February 2015 - Page 3 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Actual Free Speech

February 20, 2015 by Belghast

Calling Out

A few days ago a good friend of mine Jaedia posted an extremely heartfelt commentary about how the sexual objectification has effected her. It was a brave post, that touched on a lot of uncomfortable discussion points that most people would rather not think about. The awesome thing about it is that it sparked a really good conversation over twitter. In the middle of a series of comments about how Girl Grey had been effected by this same process, some random guy made a comment that completely derailed the conversation, and essentially proved the need for this discussion. I did what I thought was right at the time and called the guy on it, that escalated into a bigger ordeal because he clearly was not understanding what we meant about the context of the comment being important. This all happened on Monday, and after some time thinking about it I decided to post about it the experience Wednesday morning.

Later that same day a post rebuking mine showed up on the Gaming Couples blog. This by itself is no big deal because people disagree with me on a regular basis. Everyone has an opinion and they are of course entitled to it. I thought long and hard about whether or not to post about this today, because I have tried to keep my blog a place of positivity, but I feel like I have to say something because it has gotten too far under my skin at this point. I don’t care that someone called me out for my post, that is the side effect of posting “real” discussion on my blog. I took painstaking care not to directly call out the person involved in the twitter discussion. I went through the painstaking process of pasting the screenshots into Photoshop and then blurring out the names of those involved. What has frustrated me is that the blog post in response to mine is labeled “Freedom of Speech” and the author has not allowed any comments that differ from her opinion through the moderation queue. As such this morning I am taking my blog post to make sure the two responses that I have been sent see the light of day.

The Angry Response

One of the frustrating things about the “Freedom of Speech” blog post is that you could tell very quickly that the individual had not actually read the original post by Jaedia, and at least to some extent read what they wanted to read out of my own blog post. As such when Jae emailed me her response, she did so because she did not think it would make it through the moderation queue. Her response follows…

Hi, “someone he follows” here. Just feel a few corrections need to be put out there. 🙂
He didn’t call me pretty, we were having a discussion on how bullshit sexual objectification is with another Twitter friend and how she felt that before she lost weight she was insulted for being ugly, and after, she was at the other end of the scale and she really appreciated that she wasn’t alone in feeling like she was nothing more than her looks sometimes. Then the dude chimed in with “you pretty” and Bel and myself spoke up for our friend because it was ill-timed and uncomfortable.

No, it wasn’t the worst thing ever. But the fact that the guy kept on his case that he “just wanted to call his friend beautiful” was kind of uncalled for.. sure, it was sweet, but it was inappropriately timed and misguided.

Your opinion is a valid one, but in response to this particular event, you’d perhaps have been better reading my post and the resulting conversation before judging us because it pretty much reads, “I can’t be fucked to find out what they were talking about but I’m angry about it anyway.” We were trying to be civil. This guy decided we were insulting him because, and I quote, “he had a penis”, which wasn’t true in the slightest.

PS. Freedom of speech is totally cool, but it doesn’t mean that everything people say is RIGHT. And why does it always seem to come up when somebody speaks up for something they believe in? Kinda contradicts the freedom of speech argument.

Sure the response was angry and ranty… but for someone who supposedly values free speech so highly I would have assumed it would be moderated through. There have been several comments that I did not find valuable but still I gritted my teeth and pressed the “approve” button. I felt that in order to be true to myself I had to accept all criticism. However later that night I saw the above comment on twitter. Maybe the individual has a real problem with cursing… so I thought that I could let that slide. I didn’t agree with the decision to moderate the comment, but it of course is not my blog.

The Heartfelt Comment

While I could understand potentially moderating curse words, I can not see moderating this next comment. When Girl Grey got wind of the post she apparently made her way over to the blog and left her own commentary. Since she knew that Jae’s comment did not make it through the moderation queue, she also emailed me hers just in case the same fate happened. I told myself that I would give the blogger until this morning to have allowed that comment through the moderation queue before making my own commentary. This is not particularly the way I would have liked to have ended my blogging week, but I feel like I needed to make this post. Below is Grey’s comment…

I am actually the person that was being replied to in the twitter convo, not Jae. To context the whole situation: All involved are my friends, & all still are my friends.

