Month: April 2014

The Limits of Caffeine

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Sleep is a Crutch

sandman Yesterday was one of the roughest days I have experienced in a very long while, and is the type of day that causes me to go to bed early when everyone else is still up and gaming.  It only takes one or two of those days where you have to struggle through with no sleep to keep you from ever wanting to do it again.  In my case Thursday evening was totally out of my control, which makes it all the more frustrating.  I had planned on going to bed around ten and everything was going to be perfect.  Then my lungs decided to conspire against me.  Either I could lay in bed and struggle to get my breath, or I could just get up and take a breathing treatment.  The treatment hopped me up enough that it really took until midnight for me to calm back down enough to be able to sleep.

Our eldest ferret, Smokey has had one foot in the grave for some time… and the other belligerently ignoring that fact.  It is to the point where we check on him when we get home each night just to make sure he is still alive.  He doesn’t move around very well and pretty much does three things… sleep, poop and eat, not always in that order.  As a result we’ve set up a cage for him in our bedroom in the floor so he could have some peace and quiet, and so the girls wouldn’t keep trying to play with him.  For the most part we are just trying to keep him as comfortable as we can until he inevitably does die.  His littermate passed on several years back, and at this point he is ten and really past the life expectancy of even the hardiest of ferrets.

When I laid down at midnight, moments later he decided that he needed to rearrange his bedding…. for multiple hours.  After laying in bed listening to the constant scratching and shuffling about I got up and sat down on the floor opening the cage and trying to help him out.  His mobility is very limited, so I thought by helping him arrange the blankets into a pouch, he would be happy.  Wrong… I was so wrong.  Everytime I would move something it seemed to start the entire process all over again.  Finally about 3 am he either got things the way he wanted them or decided to give up for the night.  We have to get up at 5:30 for work…. leaving us only a few hours of sleep.  There are times I would have called in sick, because I knew I was not going to function but I knew at least that afternoon I would be the only person in the office for my department.

Turns out when another coworker called in for oversleeping…. who had been planning on being out that afternoon anyways… I literally was the only worker there all day long.  Which means I got nothing accomplished as I dealt with ticket after ticket and an emergency request from the communications department.  It is days like this that make me try my damnedest to keep a schedule.  You only have to struggle through one of these to make you never want to do it again.  To make matters worse…. we had to drive to Tahlequah that evening, the entire purpose of carpooling yesterday and my cheat blog post typed up the evening before.  So I struggled through… and downed another 24 oz can of Monster as we headed out to our evening destination.

Chicken Fried Chicken

delrancho This was the highlight of my evening and likely going to be the highlight of my entire weekend.  My wife and I both went to college at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah Oklahoma, and one of our favorite places to eat was Del Rancho.  It is this odd throwback diner that has been in existence since the 50s.  Their claim to fame are these insanely huge portions of chicken fried chicken and chicken fried steak.  The fact that they served this up cheaply, and stayed open until 11 pm made it the favorite late night cram session destination of many of my friends.  So of course… since we were going to be in town anyways this is where we were going to eat… damn the calories.  Besides this place has been a destination for many epic conversations involving us in the past, so no reason why it should not today.

If you are a long time reader of my blog you might remember two years ago when we helped a student of my wife’s move to college.  We were the thing he was lacking, stability.  While his grand-mom… grandmother turned adoptive mother, is a very sweet lady, she lacked the logistical ability to see him off to college successfully.  Over the course of his two years at college we have been the “parents” he has turned to, to help him out when he was in a moment of crisis.  So last night as we picked him up from his dormitory he was a much changed man.  More confident than I had seen him, and also considerably fitter.  College had done the thing that it does to everyone… change them and in this case seemingly for the better.  College is a place of “proto-adults”, folks in the tween time between being a teenager and a real card carrying adult.  Before my eyes I was watching him become the person he would eventually be.

