Aggrochat

Grand Anniversary

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No Free Lunch

Last night was Saturday night, and that means we recorded another episode of the Tales of the Aggronaut podcast…  AggroChat!  We had a few odd things going on last night.  Firstly Rae was off travelling in world visiting her longtime friends Ahi and Bez.  This means she was completely unavailable.  Additionally Kodra was travelling, and connected in from crappy hotel wifi in San Francisco… leading him to be a little bit robotty.  However we pushed through all of this and picked up a 4th player in the form of our good friend Tam.  He had been talked about plenty of times on the podcast already, and it only seemed fitting to have him sub in.  Super thankful for him to be willing to do it in a pinch.  We talked about all manner of things including Hex Closed Beta, ArcheAge and the concept of selling entry into the beta process, and our ideal scenarios as far as character building and abilities in MMOs go.

We are going to have to find a way to stay more on topic, because each episode has increased every so slightly in length.  The first one was right at an hour, the second an hour and fifteen minutes, and this one roughly an hour and thirty minutes.  We could have formal topics that we push through, but I personally like the meandering format, because it means it is more like the natural conversations we already have.  I wish I had kept rolling because moments after I cut the podcast off we had a pretty epic conversation about how Lucasfilm is disavowing the entire Expanded Universe concept… and while we will miss some things maybe it isn’t so much of a bad idea.  There were some really odd fan service things about the Expanded Universe that don’t really hold up story wise.

Steampowered Sunday #11

When Elder Scrolls Online released on a Sunday, it pretty much put a severe halt to my blog series known as Steampowered Sunday where I take some time and play a game from my backlog of titles.  Last night during the podcast we were talking about a game that Ashgar had been playing this week that fell firmly into the Bullet Hell genre.  Kodra seemed to think this was madness, and having been a big fan of Ikaruga I totally understood the draw.  There was a time period when I used to play lots of bullet hell shooters and pre-hell shooters.  Gradius, Darius Twin, Raiden Trad… all games I remember fondly.  I was never particularly good at them, but I enjoyed them nonetheless.  I remember playing 1942 on the nintendo for hour upon hour trying to make my way through all the stages.

At some point I just stopped playing them.  I think it was during the death of the dreamcast, but when I bought my PS2 I just simply stopped picking up the games anymore.  While I have Gradius 5 on my PS2, I guess my tastes in games changed a bit.  This honestly more than anything represents a period of time when I stopped playing consoles very much and started consuming games almost exclusively on the PC.  Every now and then I would flirt with a new shooter like the ever amazing Jamestown, but I never really got heavily into it again.  Last night in an attempt to cold boot this series again, Ashgar griefed me by gifting me a copy of a really rather awesome bullet hell shooter on steam.  At face value Danmaku Unlimited 2 reminds me of a less technical cousin to Ikaruga.  The soundtrack is in part what makes the gameplay, and helps you do what is needed to make it through the levels.  The secret to a bullet hell is to zone out and focus only on the pattern and not so much about the rest of the noise on screen.  Only a few things can actually hurt you, so you focus in on those things.

The hilarity of my play through is that after years of not playing these games my reflexes that had built up are completely gone.  In addition I am playing this game roughly thirty minutes after waking up.  So yeah I do pretty bad.  Ashgar tried to make me feel better by saying that I did significantly better than he did the first time.  Essentially the gameplay video is roughly seventeen minutes and the point at which I ran out of lives to keep going.  I made it to about the mid point of stage four.  All in all I think I did a pretty good job.  The awesome thing about the game is it is really cheap.  So for the price you cannot beat this kind of bullet hell goodness.  I feel like there is a lot of customization in the way you set up the game.  I went with pretty generic options and was playing on easy, so I think there is a lot more depth to be had there if I dig into it.  Probably going to stream some more of me trying to play it later.  In any case… I have successfully rebooted the Steampowered Sunday feature.  Long live me playing through my steam backlog!

