A mage character in Skyrim emits a range of flames out of her hands, setting a frost troll on fire

A Spree of Violence

A mage character in Skyrim emits a range of flames out of her hands, setting a frost troll on fire

One consistent part of gaming worlds as opposed to open platforms such as Second Life is violence, and then especially the worst kind of it: murder. Although we gamers as a rule use the euphemism “killing things” instead of the much stronger “murdering people”, the essence is the same. Apparently we like to spend a great deal of our time murdering imaginary people. I’m no exception to this rule. I have gladly spent weeks of my life killing off the digital innocent, even though I’m much more like a peaceful hippie in real life, being strongly opposed to the death sentence and such things.

In Skyrim, the art of killing things has been taken to the next level by randomly showing extended slow motion cut scenes of your killing blows, such as demonstrated above. It feels like getting a cookie for having killed off something so effectively. Recently, I have taken pleasure in collecting shots of these killing blows, even though I’m still not really sure why.

A compilation of killing strikes is presented at Kill it off (Ravalation).

LOCATION: Mountains around Labyrinthian (Skyrim)
IN PHOTO: Ravanel and an unfortunate frost troll

Ravanel explores the virtual worlds of Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Skyrim, and Mass Effect.

9 thoughts on “A Spree of Violence

  1. Aww, Ravanel! So sweet! Nothing like a little ultraviolence to brighten up everyone’s day! πŸ˜€

    haha, enough of this “Virtual Romance” BS already! The next Challenge should be “Daily Dose of Ultraviolence!”

    Oh, and yay-4-posting on the New iRez!

    I hope you don’t mind, I’ve taken the liberty of making a couple of adjustments on your post:

    1. IDK if you’ll be posting a lot on Skyrim or not, but I went ahead and made a Virtual Worlds > Skyrim category for it, just in case you (or anyone else) wants to post.

    ScreenCap of WordPress editing window showing iRez' virtual world categories: Second Life, WoW, Lord of the Rings Online, Skyrim, etc Yay, Skyrim now an “official” iRez world! πŸ˜€

    2. I assume you formatted this post with the date in the title and “Location” and “In Photo” right underneath the image is, cause, you know, like, *cough* some clown asked peeps to do it that way back when we launched the “World Today” category / challenge.

    So Marma, who’s on hiatus ATM, is the only one who actually posted every day, and we never assembled the crack team of global photographers that **cough**cough** somebody-or-other once fantasized about.

    I’ve just asked frequent poster Berry what she’d like it to be called and she said How about Virtual Adventures. So “World Today” is now “Virtual Adventures.” I think RL pix like Eva’s recent “I’m a Fun Guy” work just fine and after all, a photograph isn’t the thing itself anyway, so it’s all in the happy virtual family! And if you’re seeing Eva’s ‘shroom on a flat screen, then it was a “real” adventure for her, but a virtual one for you. kk, so I can rationalize anything, but anyway, most of our photo posts are from virtual worlds. And it’s fine too if they’re not.

    As you see on our new theme home page slider, you get the cool black box with the text excerpt from your post — if you have “Date” and “Location” / “In Photo,” we don’t really get any text preview at all.

    So the date turns out to be redundant since we’re putting it at the top of all posts anyway. And maybe moving “Location / In Photo” to the bottom of the text is better for this format.

    3. I made a “Ravanel” menu bar for you! Yay! So as you see up above, if you select “Ravanel” as “Primary Menu” in the edit window, then visitors will have super easy & fast access to either your whole author archive, or to any of the specific worlds.

    4. BTW, the “magic” ingredient to putting your (or anyone else’s) post up on the home page slider is simply to include “slider” in your list of tags. iRez is currently set to have 12 posts up there, so you and other authors are welcome to just add the “slider” tag and feature your posts. As you become the 13th newest then you’ll drop off the slider. The only “requirement” is for your post to have a decent size image in it since the home page slider window is 940 pixels wide.

    OH – and be sure to “subscribe” to iRez! haha, I’m in love with a monkey! πŸ˜€
    MailChimp that is! So cool! The banana-lover sends a super cool email out once a day at 13:00 GMT, don’t miss it!
    http://vaneeesa.wpengine.com/join/

    Meanwhile… STILL working on the “Like” button! πŸ˜›

    1. No problem for changing the stuff around, I’m fine with whatever format. It was a bit complicated to understand which was the right one, as people were using different ones, so I’m happy you made up something that works. I changed my old posts, so hopefully I got it all “right” now!

      And thanks for the Skyrim category! I might post more about Skyrim in the future, as I’m playing it actively, although I don’t have much time to post (*aargh*). So much studying!

      Thanks too for the Ravanel menu bar, it’s super sexy!

      Will the “slider” category be automatically removed as well as soon as the post has become “no. 14”?

      1. The “slider” tag is manually added / deleted. You don’t actually have to wait for me to add it, you can just add “slider” in the tag box when you post and you’ll appear up there in lights. (be sure to have a nice sized image since the thing is 940px wide)

        It actually doesn’t “auto” come off. You can delete it in the future… or just leave it… like dormant genes in your DNA it probably doesn’t hurt anything… and might protect you from alien invasion – who knows! πŸ˜€

        1. Always good to be protected. As a gamer, I of course sincerely believe in alien invasions! Tiger! Save me!

          On another note, my sexy Ravanel menu bar has disappeared. Did I do something wrong?

          1. oh what a sad story the menu bar is!

            I made 2 or 3, similar to your awesome one, but then they just started to pop up seemingly randomly, not just where peeps put them… so I had to turn that feature off for now.

            I’ll try to sort it out with the kids at Woo Themes and see if there’s a fix or some conflict we can work around… I really like the idea of the custom menu bars, if we can just get them to behave! πŸ˜›

            1. Sexy menu bars not listening to mama Vaneeesa? How dare they?! :O

              Anyway, thanks for the update and hopefully our super team can teach them how to behave soon. I thought they were really cool as well.

                1. kk, after some experimentation… OMG… WordPress SEO by Yoast conflicts with Woo Menus!

                  I’m working on it all, but anyway, your menu is now powered up again, and I’m planning to keep them live, so feel to insert it at will! πŸ™‚

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.