Month: January 2014

People Are Not Pixels

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In Black and White

Yesterday was a really weird day for me, past that I really don’t have the proper words to describe it.  Firstly I made a post, and it seemed to resonate with a large group of folks.  I will get back to that in a bit however, other than that it was one of the more stressful days I have had in awhile.  The concurrence of the two things happening at the same time was a bit of a godsend, as the internet literally got me through the day.  I am this odd dichotomy of social and anti-social.  When I am in my zone with people or topics that I feel comfortable with…  I can become a social butterfly.  When in the guild mumble or conversing in game or on twitter… I become an amped up version of myself.

However in the real world I am considerably more subdued, and wary of the spotlight.  Over the last few years I have been pushed more and more into a role of leadership within my job.  For a long while my goal was to avoid doing anything that got me into the paper.  Growing up I was in my small town local paper damned near every week… and it was a pretty claustrophobic experience.  One of the things I have always loved about living in the “big city” is that I could function more or less anonymously, and only show up on the radars of the folks I cared about.  However yesterday I had a scheduled meeting to be on a panel for a follow up interview to an earlier article.

The first time I was part of one of these panels, I thought I had dodged the bullet.  The article came out and there were no quotes attached to my name.  However over the course of that weekend another story came out outlining some of our development efforts.  Sure enough, almost every line had my name attached to it.  It is not like there is anything I want to avoid saying, or any problem I have with anything I said… but the whole experience stresses me out greatly.  I am hoping that I have actually managed to dodge it this time, because the reporter really did not seem all that interested in what I had to say.  However I had to psyche myself up so much for the whole experience that I just felt like I was crashing down afterwards.

Skewed Perspective

Most of the time I feel like I am blogging in the morning in a complete vacuum.  The fact that I choose to blog when I do doesn’t really help this much.  Generally it is dark outside, the house is completely quiet other than the hum of the various computers in my office and the occasional visit from cats.  To misquote Rowan, it sometimes feels like I am shouting into the void and never really hearing a response.  When you spend a lot of time operating in that mode, your perspective gets more than a bit skewed as was apparently the case yesterday.  I was bummed, and all the sudden it was like the entire damned internet gave me a flying tackle hug.  I am so amazingly humbled by the show of support from people I didn’t even realize were out there listening.  Much like Ardua is on a mission to hug everyone…  I just want people to feel as loved as I did yesterday.

While what I said seemed to strike a chord with a lot of people, and the spontaneous explosion of a post I expected to just wither quietly away came on exactly the day I needed a boost.  Some folks seemed to really “grok” what I was saying, and others simply thought I was asking for comments.  To be truthful… comments are awesome, and I won’t lie that seeing that many passing through my blog was an amazing thing to me.  However I would like to think this is not about ego as at least one person suggested.  What yesterdays post was about more than anything is connecting with people, on a real and permanent level.  People are simply not pixels to me, and that is really the point I tried to make more than anything else.  If we talk and interact, then I care about you and your own personal destiny, not just in ways where it is convenient for me to care.

People Are Not Pixels

Folks are amped about Wildstar, or Eve Online or Neverwinter…  none of which are things I care about at all, or have any real interest in.  However I am always excited to interact with folks on the level of things that they care about.  When a blog turns from gaming to more serious topics, I am interested as well, because it unravels the puzzle of each person and what makes them tick inside.  As Syl mentioned yesterday, the community is what you make of it.  So I am going to endeavor to comment more often on more blogs.  Quite honestly… I get self conscious at times.  “Tales of the Aggronaut” is my space in the world, and my buffer of comfort that allows me to get away with saying whatever happens to be on my mind at the time I say it.  When I leave my blog and visit others…  I feel somehow like I am intruding on someone else’s space.

There are many times I intend to comment, but backspace away the statement because I feel that it doesn’t really add much of worth to the discussion.  Jaedia mention that yesterday, the whole concept of having to take a deep breath and push the publish button.  That is me so many times, I don’t often value my own opinion…  so why should others?  Twitter and G+ are like this great neutral ground, where it feels like it is okay to bother people.  Since Twitter comments are so short, it feels like having to distill your comment to 140 characters somehow makes it more innocuous, less imposing.  Basically I am a bundle of self doubt and neurosis and I am going to try really hard to get past that.

