Real Life

There are times when I don’t have much to really talk about. One of the problems with doing a daily blog is that you need a daily churn of exciting things you are willing to expound upon. Right now I am in a bit of a betweensies phase for gaming. I’ve wrapped up Blast from the Past and gotten out of it what I wanted, and I am largely in a holding phase until we start “Bel League” with 3.23… which of note will have its theme, teaser trailer, title, and start date announced today. When I am in one of these periods I tend to allow myself a bit of navel-gazing and reminiscing. I have no clue why I barged into a thread and dumped a bit of a soliloquy on it…. but it happened nonetheless. For those who don’t know my social media of choice these days continues to be Mastodon and I help run a server called Gamepad.club if you need a good home.

Anyways in the thread that I barged into… I sort of force-dumped this whole bit about how my life has gone through various phases that have shaped me into the person my readers know. I thought this morning I might expand upon this theory into a proper blog post. This will likely be a deeply personal post, the sort of thing that I feel weird about widely syndicating. One of the rules I set forth for myself when I began this blog so many years ago… is that I would try my best to show the real me… just occasionally omitting names and specific details for the protection of others. If you are so inclined, feel free to join me on a bit of a trip down memory lane.

Baby Bel Watches Star Wars

I don’t have a lot of photos of tiny proto-bel at the ready, but I think this one is pretty great. I am guessing based on the wrapping paper that this is maybe a Father’s Day. My best guess is this is me circa age 2 or so… I have questions as to why my parents had Disney pillowcases… but whatever. One of the earliest memories that I have is of watching Star Wars at the local drive-in theater. I was around two when it came out, and that movie rocked my world. I was obsessed with it in a way that I have probably never really been obsessed with anything since. I apparently went around quoting or more likely misquoting lines from the movies and was most obsessed with Darth Vader… or “Darfa Bader” as my parents said I called him.

I think more than anything Star Wars lit a spark in me that has never really been quenched and set me down a path of consuming pretty much all things Science Fiction and Fantasy. It also ignited my obsession with toys… and more specifically anything that is at the 3 and 3/4ths scale figures. Star Wars faded to GI Joe which faded to He-Man… but all the while that obsession was ignited by being very small and very amazed by the wonders that I was seeing on the big screen while sitting in my Dad’s truck. The problem with early memories is that you can never for certain really know if you are actually remembering things or if it is a construction based on photos you have seen and stories that you have been told. I remember a lot of birthday parties… all themed over whatever fandom I happened to be obsessed with at the time.

Bel Gets an Atari

While technically my first gaming experiences were with a Sears and Roebuck Pong Clone console that my parents bought… my real addiction to video games began when my Mom brought me home an Atari. The Pong console never really got used because my Uncle borrowed it… hooked it to my grandparent’s TV… left it on all night and ruined their expensive Zenith console television with screen burn-in making EVERYONE paranoid about that. She was a school teacher and one of her students was selling it… so for $50, we got the console, several controllers, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 games. This was the era of “video games are ruining the youth” so it was a rare occasional that my folks actually let me play a stand-up arcade game, let alone go to an actual arcade… but when I got a home console I could play as much as I wanted.

Sure this led to the memorable Christmas of 1987 when I got my Nintendo and countless consoles after that as I picked up each new generation… and quite honestly still do even though I am not much of a console player. This moment ignited my obsession with video games as a whole which has never quite left me. It was a simpler time, to be honest, and I miss some aspects of being able to stick a cartridge into a system and immediately play it. Sure I long ago abandoned physical media for the convenience of digital downloads and having my entire game library “on tap” to be played on a whim. The thing is though that I have never engaged with games as deeply as I did back then. It would take several months’ worth of allowance saved up or ratholed Christmas/birthday money to buy a single cartridge… and once purchased I knew I had to make the best of it. There are a lot of games that I am personally nostalgic about only because I bought it and then was effectively stuck to make the best of it.

Bel Discovers Pen and Paper

Being a teacher’s kid came with few perks, and a lot of downsides including having to spend way too much time at school. One interesting perk though was something that happened at the end of every school year… that was like Christmas morning for the teacher kids. Essentially the rule was that anything not removed from your locker by the final bell on the last day of school was subjected to being thrown away. The janitors would pull everything out of the lockers and dump them in the aisle, and then we would rummage through it looking for anything interesting. It was on one of these treasure trove days at the end of my first grade year… that I found my first beat-up, slightly water-damaged copy of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook. Access to this arcane tome, forever altered my destiny.

