Factoid February Archives - Page 2 of 4

Corruption of My Youth

February 20, 2014 by Belghast

Confusing Dialog

For the last week or so I have been having an odd issue connecting to steam on my desktop. For random periods of time, steam cannot connect. However if I wait an hour or so… it connects in just fine. So far the online wisdom is that this has something to do with bad network drivers, but unfortunately nothing has changed on the system in the time it has occurred. So right now I am at a complete loss for this intermittent behavior. Would greatly appreciate any suggestions, especially if some of you have had this issue firing up the steam client… and better yet have found a solution. At this point my plan is to try and dig up the reference driver for my network card and install that, wondering if maybe a windows patch jacked something up.

The odd thing is, steam only hates me sometimes. Last night when I could connect I re-downloaded The Secret World and it was coming down at a peak of 10.5 megabytes per second. It seemed like the download was only being throttled by my disk I/O. Of note… I am really going to have to manually throttle steam because my system was really mostly unusable when it was downloading that fast. The hard drive was going through periods of being busied out by it. Games were completely unplayable during this time, so I am hoping that somewhere in steam there is a maximum speed setting I can ratchet down a bit. It was nice to download 18 gig in 30 minutes though.

Black Screen Blue Logo

Last night the wild goose chase in search of bottles continued, and on the way home I had to hit both Michaels and Hobby Lobby to finish getting the last few of them. So by the time I made it home I was just feeling out of it. I had a bit of trouble with my gaming desktop, and then a bout of the reoccurring steam issues, and by that time I was just mentally drained. I found out the hard way that Cyberpower PC, does the same bullshit that every manufacturer does. Namely tries to put a 350 watt power supply in a PC designed for gaming. I went to install a new video card, and noticed the size of the power supply, and didn’t even bother getting into the case. I did however at that point unhook everything.

After connecting everything back up again, I went to boot the machine and it hung indefinitely on the black screen with the blue windows logo. Thankfully I have a second machine beside this one, and I started furiously googling. Internet consensus is that something was up with the power supply. I had literally not doing anything other than unhook things… so after making sure the power cord was seated well a few times I got another idea. I unhooked absolutely everything from the machine again. This time only hooking up the monitor, mouse, keyboard, network cable and power cord. Sure enough it booted up happily… apparently in the processes I had hooked one too many things to a usb jack on the machine and it did not have enough power to boot.

So the power supply issue is not only critical to getting this newer video card installed, but seemingly for day to day usage as well. I realize it is a numbers game for companies, they try and put the smallest thing in a machine they can get away with. I just don’t understand however why anyone would put something smaller than a 500W supply in a new machine. Ultimately like it did me, it will bite the owner in the ass. Long story short, I have a new Corsair power supply on the way and it should be here on Friday. So I will be playing the swap power supplies game this weekend. Generally speaking I like to pull one power supply with all the wires connected, then disconnect the PSU one connector at a time, replacing it with a connecter from the new one. That way I am certain that nothing gets missed.

All Over the Map

By the time I finally got to where I could start playing games last night… I was like a toddler desperately in need of a nap. Nothing really seemed right, and in truth I should have just gone on to bed. I played a little bit of everything last night, but only a few minutes of each. I mined three or four resource nodes in Landmark, killed Onyxia and did Crown Chemicals in World of Warcraft, fired up Rift long enough to collect the weekly patron gift, played some of “that space game”, and finally spent the most amount of time playing some of “that elder game”. But like Goldilocks, everything was either too this or too that. I should have grabbed my 3DS and went to bed playing some Bravely Default.

The highlight of the evening was the fact that I picked up Chicken Tikka Masala on the way home from my errands from our favorite Indian place… Desi Wok. Even that just didn’t seem right, and I was only able to finish like half of mine. Nights like that suck, where you don’t like the world and you are pretty sure that it doesn’t like you either. Hopefully tonight I won’t have a bunch of running around to do before heading home. I think that combined with the power supply issues are what put me in that mood. What sucks is… I knew I was “in a mood” but I didn’t really know what I could do to snap myself back out of it. I have yet to find my personal slider that allows me to back off on the “pissy” setting.

