Belghast, Author at Tales of the Aggronaut

January Experiments

February 1, 2019 by Belghast

Given that it is a Friday and the first of February… I thought I would spend this morning talking about a few experiments that I did during January. First up is the EufyCam E that I was given a copy of to review by Anker. When I posted the review I said I would provide updates talking about how well it has generally worked, and I figured now might be a reasonable time for one of those. I have used this WAY more than I expected to use it, in part because it is constantly alerting me when any motion has been detected at my front door. Because I also use a TicWatch I will get a little buzz buzz buzz on my wrist and see that the EufyCam has detected activity. At which point I flip open the app and see a stream of video similar to the still that I snagged above. Do you know how much it improves my day when I see my neighborhood cat friends have decided at random to come visit during the day? In fact as I am typing this my wrist has buzzed to let me know that this exact same cat is outside wanting attention… which is adorable because he likes to kinda jump up and head butt your hand.

Without the Eufycam I never would have noticed that I had this visitor one morning either. At first when I viewed it on my mobile device since I tend to just watch a postage stamp sized preview… I thought to myself “well that is a chubby cat I have never seen before”. It was only later when I watched it full screen that I noticed…. oh that is a Raccoon. This makes an awful lot of sense because last year we had something trying to tear into one of our plastic chests in the backyard, and I guess I always assumed it was a squirrel… but knowing how tricksy Raccoons could be I would not be surprised if it was this little guy. Also weirdly we have had a flock of birds just sorta randomly land on the porch… I am guessing gobbling up the excess catfood that I gave the buzz buzz cat above. Regardless… all of these little breaks in the day when I have animals on the security camera make me very happy.

The other really useful thing that I did not think about with this camera is since my wife and I right now have staggered schedules… she often times gets home before me but immediately goes out for a walk. The camera gives me a time when she left the house so I know approximately how long it will be before she gets back. Lately I have been using this arcane knowledge to time a cup of coffee so that it is ready for her to come in from the freezing cold. Other times I just use this as a way of determining when is a good time to start dinner so that it is ready when she gets back also. There is of course the ubiquitous use of determining when a package has arrived, but weirdly… I am way more jazzed about the random animal friends. I’ve not actually had an occasion of a solicitor since I installed the cam, but I did freak out the outdoor cat one day when I used the “talk through” feature to say hello. All in all I am super happy with how well the setup has been working, and when it is more widely available on the market I want to see what it would take to add a few more cameras.

Another experiment that seems to be working is the whole “kick all products off to a twitter list” thing that I did shortly after the New Year (January 4th to be specific). Originally this list was called Brands, because that was my original usage… to cleanse my twitter feed of all spammy brand related information. Recently however I have renamed it to “DistanceFollow” because that is effectively what I am doing… following a user but putting some distance between them and my day to day twitter usage. So there are a few things that have come about as a result of this. Firstly this combined with turning off the retweets of a few accounts has made my twitter experience way more enjoyable. I actually enjoy popping in to read twitter because it feels more like it used to… me checking in on what my friends were doing throughout the day. While I don’t have near as much time to check in as I once did, that actually makes this feel better because I am not having to wade through a bunch of promotional junk to see updates that I might actually care about.

The second part about this is… I am way more likely to “try out” following someone by throwing them in the Distance Follow list because I expect it to be spammy and if I happen to decide that I really want to follow them more closely… I will actually do a proper follow. This is effectively what I tried to do with the whole Timeline 2.0 initiative a few years back… but I was going about it the wrong way. In that I was trying to create a special bubble that only had the people I cared about interacting with… but in this I’ve started weeding my ACTUAL follows and making it represent that core group of people that I care about. I am sure I will continue to prune… because once that process starts it gets a lot easier.

Another part that has helped this process is that I have been spending significantly more time on MMORPG.Social and Mastodon by nature is not a network that seems to give a fuck at all about follow numbers. I have tried throughout the years not to care about this… but still did to some extent in spite of not wanting to? There are a lot of people that I never unfollowed just because they happened to be following me back. Hanging out on the Fediverse and the fact that being mutuals isn’t really that bit of a deal there… is starting to remove my giving a fuck about it on twitter. As a result you can look at my Analytics and see that I have been slowly hemorrhaging followers for awhile now… and I am okay with this. I’ve come to accept that I do not have enough time in my life to hang out with every cool person I meet, and have also come to the realization that not everyone is going to like me… and that is okay.

Social Media has always set up this weird dynamic giving you a false sense of connection when often times… you are just an assemblage of pixels that occasionally says something funny to the person on the other side of the connection. I’m wired weird where I tend to actually care about a lot of the people that I interact with. The problem with that however is that there is no way I can keep that many people in my head at all times… and then I feel like shit when I realize that it has been three months since I last had a conversation with some random person in my feed. So as a result I am trying to care less about the minutiae and beat myself up less about not caring enough. I have a circle of friends that widens and shrinks organically… and I am generally going to try real hard to be okay with that fact.

In the meantime however… looking forward to playing some more Anthem this weekend!