I am sure I will have another downer of a day, but you all overwhelmed me with your giant group hug.  I care about each and every one of you, even if you silently supported my topic and didn’t muster the courage to say anything yourself.  That is me most days, so I fully understand.  There will be days I still feel like I am shouting into the void, but I need to keep adjusting my perspective.  Yesterday proved to me just how blessed I really am.  Some days I simply need to be reminded that I have a really awesome life, filled with so many amazing people that are there to support me when I falter.  So on that note… before I gush any further… I just want to give you all a heartfelt thanks.

Blogs Are Not Community

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Social Gaming

I am breaking my own rules a little bit with this mornings post.  Generally speaking I sit down at the keyboard and write something fresh each morning, in the 30-45 minutes I have before I need to leave for work.  There have been times in the past when I have broken this rule due to me needing to leave for work early the next day.  Today however I feel that this topic needs a bit more care and feeding than my half awake brain can really muster.  As such I am getting started on this topic the night before my intended date of posting.  I am sure that sounds just as contorted as it did to me as I wrote it… but bear with me.

Today I spent a few minutes sifting through my Twitter list, and pruning folks who either are not active any longer, or that have never really engaged with me in the past.  I may have accidentally pruned someone that does not fall into that category in the process, and if so I will go ahead and apologize now.  If this happened and we talk regularly I will definitely want to correct that mistake.  Essentially I view the people I converse with in games and online as more than “just pixels”.  I think this is the side effect of growing up an only child, that I have a deep yearning for being people…  despite also having an introverted streak in real life.  So as I approach people, I see them as not someone from whom I can benefit… but instead a potential life long friend waiting to be discovered.

Blogs Are Not Community

This viewpoint towards social media and other gamers has caused me more than a bit of heartburn during my almost five years of blogging.  As I pruned my twitter list today, I noticed that a number of people that I thought I had made a connection with along the way no longer followed me.  There is a time that this would have absolutely devastated me, but over time I have gotten used to a sad fact of the gaming blogosphere.  While at times we think of ourselves as a community, in truth we are more like a collection of independent nation states.  While we may make occasional alliances, and share resources…  these alignments are all too temporary and fleeting.

This is not to say that I have not met some really amazing people that I will hopefully be lifelong friends with, but over the years a handful of folks I trusted ended up stabbing me in the back.  I have come to accept that unlike my guild, these are not always people that I can rely to always be there for me.  My craving this permanent connection is likely a side effect of the amazing guild I have been a part of since 2004, and the similarly amazing community that got me started in blogging in the first place.  I have given credit to Blog Azeroth and the Twisted Nether Blogcast in the past, but had this extremely nurturing community not existed, I likely would not have set down roots in the blogosphere at all.

Blog Azeroth

I’ve always enjoyed writing and found it extremely therapeutic, but the BA folks offered me support and fertile environment.  There are several truly amazing and completely selfless people out there.  I’ve talked a lot about how amazing @RowanBlaze of I Have Touched the Sky is… and I cannot highlight this fact enough.  However I have to take a moment to talk about @Fimlys of Twisted Nether Blogcast.  This man has made a career of highlighting the amazing work going on in the World of Warcraft blogging and podcasting community.  Similarly from the Blog Azeroth roots I met so many amazing people like Stop, Triz, Rev, Linedan, Llanion and so many others that I may have met initially through BA that I now associate with other things.  So these forces combined gave me a somewhat unrealistic viewpoint of what I felt being a gaming blogger was all about.

When I made the decision to leave World of Warcraft and venture off into other games, I was simply unprepared how tentative this “community” of friends I had built really was.  I joined Twitter initially as a way to hang out with other blogger types, and within a few weeks I had amassed a large group of people that I chatted back and forth with regularly.  However as soon as I stepped forth outside of the WoW Bubble I found that a good chunk of those people disappeared. Since I was posting content not related to WoW, they were simply no longer interested in me and  my non-wow discussion.  I tried to make connections within the more game-agnostic circles, but set forth with the false notion that it would be just as easy as it had been within WoW circles. 

