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Why Albany?

July 8, 2013 by Belghast

Funny how I am on vacation… but I am still getting up at five thirty in the morning. In this case it is so that I can take my wife to her conference. Quite honestly I went to bed pretty early last night, so I am more awake than I would normally be at 5:30. Additionally I have already finished getting ready for the morning… so I thought I would have enough time to knock out a blog post.

Search for Food

So far Upstate New York is vastly different than anything I would have expected. Firstly we have found what seems to be a residential wasteland, with housing everywhere you can see… but no restaurants and very few stores. We ate breakfast around 4 am yesterday… and had a stick of beef jerky in Chicago O’Hare… but other than that we had not had anything at all to eat when we got here around 4-5 pm. As we started to roam around town we were absolutely ravenous.

We expected to drive around through the residential areas and eventually find some newer shopping developments which have familiar food options. This was the theory… but after about 2 hours of driving around we really found nothing. Finally we found a shopping center with a Target, Lowes, and various other big box stores… and in it they had a Ruby Tuesday, Panera, Taco Bell and a Five Guys. This is quite literally the first places we had found to eat that were recognizable in any fashion.

We opted for Ruby Tuesday… and while grossly overpriced it was tasty and familiar enough. The way this area is laid out just boggles the mind. I was expecting what seems to be the ubiquitous development model everywhere else I have been in the united states… of commercial areas along the major roads with residential areas between. I feel like I need to spend some time looking at Google maps trying to get a lay of the land by air.

Another nuisance we have discovered is that apparently this part of the state does not believe in road signs… or at least not well marked ones. Additionally the same street will change names numerous times… so on one side of an intersection it will be one name… but on the other side of the intersection something completely different. The entire area feels like some giant city planning rube goldberg machine… and we are the little ball bearing making its way through it.

Why Albany?

Rowan asked the question as a comment on my blog yesterday, but I guess I have never really clearly explained why the heck I am in Upstate New York in the first place. I usually don’t give a lot of details about my wife on my blog, just as a courtesy because she works in a profession that is always under scrutiny. This coming school year she will be tag-team teaching a Forensics Science class at her school, whereas she does the mathematics instruction and she teams up with a science teacher. We are here in Albany for a Forensics Science workshop, and the other teacher was supposed to be attending with her.

However at the last minute they backed out… and I did not want my wife having to navigate Albany completely by herself. So I took the time off and we are trying to make a vacation of it. While this may not be the most touristy destination we have been to… there are definitely some interesting things to look at. Our hotel is in Schenectady, and just down from it is a really cool downtown area full of interesting buildings. We are hoping to have a few nice days to wander around down there and take photos.

So far however it has been overcast and rainy. Apparently New York State rain means serious business. We were driving around yesterday when the sky opened up on us… and remember… I am from Oklahoma… we are used to thunderstorms… but these were literally some of the largest rain drops I have ever seen. Everything went from clear to flash flood conditions in moments. I just kept driving because quite literally I was afraid I would drown the car if I attempted to turn off the road. Again I am no stranger to flash flooding… but this was pretty crazy… usually the clouds move off quickly but this one just seemed to hang over the top of us for a good thirty minutes.

Chicago O’Hare

I know I bitched about this one yesterday a bit… but I have to bring it up again. My wife travels a lot during the summer, and as a result she has experienced most of the big airport hubs. Chicago O’Hare is literally the first airport she has ever been in that did not have free WiFi. It is complete crap that what gets touted as the nations busiest airport does not have free internet. Hell even when we landed in Albany… they had free WiFi, and that Airport is hands down the most dysfunctional one I have ever experienced.

When we landed in Albany, the route to the baggage claim was rather contorted winding us through what felt like half the airport just to get to it. When we arrived there seemed to be only one baggage carousel servicing any of the incoming flights. This one area was trying to serve up luggage from 8-10 flights… quite honestly they were scrolling past on the monitor too fast for me to get a good count. We waited and watched as luggage went past… including bags for the rest of the passengers on the plane we just arrived on.

But we did not see our bag anywhere… and during this time I am going through my mind trying to figure out what we would need to do if we had a lost bag. Once the crowd cleared… and quite literally it had been shoulder to shoulder as we waited for our bag… I was able to look around the room. Across the room I spotted our bag at the unclaimed luggage area. I am guessing our luggage arrived on an earlier flight and was just sitting there waiting on us. So the forty five minutes we spent standing around watching for it… were essentially useless… but I could not see across the room.