I only knew of D&D from the Cartoon but was immediately enamored by this larger world that I had just opened the door to. A few of my friends attempted to “play” not realizing that we were missing an entire set of rules in the Dungeon Masters Book, but we made it work enough to decide we liked it. This was the height of the “Satanic Panic” unfortunately… when Mazes and Monsters aired as a “movie of the week” we were sort of fucked and overnight several otherwise complicit parents shut that shit down. I pivoted to something less controversial and as a result, I have a deep nostalgia for the Marvel Superheroes System from TSR. My friends would keep their dice at my house because my parents were largely cool with it and supported my obsession. Many years later I was introduced to the Palladium system and wound up in a regular campaign run by the much older brother of one of my childhood friends. Throughout High School I always had some sort of campaign going for me and my friends alternating between me running something and my friend Jason running something… eventually built our own system that we called “Infinite Earths” which was a mishmash of things we liked from pop culture and things from books we dug.

Bel Gets a Computer

There are a lot of phases in my life that I am probably glossing over… but this is the story of what shaped the “Bel” that you know today and is just sort of skipping over the threads that didn’t really lead to anywhere. I don’t have the same tale that a lot of computer-focused GenXers have… our family did not get a computer until 1989 which was a generic clone 386 SX 16hz with 2 meg of RAM and a 90 meg hard drive. Eventually, we upgraded to a palatial 4 meg of RAM, but the system had no CD-ROM as it was a generation too early and no sound card… though later I picked up this weird hybrid device called the Disney Sound Source that hooked up through the parallel port. The weird thing is… I had actually gone to a computer camp before this point and learned how to program in BASIC on a Trash 80 (TSR-80). My family just never decided it was a thing they needed until this point. I wish I had grown up with the Commodore 64… and learned to program when I was much younger but alas that is not my tale.

When we got a computer… My Dad’s friend may have snuck some sharpie labeled diskettes home with him which gave me access to a smattering of games. I remember playing Maniac Mansion in that initial round of games. Later I found this bookstore in the mall that would sell 5.25-inch floppies with assorted shareware on it… which is where I found Wolfenstein 3D. This is also where I found the assorted shareware tools that let you edit levels… which led to a new obsession with modding my games. There was a little computer lab off my mom’s classroom, and at lunch, we would build entirely new campaigns for Wolf3D and then challenge each other to play them. Years later when Doom became the new hotness, I similarly got obsessed with creating WAD files and building new sprite artwork for them. I had this entire Shattenjager campaign that I wish I still had a copy of… that was a proto-hexen thing. I am sure it was primitive as hell… but it was at least cool in my memories.

Bel Gets the Internet

In High School, I got into a pretty bad car accident… enough so that I got a fairly heft “pain and suffering” settlement from the insurance company. Most of this money was put aside “For College” but one of the things that I was allowed to buy was a new computer given that my intent was to go into that field. I ended up getting a Pentium 90 Packard Bell, that got Frankensteined a few times to add some graphical functionality and a scanner. More important than anything else… it was a computer with a 14400 baud modem. Like so many folks of my age… my first experience with the internet was through America Online. The thing is… neither I nor my parents understood how the internet worked and more importantly that it was just a normal phone call. So after racking up a few $500 phone bills… the internet was canceled for a while.

It was a bit later that we found out that you could pay $20 a month to the phone company to get unlimited calls to an adjacent area that had the dial-up numbers… and then $40 a month to get unlimited internet via Trumpet Winsock. Essentially once I found out there was a “real and unguarded” internet that existed beyond the gates of America Online… I had no interest in doing anything else. Mostly I used the internet for downloading stuff, finding my way into usenet and reading assorted video game newsgroups. This was 93/94ish and I began to learn how to make websites and hosted my first ones on the space provided by my ISP which also ran a BBS I believe called Darkstar. I also remember playing some of my first online games through a TCP/IP to IPX/SPX emulator called Kali. In college, I got an Amiga 3000 because it was used in my coursework, and I played some Super Air Warrior a bit on GEnie because the guy I bought it from gave me his account.

Bel Becomes an IRC Junkie

I had messed around a bit in AOL chatrooms before that service went away due to the astronomical phone bills… but I had no clue what IRC was until my freshman year in college. In an attempt to save money… I commuted from home and pieced together a two-year degree from attending essentially four different campuses and two different universities. Because of the weirdness of my schedule, this meant that I had an afternoon course in C++ and then a couple of evening courses… and about a three-hour lag between the two of them. This meant I spent copious hours killing time in the computer lab, which had a few rows of internet-enabled machines. Everything about the internet was novel at that point, and no one seemed to think spending time hanging out in IRC chatrooms via mIRC was a waste of resources. So I learned the finer points of IRC from some fellow computer lab rats… and it was not long before I had snagged the software and was connecting to it from home.