Self Exodus

January 31, 2019 by Belghast

Here comes some random commentary. I have for the most part been in support of the Epic Games store and snagging some of their exclusives… like for example Hades and Ashen. Those are games for which pre-orders had not started on any platform and announcing that they would only be available on this somewhat new storefront was perfectly reasonable. I was largely okay with The Division 2 but I felt it was a little shady to shift gears a few months before the launch of the game. I had not pre-ordered, and if I had been planning on doing so… I would have probably just ordered through the UPlay store to cut out the middle man. However what just happened with Metro Exodus is in the “shady as fuck” territory, given that the game is roughly two weeks from launch and had been in pre-orders since at least E3. That is way too late in the game to be massively shifting gears like that and THQ Nordic the sub company should have known that they would be screwing things up for THQ Nordic the parent company.

Still I am largely cool with Epic Games store as a vehicle for grabbing games. Sure it feels a little spartan, but it is still a way better store front and client than Origin… a point that has been reminded of late given how much I have had to fiddle with that client thanks to Anthem. The problem I have is with the practice of taking pre-sales way the hell ahead of the games release, because frankly the term pre-order is a lie when it comes to digital software. You are not plunking down $5 to reserve your copy of a game… you are handing over your credit card information and often times being charged up front for the purchase. The thing is… whenever that process starts those vendors should be locked in stone and unchanging. If you didn’t want to support Steam six months ago… then you shouldn’t have allowed sales of your product to begin.

In truth I don’t so much fault Epic for making offers, but the company for taking that offer in Bad Faith. I get a regular stream of offers from people wanting me to place links on this site to whatever the hell it is that they are pushing… often times some sort of a casino. I don’t take the quick money because I feel like it would be violating the trust my readers have in me. I don’t necessarily have a dog in this fight however because while I have been looking forward to Metro Exodus… it was never really a day one title for me and instead something I would play considerably after release. However for those who were harmed by this action… I get the outrage. The biggest part I am confused by however is how they have stated that Steam Pre-Orders would be fulfilled and the game would be updated through that platform… but the game itself would no longer be available there. That just feels really odd and awful.

As far as gaming last night… I got the Blue Mage to 40 through lots of grinding that was relatively boring and not worth talking about. Then I swapped over and played some Destiny 2 where I completed a bunch of bounties… one of which being the weekly for Eververse. I lucked out and managed to pull the Last Word ornament… which will sit there waiting until I complete that quest chain. I did manage to push through the step where you collect a bazillion hive cores or whatever it was we were collecting. I also managed to make a little progress on the Malfeasance where I believe I am on the final step involving killing Guardians and getting invasion kills in Gambit. I had fun… but man movement felt weird after getting used to Anthem.

Speaking of which… who all will I be seeing in the weekend test happening Friday-Sunday? I’m BelghastStern over on Origin so hit me up with a friend invite.

Guardian Blues

January 30, 2019 by Belghast

I’m struggling a bit this morning to pull together a blog post. In theory I think I am fighting a cold or something because the last several days I have just felt lousy. Last night for example I really wanted to pop into some Destiny 2 and do the weekly tasks that are set in front of me on a brand new day. However I roamed around the tower a bit before logging out for the evening because I could not seem to focus enough to actually do something as intensive as playing a guardian. I didn’t really play much last week either, so I have not been helping push the clan level up and for that I feel bad. I have so many things that I need and want to get accomplished but have just been lacking the drive to actually do them. The quest for the Last World exotic went in yesterday but after looking what all is involved… I am really not looking forward to more crucible grinding. I had to do plenty of that already for the Malfeasance quest line that I have yet to actually finish.

What I ultimately spent my night doing instead was working on the Blue Mage some more. There are probably more productive ways to go about this process, but what I wound up doing was spent some time in Coerthas before eventually settling into Outer La Noscea grinding the 41-44 Goblin camps. I managed to get Blue up to 37 so the progress was moving pretty well, but solo grinding largely involved controlling the camp spawns since I was many times the only person out there. It reminded me a lot of the way that we used to play in Everquest, where you would work your way into an area and then try and hold that position while avoiding getting overrun as too many things spawned in at the same time. There were a few moments where things got a little dicey if I had two bombs and two goblins on me at the same time, but all in all I reached a comfortable pace and thanks to Sticky Tongue I could yoink mobs over to my perch of relative safety.

The biggest challenge however is that 1000 Needles has started to miss a significant amount lately. I am guessing its the fact that I have been hitting higher level mobs than my own level, but whatever the case it occasionally makes things a little questionable. At this point I should probably be able to solo Haukke Manor just fine, but all of the remaining abilities that I can pick up are going to require some significant shenanigans to collect. For similar reasons to why I didn’t play Destiny 2 last night… I just did not have it in me to attempt soloing a dungeon.

