Sixteen Years

Blaugust Begins

At this point the first few blaugust posts are starting to trickle into the nook and I am super pumped that this apparently is going to be a “real” thing.  I have to admit at this point that the inspiration here is from my wife.  During the month of May she decided to try and follow my posting every day tradition, and in the process she gathered up a bunch of math bloggers that also wanted to try it.  While not everyone succeeded in posting something every day, including my wife… it did stir up a lot of new and interesting content in their blogosphere.  Since August is such a dead time normally, my hope was that an event like this would get people moving again and a bunch of interesting stuff would flow as a result.

I had hoped that maybe I would get a couple daring bloggers to take up the challenge, but instead this seems to have developed a life of its own and right now we have over 25 bloggers committing to the daily routine.  If nothing else this is going to be another awesome opportunity for networking and community building.  Some of the best friendships are forged in the fires of shared struggle.  Since the process has begun I now have to device the best possible way to track progress.  Right now I am thinking a google doc spreadsheet, that way I can share out the link to the bloggers.  If I happen to miss giving credit for a post they can correct me, because they can actually look at my tracking mechanism.  I want to thank everyone so far for also posting their posts on the nooks blog.  This is going to make the entire process significantly easier for me.

Sixteen Years

kenzi_conkedout August first has way more significance for me than just the beginning of Blaugust.  Sixteen years ago today my wife and I were married.  If you want to check out the tales of us getting married at the house of vacuums you can see that here, as I talked about it during my factoid february initiative.  There is not a day that goes by that I don’t realize how lucky I am, in that I have found someone compatible with me.  Together we live a pretty damned charmed life if I do say so myself.  As many folks commented during the math conference, we really do make an awesome team and both of us seem to be capable of focusing on the task at hand without getting bogged down in the minutia of it.  We often bicker as we work through problems, but I cannot remember the last time we had an actual “fight” which I guess says a lot for the success of our marriage.

There is also not a morning that goes by where we do not say “I love you” more than a few times.  Granted a good chunk of the time it is simply our single line of text that says “loves”, but inside of that simple word encompasses so much.  Another hallmark of our relationship is that we support each other in pretty much any endeavor.  She is completely supportive of my blogging and podcasting and gaming and streaming… and while she has spent more time than she can probably recall waiting on me to finish something up.  She also totally gets why my guild and my community are so important to me.  She has her own completely separate community, and since I get the importance too, that is why I took time off from work to help with the math conference she organized.  At the end of the day we “get” each other, and that is more than you could ask for in a relationship.  I am truly lucky.  I included a picture of Kenzi conked out on my wife’s lap yesterday because really… is there a reason not to?  My god this kitten is adorable.

Want to Try FFXIV?

ffxiv_07202014_201342 Over the last couple of days there have been a few really cool developments in Final Fantasy XIV.  First off they just announced yesterday that you can now get a free 14 day trial of the game.  If you’ve always wondered what it is like to play, but did not want to plunk down the money to do so…  now is your chance.  I know my friend Calamity Jess had been kicking around the notion of playing and lamented the other day that there was no way to try it out without coughing up the full price.  Now folks have an excellent way to do just that.  Granted there are some severe restrictions on what you can and cannot do.  You can’t join a guild, or pretty much use any of the social communication channels.  I do believe you can join a linkshell however, which I am guessing is precisely what we would do for the various folks trying out the game so that they can have some means of communication.

For those wondered I am located on the Cactuar server, which is one of the most highly populated servers in the game on the Aether Data Center.  For World of Warcraft players, the data center is like the Battlegroup in that when you do the duty finder it pulls from players in that grouping of servers.  If you are a member of the Alliance of Awesome community, a former House Stalwart member, or just a reader of this blog I would be more than happy to have you hanging out on Cactuar.  One thing of note, sometimes Square decides to bar new character creation on Cactuar, so it is best to try and create your characters in the morning or during the day.  During primetime most of the high population servers reach a locked down state.

Lets Be Friends!

In addition to offering free trials of the game, they have now opened up a recruit a friend program.  You are seeing this right, that is in fact a two seater Chocobo… and I want one really badly.  If you end up liking the game and sticking around I would love it if I could recruit you.  The system works similar to most of the other recruit a friend programs and you can read the full details here.  After 30 days of paid subscription both the recruiter and the recruit get a nifty item that increases all experience gain by 20% below the level of 25.  This is kinda huge in that a lot of the rough spots leveling wise happen before 25 when you don’t really have all the bells and whistles for your class.  For example Gladiator is a bit of a slog until level 26 when you pick up the 3rd step in your primary combo Rage of Halone.  Anything to help speed that process up is a massive boon.  Additionally it also increases your craft experience, which in itself is a slog to level.