Corruption of My Youth

I think I have told at least part of this tale, but I never had a chance to “not” be a geek. One of the cool things about being a teachers kid was that at the end of the school year, we got to rifle through the stuff left in kids lockers. The janitors would come through and dump everything out into the hall, and if it was not gone by that evening they would come through with a big dumpster and pitch it all. I felt this was a bit of a consolation prize for being stuck there as my mom cleaned her own room to get ready for summer. Over the years I found many prizes, but none of them were as life changing for me as stumbling across a Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook. Mind you this was when I was in first grade, and upon receiving that book I absolutely obsessed about it. While I didn’t fully understand much of it at the time, I started building games around the things that I found between its covers.

I wanted nothing more than to play a real D&D session… but I grew up deep in the bible belt and the popular consensus was that “D&D” would somehow make you into a mass murderer. So all through elementary school I collected everything I could get my hands on, but had never really played any of it. My parents obviously did not care, but the parents of my best friends at the time were absolute bible thumpers. It was mid way through elementary school that I found another option. Marvel Super Heroes by TSR was in reality a pretty damned crappy game system, but it was completely benign and with the little paper foldouts made it look like a board game and not something akin to D&D. I kept all of the dice and such at my house, and for the most part their parents never questioned what they were doing. I mean funny shaped dice would have been a dead give away… and something worthy of shunning.

As I moved into my High School years I found friends with whom we could pretty much play anything… and we did, so many different systems. While we didn’t really go back and play much D&D other than at conventions… we did play an absolutely silly amount of the Palladium system. The above image is a quick picture I snapped this morning of just a small sampling of the various palladium books I have accumulated. The thing about that system that drew me to it, was the fact that if I or my friends could dream it up… we could find rules to build it. The Rifts setting at the time completely blew me away, and I played it through most of high school. Even though I don’t really play much anymore, because I don’t have a local circle of people to play with… I still pick up the books anytime I find them out and about.

MMOs for the most part have become my new “D&D night”, and it just honestly fits my schedule better. Occasionally I join in games run by friends over one of the various Google hangout pen and paper mods, but that is about as close as I get to the old tabletop experience these days. So many of the things I have been into over the years, probably started with finding that first players handbook. It got me interested in what that was all about, and got me into Time Warp comics for the first time in search of “more”. It was through this connection that I go into Warhammer, Magic: The Gathering, and so many other geeky things. While the bible thumpers seemed to think it would steal my soul, more than anything it enflamed my curiosity and creativity. Pen and Paper games taught me it was completely okay to create my own reality. That seems like a skill we could use a lot more of.

Rails Are What You Make of Them

February 18, 2014 by Belghast

Going Off Script

There was a topic yesterday that started with Tobold’s post and wound up in a G+ comment stream. While I believe Tobold’s comments about on rails gaming were initially about a certain game that is still under NDA with a space theme… it eventually wound its way to Elder Scrolls Online. To which I added the information I posted yesterday on my own blog, about the fact that the majority of quests are skippable, and that there are a very few that actually need to be completed to move to the next area. But the root of the problem here I think is that after a decade of playing themeparks… we have gotten extremely good at seeing rails. Moreso I think we are so trained to stay inside of the lines that we are afraid to break out of the little protective cage the themeparks have built for us.

For the longest time I fought the “quest to level” construct and then over time I managed to get extremely good at mindlessly grinding them. There was a time when I could take a character from 1-85 in less than seven days in World of Warcraft. The problem is… this is a thing I do to level quickly, and not something that comes instinctual. I am constantly deviating from the path, and poking my head into places I shouldn’t be. If I have 10% to go to a level, my instincts are not to grind some quests, but instead to go kill some really high level mobs. You can blame Everquest for this type of “go kill things” upbringing, and I am still happiest when mindlessly slaughtering bad guys. So when I am out questing, skipping that bad guy for the sake of speed is not usually a thing that ever enters into my mind.