I was a denizen of the Undernet and was a regular in a number of gaming channels… as well as a handful of less-than-reputable channels that shall not be named. Undernet was far less advanced than DalNet, and if you wanted to maintain any semblance of control over a channel you had to employ a bot to which you would give Operator status, and then it could “Op” users when they joined the channel if they were on the approved allow list. I spent time working on these bots, and more specifically the ancillary bots that were used for filesharing or in my case… roleplaying. I wrote a number of bots that would maintain character sheets, handle dice rolls, and such to support a few Vampire and Werewolf channels that were active because at this point… I was obsessed with the World of Darkness like the wannabe goth that I was.

Bel Meets His Wife

The thing about the bots… is that they require a lot of maintenance and periodic configuration. I was running a file serve bot for a friend who ran a less-than-reputable channel and needed to perform maintenance. So I was sitting there logged into the bot via SSH while also sitting in the channel in mIRC. I had the bot configured to execute a /WHOIS command and echo it to the console as folks joined. This was somewhat useful for when an issue happened and when I had to ban a user I already had that information in the log to craft a netmask. The thing about the early internet and more specifically early IRC… is folks tended to be logged in from their universities that configured the shell-based IRC clients. This meant you learned to decipher their connection information and recognize the folks from local schools. Very late one night… technically early in the morning… I was slaving away on updating this bot when I saw a university that I recognized pop into the channel.

Not remembering where I was… what I was locked into… I pinged them with a hey. Turns out… my wife and I had this mutual friend out of the Netherlands and she knew him through some Christian channel. He had originally gone there the first time to troll them… and stuck around and chatted, eventually becoming a regular. He had apparently dared her to join the “questionable” channel, and it was moments after making good on this dare that some random stranger clocks her university and starts messaging her. Admittedly it was not a good look, and I am sure that I came across as the biggest creeper ever. My wife said there was a flurry of side conversation that essentially amounted to “Who the hell is this creep?” and thankfully I was vouched for as “chill” and “safe”.

This set up an regular series of conversations whenever we saw the other was online, eventually realizing that we grew up 30 minutes apart from each other. Meeting your IRC friends was a bit of a thing at that point, and we decided to meet up on easter weekend and go see a movie together. It was purely platonic, and eventually, I started “dating” a friend of hers… as much as you can really refer to being IRC steadies as dating. About a year later I was in the process of transferring from my assortment of 2-year schools to the University she went to in order to finish up my 4-year degree. It was only after being around each other more regularly that things evolved into something more than platonic. However without IRC… and a random dude that we both lost touch with from the Netherlands we would have never met in spite of after the fact… knowing a lot of the same folks.

Bel Lured into Everquest

MMORPGs are very important to me and have honestly introduced me to most of my long-term friendships over the last several decades have ultimately been forged in some game or another. It all began for me however with a single moment… when my wife was out of town and a friend of mine coaxed me over to his house to help him with an Everquest raid. His guild had been planning on trying to take down Vox and as we were closing out the work day he got a text message saying that she had spawned. He was a dual boxer and ran a Monk and a Druid together… but was being asked to pull the raid and knew that there was no way he could reasonably do both roles. I got a five-minute explanation of how the game worked, and how to play a druid… and was set to the task of nuking and healing.

I held in for quite a bit of time, but at some point wiped… when my friend realized this he is yelling at me to “mem” a spell and get back into the fight. I am butt naked because that is how Everquest worked… you lost all of your gear as it was sitting on your corpse. I memorized something that looked like a powerful spell… and then fumbled my way through the caverns leading up to Vox. Something you have to know about me… I have no sense of direction. So it is a sheer miracle that I made my way back to the chamber after having exclusively followed other players to get there. I get into the room, throw a few spells and actually manage to land the killing blow. I was hooked… by the end of the weekend I had picked up the base game, Kunark, and the brand new Velious expansion and was leveling Exeteroth Iceforge the Dwarven Cleric that became lovingly known as “Tiny Elvis”.

It was not all happiness and sunshine, however… and Everquest leaves a very bad taste in my wife’s mouth. The amount of time that the game required… was extreme and the fact that I could not realistically stop what I was doing at a moment’s notice. There was legitimately one point at which my wife pulled the ethernet jack out of my computer because she was tired of me saying “just a minute” when trying to get to a safe place to log out. There was also the fact that I would get called at all hours of the night, begged to log in, and come somewhere to resurrect someone… because they lost their level. As we find ourselves in the revival of “games with consequences” this is part of the reason I am not exactly signing up on that particular nostalgia train. I have great memories, and Everquest ultimately led to so many other games that respected my time a bit more… but it also has a gulf of frustrations if I am honest about it.

