Real Life

This Account Doesn’t Exist

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There is a certain irony in the fact that it took me this long to actually go through with deleting my Twitter account, given how much effort I put into my final days of properly using the platform in trying to convert folks to Mastodon. I stopped regularly using the site in 2022 and even went so far as to deactivate my account… up until the point where folks warned me that after a certain period of days, anyone could claim my handle. This caused me to reactivate it, and let the account sit in a dormant state for the last few years. I didn’t want to be Belghast on Twitter anymore, but I most certainly did not want someone else to be either. In truth I would periodically check in to see what was going on over there… only to find that my feed was essentially the same two or three people talking all the time. Maybe I had some hope that things might change… that Elon might pawn the service off on someone else who could turn it around again. I have a lot of good memories from my time spent on the site and the people that I met through it.

There are so many people that are actively important to my life, that I never would have met were it not for that platform. I got into it during the Blog Azeroth/WoW Blogosphere era and just kept branching out and meeting new people. I was introduced to the concept of a “textrovert” the other day, and really I think that is where I live. I am outgoing and engaging… when it is all in text but deeply introverted when it comes to in-person anything. The thing I am probably most known for… Blaugust… never would have probably gotten off the ground or grown to the size it is were it not for Twitter. However, as of last week, I am permanently closing that chapter in my life. It feels like I went “away to college” in 2022 and am now finally moving out. I don’t mourn what the site is today… It has long stopped being something I care about engaging with. I mourn what the site used to be and what it used to mean to my circle of friends.

In January Gamepad.Club will ring in its second anniversary and while we never grew to be a massive server, it is a comfy space to hang out with my friends. I was an early adopter of Mastodon when it came to the concept of Twitter Exodus, first finding my way there back in 2018 and keeping a relatively active presence there on one server or another ever since. The thing is… Mastodon requires too much effort for most folks. It is not a direct plug-and-play replacement for Twitter. It has its own culture that I greatly appreciate, but not everyone does. It is a delightful place of weirdos and anarchists… and I love it with all of my heart. If you asked me where my home on the internet is, it would be Gamepad and the group of friends I have made on the Fediverse. However, it was about a year into the first major Twitter Exodus that I realized that Mastodon would probably never be that for many of my friends.

Thankfully however there is another option that is pretty much a direct replacement for Twitter, called BlueSky. While it does not feel as comfy to me personally as Gamepad does, it is still a place I enjoy visiting. I’ve had a presence on the site for a while now, and was user number 159,880 from June 26th 2023 according to some promo thing they ran when they hit 10 million users. All of the folks who seemed to bounce immediately from Mastodon/Fediverse have seemed to find their home there. Over the last few weeks, there has been another mass migration away from Twitter and it is even feeling more lively. While I don’t necessarily agree with their stance on decentralization, and prefer the activitypub federation model, it is far better than anything Twitter has ever been.

The thing that I legitimately enjoy about BlueSky is that they are evolving the format with some really cool ideas. Probably my favorite thing about the platform is feeds, which is essentially a community-supported way of sharing a filtered collection of posts based around a specific theme. At its core, it is just a regex search, but it allows you to package it in a way as to share it and let other people use it. When I started on the platform there were not a lot of game-specific feeds so I took up the mantle of supporting several of them, and then roll a new one any time I find a game that I am interested in that does not already have a feed. For example, I have one for Guild Wars 2, Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Wayfinder, and created one in support of Blaugust this year. This functionality is there to allow you to connect up with folks that share your interests, without having to know a bunch of account names.

In a similar vein, Bluesky has added a concept called a “Starter Pack” which allows you to create a list of users that you feel like people might want to follow. Think of the concept of Follow Fridays… but actually supported with systems around it. You can find your way to a friend’s starter pack and with a single button press follow all of the people on it. I am contemplating rolling a few of these… namely one for the AggroChat hosts attached to my AggroChat account, and maybe one for Blaugust members to make it easier to connect up with folks who participate in that event. Most people are using them as a way of creating an easy-to-use list of people that they think are cool or that others should follow. One of my acquaintances created one that curates folks who either currently work on Guild Wars 2 or have worked on it in the past.

Leaving Twitter at least spiritually over two years ago… was one of the best decisions that I have ever made. I could see the downhill slide that the platform was going through, and it seemed as though that only escalated after I was out the door. Essentially it is always the right time to leave Twitter. I had reached a point where I was okay with the friends I lost by closing that door, knowing that oftentimes I have a habit of finding the same people again later. While I would have loved that comfy home to have been Gamepad, for many it just was too much work to get engaged in that platform. I am booned by the fact that I keep seeing more familiar faces showing up on BlueSky, which in itself makes the platform that much more enjoyable to use. There were many folks I knew that had a public Twitter account and a private twitter account, and I guess in many ways that is how I use the two networks. Mastodon is where I am most myself, and BlueSky is where I put on a more carefully crafted guise.

