awesome Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

An Innocent Start

Most strange happenings on the internet begin with a rather innocuous start. I was discussing handwriting with @tsundereikemen and I decided to create a hand written note to show off my rather messy all caps writing. Then I happened to go directly into a meeting for roughly an hour. When I got out.. my twitter feed had completely blown up with people returning my greeting in their own hand written style. Yesterday I joked about Sigtric coining the hashtag “BelEffect” so he was immediate to point out that it was happening again. Of course I had to share this sudden madness with the world, because folks had no idea what I was talking about. I lost a few followers in my flurry of re-tweets, but screw it this was worth it. The “happening” was enough happiness to buffer any frustrations for the rest of the day.

The awesome thing is… I posted a second note some time later to adequately explain my feelings about the whole event… and it started up again adding several more notes to the mix. This silly thing is the reason why my twitter feed is so damned great. You guys can somehow manage to take a boring work day and turn it into a magical experience by tweeting a bunch of hand written notes. I always love seeing someone’s handwriting no matter how unkempt it might be… because embedded in those strokes and swooshes are a persons personality. So thank you all for participating in this little experiment… it was neither original nor that unique, but it was most definitely not something I expected to start yesterday. If you want to check out all of the images, I will be attempting to insert a gallery below.

Rough Raid Night

Not all raid nights can be amazing… in fact every now and then you can have a down right shitty one. Last night was one of these nights, and that is just something that is going to happen now and then. It seems like half of the world is sick with something right now, and last night it claimed two of our primary healers. This put us going into the night at a pretty big handicap, one that we never quite made up for. Ithato is freaking awesome for stepping in and trying to hold things together, and he fought valiantly. The problem is it just wasn’t quite enough. He was not quite as geared as the healers we lost, and had not been raiding with us all this time… so was having to learn the boss strategies on the fly. On top of these, the raid itself was just not quite what it should have been. I feel like the evidence was the fact that Teamspeak was deathly silent, which is not a usual thing. When we are doing well we are chatty and happy and picking on Rylacus, but last night… no one was talking at all.

We started off trying Gruul but after a half dozen wipes realized we didn’t quite have what it took last night to down it. From there we moved back to Highmaul Heroic, and managed to down Kargath and Butcher before hitting a similar wall on Brakenspore. We finally called the night, hoping to regroup on Thursday and see what we can do. If the gods bless us, we will have back the two healers that were absent and hopefully be back in fighting form. If not… it isn’t the end of the world if we can’t quite progress for a week. We are not exactly the most cutting edge and serious of group, and I think every now and then it is a good thing for us to be reminded of that. The health and well being of our players is worth more than our forward momentum, and I am thankful we have a raid leader that sees that… instead of angrily grinding us into the ground. I love my raid, even when we “wipe like nubs”.

Hunting Pearls

Since the raid was a wash, I opted to log into Final Fantasy XIV and work on my weekly Crystal Tower quest. With this last patch and the entrance of the World of Darkness casual raid, they introduced a quest to do all three dungeons and collect pearls and turn them back in at a quest giver in Mor Dhona. Since I had a bit of time I queued up for Labyrinth of the Ancients and was pleasantly surprised at just how smoothly it went. Normally there are wipes around every corner, but I guess at this point folks are trying to complete the quest, and as such are far over geared for the place. I lost every roll on any of the cosmetic gear, but was in and out of the raid quickly enough for me to contemplate running Syrcus Tower as well. Unfortunately it did not go quite as smoothly as Labyrinth, and we suffered some pretty massive wipe fests. That said folks silently struggled through and we managed to clear it still within thirty minutes of starting.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your take… I had completely World of Darkness collecting its pearl on Monday night, but not running the other other two. As a result I was able to turn in the quest and get my Carboncoat. This allows you to “un-weather” any of the Poetics accessories turning them into ilvl 130 items. Unfortunately I am not sure how to get Carbontwine the item needed to do the same for the Ironworks armor pieces, other than the extremely grindy method of turning in 6 Unstained Mark Logs. I think I will likely wait for 2.55 since it is more than likely that they will let World of Darkness start dropping both Carboncoat and Carbontwine just like Syrcus Tower drops Oil of Time and Sands of Time. It is unlikely that we will be raiding anything bleeding edge enough for me to need to be level 130 geared. In any case my running around in Final Fantasy XIV while chatting with the Free Company made the evening seem a tad bit less dismal, which I guess is what ultimately mattered. Hopefully we will regroup on Thursday and kick some ass to make up for the rather crummy Tuesday.

Cheat Day

One of the rules of the “Grand Experiment” has been that I would sit down each morning and write a blog post. A lot of my friends in the blogosphere write their content at their leisure and stage the publishing at a date of their choosing. There is technically nothing wrong with this practice, but the entire idea behind the experiment, was to force myself to write every day. So as a result I have always considered it cheating to do what I am doing right now… writing a topic the night before I intend to post it. These lofty ideals are one thing, but every now and then real life throws me for a loop. Generally speaking on the weekend my posts end up being considerably later because sometimes I have to accommodate life in the process.

However our weekend plans have been altered quite a bit and as a result my wife and I are carpooling together tomorrow. This means that I won’t really have my traditional “drink coffee slowly and contemplate the universe” time in the morning… or at least I won’t be able to faff about as much as I normally do. So as a result I am admitting to my “blatant cheatery” up front and hoping you won’t mind terribly much that you are getting a slightly stale topic by the time I post it tomorrow morning. I could have lied to you, and posted this without you really knowing the difference… but I am always willing to admit my failings freely.

