Crystal Madness

Permanent Exhaustion

Back in March my wife and I each purchased a fitbit, and since then it has rewired quite a few things in our daily routine.  Over the first few month we mostly focused on changing the way we walked, and picking up steps in places we could during our normal routine.  So instead of taking the elevator in the parking garage, I started walking the stairs… and have now changed that up to walking the ramps down for maximum steps.  In many ways the fitbit changes exercise into a game, and with it comes a whole slew of “achievements” being tracked by the fitbit dashboard.  While what it does is rather stupid…  it is just an always on pedometer, the fact that it is there and constantly reminding me that I need to be walking is where the real benefit comes in.

Over the last month we have been walking on a nightly basis, and within the last week and a half this has morphed not only into walking to augment our total steps… but to trying every night to “ding”.  My wife is not a gamer really, but she has picked up my MMO analogy when it comes to the fitbit.  For us dinging is getting to our target steps of 10,000 per night, and this is fitting since the little band goes nuts when you reach your target goal.  While trying to hit 10,000 is cool…  my new goal is trying to hit 70,000 weekly steps and getting the achievement associated with it.  Why do I care?  Well it has been looming there for months… and it was a thing I never thought I would actually be able to hit.

More than anything this whole experience has been a lesson in proving me wrong.  I’m fat, and I will likely always be fat.  At 6’4” I carry my 350 lbs more better than some… but I am still very much a fat man, and I am mostly okay with that.  More than anything I want to be a more “fit” fat and have more stamina and endurance… and I have already come so damned far already.  Granted right now I am somewhat living in a state of permanent exhaustion as I try and do this exercise thing each night and also do my evening gaming.  Right now we are walking a little over 2 miles per night, and doing what we call our “triple loop” where we weave a course through our neighborhood and the next one over.  The course is designed so it never takes us past our house, that way we are not tempted to call it and stop.  Right now I need to have walked between 6500 and 7000 steps to be able to hit 10-11k during my evening walk.  With it being a rainy and otherwise sedentary weekend… we might have to start walking a “quint loop”, but by god I will hit my 70,000 steps this week.

Crystal Madness

I had all intents of streaming last night, but for whatever reason it never quite happened.  I spent a good deal of the evening running down the last few things I needed to do to complete Deredune, and what I was doing… while enjoyable for me seemed like it would be extremely boring to watch.  As the evening wore on, more people joined me in the channel… and I simply never alt tabbed to fire up OBS.  Wildstar is latching onto me with a vengence, and in ways I am surprised.  You can go through my pre-launch posts… and I struggled hard to figure out a way to get into this game.  I wanted so bad to like it, because at face value it seemed like a game I would love… or at the very least the me from five years ago would have loved.  Overall it intrigued me enough to play it at launch, especially since I would be bringing with me a chunk of the Alliance of Awesome community.

Now that I have spent a good deal of time playing it… I am completely enthralled.  The thing is I am not sure exactly why.  Guild Wars 2 is one of those games that I have tried to dissect just why I don’t enjoy it, and no matter what I try and do there… the game felt largely pointless.  Wildstar feels like it took so many of the good elements of GW2 but presented them in a way that I actually care about them.  Problem is I am not sure if I can explain why.  For starters there is something psychologically enjoyable about challenges.  You can be wandering around and loot an item… and then all the sudden you on the clock and every fiber of your being is poured into completely whatever this task happens to be.  Sure you can ignore them, and start them manually from the challenges section of your quest log…  however there is something special about just stumbling onto one naturally.

The game has a depth that I have not seen since Everquest 2, and that really shocked me.  There are layers within layers within layers of nuance going on here.  Right now it seems to have every feature that I ever wanted in a game.  While it doesn’t have a “chronomage” style self mentoring system, you can apparently drop your level down to your party members at any time.  In fact so many of the things in the game seem to be there to help you group with your friends.  The only real thing that the game fails at is in still continuing to divide players into red and blue teams.  That said I can for the most part deal with this, since they have account based friends and I can at the very least talk to my friends on the other side of the faction wall.  I have reached a point where I am pretty sure already that this is my new “WoW”, and had I not already purchased Warlords of Draenor… I would seriously consider skipping this expansion.

The picture above is pretty cool because it is from my skyplot.  One of the nifty things is that while you are out in the world, you are constantly collecting things for your house.  A special kind of item that you can find is a “PreFab Kit” and these allow you to build new sections of your skyplot.  While wandering around I managed to find a green quality one that essentially added a crazy jumping puzzle to my house.  So the fact that it is a jumping puzzle in itself is cool… but it basically added a daily quest to my house.  If you can make it to the top of the puzzle in 1 minute 10 seconds you can get a prize, which is similar to the prizes you normally get from challenges.  I’ve managed to pick up a handful of housing items from doing this, including a really cool spiral tree.  If you are on Evindra/Dominion let me know and I will neighbor you so you can have access to do the puzzle.

League Beginner Night

I feel like maybe this week the title of our weekly League of Legends night might be a bit of a misnomer.  We had several folks, but not quite enough to do two matches at the same time.  So as a result we alternated swapping folks in and doing 5 man vs Bots games to let folks get adjusted to new champions.  Oakstout joins us this week and it turns out that while he signed up for a beginner night… he owns a whole slew of champions and has like 130 wins under his belt or something like that.  So I would hardly call him a beginner, in fact I am far more beginnerly than he was.  That said it was still an awesomely fun time and we hung out and joked while playing the game.  I played a total of three games, the first of which I tried out the champion Gangplank that was free this week.  I have to say I dig him quite a bit, and if he goes on sale again soonish I might pick him up.

The second round I played Aatrox, which I still absolutely love for his pure survival.  During this battle Oak was playing one of my all time favorite champions WuKong… but the combination meant we got to bully our lane severely.  Our double jumps meant we could engage quickly and shred the enemy bots quickly before returning to farming or taking down turrets.  I have decided though that I really need to pick up the Justicar Skin since I don’t really care much for Aatrox’s default appearance.  Finally I closed out the night by playing a game as Woad King Darius… which we have all agreed is the “most belghast skin ever”.  It was a great time, and if you are looking to ease your way into League of Legends, then I highly suggest you participate next week.  At some point I figure we will even start to play real people.

#Wildstar #LeagueOfLegends #LoL