May 2015 - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Podcasting Bug – Part 2

May 15, 2015 by Belghast

Making it Happen

Yesterday I talked at length about the design that goes into a podcast. While sure some people quite literally just start recording without much forethought, the best and most successful podcasts put quite a bit of effort into figuring out just how they want to go about the process of making their vision come to life. No matter how much prep work goes into the planning, there comes a point where you have to sit down and functionally record your podcast, and there are all manner of issues that arise. Most of us that go down this path lack the formal training with audio engineering to fall back on, so there is quite a bit of “sink or swim” that happens. Having gone through some of these decisions myself I thought I would talk about some of the hurdles that comes from the recording and editing of your podcast.

Recording the Podcast

The hardest part of the equation quite literally is how exactly you are going to record. If you can get all of the people you are needing to record in the same room it is a relatively easy situation of setting up a bunch of USB microphone inputs and having them all get recorded by a single piece of software. The problem being most podcasters have no physical contact with their co-hosts meaning that we are somehow going to have to make this whole thing work over the internet. When dealing with the internet you have all the standard problems of latency and network stability. Today I am going to cover some of the methods of recording remotely that I have seen or heard working very well.

The Skype Standard Method

Skype has managed become the gold standard as far as internet telecommunications software goes. While this started off as a relative rogue horse with the acquisition by Microsoft it has become absolutely ubiquitous. The problem being… it was not designed to record audio with. In fact Skype has no default method for recording either side of the conversation, and I would assume this is by design to keep away from any potential legal hurdles. The other negative is that excellent sound recording software like Audacity was not designed to work with something like Skype. As such you have to figure out how precisely you are going to make this work. Essentially the first hurdle you have to decide is if you are going to try and record individual speaker tracks or if you are going to record the resulting mixed audio.

Single Audio Tracks

Recording individual audio tracks is without a doubt the “purest” method of recording a podcast. This means each person is recorded separately and then can be mixed at a later date to create the final merged product. This means you can do all manner of post processing on audio levels, clearing up jitter and pops without effecting the integrity of other tracks. The problem is… isolating each speaker. There is software that will supposedly help you with this method but more than likely you are going to need to do a significant amount of research and testing to get it working correctly. The most tried and true method that I know of for this is the “everyone records themselves” method. Meaning that essentially each participant launches their audio recorder of choice and at the end of the show passes off their audio track for editing in later. There are a number of issues with this concept, not the least of which is that uncompressed waveform audio is way the hell too large to email. Secondly editing in multiple tracks is a mind numbingly boring process. If you record an hour long show expect to spend one hour per participant plus another hour or two on miscellaneous issues while trying to merge all this audio together by hand.

Merged Audio Tracks

The far more common method is that you simply “get everything right” before you start recording and record one merged audio track that represents the basis of your podcast episode. Generally speaking this involves getting a test call going first, and then setting up again to record the “real call” that will be the final product. Of note… my experience with Skype comes from co-hosting on other podcasts, and I chose not to go with this method myself. Some of my advice may not be absolutely accurate so before you set down this path do some legwork and research it yourself. The idea is that you start a Skype call and then have a third party software “catch” the audio and record it. Since this has become the default way of doing podcasts for many people you can imagine there are a lot of options out there for recording. Here is some of the software I have heard decent things about.

Voice Server Method

The method that I never really hear anyone talking about that has worked very well for me personally is recording off of a voice server. Both Teamspeak and Mumble offer the ability to record client side audio of what is actually being said on the voice server. Both servers we have used had their positives and negatives. The key negative of mumble is that all of the audio is recorded in a mono format, making the sound a bit hollow. The positive there however is that you could choose to record each participant to their own audio file allowing you to merge them together manual later. Teamspeak offers stereo output but merges all speakers into the same audio stream. Ultimately you have some of the same issues that arise with Skype in that you need to make sure that all of your speakers are as “clean” as possible before you actually record. Since we record on the voice server that we quite literally hang out on every single night, then this portion was pretty simple for us. There are a few things you really need to think about before going down this path.

