Aggrochat Archives - Page 81 of 82 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Five Year Blogoversary

April 21, 2014 by Belghast

Something Profound

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

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

April 20, 2014 by Belghast

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

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

Big Dumb Broforce

April 17, 2014 by Belghast

Happy Friday

At the very least, Happy Friday to me! This is the last day of my week as we have Good Friday off tomorrow. I plan on spending the day in a near vegetative state playing Elder Scrolls Online and likely streaming quite a bit of it. It seemed like today was going to be a day I could wrap up the loose ends. I have a bunch of projects that each need a few hours of undivided attention to finish up the last bits of coding. The problem is I am constantly getting interrupted at work by “fly bys” when some random person comes by to ask a question. Looking at my calendar it was completely clear, so I thought I would be leisurely listening to the ESO soundtrack and working through the last bits of these projects.

WRONG! I generally check my work email a few times a night, and right before bedtime I noticed I had been invited to a meeting to discuss hopefully the technical details of a new project. Then I panned down and noticed the time. There is a special place in hell for people who schedule 12 am to 1 pm meetings. Sure enough this damned vendor had done just that, so now I have to give up my lunch hour to listen to some vendor do a sloppy job of trying to explain the technical requirements of their product. I hate vendors… mostly because where I work the relationship of vendor and customer seems to be completely backwards. We always end up having to jump through hoops to meet vendor needs… when it should be the other way around.

Big Dumb Broforce

One of the things that I lament about modern video game design… is the attempt to make them feel like interactive movies. While I can appreciate the craftsmanship of the Mass Effect series, it is not the type of game I want to play every single day. I like blowing things up, gibbing bad guys and generally saving the day. I have massive amounts of notalgia over the big dumb games of my childhood. Nobody really gave a shit about the storyline in Double Dragon, because mostly it was completely incoherent. However we did know the bad guys by name and enjoyed punching them repeatedly. The name Abobo still sends an irrational amount of fear through me.

Broforce is basically one of these games with a storyline that is basically an excuse to blow a bunch of stuff up. The game is very reminiscent of Metal Slug, another title that I absolutely love, with a few significant tweaks. The gameplay is very similar, go through the map rescuing prisoners of war. The twist is each time you rescue another prisoner, you gain an extra life and then transform into that prisoner. This gives the game a huge cast of characters, all of which have extremely unique abilities. In the above shot I ended up playing as J from Men in Black… known in this game as “Bro in Black”. All of the various characters have been given bro names like “Brobocop” or “B.A. Broracus”.

At the end of each sequence of levels there is a boss fight, this one is a helicopter that alternates between dropping bombs and firing a chain gun at you. What makes it difficult is that both NPC weapons and your weapons can destroy terrain. Meaning pretty quickly you are running out of places to stand. One nifty tip that I have noticed is that the platforms the flags spawn on are indestructible, meaning you can use them as a shield when the bomb phase starts. All of this said the gameplay is just infectious. I’ve played roughly an hour so far, and am really enjoying myself. The only thing that I find frustrating is that not all of the “bros” are created equal. Some of them like the MacGyver clone are extremely situational. It reminds me of playing Castlevania and getting stuck with the wrong alternate attack right before a boss fight.

The one thing that would greatly improve the experience for me is the ability to swap back and forth between the bros you have rescued. That would make the gameplay feel more strategic and less random. Even in the modern Castlevania games you got a second chance to swap back to the weapon you had before. It is bad enough that if I get MacGyver I tend to just suicide out to swap to a new character. Playing mad bomber is just not as fun as it seems… even though his bombed turkey attack is hilarious to watch. The game is available through steam early release, but it feels pretty damned complete to me. If you like mindless shoot-em-up game play, I highly suggest you give it a look.

Wandering Rivenspire

The rest of the night I ended up working on the various quests in Rivenspire. This zone might be my nemesis, not because I don’t like it… but maybe that I like it too much. I find it nearly impossible to focus while wandering around a landscape full of vampires. I end up falling into vampire hunter mode and spending large amounts of time slaughtering the undead without really knowing I have done it again. I desperately tried to stay focused last night and follow the quest chains. I managed to ding 32 and at this point I am no longer getting drops from most of the encounters around me. It seems like if you are not within five levels of the encounter it becomes trivial and stops dropping anything meaningful.

I am however using the opportunity to loot everything I see, and feed the cooking mats to Kodra and Sylladora depending on the level of the material. I hit a lucky streak last night and managed to get both the Breton and Argonian racial motif books. The Argonian one is still looking for a home by the way if any of my guildies need or want it. A few days ago I managed to get an Imperial motif book, so they do apparently exist for everyone concerned the only way to get imperial gear was through the collectors edition. I managed to find a buyer for it and got 10,000g… which I figured was pretty damned good considering that the other motif books started out around 2,000 and have quickly dropped to 500 as the market has become flooded.

For awhile I was trying to broker a trade for either the Barbarian or Primal racial motif, however I have heard they are pretty common drops in the veteran levels. That ancient elves and daedra are far more difficult to find. I figure getting the gold while I can for the imperial book was the best course of order. Like always I am in a relative state of poor in this game, but I need to begin saving up for my fast pony. I might have to give up on deconstructing everything I see and just start selling it to make a profit. My biggest concern right now is that I am several levels ahead of the zone I am in… and this just seems to keep getting worse as I move upwards. I just find it impossible to move on past a zone until I think I have gotten everything out of it.