What I ultimately want to be playing however… is more Anthem. So I am guessing that the Demo did it’s trick of embedding that world deep into my psyche. This weekend we are supposedly getting access again and I am looking forward to it. I am hoping the various connection issues are resolved and I can spend some time playing with friends and doing missions together. I am also hoping they maybe give us a bit more of a drip feed of content… at least more than the one strike mission. Regardless I am looking forward to suiting up again because it feels like it is going to be a game that latches hold of me pretty tight. Ashgar introduced us to the FashionLancers reddit, which I am finding super interesting… but also realizing that I didn’t do anywhere near what I could have with the cosmetic system. Here is hoping we get a newer build this weekend and with it a bunch of the issue have been put on ice.

1000 Needles

January 29, 2019 by Belghast

I’m still not as engaged with Final Fantasy XIV as I would like to be, but I have been using the new Blue Mage limited job as a sort of way of easing my foot back into the water. While I am not the fanatic for Blue Mage’s that Ashgar is… I’ve always had a soft spot for the concept of learning abilities by getting hit with them. As a result I’ve found it really fun and interesting to go around the world trying to learn new abilities. I started playing the Blue Mage during the Podcast last week and have now made some significant progress, though from what it sounds not nearly as much as the folks that power leveled it in two hours. Side note… there is apparently a glitch in the game that has been acknowledged that cannot be fixed until 5.0 that involves killing a monster with a single hit and then rapidly switching classes. Since the first class never actually got flagged into combat… the second class that you switch to gains the experience. The only problem with this theory is that most of the one hit classes are all casters… and the only thing I have to 70 are some melee classes. As a result I have mostly been leveling the old fashioned way.

At this point my spellbook looks like this…

Water Cannon – Default Ability
Bomb Toss – Level 5 Goblin – Middle La Noscea – 23,21
Blood Drain – Level 7 Cave Bat – Lower La Noscea – 27,16
Ice Spikes – Level 9 Trickster Imp – Central Shroud – 27,24
Self-Destruct – Level 12 Glide Bomb – Western Thanalan – 27,17
Off-Guard – Unlock 5 Spells to Purchase
Final Sting – Level 13 Killer Wespe – Middle La Noscea – 15,13
Mind Blast – Solo Tam-Tara Deepcroft – Final Boss
Acorn Bomb – Level 17 Treant Sapling – North Shroud – 26,21
Bristle – Level 21 Wild Boar (supposedly Lvl.17 exists but never found) – East Shroud – 18,24
Sticky Tongue – Level 24 Laughing Toad – Western Thanalan – 14,16
White Wind – Unlock 10 Spells to Purchase
Mighty Guard – Unlock 10 Spells to Purchase
Toad Oil – Level 24 Giggling Toad – Western Thanalan – 14,6
1000 Needles – level 26 Sabotender Bailaor – Southern Thanalan – 15,15
Bad Breath – Level 31 Stroper – Central Shroud – 14,21
Faze – Level 32 Qiqirn – Eastern La Noscea – 26,32
Flying Sardine – Level 32 Apkallu – Eastern La Noscea – 30,34

I’ve more or less been following this guide on PCGamesN and am thus far missing Level 5 Petrify from the order they suggest and then we get into a bunch of abilities that come from bosses. I attempted to solo Haukke Manor and just got wrecked so I effectively need to put some levels on before I can realistically do that. I think at this point I am going to grind up to 32 so I can equip a full set of Battlemage armor and give it a shot. The leveling thusfar has largely involved me wearing a bunch of random gear that I happened to have available in my bags rather than actually trying to go for something optimal. The other answer is of course to simply grind the rest of the way to 50 and then deal with going after abilities after having a decent set of gear on. Whatever the case I am finding this interesting and fun and it is super satisfying when you see the animation indicating that you learned an ability. The money combo tends to be Acorn Bomb to put something to sleep, 1000 Needles to deal 1000 damage… that ignores the debuff of Mighty Guard and repeat that until whatever it is you are fighting is dead with the occasional White Wind to heal yourself back up.

Too Pure for the World

So I have not related this story, but the other day I was roaming around outside of Aleport killing things for experience. A FATE had just started and I began chipping away at it… and someone responded in /say that I would not actually get bonus exp as a Blue Mage from those mobs. This lead to them offering to kill stuff if I tagged it… so we ran amok for a bit in zone but at the time the fastest spell I had was Water Cannon. So they suggested that I meet them at Costa Del Sol and ran me over to pick up Flying Sardine which is an instant, and then proceeded to have me run around the zone tagging things for a bit until I legitimately needed to leave. This was not something I asked for, nor was it something I expected… but some random stranger on this awesome server called Cactuar just volunteered to help me out. I shot up something silly like from level 10 to level 28 in a few minutes, but more than anything I was just shocked that someone was willing to do this random act of kindness… which makes me realize how long I have been away from this community. That is the kind of game that Final Fantasy XIV is… and over the years I have had so many of these random encounters that wind up with both of us friending the other so we can see orange text run past. Hell I have struck up conversations just while hanging out on the Gold Saucer that wound up with me getting invited to run stuff with their Free Company.

Final Fantasy XIV as a community is just too damned pure for this world.