AggroChat Podcast Archives - Page 94 of 108

Twenty Legs

December 21, 2014 by Belghast

Double Feature

Last night was both amazing and horrible at the same time, for so many different reasons. Since it is holiday season our ability to record AggroChat is going to become increasingly strained. In fact last night both Rae and Tam were recording on location at their respective parents houses. For some time we had been kicking around the idea of having a “Game of the Year” podcast. The problem with this concept is it would require us all to actually agree on what we felt was our game of the year. While there is a lot of overlap in our tastes, there is also an extreme amount of divergence. The end result had us recording our “Games of the Year” podcast, in which each of us picked five games we felt were significant to us in the past year, and then we as a group talked about all of them.

The end result is that between last night and this morning I had over three hours worth of recorded audio to sift through. Thankfully we totally did this on purpose as it allows me to split this one episode into two still significant episodes worth of discussion. As such I have released part one today, and I will release part two next Sunday, giving everyone a much needed break from recording to go hang out with family and friends and not care about being home by 9pm on a Saturday night to strap into a chair and record a podcast. The other side effect of this whole thing is that I was up until 2 am last night, and then back up this morning at 8 am to finish editing. I quite literally just finished editing everything and uploading the first part when I sat down to write this post. It is going to be a really long day.

Shrine to Geeks

The reason why it is going to be a really long day, is that yesterday was ALSO a really long day. I got up fairly early, and as my wife was getting dressed and ready knocked out yesterdays rather frantic blog post. Then from that point until I literally sat down to record AggroChat last night, I was either driving or shopping. We took my mother in law with us to Joplin Mo, because one it is a really cool town and two it is not terribly far from where she lives. We had a whole bunch of things that we wanted to do, but one of them was to go to the Mall. It really is borderline suicidal to go to any Mall on the weekend before Christmas, and by the time I got out of there I was absolutely done with humanity for the day. One of the cool things about the Joplin Mall is that several years ago Vintage Stock went in and created this insane flagship store.

Now I have talked about Vintage Stock before, but it is really hard to grasp the scale of this place until you are actually in it. Imagine going to a Wal-mart, where everything in the store somehow pertained to geekdom. The amount of consoles, comics, rpgs, videos, puzzles, books, board games, and action figures is really hard to grasp. I tried to snap a picture to show you folks the scale of this place but it extends out on either side from the vantage point I took up. Hopefully at least you can get the idea. On a normal day it is absolute sensory overload… but yesterday with all the people packed in… it was a bit too much for me to handle. Thankfully we make it to Joplin fairly often so even though I did not really get to enjoy the bounty that is this store… there will always be another trip to explore it under more calm circumstances.

Twenty Legs

One of the regular themes of my blog is that we like to go to Flea Markets and junk stores. One of my favorite activities here is to take photos of the random strange things I happen to find. Sometimes you find an item that creates far more questions than you could ever possibly answer. For example the above photo is a box of 20 Furniture legs… for $5.95. While I am not really sure what the going rate for disembodied furniture is, that seems like not too bad of a deal. The problem is… why do they have a box of 20 furniture legs… and better yet who is going to come along and NEED a box of 20 furniture legs. I have a feeling these are the sort of thing that are extremely specific to the piece they came off of, so unless you happen to need exactly these legs for your furniture… you probably have no interesting in this box. Better question is why would someone purchase furniture without the legs in order to need said box of 20 legs.

There were a ton of strange and cool things to be found. For example I thought this Igloo style R2-D2 cooler was pretty awesome. The inside of it was roughly the same size as one of those large drink cooler that sports teams use to dump Gatorade on their unsuspecting coaches. While it was pretty great… it was not $75 worth of great. Had it been somewhere in the $20-$40 range I probably would have snapped it up, because seriously when the hell else am I going to find an awesome R2-D2 cooler. Then there is the just straight up bizarre collectables. The above photo is this group of mannequins dressed up in various outfits. For starters… I struggle to wrap my mind around why these were created in the first place. Secondly I also struggle to imagine who decided it was a good idea to purchase them. Thirdly… I find it even stranger that someone thought that selling them as another really good idea. I picture somewhere someone has a whole set of these disembodied figures in various bright outfits, because while I snapped a picture of four standing side by side, there were probably a dozen different ones in the booth. Since they appear to be missing legs… wondering if I can somehow reunite them with the furniture legs above.