Interesting Footnote

It seems as though I am going to be on two podcasts this weekend. I will of course be recording the second episode of AggroChat… which I am looking forward to. We have several topics that we may or may not get around to discussing. It should be a fun time for me at least either way. The second however is that I will be guesting on the Multplaying.net podcast. So keep watching their site for the file because I am sure it will be a fun time.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #BroForce #AggroChat #Multiplaying

Life in Castlevania

April 14, 2014 by Belghast

Keep Progress

Last night I popped into Landmark for a bit and continued work on Belgarde Keep. At this point I have burned through around 1 million stone and still have so much more to do. One of my friends chastised me for building with stone. He said that I could do this much more easily with dirt and then come back over and paint in the stone texture. For whatever reason that just feels like cheating. Right now I can carve out bits of detail as I so choose and I still have stone underneath. With dirt I feel like I would be playing a constant game of trying to keep the facade looking right. The irony of my structure is that in a game with a pretty prolific smooth tool… I go out of my way to try and keep from anything getting smoothed. I don’t like the way it mushes up the textures to be honest.

I was feeling pretty good about my progress until I saw this picture… it looks like maybe my structure is a voxel off somewhere when it comes to what is currently the upper tier. So that means I will likely have to rip it out and start over from scratch placing stuff up there. However for the time being I think I will leave it as is until I get the “oomph” to go on another massive stone farming mission. The section I am standing on in this above photo… I am thinking about removing large chunks of it and making it a low balcony. Giving it more of a ramparts feel to it. Right now I am pretty pleased with how things are going, I just need to pull myself away from Elder Scrolls Online more often to do more work on it.

Life in Castlevania

I spent most of yesterday faffing about in Rivenspire, and as was my expectation from yesterday… it is very much Castlevania. Stuff is going horribly wrong in zone, and it is mostly due to the fact that we have free roaming vampires everywhere. There are few things I like more than slaughtering malformed vampires, but apparently one of them is killing Trolls. I remember in Skyrim the first time I was attacked by an Ice Troll. It felt completely epic seeing this lumbering shape charging at me through the blowing snow. That feeling apparently never gets old because I spent a good chunk of the day yesterday avoiding finishing a quest just so I could kill loads more trolls. Fire is traditionally the weakness, and I am not sure if that is still the case… but I as a Dragon Knight I applied loads of it just in case.

Rivenspire in the way it is laid out seems to be designed to keep me moving around in circles. There are so many things I still have to do in the zone to be able to move on… and I have already dinged 30. I am afraid I will be at least 35 before I manage to gather up the presence of mind to focus on the task at hand. This game for whatever reason is almost my kryptonite. There are so many shinnies and rabbit trails that I cannot keep from following. One minute I will be on task riding towards an objective, then a dark tear will open up from the sky and dump things down onto me… then I spend the next forty minutes on a mindless rampage across the country side only to realize I am back where I started and no closer to my objective. Thing is… I might get frustrated over my constant state of distraction, but I am enjoying each and every minute of it.

Faffing About Bleakrock

In an attempt to let people catch up a bit I decided to run around on my little Bosmer Nightblade in the Ebonheart Pact. Nothing terribly exciting but I thought I would stream my adventures. I had not streamed in awhile, and I end up joined by my friend Pazz. Over the course of an hour I make my way through the Bleakrock quests. If you’ve already played through Bleakrock there is nothing terribly exciting to see here, other than me roaming around aimlessly with a big sword. I really like the Bosmer for some reason, they feel more “feral”. In a way I am purposefully rolling things that would not be seen natively in an area. I plan on making an Argonian when I roll a character in the Aldmeri Dominion. You can listen to Pazz and I rattle on for awhile, and since he apparently does not understand how to make a push to talk key you get to listen to his inane water bottle noises that sound rather “questionable”.

You Apparently Like Us?

I am absolutely floored over the support we have gotten so far on the podcast. Embedding it again because it seems like the thing to do. Honestly I expected to post the podcast and then maybe have a dozen listeners that took pity on us enough to download it. Instead I have gotten some pretty positive comments. I know that it is currently pretty low quality, but that is something we can improve on over time. I had a friend ask me what bitrate we encoded at… and I literally had no answer. I just saved it out without really paying attention what I chose. I also want to fiddle a bit with the actual recording next time around. The positive is that I do believe there will be a next time. We all had fun doing it, and even if no one else was listening I think we would still continue recording.

I had a few people offer to be guests, and another few people offer to have us on their podcasts for some cross pollination. I think for the short term we need to lock down exactly what it is that we are doing before changing the mix significantly. I think it would be fun to record a show where we completely open things up similar to my podcasts, but then again that might be a little odd fighting to stay on task with people constantly popping in and out. For the time being what we did works, so I expect to keep tweaking that a little bit to improve the quality. I’ve already worked on a new version of the intro, and hopefully by next week Rae will have our awesome Chibis finished. This is starting to feel like a “real” thing… and while that is odd, it is also pretty damned cool.

#Landmark #ElderScrollsOnline #AggroChat #RIvenspire #Bleakrock