Month: May 2013

Thief School Dropout

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It’s shaping up to be a rainy and hazy morning here in Oklahoma.  I have an on-site meeting with a printing company today about a joint project, so that is going to prove to be an odd little detour for me.  I am not really a hands on people person, I prefer to communicate over email unless I absolutely have to do otherwise.  So the thought of having to do a face to face with someone is extremely nerve wracking.  However, if this moves the project along I will take one for the team.

Thief School Dropout

As the day went on yesterday, we found out there far more than just ourselves had gotten hit by the car bandit.  Most of the individuals that got hit swore they locked their car, and in the case of one of my neighbors I believe it.  My problem is I don’t really remember if I locked it or not, it is usually just something I do as a reflex.  So essentially we are finding that the thief had some way of unlocking car doors rapidly.  What makes the whole thing even more brazen is the fact that there is a county sheriff directly across the street from me.

But since the thief had hit multiple sites, it meant when he hit our cars he was likely on the way to another home.  I figured he would have noticed that my sunglasses were prescription and tossed them pretty quickly.  Sure enough after retracing his steps I quickly found my sunglasses case, and shortly after my sunglasses laying nestled in the grass.  Basically they got into our cars and found nothing worth keeping.

It really makes me wonder what the thief was looking for in the first place.  If it was just a bored teenager as I originally thought, why go to all the trouble.  Especially since some of the cars appear to have been locked.  What on earth was worth the risk that they went from car to car but essentially found nothing much.  The whole skewed logic behind the whole thing baffles me.  I guess I will likely never understand it since I am a law abiding citizen…  and would never think to break into someone else’s car.

Rift Changes

The more I think about it the more I am looking forward to the changes.  But the more I have seen from the community that they feel this is the end of the world for the game, and that all of the priorities will shift from this point onwards.  I can understand this line of thought, but having lived through the cash shop and free to play conversions inside of Everquest 2 I know that life goes on happily regardless.  Not every cash shop implementation is as egregious as the SWTOR conversation has been.

What I have seen with EQ2 is that the regular big updates continue to happen, but now there is a weekly flow of optional items you can pick up from the store.  Most of these are completely optional and purely flavor based, but all in all make your character more enjoyable to play.  I really hope they exploit this for some really cool looking cosmetic sets.  I am also really hoping that a good deal of the housing stuff makes it to the cash shop as well.

The other big thing that I am looking forward to is REX.  I actively played EQ2 during the transition to Krono, and to me personally this was a huge deal.  No longer did I have to worry about how much platinum I had, or attempt to farm it at all…  which is my least favorite activity ever.  If I ran low, I could just pick up another Krono and fill my coffers again, so I stopped having to worry about such things and just got to play the game.  It allowed me to do all the things I enjoy in the game without ever having to worry about trying to accumulate large amounts of wealth and/or play the auction house.

If you are one of those players that love playing the Auction House… then I apologize because this really is the apocalypse for you.  The best change for me in a post Krono economy is that almost everything on the broker in EQ2 is dirt cheap, making it super easy for players starting out to get the items they need to play the game.  The highest tier of quality at every level range is still commanding a premium, but the basic items that you need to survive all plummeted in price massively after the introduction of the Krono.  This was a huge net positive for me personally, but reeked havoc on the players that loved to piddle around with the broker.

Yesterday they sent out a survey to all subscribers trying to get feedback on the transition.  I took the very short survey, and will be interested to see if they release any of the data.  Essentially it is mostly concerned with how likely you are to stay subscribed to the game.  I said that the big benefit that is missing from the patron rewards is a monthly cash shop stipend.  I have come to expect this playing SOE and Turbine free to play games.  If they managed to cough this up, even a small stipend it would make this literally the best free to play conversion for subscribers.

Going Dark

As of this evening I will pretty much be going dark on my nightly activities again through the weekend.  I will be once more bound by an NDA, as a result I am going to be trying to dig up interesting things to share in the absence of updates about what I am actually doing.  However recently I have been talking a good deal more about myself than my gaming.  Over the last few nights though, I have mostly played PlayStation 3.  The whole cleaning of the loft thing has provided me something I had been missing, a way to play console games without feeling guilty for taking up the television.

Thanks to Playstation Plus I now have this instant library of titles to play, and thanks to a recommendation from a friend I have been playing a good deal of Guacamelee.  If you have not played it you should at least download the demo.  Basically it is this awesome side scrolling fighting game meets metroidvania with an awesome Mexican luchador flair.  Everything about the game screams fun, from the colors to the ability names… instead of wall jump, you get goat jump.  The story is simple, but the cast of characters are colorful and well written.

