Holiday Countdown

Gone Viral

Yesterday did not go as planned in any sense of the word.  Well to be honest the morning went pretty smoothly and I had a rather relaxing go at piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV while doing laundry.  However that all changed mid afternoon as we started battling a virus infection on my wife’s laptop.  The night before she had some weirdness going on with several DllHost.exe in memory consuming lots of system resources.  She rebooted and it seemed to go away at least temporarily.  However yesterday morning the virus scanner picked something up and deleted it… which seemed to only cause things to escalate from there.  She started getting errors in Powershell which to the best of my knowledge we never actually installed on her system.

It seems as though a new strain of something called Trojan.Poweliks had gone out into the wild on the 8th and she had the bad luck to hit the wrong site and the wrong time and contract it.  For a bit we thought maybe it had been stopped, as the virus scanner found several items and correctly identified them as Poweliks.  Strange thing is that this only seemed to piss off the system, as constantly more things were popping up with the same infection.  Finally around 10pm we decided to just wipe the system taking the “nuke it from orbit” approach.  So that is precisely what I did after watching Walking Dead.  At least this solves one problem… as that laptop had a 32bit version of Windows 7 on it… which prevented us from giving her some more ram.  Problem solved.

Dragoon Legs

Since the 2.4 patch release I have been on an insatiable quest to finish out the level 100 Dragoon set from Syrcus Tower.  Sure I could get better items from the soldiery vendor, but at this point it is a matter of principle.  I have gathered up every item but one, the legs that drop from Amon the next to last boss.  At this point I can run Syrcus Tower in my sleep, as I have quite literally been in there three to five times a night.  I have seen the legs drop exactly three times… each of those times I had the misfortune of being in the same dungeon with another dragoon.  Each time I lost, one of them by a single point on the roll.  Essentially these legs have become the bane of my existence… but I am not giving up, not by a long shot.  I know that the moment I switch classes and start running Syrcus as my bard… the legs will drop on the very first time and go uncontested to another Dragoon.

One of the interesting options you have as part of the Duty Roulette is that you can check the “join party in progress” check box…  meaning in theory you could get dumped into a partially cleared instance.  I actually managed to luck out twice with this… the second time they were on Zande the final boss in the raid.  Now when you join it dumps you at the beginning of the instance and you have to take a teleporter that brings you relatively close to the boss that the group is working on.  Apparently they pulled before I could get there so the above picture is me dancing the Manderville as the final meteor plummets towards the party.  The funny thing is that I still got to roll on all of the items that dropped even though I got locked out of the encounter.  While I didn’t win anything… this was the easiest 15 poetics and 20 soldiery I have ever earned.

Holiday Countdown

It feels like this has been the year of gaming blogosphere events.  The first was the always awesome Newbie Blogger Initiative, then I had my own super successful Blaugust, and Izlain just wrapped up Bragtoberfest, and now the ever amazing MMO Gypsy is wanting to create a virtual advent calendar.  It seems there is tradition in her area of the world of the “Advent Window” where each member of a town or village decorates their home to represent a day of the advent season, the days leading up to Christmas Day.  In a way we are a virtual village, with our blogs representing our homes and the town being made up of the gaming blogosphere as a whole.  The idea that she talks about in her blog is that for each of us to create a post on an assigned day highlighting all of the positive things about the gaming community.

If you have a blog and are interested in participating, you can sign up by either leaving a comment in the post announcing it, or dropping Syl a line on twitter.  I have been informed that since I helped with the logo, that I had no choice but to participate.  Of course I would have signed up anyways, but I will just let Syl think she has some serious pull to order me around like that.  I think it is going to be a really interesting event, and hopefully we can come up with some way of visualizing the days of the month to carry out the window on the world feel.  All of the specifics about the topic, title, how you get your day assigned can be found in the original post.  We have had so much negativity this year in the broader gaming community, and as such it is up to us the gaming bloggers to show that there are still positive voices in our world.

Gaming Blogosphere

While it was not my original intent, I am ending up making thankfulness posts that ultimately relate to the topic I just posted.  Similarly this morning I am extremely thankful to be a member of the Gaming Blogosphere.  That term in itself is a fairly ephemeral thing, because it means so many different things to so many different people.  Ultimately it was the Blog Azeroth folks that gave me the spark to start Aggronaut.com so many years ago.  Like so many Tales of the Aggronaut started as a single focus blog, with my intent being focused on World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking.  However this shifted focus to being a general tanking blog, with some raid leadership topics… and then ultimately abandoning being World of Warcraft focused at all.  At each step of my journey I have had supportive voices cheering me on from the community, and were it not for them I likely would have fallen completely into obscurity.

For a long time it felt as though we didn’t have a very strong sense of community out here in the “not entirely devoted to World of Warcraft” blog space.  However the events I talked about in this post have helped to create a much more cohesive sense of community.  This combined with the fact that this year we launched The Gaming and Entertainment Network has given me a deeper sense of belonging to something larger than just myself.  I am deeply thankful for the other bloggers that I interact with on a near daily basis, and thankful that they have for some reason accepted me into their good graces.  You have been a supportive voice when I desperately needed one, and I am so thankful to have all of you.