Finally I always end up finding things that make me feel extremely old. I guess that ultimately is the sign of aging, when a good chunk of the things found in a flea market are things from your childhood. On the right we have the infamous Kraco Stereo Cassette Adaptor for your 8-Track tape player. This was awesome for vehicles that had an 8-track deck in an era that rapidly adopted the Cassette tape instead. I say infamous because it had a notorious reputation for completely eating tapes. I remember using this to survive a family trip to Colorado with my cousins, and as we went across country… it slowly mangled a Phil Collins tape until it was completely unrecognizable. Ultimately mangled or not… we considered the ability to actually play tapes in the massive conversion van worth the risk. I posted about this on twitter yesterday and it turns out a lot of other folks that follow me also had mixed memories of this device. In any case seeing it hanging there in relatively good packaged condition brought back a ton of memories.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

December 14, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 35

Last night we recorded our 35th episode of AggroChat, featuring myself, Ashgar, Tamrielo and Kodra. Last night the show became mostly about raids and raiding. I am not sure if this started with our progress in Final Fantasy XIV working on Turn 5 of Binding Coil of Bahamut or if this began with Tam talking about the new “It’s A Wipe” game from steam. It’s A Wipe is essentially a raid simulator in that you are the raid leader of a group of players trying to make it through progression content. Having lived this world… the more we talked about this game the more it seems like the creators of the game were raid leaders themselves at some point. When Tam got into the section talking about the descriptions of the various players and their traits… I could seriously associated names to each of the people he was talking about because we had those exact personalities in our own raids.

From there we wound our way through lots of digital card gaming with Kodra, as he talked about the new Hex and Hearthstone expansions. Tam talked about the sweeping changes to the Infinity miniatures game and the ramifications it is having on the various factions. Finally we delve into my relapse into raiding. This past week I raided Monday in Final Fantasy XIV, Tuesday doing Highmaul progression content in World of Warcraft, Wednesday a casual foray into LFR with the guild, and Thursday Highmaul progression again. All total that was four nights of raiding… and I was having an absolute blast. As Kodra pointed out, I am raiding as much as I ever did in Late Night Raiders… just doing it in a more piecemeal and casual fashion. I am really enjoying splitting time between Final Fantasty XIV and WoW and seeing how each game does raiding.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

A few hours before the raid my friend Kinral mentioned that he had an impending invasion in his garrison. I volunteered to do one as I had not gotten one done for the week. In theory you can do as many invasions as you like, but as far as I know you can only receive rewards from one a week. Additionally there is an achievement for having done all of the available factions, so I have been looking to spend my weekly garrison fight on a new faction. Kinral thankfully had the Shadowmoon Clan, which is the one you fight during your “trial” garrison invasion. We got all prepared to do this, teleported to his Garrison… but for some reason he could not accept the quest. So we ran out to the edge of the phasing and waiting as he logged in and out and fiddled with various bits to try and get the quest to show up. While doing this Odie and I did what any bored players do… start breaking out the Paper Zeppelins.

Yesterday I learned a very important lesson… firstly that you can outrun the paper zeppelins. More importantly however that you can keep throwing more Zeppelins at the player and end up with an army of them following them. The above photo only shows four, but I did managed to get all five chasing him at one point. After some more figurations… we found out that Kinral had not upgraded his Garrison to the Tier 3 Town Hall… which is really strange because when I teleported to his Garrison… I saw the Tier 3 castle layout. He upgraded really quickly and we were able to do the invasion. We were roughly 50 away from getting gold, and none of us got anything tangible from our loot bags. So here is hoping that next week I can manage to get in on one of the gold invasions and get something cool from it. I mostly just want to get gold so I can prove to myself that I can do it.

