Belghast

GenX • Husband • Petfriend • Daily Blogger • Weekly Podcaster • Eternally Confused • avatar by @Ammosart@gamepad.club He/Him

Mixtape Mondays: Contours of Indecision

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Good Morning Friends! I have been planning some nonsense for awhile now and today represents the first day of a new series on this blog. As a GenXer I come from the golden age of the Mixtape, and was one of those people who would create lots of them and often times hand out to friends. The thing that has been lost in the age of the single and iTunes is that there used to be an intelligence to the placement of songs on an album. There were various bands that had what I used to call a “listen through” experience, where the flow of the music would happen in just the right way to have high points and low points and provide an experience that was greater than the sum of its parts.

When I used to build mixtapes for my friends, or as an often times failed vehicle for flirtation… I attempted to apply this same sort of care to the placement of songs. The majority of my life I always had some sort of soundtrack to my activities that would be playing in the background. I would associate songs with places and people and now listening back to any of those invokes this tapestry of feelings and memories along with a very concrete sense of time and place. However for the majority of the past decade this has been absent in my life and replaced with a combination of NPR and podcasts. Very recently I have been immersing myself in music and it is like a sense that I had once lost came rushing back to me.

Along with this has come the desire to start building mixtapes once again. I’ve cobbled together a number of these and I decided that the best way to share them with you my friends… is to do a weekly column of sorts. I am notoriously bad at keeping this sort of thing going for very long, but for until I get distracted by some other shiny object… I will be posting a new mixtape every Monday morning.

Contours of Indecision

This first mix tape has more of an industrial bent. I often times gave my mixtapes pretentious names, so I figured I would start off this process with a doozy. I spent hours adding and removing songs from the list until I ended up with a balanced product that sorta fades in on a strong note and releases you on a very melancholy and reflective note. There are a lot of what I would consider rarities on this specific mix tape, or places where an artist is acting in a manner other than what we expect from them. I hope you enjoy, here is the manifest:

  • Burn – The Cure
  • Everything’s Ruined – Faith No More
  • All Wrong – God Lives Underwater
  • Eye – Smashing Pumpkins
  • I’m Afraid of Americans – David Bowie and Trent Reznor
  • The Witch – The Cult
  • Ruiner – Nine Inch Nails
  • Animal – Prick
  • Down – Gravity Kills
  • Army of Me – Bjork
  • Trip Like I Do – Filter with Crystal Method
  • Girl – Beck
  • Tech Noir – Gunship

Tidal

Spotify

For those without Access to Spotify, I also have provided this in a YouTube Playlist, with the key difference being you won’t get my custom album artwork.

YouTube

I hope you all enjoy my nonsense. Drop me a line with your thoughts about this project.

AggroChat #342 – The Bleak Parade

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Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we have a show that is pretty much dominated by a discussion about Outriders.  Tam and Bel both attempt to avoid any outright spoilers but I feel like I still need to issue a warning.  This game has some deeply disturbing themes and we talk about these.  While we attempt to do so as gingerly as possible, I feel like I still need to provide a content warning to our listeners.  From there we talk about Stellaris and the third release of the game and how apparently it changes everything.  We also talk about Paradox and the history of long tailed support for games.

Topics Discussed

  • Outriders
    • Bleak Story
    • Endgame
    • Innovative Design
  • Stellaris
    • Third Edition
    • Reinventing the Game
    • Paradox Long Support

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I am a Horrible Human Being

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Morning Friends! It has been awhile since I wrote a complete nonsense post and as such now that I have some nonsense to talk about I thought it was high time. I am a horrible human being. Like I realize that is a big blanket statement but I will attempt to explain WHY I am a horrible human being. First there are some key elements that you need to understand for this story to work. This is Josie rolled into a ball sleeping on the box beside me during the work day. She is a mess, but a delightful one. As a ringtail breed as I understand them… she will pretty much be permanently in a state of extended kittenhood. She plays with everything and has a grand ole time doing it. She is also EXTREMELY precocious and figures out ways to get into pretty much everything. She wakes us up on the weekends by trying to running across us, attacking the rug at the foot of the bed or attempting to climb the curtains. Let me reiterate… she is a mess but we love her greatly.

Another key bit of information that is important for this story to make any sense is the fact that my wife has no depth perception. I don’t mean this is a funny “ha ha” sort of way stating that she is bad at catch, but instead in a very literal sense. She was born without her eyes fused together and while she spent much of her childhood going through an arduous path of attempts to make them fuse… it never quite happened. There are some truly adorable photos of her as a child sporting an eyepatch, mischievous grin and adorable curls… and I can’t revel in just how stinking cute she was because it is a traumatic experience. It took me until recently to understand some of her behavior like her reluctance to use drive throughs or to gas up her own car. These are both things I do for her generally, but never understood why until she finally explained some twenty years after marriage that she cannot figure out where she is in relation to the drive through or the gas pump.

The next bit of information that you need to understand is what a “Roly Polly” is, which admitted gets called by a bunch of names depending on the region you grew up in. I think more collectively they are known as pill bugs. One of the first things we learn as a child is that they roll up into a ball as a defensive mechanism (or to preserve moisture in periods of dryness). It is fun of course to flick a rolypolies and watch it go rolling across the ground. We have a partially collapsed ductwork through our concrete foundation and as a result the odd random smol bug finds its way into our house. Generally speaking I leave Rolypolies alone because they are obviously lost if they made it inside but occasionally I will just open the bedroom door and set them outside so they can find a better climate.