Essentially he is a young gay man having an existential crisis, and once again we applied stability and logic to his dilemma.  After sorting through various relationship issues that he just needed someone to act as a sounding board on, we got to the root of the issues.  His mother and sister were planning on moving across country to California.  They were planning on doing this over the summer.  He was trying to decide if he should go home for the summer and see them for as long as he could or not.  But in reality what it seemed like he was needing was someone to give him permission not to.  His family is a massive quagmire of drama, and my fear is that him going back would cause him to become mired in it again.  His family has stolen from him, and tried to rope him into their schemes in the past.  So we gave him the one thing he really needed… permission to do what was best for himself.

The Limits of Caffeine

monsterzeroultracans It was while I was walking around Wal-mart as he and my wife picked up groceries, that my body began its crash cycle.  The lights in the store felt dim and funky… and I found myself having trouble focusing my eyes on anything without staring at it for a long while.  I had been here before… it what happens when I have pushed my luck entirely too far and the joyous effects of caffeination fail me.  The problem is we were still over an hour away from home.  I dropped him off at his dorm room and headed out of town to the convenience store formerly known as hilltop.  I gathered up a cocktail of stuff in an effort to try and give me enough to push across to home.  This consisted of a grape five hour energy, a monster zero ultra… and a bag of white chocolate drops for sugar content.  I questioned if this would actually do it, but I knew that it needed to.  My wife had been up just as long as I had, and while she was offering to take the wheel and drive home… she has even more issues with night driving than I do.

The problem is I had already abused myself pretty sufficiently to get to this point.  Two hours of sleep had been extended by a cup of coffee in the morning, a monster on the drive in… another monster at work, a five hour energy about lunch, a few diet mountain dews during the day, another big monster after work, and another five hour energy on the turnpike to Tahlequah.  Essentially I was learning the hard way… that there is a finite limit to just how long Caffeine can do its magic and keep you alert.  The drive home was really weird and somewhat hazy.  I went through moments of absolute clarity and alertness, to moments of feeling like I was swimming through fog and exhausted.  The oddest thing is these cycles seemed to happen about every ten minutes.  My wife did a valiant job of keeping me talking, even if it was just me responding “uh huh” and “yep”.

Thankfully we made it home safely, and went through the nightly ritual of dealing with the litter boxes and making sure all the children had food and were safe and happy.  I finally got to crash around eleven, and I am not sure if I was conscious much past that.  It was a day of zero gaming, and the beginning of a weekend where it is not sure if I will get in much gaming either.  Several years back I wrote a testing software for my wife in ASP.NET, and we hosted it on a web server here at the house.  When we switched providers and jumped from a 4 meg connection to a 98 meg connection… we lost the ability to host servers.  So now I need to figure out a way to rewrite this over the weekend in PHP/Jquery so that I can host it on the same external host I use for this blog.  All of this said… I plan on logging into ESO and relaxing a bit the moment I finish this blog post…. which seems like a really good thing to do right now.

Thumper Logic

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Cheat Day

One of the rules of the “Grand Experiment” has been that I would sit down each morning and write a blog post.  A lot of my friends in the blogosphere write their content at their leisure and stage the publishing at a date of their choosing.  There is technically nothing wrong with this practice, but the entire idea behind the experiment, was to force myself to write every day.  So as a result I have always considered it cheating to do what I am doing right now… writing a topic the night before I intend to post it.  These lofty ideals are one thing, but every now and then real life throws me for a loop.  Generally speaking on the weekend my posts end up being considerably later because sometimes I have to accommodate life in the process.

However our weekend plans have been altered quite a bit and as a result my wife and I are carpooling together tomorrow.  This means that I won’t really have my traditional “drink coffee slowly and contemplate the universe” time in the morning…  or at least I won’t be able to faff about as much as I normally do.  So as a result I am admitting to my “blatant cheatery” up front and hoping you won’t mind terribly much that you are getting a slightly stale topic by the time I post it tomorrow morning.  I could have lied to you, and posted this without you really knowing the difference…  but I am always willing to admit my failings freely.

Thumper Logic

Thumper-GIF One of the things that I have not talked about much is that the Grand Experiment is far more for me than just writing every single day.  It has also been an effort to surround myself with as many positive influences as I can, and limit the amount of negativity I have in my life.  I am not just trying to bury my head in the sand.  I assure you that I see just as many negative things on a daily basis as anyone, I am a pessimist by nature.  However I had noticed that the more negativity I surrounded myself in, the more negative I became and as a result the more unhappy I was.  You know how they say “fake it until you make it”, well it turns out it works pretty well for being happy as well.  If you can’t be happy, adopt the trappings of being happy until I actually sinks in.