During the whole conversation, I had posted about how, when I was 350+ pounds, I would get looks and stares coming into a room. My ultimate goal was just the be unnoticed. I felt shamed, I felt outcast, and I felt worthless. Fast forward 200 pound loss, and I was also explaining, I still feel that way. I walk down the mall and I hear cat calls. I get accused of showing too much chest area – when I’m still a large chested woman – and beyond turtlenecks, I’m going to show something. My boisterous and naturally flirty personality gets me called a tease. And in all this, I I found people who understood me.

And then the pretty comment happened. And yes, I do believe in the right to say what you want – but there is a time and place for everything. I get compliments every day. I take them with grace and appreciation, as I took this one no different. I actually had a nice DM with the person afterwards, and all was well.

However, that being said, I feel like this situation was akin to coming into an AA meeting and calling the lot a bunch of drunkards; it was inappropriate timing. If we all agree that mental health issues need to be addressed, but then turn around and say “Oh, but if someone says something hurtful, grow a thick skin because there is free speech,” I think we have an issue. I appreciated Bel & Jae stepping in, I don’t feel like Bel was in the wrong.

This morning when trying to decide if I was going to make this post or not, I noticed the above commentary on a second twitter account that the blogger uses. I knew then that no matter what someone posted, it would not end up making it through the moderation queue. It seems that the person is not actually interested in free speech like they claimed in their own post. In fact this is a direct quote from that same blog post…

Free speech isn’t just speech that makes you comfortable. Free speech means everyone is free to engage is speech regardless of the feelings of others.

The hypocrisy of that statement, given the turn of events actually makes me a little queasy to my stomach. I’ve never claimed to be more than I am, nor have I heralded higher ideals than just trying to be a decent human being. However if an individual is going to wrap themselves in the blanket of free speech, then by god they better mean it and live up to those ideals. I’ve tried to make this post as positively as I can, and I have still tried to protect the identity of the twitter accounts that I am referencing. I am just disgusted by this entire chain of events, and should have potentially let it go. However I felt like the comments that never made it through moderation needed to be heard. Thanks for your time and tomorrow we will return to regularly scheduled gaming discussion.

Lord of the Storms

February 19, 2015 by Belghast

Region Limited Items

One of the things that game companies continue to do that drives be absolutely insane is to treat game regions differently. I realize there are functional reasons why certain areas of the world have to be a walled garden, but stop placing exclusive items in those walled gardens. World of Warcraft did this with a number of limited edition pets and mounts only available in the China region and it seems as though Square Enix seems to have done the same. For I assume political reasons the Heavensturn new years event did not appear on the Chinese servers. Instead it was replaced with a lunar new year event featuring awesome red lantern decorations throughout the world. If you want to see a full folio of pictures you can check out this link over on the lodestone.

The culmination of this event is a battle with Xi the New Years beast… which appears to be an insanely remodeled Behemoth. At first I thought this was a new mount but apparently that is not the case. Through completing this event you get the extremely adorable remodeled Nana Bear minion that looks like a panda with a little sprig of bamboo. I really hope that Yoshi P and crew decide to bring this same event to the global servers. I realize that for extremely idiotic reasons the Chinese servers are going to miss content that is politically unpalatable to their government, but it sucks when they get nifty exclusive content to replace it. I really hope they choose to do the right thing and make it available, even if only through the Mog Station store. I would absolutely pony up the traditional $5 price for a panda nana bear.

Ifriting with Jae

Last night and this morning too for that matter… I have been feeling absolutely horrible. As such I made last night some what of an early one going to bed around 9pm. Before that however I offered my services to the free company to help a bunch of players catch up on content that had been gating them. The above picture is of me and Jaedia doing some Ifrit, though admittedly she is stuck in a cut scene I believe when I took this picture. Yesterday there was an excellent post by Liore talking about how good the community is. There are times however when the community is not amazing, but even then it is rarely as bad as it can be in World of Warcraft. When we ran Ifrit, we had to random in a single dps to make it happen. Upon zoning in we did our normal greetings and the ninja named Justin’s only the comment was “kik me”. We ignored the first one, but he kept repeating it.

