MixTape Mondays: Semi-Charmed Panic Attack

Good Morning Friends! I hope you are all having an excellent Monday out there in internetland. For those of you who might be stumbling onto this as your first visit, I do this thing every Monday where I post a new MixTape pulled from some of my musical tastes. I was one of those kids that made MixTapes for my friends or as a poor substitute for flirtation. There is a certain artform to placing songs in a very specific sequence in order to create a whole that is greater than any of its parts. I’ve missed this process and decided to revitalize it for you my readers. Again like my blog posts in general, I am sorta sending this out into the void and hoping that someone out there might get some enjoyment from this particular brand of nonsense.

Semi-Charmed Panic Attack

There is this particular moment in music that feels like it gets overlooked. Between Grunge and the more punk inspired stylings of Blink-182 there was this music scene that I find it hard to really define. It makes me think of college and the early days of trying to figure out how to be something resembling an adult. I attempted to reach back into that era and pull out a cohesive soundtrack to represent it. There was this weird thing going on where the songs were still peppy sounding, but the lyrical journey that was happening behind them was pretty damned depressing. I’m also abusing my powers to expose you to two excellent Tulsa area bands: Caroline’s Spine and Mollys Yes.

  • The Way – Fastball
  • Everything You Want – Vertical Horizon
  • Attention Please – Caroline’s Spine
  • Promise – Eve 6
  • Sugar – Mollys Yes
  • Load Me Up – Matthew Good Band
  • Father of Mine – Everclear
  • Semi-Charmed Life – Third Eye Blind
  • One Man Army – Our Lady Peace
  • Rain King – Counting Crows
  • Good Intentions – Toad The Wet Sprocket
  • Til I Hear It From You – Gin Blossoms
  • Get Off This – Cracker
  • Closing Time – Semisonic

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

And there we have it friends, another MixTape Monday in the bag. I had honestly been a bit concerned that I might be out of inspiration given that I had burned through all of my pre-made MixTapes last week. Then this weekend happened and I crafted no less than five brand new ones for the coming weeks as well as a handful of idea fragments kicking around in my head. Also of note if you are tuning in late you can view the entire archive of the past nine weeks at:

AggroChat #249 – A Subnautical Tale

Tonight we start the show missing several people and then Kodra sneaks in while recording and claims to have been there all along.  We start out with a discussion of the Windows 11 announcement and the odd requirements it seems are going to be required to upgrade into it.  From there we talk about Grace’s adventures with Subnautica: Below Zero which I legitimately thought was an expansion pack and not a whole new game.  Bel talks about the trend of WoW personalities switching to Final Fantasy XIV and the videos associated with them.  We talk a bit about MMORPG Tycoon 2 and Lum’s delightful tweet thread making us want to play it.  Bel talks about his nonsense setup and how Sony Remote Play is so much better with a PS5…  and how TMACDev REPL4Y is even better than that.  Finally we close out the show with some talk about Ratchet and Clank and Kodra’s observations given this is his first game in that series.

Topics Discussed

  • Windows 11 Announcement
    • Leaked Build
    • Scalping TPM Modules
  • Subnautica: Below Zero
    • What a difference a story makes
  • WoW personalities playing FFXIV
    • The “quitting wow for ffxiv” video trend
    • What has lead to this point
    • Medieval Marty
  • Lum plays MMORPG Tycoon 2
    • Make bad MMOs for fun and profit
  • Sony Remote Play
    • Better on PS5
    • TMACDev REPL4Y
  • Ratchet and Clank Observations

Don Corneo and Remote Play

I exist in a very odd space when it comes to gaming, or at least my gaming habits are less than average. Much of what comes with console gaming takes for granted that you would be playing said games in a comfortable couch based set up. That is not the case for me however because the screens that are “mine” and not considered communal space are up in my office. I’ve always felt like I couldn’t exactly commandeer the Livingroom television for the hours that gaming would require, when my wife might want to be watching some program downstairs or just basking in the silence and reading. When I am hanging out downstairs it generally means I am on a laptop with headphones.

This has generally meant that in practice I end up playing a lot fewer console games because it is just easier to remote control my gaming desktop upstairs and play PC games through either Parsec or Moonlight. In the past I have tried using the PlayStation Remote Play app and even an unofficial Remote Play app to varying degrees of success. Though as I sit down and write this article it looks like the second option has changed drastically and probably deserves a revisit. Basically the problem that I ran into is that the baseline PlayStation 4 that I had ultimately has fairly slow wireless and was limited to 720p game streaming… which looked and felt awful.

Since getting the PlayStation 5, I have to admit there have just not been a ton of games that I felt like I could play through remote control. Ratchet and Clank for example… has just enough input lag to make it exceptionally difficult to time some things. Playing Final Fantasy VII Remake however seems to be just fine given that most of the inputs are not exactly twitch oriented. I did struggle a bit with a puzzle that required me to pressurize a valve and then do another action extremely quickly to seal in the pressure. However for the most part I spent last night chilling on the sofa happily playing PS5 through my laptop with a Dualshock 4 connected.