After 90 days of paid subscription the recruiter gets the spiffy two seater Chocobo mount.  The person being recruited of course gets the normal “veteran” benefits from a paid subscription which in themselves are pretty cool.  As you can see here for 90 days subscription you get 3 pets, a swimsuit, a appearance change potion, and a flying eyeball mount.  They have one of the better veteran rewards programs, because really at each step there is something really cool there.  Right now I have gotten the 180 day step which gives me an awesome pet that summons a warrior of light from final fantasy 1.  I tend to cycle it until I get the black mage, because the FF1 black mage is adorable.  Anyways if you try out the game and want to stick around I would appreciate being given the opportunity to make you a recruit!

Writing Prompts

The first posts are rolling in and folks seem to have plenty of inspiration behind them.  That said I plan on still posting a series of daily prompts to help out those folks who need a little bit of inspiration.

  • What is your proudest gaming accomplishment?  What think took you the longest to complete or required the most skill.  What thing makes you the happiest that you have accomplished.
  • What is your favorite game biome?  Games often have the same kinds of generic climates spread through the zones and levels.  What is your favorite type of climate and why?
  • What is your favorite grouping experience?  Even the most staunch solo artist eventually groups up, what is the best thing that has happened while grouped with other players?

Burn It All Down

Diminishing Returns

Wow-64 2014-02-24 06-17-22-04 This morning I am feeling absolutely horrible.  My lungs have conspired to rebel against me again, and since there is a good chunk of weather on the way this weekend, I am hoping I can get it under control before then.  Yesterday the world was all a twitter about the blog post that Blizzard was going to release at 6 pm PST…  see what I did there?  Twitter was was full of speculations of what this news announcement might mean.  Some predicted the start of Warlords preorders, but eventually Rygarius the coffee bird eventually explained that it was going to be more of a roadmap type post.  With that I believe most of our fearless brits opted to get some sleep and just check it out in the morning.

At least I am really hoping that they ended up getting a good nights sleep, because what ended up posted really did not feel like it was worth staying up until 2 am for.  Don’t get me wrong I am not trying to disparage the blog post itself, but it was not the shock and awe that players were hoping for.  For me personally there were a few things that concerned me.  Firstly the tweaking of the Racial abilities.  I wholeheartedly agree that some racial perks are better than others… however many of us chose to PLAY those races for that reason.  When this goes love will they give everyone a free racial change for each character?  Some of the racial perks that I am personally most attached to are some of the fluff ones.  For example I am still reeling from the loss of Find Treasure on my dwarves…  but not sure how I would feel if we lost Explorer as well.  I mean I fully expect to lose Every Man for Himself, but I would hate to lose the fun traits in the process as well.

The part of the post that worries me the most however is the talk of crowd control.  It starts off with the statement “One other big takeaway from Mists of Pandaria is that there is currently simply too much crowd control (CC) in the game, especially when it comes to PvP.”.  Now are they only talking about removing CC for the purpose of PVP here?  Or is PVE once again getting the shaft for the sake of a game I have no interest in?  I have to say my favorite era of dungeon running was burning crusade, in part because crowd control was absolutely mandatory.  Even in tier 6 gear, you needed to CC or you would die.  The problem with that era however was that crowd control was not distributed equitably, and over the years each class has gotten some form of permanent or temporary crowd control.  Problem is the dungeon design has just not required doing anything other than smashing into objects with your face repeatedly.

My hope was with the return to Draenor, and the focus on heroics as a way to gear up for raiding…  that we would see a return to this more strategic era of dungeoning.  However if they feel that Pandaria had too much CC…  and by that I mean no one CC’d anything at all EVER…  it gives me great concern for what dungeons might look like going ahead.  Maybe I am coming off a bit half cocked here, since they did qualify the statement with PVP, but the diminishing returns changes would keep a fight like the PVP encounter in Crusaders Coliseum from really being viable in the future.  The one thing I did notice they left completely off the list of diminishing returns mentions…  taunt.  This was honestly the secret to us beating the crusaders coliseum fight, that the tanks would swap off taunting the hardest hitting mobs and kite them around.  A druid taunt, warrior taunt, deathknight taunt and paladin taunt all had unique diminishing returns stacks, so we could swap targets to keep them tied up.

