trying to complete and the money they need to get it done. Then other people can pledge money to help them reach that goal. If the project creators don’t reach the funding goal, no money changes hands. If they do reach the goal, they use the pledges to complete their project – in our case, buying art and whatnot so we can launch Project:Gorgon.

Our funding goal is $55,000 – which seems like a whopping amount (even to me!) until you start looking at what decent player character art costs. Three races times at least a few heads times several sets of armor times … well, it adds up fast.

You can pledge any amount you want from $1 up, and depending on the project and the amounts, you can also get rewards from the project creators. I think we may have gone a little over-the-top with some of the Project: Gorgon rewards … But some of them are pretty cool - like a digital copy of the soundtrack, the chance to design an NPC, or two vials of wolf spit.

Anyway … if you have a few extra dollars and want to make a pledge, please do! We will both be immensely grateful. (And hey – wolf spit!) Even if you can’t, maybe you could mention it to some friends? It’s up to us – and now you, because I am assigning the task to you (also known as begging for help) – to let people know about Project: Gorgon and this Kickstarter campaign.

So if you have a chance, check out the project page, check out our Elder Game blog, watch the video … And thanks, ahead of time, for any help you can give us spreading the word about Project: Gorgon.

…

[Incidentally, there is a picture of me on the Kickstarter page, and I am in the Project:Gorgon video as well. So ... do me a favor and don't make fun of the pasty fat woman, okay? I am a programmer, after all. *grin*]

(If you see an error, please post a comment in the Corrections thread on the forums.)

Sadly, Warcraft Mounts is not updated yet. That’s next on my list.

And may I say again that I owe a huge debt to the entire Petopia community for gathering and organizing so much data! And especially to Wain for making sure I actually did something with all that data, even if he had to do it for me. <grin>