In addition to trying to limit my exposure to negativity… which means I pretty much stop reading game forums when they exit the alpha and beta phases… I have been trying really hard not to write many “rant” posts.  In doing so I have realized just how unbalanced and ranty the world seems to have become.  If you look at the popular review sources, it seems as though we absolutely love to hate video games.  There are popular youtube personalities that I have never seen give a single game a positive review, however people line up to watch them.  I am sure that the occasional video like this is funny, but after awhile it changes into something else.  IT feels like these reviewers are trying to enact their revenge on an industry they believe has “wronged them” somehow.

People Want Different Things

Yes I am in fact breaking this image out again.  It is perfectly okay for you to not like something, but just because you don’t like a thing does not mean it is immediately “bad”.  I may not have enjoyed War and Peace… but that does not make it any less of a classic.  Sure there are of course the occasional game that are horrible in an academic sense… I am looking at you Superman 64, but these are really rather rare.  If a game comes out and at least one person enjoys it then I cannot really call it a “bad” game.  There are games that are a financial failure, but that is a completely different line of discussion.  Over the last few years it has become extremely “cool” to hate everything, and a lot of this was ushered in by the “hipster” movement.  If you read the reviews of games, you would have the impression that the industry is doing horribly and making nothing but utter crap.  However they seem to be making more money than ever, in part because very few people who consume these games actually pay attention to internet reviews.

At this point I am just too damned old to care much about looking cool on the internet.  I feel no shame in gushing about the things I am really enjoying, and just glossing over the things I don’t so much enjoy.  Over the weekend I appeared on the Game On podcast, and eventually the topic came around to Wildstar a game I really don’t like very much.  I had a few options of where to go with my commentary.  I could of course have spun up a mighty rant that would nuke the game into oblivion from orbit.  Instead I chose to share my reservations, but also talk about a few of the things that I thought the game was doing right.  It is your choice as a player, or a blogger, or a youtuber to either dwell on the good parts or the bad parts.  Right now I am making the conscious choice to look for the good in both people and games, and so far I am much happier for doing it.

The Curse of the Fanboy

I hope it feels so good to be right.
There is nothing more exhilarating
than pointing out the shortcomings
of others, is there? – Randall
 

One of the worst curses you can give to another gamer is to call them a Fanboy, because it immediately belittles anything they may or may not have to say in response to your criticism.  I guess my question is, why aren’t we all “Fanboys” over something.  For the majority of us, gaming is our hobby, and even in those for whom it is a job…  at one point or another it was also their hobby as well.  We are all geeks here, cut from the same core fabric even if we claim to not acknowledge it.  We all love games, more deeply than any of us would ever care to admit.  At least at some basic level we all have to admit that games are absolutely magical.  They can bring us to tears, make us laugh, and cause us to plunk down another $60 like a junkie in search of a fix.  If we do all of these things, then why the hell SHOULDN’T we love it, and be more than happy to raise our hands high and yell “FUCK YES I’M A FANBOY”.

I love games, or I wouldn’t be spending each and every morning writing about them.  Sure you get a fair dose of my personal shenanigans and that of my friends… but this is a gaming blog devoted to my love and obsession of video games.  I am not trying to make games better than they are, because they seem to be just as good today at getting me to spend countless hours a night playing them than they were when I was a child.  Sure I hold up certain games like Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past or Castlevania: Symophony of the Night on a pedestal, but my love of those games should not somehow tarnish something that doesn’t do the same thing as those games did.

What gets lost in the shuffle is the people behind the games that folks all too often want to tear down.  No one goes into a game trying to build something that the players will hate.  Each and every one of them has lost sleep at night trying to make the best possible game within the constraints they were given.  Just as I started writing about games because I love them, they all aspired to be part of this industry that quite frankly has some pretty shitty conditions placed upon them.  No child says that they want to grow up to work in an industry that is ultimately thankless and will more so make large segments of the fan base revile you.  I am just waiting for it to be acceptable to like something again without someone else feeling the need to put you down for doing so.