Bel Becomes Belghast

For most of my internet existence, I was largely known as “eXeter”… yes I legitimately used to type it just like that. Even with World of Warcraft, it was my intention that Exeter my Dwarf Paladin was going to be my main and it was only a death in the family that caused me to fall behind my friends that led me to start Lodin my Hunter that eventually became my raid main. When WoW Launched I founded a guild named House Stalwart, in part because I had some baggage from Everquest when guild leadership goes wrong. It just so happened that one of my friends from the guild started a raid group called the Late Night Raiders. He needed a few more hunters that he could rely on for tranq shot rotations… and given that I did complete heal rotations in Everquest… that was something I was more than prepared to orchestrate. This group is super important to me, in large part because so many of my current friend group either stems from that group itself or branch out from it. On the AggroChat podcast that I record every week… Tam and Kodra were both members, Thalen was in another raid but occasionally subbed in on our raids, and Ashgar came from the guild that came AFTER that raid broke apart that Tam led. Even Ammo the artist that does all of my stuff… has ties to the server we all raided on.

I never wanted to be a Hunter. It was just something that knew I could solo and use to catch up with my friends. I am not a DPS at heart and do not care one bit about how much damage I am dealing. What I care about is tanking… similarly, my friend Finni decided that she didn’t really want to play a hunter anymore either but instead wanted to be a Priest. Leveling a Warrior and a Priest sucked in vanilla Warcraft, so we decided to level together as a tag team allowing me to play as Prot and her to play as Holy… and then chew our way through the quests rapidly. Now I had used the name Belghast before in Dark Age of Camelot as my Celt Champion and in Everquest as my Froglok Warrior, so when I went to create a Human Warrior in World of Warcraft I kept that naming scheme. With the great reset of that game with Burning Crusade, I used it as my opportunity to shift mains, and from that point forward I was known as Belghast to most folks.

As LNR failed to survive the transition from 40-player raids to 25-player raids… I bounced around tanking for a handful of other raids before finally banding together with Thalen and a priest friend named Elnore to start the “Duranub Raiding Company”. Shiana the leader of LNR used to refer to our raid as a “Durable Pack of Nubs” and we just sort of shortened that sentiment. He left the server to play with another group of friends… House Stalwart was supposed to be a dual guild with one half on Alliance and one half on Horde, and a significant chunk of folks that we had played with in City of Heroes ended up preferring the Horde side better. I just became known on Argent Dawn as Belghast it was the character that I wound up taking to raids most often, and when I eventually started a blog the name was forever cemented in time as I started signing up for social media accounts under that name.

Bel Starts a Blog

Friends… I started this blog under the hubris of feeling like I knew something about both Warrior tanking and leading a raid. The name Tales of the Aggronaut was referring to a tank as someone who holds/navigates aggro… aka an Aggronaut. I was inspired by the blog “The Wordy Warrior” and thought that maybe I could do something similar. Little did I know that I had essentially painted myself into a corner feeling like I needed to talk about playing a Warrior in World of Warcraft and more specifically talking about leading a raid as a Warrior. What did not help is the fact that Wrath of the Lich King was very much a high point of the game for me but a crushing low point. I went through one of the worst depressions I have ever experienced in my life and there were a few times I came close to acting upon it. It did not help that I felt like I was failing whatever audience I might have… but not keeping up with the rigors of actually making posts.

As The Cataclysm expansion decimated Duranub… with the shift towards rewarding guild-based raiding… I found myself out of sync with the guild as a whole and enjoying raiding significantly less. When Rift came out, I used it as a lifeboat and an excuse to go elsewhere… and with it, I shifted focus to that game. I went through a rebranding of the site and everything… new logo, a new chibi Bahmi version of my character from the game adorning its masthead. As I once again found myself out of sync with that game… I realized that doing this every time I jumped ship was going to get extremely tiresome. While the name of the blog became increasingly incorrect… I needed to shift its focus to just being about me and my adventures.

In 2013 I started what I then called the Grand Experiment, where I forced myself to write something every single day regardless of what it was. The idea was simple… I was essentially trying to desensitize myself against the anxiety of hitting that publish button and feeling like I needed to wait for something truly profound before posting it. A year later… with much hubris again, I decided to challenge other bloggers to do the same… at least for a single month. Timing just so happened to land around August so I mashed the word Blog and August together in my head and wound up with the term Blaugust… only to find out years later that someone had already started something of the same name back in 2010. Now I have become known for running this event and in the broader blogging and social media community as being a pillar of the game blogging community… but really I am still the same idiot that used to flood forums with inane banter.

Admittedly I am feeling rather exposed and stupid for writing all of this nonsense and forcing it upon you all. I have no clue WHY exactly I did this other than a lack of other things to talk about. As I have written today it just sort of developed a life of its own. If you’ve made it to this point I thank you greatly for sticking around. There are a lot of things that I have skipped over… I generally don’t talk about work stuff on my blog for example. Other things I have already talked about here like my skater phase… but really this is the progression of events that more or less led you to be reading me today.