Last week I talked about rediscovering X’s Adventures and the fact that he is currently doing an adventure in Minecraft Hardcore Mode. I also talked a bit about how I thought it might be fun to do the same thing given that I had no clue Hardcore Minecraft even was a thing that existed. Since then I have started recording clips of me playing Minecraft in Hardcore mode and uploading them to my YouTube channel. They are pretty low production value because I am recording them directly from OBS and then uploading them more or less uncut. If you are interested in listening to me ramble while trying to sort out how Minecraft works, then this may be your jam.
As of this blog post, there are three parts to the series and each of them are in the neighborhood of 30 minutes. It seemed like 15 minutes wasn’t really enough time for me to actually accomplish much of anything. Seeing as I am not exactly doing this thing to get internet famous and really for my own personal amusement I am sticking to that format. The funny thing about this video series is that I don’t believe I have ever used my name aka “Belghast” as a seed for a Minecraft world. Turns out that seed is really solid because it put me really close to a village.
I need to sort out what exactly I want for a goal, because right now I am more or less going through the same routine that I have always gone through. Initially it was a hunt for Wood, Coal and Shelter and that evolved into a search for Iron. Which will in itself lead to a search for the bounty hidden without the bowels of the earth like Diamonds and such. However I am not entirely certain what my goals SHOULD be. An initial goal was to get a full set of armor, but past that I am going to have to sort out what my long range goal needs to be. I could in theory hide within mines for any number of videos because that is something that is relatively safe to do.
However I somehow doubt that watching me hollow out the innards of the earth is exciting content. I have various projects that I would like to complete, but the challenge with that is a lot of them are going to require large chunks of time to do them. My fear at doing “offline play” and then showing the results is that since this is Hardcore Minecraft… one death means the end of the run and should probably be something that is recorded. I’ve done a few things offline now, but they are simplistic like building some proper stairs or organizing my inventory. Something like “Let’s build an inside garden!” would take significantly more time and also with that brings forth significantly more dangers. I might be able to do the safe indoors tunneling work offline and then do the final bits while recording.
I will have to figure out exactly how to make this work. For now I have been releasing a video each day, but I somehow doubt I will be able to maintain that schedule for very much longer. It isn’t like I have an awful lot of viewers right now, but what are some projects that you would like to see tackled? It seems like a double edged sword because there is a certain act of discovery from not having played in so very long and not fully understanding how the world works. However that also means I don’t know a lot of things that might be interesting to go after.
It has been a pretty wild ride for me and Dragon Age Inquisition. I remember when it initially released I had a pretty negative reaction to it, not in the least part because I ran into some significant technical difficulties. The negative opinion might have also been brought on by the fact that I had an awful lot of things on my plate. Warlords of Draenor was ramping up and that was an expansion I absolutely was serious about raiding in, as well as the fact that we were still very much actively raiding in Final Fantasy XIV as well. The combination of all of these left a pretty sour taste in my mouth, but I think a bit part of the experience was the fact that narratively it set me on a path of playing someone I considered to be the bad guys of Dragon Age 2.
As such it might come as somewhat of a surprise when I now tell you that after finishing Dragon Age Inquisition over the weekend, that I am pretty certain that it is now my favorite in the series. This game does more for the overarching cosmology of the setting that any of the previous games. It answers so many questions that were left hanging as well as creation all new mysteries to leave us waiting a fourth outing. Additionally to bring up a point raised on the podcast this weekend, Dragon Age Inquisition shows you a world worth saving. Ferelden during the blight was a miserable place, and Kirkwall similarly seemed to be horrible place as well. It isn’t so much that Orlais is that much better but you do get to see that the outdoor world of Thedas truly is breathtaking.
The real charm of Dragon Age Inquistion and the thing that ultimately won me over to its side… are the characters. In every other Bioware game there are always going to be one or two characters that by the end of the game I hate with passion. My friends have had to listen to my rants about these characters for years. In Dragon Age Inquisition there isn’t a single character that I did not come to love in the end. They all evolve over the course of the missions and the two of you grow together so that in the end you can look back on your time spent together fondly. I could not have said the same in those early hours with this game, but after over a hundred hours spent on this one play through I regret that the journey is over.
One of the more interesting things about Inquisition is that it has given me a new found respect for Dragon Age 2. The only problem is that now I cannot view my adventures in Kirkwall as anything other than the opening story arc of the Inquisition story. It makes me want to go back and play my way through it again because the events of Kirkwall play so directly into the events of the Templar and Mage war that I feel like knowing where it is going will give me a better appreciate of that story. I enjoyed Dragon Age 2 when I first played it, but it is a more cloistered experience than Origin or Inquisition. It is telling a smaller tale and as such it doesn’t feel like you had quite the same epic sweeping adventure. That said if you never played the second game I would absolutely suggest it as “required reading” for inquisition, because there will be plot points that probably land a little hollow. There wasn’t really a direct continuation of the story in Origins, but it feels like Inquisition takes place moments after the events of the second game.