Grand Anniversary

Last but definitely not least… today is the one year anniversary of the Grand Experiment… my attempt to blog something each and every day.  This means as of today I have made a post every single day for a year.  That is a pretty significant feat and I am really damned proud of myself for sticking with it.  At this point I figure I am going to try and make it another whole year without letting the beat drop.  It hasn’t been the most easy thing to do, but I want to take a moment to thank my wife who has been extremely supportive in this adventure.  There have been days where I might not have made it through the post without her just assuming that it was going to happen and giving me time and space to do so.  Additionally I want to thank my friends who have supported me in this madness and my readers.  There have been moments when I felt alone in my mission, and was surprised at how many of you have reached out your arms to help me along the way.  Somehow I have gone from being the least regular of bloggers… to the most regular, and it is a pretty insane transition.  I feel like I have grown a lot in the past year, and I thank you all for helping me with it.

Thumper Logic

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Cheat Day

One of the rules of the “Grand Experiment” has been that I would sit down each morning and write a blog post.  A lot of my friends in the blogosphere write their content at their leisure and stage the publishing at a date of their choosing.  There is technically nothing wrong with this practice, but the entire idea behind the experiment, was to force myself to write every day.  So as a result I have always considered it cheating to do what I am doing right now… writing a topic the night before I intend to post it.  These lofty ideals are one thing, but every now and then real life throws me for a loop.  Generally speaking on the weekend my posts end up being considerably later because sometimes I have to accommodate life in the process.

However our weekend plans have been altered quite a bit and as a result my wife and I are carpooling together tomorrow.  This means that I won’t really have my traditional “drink coffee slowly and contemplate the universe” time in the morning…  or at least I won’t be able to faff about as much as I normally do.  So as a result I am admitting to my “blatant cheatery” up front and hoping you won’t mind terribly much that you are getting a slightly stale topic by the time I post it tomorrow morning.  I could have lied to you, and posted this without you really knowing the difference…  but I am always willing to admit my failings freely.

Thumper Logic

Thumper-GIF One of the things that I have not talked about much is that the Grand Experiment is far more for me than just writing every single day.  It has also been an effort to surround myself with as many positive influences as I can, and limit the amount of negativity I have in my life.  I am not just trying to bury my head in the sand.  I assure you that I see just as many negative things on a daily basis as anyone, I am a pessimist by nature.  However I had noticed that the more negativity I surrounded myself in, the more negative I became and as a result the more unhappy I was.  You know how they say “fake it until you make it”, well it turns out it works pretty well for being happy as well.  If you can’t be happy, adopt the trappings of being happy until I actually sinks in.

In addition to trying to limit my exposure to negativity… which means I pretty much stop reading game forums when they exit the alpha and beta phases… I have been trying really hard not to write many “rant” posts.  In doing so I have realized just how unbalanced and ranty the world seems to have become.  If you look at the popular review sources, it seems as though we absolutely love to hate video games.  There are popular youtube personalities that I have never seen give a single game a positive review, however people line up to watch them.  I am sure that the occasional video like this is funny, but after awhile it changes into something else.  IT feels like these reviewers are trying to enact their revenge on an industry they believe has “wronged them” somehow.

People Want Different Things

Yes I am in fact breaking this image out again.  It is perfectly okay for you to not like something, but just because you don’t like a thing does not mean it is immediately “bad”.  I may not have enjoyed War and Peace… but that does not make it any less of a classic.  Sure there are of course the occasional game that are horrible in an academic sense… I am looking at you Superman 64, but these are really rather rare.  If a game comes out and at least one person enjoys it then I cannot really call it a “bad” game.  There are games that are a financial failure, but that is a completely different line of discussion.  Over the last few years it has become extremely “cool” to hate everything, and a lot of this was ushered in by the “hipster” movement.  If you read the reviews of games, you would have the impression that the industry is doing horribly and making nothing but utter crap.  However they seem to be making more money than ever, in part because very few people who consume these games actually pay attention to internet reviews.

