Thanksgiving Revisited
For years we have had a second tradition surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday. My wife’s father and step mother are snow birds, and for those not familiar with the term, it means they travel south for the winter. Namely they have been living full time out of their RV for over the last decade, and when it starts to get cold they pull up and roll out. As tradition this has been a few weeks after Thanksgiving, so we started having a combined Thanksgiving and Christmas celebration with them on the Saturday immediately following Thanksgiving. Once upon a time this was a massive potluck dinner, and then some years in the past we have had BBQ and smoked bologna, essentially something different than the traditional holiday faire.
However a few years ago we decided as a group that what we were actually eating was not terribly important, but instead the fact that we were getting together. My wife’s dad and step mom are getting up there in age, and even if we brought all of the food… there was still a considerable amount of set up time on getting the rest of everything ready. As such we have just started meeting at the local Pizza Hut, that has a big banquet room that we can get for such occasions. This allows us each to order our own meal… and I tend to have boneless wings and fries myself, but still hang out and chat and do all of the actually important parts of a Thanksgiving meal. As such I am trying to knock out a blog post this morning so we can get ready and get on the road before too much longer.
Craigslist Saga
If you have read my blog often at all you will know that I have a proclivity for trying to purchase things from the local Craigslist whenever possible. I absolutely detest being the person who takes the initial depreciation hit on an item. So if I can find a reasonably priced and not too heavily worn item from Craigslist… I will happily do so every time. Some examples are that I got my Chromebook that I have used the hell out of from Craigslist for $100, and I quite literally use it every single day at work for note taking. I also got a PS Vita for $100 and a PS4 for $250 both of which have performed admirably. To be truthful the desktop I am writing this on right now, also came from Craigslist and I have been exceptionally happy with it overall. The only downfall is that the GeForce 750ti I have in it is underperforming on a handful of newer games like Dragon Age: Inquisition.
As such I had been passively watching video card prices over the last few weeks, in anticipation for a potential drop in prices during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday madness. At the same time I never actually expected to find something off Craigslist but last Wednesday there was a post for exactly the card I had been looking at. After buying nothing but GeForce cards for the last several years, I was interested in trying an AMD Radeon because at least on paper it seems like you can get far more bang for your buck. I had been looking at the r9 290 because it seemed like a good price point for the performance. However on Craigslist I found listed a r9 290X 4 Gig card, something that is normally around $400 for $150. At first I was hesitant since that seemed like too little money for that kind of card.
After talking with the guy for a bit, he simply upgraded out of it and is now running a pair of GeForce Titan Black cards… which are like $1000 a piece. Basically the guy has way more money for these sort of shenanigans than I could ever dream of. Yesterday afternoon I met the guy to pick up the card. I am sure he thought I was insane as I “smelled” the card but really there is only so much you can do to determine if a card is healthy. When a card has overheated past a certain point the PCB smells strange, and the fan itself seemed to move freely without seizing, and none of the chips on the bottom side looked damaged in any way. So I parted with my $150 thinking it was a gamble, but one that might pay off extremely well.
I get home and everything seems to be going swimmingly, the card fits perfectly, and I have just the right connectors for it and plenty of clearance for the fan itself. I had checked online and saw lots of people talking about how hot the powercolor r9 290X was running, but was not entirely prepared for the reality. Under relatively light strain playing World of Warcraft it was sitting in the 90c range and finally tripped the heat sensors and rebooted. There is some strangeness with the fan controller, as it seemed to not be performing well enough by default. After some reading however it seems like I have too small of a power supply to really support the card. The literature from Powercolor says that it requires a minimum of a 750w PSU, and I just have a 600w so that could be causing some of the low fan performance issues. In any case there are some things I can do to try and get better air flowing to the card, but in the meantime until I test these theories I am back to the tried and true 750ti. I don’t think it is a complete bust, because the card seemed to be performing really well… it just ran insanely hot. A lot of folks online have stated that you really need an aftermarket cooler for this card, but not really sure I want to resort to that yet.
No Luck with Nefarian
Last night I continued my trip through the previous expansions raids with a trip into Blackwing Descent and Bastion of Twilight . These were the raids that I was actively raiding when I left WoW for the first time. We had cleared up to Cho’Gall in Bastion and were working on Maloriak in Descent when I decided to quit the game. As such my knowledge of the instances is rather incomplete. I was able to limp my way through most of it soloing the encounters after figuring out the trick to Chimeraeon. When it came to the final battle with Onyxia and Nefarian, I hit an impassible wall. When Nefarian floods the room with lava, I seem to take entirely too much damage to survive through a combination of his shadowflares and the lava. I’ve duoed this fight with a healer before and it went well enough because we could each take a platform, and then the healer could keep me alive as I swam to the third platform. However doing all of this by myself just did not seem feasible.
Bastion of Twilight on the other hand was a complete and total Roflstomp, and I managed to pick up a BOE transmoggy bit for my priest or warlock. Additionally I managed to pick up a fairly wicked looking axe… Shalug’doom the Axe of Unmaking. This causes other issues however because I am quickly running out of bank space to keep all these awesome transmoggy bits. I feel like we desperately need the Diablo 3 system for transmogs, where if you get an item you learn its appearance and then can apply that appearance to any other item without having to hold onto that item forever. It has been long rumored that they were working on it for World of Warcraft, but at this point I need it like yesterday. Another interesting thing of note… it seems like all of the sets of gear you could previously buy with Justice and Valor points… have been converted to gold. So you can just walk straight into Icecrown Citadel for example and buy an entire set of Tier 10. You can go to Stormwind/Orgrimmar and buy MOST of a full set of the first two tiers of Cataclysm gear as well.
This Blog
This morning I thought I would take a moment to talk about this blog, and why I am thankful that it exists. I’ve always been a fairly verbose person, and I used to use the various gaming forums as my outlet for this desire to write about the things I care about. I was a regular on the Argent Dawn forums in World of Warcraft, and previously was active on various EQ and DAoC forums as well. I had always attempted to adopt the personality of a “white hat” the folks trying to build consensus and put a positive spin on things rather than attack other players. In 2009 I was introduced to the World of Warcraft blog community, and thanks to the support of Blog Azeroth… I created a blog of my own. Originally Tales of the Aggronaut was intended to be nothing but a Warrior tanking blog, but that didn’t last terribly long before I was talking about my raid and my guild, and my frustration with the game.
I went through some pretty massive lapses in posting, and each time that happened it was because I was too frustrated with something going on to actually put it into words. I didn’t think folks wanted to hear about me, and my hopes and fears… so I simply stopped writing for periods of time. In April of 2013 I embarked on a “Grand Experiment” as I have called it. My goal was to blog every single day, regardless if I actually “had a post in me”. It has been through this that my blog has really helped me. By necessity, Tales of the Aggronaut stopped being about “things” and started being about me as a person and as a gamer. It is also through this that writing every single day about my thoughts regarding the world has been extremely therapeutic. I’ve tried really hard to keep a mostly positive outlook on everything that is going on, and the constant reinforcement each morning has helped me the person behind the screen to remain far more positive about the world as a whole. For that and for my readers I am thankful.