Cast of the Aggrochat

aggrochat_bubbles_trans

I feel like I got a little preachy during the course of this post, but it is really how I feel.  I am going to unabashedly love things, until I don’t then move on to other things that I love equally well.  So far I feel like my mission of being more positive has paid off.  I am surrounded by some pretty amazing friends, and I feel so thankful to have all of you supporting me on a daily basis.  While I have a deep protective streak, which leads me to play all the tank classes that I end up playing… I feel no need anymore to protect you from what I deem a “bad game”.  You might see me wax philosophical about how I don’t quite grasp a game, but that is coming from a place of wanting to learn what people see in it… and not from a place of hatred.  I wanted to close things out on a really positive note by showing off something that I really love right now.

Rae has been hard at work over the last few weeks since we got the odd idea to start Aggrochat.  She has been capturing the essence of our personas in Chibi form and I think she did a damned fine job.  From the left we have Rae riding Ashgar the bear, with me in the middle, and the ever stylish Kodra on the far right.  There are a few inside jokes in the peace but I figure it is universal enough for most to enjoy it.  She does amazing work, and is the creator of the original Chibi Belghast that I have used for ages as avatars and in the masthead of this website.  Over the coming weeks we will be branding our libsyn page into something more fitting a proper podcast.

Point Paralysis

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Maybe I didn’t suck

For whatever reason this morning I am absolutely struggling to remain conscious.  I feel like maybe I drifted into the “too much sleep” territory last night.  We ended up with a heavily altered game play, in that when my wife got home last night we ended up taking our evening walk and combining it with some extra steps to go walk to eat dinner.  This was awesome in that it meant that my playtime was not perforated last night by going out to walk, but I seem to have squandered the benefit by going to bed early.  For whatever reason around 9 pm I got irrationally tired and after dealing with a few chores crashed out on the bed with two cats snuggled up beside me.  Normally I get pretty much the same 6 hours of sleep every night, but last night I got a little closer to 8 hours and I feel groggy as hell.

Awesome thing happened yesterday, in that the podcast I was a guest on over the weekend published the episode.  I feel humbled that I was offered to join in the fun, and the end result was really nice.  I listened to it yesterday after getting out of our weekly staff meeting, and I have to say I was a bit scared to do so.  I was worried that maybe I would have come off like an ass or something, but overall it seemed to flow really nicely.  Every now and then podcasts will have a guest on that is abrupt and disruptive… and I am always afraid I will be that guy.  Each podcast has a certain feel to it, and I was hoping that I was staying true to that.  It is still really damned weird to hear my own voice, but after doing this streaming thing and our own podcast I am starting to get used to it finally.

Point Paralysis

Screenshot_20140424_062015 Yesterday one of my guildies and fellow bloggers Werit posted a piece on something I think all of us have felt, that he calls “Skill Point Paralysis”.  One of the big features of Elder Scrolls Online is that the game is not so much about how you play the game but how you choose to build your character.  You can be damned near anything you can imagine within the frame work of the game.  You want to play a spell slinging rogue, or a tanky archer?  Sure you can build both of those in damned near any “class” as well.  The problem is without a reasonable undo system, it gives a false sense of importance on every single skill point.  It is a bit like playing a chess match and being afraid to make a move for fear it was the wrong one.  I have had the benefit of playing this same character over a dozen times throughout the various beta test phases.  Over that time I have refined exactly what I want to do, but still I will find myself with four points pooled up and not really sure where to spend them.

So I thought I would spend a few minutes this morning talking about the type of decisions I make.  Essentially I tend to divide things up in my head into three categories:  Active Attacks, Passive Buffs, and Utility.  At the end of the day I can only have five active attacks on my bar at any given time, so as a result I tend to discount the value of choosing one of these.  Also picking up a new active attack means I need to devote some time into raising it and unlocking the morph.  After a point new abilities are not really as useful as old abilities until you can morph them.  So that means I need to be committed to a new ability choice if I want to go down that path.  I will occasionally pick up an ability if it sounds interesting, but if you notice in the above screenshot I have Power Bash at level 1… in part because I have not really used it much in combat.