Right now it and Darksiders are seeing the most playtime, but I have a large stack of games I have grabbed from the Playstation Plus program.  My biggest problem right now is that my internet connection has gone to hell.  I am going to be working on my office this weekend trying to prep it so that I can order the cable installed next week.  It will be so nice to bump up to 50 meg internet.  I am literally going to stream all the things…  ALL OF THEM!!!!

I hope you all have a great day, I am going to try my best to be a civil member of society and deal with this on site visit thingy.  Hopefully nothing horrible happens today, since the last few days have pretty much depleted my ability to care.  Dear weekend… why can’t you be today?

Robots Made Me Keys

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Good morning you happy people.  I know it’s a bit of an odd greeting, but it feels like my brain is struggling to boot this morning.  Here is hoping that the coffee in my cup with help along the process.  I may have to wiggle the power cord or something, but I can’t seem to find it…  Last night I finally successfully completed a server move, so that is a huge weight off my shoulders.  Maybe this grogginess is just the afterglow of that success.

Adventures in Locksmithing

So far this morning is going a bit better than yesterday.  After writing up my blog I went downstairs to get ready, and attempted to leave the house.  The door would not lock, neither by the pushbutton on the back of the door or by the key.  I texted my boss to let him know I would be late, and that I would likely have to call a locksmith.  I just did not feel comfortable leaving my house without a lock on the door.

Then I remembered… once upon a time…  when we first moved into our house back in 1999… the real estate agent had given us a new set of locks as a house warming present.  Lazy happened… and we never actually installed them, but they should be around the house somewhere.  After rifling through the laundry room cabinets…  that tend to be the catch all for that sort of thing…  I found the package.  Inside were in fact two nice bronze colored keyed doorknobs.

I scurried around to gather up the necessary tools, and changed the front door lock as quickly as I could.  Unfortunately in the process I got grease all over my shirt… so I had to go change that.  But all in all I rapidly changed out the front door lock and was on my way in not much time at all.  I purposefully left the back door the old lock, just in case for whatever reason my wife needed to get in before I had a chance to get her keys.  I managed to make it into work only thirty minutes behind my normal schedule.

Robots Made Me Keys

At lunch I decided that I should probably go make some keys, since both myself and my wife need one, and our neighbor down the street as we care for each others animals when either goes out of town.  Normally I tend to just go to Wal-mart to get keys made, but I needed to run a few more errands and Lowes was in the shopping center I was going to.  I thought I had remembered in the back of my head seeing one of those little grinder stations, so I charged ahead assuming surely I could get keys made there.

Upon entering Lowes, I was pointed towards a little automated Kiosk.  The system prompted me to put my key in the slot, in a specific orientation.  I could hear servos whirring as it clamped down on my key and evaluated the shape.  On the touch screen I was able to place an order for what kind of key blanks I wanted, and the quantity.  I started off only planning to make 2 keys, but the third was free… and the fourth was half off…  so I ended up putting in an order for 4 keys for $7.

The machine sprang to life, going through a process of grinding the key, polishing it… and then spitting it out into a little receiver tray with a very satisfying ka-thunk.  All the while there was a little progress bar telling me what key I was on, and how long an individual key was likely to take.  The whole process was pretty amazing, but I may or may not be old… and just not used to this concept.  I collected my keys and went on my way, overly amused by the entire process.

Always in the past I had made way more keys than I ever needed, because when you got them made at Wal-mart… at least half of them didn’t actually work.  I am guessing robots trump some random kid with some random machine in some random store… that maybe had a 5 minute talk on how to use the thing… because all four keys work perfectly, no scraping or anything of the sort.  I hail our new robot overlords…  the future will be amazing.

Gorilla in the Room

So the big news of yesterday was that Rift would be going “completely free” in their words, and involve “no trials, no tricks, no traps”.  I am of mixed emotions myself about the news, but overall the community seems to be taking it very badly.  Personally I like the subscription model, it feels just and equitable and provides support for the company.  Whereas the free to play model tends to involve “going whaling”, and looking for some mega consumer to subsidize the gameplay for a bunch of folks who will likely never actually spend money on the game.