Audio Codecs Supported

The server that we happen to record on supports a large number of audio codecs. This allowed me to set up a custom server channel and tweak the audio settings until I got a product that I was happy with. Currently the channel we record in uses the Opus Voice codec with a quality rating of 8, and this is something we had to tweak down a bit until we found a happy place. In order to maintain that quality of stream you need an uninterrupted 7 KB/s transmission but thankfully for the most part all of our participants have really solid internet.

Lock Down Your Channel

If you are going to record on an existing server that is already active, it is important that you have to lock down your channel. It is extremely easily for some well meaning person to pop into your channel out of curiosity and completely destroy your podcast. In theory you could get by with just naming your podcast channel something obvious like “Podcast Channel”, but I suggest taking the extra step of password protecting the channel. This allows me to hand the password out to regular guests and simply drag limited hosts into the channel manually.

Turn Off All Audio Queues

This one is absolutely important. Sure it is nice to know when someone leaves or joins the server but for the purpose of recording a podcast make sure you turn off all of this stuff. Someone popping on and off the server will be recorded in your final output stream.

Priority Speaker

This one has bit us in the ass a few times, but if your voice server uses a priority speaker system… make sure that ALL participants in the conversation are artificially elevated to priority speaker status. How priority speaker works is that it essentially lowers the volume of low priority speakers to make sure that the priority one is heard. This works great in a raid situation where one person needs to be delivering orders, this does not work well when you are expecting multiple people to be chiming in on a conversation. I am administrator on our voice server so I cannot turn off priority, so I just elevate everyone else to the same level while in the podcasting channel.

Google Hangouts Method

This is the method I honestly know the least about but I believe this is how Cat Context has been recorded for eons. You can check out this guide but I will try and cover the basics. The idea is that you start a Google Hangout On Air inviting all of the members of the show. This is recorded and afterwards you can export the video in MP4 format. From there you can take the MP4 and edit in an audio editor like Audacity and extract the audio only portion that then becomes your podcast. The benefit here is that instead of only having audio you also have video recorded of the hangout that can be uploaded to a service like YouTube allowing you to tap into a completely different audience from the traditional podcaster one. The negative is that you are putting all of your faith in Google Hangouts and hoping that the service will not have any hitches during the recording. In my own experience playing games over Hangouts, and having people drop in and out of the call… this one makes me more than a little edgy. I just wanted to throw it out there as an option because I know lots of people make this one work, and work extremely well.

Editing The Podcast

No matter how pristine you think your final recording is.. you will ultimately need to edit it somehow. Ultimately you can easily spend ten times as long editing the podcast as it took to record it. I personally go for a minimal editing process to safe my own sanity, but I know some folks that can take upwards to a week to get the final edit ready to go. The more you edit the faster you get, so expect your first few podcasts to take a significant investment of your time as you get used to your tools. My suggestions will be based on Audacity the extremely flexible open source audio editor. It works equally well on Windows, Mac and Linux and actually does an amazingly clean job of letting you edit just about anything you could ever want to edit. To make it even more extensible it supports a number of standard audio plug-in formats. Like I said above I take a pretty minimalistic approach to editing AggroChat so I am going to focus only on the features that I actually use.

Normalize

The very first pass I make is to normalize the audio. This helps to minimize the difference between the loudest volume speakers and the quietest volume speakers. Now you can completely squash any difference in volume if you really like but you end up with robotic sounding audio. I have personally found that I like the defaults pretty well. This is an extremely fast edit so should not take a lot of time, but the final result can be very noticeable.