I’ve now made it through the entire Don Corneo/Wall Market story arc and I am not back in Sector 7. I have no clue how much more there is to go in “Remake” but I feel like I have to be circling in on the end of the game at this point. It is going to be really weird to reach the end… knowing that the story is so far from over. I’ve been pretty pleased with how the story has gone and Cloud is finally starting to grow a heart. There are events that I know are coming… but I am curious to see how they play out. This mornings post however is mostly me re-exploring Remote Play with the PlayStation 5. I do need to investigate what became of TMACDEV and the new REPL4Y product. Previously it had way less input lag than the official offering so I want to give it a test and see how that goes.

FF7R and Console Screenshot Hell

Morning Friends, there is more than a bit of irony in that I got this sweet sweet gaming rig for my birthday, and for the last several nights all it has been doing is operating my second monitor while I play PS5 on the main screen. Confession time… I never actually got around to finishing Final Fantasy VII Remake, which I guess shouldn’t be much of a surprise given how many other titles lay unfinished around me. There has been a recent perfect storm of events that has gotten me interested in wrapping things up. Firstly the PlayStation 5 version with slightly prettier graphics was released and then more recently the Yuffie DLC pack dropped. While I get that you can play it completely independent of the main story, I still want to finish the first game before diving into anything further.

However before we get there it is time for a brief intermission. If you have read my blog for awhile, you will know one of the hallmarks of said blog is that I use screenshots to break up the blocks of text. This means I need a pretty steady supply of screenshots to fill that role. It is a colossal pain in the ass to pull screenshots from a console and this really needs to be remedied. Essentially you have two options… both of which require a certain measure of pre-planning. The easiest option is to post them on a social media account and I have @BelghastShots that exists exclusively for this purpose. The option that preserves image quality is to drag out a thumb drive and copy the images there and then “sneakernet” them to your PC.

What we need instead is for the console vendors to implement a DLNA server that would allow access to screenshots, recorded video and frankly any purchased media that you have on that console across a network that could be consumed by any other DLNA devices. DLNA stands for “Digital Living Networking Alliance” and is a set of standards that are designed to ensure interoperability between devices in sharing media and streams. I use this constantly with my chosen server platform called Plex to allow any devices on my network to consume media from my server. In theory until the PlayStation 5… Sony was implementing part of this set of protocols because on PS3 and PS4 I could view things from my Plex Server.

The problem is no one seems to do this natively. Windows has had DLNA built in since at least Windows 7 yet Microsoft has never built this same support into Xbox Consoles. Many console revisions can consume a media server, but to the best of my knowledge none of them are capable of serving up their own feed. While leaves me at least annoyed and having to jump through hoops to dump files from the console. I mean I get that console platforms are scared to death that any protocol access will give someone a way to pirate games, because this has absolutely happened in the past. However it sucks that this thirteen year old solution that is pretty ubiquitously implemented by media having devices… is a non starter for consoles.

Back to the PS5 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I am having a blast and the game is freaking gorgeous. I have to say this might claim the “favorite final fantasy” game title for me. I really enjoy the combat system and how it feels like gear matters a bit… but also it is mostly just excellent smashy combat time. I think this more than anything is why I am at least passingly interested in “Not-Final-Fantasy-1”. The other nice thing about this play through is FF7 was never really one of my favorites in the series. It was good, but I played it on the PC originally and was going through a renaissance of PC gaming which it struggled to stand out from. I’ve also never replayed the original so the story feels fresh to me and I can’t honestly tell you all of the subtle tweaks that the game is making so far.

I’ve hit the Wall Market section of the game… which seems to be keyed for a different kind of humor than is drift compatible with my own. I think the area looks really cool but I am ready to be done with it. I finished fighting my way through the Coliseum and am now running around town doing various errands for folks. If I have any complaint about the game… the errand boy sections that perforate each of the sections of focused action maybe drag on a bit. I get that this is the time when you would normally level up before the next battle, but I seem to be flying through levels so fast that it isn’t really a problem so far. I seem to always have plenty of money and plenty of experience for whatever the next thing I am supposed to tackle.

The only thing I would change if I could… is to make Cloud be less of a general stick in the mud. Cloud is the Carth Onasi of Final Fantasy characters and I get this is designed to make us feel his character growth, but I do wish I could make him be a little nicer to poor Aerith. She is trying so hard and he is pure butts. Like all of the stuff with with the children was pretty adorable… even though the NPCs in this game have weird faces. I especially like the “Moogle” and I am so down with interacting with this character some more. FF7R has been a pretty delightful way to unwind in the evenings because I am still averaging 10 hour days right now.