So there we have it. The fifth time playing this game absolutely was the charm. I am looking forward to the next outing so much and I am hoping that maybe just maybe we see it before the end of the year. However given the lack of details and the still very early state the Game Awards Teaser appeared to be… I fully expect it to be a 2022 release. After experiencing the main story and DLC content I can say without a doubt that I am happiest with the way that Inquisition wraps things up. As such it is bumping Dragon Age Origins out of the way for my “favorite Dragon Age game” slot. Unfortunately this also bumps down Dragon Age 2 a rung, because it is still an overall worse experience than the first game but still one very much worth playing.
While I am apparently on this redemption arc for Bioware games kick, I am trying the OTHER title that I have never successfully made it thorugh. KOTOR and KOTOR2 originally released on the Xbox and I did not get to play either of them until the eventual Windows releases came out slightly afterwards. I loved Knights of the Old Republic when I played it in late 2003 and was absolutely rabid for a sequel. So when KOTOR2 The Sith Lords released in early 2005, I made every attempt to play it but encounter so many bugs that ultimately halted that experience. Similarly when it was finally released again through Steam in 2012 I gave it another attempt… but still largely found it to be a buggy mess. So here we are nine years later and an intricate series of third party patches applied… and things seem to mostly be going fairly smoothly.
It is a MUCH slower gaming experience than the more recent Bioware titles that I am used to. However I am starting to get into the swing of things. This is an era when this sort of third person RPG experience was not a “solved problem”. Interesting thing of note… sometimes Tam and I discuss when exactly mouse controls flipped so that what was inverted Y is now standard Y. Apparently it was sometime around the release of this game, because I ultimately had to flip the Y axis in order to get a control scheme that was more comfortable overall. The other interesting thing of note is that this exists in a world before “Quest Tracking” really existed and as such I find it interesting how there are no real waypointing going on directing you towards your objectives. I guess it was a different time in gaming, but I am getting used to it and hopefully can make it through the experience this time.
Now I am curious. Do you have any games that you bounced off and would like to return to? Drop me a line below. Also feel free to contest my proclaiming Dragon Age Inquisition the best Dragon Age game.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we talk about a few things that have been on the list for a while along with some new fresh topics. First off Kodra talks to us about Nerts and the world of competitive solitaire. From there Bel talks about how Dragon Age Inquisition has won him over and how he thinks that it might be the best Dragon Age game so far. Ash talks about Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and how it also might be the best Warriors game to date. Thalen shares with us Nick Knacks on the PopArena YouTube Channel and its exploration of classic Nickelodeon television. We also debate what we consider our Golden Age of Nick. We dust off a topic that has been on the list for awhile where we talk about whether or not it is the time for World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV to go Free to Play. This leads into a general discussion of MMO mechanics over the years and lends its way to some talk about Guild Wars 2.
I am going to warn you ahead of time that this story is going to be a bit of a wild ride. I’ve tried to provide details, reference links, and images wherever possible. However since I have never told it on this blog, and Oklahoma is in the news right now for our crazy “Bigfoot Hunting Season” legislation… it seemed like the right time to talk about it. Something you have to understand about the region I grew up in, is that it has very low population density and miles of largely undisturbed river bottoms attached to the Verdigris River complex that eventually winds its way to the Arkansas river and eventually to the Mississippi. The Bigfoot or Sasquatch is just something that has been talked about my entire life. I grew up around a large density of Native Americans and they would talk about the creature like it was fact not speculation, so admittedly it is a little hard not to get caught up in the romance of the tale.
The Noxie Monster
Article from Lawton, OK Paper on Noxie Monster
We are going to start this tale with something that comes right before I was born. In 1975 there was a Bigfoot sighting in Noxie, Oklahoma some 15-20 miles away from the County seat of Nowata where I grew up. It turns out my Dad who wanted to be a professional Photographer and and his Cousin who eventually became a photo journalist got the Bigfoot hunting bug. It was decided they were going to try their best to snag photographic evidence. Over the course of a few weeks in September they crawled throughout the Northwestern region of the county surrounding the farmstead where the sighting took place. They never really saw anything other than the fact that the landowner that made the sighting was very visibly shaken by the incident. It turns out that he accidentally shot his hunting dog one night thinking the “monster” had come back.