Noise Reduction

This pass is primarily for if someone I am recording with has a significant amount of white noise or audio “hum” when they record. For the majority of the time recording Aggrochat this was actually “me” that I was having to edit. This pass is a little trickier because of the way this tool works. Ultimately you need to highlight an area of the recording where the noise you want to extract is evident and use it as a sample using “Get Noise Profile”. From there you run the complimentary command of “Reduce” to essentially cycle through your audio and filter out that noise. It does a fairly good job but the more noise you filter, the lower the overall fidelity of your recording gets. This really needs a fine touch because if you filter too much you end up with washboard sounding audio as a result.

Truncate Silence

If you have ever edited audio the thing you notice after the fact is just how many awkward pauses we make as human beings. Going back and finding these and eliminating them is pure tedium. I spent weeks doing this manually until it finally dawned on me.. that this should be something that is pretty easy to automate. After a little research I found the “Truncate Silence” tool and it is going to be your new best friend. What it does is essentially even out the silence in your track truncating any silences over a set amount and padding any that are under a certain amount. These are the settings that I go with for AggroChat, for Bel Folks Stuff I move it up to 400 and 600 respectively to allow a little more room for contemplative silence. Ultimately you will have to figure out what setting “feels” best to you.

Limit Your Futzing

You can literally spend hundreds of hours if you really wanted to obsessing over the wave form audio. I have stared at ours enough that I can literally tell you which person is speaking at any given moment from the shape of their waveform audio. Basically the end result is going to need to be something that you can live with, but at the same time does not take over your life as you keep editing and re-editing. To make my life easier I have created these files that I refer to as the “Canon” file that includes everything a show needs minus a given weeks audio track. I set these up once and then just paste the new audio into them before saving them out. You too are going to find little tricks that you can do to speed up your process. On a good night I will have the MP3 audio of our podcast ready to post within thirty minutes of finishing recording. The longer the recording the longer the edits will take, especially as you start doing things like noise removal. Those take a significant amount of processing time. Now that you have your audio recorded and ready to go, you are going to need a place to put it. Tomorrow I am going to cover the hosting of your podcast and some other bookkeeping tasks like publicizing. My hope is that someone will find this whole process useful and maybe it will spur on a few new Newbie Blogger Initiative podcasts as a result.

The Podcasting Bug – Part 1

May 14, 2015 by Belghast

Love of Spoken Word

I grew up with I guess what you would call a love of both the written and spoken word. The moment I got access to my first copying machine, was the moment I first tried to create my own comics and magazines devoted to whatever I happened to be into. When I got my first word processor I went through a renaissance of sorts in trying to publish information about the games I was playing and distribute it freely among anyone who was willing to take it off my hand. So when I started blogging significantly later in life it was of no real shock. I had been “trying” to publish my own content for years, just doing so with limited success. I would be willing to bet that other bloggers “of a certain age” can tell very similar tales of youthful exuberance. While I grew up in the MTV generation, my sentiments will more than likely always lay with the era when print media was king.

Another constant in my life however was Radio and Public Television. I spent most of my childhood watching Nova and Mister Rogers Neighborhood, and when I rode around in my fathers truck it was almost always tuned to the radio station playing Paul Harvey. When I started choosing my own radio stations to listen to I found the best use of my time to listen to NPR and use that morning lull as my way of catching up on the world. From there I discovered so many broadcast programs that were more entertainment than education, and I was absolutely hooked. In many ways podcasting is the extension of this love for the spoken word. Some bloggers catch the bug, and feel like they have to move into doing something more than just writing. This happened to me a little bit over a year ago and now I have two different podcasts to show for my obsession. Many other attempt to maintain three for four different shows devoted to different segments of their experience. If this is happening to you, I thought I would take a moment this morning to talk about some of the issues I had to deal with when approaching my first show.