Thumper Logic

One of the things that I have not talked about much is that the Grand Experiment is far more for me than just writing every single day. It has also been an effort to surround myself with as many positive influences as I can, and limit the amount of negativity I have in my life. I am not just trying to bury my head in the sand. I assure you that I see just as many negative things on a daily basis as anyone, I am a pessimist by nature. However I had noticed that the more negativity I surrounded myself in, the more negative I became and as a result the more unhappy I was. You know how they say “fake it until you make it”, well it turns out it works pretty well for being happy as well. If you can’t be happy, adopt the trappings of being happy until I actually sinks in.

In addition to trying to limit my exposure to negativity… which means I pretty much stop reading game forums when they exit the alpha and beta phases… I have been trying really hard not to write many “rant” posts. In doing so I have realized just how unbalanced and ranty the world seems to have become. If you look at the popular review sources, it seems as though we absolutely love to hate video games. There are popular youtube personalities that I have never seen give a single game a positive review, however people line up to watch them. I am sure that the occasional video like this is funny, but after awhile it changes into something else. IT feels like these reviewers are trying to enact their revenge on an industry they believe has “wronged them” somehow.

People Want Different Things

Yes I am in fact breaking this image out again. It is perfectly okay for you to not like something, but just because you don’t like a thing does not mean it is immediately “bad”. I may not have enjoyed War and Peace… but that does not make it any less of a classic. Sure there are of course the occasional game that are horrible in an academic sense… I am looking at you Superman 64, but these are really rather rare. If a game comes out and at least one person enjoys it then I cannot really call it a “bad” game. There are games that are a financial failure, but that is a completely different line of discussion. Over the last few years it has become extremely “cool” to hate everything, and a lot of this was ushered in by the “hipster” movement. If you read the reviews of games, you would have the impression that the industry is doing horribly and making nothing but utter crap. However they seem to be making more money than ever, in part because very few people who consume these games actually pay attention to internet reviews.

At this point I am just too damned old to care much about looking cool on the internet. I feel no shame in gushing about the things I am really enjoying, and just glossing over the things I don’t so much enjoy. Over the weekend I appeared on the Game On podcast, and eventually the topic came around to Wildstar a game I really don’t like very much. I had a few options of where to go with my commentary. I could of course have spun up a mighty rant that would nuke the game into oblivion from orbit. Instead I chose to share my reservations, but also talk about a few of the things that I thought the game was doing right. It is your choice as a player, or a blogger, or a youtuber to either dwell on the good parts or the bad parts. Right now I am making the conscious choice to look for the good in both people and games, and so far I am much happier for doing it.

The Curse of the Fanboy

I hope it feels so good to be right.
There is nothing more exhilarating
than pointing out the shortcomings
of others, is there? – Randall

One of the worst curses you can give to another gamer is to call them a Fanboy, because it immediately belittles anything they may or may not have to say in response to your criticism. I guess my question is, why aren’t we all “Fanboys” over something. For the majority of us, gaming is our hobby, and even in those for whom it is a job… at one point or another it was also their hobby as well. We are all geeks here, cut from the same core fabric even if we claim to not acknowledge it. We all love games, more deeply than any of us would ever care to admit. At least at some basic level we all have to admit that games are absolutely magical. They can bring us to tears, make us laugh, and cause us to plunk down another $60 like a junkie in search of a fix. If we do all of these things, then why the hell SHOULDN’T we love it, and be more than happy to raise our hands high and yell “FUCK YES I’M A FANBOY”.

I love games, or I wouldn’t be spending each and every morning writing about them. Sure you get a fair dose of my personal shenanigans and that of my friends… but this is a gaming blog devoted to my love and obsession of video games. I am not trying to make games better than they are, because they seem to be just as good today at getting me to spend countless hours a night playing them than they were when I was a child. Sure I hold up certain games like Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past or Castlevania: Symophony of the Night on a pedestal, but my love of those games should not somehow tarnish something that doesn’t do the same thing as those games did.

What gets lost in the shuffle is the people behind the games that folks all too often want to tear down. No one goes into a game trying to build something that the players will hate. Each and every one of them has lost sleep at night trying to make the best possible game within the constraints they were given. Just as I started writing about games because I love them, they all aspired to be part of this industry that quite frankly has some pretty shitty conditions placed upon them. No child says that they want to grow up to work in an industry that is ultimately thankless and will more so make large segments of the fan base revile you. I am just waiting for it to be acceptable to like something again without someone else feeling the need to put you down for doing so.

Cast of the Aggrochat

I feel like I got a little preachy during the course of this post, but it is really how I feel. I am going to unabashedly love things, until I don’t then move on to other things that I love equally well. So far I feel like my mission of being more positive has paid off. I am surrounded by some pretty amazing friends, and I feel so thankful to have all of you supporting me on a daily basis. While I have a deep protective streak, which leads me to play all the tank classes that I end up playing… I feel no need anymore to protect you from what I deem a “bad game”. You might see me wax philosophical about how I don’t quite grasp a game, but that is coming from a place of wanting to learn what people see in it… and not from a place of hatred. I wanted to close things out on a really positive note by showing off something that I really love right now.

Rae has been hard at work over the last few weeks since we got the odd idea to start Aggrochat. She has been capturing the essence of our personas in Chibi form and I think she did a damned fine job. From the left we have Rae riding Ashgar the bear, with me in the middle, and the ever stylish Kodra on the far right. There are a few inside jokes in the peace but I figure it is universal enough for most to enjoy it. She does amazing work, and is the creator of the original Chibi Belghast that I have used for ages as avatars and in the masthead of this website. Over the coming weeks we will be branding our libsyn page into something more fitting a proper podcast.