Utility abilities are a special kind of actives, and I generally limit myself to only having one of these on my bar at a time.  Sometimes these are survival cooldowns, self heals or group buffs… but most of the time I classify things into this category that are only “situationally good”.  For example I love beyond love the Silver Bolts ability.  However it is only really worth putting on my bar if I know I will be fighting Daedra or Undead… or now that I have the fighters guild rank 7 passive Werewolves.  If it is an ability that I will use only 20% of the time, I greatly devalue picking that with my skill points.  Sometimes however these abilities are useful for things other than their original intent.  Even if you are fighting something other than the mob types mentioned above… Silver Bolts still becomes a pretty potent weaponless ranged attack if your character happens to be lacking one of those.

Always On is Awesome

The final category is where I tend to spend MOST of my points.  If you look at the above screenshot I have every single passive ability that I can currently get in the sword and board tree.  Similarly if you would look at my Heavy Armor and Imperial Racial trees their passives would be completely filled as well.  If I have a useful passive to buy, I will almost always choose that over something else.  Passives do not require me to change my play style to incorporate them in, nor do they require me to level them to make them truly useful.  Instead they are a single pick that makes my character immediately and permanently better.  In a game I will always favor something that gives me a permanent boost over something that gives me a situationally better boost.  I like “always on” things, because if I can be awesome all of the time, it is better to me than being awesome some of the time.

Finally I have limited myself to a single tradeskill for the time being.  Until the points begin to flow like honey later as I wander around the world collecting them…  I have narrowed my focus to two weapons (sword and shield and two handed), three class trees (because really you want to cherry pick abilities between them), one armor type (heavy is the only choice I ever seem to make), racial tree, and a single tradeskill (blacksmithing).  Now I will occasionally pick up some especially valuable picks like Soul Lock from the World tree, that gives you a chance to fill soul stones each time you kill a mob.  Overall I  have narrowed my focus to a specific set of abilities.  The big thing I see players doing that gets them in trouble is trying to tackle more than one weapon at a time early on.  I did not pick up a second weapon until 20 or so, well after I had the ability to hot swap between them.  Trying to spread yourself too thin is something that will ultimately lead to making the game harder than it really needs to be.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #SkillPoints

The Impossible Plateau

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Forced Fasting

Screenshot_20140422_193251 This blog post is going to suck, I just wanted to get that out of the way now so you can avoid reading it.  In the mornings I muster the “oomph” to blog by channeling the dark arcane magic of coffee.  I am completely un-caffeinated today and it is horrible.  I am having to fast this morning as part of some blood work, and I have no problem with the not eating part…  but no coffee is hitting a little below the belt.  I totally imagine that once I have had my blood drawn I am going to go to the nearest QuikTrip and like try and drink straight from the coffee pot or something like that.  I’ve never really understood the purpose of fasting before blood work, since don’t you really want to see the persons stats how they actually are all the time?  What is the point of having this fasted idealistic state, when you know the person is going to screw everything up with caffeine anyways.

As part of our insurance plan at work, we are having to submit to a “biometric screening”, which seems really damned Orwellian to me.  The last few years I had been a conscientious objector to the process and as a result paid a significantly higher insurance premium, but this year that reached a critical mass.  If you do not take the screening your monthly insurance rates are literally over double what they would be if you submitted to the finger prick.  We did not find that out until after all of the normal screening sessions were finished.  So now I have to go to some massive last call session this morning.  I still think this entire process is bullshit.  I’m curious, are any of you having to do this for your work insurance?  My working theory is still that our HR department is incompetent and just simply cannot negotiate for new insurance plans worth a shit.

The Impossible Plateau

Last night I decided to faff about again in Alik’r and start the stream going while I did so.  There is a spot on the map that seems like it should have something cool at it, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get up there.  During a good chunk of the video I am trying to get up to the place and failing miserably.  I go for a really long swim, which I am sure was boring for everyone watching… and by everyone I mean no one.  Actually to be truthful over the course of the video I did manage to pick up two viewers.  First I was joined by ShinyWhip who apparently was bored and was willing to watch me go for a swim.  She got to watch me fail miserably at trying to solo a world boss as well.  Eventually I was joined by my guildie Saia who also got to watch me fail at a few things.  That is pretty much the subtext of my streams…  me failing at playing video games.