Burn It All Down

As a programmer, I read these changes in a completely different light… because I have been them before.  When you get dropped into a situation where you have some severely outdated code, the knee jerk reaction is to burn everything to the ground and build it from scratch.  This reaction is in part because no one still exists that remembers why the code worked the way it did.  This is what this current phase of Blizzard development feels like.  No one remembers why they had hit and expertise and all these other things…  so lets just simplify everything and get rid of all things that are not strictly needed.  As a programmer I totally get this, because it feels like they are trying to minimize the variables that they have to deal with.

I figure at this point there has been a prodigious amount of turnover in the folks that are working day in and day out on World of Warcraft.  The guy that wrote this or that code is simply not around any longer to explain why exactly he named that variable “Football” when it is just passing data around.  My fear is that in this minimalistic approach we are going to lose some of the things that make Warcraft feel like Warcraft.  I am trying my best not to fall into “change is bad” mode, but in many ways the sequence of changes feels like knocking down a 300 year old building, to put up a mini-mart.  Maybe I will be wrong, and maybe the end result will feel fresh and shiny… in the same way that Diablo 3 2.0 has felt for me.  At this point… you can just file all of this in a bin called “concerns”.

Fun With Demons

Diablo III 2014-02-27 19-29-26-32 Last night my friends and I continued our trek through the demon infested realm of Diablo 3.  The big thing we have noticed is that the game gives players insane catch up experience when the level ranges are not even.  This accounts for how I went from 37 to 50 in a night, because most of the players were significantly higher level than that.  Last night the experience curve flattened significantly, so during the course of the evening I managed to go from 50 to 58 before I just felt too lousy to continue.  As a result however I am knocking at the door of 60 and have no doubts that I will finish off leveling my monk before the expansion.  Granted most of this weekend will be spent in Tamriel playing with the multitude of folks who are getting in for the weekend test.

Diablo III 2014-02-27 22-13-29-27 We managed to get a second puzzle ring, so for most of the evening both myself and my friend Warenwolf were running around with our treasure goblin pets.  We managed to get a ton of legendaries, but oddly enough I got three different versions of the same item… the Saffron Wrap.  Apparently the game thinks I need a lot of belts… maybe it knows that I actually only have one in real life… that I keep punching new holes in as I lose weight.  The score of the night came from when we beat Belial.  There were several points through the night where we learned just how impressive “ignores durability loss” can be, as we took a number of chain deaths to freezing, poison bomberman, electrical orb mobs.  The sad part of the evening however is that I no longer have my ghostly fallen champion pet, because I reached the point where I absolutely had to upgrade out of that axe.

The Final Factoid

Well as I was reminded by my wife, today is the final factoid.  I have somehow made it through an entire month of writing these.  As a result I think it is fitting that I close this factoid off with one relating to the purpose of this entire month.  I do not like writing about myself, at least I do not like talking about personal details.  Talking about gaming is a space of comfort for me, and I have no problem discussing me the gamer…  but I always shy away from talking about me the person behind the screen.  I guess in a way I feel like what I have to say about myself is pretty boring, and the more people know about me…  the more likely they are to reject me as a friend.  I grew up as an “only child”, and we lived just far enough out of the city limits to greatly limit the number of kids I had to play.

For years I craved having someone else to be there and play with, and that craving has carried through to my gaming life.  I end up trying to collect people into my little digital family.  I have deep anti-social tendencies that I struggle with, but online I can have just as much interaction with someone as I want, but then still be able to shut down the game, or twitter and walk away and have seclusion time as well.  2013 was a year of great personal growth for me.  I completed NaNoWriMo, started the daily blogging thing and ended up losing 70 pounds.  In a way Factoid February was a way of trying to get used to opening up and talking more about myself and my life in my blog.  For the most part I think it has worked, and I did manage to complete the month writing something new each day.  There were times I had to sit and think for quite a bit before deciding what to write about, but I struggled through.