My opinion is that if you are not actively supporting a game, you are actively harming it.  Additionally my brain makes a sort of calculus of…  if a game is not worth paying for… is it really worth your time?  But that ultimately gets into the equation of why these games work.  For me personally, my time is worth more than my money to me.  As a result I am willing to spend extra to avoid having to spend time doing boring things.  This is what the free to play model counts on, is that someone will buy extra stuff to make up for the fact that a large number of players are spending nothing.

My big hope is that it will make it more likely for players to try the game.  Right now it is extremely hard to get anyone to try Rift, because a good chunk of my friends have WoW inertia.  Hell during the Raptr promotion, I got a free copy of the game, free expansion, and 30 days of free playtime… gave it to a friend of mine who is interested in Rift…  and after a couple of weeks he has yet to even create an account.  If knowing that it won’t cost them anything ever, helps players try the game…  I am all for whatever actions cause that.

On top of that, I continue to still subscribe, which means I will begin to get premium “Patron” access to the game.   Usually games paywall off features, but Rift in their infinite wisdom seems to be giving Patrons some huge and very tangible benefits to keeping their subscription active.  The two big ones for me are that all of my mounts will travel a base 10% faster, and that all money drops will increase by 15%.  Those alone would be enough to get me to keep subscribed.  However they are also adding in all sorts of xp bonuses, and token bonuses that just sweeten the deal.  The whole thing begins June 12th, so in less than a months time we will just have to see what it ends up being like.

Another Shitty Morning

So this morning has turned out to be far worse than yesterday, but it a totally different way.  Roughly halfway through writing about Rift, my wife yelled up and told me to “get outside now”.  I of course am freaking out, wondering what has happened…  turns out that once again we forgot and left our cars unlocked, and once again someone had rifled through them.  We live in a pretty decent part of town, in a super quiet neighborhood, but this has happened to us 3 times since 1999.  This is why I did not want to leave the house yesterday with the door unlocked.

Essentially we have nothing of any value in our vehicles, we have stock radios and keep no electronics in them.  There is nothing of value that can be gained by them rifling through our stuff, but it feels so damned violating.  This time they look to have taken one thing…  my prescription sunglasses.  You have to be pretty damned dumb to steal prescription sunglasses.  They didn’t even get the current set of sunglasses out of my jeep, they got my old set out of my wife’s vehicle.  I mean my eyes are complete shit, so they are thick as the bottom of a pop bottle… so it is completely obvious even looking at them that they are not normal sunglasses.

I am not really sure what they were looking for, but they obviously didn’t find much.  But the frustrating part is having to stuff everything back in their cubbies that were tore out.  In my jeep this means gathering up a bunch of wow tcg cards from my habit of picking them up every now and then, and stuffing the paperwork back in my glove box.  If I had to guess they were likely looking for prescription drugs, money or electronics.  They didn’t grab anything from the back of either vehicle, and in my wifes there were a few items neatly boxed up.

Anyways. this makes another shitty start of the day.  I sincerely hope yours goes much better.  Hard for me to muster my attempt at a cheery greeting right now.  Need to be finishing this up and getting on to work.

Late to the Dance

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Yesterday for whatever reason was extremely rough.  I felt like I spent the entire day sleep walking, so when I finally got off work I came home and took a nap.  Naps are such glorious things at times, I wish I had known that back as a child when I tried to actively evade them.  When I got up I cooked dinner and while still extremely groggy settled in for a bit.

Elite Ready

One of the things I have been attempting to accomplish over my lunch time gaming break is to finish all of the Ashora and Steppes daily quests in Rift.  Usually I manage to chew through Ashora, but rarely do I make a significant dent in Steppes.  However yesterday for whatever reason I seemed to be able to do both without much issue.  This put me fairly high on the daily infinity stone count, and creeping close to that piece of gear that would tip me over 300 hit. 

After all was said and done, I was sitting at 2 stones away from the gauntlets.  Last night I went back out to the Steppes and wandered down along the coastline.  I knew I had left a carnage quest partially finished down there, and as a result I pushed through those last few stones rather quickly.  Still feeling pretty worn out, I decided to go ahead and port back to Tempest Bay and purchase my upgrade.  While I knew I did not have the juice to do any random elites last night, I at least was Elite ready for the grouping tonight.

Late to the Dance

Since redoing the loft I have found myself playing around on my PlayStation 3 a good deal more.  Quite honestly, the loss of my gaming loft as viable space pretty much marks the end of me regularly playing console games.  I simply did not have a TV that was dedicated to gaming, and I never wanted to monopolize the tv downstairs in case my wife wanted to watch something.  So as a result I have essentially been a non-console gamer during this current generation of systems.