The Final Stretch

While I am about to talk about Belgrave and my progress leveling… I had to share the above screenshot just because I thought it was pretty amazing. I spent a good deal of time yesterday while recording the podcast faffing about in Pandaria, either farming Dinosaur bones for the 9999 mount or trying to get Zandalari Warbringer kills. During one of the long stretches flying across the continent I noticed I flying against the moon and snapped a screenshot. I really really love the Grinning Reaper Ebola charity mount, and especially when it is flying… because it seems so improbable. Anyways onwards to Belgrave… last night I managed to hit 99 so I am in the final stretch towards 100. Unfortunately he is not having the best luck in the world. I keep completing these quests, and almost every time I am walking away with the default green reward instead of an upgraded version. While Cuppy chimed in yesterday telling me that it was in fact possible to hit 615 without the Dwarven Bunker… I think maybe she also had a significant amount of luck going into it too. I plan on completing Nagrand and seeing where I am at the end of it… but I have a feeling I am going to be significantly shy of 615.

I have to say when you are used to getting upgrades from quest rewards… you die a little inside each time you get a green. Similarly not a single on of the lootables scattered around the zone have become upgrades either. At some point I am going to make an attempt on the 620 sword on top of Oshugun. Here is hoping that ends up purple, because it if does I will be set for awhile. One of my big frustrations with Blizzards design through the years is their seeming inability to ever put a full set of gear in an area. Since Nagrand is a gearing up zone basically… would it not have been better for them to have enough treasures in the zone to make a full set of gear? Better yet… why is there not a blue set of Smithed gear that the player can wear while trying to gear up? I feel like gear in general has been a frustrating point this expansion, especially considering most heroic gear has a chance of dropping from any boss in any dungeon… making it feel extremely generic. I feel like Blizzard tried to do a lot of things with this expansion, but most of them are not working as intended.

AggroChat Episode 34

December 7, 2014 by Belghast

Bad Name Great Cat

This is going to be a really rough post to get through, so I am sitting here avoiding writing. That said I need to actually get through this, otherwise I will sit here staring at the empty page all day. Yesterday started off fairly normally, I got up, got showered and went out for breakfast like I have for years. The problem is what happened during the middle of the day pretty much broke my heart. Fifteen years ago this past Thanksgiving weekend, the above cat entered our lives as we rescued her from the cold of my parents barn. There is some confusion about her name, because I originally named her Sasha having always liked the name. My wife however had a living terror of a student named Sasha in her class that year… so the name actually stuck. The only people who ever called her that were the veterinarian and my mother. When we got her, she was tiny and into everything like kittens always are… there was a common refrain of “you little shit” as we cleaned up one mess she made after another. Well the name stuck and she was forever called “Little Shit” from that point on.

She never would have guessed her name was a bad thing however because we said it with the utmost love. She was my baby girl, but she spent as much time being my wife’s baby as she did mine. There were so many nights I fell asleep with her purring loudly on our pillows. She had the most amazing purr that you could literally hear like three rooms away. For most of her life she always wanted to be somewhere near us, as evidenced by the two pictures above. In fact I always tried to make sure she had room to lay down either at my feet or on the sofa near me. You don’t realize how much you have changed your life to fit someone else. She had all sorts of quirks, like while we were getting ready in the morning she would hop in the shower first and get a drink of water while the shower was running. Actually that was only one of two ways she was willing to get a drink, the other being from a bright red cup we left on the bathroom floor. There were many times in the middle of the night I woke up to the sound of that cup banging around, letting me know that I needed to get up and fill it up for her.

Some Rough Times

We have had two boy cats that had thyroid issues, so we were well aware of the tell tale signs. A bit over two years ago we started seeing them in her, so we got her into the vet and had been treating her with a topical cream that I had to smear into her ear morning and night. She was an absolute trooper and stayed still as I “greased” her ears as I referred to it. About one in three cats experience some digestive problems associated with thyroid disease, so when she started having issues with inappropriate elimination… we thought it was all tied to the issues as a whole. It became a nightly task for me to come up and pick up the messes left by her during the day. Frustrating as it might have been, she was worth every bit of the effort. Over the last two weeks however it had gotten noticeably worse. She was spending pretty much all of her time sleeping on the couch, and then barely making it off the couch before having to go potty. Yesterday afternoon we took her into the vet to see if maybe we needed to tweak the dose of thyroid medicine again.