Format

One of the first decisions you are going to have to make is what exactly you want your show to be about. Just like with your blog you have to make a decision as to what you want your format to be. Single game or single topic blogs and podcasts will be significantly more popular than generalist ones, however in my experience your audience will also be considerably more fickle. If you listen to a Wildstar podcast religiously for example, and you stop playing Wildstar… then your reason for listening to that podcast also goes out the window. If you listen to a more general podcast you ultimately end up listening for the cast of people, and those sorts of listeners tend to be significantly more loyal. That said all of the biggest podcasts that I know of tend to be devoted to a very specific niche.

For me personally I knew that there was no way in hell I would be turning this into a career so I was not extremely concerned about trying to get the biggest possible audience. I am interested in a lot of different things, as are my friends… so for me it was a no brainer that we created AggroChat to reflect the conversations we already had on TeamSpeak on a regular basis. In my experience podcasts tend to fall into four broad groups as far as the actual format goes. I have listened to great podcasts that fall into each of these categories, and not so great podcasts as well. Ultimately you have to pick whatever works best for your cast, which leads us to the next point.

Topic Focused

I chose to refer to this as topic focused, but more often than not this tends to mean a “News” show where the hosts cover a series of predetermined topics. This requires you to keep good show notes and that they get circulated before the actual recording of the show. Believe it or not we actually started AggroChat trying to follow this format, but quickly realized we were not the “planning” type people. These tend to be the most “predictable” shows as far as recording time goes, since you have a clear list of goals that you want to accomplish in each show.

Conversational

This is ultimately the format that AggroChat became, because we are bad at having structure. The idea here is to record a somewhat natural conversation with a group of people. Topics flow in and out of the discussion and segway naturally. The problem here is that this only works if the folks you are recording with are very very familiar with each other. While the first format relies heavily on planning, this format is all about interpersonal chemistry. I personally love this format, but I am sure there are just as many people who are annoyed by it. This is not a format you can carry off if you are assembling a group of people that do not regularly spend time together.

Narrative

This is the podcast that tells a story. There are many different versions of this but probably my two favorites are This American Life and Radio Lab. This is the format that requires extreme planning but adds a whole new dimension… that is significant amounts of post production editing. When it works you have this wonderful audio journey through the story you are trying to tell. When it doesn’t work, you end up with jarring gaps. This is one of those formats that I aspire to try some day, but just don’t have the technical ability yet to really make it work. If you are an audio editing wizard though this might be your natural format, mixing in clips and music to support the tale you are trying to weave. The folks that can do this one will have my constant and undying respect.

Interview

This format is probably the most straight forward and at the same time extremely flexible. The concept is simple, in that one or more hosts asks questions from one or more guests. The challenge is in scheduling a constant flow of new guests to sit down and record with you. You can put as much planning into this format as you need to, or you can do it completely off the cuff. When I record “Bel Folks Stuff” for example I ask a few standard questions but the rest is taken from queues in the conversation and I try and go wherever the conversation wants to lead. When Braxwolf records Beyond Bossfights he seems to have a master plan laid out in exactly what he wants to ask his guest. Both work and both are completely viable methods, so ultimately you have to figure out which version works best for you. Chances are you can even make a hybrid approach work a well. This format relies mostly on the ability of the hosts to “coax” a performance out of their guests.

Casting

There are lots of different styles of podcasts and each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. The more people you add into a podcasting cast, the more chaotic the end result. The fewer people you have, you lose some of the depth of having multiple opinions chime in on topics. The “Solo” podcast is its own beast that I personally am not a huge fan of. It always feels like I am being lectured to more than joining in on a conversation. I am going to talk about a few of the styles that I have experienced and some of the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Solo Podcast

This is the traditional “one man show” to borrow the showbiz term. You have an idea that you want to run with and you just start recording. The problem here is that like I said above these shows tend to be extremely unbalanced sounding. The solo podcast works well if you are telling a story, and going to be referring back to audio or music clips to help flesh out your narrative. These shows also work amazingly well for five to ten minute “news update” type formats. Where the format tends to grind on is when dealing with a thirty minute or longer show of just one voice talking. The positive is you can literally record whenever you want to, and are not limited by other people to make your ideas work. The negative is… you have to carry all of the weight on your own shoulders.