At this point I am just too damned old to care much about looking cool on the internet.  I feel no shame in gushing about the things I am really enjoying, and just glossing over the things I don’t so much enjoy.  Over the weekend I appeared on the Game On podcast, and eventually the topic came around to Wildstar a game I really don’t like very much.  I had a few options of where to go with my commentary.  I could of course have spun up a mighty rant that would nuke the game into oblivion from orbit.  Instead I chose to share my reservations, but also talk about a few of the things that I thought the game was doing right.  It is your choice as a player, or a blogger, or a youtuber to either dwell on the good parts or the bad parts.  Right now I am making the conscious choice to look for the good in both people and games, and so far I am much happier for doing it.

The Curse of the Fanboy

I hope it feels so good to be right.
There is nothing more exhilarating
than pointing out the shortcomings
of others, is there? – Randall
 

One of the worst curses you can give to another gamer is to call them a Fanboy, because it immediately belittles anything they may or may not have to say in response to your criticism.  I guess my question is, why aren’t we all “Fanboys” over something.  For the majority of us, gaming is our hobby, and even in those for whom it is a job…  at one point or another it was also their hobby as well.  We are all geeks here, cut from the same core fabric even if we claim to not acknowledge it.  We all love games, more deeply than any of us would ever care to admit.  At least at some basic level we all have to admit that games are absolutely magical.  They can bring us to tears, make us laugh, and cause us to plunk down another $60 like a junkie in search of a fix.  If we do all of these things, then why the hell SHOULDN’T we love it, and be more than happy to raise our hands high and yell “FUCK YES I’M A FANBOY”.

I love games, or I wouldn’t be spending each and every morning writing about them.  Sure you get a fair dose of my personal shenanigans and that of my friends… but this is a gaming blog devoted to my love and obsession of video games.  I am not trying to make games better than they are, because they seem to be just as good today at getting me to spend countless hours a night playing them than they were when I was a child.  Sure I hold up certain games like Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past or Castlevania: Symophony of the Night on a pedestal, but my love of those games should not somehow tarnish something that doesn’t do the same thing as those games did.

What gets lost in the shuffle is the people behind the games that folks all too often want to tear down.  No one goes into a game trying to build something that the players will hate.  Each and every one of them has lost sleep at night trying to make the best possible game within the constraints they were given.  Just as I started writing about games because I love them, they all aspired to be part of this industry that quite frankly has some pretty shitty conditions placed upon them.  No child says that they want to grow up to work in an industry that is ultimately thankless and will more so make large segments of the fan base revile you.  I am just waiting for it to be acceptable to like something again without someone else feeling the need to put you down for doing so.

Cast of the Aggrochat

aggrochat_bubbles_trans

I feel like I got a little preachy during the course of this post, but it is really how I feel.  I am going to unabashedly love things, until I don’t then move on to other things that I love equally well.  So far I feel like my mission of being more positive has paid off.  I am surrounded by some pretty amazing friends, and I feel so thankful to have all of you supporting me on a daily basis.  While I have a deep protective streak, which leads me to play all the tank classes that I end up playing… I feel no need anymore to protect you from what I deem a “bad game”.  You might see me wax philosophical about how I don’t quite grasp a game, but that is coming from a place of wanting to learn what people see in it… and not from a place of hatred.  I wanted to close things out on a really positive note by showing off something that I really love right now.

Rae has been hard at work over the last few weeks since we got the odd idea to start Aggrochat.  She has been capturing the essence of our personas in Chibi form and I think she did a damned fine job.  From the left we have Rae riding Ashgar the bear, with me in the middle, and the ever stylish Kodra on the far right.  There are a few inside jokes in the peace but I figure it is universal enough for most to enjoy it.  She does amazing work, and is the creator of the original Chibi Belghast that I have used for ages as avatars and in the masthead of this website.  Over the coming weeks we will be branding our libsyn page into something more fitting a proper podcast.

