Nexus Destiny

Bel Against Nature

As I said yesterday morning, last night we had a big end of school cookout to attend and in spite of my antisocial tendencies I enjoyed myself quite a bit.  However this morning I am paying for that enjoyment as my sinuses and lungs are full of crud from “extended exposure to nature”.  The food however was amazing as was the company.  This little guy showed up towards the end of the night, and we all ended up snapping photos of him.  Firstly I had zero clue that Tree Frogs existed in Oklahoma, secondly if they did I didn’t realize they could be green.  Most of the frogs you see around here are muddy brown or grey to mix into the surroundings.  According to the biology teacher in the midst this guy is NOT native to Oklahoma, but we have no clue where he comes from.

The other thing I am wishing I had snapped a photo of were the kittens.  One of them tried really hard to come home with us, and I totally would have been cool with that…  if I didn’t think it would completely upset the existing balance with our three cats.  These babies were the most chill and relaxed I have seen.  One of them I carried around in the crook of my arm on her back like I would a ferret.  She was all to happy to have my scratch her belly, and none of them really seemed to use their claws at all.  The most entertaining thing was listening to the back and forth with the parents as the various kids tried really hard to adopt one for their own.  One girl damned near outlined a PowerPoint presentation for exactly why she should have a cat.  But alas her mother decided that she would rather have a crying daughter than a divorce.

I have a sneaking suspicion that in our household this will not be the end of the talk of the adorable kittens.  Right now our eldest cat is extremely picky, and I am afraid bringing a little one into the mix would set her off.  That said it is impossible to find more relaxed cats than these I think.  I am such a softie when it comes to little furry things.  The desire to adopt them all is why we had six cats at one point.  Over the years we’ve had two bunnies, six different ferrets, two sugar gliders, a hamster, a guinea pig, and in total ten different cats to date.  So I am sure there will be more cats in our future, in spite of me putting up a good defense… I always eventually give in.  Right now I am happy with just cats and ferrets though, and I doubt I will branch out into other fuzzy children again.

Newbie Blogger Initiative

Today is the last day of the Newbie Blogger Initiative for 2014, and I feel like I should have probably done more.  This year I have set in a different role, doing more personal tutelage of participants than big informational posts.  Mostly this happened because as far as a advice goes I am not sure what I could say that has not already been articulated better.  I don’t really know what I am doing, and I am still very much figuring it out on a daily basis.  In a way I have been a Newbie this year as well in that this is our first year doing the podcast.  Tonight will be our 8th episode, so I am pretty proud of how that has progressed so far.  I am also very much a newbie at this whole streaming thing, even though this month I have cut down massively on the amount of time I have devoted to it.  May is pure hell, but hopefully as we move into June things will chill out quite a bit.

About mid month I reworked my blogroll so I have all of the Class of 2014 blogs listed there.  You should totally check them out because this crop is doing some pretty great things.  What has been the most interesting for me personally is that a number of my long term friends have opted to start or recommit to blogs this month as well.  I have each of them in my blogroll and I have been seeing some pretty great stuff come out of the “noobs”.  We as a community need this event, to help replace the many people who just stop blogging each year for whatever reason.  As someone who spends a lot of time doing this… I fully understand the desire to throw up your arms and stop.  That said we need this transfusion of talent each year to help keep the gaming blogosphere a vibrant place.

Here is a rundown of my NBI topics this month.

• The Ritual – my discussion of the writing routine
• So You Want to Stream – primer on getting OBS working with Twitch.tv
• Permission to Suck – My thoughts on getting started and posting regularly
• Reaching Out – discussion of social networking and blogging
• Class of 2014 – preliminary rundown of Class of 2014 early adopters
• Not as Hard as it Seems – my getting started blog post

So I guess at the end of the month I didn’t do as poorly as I thought I did.  Six posts devoted to NBI2014 is probably better than I did during the 2013 run.  My only real regret is that I didn’t come up with anything brilliant for Syl’s Poetry Slam.  I think maybe the topic of “Magic” threw me for a loop, because I have a very negative feeling towards “finger wigglers” as I call them.  I am at home with swords and shields and shotguns…  but I have always shied away from casters and wizards and spell slingers.  I tried to come up with an epic about slaying an evil necromancer… but nothing really worked.  So I wish I had come up with something, but I am sure she will have plenty of entries this year to choose from.

Nexus Destiny

Today is the beginning of the Headstart for Wildstar.  I think the servers came up last night at Midnight PST, which would have made it 2 am for me.  I have a deep seething hatred of all of these launch dates being centered around PST, but I not much you can do about it when a studio is from the west coast.  I was so damned happy when the Elder Scrolls Online times were all based on East Coast.  All of this gnashing of teeth aside, I got in this morning rather smoothly and created Belghast the Chua Engineer and Belgrave the Human Warrior.  Both of which are on Evindra the PVE-RP server… which is where all the sane and rational people seem to be rolling characters.  I say that jokingly, but almost all of my twitter list will apparently be on that one server, so even if folks are not all in the same guild it will be good to at least have them all centralized on the same server community.

This is the new Belghast… while I could not do anything vaguely close to my traditional “Bel” look as an angry bunny/rat/thing I feel like I captured the “feeling”.  Something about playing as a Chua immediately made this game more enjoyable.  I think mostly it is the animations, and the fact that in early games I always favored dwarves or small races in general.  My original Everquest character was a Dwarf and my first WoW characters were all also Dwarves.  So while this seems like a huge departure race wise for me… someone who mostly rolls humans, it is more a “getting back to my roots” of sorts.  I am still up in the air about this game, but I am going to give it a fair shake.  I did not intend to like Final Fantasy XIV at all, but ended up having a blast playing it.  So I am hoping that Wildstar will be another similar case.  I feel like this is precisely the game that I would have loved… about five years ago, but I’ve changed massively since then.  Here is hoping there is a game inside of Wildstar that the current me will enjoy.  In any case I plan on still playing quite a bit of Elder Scrolls as well.

#Wildstar #NBI2014