Duo/Trio Podcast

I feel like the majority of podcasts fall into this category, where you have a preset group of two to three voices that present topics every single week. This is the cornerstone of the podcast for a reason, because it works extremely well. In three voices especially you can get just a wide enough range of opinion to make most topics work, but not have too many competing voices to let a discussion descend into chaos. The challenge here then becomes scheduling. Unless you can find a time every single week or whatever your recording schedule happens to be… it becomes a juggling act trying to get all of the key players in the room at the same time to record a show. I know many shows that will record multiple episodes in the same weekend and stagger their release to make up for scheduling conflicts. I know personally we have done this twice with AggroChat and they made for some very long evenings. Once you get into a routine then more than likely things will stabilize and get significantly easier. Duo works well but the problem with Duo is when one person is gone… you have a solo podcast. With a Trio you can limp through with just two people relatively successfully.

Ensemble Podcast

The ensemble cast is the most forgiving when it comes to scheduling conflicts. It tends to draw on a large list of potential co-hosts and arranging as many of them as you can on a given night. This is ultimately what AggroChat has turned into over time having had ten different people who have appeared with semi-regular frequency during the course of our time recording it. Ultimately however in order to make it work you are going to need a large group of friends who are interested in podcasting. The strength of this format is that you can incorporate new people easily and in a pinch you can record with significantly fewer people than normal. The problem being that once you get over five people on a podcast it starts to get extremely chaotic. We do our best to mitigate that problem with our format, but ultimately AggroChat is what it is… a rambling chaotic mess sometimes. I feel the casting is extremely sustainable as recently Rae expressed interest in stopping the podcast for the time being, and we were able to work in a couple newer voices in her place.

Interview Podcast

This one is a very different beast in that essentially it is a solo podcast… with one additional guest that varies each time you record. This is the format I chose for my Bel Folks Stuff podcast, and it has its own set of interesting challenges. The key problem for me has always been scheduling people. When dealing with a few people on a regular basis you can pick a single time to record that works for everyone. When you are constantly changing who your “partner” is on a show by show basis you end up having to work with the new persons schedule. This has been pure hell for me at times considering a lot of the people I have wanted to talk to are in vastly different time zones. This has completely destroyed any semblance of a release schedule for me, and as a result I have purposefully kept from submitting the show to TGEN because I never know when I will get time to record one. I personally find the format gratifying as a host because it allows me to have interesting long form conversations with “folks” that I care about. Due to all of the problems I would highly suggest against this being your “primary” podcasting format.

Release Schedule

As with blogging the key to building a reliable audience is through regular and predictable release schedule. There are people who start their day by reading my blog, because they know it will always be there waiting on them. Similarly there are a series of podcasts that I start listening to Monday morning as I begin work because I know they will be reliably waiting on me. As such I have found that the interval is not nearly as important as simply sticking to something. I personally jumped in the deep end and started immediately with a “weekly” show. This means every single week like clockwork you have to crank out a show, edit it, and get it posted and publicized. AggroChat requires less editing than most shows out there, and still without a doubt this dominates my Saturday night and Sunday morning getting things ready for the world. There are many nights that I go to sleep about 2 am after editing, and then still have to get up the next morning and deal with the publicizing. This is the last point I am going to talk about today so I thought I would talk about a few of the release schedules that I have seen work.

Weekly

Like I said this one is at times sheer madness. You are signing yourself up for a radical shift in your lifestyle to incorporate making a podcast into each and every week. Depending on the type of podcast this can be easier or harder. For example we use an ensemble cast, and Kodra is more than willing to “host” but I have never really cross trained anyone else on the whole “creation” process. The positive here is that people LIKE listening to new content every week. Your audience will grow faster because you are creating more content for them to consume. We even have some insanely loyal listeners that have gone back through our entire back catalog of new 56 episodes. Just realize that the weekly show is a massive challenge, and you have to be fairly stubborn to make it work.