Five Year Blogoversary

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Something Profound

fivecake I feel like this morning I should post something deeply profound since as of this morning it means I have been doing this blog thing for five years.  Technically my first post was on the 17th, but it was really just a test to make sure the site was functional.  My very first “real” post was on April 21st 2009 contemplating the ramifications of what “dual spec” would do to our raid.  I have changed a lot in these five years, and while I wish I had posted more regularly early on, I do like the fact that you can see this evolution in game play and attitude over the years.  The original intent of this blog was to be a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog hence the title.

But looking back that idea didn’t seem to last more than a few posts before it started to morph into a blog about my adventures in raiding.  At that point I was in my “wannabe hardcore” mode, and in this fashion being plugged into the blog scene was probably more of a detriment to my enjoyment than a boon to my happiness.  I saw people doing really awesome things, and our little rag tag mostly casual raid just couldn’t keep up.  I am not super proud of some of the angry posts I made to that effect as we struggled to clear content in Wrath of the Lich King.  There are many times I wish I could just jettison the first couple of years worth of posts, because I really don’t know that version of me any more.

Personal Growth

Every so often through the back log of posts I stumble upon one that I had forgotten about and that I really am still proud to have written.  The biggest takeaway for me over these five years is that I have become much more comfortable in my own skin.  When I started writing for my blog, I tried to be this thing that I thought everyone wanted me to be.  The flawless leader, the archetype, the figurehead that did no wrong and always had the right words to say to fix the problems.  The longer it ran the more I realized I was not that person.  I was just as full of self doubt and confusion as the next player, and that they didn’t follow me because I knew all the answers…  they followed me because I cared enough to try.

So now I can look back at the first four years of my blog as me trying to “find my voice”, but I don’t really think I found it until I embarked upon my “Grand Experiment”.  There is something about having to write a post each and every morning that forces you to open up and be honest.  There comes a point where you just run out of spackle and polish to keep up your persona.  I would like to hope that by the time I entered into the idea, the “persona” of me was dwindling and I was left with just the real version…  but I can even see that over the course of this last year of daily posts I became far more honest with my public.  I still enter into each posting expecting no one to actually read it, and in that there is a comfort level that allows me to say some things that I might not say otherwise.

So while today is pretty cool that the blog itself has been around for five years now, I feel like the upcoming anniversary of the grand experiment is far more important.  That was really the moment when I decided a true direction for my blog, and in the last year I feel so blessed in the connections I have made during it.  The funny thing is… even after five years of doing this, I feel like I don’t really “know” anything about this trade.  I tend to just push forward with what seems to work, and figure out the rest of the details as I go.  As I enter into my third year of the Newbie Blogger Initiative… I really don’t feel like I am worthy of the title of “Mentor”, because I am still very much figuring things out for myself.

Breaching the Spotlight

I’ve always been one of those people who has preferred to be behind the scenes, and while I like knowing that people are actually reading what I write, I’ve tried to avoid stepping out into the spotlight.  Part of this comes from the whole “not really comfortable in my own skin” aspect of things.  I’m a big guy, and I probably always will be, but over the last year my wife and I have embarked upon a personal journey that has lead to both of us losing well over seventy pounds.  So while I am not going to be taking any “selfies” any time soon, I am feeling a lot more confident about myself as a result.  As such I am forcing myself to do things that I would have avoided before.

This started with my game streaming over on Twitch, and while I choose not to display my webcam on the stream… it is a start.  While streaming I started joining mumble and letting anyone pop in to chat, and I realized that I might have something interesting on my hands.  In listening to the old streams it really started to sound like a sort of impromptu podcast.  Out of this I talked to a few of my friends that I have talked with nightly in twitch for years, and we started a podcast.  Sunday we recorded our second episode and I am pretty happy with how things are turning out.  I made an attempt to go on camera with the Gamer Hangout vidcast but honestly the “in front of the camera” thing was just a bit too much for my anxiety.