Cold Outside

It is funny how a one game can instantly bring people together.  If you meet anyone in real life, and find out that you both play WoW… regardless of the Horde/Alliance divide…  you are pretty much instant friends.  You both share this large shared set of experiences to draw upon, and it gives you immediate common ground.  Going out into the outer reaches of the mmo landscape, was tantamount to leaving civilization behind.   I expected to find the same kind of fast friends I had experienced before, and instead had some pretty harsh reality checks.  Like I said, I go into almost every encounter with a new person open minded and entirely too trusting for my own good.  This is likely a side effect of growing up here in Oklahoma, but I generally expect the best from people.

The problem with the non-wow MMO blogosphere is that there is no common point of reference that we all have.  Sure I would imagine that most of us have WoW in common, but each of us exited that experience with a kaleidoscope of different experiences not all of which something you want to build a friendship on top of.  If you go a little further back there is likely a common thread of Everquest, however not everyone views those days with the same rose colored lenses.  So instead of immediate bonds over shared experience, what I found instead were a bunch of wholly independent personalities, not all of which were that open to new people operating in their shared space.

Lessons Learned

I had a bunch of bad experiences early on, and it has made me a bit more guarded.  I still try and be as open as I can be, but at the same time realize that I am “just pixels” to a fair number of the people I meet along the way.  This has made me cherish all the more the people I do feel genuinely care about my well being along the way.  I want to thank @Sypster for creating the Newbie Blogger Initiative and @ModeratePeril and @TRRedSkies for carrying the torch forward this year.  You three and everyone who has participated in the initiative in any way are selflessly trying to create the same kind of nurturing environment that lead me to start blogging.  The problem is, that once the initiative is over we all fail pretty miserably at keeping the ties we created going.  I’ve picked up several of the new bloggers on Twitter, but I could be doing so much more as well.

I think all of this comes down to the fact that once you leave the rather large and protective WoW-based blogging bubble… the community is somewhat flawed.  We lack a single focus, a single rallying cry to unite behind.  For a long time there has been a zeitgeist of players rushing to whatever happens to be the newest thing.  So for a short period of time, we have a rallying call, a thing everything wants to talk about.  When the magic fades from whatever shiny new toy we have, we are left again with a bunch of separate islands floating in the same stream.  I can wish things were different all I like, but I know at the end of the day I have a very few individuals that I can really count as true and long lasting friends.  Overtime I have learned to accept this and just expect folks to drift apart and forget or be forgotten.

What Was the Point?

Quite honestly… I am not really sure what I was trying to say before I started down this path.  I still find it disappointing when someone decides they no longer want to interact.  I know for example one individual who has followed and un-followed me at least a dozen times by now.  I feel like I am the same person I was the day I began blogging, or at least I am at my core.  I have always tried to be myself and be open to meeting new people, and hopefully integrating them into my own personal monkeysphere.  If you want to interact with me, and do so in a way that does not stress me out… then I want you in my sphere.   Chances are I am also going to try and adopt you into my guild family…  it is a thing I do.

This year I really want to surround myself by more positive influences, and be willing to accept that there are going to be some negative ones I need to let go of.  I cannot make everyone happy, and I am sure I will annoy the hell out of a good number of people along the way.  My hope though is somewhere between I will keep finding a lot of loyal and true friends along the way.  I also hope that by some small way I can do my part in trying to fix what is broken with our “community”.  I am not really big on making new years resolutions, but if I did make one it would be to continue staying positive and try my best to find the good in people.  Here is hoping that some folks will stick around long enough to find the good in me as well.

Factoid February

I have to credit @TheChindividual for the name, who is as a matter of fact one of this years crop of Newbie Blogger Initiative graduates.  This February I am going to do something to put more of myself out there in front of everyone freely.  During the twenty eight days this year I am going to start off each mornings post with a true factoid about myself.  @Ithato had a great idea of posting two falsehoods and one truth…  and as much as I like that, I think it defeats the purpose of baring my soul for all the world to see.  So I have a few days before this starts, and I am going to begin jotting down things… hoping by the time I need them to have all twenty eight ready to go.  Hopefully at least someone out there will get some enjoyment about my little tidbits.