Bi-Weekly

I hate the term bi-weekly because it means two things… twice a week or every other week. In this case I am referring to the every other week schedule that several podcasts use. This is still a strenuous schedule but gives people an “on” week and an “off” week to recuperate and plan things around. I have been exceptionally lucky that I have a wife that supports the madness I am involved in, but for a lot of married couples locking away a night every week is going to be a problem, especially once you factor in children. The bi-weekly schedule tends to be this happy medium making it equal parts flexible and manageable while still churning out enough content to get folks “hooked” on your format quickly.

Monthly

There are a myriad of issues with the monthly format. For starters you have to be extremely careful when you schedule exactly when you want to record. Theoretically you need to record with regular interval meaning you would need to release the first week of every month or some similar schedule. The problem is life often sabotages you, and while it sounds good right now that we will record in three weeks… there might be a birthday or an anniversary or some other hurdle that gets in the way. I am horrible at keeping calendars so there is no way I could do a regular monthly show. I release “Bel Folks Stuff” on a semi-monthly schedule, but I have actually missed an entire month before. The big problem I see with a monthly show is that in theory you have to always have a great show. When you do a weekly show, you can recover from having a shit week pretty easily. When you are only releasing twelve shows a year… they all pretty much have to be golden to keep folks interested.

Recording Your Podcast

When I set down to talk about all of this I quickly realized that I would have to chunk this up over the course of multiple posts. In this first part I focused on the “design” of your podcast. In the next part I am going to focus on the nuts and bolts of recording your first episode. The final part to follow after that will talk about the nuts and bolts of hosting. My hope is that this inspires folks to go off and create their own podcast, but also inspires them to realize there is a lot of planning that goes into making it work. As I am drafting the next pieces I would love to know if there are any specific things that you would like me to take a detour through and cover.

Happier Without Meters

May 13, 2015 by Belghast

Deliberate Exclusion

One of the puzzles I have been trying to sort out the entire time I have been back in Final Fantasy XIV is why exactly the community as a whole seems to be friendlier to other players. I’ve talked about the various literal “social engineering” missions that the development staff have made in order to spin things that would normally be a negative as a positive. When I see the new player bonus in a dungeon I actually get excited rather than frustration over having to potentially teach someone new mechanics. Quite honestly I am wondering if it is something far more simple than anything, a line in the sand that the folks running the game drew long ago and have since reinforced numerous times. In Final Fantasy XIV running a DPS log parser is not only unsupported by the game, but it is actually an actionable offense. This has had an interesting chilling effect on some of the elitism that you normally see in communities.

Since simply mentioning parsed logs in private free company chat can end up with a GM knocking down your door… it changes the way folks interact with the data gained from log parsers. That is to say people are still parsing the logs, but the first rule of “FFXIV-APP” is there is no “FFXIV-APP”. This means that no one gets called out in the middle of a pug for having “weak dps” and no one is standing around in “trade chat” linking their latest boss kill. The players that do parse, do so quietly and in secret and I believe in the end this makes the “meters” less of a competition and more of a personal diagnostic tool. It seems that once you take this competition out of a community it has some pretty wide reaching trickle down effects. I’ve always thought of dps meters as a distraction, and back during Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, we had rules against mentioning them or linking them in raid chat. I largely just found the automated spam annoying, but it also seemed to cause players to focus on things that were less important than the mechanics of a fight.

Accidental Experiment

The problem is that meters are a double edged sword. Eons ago while the earth was still cooling I needed a add-on called Omen in World of Warcraft to let me know how I was doing on threat. Later on these features got rolled into Recount, and Skada and the rest of the meters. As a result I simply got used to running the meters all of the time, but after a point they were no longer needed. Tank threat became a non-issue with the introduction of Vengeance to help mitigate the lower damage that tanking characters generally had. Once introduced into my life I started feeling like I needed meters all the time to let me know how things were going. I became addicted to the metrics and numbers associated with raiding, and as such spent a good deal of my time staring at bars and percentages rather than actually playing the game. Some weeks back I talked about being frustrated with the current state of my mods, and actually went so far as to start installing several of the addons that I had been using.