The odd thing is… it seems as though people have enjoyed it.  Looking through the blog statistics, it seems as though my average daily readership has increased a bit during the month of February.  I am not sure if this is in part because I am writing more personally… or if I have just gotten more exposure thanks to the amazing folks who regularly retweet me like @RowanBlaze and @AlternativeChat.  It gives me huge fuzzies when I see people are reading what I have written, but I have to say at this point… even if I had zero readers I would likely keep doing whatever it is I am doing.  I find the process of waking up in the morning and dumping my thoughts onto the page while drinking my coffee amazingly therapeutic.  On the weekends when I am forced to vary my schedule a bit, the day just does not seem entirely right… until I have done my blog purge.  I want to thank all of you for coming along with me on this journey.  Not entirely certain where I am going next, maybe more features…  maybe more of the same, but I appreciate that you all are on the ride with me.

Everything You Loved, Just Better

The Beauty of a Patch

Diablo III 2014-02-26 18-50-24-23 This past Tuesday we finally got the ever amazing patch 2.0.1 in Diablo 3 bringing us a slew of promised Reaper of Souls changes.  The first of these was something that I had yearned for since release…  a decent social system with the ability to form guilds.  While they call them clans, we have the basic structure now to build House Stalwart inside of Diablo 3 as well.  This was one of the first things we did Tuesday after the servers came back up, and now many of us proudly sport the <HS> beside our names.  It is funny how much more enjoyable the game is for me to see happy green spam from my guildies as they get cool stuff out in the world.  That second it takes to say the obligatory gratz changes the feeling of the game entirely for me.

Additionally there is now a functionality called Communities, which are in a sense a big chat channel.  It functions in many of the same ways as a guild, in that you can see who is online that is a member of the community for easier grouping.  My only real complaint here is that you have to manually join the community chat each time you log in.  I am really hoping they fix this so that you can toggle certain communities on.  Tuesday night we also created the Alliance of Awesome community, and it is now out there open for the public to join.  We have a few people in it, and last night I noticed that Scopique created a Combat Wombat guild, since he was sporting the <CWBT> clan tag.  So the functionality seems to be working well, sub clans but one big community.

Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys

Diablo III 2014-02-26 20-25-36-15One of the biggest changes we have seen so far is that the loot is much better.  Not only do we get more usable loot, with far more interesting statistics, but since the patch went live we are seeing more “legendaries”.  Last night I found what has to be the coolest one yet.  The Puzzle Ring, when equipped summons a treasure goblin pet that follows you around.  As you kill things he runs over and “eats” any white quality items that happen to drop.  Upon eating the thirteenth item in this fashion he drops something good on the ground.  I only had this actually happen twice during the play, but each time it was simply a yellow item.  However as the item says there is a chance of this being a legendary.  At this point I cannot see a reason why I would ever get rid of this ring.  I mean even if I got something significantly better stat wise, the effect and the coolness of having my own personal treasure goblin makes up for it.  The only problem is when we fight an ACTUAL treasure goblin, I maybe… sometimes… get confused and try and attack the pet instead of the real thing.

Diablo III 2014-02-26 20-49-29-45 So the puzzle ring was amazing, but the cavalcade of awesome didn’t stop there.  A little bit later after downing the butcher, I managed to get a legendary one-hander to drop.  Now just stats alone, it was better than anything I had…  but once again it is the special effect that makes it truly great.  While using this weapon there is a chance to summon a ghostly Fallen Champion, and while I don’t have any stats on this… it happens a lot.  It took us a bit to realize exactly what was happening, but my ghostly buddy seemed to help speed up our kills significantly.  At this point I have managed to pick up better damage weapons, but I am rocking this is my offhand just for the procs… which seem to make up the gap.  At some point I will pass this off to my Barbarian or Crusader, because it really is rather good. 

Everything You Loved, Just Better

Diablo III 2014-02-26 22-44-30-56 So last night I spent most of the night running around in either a three man or a four man group.  I don’t even know what difficulty we were playing on, but I know we ratcheted up a few times from normal.  Around 7 pm I was sitting at 37, and at 10:30 when we stopped playing I had just dinged 50.  The experience gain for grouping has significantly improved, and if we do another night of this I have no doubt that I will get my first Diablo 3 character to the present level cap.  A few months ago… I was deeply uncertain if this would happen before the expansion actually landed.  Everything about Diablo 3 just feels “fresher”, like the world has a shiny coat of paint… and in part this is the magic of finally getting meaningful drops.  Also there is the side benefit that the crafting system finally makes a marginal amount of sense.  So many things have been tweaked to make far more sense… like condensing all the flavors of heal pot into one… and making them stack to 100.