Little shit had always been a waddly cat with a huge belly, and we always attributed it to her just being built “stocky” she reminded us of one of those strong country women, that while they might not win a beautify competition had the sheer presence to get job on the farm done. As she lost weight her belly became more distended, which again we attributed to her odd body shape. However upon seeing it the vet was immediately concerned. Upon taking some X-Rays the news was pretty grim. There was a massive growth in her stomach region pushing in on her bowels and likely causing pain to eat and got to the bathroom as well. With her age there was nothing really surgery wise that they would recommend as the likelihood of recovery was pretty slim. We were left with the extremely hard choice of either taking her home and waiting for her to get worse and die, or letting her go. She had always been a very clean girl, with extremely preferences in her potty habits. She hated a dirty litter box, and there were certain kinds of litter that she absolutely refused to use. I could tell the last year was rough on her, because when she was force to used to bathroom in a bad place there was a look of panic on her face. With the extreme increase over the last two weeks it felt like we were not terribly far from her messing herself in her sleep, and that is something she would not have wanted to happen.

So we made the decision that seemed like it was going to be the best for her. She had struggled with many things over the last few years. She was struggling to move around the house, and we had to install pet stairs on the sofa for her to get up and down easily. She had not slept with us for about a month, spending nearly 24 hours a day sleeping in my chair on the sofa, snuggled into blankets that I am sure smelled like me. When we tried carrying her to bed, she would last for a bit but ultimately hop down and return to the sofa. Cats do an amazing job of hiding what ails them… and I think she was trying to keep away from us from showing how much she hurt. I wish I could have fixed her, made it all better… but I couldn’t this time. Truth is she has probably always had this mass in her belly, and we always thought it was just her unique shape. This might have been the first time she ever had an x-ray… and unfortunately it happened far too late. I wish I could go back in time and have caught this earlier, but I am not really sure how we could have known. All I know is that I lost one of my best friends, and one of the sweetest animals we will likely ever have. Yesterday it felt like my world was falling apart, and I am still not sure if the gravity has really hit me. Laying down last night, as I called for the cats to come to bed… I had to stop myself from yelling for Little Shit. We will miss you baby girl.

AggroChat Episode #34

I am so thankful to the awesome people that I record with. During the day yesterday I was not sure if I could go on that night and record a podcast. Then something happened over twitter. Someone mentioned me stating that they had found the podcast that day and was really enjoying it. Turns out they listened from show 33 to 24… so some 14 hours of our podcast in a row. I have to say hearing that greatly improved my day and gave me that push to keep going last night. I just was not sure if I could be my normally jolly self, and carry the show… so Kodra stepped up and did an excellent job as master of ceremonies. Actually he did a phenomenal job matching pretty much everything that I normally do and then adding his own flourish.

There was much discussion of Final Fantasy XIV as usual with Raven talking about completing her second Novus weapon and beginning a second Nexus grind, and several of us talking about our victory over Ultros and solid attempts on Tier 5 in Binding Coil of Bahamut. I talk World of Warcraft raiding, and looking forward to beginning the Highmaul Raid after missing Thursday and my raids first two boss kills. We talk Heroes of the Storm, since this week they finally saw fit to give Rae an invite. That game is exceptionally fun and better suited for a more casual gamer than League of Legends is. Over the course of the week we have played quite a bit of it and talk about our personal hero preferences and playstyles. Kodra runs a much tighter ship than I seem to, because we actually clocked in at just barely over an hour once editing was finished. Extra special thanks to Kodra for steering the ship while I couldn’t quite muster the oomph to do so.

Opening the Mines

November 30, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat #33 – Crafting, Puzzles and Raven

Last night we had a special guest on AggroChat that may turn into a more permanent addition, but for not we are playing that by ear. Raven is a friend that I initially met through Twitter but we all have become close to through our time spent in Final Fantasy XIV. She has been awesome with offering to fill in with her characters whenever we happen to need them for our guilds semi-regular shenanigans. With Rae’s recent absence from the show I had been kicking around the idea of bringing on another person, and thankfully Raven showed some interest in doing it. Hopefully she had as much fun as the rest of us did, and she brought some interesting takes on the topics we discussed.

Last night was a massive meandering show where we talked about some of our favorite puzzle games at length even dredging things up like Tetris Attack. We talked about the Road Not Taken, which is quite possibly the most depressing puzzle rpg ever. We talk Super Smash brothers, and do a horrible job at trying to guess Ashgar’s favorite character. We talk about Kodra’s experience playing Dragon Age Origins and how he is ultimately playing a completely different game than I ever managed to play. We fall into a giant Final Fantasy XIV crafting discussion, since Raven is the pocket expert on the topic. Finally I discuss my frustrations with Molten Core 40 man LFR from this past Tuesday and how it really does make players not ever want to do 40 man again.

