Month: May 2019

Tornado Watching

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Last night was effectively a repeat of Monday, but seemingly with more activity going on. I lost track of the number of Tornado warnings we were under at various points during the evening. The above photo is not mine but it is of a tornado that formed in my town. I quite possibly did the most Oklahoman thing ever and stood out on the front porch watching it happen. Before you chide me for not being safe… the storm cell was headed the opposite direction and at this point it was several miles away. Now this is not the first Tornado I have watched, but there is something mesmerizing about the process of watching it. It isn’t like the movies… the clouds feel like they are moving impossibly slowly as a plume of clouds begins to snake down towards the ground. In truth they are moving insanely fast but you just happen to be watching something massive occurring and the scale throws off any gauge of speed.

While we spent the night watching out for storms… the more insidious concern is the fact that we are having significant flooding. Thankfully where I live specifically… there isn’t much of a chance of flooding as I live outside of even what is the 500 year estimate floodplain. That said it is making travel around the area pretty rough as several of the roads that are normally completely safe to take are under water. Essentially we are in a rough spot as a state because all of the dams in this area are beyond safe capacity… meaning they are having to release way more water than they normally would. Effectively I think we are going to be past the 100 year floodplain estimates and will be setting ourselves up for the levels we have not seen since the “great flood” of 1986.

One of the things that you don’t expect in Oklahoma is the fact that we have the largest inland shipping port, and with it a huge navigational system. To add another monkey wrench into the works, last night two barges loaded with stuff broke free of their moorings and were heading towards one of the lock gates. The tugs were not available to try and round them up, because they had already rounded up two other barges that broke free earlier. So the concern is that if they slammed into the dam that is part of the lock system, and if it were to break… an entire town would effectively be wiped off the map not to mention other less immediate ramifications. For the time being however they appear to be hung up on some rocks and are still tied to each other… so folks are scrambling to try and anchor them in some more permanent fashion. Regardless the town in question has been evacuated in case things go south.

Basically right now we are living in a really weird time, and as such my game time has suffered. What you are getting from me instead in the meantime is a lot of random commentary about my life. I want to emphasize that I personally am safe and that my home is safe. The world around me however is less so… and it is interesting to be a spectator to all of the calamity going on around me. The area will most certainly be dealing with the ramifications going forward for a long time. I did however get some time to briefly play a bit of Necromancer in Elder Scrolls Online… and I have to say that the new game experience is a little weird. I am used to having the entire skill tree available to me from the start, and it seems like you only get access to something once you have used it? I didn’t get Two Handed Weapons for example until I had killed some stuff with one, at which point the skills opened up.

I still more or less plan on trying to play a Necromancer tank, but I probably should have gone through the tutorial to at least get some starter weapons. All I have found thus far in Elsweyr is a Two Handed Sword so I am using that for the moment. It feels really weird to be starved for skill points… seeing as on my main I have a stack of them that are sitting unspent. I figured a Dark Elf was probably the most likely to be a necromancer, so I went with that and with the scarred appearance. I hope to spend more time playing this when I am not dodging twisters. We were going to go buy flowers this weekend… but the Nursery is now sitting completely underwater so that won’t be happening. Memorial Day is going to be an odd one this year.

Minor Renovations

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Over the last few days I have been doing a number of minor renovations to AggroChat.com which is a site that you may or may not know about. Essentially the site is a mirror of the content that the various members of the AggroChat podcast do on the interwebs along with the resting place of each of our episodes. We use a plugin that is no longer actively supported… but still seems to work… to make a local copy of each post that comes out on the various sites that make up our group. What this means in practice is that the site is mostly filled with Aggronaut posts and podcast episodes given that I am way more prolific than the rest of our crew.

The site itself had been in a weird place for some time, largely due to the fact that the previous web host made it very hard to modify anything as I had to go through a manual install process. So over the last few days since moving the sites over the weekend I have been making small tweaks here or there to the site to refresh it. The main change that I made is to swap from the cumbersome theme that I had been using over to Generate Press, the same highly modular theme that I use with Aggronaut. What makes this theme extra awesome is the fact that the licensing allows you to pretty much use it on any site that you own.

I may be tweaking colors a bit, but I think for the most part things are now in a fairly stable state. The last major changes I made yesterday were to make private any content not related to the current staff, and to re-associate the podcast episodes to the AggroChat account instead of my account. What this gives me is a much cleaner Author widget in the sidebar that shows the last several podcast episodes lumped together as well as the last several posts from each author. Previously I really didn’t make proper use of the sidebar and now it has a much more consistent feel to it as well as linking to the various “AggroChat” branded social media accounts. I’m fairly happy with the current state of things and just felt like talking about it a bit this morning.