I still dislike click to move as a control scheme, but it feels as though the hours I have spent playing League of Legends has improved my dexterity at doing so.  While I still die a lot to standing in the stupid…. and man we got some seriously bad combinations of stupid at the same time…  there seems to be a far greater chance that I will come through it all successfully.  There were a few times last night where I ended up kiting mobs around when I was by myself, and were not for the little bit of experience I have laning in LoL… I never would have survived.  Granted I am still pretty freaking horrible at laning, but it has made me a much better Diablo player just in the bit I have done.  Hopefully tonight we can push our little team of characters to 60 and start gaining some Paragon levels.

Belghast the Altar Boy

I was raised Catholic in a very protestant area of the world, and this was an area for confusion during most of my childhood.  I still remember one day in elementary school one of the southern Baptist children coming up to me and asking me “why I don’t believe in god”.  Idiocy like that aside, I have never been very “religious” and at this point I am not a practicing anything.  I can’t even attest to having something that you could quantify as a formal doctrine of beliefs…  I mostly just spend my time trying to be a good person… and winging it.  However as any good catholic should be… I was an Altar Boy.  No this is not the beginning of a priest sex abuse tale, because really my priest was one of the coolest people I have ever known.  He would probably be classified as a heretic, but he was the first person that told me it was okay to question  my beliefs.

The funny thing about being an Altar Boy is that forever will it color the way you feel about the heart of the Catholic church… the Mass.  Before they started with the incense crap recently, forcing to simply not attend Christmas Eve Mass… I did so every year to appease my mother…  who refuses to believe that I am not a “good little catholic boy”.  Even to this day, I can hear certain phrases in the Mass, and immediately feel the instinct to do something… like walk over to pick up this thing, or move to this area of the altar.  As an Altar Boy you learn this oddly choreographed dance to prove the priest whatever he needs before he actually needs it.  I use the term “Altar Boy” but in truth our parish was pretty progressive and had plenty of “Altar Girls” as well.  The priest claimed that we simply didn’t have enough people, but in truth I think he just enjoyed shaking things up a bit.

I really don’t miss much about being a practicing Catholic.  We were a satellite parish attached to a significantly larger one, and as such we shared the same priest.  So each Sunday morning at 7 am he would come to our church, perform mass and then return to do the several masses there as well throughout the day.  Seven in the morning seemed like the ass crack of dawn to me as a kid, and while I write each morning at 6 am… it doesn’t mean I am actually fully verbal until about 9.  I do however miss the priest, he has long since retired but he really was a deeply interesting man.  Once upon a time in another life he was a fairly successful commercial artist, working for an advertising agency.  For reasons I never asked him, he decided to give that life up and enter the priesthood.  I always got the impression there was quite a bit of sex, drugs and rock and roll… and he just tired of the life and wanted something more meaningful.  So much of my outlook on life comes from this man being the first person who told me that religion was a deeply personal thing, and it was natural and in fact encouraged for me to question things and figure out my own path.

Playing With Dolls

Goodbye to Justice

Yesterday the ever amazing Qelric posted an interesting video surmising that Justice and Valor points may be on the way out.  This of course was a conclusion drawn based on various tidbits of information that has been released over the last few days.  I don’t think Blizzard is terribly happy with the current Justice/Valor situation, but in truth I think this is mostly because over the last couple of expansions they have lost sight on why it existed in the first place.  The pinnacle of the system “working as intended” I feel arrived during Wrath of the Lich King.  At that point if you were completely unlucky in getting the right dungeon drops, you could save up and eventually buy even set pieces with this “consolation currency”.

Sure it also modified how we viewed gear, since only certain pieces could be bought with valor but generally speaking you could get a two piece bonus with the current tier without actually having to rely on raid drops.  I did not play much during the cataclysm era, so I cannot really recall how the system worked then, but during Pandaria it has changed into something mostly useless.  The gear you can get with Valor is a much watered down version of what you can get through even the latest tier of LFR.  As a result Valor has become a currency almost exclusively reserved for spending on item upgrades.  So quite honestly… I don’t think the valor/item upgrade system is really working as intended either.