One of the addons that ended up getting pulled was Recount, because I had this plan of switching over the Skada. The funny thing is that I got interrupted during the middle of what I happened to be doing, and while Recount absolutely got installed… I never went so far as to install another meter. The first time I noticed was during a raid a few weeks back, but since I was so used to NOT having meters in Final Fantasy XIV it didn’t bother me terribly much. This combined with the fact that I knew someone in the raid was going to parse our logs anyways caused me to simply ignore the fact that they were not there any more. The end result was that I felt generally happier about my night of raiding. I spent more time in the moment of the game play rather than focusing on how I was doing versus this player or that in the meters. I decided to just go with this and run without meters for awhile to see if it improved my overall outlook on the raid.

Happier Without Meters

The funny thing is that I actually think it did. World of Warcraft stopped being a competition for me and more of an experience. Sure the fights are still nowhere near as engaging or enjoyable for me as the ones in Final Fantasy XIV but I am spending more time “in” the fight and less time worried about other non-important things. The funny thing about this is that apparently it had other effects on my game play as well. The constant concern about how I happened to be doing may have been actually holding me back from actually doing well. I figured I was still firmly in the middle of the pack dps wise, until after the Flamebender Ka’graz fight one of our mages said something that made me curious. He said something to the effect of “I can’t believe I was beat by a protection warrior”. To which point I confessed that I had installed my meters some time ago, and had no clue how I was actually doing anymore. To which my raid leader responded “Well, Bel, You Did Well” and linked me the url of the live parse.

There are a lot of mitigating factors behind my performance and I know this. For starters I recently got the four piece set bonus and for gladiators it essentially increases everything useful to us by 20%. More than that I think the absence of meters caused me to stop worrying about every button press and rely more on what I knew I should be doing when I should be doing it… instead of trying to second guess myself all of the time. In essence I stopped caring about my performance and just started playing the damned game, and while it most definitely improved my levels of happiness it also seems to have actually improved how I was performing. I am just not a hyper competitive person about most things, and accidentally eliminating that stimulus from my game experience seems to be a net positive for me. I know that there are always going to be meters tracking my performance but I also feel like so long as they are not in my face all of the time I can try and ignore them. Now I am not suggesting that you uninstall your meters, and that it is some new path to happiness. However for me it seems to have given me a new lease on a game I was starting to hate playing.

Axe to Grind

May 12, 2015 by Belghast

Lung Infections Suck

I’ve been in a strange place the last few days, where I am still recovering from what has turned out to be an infection in my lungs. It has been allergies central around here and unsurprisingly my lungs have reacted negatively to it. I had been dragging along for awhile with what felt like a constant persistent dry cough. Last Friday I finally decided to go to the doctor when I coughed up a small bit of blood. Turns out my lungs were actually in far worse shape than I thought. Since then I have been on a pretty heavy dose of prednisone and am on the mend, but man… I have to say I am still drained as hell. I attempted to go to work like normal yesterday but ended up coming home about halfway through the day. Today I am making another attempt to go a full day, so I am hoping the strength stays with me. What is so strange about this one is just how drained I feel as a result of simply existing.

Why are my lungs betraying me you might ask? The above photo is not intentionally abstract but instead my my phones camera attempting to focus on what are ultimately hundreds of tiny particles of Cottonwood seed. This is what we jokingly refer to as summer snow, and with all the rain we have been getting the Cottonwoods have been blooming in overdrive blanketing the law with a mat of white fabric and making the air look like it is quite genuinely snowing. Thankfully I have a day or two of reprieve thanks to the recent round of storms, but I am sure as soon as things dry up again the bloom will begin a new. Normally this happens around my birthday in June but I guess all the moisture moved up the time table. In any case it sucks to live through and I am just hoping that I can limp through until it has finished. In the meantime I will continue to take this high dose pack of prednisone and antibiotics and pretend to be a normal human being.