As a way to catch up, I went ahead and signed up for a years subscription to PlayStation Plus, as this gives me around a dozen games immediately to play around with.  Namely there were a bunch of titles that I had wanted, but never really had picked or played… namely Sleeping Dogs, Darksiders, The Cave, Ratchet and Clank All 4 One, and Little Big Planet 2.  Since they release new titles for free over the network on a regular basis, I figured it would be an excellent way to passively acquire titles.

Darksiders

I knew this game would be right down my alley, but for whatever reason over the years since its release I have never actually played it.  Big dude, in bigger armor, carrying an even bigger sword really is my ideal game archetype… and this game does not disappoint.  Everything controls extremely well, and it feels a lot like a modern golden axe at times.  I had heard this in the past compared to Legend of Zelda, and I can kind of see the similarities but to me it feels more in line with the old school final fight style fighting games.  I played this for quite awhile last night before my ADD kicked in, but I am sure I will be devoting many hours to running around as a badass horseman of the apocalypse.

Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One

Since I was pretty tired still, my gaming wanderlust was in full effect… also I had a whole stack of games I was wanting to try.  The next on the list was Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One.  I remember being a big fan of the Ratchet and Clank games on the PS2, so this was pretty much a no brainer for me to try out.  I went into it knowing that this was basically a streamlined experience designed to be played with four players.  I was okay with this, and while the world was not nearly as intricate as the ones I was used to from the PS2, it still retained all of the enjoyment of the earlier titles. 

My only takeaway is that the game seemed really easy with Ratchet and Clank as an AI controlled bot.  Clank seemed to always be targeting and taking out the mob types that were difficult for me to get with my wrench.  All of the controls were essentially the same as before, so I regained my ability to play the game rather quickly.  I did not play terribly far but I thought the “driving a space taxi” sequence was extremely fun, with me steering by moving to one side of the taxi platform or another.  Should be a great game to return to and give it more time.

The Cave

The last game I went on a tour of last night was The Cave, and I did so on a very cursory level.  I fired it up, and selected a team of the Knight, the Monk, and the Twins.  Each character feels extremely interesting and has some special ability… that I have yet to really figure out what it is for.  Right now the game seems like it is going to be a puzzle and exploration game.  Essentially you have three characters to control, and various puzzles will require one or more characters to solve.  It has the interesting and humorous writing that is trademark of Double Fine games, so given the time I am sure I will get into it.  Having not played it terribly long, all I can really say is that the world is gorgeous and full of interesting visuals.

Crashing

At this point I was past going, so I decided I needed to head to bed.  I still have Sleeping Dogs downloading as well as a couple others.  Having access to a fresh font of games will definitely make the ps3 feel more useful.  Also having access to a place to set it up, on a dedicated tv… with a comfy love seat to sit on will make it that more likely to get used on a regular basis.  It was absolutely glorious sitting up there with a fan on me happily playing away in our newly renovated loft.  I am going to have to try and resurrect my long red-ringed xbox 360 and get started back playing those games as well.

I have a ton of things to deal with, and today is trash day… so I bid you all goodbye.  I hope you have a great day, and that you survive the rest of the week.  I will be heading downstairs myself to take out the trash, and try and deal with the front door that appears to not be wanting to lock.  It is always something…

Nature Sucks

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This morning being coherent feels like I am running some kind of cruel race.  Honestly being coherent any morning is rough, and the fact that I can string together multiple words into sentences is pretty freakin amazing.  This one is particularly rough because it feels like I did not actually get much of a weekend.  Between yard-a-palooza and furniture moving on Saturday, and the mothers day visiting marathon yesterday I feel like I just need to sleep forever.  I keep reminding myself that sleep is for the weak, and myself keeps giving me the middle finger.

The End of a Ploy

Over the past few years, my wife and I had decided that for mothers day we would divide and conquer.  I would go to my places, she would go to her places, and we would theoretically meet back at home in a shorter amount of time than normally needed.  Apparently my wife realized that she was getting the shaft, and while I also had two people to visit… those two people could be easily coaxed into being at the same location. Whereas her two people were in completely separate towns.

The divide and conquer meant that usually I was back home by 1 or 2 in the afternoon, and could chill out and relax and enjoy the rest of my Sunday.  That said, my wife would roll in around 4 or 5 and have the rest of her day as well… which is still better than going together.  However since we were both exhausted, she was determined that we should go together this year, if nothing else than to try and keep each other from falling asleep at the wheel.  Reluctantly I agreed knowing that Sunday as a whole was a completely gone day for both of us.