I feel like right now Blizzard is going through a lot of growing pains, in part due to the fact that there has been a fairly constant changing of the guards when it comes to decision making.  I feel like we are seeing a classic case of “I don’t know what the original intent was, so lets just get rid of it.”  As a programmer I completely understand this, since if you look at some code and you cannot fully grasp what is going on, the instinct is just to gut it and replace it with something that does make sense to you.  As a result we are seeing a lot of these “re-writes” going on, tanking stats not working the way we want them… lets get rid of them.  Juctice/Valor mutated in purpose over the last few expansions… well lets get rid of that too.  I feel Justice points used to fill a niche that was highly needed in the game, so my hope is that we can return to the way things worked during Wrath.

Massive ESO Beta Weekend

eso 2014-02-17 13-53-20-16 For those who do not know already, this weekend there will be another massive beta test weekend over in The Elder Scrolls Online.  They have also announced that by participating in the testing you will be eligible for an in game Monkey pet at release.  Millions of beta keys have been sent out at this point, and most of them came with a buddy key attached.  So hopefully all of you that are reading this will be in this weekends testing.  I have my public beta client tested up and will be popping in to hang out with you all.  If you are playing this weekend feel free to throw @Belghast a friend invite.  You can do friends lists in two ways, either you can friend a specific character or you can friend the root account identifier.  They follow twitter like syntax so prepend all account invites with the @ symbol.

I believe that weekend testers will be able to see first hand the new starter experience, as well as the new collision detection.  This is something that had been in the works for awhile, but since it had also been a major weekend test complaint they were able to get the collision detection in before launch.  Essentially now you can no longer run through NPCs, enemies and other players in PVE settings.  This has been disabled for PVP however since managing collision detection with hundreds of players in the same area becomes problematic.  Additionally and some of my readers will appreciate it, what were essentially Midi tracks have been replaced with the full orchestral equivalents.  The game feels and sounds amazing.

I have a spare buddy key that I would love it to go to one of my readers.  So if you are interested in testing this weekend, and do not mind downloading a roughly 30 gig beta client…  post in the comments and we will figure out a way to get you the key.  I think most everyone I know already has access to this test, and I look forward to seeing them all over the weekend.

Playing With Dolls

Yesterday my good friend @Gypsy_Syl posted the above video to twitter in response to another friend.  Without really meaning to, she helped to pick out today’s factoid.  As a kid I played with dolls, in fact I owned a Barbie and a Ken doll and eventually down the line a Cabbage Patch doll as well.  I am thankful that my father didn’t make a big deal about it, and I obviously grew up no more scarred than any other kid is by their childhood choices.  In part a good chunk of it is likely that I was “mostly” raised by women.  My mom and dad were busy working all of the time, so my caretaker and playmate was my Grandmother, where I spent most of my early years.  Next door there was a little neighbor girl, that became my best friend and constant companion.

So instead of forcing the issue and playing Gi-Joe or Star Wars, I just went with the flow and played whatever she wanted to play.  While Crystal was not really a “doll” type, my cousin most definitely was.  So I can remember playing barbies and strawberry shortcake and whatever else she wanted to play.  At this young age I just got used to relating to women, and even today I am far more comfortable in the kitchen come holiday time than sitting around the living room having to pretend to know anything at all about sports.  While I am 6’4” and have a mountain man beard and can generally pass as one… I am most definitely not the “manly man” archetype.  So when it comes to long-term friendships, I tend to flock to either women or other guys like me that are not drenched in an overabundance of testosterone.

One of the things that frustrates me is that gender is associated with toys in the first place.  The whole topic of boys playing with dolls started when another friend, @MMOGC mentioned that it was impossible to find pictures of girls playing with train sets.  I have encountered the problem myself when dealing with Lego sets.  It is damned near impossible to find Lego sets that include female minifigs.  My niece has decided she is into lego, and while she is a huge fan of the “Friends” line of mutant minfigures… I am trying to also provide as many cool normal minifigs as I can in the process.  While they exist freely in the minifigures packs, it is almost impossible to buy a Lego City set and see a woman performing any role there.  Why can’t there be Women Fire Fighters or Police or hell… even Sanitation workers?  Somewhere over the years it was decided apparently that Lego was a “boy toy”, and while there are “pink” Legos, they simply do not have the same variety as the normal kind.  However I am still going to do my best to support the habit of building and creating things, even if it means the really cool stuff is harder to find.