Boyscouting
My Scouting Shirt
Growing up I was heavily involved in Boy Scouting. While taking care of my parents over the last few months I happened upon my old scouting shirt where you can see the various badges and such I earned. Scouting got its start in Oklahoma and was largely brought to the Americas by Frank and Waite Phillips of Phillips petroleum fame. The very first troop organized was in Pawhuska Oklahoma and as such my Troop 29 identification legitimately means we were the 29th chapter given our proximity. I ultimately made the rank of Eagle before dropping out of the pattern of attending scouting events in 93/94-ish.
One of the challenges that comes with remembering back to this era is that the years sort of blend together. However I am pretty sure that our tale takes place in 1989, and I have some reasoning that goes into that. It surrounded a Birthday weekend, of one of the individuals involved and I know for certain it was not 1990. At that party it took place days before we were going to scout camp, and I had just gotten my grubby mitts on Final Fantasy 1 for the Nintendo, which released in 1990 and I was super sour about having to wait a full weeks time to play it… and ended up bringing it with me to the birthday party and stayed up all night long grinding the area surrounding the Marsh Cave trying to get through it. The birthday in question must have taken place the previous year which would have been 1989.
The Campground
Biggerstaff Parcel of Land
Our scouting troop had been together since we were all cub scouts, and part of that leadership was the Biggerstaff clan. Adam was one of the members of the Troop and one of my close friends, his mom one of the den mothers, and his dad one of the adult leaders as we transitioned into boy scouts over cub scouts. At some point during the scouting journey they purchased a huge acreage that bordered the riverbottoms and because of the huge area of land this became our stomping grounds for so many shenanigans. We even managed to build a freaking bridge out of telephone poles and railroad ties to make it easier to traverse an area of the pasture. The highlight however as this little nook in the northwestern corner of the property bordering up against the fenceline that we turned into a permanent campground of sorts.
The funny thing about it is with the advent of google maps and satellite view I have at my fingertips things I never could have dreamed of as a teenager. This area seemed so massive to me but in reality it isn’t nearly as big as I thought. We never did get the pond to a state of it being swimmable, but did stock it with some fish so it was at least fishable. When they first bought the property it was overgrown with moss but a few moss carp took care of that. Sadly I see no visual evidence of bridge work, but it was in the lower left corner of the above image over that creek. We had originally tried to turn that corner into a campground but it was entirely too infested with tarantulas to make it a long term goal.
The First Incident
Overview Image of the Area for Incidents 1 and 2
I feel like I have been talking around the story up until this point, so I guess it is just time to dive into it. I remember specifically that the gathering in question and campout associated with it was for Adams birthday. Since our little group was a bit like the kids from Stranger Things, there was a heavy crossover between those invited to the party and those who were part of the scouting troop. I’ve attempted to draw what I remember of the scene on top of the satellite photos for visual reference. I remember the area being significantly more wooded than the satellite photo shows. So I attempted to shade in green an area that I remember being the treeline at the time some thirty two years ago. The other problem with the overhead photos is they were taken in winter, so nothing looks anywhere near as full as it actually is during the summer months.
Essentially the campground was a little clearing right up against the northwestern fenceline of the property bordering the riverbottoms. It had a semi-permanent fire ring and then we would set up our tents in the open area just south of this, generally a single depth arc around the fire. There was a trail through the treeline on which we dug a latrine with a crudely lashed together lean-to allowing you to do your business in peace. When it came time to shut down for the night, the adults would hang a lantern on a dead tree that had a good branch for such things at the entrance to this trail, in theory allowing someone to find their way to the latrine at night if they were really desperate. To the best of my knowledge no one was ever that desperate.
A Frame Tent like we were using
On this specific trip I was bunking with a guy named Ryan, that we called “Slimer” because he was sort of our mascot and we could get him to do pretty much anything. Look this is 80s friend group logic and also Ghostbusters was still a big deal at this point. We were staying in an A Frame tent that we generally referred to as a “Pup Tent”, this one specifically was beige but I copy pasted this example from Amazon because I remember it being pretty similar. The opening faced the fire ring and thus the entrance to the trail. Both of us were pretty chill and ended up bunking together because we actually wanted to sleep… not stay up all night doing nonsense. Some of the campers were known for doing pranks and such and we were attempting to avoid this.