So when I was plunked down on Stros M’Kai in the Daggerfall Covenant for the very first time… I willfully and gleefully ignored the quests that were given to me. I wandered off and explored the island, gathered some crafting bits, found lots of treasure chests and leveled happily oblivious to the fact that there was a rail. Sure eventually I reined myself in and did a few quests, but the vast majority of that first couple hour play through was aimlessly exploring. If I found a cave I poked my head in to see what was there. The little voice in the back of our head that says “don’t go there yet, you will have a quest for it later” is something that we end up doing to ourselves.

Rails Are What You Make of Them

For the most part I would agree with Tobold’s assessment of that space game, but since so many people love it I continue trying to give it a second and a third and a fourth chance. I went through this same thing with Guild Wars 2, I kept trying to see what people liked about it… because I honestly didn’t understand it. Over the weekend I maybe landed at how to enjoy it. Once I finished the tutorial, I went completely off the rails, wandering around aimlessly killing lots and lots of things and getting nifty bits in the process. That mode of play made the game enjoyable for me. Quests are a really good way to level, and I think they also do an excellent job of telling the story. However something we have forgotten along the way is that they are mostly optional.

We can blame World of Warcraft for this to be honest, but not in the way you might think. WoW brought quests out into the open, where they had always been something for insiders before. In Everquest you went around /hail-ing every single mob you encountered because maybe just maybe they might have a quest for you. In Dark Age of Camelot, you did the same thing trying to locate the “Kill Task” quest giver for a specific area. City of Heroes gave you specific contacts you needed to talk to that acted as a hub for running future missions. Finally World of Warcraft gave us the now ubiquitous golden exclamation point… taking complete all of the subtlety out of it. Still… even in WoW it was not until Burning Crusade that I really started to lean on quests as the crutch that they are. I got a good number of my levels by going off the beaten path and looking for neat things out in the world.

To some extent it is also the fault of games that have stopped giving us things to find just over the next ridge. There should always be things just out of the way for us to go looking for, because this act reminds us that there is another way to play the game than just mindless questing. This self directed fun is crucial, and is what ends up making a game stay fresh. I tend to cycle through two modes of gameplay… aimless wandering and mindelss questing. I find both to be really enjoyable when I am in the right frame of mind. I think this is why I can return to WoW all these times and still be happy with what it is. That said I am constantly going off script in that game as well. There are so many nooks and crannies that often lead to treasure or at least interesting things to kill. Basically… these rails that we keep seeing, are something we’ve allowed ourselves to see.

Dungeons of Belgrade

With all the talk of ESO lately, I am still very much playing Landmark on a daily basis. Last night I got in and worked on Belgrade Keep for a bit. I tweaked the exterior a bit adding supports to the first balcony and then building out an entirely new balcony from the top of the castle. Additionally I added some more of my custom columns to the corners of the ramparts to tie the visual theme together, as well as adding some to the ground floor to mark the entrances to the ramp leading up to the keep and the entrance to the crafting undercroft. I thought I was nearing a point where I needed to simply grind out the various accoutrements to decorate the keep. I was completely wrong however.

I decided that Belgrade keep needed a proper dungeon, so I spent the majority of the night watching episodes of Arrow on Netflix and hollowing out the basement by hand with the remove tool. One of the things I have noticed that removing large blocks of material with the select tool often ends up leaving weird fragments. So I tend to do it manually simply because I like the results better. After having spent hundreds of hours hollowing out tunnels branch mining for diamonds in Minecraft… I find I have an affinity for that sort of work. The plan is to divide up the sub basement into cells, maybe with a torture area… but that all depends on how creative I am. I am curious if I have enough room for a second sub basement to be honest, because I can seemingly dig down further.

My Father the Builder

I really need to sit down and brainstorm out the rest of the month, because when I am not staring at a blank page I am full of ideas with factoids. However when I sit down to write at 6 am, my mind is mush and devoid of any good ideas. So today’s factoid is going to be a little odd, be warned. I am not a terribly handy person, as in I am not a manly man builder type. I can watch a youtube video and figure out most things, but I have a bit of a mental block about things that are mechanical. In part I think it is because my father is so damned amazing at it. I realize he grew up in an era when if you didn’t fix it yourself it stayed broken, and my grandfather was the king of tinkerers. For me however, since I spent most of my childhood sick… I just simply was not exposed to it… apart from getting to be the loyal “flashlight holder”.