Wrapping Up

Well it is time for me to run my wife to the conference. I hope you all have a great day. I will likely be coming back to the hotel room to do some googling and try and find something to do during the day. If all else fails I will just boot up Rift or Cube World and entertain myself just fine. I find it funny that I have a ton of people on twitter and G+ but not a single person in this area so far.

The Puddle Jumper

July 7, 2013 by Belghast

This morning has been a pretty wild ride. I am sitting in concourse F of the Chicago O’Hare airport with my combination camera/laptop bag on my lap as a table. So far it is working pretty well. I am trying to bang out this post before my battery dies. The negative side effect of a gaming laptop is the fact that they have complete crap for battery life. So long as I stay out of a game here is hoping that I can type fast enough to make it through… and then hopefully post it with the complimentary 30 minutes of free wifi access.

The Road Warrior

My wife travels all the time… and I did not really realize exactly what that meant until I watched her glide through the check in process of the airport. For me this was a confusing and often times anxiety ridden experience… but for her she had everything ready at exactly the right moment when it was needed. I have a brand new respect for her as she is able to navigate this world of cold steel and fluorescent lights.

I guess thought in the grand scheme of things it makes a lot of sense. For the last six years or so she has been travelling to at least 3 different conferences each summer. Anyone who feels that educators get the summer off can rightly go to hell. My wife spends almost every moment from when she gets out in May until when she goes back in August preparing for the next year. While some educators might rest on their laurels and recycle the same curriculum each year… she essentially rewrites her class work from scratch over the summer months factoring in new things she learns from these various workshops and conferences.

I feel very much out of my element sitting here in an airport. I have entered someone else’s work. All airports seem to look the same to me. They are all the same kind of cold shiny exteriors and remind me in many ways of most hospitals. The only variable seems to be the size… and jesus christ is O’Hare huge. We had to cross three concourses to prime ourselves for our connecting flight. I will admit this is the first time I have used a moving sidewalk… and they are pretty amazing. Right now I feel like a caveman experiencing fire for the first time.

The Puddle Jumper

Even thought I have lost roughly fifty pounds… I was not quite ready for the reality that is riding a puddle jumper. I was able to get an extension belt… which seemed overwhelmingly too large… but it helped get the extra inch or two needed to make the two connect. The hardest part about the flight for me at least was trying to cram my 6’4” height legs between the tiny rows. I really cannot recall the designation for any certainty… but I believe it was a CSL 700. Whatever it was it was tiny.

I am extremely thankful however for the fact that each row was only two seats wide. This let my wife and I forcibly cuddle… without the awkwardness that is trying to ride with a stranger in an extremely confined space. The thing that I found extremely bizarre was just how many people partook of what had to be an even smaller bathroom. All flight long however there was a constant stream of people going back and forth between the sky-commode and their seats. It got extremely awkward as this one guy was so insistent that he tried to squeeze past the beverage cart to get there.

There is literally nothing that you could do to get me to use a bathroom on an airplane. Even if I was sick beyond reason… I would find a way of mustering the strength to keep holding it in. I brought a drink on the plane but did not really consume much of it out of abject fear of needing to go. The bathroom was so small that when the flight attendant at the back of the plane sat down… his chair completely blocked its entrance. On the positive side… the flight attendant setting between us was a pretty cool guy from St. Louis.

The Rest of the Trip

So far the trip has been thankfully uneventful. I have to say from the air… Chicago looks just like every other city I have ever seen… just much much larger. Somewhere along the flight path… I swear there was a building that looked just like a classic playstation. I will have to Google maps it to try and figure out what the hell it was. We have a three hour layover here in Chicago, and hopefully the plane to Albany will not be extremely packed. We look to be departing from an even smaller terminal… so my fear is that it will mean a smaller plane. I wish I could just detach my legs… that is probably the only way I will ever fit comfortably between the tiny rows of seats.

When we were waiting at the terminal in Tulsa… I experienced what was probably the worst possible choice of television to be watching. All morning long it was nothing but nonstop coverage about the plane crash yesterday. I could tell it was having an extremely negative effect on a few of the passengers. There was a lady in quiet tears as she sat there obviously physically nervous about getting on a plane. Her boyfriend took her away on a walk through the concourse to try and calm her down… and she returned about ten minutes later and was no longer crying… so it appeared to have worked.