Close up of the Camp Area
I was not taken to wearing a watch at this time in my life, so I have no clue what time it was when I was awoken by some sound. I scanned outside the tent to see what it might have been when I noticed someone messing with the lantern at the entrance to the trail. At first I thought it was one of the adults adjusting it, but as my befuddled state faded I noticed the the thing was batting the lantern with its hand. Now this lantern was hung at least 10 ft off the ground and required either standing on something or using a stick to hang it up there. I woke Ryan up to see if he was also seeing what I was seeing, and we sat there for a few minutes whispering trying to sort out what was happening.
I am guessing our frantic whispering was not as quiet as we thought, because whatever it was bolted and started running towards our tent, or at least at the time I thought it was running towards our tent. At some point it veered to the west before it hit the fire ring and headed to the fenceline, hurdling it in a single fluid motion before heading out into the neighboring pasture and disappearing out of our sightline. I drew in orange what I am guessing the path probably was, but at the time it certainly felt like it was heading towards us.
Random Figure in Silhouette
The problem is I can only speculate what it actually was. It was a humanoid figure and it was dark, but the fact that it was a figure standing between us and a light source is pretty much going to mean all we really saw was a silhouette. While our eyes were adjusted to the dark, I can’t for certain pick out any specific details about the figure. I certainly thought “Sasquatch” at the time given its scale. I’ve seen a truly countless number of whitetail deer and it certainly wasn’t something like that. Far as I am aware there are no bears in this area, nor am I aware of bears being able to hurdle fences like a track star.
I remember thinking it was very tall and relatively lanky for the height. My 1980s brain thought that it looked sorta like the outline of Chewbacca. Past that I don’t really trust my memory of specific details. I do remember being extremely scared and not really talking much about what we had just witnessed for the rest of the night. I am sure at some point sleep claimed me, but I remember sitting there staring out at the night for a really long time afraid it would come back for us. Neither of us told the others the next morning, and it was years before I was really willing to talk about it myself.
Some Math
Hoops Geek Blog with Standing Reach Calculator
I have no clue why this is suddenly important to right down this story today, but as a result I have been doing copious amounts of searching for various bits of information. Firstly I was curious how tall a humanoid would have to be in order to carelessly bat around a lantern that was in theory hung roughly 10 ft up in the air. In my searching I found this interesting blog with a built in Standing Reach calculator, allowing you to type in your height and get an estimation of what your Standing Reach would be. So in order to comfortably reach that 10 foot high lantern, the humanoid in question would need to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 feet tall. Granted that is taking a bunch of assumptions that a “Bigfoot” would have a human like ratio of arm to height, when that might be the case depending on how much after how similar they might be to our shared primate ancestors.
Similar Metal Barbed Wire Fence
Now for some more math. The average barbed wire fence stands around 4 foot tall, and from what I remember it was the standard ubiquitous red topped metal fence post construction similar to the above photo. I do not remember the vertical pieces designed to keep the fence tight however because we absolutely crawled through the fence on a few occasions. The calculation that I am not sure about, nor am I really certain how to find out is what it would take to seamlessly leap over a fence like that. The tallest hurdles used in track and field events are around 3.5 feet in height, so I am guessing this hypothetical 8 foot tall humanoid should have the clearance to cross a 4 foot tall fence. Again this takes a lot of things for granted, that a Sasquatch would have similar abilities to a Human of that size and build.
The Second Incident
Second Incident Close Up Area
After we got up and around, ate some breakfast the birthday boy wanted to go roam around in the river bottoms. After having experienced what I did the night before, I was apprehensive but eventually was talked into doing so. I guess I figured there were enough of us roaming around in a group that nothing was going to happen, safety in numbers sort of thing. Before long I had forgotten myself and we were playing hide and seek in the trees. Ryan and I once again paired up and ended up breaking away from the group. We kept slipping away as they tried to find us and eventually hung his knock off members only jacket up on a tree trying to convince them that we were hiding somewhere we were not.
We did this for several hours and when it was finally around lunch time we all met up as a group. We were about to head back, when I remembered that we didn’t have Ryan’s jacket and since it was my idea to hang it up I figured I should be the one to retrieve it. I had hung it on a tree near the bank of the creek running through the property. I pulled it down from the branch that was holding it and as I was turning to walk back to my friends I heard a noise behind me. On the other side of the creek in the treeline there was what looked to be a humanoid shape walking away from me back into the trees. Once again zero clue what exactly it was, but in my mind I was thinking it had to be whatever we saw the night before.
The Area
Area Between My Sighting and Noxie Oklahoma
One of the things about this area is that there is a near unbroken series of low lying forested riverbottoms that span from the verdigris river all of the way up into Southern Kansas. When my dad was talking about Noxie growing up, things like Google Maps did not exist. So today as I was thinking about that tale of him hunting for Photographic evidence I finally thought to plot how close Noxie was to the area in which I had my own sighting. If you measure as the crow flies from the point of my sighting to the relative area of where I think the Noxie sighting was it is roughly 16 miles. However if you also look at the map there is pretty much a pathway through the green forested areas that could lead one between the two points.
