selfie Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Tired of Selfies

This weekend while out running around in Joplin I kept myself entertained thanks to my twitter feed. Among the constant stream of updates was a series of posts from Alternative Chat, where she attempted to tell a story through twitter and succeeded beautifully. The only problem is that in the weeks since the release of 6.1 I have developed a knee jerk negative reaction to seeing a wow selfie posted in my twitter feed. It was a real struggle for me to look past the medium of the pictures to peer at the underlying story. Largely my problem with selfies is that they are this distorted caricature of what our avatars actually look like. The angles are all distorted, and it is impossible to control your facial expressions as they go through a series of seemingly random contortions. Like I had said before I thought that with time folks would get bored with them, and move on… but as the weeks continue it only seems to be more prevalent.

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying, because I still love taking photos of my characters. I just prefer the picture above to the selfie I lead off the first paragraph with. There is just something much more visually appealing to being able to see more of your character than simply your face, torso and part of your arms. The biggest problem I have with selfies is the fact that it becomes hard to take in the entire picture. During Alt’s twitter story, it was as much about the places she was at rather than her character. I struggled to see enough of the elements in the background to immediately indentify where she was actually standing to take the picture. I realize that for the purpose of that story it was in an almost travelogue format, but the times when she broke from it and took a traditional screenshot were my favorite segments of the story. Not that I expect this to change anyone’s practices, but I am just saying now that I have a major preference towards traditional screenshots as compared to the distorted version that is a selfie.

Warrior Milestone

This weekend I did not manage to get nearly as much playtime in as I had hoped. Saturday we spent pretty much the entire day until about thirty minutes before podcast time running around. We ended up having to go visit my Mother-In-Law and made a day trip of it meandering our way there and to Joplin through a series of small towns. My wife and I both have this thing where we like to go hunting for interesting items on clearance, and I have managed to pick up quite a few awesome Lego sets for less than of their original price. This weekend however, I found a ton of sets… but nothing that I really could not live without. Ultimately my vice is Star Wars and Space/Futuristic themed sets. My most recent find was three of the sets from the “Agents” line at a local target for slightly less than half off the original price. Needless to say I did not really get much play time in Saturday. Sunday until 4pm I ended up helping my wife with a few things around the house, namely putting together a large cubical storage unit and a smaller bakers rack unit for our closet.

So by the time I finally got logged in downstairs and was able to play Final Fantasy XIV I felt under the gun to help make up some ground. At this point I am sitting at 254 poetics out of 450 for the week… and all I have is tonight to somehow manage to cap. I don’t have a feeling that I am going to make it, because we have a raid. However when I get home from work I am going to try my damnedest to get it through a combination of duty roulettes. I did however manage to run through the three Crystal Tower instances and get another Carbontwine allowing me to upgrade my Helm from 120 to 130. Similarly I managed to get enough Poetics to buy another piece of jewelry, so that I could use one of the Carboncoats I had laying around. This took me to 120 ilevel which for me at least is somewhat of a mental milestone. There is something about breaking another 10s barrier in my gear score. I am now sitting at just over 11,000 hit points, which is only going to serve to make my healers complain more strongly about my health pool when I am fully buffed. It makes me feel useful though the more gear that I can manage to pile on.

Foraging Slowly

One of my hopes this weekend was to spend a good deal of time on the sofa watching television and working on my Botany. This never actually happened, for various reasons. I spent a bit of time yesterday morning watching a movie and importing by hand 48 episodes of Aggrochat into the new Aggrochat.com website. I did however manage to work on botany some during the recording of this weeks AggroChat, and at this point I am level 16. The brute force leveling is finally starting to slow down, but I keep telling myself that every level that I can gain in this fashion is going to let my level allowance build back up so I can push through the levels more quickly later. When I pushed mining I managed to drop down to 30 leves left, and over the last few days it has managed to regenerate back up to 65, so when it caps I will begin pushing Botany a bit harder.

I had honestly wondered about stopping Botany for a bit to get fishing up to 15 as well. That way I can start getting rid of all of this gathering gear that I have clogging my banks. Since I only have Fishing and Botany left, my hope is that I can maybe stair step them both up together pushing it up 5 levels at a time so I can shed a bunch of gathering gear in the process. That really seems to be the ideal way to level classes in general. I have four retainers and they are all full of gear that I think I will use at some point. I turned in a bunch of the Syrcus Tower dragoon gear last night for company seals, and I need to really spend an afternoon identifying the stuff that I want to keep and sorting it out from the stuff I don’t want to keep. All of the Scylla’s healing gear for example is prime territory for giving away… considering I am slowly replacing it with soldiery items to help burn down my tomestones. Honestly as soon as I have Soldiery equivalents all of the gear from Syrcus Tower is suspect because I consider every single set “ugly”.

Hipster Glasses

Living in Oklahoma is absolutely insane sometimes. We have been having a string of 80 degree days lately, and it has been fairly glorious. When we went for our walk in the evening it would be in the high 70s and absolutely wonderful outside. Last night the temperature dropped again and this morning it is 48 degrees outside. I don’t like turning the AC and Heater off and on, especially for a short cold snap like this, so instead last night we simply piled the blankets on. I am so thankful for our cats , because Chloe our fattest and fuzziest cat somehow managed to squeeze between us and under the covers keeping us both nice and toasty through the night.

Yesterday I happened to snap the photo on the side on a whim. The previous day I had gotten some new glasses, so I snapped a photo to send to my wife to show her. Well yesterday morning we had some absolutely amazing looking skies. When I went to snap a photo I noticed that the camera was still turned the wrong way, and using the front facing one. At which point I noticed that it looked pretty cool to see my head surrounded by the halo of clouds. This is the first photo I have seen of myself in years that I actually kinda like. I have had a lot of issues with the way I look and in part it has been due to the weight issues I have had. Just like I am starting to get used to my own voice through all the podcasting I have been doing… I am starting to become more comfortable in my own skin.