Yesterday I got the opportunity to branch out from my comfort zone again, and while I was extremely nervous going into it… and likely drove my wife insane starting an hour or so before it was supposed to happen… it seemed to go off without a hitch.  I was invited to guest host MMORPG.com Game On podcast with Liore and Syeric.  The episode we recorded last night will not be posted until this coming Wednesday, but I am excited and scared to see how it turned out.  The multiplaying podcast did not happen this week, but I may end up getting rescheduled on this weeks show.  While it may not seem like a big leap for me to go from doing my own podcast, to joining in on others… it really is.  What has made Aggrochat so easy for me is we are just recording the same kinds of conversations we have had for years.

Aggrochat Chibis

belghast_shieldhat Rae is probably going to kill me for posting this, but meh she will get over it.  It feels fitting to show this off today, since five years ago she made the Belghast in Zul’Aman gear chibi that I still use for everything.  Right now everything we have for AggroChat is very much in a placeholder state.  We wanted to get podcasting before we lost our nerve, and did not want to wait for all the infrastructure to be in place.  One of the things she has been working on are Chibis for each of the podcasters so we can have a nifty chibi-fied logo version of ourselves.  Over the weekend she sent me what looks to be a final or near final version of my chibi.  I am absolutely in love with it, and can’t wait to see what the final version of all of them looks like put together.  Once she is finished with everything I am probably going to be updating the masthead to include this guy as well.  I want to thank all of you who have read my blog during the last five years.  You’ve made this a very interesting journey, and I can only hope I have to “oomph” to make it another five years.

World Without Warcraft

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Replace all the Tech

Yesterday was a really odd day for my wife and I in that it seemed to end with some results that we never really planned ahead of time.  The key focus of the day was to get out and move around so that hopefully we could get some steps in.  It is funny how the fitbit has gamified our lives, in that both of us want those extra steps whenever we can.  So when we went to a shopping center we parked purposefully way the hell out in the boondocks so that we would have to walk extra steps to get to our destination.  Thing is I find myself doing this little tweak almost everywhere.  It feels like cheating, but I guess in the long run it will be far better for my health to force myself to walk more.  The fact that I get “acheesements” for doing so just reinforces the behavior.

I wish we had gotten the fitbits a year ago when we first heard about them, because it makes me wonder where we could be today if we had.  One of the various errands we had to run was going to Sams Club to pick up a few things.  They have these amazing apples, and I was getting low on oatmeal.  Now that we have one around the corner from my house I tend to go there quite often.  We actually got our fitbits at Sams because they were significantly cheaper than anywhere else, even considering internet pricing without the shipping.  Turns out we need to shop there more often for tech, because we noticed they had the Samsung Galaxy s5 in stock and at a pretty massive savings.  Currently to get one through AT&T the carrier we use is $250 a 2 year contract, through Best Buy it was $199 with the same contract, but Sams had the price down to $160.

After we walked around the store for a bit and thought about it, we decided to upgrade our phones.  My wife decided she would rather have the maroon s4 instead of the s5.  So for about the same amount that we would have spent to upgrade one phone through AT&T we upgraded both.  The best part is that the mobile tech managed to keep our original phone plan.  We have been grandfathered into the AT&T unlimited data plan for years, and if we ever lost it… we would jump providers in a heartbeat.  So really in the grand scheme of things it is beneficial for them if they want to keep us as customers… to keep moving that plan down the road.  We are not massive data users, but I just like knowing I don’t have to ever think about that.