Axe to Grind

For months now we have been slowly keying folks through the various primal fights in our Final Fantasy XIV free company. While a chunk of us have been sitting on the Ifrit step, the final of the original set of Extreme primals… it seemed like every time we set out to attempt it we were missing a seventh or eighth that also had it unlocked. So we would once again shift focus and do another round of Garuda or another round of Titan to get people caught up. Last night, finally after a new round of Titaneers we managed to get eight people on at the same time with the ability to do Ifrit. Now I realize I could have been pugging my way through the primal encounters, and with all of the mount farming parties this is a relatively straight forward prospect. There is just something rewarding about doing a fight that is new to you, with nothing but your free company surrounding you. It makes the kill that much sweeter and the experience that much more magical as you accomplished a new mission with friends. Once again we went into the fight without much research, but managed to pick up the basics extremely quickly.

It took us several attempts but by the end of our first night ever working on the boss we had downed an Ifrit and moved on to other things. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to get this quest out of my log. I know the big push for this at least from Ashgar’s side was to get the sweet axe I am pictured holding in the first picture. For those who have completed some of the later story, you will recognize this as the axe that Moenbryda wields. It is just one of many weapons you get as a reward for defeating the original trio of Primals, but I went with the axe because it is probably one of the more unique appearances in the game. Now I doubt if it will ever offset my usage of my Malignant Mogaxe, but it is still pretty awesome to have it as an option for when I decide to change up my outfit a bit. Glamouring/Transmogging/Wardrobes are one of the simple pleasures of a modern MMO. The ability to look like you want to look is what makes these games fun to play for me. Gone is the era of looking exactly like every other player in the game, and here to stay is the ability to craft your own appearances. After playing Everquest and being able to tell every single item a player was wearing based on its color and appearance… I have to say I am happy to be living in modern times.

Back to Nael

Yes I realize this is not a picture of Nael Van Darnus but I didn’t snap any pictures from our attempts on Turn 9 last night. Instead this is a picture of me rocking the Garuda bow because I finally feel like I have an outfit floofy enough to support it. This weekend I managed to finish getting my 120 set from World of Darkness which makes up a chunk of the outfit above. Since picking up the Garuda bow I have been looking for a reason to use it, and finally I think the gold and white in the Bogartyr coat works well enough with the gold and white on the bow. Now if anyone tells me that is really blue and black I will reach through the internet and punch them in their soul. A few weeks back we set down on a new mission, which involved alternating between working on coil and working on other things. Since then we have finished the original three primals, Leviathan Extreme and Odin and as a result feel like we are no longer beating our heads against the wall that is turn nine. Coming back to Nael tonight felt far more fresh than it has in a long time.

I was somewhat concerned that we would have lost progress, but in truth we picked up right where we left off and started making fast progress. Everything about the fight is smoother now and we have been making it into the final dance phase every single attempt. The awesome thing about this is that it feels like last night we were finally getting the pattern down. In fact the last few attempts we were making it to the dive bombs phase consistently. Now if we can just master where the dive bombs need to go… I have a feeling we will be clearing turn nine finally and moving on to the final coil. I love my static group, and I love the way folks just keep plugging away without getting frustrated. We have been on this boss for a very long time, and no one seems to have any diminished desire to KEEP doing the boss, or keep trying to succeed. In fact everyone seems to keep doing little things here or there to tweak their performance and make things work more smoothly. I love my free company, and I love the raid we have built around it… my hope is that we can keep trying to get more people into the mix and maybe with Heavensward expand to a third static because the two we have now are just awesome.