The willingness to try something new as far as glasses go is probably just a side effect of this. I have literally work the same hair cut, and same glasses for damned near two decades. While they aren’t always the same frames they are as close to the same thing as I can get at the time. I like to keep things simple, and I have always reasoned with myself that this is in part because I am trying to not have to think about things. In part I think it is this lack of comfort in my own skin that had lead me to simply think it didn’t matter what I wore or what I looked like. I kind of dig the new glasses, my friends have been giving me shit about them. When I like something they say it is because I am being “ironic” or if I dislike something they claim it is “too mainstream”. That however will fade, and each of them has begrudgingly said that they like them as well.

Nerd on Nerd Violence

Since getting my fitbit I have done all sorts of little things to hack my life and try and add in more exercise where I could. While I have always parked on the roof, I’ve begun walking up and down the ramps from the 6th floor to the 4th floor where the skywalk is. As a result I have started noticing various vehicles and one of them has stood out. There is a green Honda “something” that has a cute little demon skull and cross bones on it and a “twilight girl” sticker. My feelings about that sticker have evolved over the last few weeks as I have passed it. I think we can universally agree that the Twilight series is pretty horrible. My wife had been given the books by a student, and she read them… then when the first movie came out we struggled through it. We both agreed it was a horrible idea and one we would never repeat again.

Thing is… somewhere along the line this morphed in culture from “twilight is horrible” to “people who like twilight are horrible”. As I have spent the last weeks walking past this car I had a revelation. This person is a geek, and they have proudly emblazoned their vehicle with something they obviously care about. While we might not like it, we have to respect the fact that they stepped up and announced that they loved something… anything. This is no different than my Doctor Who lanyard, or my co-workers collection of my little ponies, those things are just “socially acceptable” geekdom. At one point or another throughout our lives we have been picked on for those same geeky traits, and if you have not… then you’ve lived a truly charmed life. It just feels like picking on someone for liking a horrible novel, is fairly hypocritical.

The other night I friends and I ended up having a fairly epic discussion after I had stopped recording the podcast about the decision to completely jettison everything in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. As we started discussing it, the initial reaction was “how dare they” and it faded more into a “makes sense” as we started to recount the various aspects of the Expanded Universe. For each thing that we loved we managed to pull out five or six fairly horrible and badly written constructs from the comics, novels or video games. Most of it was no less “horrible fan service” than the Twilight novels. As much as I loved Dark Empire for example… you have to admit it is a pretty dumb story arc when it involves the fact that there are millions of clone emperors hidden throughout the galaxy. Not to mention the fact that while Luke spent an entire series of movies fighting the Dark Side, he decides to give in within a couple of comic books.

We are all guilty of loving something completely moronic that has no literary merit. So I say to the “Twilight Girls” out there… rock that shit and ignore the people who will hate you for it. To the rest of us… we need to realize that this person is a geek just like we are, they just happen to like different things. Geekdom is not a thing we own, there are no rules of entry. While I might rage on “Brogamers” and what they have done to my beloved gaming community… they have no less right to be there than I do. For us 30 and 40 something’s, who spent our lives getting excluded from pop culture… it really is not cool that we try and do the same thing to others. I am proud when I see anyone let their geek flag fly… even if it is not something that I particularly care about.

Prophet Loves Jewelry

I was all over the place last night gaming wise. I popped into Trove for a bit and streamed it, and I decided to do the same for Rift and show off our awesome guild hall. When I finally settled on a game and played for a bit it was once again Elder Scrolls Online. Over the course of leveling I seem to have completely ignored the main story. This is in part because you keep having to go back the harborage to keep accepting the next step, and for whatever reason I have simply not taken the time to do this. As a result I spent a good chunk of last night trying to play catch up and do both the level 35 and 40 main storyline quests. My big takeaway… is that at some point during his history The Prophet managed to knock over a jewelry store. He seems to have this endless supply of necklaces and rings.

At this point I am a stones throw away from 44 and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of Bangkorai. Normally I do a pretty bad job of following quest chains through the zones in Elder Scrolls, but this zone… I have done worse than normal. I have objectives scattered all over the place some of them completed, others still dark and unfinished. I am getting cursed quite a lot because I cannot stop myself from charging packs of werewolves and vampires. I’ve had the “Sanies Lupinus” curse more times than I can count, but it seems to just go away on its own rather rapidly if you do nothing about it. I had one guy rather mad at me the other night named “Raper of Souls”, which was convenient since I had already paused to report his name. Yes I am one of those people… I report bad names, and do so on a nightly basis. I am not going out of my way to troll people who are trying to turn into a werewolf or a vampire… I am simply playing the game as I always do. Namely I charge first and ask questions later.

Thankfully we have plenty of werewolves and vampires in guild if someone needs to get bitten. Personally I would far rather choose neither and be a hunter. In fact I have already morphed my silver bolts attack to also effect werewolves. I’ve always had a love of werewolves, so in theory I would totally become one were it not gimped. Right now werewolf seems a bit underwhelming, considering all of its buffs only actually take place when you are in Crinos form. Yes I just called it Crinos form… I played a lot of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, so it will always be known as Crinos to me. Vampire on the other hand has all sorts of passive benefits that are active all the time, but the weakness to fire seems far more problematic than the werewolf weakness to poison. As a result… I am just walking the line between and hunting both equally. Though oddly… I seem to be going out of my way to save both werewolves and vampires in the storyline.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #HipsterGlasses #NerdOnNerdViolence