Additionally I got to see probably the least tasteful display of public affection. Seated across from me was a couple that was just barely keeping out of each others pants. I am sure they appreciated the confined spaces of the airplane… because for the 45 minutes or so we sat there she crawled up on the guys lap a few times. I have to say that is the most interesting thing about the airport… watching the behaviors of other people.

As a result I don’t think our three hour layover here in Chicago will be too bad. They bill themselves as the busiest airport in the United States… and as a result there is a constant stream of humanity flowing past me as I sit here and type. It is pretty easy to play guessing games… wondering where each person is headed. Some of them happy… some of them obviously not… but all of them going somewhere different.

Wrapping Up

Going to wrap this up and attempt to get on the WiFi and post it. Here is hoping that the rest of our trip goes relatively un-eventful. I am looking forward to being done with the trip… I like going places… but I hate the act of travelling. As a result I tend to go nowhere. Hopefully you are having a good Sunday morning… and that you did not have to get up at 3 am like I did. Looking forward to exploring Albany and finding what nifty things i can discover there. If you have any suggestions… I would love to hear them.

Addendum

I will rant about this more tomorrow I am certain… but I was not able to get WiFi access at Chicago O’Hare. So While I typed this up there I am just not able to post it from my hotel room. We are safe and sound in Schenectady New York, and just about to go exploring. If you guys know of anything we must see in the area, please let me know!

Last to Know

July 6, 2013 by Belghast

This morning is feeling really harsh, as I woke up around 7 am on a Saturday, after staying up until around 1:20 or so last night. It was entirely intentional however… since I wanted to make sure I could sleep tonight. We will be getting up before 4 am tomorrow… so that we can catch a 6 am flight. Normally I struggle to get to sleep, and the only sure way I could think of to make sure I slept tonight… was to purposefully exhaust myself today. All of that logic aside… it still sucks to be groggy and feel like you just want to go back to sleep.

Last to Know

Most of yesterday was relatively un-eventful. We hung out around the house, cleaned a bit, did copious amounts of laundry… but in the larger scheme of things nothing much happened. I hung out on my laptop playing some Rift and my wife read or did planning for the next school year. Essentially the standard things we do any day. We had plans to go out and about but those never really materialized, so essentially we were the exact opposite of busy all day long. This will factor in shortly as to why how un-busy we were matters.

About seven last night we get a call from my wife’s step brothers spouse. Apparently my wife’s mother is in the hospital… suspected heart attack. Of course we are a little freaked… but the freaked out part turns to a bit of anger when we find out that she has been there essentially all day. My wife goes into a panic of trying to call people and make sure they know… and one by one… every person she reaches has known for hours. Even estranged family members seem to know.

Essentially my wife is her mothers next of kin… the closest blood relative and the only one who could legally sign for her. Yet she is quite literally the last person to find out she is in the hospital… let alone has been there since at least around noon yesterday. Somehow one of the step daughters got called and went to the hospital with her… but my wife’s mother did not want anyone called… since they “didn’t know anything”. Thing is… the step daughter is a 50+ year old grown woman… she should have started calling the moment she found out anything. My wife’s mother was in a hospital bed… it is not like she could have stopped her.

To make matters worse… my niece thinks it is important to let everyone know when her kids have odd bowel movements… yet the one time something important actually happens she doesn’t let us know? She is a busy body, with no job, and essentially no life… yet the one time she could have passed along crucial and vital information she didn’t. Essentially the whole experience was frustrating to be so catastrophically left out of the loop. I think we finally got called because people wondered where we were.

Okay So Far

In their defense… for whatever reason they all thought we had already left on our vacation. But even then it would have been nice to at least know something was up. Ultimately I think they wanted to save us the stress since we couldn’t really do anything about it. Overall she is being treated like it was a heart attack… but she has had none of the signs of heart attack. She was out working on the farm of her “boyfriend” and fainted. But afterwards we find out she had not had anything to eat since 9pm the night before… and not really had anything to drink since around 6pm. So it could have been a low blood sugar or dehydration thing… since senior citizens dehydrate extremely easily.

She was as stubborn and frustrating as ever when we finally got to the hospital last night around 8:30. All in all she was doing well, and felt much better, however they had her hooked to a heart monitor just to make sure things were okay. They said she had some signs of plaque in her arteries… but quite honestly what 76 year old person has not developed a build up? Based on her explanation of what happened I am doubt it was anything cardiac since she had no chest pain… and has no soreness other than the injuries she experienced in the fall. The doctors had not really seen any “smoking guns” so hopefully they will release her today with an all clear.