As I am writing this post I am still editing away on the episode or more so the audio is rendering. We ran really long, but at this point I am not quite sure how long. We might have ultimately recorded our very first two hour long episode… this may or may not be a good thing. I think everything flowed extremely naturally with our newest guest host, so hopefully that can be a thing that happens more often. Even if not I am extremely grateful for Raven filling in and offering her views on the completely unprepared list of topics. Our complete and total lack of organization would throw some people off, but she took to it like a champ.

Opening the Mines

My initial goal upon reaching level 100 was to be able to get geared for the impending opening of the first raid, that happens this Tuesday. As such for the better part of a week I have been well over the 630 required cap to get into raiding. Additionally I have been helping out various players that needed another dps or tank for doing their own heroic gearing. Now however I am taking a bit of a step back and working on some of my alts. Right now my goal is to get each of them to the level where they get their Tier 2 Town Hall and with it a mine and a profession hub. Since I have an army of level 90 characters, this is going to take awhile but it should allow other tradeskill materials to start flowing in naturally on all of my characters. As such I worked up Exeter my blacksmith and miner first with the hopes of eventually using him to fuel some of my gear on my warrior. That said by the time I get around to making that gear I might already have epics in those slots. In any case I now have his T2 Town Hall and T2 Mine so he is finally self sufficient in the creation of truesteel ingots.

Next I am opting to work on my leatherworker/skinner Worgen Druid Belgarou. I noticed that most of the smithing patterns also require leather, so as such I need someone that can bring it back in large quantities. Last night while recording the podcast I worked on getting the druid through the opening sequence at the dark portal, and now I am working through the various early areas of Shadowmoon Valley. Unfortunately this character does not have an heirloom weapon, and the lower attack damage is noticeable. My hope is that I can limp by with enough gear gained through the various treasure hunts in the zone. I am also having to relearn how to play a feral druid… which feels a bit strange these days. It feels like I only really have one attack button, and a bunch of optional attacks. That said I should probably research that class further, because my survival seems to be lacking at times.

Exciting Guests All Around

Now comes the time to be extremely vague. This morning I am recording the next episode of Bel Folks Stuff, and for those who have not been listening to them.. it is where I grab a personality in our community and talk to them about the various things that are important to them. Previously I have had Gypsy Syl and Rowan Blaze on… and this guest is going to be just as awesome. The thing is I am honestly a bit nervous about it. Syl and Rowan I have gamed with or at the very least hung out on voice chat with… so were both super familiar to me. This guest is someone I have the utmost of admiration for… but have never actually cross paths with in any games. I am sure it will end up being fine, as when I close the office door and go into serious recording mode… I seem to never have a shortage of anything to talk about. That said I think you guys will be absolutely pumped over who I have for a guest this time.

Similarly my hope is to turn this episode around much more quickly than the previous ones. I sat on the recording with Rowan for a good month, and as such it ended up kinda bizarre as we talked about a few issues… that were resolved or at least changed during Blizzcon. Right now I am tentatively planning on having this third episode of Bel Folks Stuff out if at all possible by this coming Friday. That should give me time to edit and fiddle and get things ready for the public, but hopefully still keep it from sounding outdated like the one with Rowan did. I don’t have that huge of an installed listener base yet, but this is mostly something I am doing for my own sake and enjoyment rather than for any sort of internet fame. Then again all of the things I do are mostly for my own entertainment.

The Month is Over

This morning I am thankful that the month is done. This was hands down one of the hardest challenges I have done on my blog. There were so many mornings that I was completely finished with the post and starting at the above logo not sure what to write about under it. The first few days were rather easy, but after that I kept struggling to find something else to say… that also somehow related back to my post. I think I mostly succeeded but there are times when it really is difficult to count your blessings. I think I wrote some really solid blurbs during the month, some of which that maybe even surprised me a bit. That said I am more than happy to close the book on this little chapter and move on to the next thing whatever it might be. Thanks for riding along with me on this journey.