Now I am coming from the Galaxy S2 that I have had for over three years now, but so far I am liking the S5 quite a bit.  It has a lot of features that I had been missing like the extended bluetooth support that allows me to sync my fitbit directly with the phone.  Additionally it works with chromecast allowing me to use my phone as a remote control for plex and other chromecast apps.  We spent a good chunk of time after getting the phones trying to set them back up again for usage.  The battery life overall seems much better than that of my s2, which is odd considering how much larger the screen and everything else is about the phone.  I have not even attempted to play with the camera yet, but I have heard it is a big jump forward.  The oddest thing about yesterday is using our phones without our contacts… since apparently most of them were stored on the sim card and not in google contacts.  Sams did not have a data transfer cable, so I guess that is the one negative about using them to swap phones out.

Chromebook Time

acer-unveils-first-chromebook-with-haswell-for-249 Have I ever mentioned that my wife is amazing?  I believe I have in the past but here is yet another instance of this.  I am a habitual craigsist shopper but I go in slumps.  I will furiously check it daily for something and then ignore the fact it exists for months.  My wife on the other hand tends to do so pretty regularly, and if she knows I am looking for something keeps an eye out.  For awhile now I have been interested in a Chromebook because for me it seems like the perfect note taking machine.  I religiously use chrome already and pretty much use nothing but google docs as it stands.  I wrote my entire nanowrimo novel last year in google docs… and I still need to edit that.  Basically I needed a machine that I could take with me into meetings at work and take copious notes and then have easy access to them later to mail to my boss or anyone else who so needed them.  The chromebook really seems like the ideal solution for this, but I balked at paying full price for one… since really I was only going to use it for a super limited purpose.

At the suggestion of friends I had mostly been looking for an Acer Chromebook instead of one of the Samsung models.  Yesterday my wife asked me “what brand chromebook were you looking for?” which generally means she’s found something on Craigslist.  Sure enough there was an Acer c710 Chromebook for sale that looked to be in pretty good shape for $150.  I hem hawed around a bit and thought about it, and decided that still I did not want to pay that much.  So instead we counter offered $100 and figured that would be the end of it.  After awhile the guy responded back that he would take $120, which was better but was not exactly an immediate purchase type situation.  We were heading on our way to our favorite Indian restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner so we told him we would think it over and get back with him.

I realize it was only $20 but it seemed like a significant difference at the time.  Mostly because I feel like in buying a chromebook I am only going to use it for the most basic of things.  I already have a really nice full fledged gaming laptop, and this is really just for carrying with me to meetings or any place I need to show off something on the web.  My wife’s school system is getting chromebooks for her students, so there was also the side benefit of giving her a machine to play with in seeing precisely what she can do with it.  After thirty minutes or so of discussion we decided to just pass, and tell the guy we really didn’t want to spend more than $100 on it.  Apparently he was wanting to sell it and we were the only decent offer all weekend, so we shifted gears and went all the way across town to meet the guy.

The funny thing is, the kid grew up in the very small town my wife hails from, so any question about reputability was out the window there.  We’ve dealt with some pretty sketchy people over the years of using craigslist and sometimes you just get a bad feeling about things.  Anyone who is willing to admit that they are from a town of 3,000 is obviously not looking to do something untoward.  I actually used it last night while podcasting to bring up our show notes, and so far it seems pretty much what I expected.  Chromebooks are really just a machine that runs nothing but a chrome web browser.  Anything that would work in chrome seems to work great on the chromebook, for my needs it seems like it is going to be perfect.

World Without Warcraft

Last night we recorded our second broadcast of the Aggrochat podcast.  I am shocked, amazed and absolutely humbled that people seem to have listened to the first one.  At last check we were around two hundred downloads, and for our first effort that seems insane.  Last night we followed the same basic format we set up with the first show, and ended up getting caught up in a quagmire of a topic.  There was a thread on twitter during the week where someone made the statement that they thought the gaming world would have been better off without World of Warcraft.  We spent the majority of the hour and fifteen minute run time of this episode discussing what that world would be like, and what things simply would not exist without WoW.  Between the four of us we managed to take a bunch of different angles and the end result was this nostalgia filled romp through MMO gaming.

#AggroChat #GalaxyS5 #ChromeBook #WorldOfWarcraft #Podcast