At a young age I think I told myself I couldn’t do this. There are things that are well in the realm of my mastery. You give me a few boxes, scissors, magic markers and tape… and I will build for you a GI-Joe base that will make you weep. However you dump a heap of mechanical bits on the table and I cannot see the same possibilities. Growing up with a machinist for a father was a really interesting and awesome thing. When I broke a wheel off one of my hot wheels… he would take it away to a magical land where it would come back with a shiny new wheel better than the previous. He would take it over to work and machine out of scrap aluminum a wheel, then carefully wrap it in electrical tape for traction…finally carefully attaching it back to my hot wheel. My father could make magic happen.

I just wish I appreciated it more at the time. When Star Wars was all the rage, I wanted nothing more than the Death Star play set. I did not grow up with a lot of money, so spending $100 on a cheap plastic and cardboard play set was really out of the question. That Christmas instead my dad hand crafted me a Death Star that was far cooler than anything store bought ever could have been. I am still not sure exactly how he built it, but he had some long screw running down the back of the unit with a crank up top. and a machined elevator that rode up and down on the screw. So that I could crank my action figures up and down between the floors. Now I appreciate just how ingenious it was, but probably at the time I wished I had the “real thing”.

As my father is getting older, I am starting to have to figure these things out on my own. I know at some point he won’t be there to call for advice. Someday I will have to learn the lessons he had to learn. I admit it scares me, to think about a world where a master builder like my father doesn’t exist. I don’t think he really knows how in awe of his abilities I am, and how much I wish I had his natural intuition for how things should go together. I should really remedy that, but my father is a lot like me, and not really great at saying these sorts of things in person. There are times I think that maybe he DID pass on his legacy to me, but that it just changed over the years. I am good at computers and hacking around with software to get it to work the way I want it to work. Then when I can’t find whatever it is that I am looking for, I know that I can crack open Visual Studio and build it myself. So maybe just maybe I have some of that same magic too.

Late Night Doctor Who

February 16, 2014 by Belghast

Mad Man with a Box

Since today is Steampowered Sunday, I thought I would do my factoid as a separate post again, simply because if feels really odd to tack on personal bits on the tail end of “feature”. Since I vowed to finish this month with a factoid a day, this seems like the best way of handling that. Anyways… as I have stated before I grew up in a really small town. There are smaller I am sure, but 2500 people is pretty damned small especially for being a county seat. As a result I did not have cable until I went to college. The cable ran to within a quarter mile of my house growing up, but because of that we were limited to six channels. Essentially an NBC affiliate, CBS affiliate, ABC affiliate, Fox, UPN and the local PBS channel.

Since network television has always been crap, I spent a good chunk of my childhood watching Public Broadcasting like Mister Rogers or Nova. Late at night however the PBS channel changed and brought into our living room all these excellent British television shows. They varied over the years from Are You Being Served, Faulty Towers, Monty Python, Keeping Up Appearances, Benny Hill, Blakes 7, The Tripods… but the constant was always Doctor Who. Some of my fondest memories of my father were staying up late to watch Doctor Who.

Late Night Doctor Who

I realize it is not much of a shocker that me… a notorious geek… loves Doctor Who. It goes deeper than that. The first Doctor I can really remember is Jon Pertwee aka the Third Doctor. However to me Doctor Who will always be the fourth doctor, Tom Baker. Seeing that hat and that scarf still gives me warm fuzzies. Doctor Who above all represented what was good and right in the world. The solemn defender that used his mind rather than brute force to solve problems. While I love the modern incarnation of Doctor Who as well, it is simply a different animal. For as crappy as the special effects were, even rewatching the old episodes on netflix, everything from that era felt more fantastical and hopeful.