Mommy-ball Run

So yesterday got up with our horribly annoying alarm from 1988 going off at 7am… me rolling out of bed, showering and setting down to blog as rapidly as I possibly could.  I grew up catholic, so we had to get up that early to be able to attempt to meet my mother for breakfast immediately after mass at 9 am.  My mom has always talked about going out to eat with a “group of friends” after church, so assuming this was still the case we grabbed a largish table when we got the the restaurant shortly after 9.  We had no clue that it would just be Mom and Grandma, and that they would not be showing up until closer to 10 am.

Our original plan was to eat breakfast, and then go back to Grandmas house and chill out for awhile.  We did not however take into account that if given the choice between talking and eating, my mom will always choose talking.  As a result it took roughly two hours for her to finish her veggie omelet, and by then we needed to start getting on to the next house.  We gave our hugs to mom and grandma, made sure grandma got safely into the car and then moved on down the line to then next house.

All Roads Lead to Bernice

We travelled the almost hour to the next destination, my wife’s mothers house.  She was happy to see us as always, and hugs were exchanged, however she had an agenda.  Over the last few months my wife and I have both gotten into photography, and one of the things we had been searching for were old timey rickety metal bridges.  My wife’s mom thought she knew where a few were… 8 or 9 years ago… so we set out on an adventure to find them.  One of the things we quickly learned that a short distance means something completely different to her than it does to anyone else.

Over the course of the next few hours we drove along the backloads of Craig County in search of the illusive “old metal bridge”.  The first candidate was in a place that kept sounding like folks were saying “Car Salami”, but once we got there we found out that at some point recently it had been replaced with a very spartan concrete bridge.  The river still looked cool so we got out and snapped a few pictures, and played dodge the oncoming cars while doing so.

The next candidate was in what felt like the exact opposite end of the county, honestly maybe 10 minutes from where we started our journey.  We started backtracking with furious vengeance, all the while my wife’s mom telling us tales about what used to be there and who used to live where…  all of which were a super confusing tapestry of references that neither of us actually knew.  We arrived at our destination and low and behold it was a real live rusty metal bridge.  A placard on the bridge announced that it was built in 1913, and while extremely cool it was bizarre how every so often the bridge would shudder and sway.  We had been on the bridge a few minutes when my wife noticed that on one end it was being held together by only a few pieces of rebar… as you could see all the way down to the river below through a crack with only little toothpicks of iron rebar holding it together.  Yeah… we totally drove across it anyways.

The Final Leg

After finding the goal of the mission, we needed to be getting on the road to our last destination.  We travelled the 20 minutes there and at this point we are both extremely sore and tired.  We had a good visit with my wife’s step mom and her dad.  Also got to see my brother in law and his significant other, which was pretty awesome.  We have not seen them much since they moved away from Tulsa.  We talked about my wifes mothers addiction to the kindle, and just how many books she has read.  Her dad showed off his new tablet, that he purchased entirely for playing games on.  It was a pretty chill time of just hanging out and talking, which at that point was roughly all I was capable of doing.

As we headed back home, we had run the marathon for yet another year.  Four people to see, three households and it took roughly 12 hours to accomplish it all.  So this is why I am exhausted this morning, and why no amount of sleep would satiate me at this point.  We had a good time all around, but overall it just wears you out to run around and visit that many people in one day… attempting to make sure that no one feels slighted in the process.  So instead of me getting home around 2 and my wife around 5… both got home at 7 pm.

Nature Sucks

The big take away from the weekend is that nature hates me and is trying to kill me.  After all the yard work, dusting, and running around Sunday, my allergies are declaring war on me.  I have sneezed more in the last 48 hours than I have in the last 4 to 8 months.  As I write this blog entry, I am clearing my throat constantly and praying that the Allegra kicks in without bringing me into an allergy medicated coma.  It is going to be a crazy busy week, but at least I can enter it knowing that a ton of things got accomplished.

I hope the mothers out there had a great Mothers day, and I hope the children out there survived it.  I managed to get in a little bit of Rift last night before collapsing in bed, and the highlight was getting a friend of mine guilded with the Catari Honor Guard.  I will go into my debate over the positives of Alea Iacta Est and Catari Honor Guard another game, but I brought him into the Cats for the simple reason that we have the ability to invite people there.  I hope you guys have a wonderful day.