Month: June 2020

Cypher and the Bail Project

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I was not in the best head space yesterday and to be honest I still am not. I don’t think anyone really is right now, but that is okay. Right now I have all sorts of minor issues going on, including the hard drive that I keep a lot of stuff on attempting to die on me. However I decided to make a post this morning because I saw something that actually helped me out a bit.

I am not even sure at what point I tuned in to the stream of @CypherofTyr but I do know that the original intent of the stream was to raise $500 for The Bail Project. When I joined the stream was somewhere between $10k raised and $20k raised, and throughout the afternoon I kept returning from meetings to watch the numbers just keep jumping. This became my afternoon activity of tuning in periodically to see where the stream was at. As afternoon turned into evening, things just started snowballing and over the course of a marathon 10.5 hour long stream she raised $142,781 dollars for The Bail Project.

It didn’t stop there however, as the fuse on Urban Bohemian’s stream was lit with the flamethrower that was everyone piling in after Cypher’s stream concluded. I had popped over ahead of the official end of the stream and was entertained as we watched the numbers start ticking upwards again. I admit that I didn’t stick around until the very end, but I stayed for a few hours and watched the numbers climb past $10k which triggered the inclusion of an amazing Unicorn Kigurumi. All total this stream raised an additional $15,305 for The Bail Project.

It kept going from there with SushieMonster, but by that point I had long been claimed by sleep. I didn’t get to sleep on Monday night until somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 am, and was back up at 5:30 am so I was running on fumes at this point. This third stream however continued again to raise another $6000.69 for The Bail Project. I think the coolest part about all of it, is that it introduced me to Tiltify, which I apparently was completely in the dark about. It seems to make it very easy for you to rally a team of streaming fundraisers around a specific cause, which is something that I will file away in my brain for possible future usage.

The best part however was to watch this one stream team raise a total of $184,654.59 for The Bail Project. This is still going however as there are a number of additional streamers signed up at part of the team and throughout the course of this article I have been linking to the Tiltify Team page which you can still donate on. You might find yourself asking “What is The Bail Project”, because to be honest it is not an organization I had heard of prior to yesterday. I think it is summed up succinctly with their mission statement.

We believe that paying bail for someone in need is an act of resistance against a system that criminalizes race and poverty and an act of solidarity with local communities and movements for decarceration. Over the next five years, The Bail Project will open dozens of sites in high-need jurisdictions with the goal of paying bail for tens of thousands of low-income Americans, all while collecting stories and data that prove money bail is not necessary to ensure people return to court. We won’t stop until meaningful change is achieved and the presumption of innocence is no longer for sale.

I’ve been around the criminal justice system enough to know that those individuals who are incapable of bonding out, don’t have great outcomes. They are robbed of the critical time needed to prepare their case, and god forbid if things don’t go well, get their affairs in order. If someone cannot bond out, they are greatly limited in the amount of time and types of interactions that they can have with not only legal counsel but their own family. It is a broad cause, but one that helps individuals from getting stuck in a system that is so insurmountably stacked against them.

As I said before I have been dropping links to Cypher’s Nat 20s stream team on Tiltify throughout this post. I highly suggest that not only do you tune in to some of the streamers participating, but that if you are in a place where you can do it you donate some money to this excellent cause.

Cessation

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I can’t folks. I just can’t right now. I’ve been staring at my scrolling twitter feed for a good hour and I can’t come up with a single thing to write worth reading. I joked once that we are living in interesting times, and at the time I was simply referring to the pandemic. It is my hope that twenty twenty will be remembered as a turning point for this country and the rest of the world. Unfortunately in my just shy of forty four years I am not sure if I can muster the hope that that will be the case. It is my ultimate fear that this is but a brief pause as we continue to slide into a dystopian novel like the ones I read as a teen.

I’m scared for my friends. I am exceptionally privileged that I can be scared for my friends and that I don’t have to be scared for my own life. I would love to believe that something is going to change, because it needs to change. I’m not going to syndicate this post because there really isn’t much here to read. It will go out automatically to a few places but I won’t go through the process of posting it around. Tales of the Aggronaut is going to be silent for a bit, at least until I can think of something worth saying.

Keep your family and your friends close as we experience these times. Until Black Lives Matter, nothing much else matters.