Now that you have all of the key bits of information we will move on with this story. I had gotten up and showered and was getting dressed when my wife was in the bathroom. Josie has this habit of obsessively staying in the bedroom with us as we get ready, and she was apparently stalking something in the adjacent bathroom. My wife proclaimed that she thought there was a bug on the floor and I of course asked what kind. She wasn’t sure and that lead me to come into the room and upon seeing it I immediately said it was just a rolypolie and not a big deal. She doubted me because she said it didn’t look like a rolypolie… because again no depth perception she just saw a flattened black thing on the ground. So without thinking I reached down and gave the bug a little flick… it rolled up into a ball and skidded across the room.

Remember that Josie is extremely precocious. She immediately grasped what had happened and proceeded to start batting the rolypolie around the bathroom floor. I am a horrible human being because I taught a cat how to torture a poor little bug. At some point she lost track of it and we proceeded to quietly open the back door and rescue the poor thing. However I am absolutely certain that Josie is not going to bop every single bug to see if it rolls into a ball and can be made into a “more funner” toy. I’ve given her a bit of information she did not need to know because up until now she had mostly just quietly followed bugs around the house out of curiosity. I just taught her that they can also be really fun toys.

Digesting Expeditions

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Well friends, I have reached the end of the storyline in Outriders. I struggled a bit with the final boss and dealt with it by lowering the difficulty and just steamrolling it. This is apparently maybe something specific to my class because my friend Tipa said she had no real issues with it on Trickster. Also she had been farming gear quite a bit so was probably way better geared than I was at the same time. I was wearing mostly blues when I finished the campaign because that is ultimately what I had on hand at the time. I didn’t spend much time farming because it seemed somewhat pointless until I had hit the level cap.

Outriders is this weird blend of Destiny and Diablo 3 and there are a lot of parallels between this game and those two titles. However it seems like it has learned from all of the systems involved the traditional loot grind game model and evolved them quite a bit. For example I’ve had several Legendaries drop, but for me… I largely viewed them as a vehicle to get Tier 3 mods and ended up deconstructing them all so far. Here is an example of the difference between a Tier 2 and a Tier 3 mod. Minefields II causes an explosion of grenades to spawn when you kill an enemy. Minefields III however causes this same effect to trigger anytime you crit an enemy and it can happen every 3 seconds. So this goes from being an extremely effective means of trash wave clear… to an effective means of fighting pretty much anything and STILL being able to do wave clear.

Leveling up Epic and Legendary gear is extremely cost prohibitive, but slotting those same abilities in other items is extremely cheap. So one of my core goals has been to try and collect every mod I come across so that I can shift up my gear as needed. This process works much like the Enchanter in Diablo 3, in that you can only modify a single mod on an item… but unlike the enchanter it isn’t a random roll and instead just allows you to choose whatever mod you want in a given slot. Putting Legendary Minefield III on a blue quality gun cost roughly 400 iron which seems extremely reasonable for the significant power bump that gives you. Granted you are missing a full mod slot that Epic or Legendary gear would have, but for now I am making do with this.

I’ve officially entered the end game at this point since I wrapped up the campaign last night. I am one level away from the cap and from there it is only a matter of leveling my loot up to higher tiers. I believe the highest loot level in game right now is 50 which is a long ways off from where I am currently in progression. When you finish the campaign this game mode called Expeditions unlocks and for the most part these are a weird blend of a Destiny Strike and a World of Warcraft Mythic+ Dungeon. You are presented with a mission and you are timed while completing it. The faster you make it through the better the rewards that spawn at the end. I did not do so well on my first expedition but walked away with something silly like fifteen blues. I imagine those turn into purples and maybe even oranges if you manage to push through in time.

In expedition mode you are presented with a new world map and around it are various locations to reclaim resources from drop pods. It seems like at any given time there are going to be at least 3 different activities available. When I beat one another one showed up on my map, allowing you some freedom of choice as you move around the map knocking them out. It was a little frantic going in solo, but I am sure this is the sort of thing that would be great with friends, especially if you have some synergy between your builds. The one I ran was a standard kill stuff then do a thing and keep repeating this until you win.

It seems that the expeditions have their own leveling system called Challenge Tiers and that the World Tier from before has no impact on these missions. Continuing my converting things into Diablo or Destiny terms… this appears to be the equivalent of running Greater Rifts. The key difference here being that it is through these expeditions that you unlock the higher gear ratings. Challenge Tier 15 for example drops those item level 50 pieces that we will eventually be chasing. Similar to Diablo it sounds like there are absolutely times when you could get stuck in this progression because you lack the quality of gear to progress or your player build is not as optimal as it should be.

Another thing that I am finding out this morning, is that there are apparently repeatable quest chains that will reward a legendary each time you make it all the way through them. I am probably going to do a bit of farming in this department to at least complete a set of the various mods. Supposedly you can drop down to World Tier 1 and burn through some of these quest chains quick given that the only thing that actually matters is the final turn in, which will give you an on gear level legendary pick. For example I picked up The Landlubber last night which I immediately deconstructed to give me access to Legendary Minefield III that I was talking about earlier.

Pretty much every bit of content in the game is repeatable, and as such you can figure out what activity makes you the happiest and farm it indefinitely. I’ve heard folks have had good luck with the “Nature Calls” questline… aka the dude stuck in the outhouse. It is pretty quick to complete and involves a large number of captains in a very short period of time. I’ve run it a few times and didn’t get spectacular drops but I can probably keep bumping up the world tier in order to increase the drop rates and make it worth my time. Now essentially I need to finish leveling the rest of my final level… and then shift focus to gearing.