As far as gaming goes… I started my night attempting to do some Diablo 3. I say attempting because the thing that I really need to do is a round of bounties, and the thing that I keep struggling to do… is a round of bounties. For some reason over the last few days I have encountered issues where I get disconnected from Diablo and battle.net entirely… so much so that I often have to crash the client and restart it. This happened the other night while Grace and I were grouping up, which didn’t make it that big of a deal because she kept the session active. However when I am playing solo… this means whatever progress I made towards a round of bounties was lost since I only really need the Bounty Caches at this point and not whatever I happen to loot along the way. This also meant that Diablo 3 was not my final resting place for the evening.

My next go to was World of Warcraft Classic, but after screwing around on my newly minted Undead Warrior… I was not having much gusto there either. I think I might be in a holding pattern with this until it officially releases in August. Were they to tell me that they were not going to be resetting progress between now and release… then that would be one thing. However since leveling in Classic is not exactly fast… I am not exactly relishing the prospect of getting to a happy place in beta and then losing all of that progress for live. Classic served to tell me that yes I did in fact want to do this… and now I am more or less ready for launch.

Instead I largely opted to watch some episodes of The Toys that Made Us on Netflix. For the uninitiated this is a docuseries that outlines the various decisions that went into making the toy lines I grew up with in the 80s. I watched the first season when it initially was released, and yesterday was made aware that season 2 was available. So I watched the first of the new episodes on Star Trek toys, and then the majority of the episode on Transformers before I eventually gave up and went to bed. I think a lot of my restlessness from last night comes from the fact that I did not sleep well due to the storms. I was more or less dead to the world until the alarm went off this morning… and then was groggy enough that i couldn’t figure out how to turn the alarm off on my watch. Hopefully tonight will be more fruitful on the gaming front… and if not I will just keep on watching Toys that Made Us because it really is a charming show.

Bugout Bags and Hidey Holes

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I made an attempt to write this post earlier… but my internet at home seemed to be having issues due to the storm and WordPress ate the entire thing (even though I thought it had saved a draft…  not sure what I think of the latest version).

The last twenty four hours have been exceptionally strange to live through.  First you have to understand that I have lived in the area known as “Tornado Alley” for my entire life, growing up an hour north of Tulsa and living in the Tulsa area since 1999.  We largely take Tornados with a grain of salt, and while most of the cells that do pass overhead produce a Tornado at some point… the likelihood that you are going to get hit seems fairly small in the grand scheme of things and the prep work you go into seems often times for naught.

Yesterday however was a different beast entirely from what we are used to.  We had been hearing for days that we were going to get bad storms… but given that it is May in Oklahoma that is effectively like telling me the sky is blue.  What made us really take notice is when several of the school districts decided to preemptively cancel class. On the same day in 2013 a EF5 Tornado hit Moore Oklahoma and killed 24 and injured 212…  including directly hitting the Plaza Towers Elementary School. When the weather folks tell you that there will be multiple major storm cells throughout the day… I guess we have learned the lesson the hard way to take note.

My wife got out a little early and I left right at 4, which allowed me to get a couple of errands done before making it home before anything major had started.  My wife scrambled around and gathered all of our important stuff and some basic supplies and packed them into a rolling carry-on style duffle bag, sticking in in our “hidey hole”.  The rules of shelter are basically that you need to get to a room on the lowest level of the home with no exterior walls. The problem with our house is the only place that fits these requirements that you can actually get human beings into…  is the laundry room. So we created a little makeshift pantry of sorts on top of the washing machine and prepared for the worst.

There were a few of what I would call close calls, as in a storm that had produced Tornados passed within 10 miles of the house.  One of which was close enough to trigger the sirens… at which point we went to the laundry room to ride it out, at least until the news that was blaring in both the livingroom and the bedroom gave us an updated trajectory.  That is the thing about Tornados… they tend to behave in a fairly predictable manor. That is not to say that you should not respect every single one of them… but there are certain areas that get hit more than others. Often times the storm turns right before it gets to where I live and passes a little south of us… as did the two cases above.

The double whammy however is that as we were getting ready this morning… the news was projecting a Tornado headed directly for our house.  It was serious enough that the Tornado Sirens blew seven separate times during the course of the thirty minutes it took to clear us. I am uncertain if there is any damage, but I am guessing it passed by the outskirts of my town.  When it hit Tulsa International Airport however the storm turned… much like the others had and passed just south of us… by about five miles. What it largely caused is a delay in me getting ready and blogging… but we did hide out in the laundry room for a bit to make doubly sure we were safe.

Today I am sorta living in a permanent state of stupor.  When you live in this region you do this thing when you finally surrender and decide you are perfectly okay with death so long as you get some sleep in the process.  I finally reached that point around 10:30-11 pm and I have no clue when my wife fell asleep, but we left the television blaring in the thought that if something major was about to happen we could jump up and get into our shelter quick enough.  I changed into night clothing, but I think my wife more or less slept in the clothing she had been all night long. You don’t exactly sleep soundly when you fall asleep in that state.