Fun With Fake Friends

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Hanging out with Pizza Maid and her adorable Hatsune Miku Mag

This weekend I learned about a fun system in Phantasy Star Online, in part thanks to my good friend PizzaMaid. However since I have way more friends showing up through Xbox Live than I do friend avatars available I thought I would take a few moments today to talk about this system. First off at a high level Friend Avatars allow you to run around with up to 3 copies of your friends characters, pending they have gone through the process of registering an avatar. These are going to be weaker versions of their own characters, but nonetheless are a bit of a buff when playing through content as they do a non-zero amount of damage, healing and buffing.

Creating your Own Friend Avatar

Friend Avatar Creation Options

This system like so many begins with the Visiphone, aka the kiosk with the purpleish pink ? inside of a rotating oval. By now you should in theory make yourself familiar with this interface as it is also how you access this games version of the auction house, aka the Personal Shop. I’ve pasted together several of the UI screens showing the process of selecting the Friend Avatar option, choosing to Add and Avatar and then the settings that I currently have filled out for mine.

From what I understand the personality means nothing really, but the Attributes and Title impact how your avatar will perform in battle. I’ve not found a good NA guide to the settings, but here is one that I attempted to follow for my settings. I took that list and compiled it with the North American names here as a Google Sheet. I chose Hot and Cold which is known in the Japanese region as Tsundere and makes it so that they get better the more times you use them. Ready for War appears to translate to the “Battle Ready” option which means they have their weapons out and ready in advance which seemed useful. Lastly I checked the “Make Me Visible to Non-Friend Players” because whenever someone runs with your Avatar you earn some “FUN” currency as a result.

Real quick side note. You are going to have to go through this menu system every so often to update your Friend Avatar, as it will be snapshot at the moment it was created. Pretty much each day I go through and update mine so that as I gain new levels my friends will have access to those levels as well. The Avatar will in theory scale to the level of your friends, but it will be capped by the actual levels that you as a player have earned.

Running with the Avatars of your Friends

Friend Avatar Kiosk

You can access your friends avatars when you are just about to start a mission and are in this pre-loading area. Head over to the terminal that has an Orange “i” icon which gives you access to choose some characters to take along with you. In theory for most expeditions and such you can take three avatars with you. I have found a few missions that limit you to only having one, and others like Urgent Missions won’t let you take any with you.

Friend Avatar Selection Options

Once again I have pasted together several of the interface screens so that you could see the various options. The first menu allows you to choose one of the NPCs that you have gained some affinity for. Right now I only have two showing up which are Afin and Io. The next tab over shows you all of your friends that are available for running content. I have no clue what the “Support” tab does as I have nothing currently listed there, but the last tab labelled “Free” gives you access to the Avatars of random strangers. The avatars you have not run with that day show up as having “Fun Available” beside them, but in truth I ran a bunch of content yesterday and I believe I hit some sort of internal cap until reset.

Now you too can run around with what feels like your own personal army. I tend to largely pick classes that have a decent chance of healing or buffing me, because they seem to be more efficient than classes that attack things. They are by no means a “pet” and will ultimately have a mind of their own, but thankfully the game doesn’t seem to have a version of “in combat” that actually matters or blocks you from doing anything.

The Symbol Art System

Symbol Art System

Another random system that I learned about this weekend through my friend Ashgar is the Symbol Art system. If you are hanging out in the Gate area and someone throws out a message with a picture in it, then you have experienced Symbol Art. Based on my limited understand, there is an in game editor that allows folks to draw images as well as supposedly a windows based tool that you can import images from. What you end up with is a recipe for lewds and offensive content. So before you get any further into this system consider yourself warned.

In fact it took me a bit to find some pages that were relatively safe to show you in order to explain the system. You can access your symbol art collection from the Gear Icon and choosing Symbol Art. By default you won’t actually have anything, but the piece that Ash figured out is that the game seems to keep a rolling history of every piece of symbol art that you have seen. I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the Personal Shop and as a result I have seen a TON of symbol art. At the top of the screen there is a drop down that lets you change over and view your history, and then from there you can save any image to your permanent collection.

And there we go, two new systems that I have talked about. The personal avatar system is pretty great and I am enjoying running around with an army of minions. I’ve also figured out where to spend my Memories of Ragol tokens, allowing me to look like a Phantasy Star Online 1 era RACast which pleases me greatly. All in all I am still really enjoying the game, but also still extremely confused about the finer details. I will likely continue to keep posting random observations like this, so hopefully you find them helpful.