I am not saying necessarily that they are connected, but that sighting in 1975 took place far closer than I ever realized as a kid. So you have to take some pretty severe leaps of reason here and assume that what I saw was a Bigfoot, but I am left not knowing any other explanations. The second day sighting could have been literally anything, but I tend to personally focus on the Lantern incident because it is significantly more clear in my memory. I have no clue what the range of something like a Bigfoot might be. If you take an animal like a bear, they have an active range of around 15 to 20 miles depending on a bunch of variables. What would the active range of something as large as a Sasquatch be in that case?
The Third Sighting
US-400 Between Parsons Kansas and Cherryvale Kansas
For this next incident we scan forward several years. I’ve graduated High School and am still living at home and commuting back and forth to Junior college in an attempt to get a college degree on the cheap. It was during this era that I discovered the internet and more importantly IRC, and through Vampire Roleplay Channels I met this girl who was attending Pitt State in Pittsburg Kansas. As a result I would occasionally make the roughly two hour drive to go see her in person throughout late 1995 and early 1996. I would go up US-169 to around Cherryvale KS, grab US-400 through Parsons KS and on into Pittsburg KS.
The above area is as far as I can tell the stretch of road this third incident took place on. I left my girlfriends apartment in Pittsburg around midnight and was driving back. I had just made it through Parsons and was crossing a creek which in theory would have been the creek you can see on the lower left hand corner of the image above. As I was driving along, something crossed the road in front of me that made me slam on my brakes for fear of hitting it. It was large, humanoid, dark and extremely fast moving. I remember sitting there for awhile not exactly sure what I had just seen before continuing driving again. I made a stop at some convenience store just down the road to get a drink and calm my nerves a bit.
I am guessing that I rattled the attendant as well because when I got home I noticed something odd. When I stopped to get a drink and something to munch on, I paid with a $20 bill and should have gotten back a $10 and some ones. What I instead had sitting in my wallet was $100 bill and some ones, and apparently neither of us noticed this. I wasn’t super keen on driving that road by night anymore, and limited any trips up to the daytime. Truthfully we had a falling out not long after, which is a bummer because I never got back my original hardbound copy of Werewolf the Apocalypse. Again I have no clue what crossed the road but it absolutely looked like a large humanoid leaping across.
Area between Third Incident and Noxie Oklahoma
Out of curiosity I did the same thing that I did with my original sighting and Noxie, and drew a measurement as the crow flies. That spot on US-400 is way closer than I would have assumed. Drawing a straight line between the two points is roughly 35 miles. Once again most of this region of Oklahoma and Southern Kansas are dotted with these low lying creekbeds and hollows. Not saying there is any connection, but were fencelines not an issue you could get from point A to point B again without ever leaving wooded low lying areas.
The Rationalization
So where I am left with all of this is that I can rationalize away everything except that first incident. Up in Kansas it was after midnight on a somewhat unfamiliar stretch of road and literally anything could have crossed and startled me. I thought it was humanoid in shape but who knows what I saw because it was over in a second and I was left only with scattered thoughts to piece it together. The second incident I saw movement in the trees on the other side of a creek and what I thought was a humanoid shape walking away. However it could have been anything in the woods or it could have been nothing. I could have startled something and my mind played tricks on me for the humanoid shape.
The one I cannot rationalize away is whatever was batting that lantern all those years ago and that bolted across a 4 foot tall fence like it was nothing. Enough time passed during that incident that I feel like I had my wits about me. Time perception is really hard. When you find yourself in an intense situation it often feels like time slows down. In my mind it felt like five or more minutes passed, but maybe it was significantly less and that my mind just sorta played those events back after the fact in slow motion. I can’t with any certainty say that I saw a “Bigfoot”, but the region does have a history of whispered Sasquatch sightings. I do wish I had a more scientific mind at the time and would have actually looked for some form of evidence.
Again I have no clue why it was suddenly important for me to talk about this. I think the whole Bigfoot Hunting season is pure nonsense and mostly bait for the press to talk about it. That said this region does have a history of sightings or at least supposed sightings. I saw something that I can’t reason away and I largely think of this as a my Bigfoot story, but the truth is I have no clue exactly what I saw. People get real weird around me when I have opened up about this. Chances are a few of you are going to treat me like I have a little less sanity than you thought afterwards. It just felt like something that I wanted to get out there.