We’ve made everyone we talk to essentially promise to call us first from now on… despite whatever she says. I know she just didn’t want to needlessly worry anyone… but the simple fact that she was in the hospital at all meant folks needed to know. We would have headed up there at noon and sat all day with her if we had known. But this has always been the way it has gone in our family. Since we tend to keep our heads down and focused on the day to day… we always end up the last to know about anything. Generally it is the gossip queen niece that keeps us up to date… but sadly she seems to gloss over the things that are actually important.

The Treehouse

During the day yesterday I played a ton of Rift, as I ran around happily on my stabbity rogue. I completed Pelladane and most of Cape Jule, but found myself struggling a little bit when I hit Seratos and the mob levels increased. As a result I decided to try and push on through to 53 through a combination of Instant Adventures, Rifts and Zone events. I made pretty decent progress and am sitting at roughly 75% through 52. I would have probably made it to 53 that night, but of course the things I mentioned above happened and that pretty much closed out our evening.

During the middle of my Instant Adventure-a-thon my friend Rae got home and logged in… and wanted me to check out her dimension. She has literally spent the last three days doing nothing but work on her dimension and it shows. She had some some really awesome things. The picture above is me standing on the top platform of her tree house… that she built entirely from scratch. Essentially she has this huge pavilion of sorts on the ground floor, with spiral staircases leading up to a garden level… then finally a series of platforms climbing up the tree.

This alone would be amazing, but she has also built down into the little grotto area at the bottom of the falls in the Moonshade Pools dimension. So through a nifty winding path downwards you can reach the bottom and she is starting to build a pretty nifty dock down there. I knew she had this in her, since she is a minecrafting fiend… but overall she has done way more with dimensions than I would expect anyone would. She has inspired me to start trying to do something with my own version of Moonshade Pools. Right now it is pretty much just a catch all for all the nifty dimension items I have gotten so far. If you are over on Deepwood, friend Audrae and take a look for yourself.

Wrapping Up

Well I should wrap up this post and get on with the whole getting ready thing. We have a long list of errands we need to run today so that we can pack this evening and prepare to leave the state tomorrow. We still have our houseguest, and he is seemingly doing okay. He has been down to his mothers house quite a bit, so here is hoping he is about to decide he wants to move back home. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope we have safe travels. I will likely be blogging tomorrow from the airport in Chicago, as that will be the first time I really have anytime to do much of anything.

Original Norrath

July 4, 2013 by Belghast

The big hullabaloo at work ended up going far better than expected… however since the meeting time was at 1 pm I spent most of the morning in an overall sense of dread. I am a “rip the band-aid off” person, not peel it back slowly… as a result I detest suspense. I want to get the pain over with so I can get on with my life. In class I usually volunteered to give my speech or presentation first so I could get it out of the way and relax. But I survived… and now I am on vacation for awhile.

Original Norrath

Thanks to my Everquest 2 account and having station access I have had the ability to play the original Everquest for some time now. For whatever reason I never really took advantage of this. From time to time I would boot up a copy of the game playing one my favorite emulator server, but I had no real interest in ever returning to the real thing. On a whim I decided to fire up the game client and see if the game experience had improved as a while. A few months back I did the same for Dark Age of Camelot, and was surprised at how well the game actually stood up against modern titles.

The Good

Honestly many of the features of the game have been drastically improved since I last played it on an older emulated copy. Firstly most of the NPC models I encountered had been drastically improved, but honestly I never had an issue with graphics… I play minecraft afterall. The problems I always had with the game were just how bad the user interface was. Luckily this has been improved a lot, and they seem to have fixed the horrible mouse look system from the early days. For the most part it controls out of the box like you would expect any modern MMO to control.

Additionally they have completely gotten rid of the corpse recovery aspect of the game. This was the biggest sticking point with me, and the cause of lots of marital strife for myself and my friends. The inability to simply disconnect without dire consequences caused many a fight, and I can still remember getting a call one Sunday afternoon begging me to come home right away and resurrect someone because they got stuck in a bad place and were about to lose all the gear on their corpse. All in all there was nothing positive about that system.