On Wings of Nether

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Low Graphical Fidelity

Since this is a patch day that happened to start super early… aka 5 am my time… and I don’t wake up until 5:30 I will not be having any screenshots that are not recycled or otherwise blatantly borrowed.  Since I was off yesterday I simply did not think ahead.  For me at least it feels like Monday… even though it really is legitimately Tuesday.  Maybe this is the way my Aussie friends feel since they perpetually live in the future.  Today’s post is going to involve a whole lot of faffitude, so be prepared.

For those who have not been following the news of all that is faffing about…  you have potentially mentioned that @AlternativeChat has declared that 2014 is the “Year of Faff”.  Tales of the Aggronaut is one of the many blogs that now proudly sport the badge on our sidebars.  While I am proudly participating, for me at least 2013 will be the year of Faff in that it was the year that the Godmother of Faff brought the term front and center in the collective consciousness that is the “blogosphere”. 

Faff is a term that has been in my vocabulary for some time, and not always in an extremely positive context.  When my friends and I had to jump through a whole bunch of meaningless hoops to accomplish something it would often be described as a “whole lot of faffing about”.  What has changed during 2013 and the start of 2014 is that “Faff” has become a proper destination for the evening.  Realizing this has added greatly to the overall enjoyment of games like World of Warcraft that are so chock full of fluff that you cannot go more than a few in game feet without encountering something that could be worth achievement points or something that you have yet to collect.  If for no other reason, I salute @AlternativeChat for realigning our vocabulary and taking what used to be a negative and turning it very much into a positive.

On Wings of Nether

Netherdrake_choice_noPCOver the last few weeks I have been working feverishly each night on completing my Netherwing Dailies.  As I have said before for whatever reason, during the Burning Crusade this is a grind I never participated in.  In truth more than anything it is likely thanks to the fact that during Burning Crusade I lived in a perpetual state of broke.  As a raid tank, pretty much every spare gold I had went to my volumes of repair bills.  These repair bills have decreased greatly over the last few expansions, but back then it was not unheard of that I would rack up 100-200g in repairs a night, and in BC money that was quite the little fortune.  As a result I never really had the money to get my epic flight training, which was required to start the Netherwing quests in the first place.

To be truthful, I likely never would have gotten it were not for a contrived scheme to get me my epic training.  A friend of mine started a guild lottery, where we would send him raw materials and he would turn around and auction house the materials and pool it up to fund epic flying mounts for people.  The first one apparently was universally rigged, as everyone colluded behind the scenes to give it to me.  Thankfully through this welfare flying program we managed to buy at least a half dozen epic flying mounts, and I believe the final number was a bit closer to ten.  However this was pretty late in the expansion and I never ended up going out and starting this grind.  In part I was a bit slowed by the fact that my main at the time had no harvesting skill, and as such had no daily quest for turning in that.

War Bear Time

amani-war-bear Needless to say yesterday mid evening I managed to finish out exalted and got the On Wings of Nether achievement.  You get one mount free for completing the achievement, but I quickly flew out to Shadowmoon Valley and snatched up the other 5 for what now seems like the extremely cheap price of 180g.  This puts me I think a a half dozen mounts away from We’re Going to Need More Saddles.  There are so many farmed mounts that I am lacking, that I need to just buckle down and start farming away. Over the course of the weekend however I did manage to get one of these mounts that have elluded me.

Back in Burning Crusade we farmed more Karazhan than I really care to think about, but after we had used up all of the Medivh goodness, we set our sites on the newly released Zul’Aman.  Over the course of the expansion we got better and better at this dungeon, but never quite had the gear and strategy needed to get through a successful bear mount run.  We got really close a few times… I remember one time we were less than a minute away from the mount.  Something would always go wrong and fate conspired to keep me from my prize.  During Wrath of the Lich King, I really have no clue why but I never went back and attempted getting the mount.