I hold out hopes that at one day the AT Protocol which BlueSky runs upon and the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse use will be fully integrated. In the meantime however, there is Bridgy which serves as a hacky way of federating an account between the two platforms. For example, if you follow the official Bridgy BlueSky account and my federated Gamepad Account on BlueSky, you will be able to have bi-directional interaction with my posts on the Fediverse. Following the Bridgy account will also then federate out your BlueSky account so that folks can follow you from Mastodon. For example, my BlueSky account shows up as @belghast.com@bsky.brid.gy on the Fediverse. I wish there was a way to connect my ACTUAL Bluesky account to my ACTUAL Mastodon account.. but baby steps. For the time being I am using both, but for slightly different purposes.

Anyway… if you are still hanging on to Twitter I encourage you to cut ties and move on with your life. BlueSky is legitimately a direct replacement and you are probably going to be able to find most of the folks that you used to follow over on Twitter. We are starting to see Brands migrating there as well, which is probably the final sight that it has been crowned the winner. I will keep using the Fediverse and namely Gamepad because I enjoy it the most, but I am more than happy to also hang my hat on BlueSky.

Too Many Charizards

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Good morning folks. The last few days have been pretty hard to get through, and as such I have not blogged. I am still here and I am still okay-ish. I figured we could all use something cute, so I am starting off this post with my snuggling goobers. I’ve spent most of my time downstairs with my kiddos the last two evenings and it is not uncommon for them to arrange themselves in this pattern with Josie snuggled up against my arm and Gracie laying between my arm and over onto my chest. I always feel bad that I end up with two cats where my wife often has zero… but occasionally Mollie will get brave and go snuggle with her… which never lasts terribly long because Mollie is insane. I’ve said a few things on social media, but basically, my faith in humanity right now is non-existent and I am just trying to truck along.

One of the things that has swept through my friend group is Pokemon TCG Pocket, so I have been playing around a bit with that. Effectively this is the Hearthstoneification of Pokemon just like MTG Arena was mostly that for Magic the Gathering. Quite honestly though I feel like this is a more effective port to mobile because it fixes one of the problems that Magic and Pokemon both have. I’ve always hated how Land and Energy cards work mechanically, and I greatly preferred the Hearthstone mechanic of just getting one mana/energy per turn to use as you choose. I feel like Magic would be far better served by having a spells deck and a land deck, and you drew one card from each every turn. Anyway, the thing with Pokemon is that I largely missed out on it. I played a bit of the early WOTC days of it before the fad really hit, and have maybe 1000 cards or so lying around somewhere from those first four sets.

Pokemon was something that my Nieces and Nephews grew up playing, and less so something that I actually experienced myself. I played through Blue on a Gameboy Emulator in 1999 but had not touched another Pokemon anything until the release of X and Y. To this day I have still only ever beaten Blue, because I seem to care more about the acquisition of Pokemon than I actually do the battling system. Right now with Pokemon TCG Pocket for Android and Apple, I mostly seem to care about opening my daily packs. I have however played through enough battles to understand the flow of the game. I’ve made a few custom decks that perform well against the basic AI, but largely get ripped to shreds when I fight human opponents. Building a deck with only twenty cards is a bit odd mechanically, and I feel like I am missing a lot of cards that would allow me to bump things up a notch.

If you are playing around with this as well, you should absolutely friend me. I legitimately don’t fully understand what the benefits are other than you get some sort of currency when you interact with your friend’s stuff. At some point, the game is going to be adding trading support, so I think this will be much more interesting when that happens. For example, I have pulled four Charizard EX cards and I do not need them all. I would rather have Venasaur Ex as I am on the Bulbasaur team all day long. Pulling packs is a bit odd because each of the different package designs has a slightly different distribution of cards so it legitimately matters if you choose the Mewtwo, Charizard, or Pikachu design based on what you are trying to get. I spent a lot of time pulling for Grass Pokemon in the Mewtwo design, and have shifted to trying to get some Electric types out of the Pikachu packs.

Recently I was up at my folk’s house and they had unearthed these two M.U.S.C.L.E figures from the 80s. I am hoping that given time, they might uncover the rest of them because I freaking loved these things. “The Claw” as we referred to it was easily the most sought-after one in my childhood circles, and I am pretty sure there was another one that we referred to as “Human Hand” that was essentially just that. I also remember the Chibi ones being super popular, but mostly I would just love to see them all again. There are so many random artifacts of my childhood that remained in my bedroom… but my folks then mostly piled a bunch of other crap in there. They only had to start removing stuff because the floor literally started collapsing due to water damage. So I have no clue what was lost and what still remains unscathed. I’ve seen my long box of comics, and it seems to largely be intact.

I know I shared this on social media, but I am not sure I ever posted it on the blog. Another thing that I reclaimed was these skate decks. There is one missing from the bunch that I had, but I have no clue what happened to it. It used to be in the back of my Honda Civic, so at some point, someone might have relieved me of it. I would love to have a pristine copy of that Jason Jesse Neptune deck, but they are a bit too rich for my tastes as the re-released copy from a few years ago is rather expensive. It currently goes on eBay for around $700, which seems silly for something I am just going to hang on the wall. Instead, I am going to hang my extremely battered original deck somewhere in my office at some point.