At some point I had to go afk for an extended period of time and I cut off the stream after returning.  Later in the evening I attempted a public dungeon with Warenwolf but we seemed to be missing a lot of the bosses.  Turning in the quest from inside gave us credit for the place, but I have never seen a public dungeon without a slew of optional bosses. In grand total I think we found three, and none of them actually seemed to drop anything of use.  Honestly I have been on a bad streak as far as bosses go.  I am reaching a point where the greens I craft seem to be significantly better than the blues I am getting as drops.  Crafting in this game is extremely overpowered, and I now have enough skill points dumped into blacksmithing that I have a pretty great chance of getting a temper off anything I deconstruct.

I dinged 38 last night, so In theory I could craft up an entirely new set of gear.  Not sure if this is really worth it however.  Thinking I am going to try and limp on with the 36 set I have until I ding 40, and then craft all new gear then.  The problem with crafting sets of gear is that it is a serious drain on your available tempers.  I am really not sure how many I have, but I don’t think I have near enough to be throwing them away randomly.  The big frustration so far with Alik’r is that I am still mostly finding Orichalcum.  I thought by now that I would be swimming in a sea of Dwarven Ore, but so far it has been extremely rare… which means I may not even have enough ingots to craft a full set of anything right now.

On Streaming

I am really bad about not touching social media or my RSS feed on the weekend, and as a result I usually have a significant backlog that starts sometime on Friday night.  Since I was off for Good Friday this past week, it mean this void started on a Thursday night.  As a result I missed this post by Scopique on his thoughts about streaming.  I am honestly not sure how I feel about streaming in general.  Twitch is one of those weird things that I am not really sure what to do about.  While I have a twitch channel and I stream somewhat regularly, and then dump said videos on Youtube…  I really don’t watch twitch much at all.  Well there was that period of time when all of us were watching Twitch Plays Pokemon… but that was more of the “trainwreck you just can’t help but watch” thing than something I genuinely enjoyed.  Generally speaking the only time I watch anything on twitch is when there is some presentation relating to a game I am playing.

As a result I feel kinda bad that I am streaming and love it when people watch my stream…  but I don’t ever actually end up watching anyone elses streams.  I feel like that is a big reason why my stream and youtube channel will never really be successful on their own.  They will always be attached to my blog, since the blog is what is really important to me.  I don’t fully get the twitch or youtube cultures, and in order to get either to really work it feels like you need to fully immerse yourself into said culture.  Right now I am streaming mostly because going back and listening to the things that my friends and I say on my stream entertains me.  I say all sorts of stuff and fifteen minutes later I cannot remember what the hell I just said, so it cracks me up the random stuff that comes out of my mouth while I game.  Ultimately I stream for the same reason I blog, because for whatever reason I find it entertaining and fun, and would probably be doing both even if I never had a single reader or viewer.  The stream however is just not something I think of as meaningful or permanent… it is very much a throwaway experience to me.  Entertaining for the moment it is happening, but not something to really ponder once the stream has been turned off.

That is not to say that there are not some absolutely amazing and entertaining folks out there.  Qelric for example does amazing videos, and her production value is just great.  I tend to watch whatever videos come down the pipe from her, because I find them equally entertaining and informative.  That said I have never really gotten into the “let’s play” culture on YouTube.  I tried doing some of it with my series on Trove… and really I just didn’t like the way it felt.  For a period of time I was trying to get people to do the like and subscribe thing… before I realized that I just didn’t really care much.  If people watch my YouTube channel and like my videos… awesome…  if they don’t… equally awesome.  I think the big difference is I am not trying to make a career out of being an internet persona.  I don’t need viewers or clicks or likes or whatever to get a pay check.  At the end of the day my blogging and my faffing about in streams and videos… is just something I do for entertainment.  I respect the folks who are trying to make this work as a career but I don’t think I could ever deal with the inherent instability that is trying to make a living off the whims of others.