To which I responded the above… and he started doing the /angry emote. Not sure what he thought that would do, but he eventually piped up again saying to “kik me”, this time Ash chimed in with “We Said No”. Ultimately he huffed and puffed a bit more with his angry emote, and then resigned himself to do the fight. Now there are probably ways he could have trolled us, but I give him credit in that he eventually straightened up and did the content as intended. I mean I feel sorry for the guy to some extent, it sucks to be sitting through the 40 minute queue as a ninja… only to find out that you got randomed into a primal encounter… something that notoriously yields little to no experience for completing it. So in the end, even though he was a bit of a jerk about it… I still gave him a player commendation as a consolation for him having to sit in another 40 minute long queue. That right there is the WORST encounter I have had with another player in Final Fantasy XIV in months. All in all not too bad at least based on the encounters I have on a near nightly basis with someone in garrison chat.

Lord of the Storms

Continuing with the theme of helping free company members catch up, we had a player working on his relic quest. For some reason the queue time for the Dhorme Chimera is exceptionally long, so we have been trying to pull together a quick group when someone needs this. Through begging and cajoling I was able to get seven players on at once which meant we were either going to random a player or ask for help. The preference is to ask for help because the fight only really needs a single tank, especially if the tank is as geared as I am. However if you queue into it randomly you have to start the fight with two tanks and two healers in a standard eight man configuration. So while we have an example this morning of the worst of the community, I can give you an example of the best of the community as well. Several of us are members of a linkshell called “We Stand as One” and at this point I am not 100% sure how we ended up in it. I asked in LS chat if anyone was up for helping, and I had no less than eight responses saying to invite them. We killed the Chimera fast enough that we didn’t even get a level one limit break.

After that we did Ramuh Hard mode…. which in essence is the “normal” mode since that is the lowest version of the fight. Solaria needed the fight for her story quest, but unfortunately Nyahn had not quite unlocked it. As such we dropped him, and picked up a few more willing volunteers from the linkshell and proceeded to wreck the Ramuh encounter. I remember being so massively stressed the first time I did this in a random group. There are two phases where you have to burn down some adds or everyone in the raid dies. We did not even get close to the timer easily sailing past both obstacles. The best part about Final Fantasy XIV is the fact that these primal fights are really enjoyable encounters. Generally speaking folks will line up to volunteer to experience them, because it is the sort of thing you only do once in awhile when a player needs it. The raid encounters in general seem to be the same way. They are enjoyable experiences and no one much minds when a group is learning and wipes quite a bit. All in all it was a pretty great night in game, and while I didn’t really accomplish any of my goals… it was great to see others accomplish theirs.

Flamebending for Fun

February 18, 2015 by Belghast

Serious Time with Bel

This morning I am going to break from my normally positive fluffy posts to talk about something fairly serious. Hopefully you will bear with me, because it is a topic I believe strongly about. A few days ago my good friend Jaedia crafted an excellent post talking about her frustrations and outright anger with sexual objectification especially in video game culture. This sparked an interesting discussion among both the women and men on my twitter feed, and I personally ended up rebroadcasting it twice for emphasis. Over the years I have watched as my female friends have had to constantly battle everything from largely harmless statements to the downright creepy and dangerous. What happens time and time again is there is this thread where folks are discussing a specific topic… and then out of the blue some guy will make a comment inappropriately off topic. Then almost by queue it happened to this very discussion.

I’ve decided to mosaic the information about the person and the participants in the discussion to attempt their anonymity. Granted you can scroll through my feed and likely find out who this is about, but in truth I don’t think the guy in question meant any real harm by it. The problem is it was just tragically timed, and interrupting a conversation about objectification. Essentially he was being the poster child of this thing that everyone was talking about being frustrated about… IN the discussion about it. When I called him out on it, he immediately got defensive which is exactly the wrong action to take. If someone calls you out on something in regards to something that is making another person uncomfortable… your reaction should be to re-evaluate this action you just took, not to mount a defense against the “slander”.

After a mountain of back and forth, of Jae and I trying to explain what exactly the transgression was, we get down to the real root of the problem. He quite literally did not care what the conversation was about, and instead felt the need to chime in with his comment. There is this ingrained feeling of the divine right to pass judgment on the appearance of others, made worse by the thought that they should do it against the context of the current conversation. The comment that was made was completely harmless and in the right context would have been perfectly acceptable. However I have seen this play out time and time again… Female friend posts a serious topic, and guys below comment about how pretty she is. Do you not realize just how creepy that seems? The guy in question apparently did not, and he spent awhile raging that we were picking on him for having a penis, completely missing the point. My hope is that by posting about this others might think twice before they interrupt the context of a conversation to essentially objectify the speaker with something completely off topic.