Doctor Who also gave me and my father a time to bond together. It was not something my mother liked at all, so she gave us the time to hang out together. More or less I was raised by my mother and grandmother, in that they were the people who I spent most of my time with. My dad was almost always working, and when he was off work he was busy with his photography business. So the moments when I got to just hang out with my dad felt few and far between. Even today when we get together, the topic will eventually lead its way back to whatever is happening in the current series with the current doctor.

While there are a lot of things that I am nostalgic about, and am willing to geek out over… Doctor Who just feels more pure. While the show has better special effects and has ratcheted up the horror factor a notch or two… it still feels very much the same show at its core. It will and always has been about a mad man with a box, who deeply loved what he saw special and different in humanity. That gives me hope for us as a species, that this lonely man from Gallifrey could care about us that much. I hope that the series continues on forever, infecting each new generation of viewers with the same spirit of wonder.

Belghast Hates Crowds

February 15, 2014 by Belghast

Mixed Up Day

This has been a really odd day. I am doing a second post today so that I can do my factoid. I didn’t really want to include it as part of the previous one… because the previous one was pretty epic. I woke this morning to find that the NDA had lifted for Elder Scrolls Online. I have seriously been waiting for this day for so long, but oddly enough I was relatively unprepared. I didn’t have all my ducks in a row, and tons of material ready to post once the embargo had dropped. I guess it makes sense, as winging it is more my style. Hopefully over the coming weeks until the release I will keep posting little tidbits. The NDA lift was only relating to the beta weekend content, namely the first 3-4 zones for each faction. As a result there are still a few things I can’t really talk about fully yet.

Nothing at all really went as planned today. Originally we were going to get up and around, and I was to take my wife to meet a friend. Then they were going to my mother-in-laws to pick up a baby goat. Yes that does sound strange I know… but it was a thing that was happening. Basically the goat would go to our friends house and be able to roam freely on what is ending up as being a pseudo livestock sanctuary. Things happened however and we wound up spending the entire time killing time… only to find out about 4 pm that it was not going to happen at all today. Had I know all of this to start off, I would have blogged in the morning.

Belghast Hates Crowds

It was an absolutely lovely day, so while we were stuck in a holding pattern… we at least got to run most of the errands that had been stacking up. Since it has been below freezing for what feels like a month, everyone was out and about with the same basic idea we had. The problem with this is the fact that every single place we went was crowded. Crowds are something that causes extreme anxiety in me. If people are packed in too tightly in too small of a space, I get this severe fight or flight instinct.

Earlier in the day my wife wanted to run by our local Goodwill, which is a pretty small store in the first place. To make things worse they were apparently having some insane half off sale or something. The result was that you could barely move around the store. I had run over to the convenience store to get us drinks for the road, and thankfully by the time I fought my way inside she was ready to go. The moment I stepped inside this massive panic set over me, and as I pushed through to where she was it was like my skin was crawling. In most times by sheer power of will I can reset the desire to run screaming away. That is not to say that the instinct is not there and is not strong.

This seems to be something I inherited from my father, and his father before him and so on down our family line. I grew up in a town of 2500, and my grandfather refused to go to the grocery store, or to the sonic drive in… because there were too many people there. My father, cannot make it for more than a few minutes in most stores without having to return to the car and wait for my mother. The fact that I can exist in society and live a pretty normal life is a real boon. The older I get however, the worse it seems to get. The place that it bothers me the most is a crowded elevator. Being a big guy already, trying to squeeze into a standing room only metal box is something I can barely handle. There was a time at which I could go to concerts, but now that many people assembled in one place just is an impassible barrier.

For the most part I have found ways to mitigate my anxiety. Movie theaters are a huge problem, with people crammed in tightly. So to get past that I tend to go to matinees where there are simply not that many people. If I can get an entire row by myself I can normally make it through the experience just fine. For example this past Friday I got out to see the Lego Movie at the 4:15 showing… giving me pretty much free reign of the place. So knowing that the instincts will set in, I can just avoid situations that will make me try and climb the walls.