When they redid the dungeon during Cataclysm, I was unfortunately not playing the game… so I completely missed my chance to get the mount legitimately again.  For fear that they might eventually simply do away with the mount I decided that I needed to set my sights on this mount and just get it over with.  I realize there are subtle differences between the mount you earned at 70 and the mount you can get today… but I don’t really care.  It is a big freaking bear with horns and spikey bits.  I will likely be proudly riding this mount around for awhile, as it has officially offset my Spectral Tiger as my normal mount of choice.  Now I just need to pick a new victim, and start working towards farming up that mount.  Starting to thing the Barons Charger is a likely candidate.

The Wi-Fi Miracle

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Aging with Technology

high-contrast-keyboard

It has been a really weird morning so far, and as a result I am getting an extremely late start getting a blog out today.  For starters I was up pretty late last night watching episodes of Lost Girl on Netflix.  Neither of us really seemed to want to get out of bed this morning, seeing as for both of us it was a holiday.  The original plan was to go up to my mother-in-laws and set up a printer.  However there were several other issues that needed to be dealt with at all.  She is in her 70s, and the fact that she is on Facebook is pretty damned impressive to me.  However technology as a whole is this black box for her, and she seems to be unable to decouple the existence of the internet with the existence of her laptop.

For weeks she has complained that her laptop isn’t working, and in truth it works completely fine.  What is at fault however is her internet connection.  Quite simply put she doesn’t have one.  That is not to say she does not sometimes have one, but internet is not a thing she pays for.  Instead years ago I installed a wifi router at my nieces house that lives adjacent to her.  The intent was to provide me internet access when I was up there during a family illness so I could continue to work while still being available.  By some freak if science the wifi signal was usable over at my wife’s mothers house. 

The Wi-Fi Miracle

Using Google maps to measure the approximate distance it is well over 200 ft, and passes through lots of walls between the access point at and the location where my mother-in-law has her desk.  It was absolutely amazing that it ever worked, let alone has continued to work until recently with a over seven year old wireless router.  But she cannot grasp or does not seem to believe that it is simply an issue of not enough signal strength.  At this point it could be so many different things, her new laptop could simply have a weaker wireless card, since good wi-fi coverage is just an assumed fact these days.  It could be that she piled more stuff in the back bedrooms, which the signal has to pass through.  Or it could simply be that the wireless access point is slowly dying.

Whatever the case she feels there is a  grand conspiracy to deny her access to Facebook.  In truth I was really not ready to deal with this issue today as I have never attempted to set up a wireless repeater, let alone tried to make two different access points work together.  We have a graveyard of old wireless routers laying around the house as we seem to burn through them every couple of years.  The last thing I wanted to do was try and install a semi-functional technology in the home of someone completely technologically confused…  and end up having to do house calls two hours away.  So we rescheduled for next weekend, and this week I need to research some options and get something ordered from Amazon.

Gauntlet Revival

Hammerwatch 2014-01-19 16-29-59-38 I am not really sure if yesterdays Steampowered Sunday post adequately covered how much I really enjoyed playing Hammerwatch.  By the time I stopped to write my blog post, I had played roughly 66 minutes.  By the end of the day I had logged well over 4 hours.  Shortly after posting my blog entry, I hooked up with 3 other friends and we discovered a bunch of new things about the game.  Firstly when doing multi-player you have the ability to add crutches.  Since we were still obviously learning the game, we added two really important ones.  Firstly we gave ourselves unlimited lives, which allowed us to brute force a few horrible areas of the game by simply respawning back into combat and bashing our faces against a wall until we got through it.  Additionally we added hit point regeneration… which was extremely slow… but just enough to help take the edge off things a bit.

With these added bonuses… we were able to push through to the third set of stages and down two world bosses.  I have to say the game just keeps getting more enjoyable and trickier.  It seems like each of the character classes has some really strong abilities.  The paladin that I was playing eventually got the ability to proc a stun on mobs, as well as the ability to deflect missile attacks from an ever widening frontal arc.  The warlock began getting some life drain abilities which greatly improved its sustain.  While I didn’t pay that close of attention to the Ranger or Wizard they both also seemed to get more and more lethal over time.  I have to say sale or no, this game is very much worth picking up.  The above image if from a really cool Gauntlet bonus level that we unlocked.  So much nostalgia. so many feels.