Flamebending for Fun

Last week was a rough week for our raid. We had several people out with the death flu and as a result quite literally half of our healing corp was absent. Early in the day on Thursday it sounded like we were not actually going to raid. After talking to our raid lead, he told me not to worry about rushing home… and instead went out to eat with my wife and ran a few errands. When I got home they were knee deep in Highmaul and I am uncertain what the final results of it were. As a result of not raiding since last Tuesday I was looking forward to hopefully getting back into Blackrock Foundry and making some forward momentum. We started the evening by taking down Hans and Franz. There are a lot of moving parts in that fight, and some RNG elements… but ultimately on our third attempt we got our second kill in the books. My luck with loot in Blackrock was not going to hold however, as I walked away with double gold.

The rest of the evening we spent working on the boss directly after Hans and Franz… Flamebender Ka’graz. She essentially is a blademaster, and as we know blademasters are good at two things… fire based attacks and spinning weapons. There are a bunch of things going on in the fight, the first is dealing with the placement of her flame slash attacks, which draw giant lines from the boss to the edge of the room and will target players outside of melee range. The next problem child is two flame wolves that act much the same as Corehounds in that you have to dps them down within a few minutes of each other, otherwise they will re-ignite the other hound. The last really frustrating attack is that she does a massive room wide fire AOE that players need to stack up for and heal through. We managed to make some solid progress on her, but for whatever reason could not seem to get all the moving parts together. On our best try we managed to get her down to around 30% I believe, but the healing on this fight and the placement of objects ends up with us slowly bleeding players until we simply do not have enough to finish the battle. My hope is with some more research we can come in Thursday and wreck her.

Attempting Neverwinter

If you remember a few days ago I had a post talking about the three games that I would like to revisit. One of them was Neverwinter by Cryptic now Perfect World, so after the raid I fired it up rather than what has become my more recent winding down game… Guild Wars 2. All told I played around 45 minutes of the game, and it was roughly how I remembered it. There are positives about it and negatives… the most glaring is this feeling that everything you actually want is somehow locked behind a confusing two tier currency system. You have Astral Diamonds and you have Zen… and the two do very similar functions. The problem is it feels absolutely arbitrary which currency is used for which thing. Since I was a preorder I got a large quantity of Astral Diamonds, but it seems like the main function of them is to speed up tasks like training your companion. All of the useful unlocks and content walls seem to be purchased with Zen. That whole mess pretty much guarantees that I would never play this game seriously.

What I was surprised by was how fun the actual dungeons were. Granted I didn’t run a “real” five man dungeon last night, but I did do one of the many lairs that the storyline weaves you in and out of. The one I completed was some sort of orc barracks, and considerably larger than the ones I remember. There were no less than three boss fights, and several hidden treasure chests. The only thing that I really disliked about the gameplay was the fact that health did not regenerate. It was something that I could get used to, but it is just so against the norm of the games I play normally. In fact I stood around waiting for awhile waiting before I realized that my health was not coming back at all… at which point I remembered that I had to use health pots. Mechanically the game is interesting, but I still have the same opinion. Elder Scrolls online just does the action combat style better. That said there is a wealth of player generated content, so more than likely I will be spending my time exploring that.

Playing Catch Up

February 17, 2015 by Belghast

Battle Bards Episode 45 – Rock On!

This segment is going to be a little bit odd, because at the time of me writing it the episode has not officially gone live. However I only post once daily, and as such I really would like to get a plug out there for the show. In saying this, the links I am about to post will not go live until 9 am so I will be embargoing my post this morning which is an odd experience for me. On February 7th I had the privilege of sitting in as a guest host on the Battle Bards podcast with the illustrious Syp and Syl. To make things even kookier, they told me that I needed to pick a topic. I went back and forth on a few topics and finally landed upon rock themes in MMO games. Traditionally MMOs seem to have the same auditory palate of instruments and themes. Every now and then however there is a soundtrack that abandons the traditional and brings in some rock guitar. Over the course of the show we focused on these tracks, and I believe it was Syp that finally gave the show its title of “Rock On!”.