What happens now is if you die you respawn back in a safe area with all your gear just like modern MMOs. After level 10 you begin to lose experience just like you used to in the old game. From my understanding you still can lose levels through death, but this is acceptable I suppose. Temporarily losing progress on death is something you can deal with, permanently losing everything you have spent years acquiring on your characters… that is not something you can deal with.

Additionally they have added in a return to bindpoint functionality that lets players rapidly get out of an area. This was another huge problem with the game as a whole, the inability to safely leave the game at a moments notice. Things happen, and you cannot always plan when you might need to leave a game. Modern MMOs have taken this into account, but it is nice to see they have gone back through and added this functionality into what was always the most painful game on players.

The Interesting

The thing that I find most interesting is all of the ways that they have essentially “hacked” modern features into an extremely old and limiting engine. The name Everquest used to always be a joke, since for the most part the game itself had very few “quests”. They have remedied this by adding in a full quest journal system, and through some clever scripting given you an overarching quest for each area that essentially leads you by the hand to the other quest givers. This way players at least know who to /hail to get the quests in a given area.

Additionally they have incorporated new features, like treasure chests that are commonplace in other games. They had no real way to do this in the traditional sense… but instead creatively created ground spawn stationary mobs that look like chests but don’t fight back. So by destroying this “chest” the player can then loot the contents. I have to applaud the devs for coming up with extremely creative solutions around complex problems and limitations of their game engine.

Additionally I find it interesting that they have come to a point where they expect mudflat ion to occur and that players need certain stats to be able to survive. Through the tutorial quests you manage to get a really nice set of gear, probably better than I had in my 50s in the original game… and include with it the ever important 10% haste item. This was a must have item, and I remember hours spent farming various drops for the guild to make sure that every dps player had at least the most basic of haste items.

The Bad

Today’s post was essentially spurred on by one of my friends blog post yesterday. Over on West Karana, my friend Tipa posted an article called “Why I Stopped Playing Everquest”. Her commentary could almost exactly double for whatever I am about to say, because the same things that do not appeal to her… are what I noticed indulging this whim. Ultimately it is honestly the same problem I had with Dark Age of Camelot as well. The game play is to slow and prodding… and quite frankly boring after being used to today’s MMO standards.

I played a Cleric in the original game, and my little circle of healers used to joking refer to the game as AFKquest, in that we spent far more time alt-tabbed or talking than actually doing anything active on our characters. Unfortunately playing a melee is not much better. I have reached a point where I just cannot handle passive and slow combat, and literally doing nothing as your character auto attacks down a monster. The above golem took a good 15 minutes of waiting on my character to slowly chew down its health. I alt-tabbed and caught up on my news feed, tabbing back between articles to see if it was over yet.

This is not what fun game play looks like anymore for me. At one time it was, but more so it was because it was the only thing that gave us online character development and progression. The game holds up on many levels, but the slow pace of the game and the absolute passivity of combat guarantees that it will never be more than a passing novelty for me again. Sure I got the tingles of nostalgia as I heard the opening theme again, but I have the same nostalgia playing Everquest II, which for me at least is a much better game in every possible way.

I feel like I have always looked at my time playing Everquest through rose colored lenses… but after playing it again for a short period of time… I started to think about all the things I didn’t remember. All of the hours spent standing around doing nothing, while other players drug mobs back to the party and killed them… somehow never taking enough damage to make it worth casting a heal. Quite honestly the game involved way more waiting around than I would like to remember. Waiting to break fear, waiting for everyone to log in and show up for an event, waiting to get enough faction to turn in a specific quest item, waiting for that one magical super rare monster to spawn needed for someone’s epic. I simply don’t have the patience for that much waiting, or at least I have come to value my time a bit more and I am simply not willing to squander it.

Wrapping Up

Overall I was surprised at just how well Everquest had updated itself to compete with modern games. However after playing for a very short period of time… I remembered all the bad things about the game and they pretty much toppled the nostalgic good things. I am going to file the game in the “not for me anymore” category. I might visit occasionally since it is free for me to do so, out of sheer nostalgia, but it isn’t something I could ever really get into again. The gameplay overall is just not what I am looking for out of an MMO.

Since this is the big holiday weekend in the United States, I wish all my fellow Americans a happy Independence Day. For my dear friends in the rest of the world… I apologize… because for the next 24 hours you will hear about nothing but our Fourth of July celebrations. I still hope you all have a great weekend. We have a bunch of stuff to do to prepare for our vacation and a bunch of cleaning to do for our house sitter. Guess I need to get up and be productive.