As far as gaming goes I spent the majority of the night playing Diablo 3 in little doses, but did manage to group up with my friend Grace during part of it.  My lack of attention to detail and the fact that I am still under her level a bit… meant I largely spent the night dying a lot. That said I knocked out a few steps in the seasons journey and managed to gather up a few pieces of gear.  I am one step away from completing Slayer… but that step requires me to do rounds of bounties until I gather enough crafting bits to cube a piece of jewelry. The challenge there however is that as the night went on I kept getting disconnected making a round of bounties impossible to complete.

I’ve decided that my favorite part of this season and the patch that came with it is the fact that you can now peek ahead in game to what is needed by steps in the seasons journey you have not yet reached.  Previously you had to keep open a wiki and keep alt tabbing back and forth to see what you could be working on while you were waiting on something else that you could not necessarily complete at that moment.  I really want the fiery cosmic bat wings that come from finishing ALL of the seasons journey steps, so I have a feeling over the coming weeks I will be spending a lot of time playing Diablo 3.

Thorns and Rebirth

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This weekend was the beginning of Season 17 of Diablo 3, and after largely taking off the previous one we were back in the saddle again. I started the season on PC and hope at some point to start playing it on the Switch as well at least far enough to get the various season rewards. To the best of my knowledge this is the first season to double back and start repeating, as I had all of the cosmetics that were handed out this time around. This is both a positive and a negative in that I will be able to pick up the things that I have missed in the past, but it also will lower my overall drive to play a given season if I know I won’t be getting anything brand new.

I am amped for this season however because it allows me to return to my favorite build in Diablo 3… the “stop hitting yourself” crusader. Generally speaking I pick which class I play in a given season based on which class sets are available through Haedrig’s Gift, and this season the one available for Crusaders is Invoker… aka the Thorns build. The inner tank in me just really loves running around and watching the monsters explode when they try and hit me, and apparently everyone is pushing this one up high on their tier lists for long term clearing. Which makes me really want to try and get a bonus stash tab and the cosmic effect bat wings this season. I had a lot of fun this weekend playing around with Diablo 3 and I just wish that my schedule would have synchronized better with my friends because apart from the Friday night push and while recording on Saturday… I never quite managed to group up again. I did however finish chapter 4 and get the full set of Invoker… and am now working on the Slayer chapter.

Also the “Decades Behind” thing is starting to gather steam and I am shocked that for the most part the AggroChat crew seems really interested in it… or at the very least it is a thing that they feel like they are insane enough to do. With that however I decided that maybe I should see if I can get used to playing an Undead Warrior… given that raiding Horde side means you don’t have Fear Ward and having an extra fear break would potentially be worth it. It is weird that I am now thinking in terms of optimization for something that I have literally “been there and done that” for… which is going to make the whole raiding experience feel weird. I know these bosses and the strats to take them down… I know the drop tables and which gear I should seek out. I feel like Classic WoW is going to be a master class in optimization as much as anything else in trying to seek out the items you need. Like for example… I want to tank every single Warlock when they get their Felsteed… because that boss can drop one of the best +defense guns in the game at the time of Vanilla. All of this shit is coming back and my memory is on fire with all of the things I used to do to make things functional. This is going to be a really interesting ride.

Lastly this morning is the first post from a brand new web host. Over the weekend I uprooted both Aggronaut.com and AggroChat.com and moved them over to a brand new location. For the most part things seem to be going smoothly, apart from a few hiccups here and there. Aggronaut seems to be having more problems than AggroChat but that is largely because I am needing to undo the various customization I made to make it work on the previous host. Like this morning I could not get image uploads to work, but I ironed that out in short order. It was a sequence of events that made me to abandon ship. Firstly I was paying way more than I would need to make… but you can never underestimate the power of my laziness when it comes to avoiding paying money for something. Next there was the problem where at some point automatic upgrades broke completely… which was a big boost for moving but again something I was willing to deal with for the short term.

The final straw however is that the host itself has been wildly unstable… I use a cloud app called Uptime Robot to track if my sites are up or down. The above spam is from my inbox and the messages showing my site is going unresponsive on a pretty regular basis. This finally was enough of a kick to get me to go off and find better options. As it stands I am in the process of moving things over one by one but with AggroChat and Aggronaut both moved that really is the bulk of the work. It took forever to transfer the 77,000 files for AggroChat and the 25,000 files for Aggronaut… which is bizarre considering that the bigger of the two sites is roughly half the age of the other one. I think I have an addon gone awry on AggroChat that we use to cache copies of posts from all of the AggroChat crew’s personal sites. Every so often it will go on a binge and add the same post over and over… and apparently this has happened more times than I realized.

It is returning… time to start planning

Whatever the case I am on new ground now, and if things continue to go as smoothly as they have I will probably write a proper review of the service during Blaugust. That is right folks… I have not forgotten about Blaugust and will begin talking about this years running shortly over on the Discord.