I had an absolute blast recording the show, and would be more than willing to step in again if they ever had need of me. Now onwards with the show information.

Episode 45 show notes

Intro (featuring “Blue Turns to Grey” from Tabula Rasa, “Battle on the Big Bridge Reborn” from FFXIV, and “Prologue” from Castlevania SOTN)
“Titan Battle Theme” from FFXIV
“Alonewolf” from Rusty Hearts
“Toko” from Granado Espada
“Character Select/Map Load” from Heroes of the Storm
“New Conglomerate Main Theme” from PlanetSide 2
“Malicia’s Finale” from DDO
“Lucid Dreaming” from Aion
What track did we like the best?
Mail from Akiranon
Outro

Listen to episode 45 now!

Email the Battle Bards!
Special thanks to Tesh for the Battle Bards logo!
Battle Bards is part of The Gaming and Entertainment Network of podcasts

Giving Levels Away

Last night I managed to hit level 71 in Guild Wars 2 and absolutely thought I would never actually get there. In truth I would not have gotten there were it not for the fact that the game seems to be giving away levels every time I turn around. At some point they added the Tome of Knowledge into the game, and double clicking them item grants you one instant level. I am not sure if I am exceptionally lucky, but I seem to be pulling these left and right out of various bags and containers. Last night from my daily login reward chest I pulled two of them for example. I think my meteoric rise in levels is really two fold. First they keep giving me levels, but secondly it seems like everything is quite simply worth a lot more experience. I did a level and a half over the last few days dinking around and completing a level 5 starter zone. I still have about half of the objectives in that zone to go, so I am enjoying the fact that it doesn’t actually seem to matter what I am out in the world doing… just that I am doing something.

At this point I can honestly picture getting up a few more characters, because right now this game seems to be the ideal winding down practice for me. We finished our Final Fantasy XIV raid around 9:30 pm, and I played Guild Wars 2 for another thirty minutes or so after that. At which point I felt relaxed and ready to go to sleep, which has always been a problem for me after any raid experience. When you have been doing exciting things, you have this surplus supply of adrenaline flowing through you, and for me at least I need something much more relaxing to work through all of that. While Guild Wars 2 may never be destined to be my primary game, I am really appreciating its worth in the role it is playing. I am curious to see what life at 80 is going to be like, but I have a feeling that ultimately I will just end up switching to an alt so I can continue the slow paced progression. If nothing else I think it would be pretty awesome to 100% the map.

Playing Catch Up

Monday night is traditionally our more serious raiding night in Final Fantasy XIV with Saturday being a sort of anything goes experience. However since last night we had a number of players hung up on key steps to the main story and other things… we opted to do a grand “catch up” night. We started the evening by knocking out the Battle of Big Bridge for Neph, which is always an extremely fun experience. That is one of those fights that I happily do every single time anyone needs it because getting to play with Gilgamesh is always a treat. From there we knocked out the Dhrome Chimera fight because that was the step Neph happened to be hung up on for her Relic. I remember the first time we did this fight, it took the full raid timer, because quite honestly back then it was a massive challenge. However since then a method of pulling the Chimera out of the cave has become popular and this makes the fight immensely easier. Also the fact that I am insanely over geared helps as well. In any case we got the fight completed quickly and Neph moved on to the next step in her relic chain.

The bulk of the evening was spent working on the Chrysalis trial. This is the road block placed in the path of completing the 2.5 main story arc addition. I don’t want to go into too much detail about the fight, namely because I don’t want to provide any spoilers. There are a couple of places in the fight there where things shift drastically, and you have to begin dealing with a new mechanic. In truth the fight felt like a bit of a remix of some of the raid encounters. There were elements of several fights from the Crystal Tower series especially. I think it took us about five tries to get through the encounter, but I have to say the whole experience was extremely fun. That is one of the best things about Final Fantasy XIV is that their boss encounters are extremely solid. After defeating it, and each of us making it through the cut scene we had around twenty minutes left to do something. As a result we grabbed Solaria and opted to help her get through the Leviathan primal encounter. It was a night of lots of objectives being checked off, and a night of many fun battles.

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