Anyways… I figured two days off was way too long without some sort of a blog post. Not that I had a ton of things to say this morning, but I needed to get back into the rhythm of actually posting things.

BackSlash WhoAmI

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Morning Folks! Yesterday Wilhelm Arcturus aka The Ancient Gaming Noob aka TAGN ran a bit of a thought experiment on his blog. He asked the three most common Large Language Models for Chat who he was, and got some less-than-stellar results. However, eventually, Microsoft CoPilot managed to get the correct answer at which point it led to a whole series of questions asked… some of which were given reasonable answers. This of course made me curious what my results would look like, and within minutes I was looking up the pages for the models from Microsoft, Open AI, and Google and asking it a simple question.

Who Is Belghast?

Open AI / Chat GPT

I figured we would start with the most mature of the three, ChatGPT by Open AI. It was simple enough to get into the tool through a web browser and type my simple query. For the most part, it nailed it in one. It indicated that I wrote a blog called Tales of the Aggronaut that is focused on MMORPGs… but that is essentially something you could get from the short description of my website. The bit about the significant following through that feels like freestyle and not exactly something I would agree with considering my dwindling readership over the years. It got a little less on the nose as I asked it additional questions like what games I play… which admittedly it did specifically call out World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. However given that the model is using data from 2022… it is completely missing my obsession over Path of Exile, Last Epoch, New World, Guild Wars 2, or even Diablo IV.

All in all, it was a good effort: B+

Microsoft CoPilot

Since this is the service that Microsoft desperately wants me to give access to my computer… I figured I would turn next to CoPilot. The key difference between CoPolit versus ChatGPT is that Microsoft has decided to give its AI monster direct access to the internet. So when I ran this query again this morning it specifically called out my weekend podcast where I talked about the New World Aeternum debacle. All in all, I like the summary thought and it specifically name-drops Blaugust with a short explanation of what it is. The Twitch bit is a little off the mark because while I technically do have a channel there it has been three or four years since I last streamed to it. The thing I like the most about this is that it specifically links a bunch of relevant things including Aggronaut main page, the Blaugust Announcement from last year, AggroChat and my Twitch page. Where it fell apart was on follow-up questions where it essentially regurgitated back the above paragraph when I asked it what games I played.

Another pretty solid effort thought, but I am giving it a B+ only because I liked its formatting and mentioning Blaugust. The follow-through needs some work. What is weird is that CoPilot seemed to work the best for Wilhelm but it absolutely did not for me.

Google Gemini/Bard

Next up we try Google Gemini which I believe until recently was referred to as Bard. This is the thing that is gobbling up all of our content and serving it up to web browsers without ever sending readers to our websites. The first strike against this is that I could not run it in an anonymous browser session, and had to log in with a Google account… which gave it a headstart in knowing this information. I am apparently a “multi-faceted online personality” and honestly I am not sure how I feel about that. It goes on to break down the things I do… which again everyone seems to be leaning hard into Streaming when I did it enough to get Twitch Affiliate while Elder Scrolls Online was launching and then basically never did it again with any regularity. The weird text formatting is I believe Grammarly complaining about something because it only happened the first time I tried to use it. When I dug down a bit further about what games I play, it gave me some pretty generic answers: MMO Gamer, Variety Gamer, and RPGs.

I think this is the one that I liked the least of the three so I am giving it a straight-up B or maybe even a C+.

Personality and Branding

I was curious about something. I know that I am way more widely known as “Belghast” than I am as the title of my blog “Tales of the Aggronaut”, and as such I think the Large Language Models had a bit easier time honing in on who exactly I was given that I use the same name on pretty much every platform and said the name is not exactly commonplace. While I know Wilhelm by the name Wilhelm Arcturus, I only do so because I have read his content for years. If I were going to tell someone about something he wrote I would probably use TAGN or The Ancient Gaming Noob instead because that is the “brand” that I associate most strongly with him. So Chat GPT was one of the LLMs that struck out horrifically and I decided to give it a test run by asking it who “The Ancient Gaming Noob” is.

Sure enough, it nailed it on the first attempt, because LLMs are ultimately just search engines. They are way more complicated search engines, but at the end of the day, all they are doing is sifting through harvested data and then trying to extrapolate something that looks like an answer based on that data. When you search “Wilhelm Arcturus” you don’t get the blog until the fourth link down. However when you search “The Ancient Gaming Noob” you land on the WordPress blog in one hit. With me, if you search for my name or my blog title you get essentially the same results every time. This is not necessarily an intended effect or something that I spent years of SEO nonsense trying to accomplish, but just something that happened over time. I just figure Wilhelm would have had better results had he started with TAGN rather than his pen name.

Anyways! It was a fun experiment and I figure at some point Wilhelm will read this post so thanks for the idea. It was definitely an interesting journey.

Bad Week Is Bad

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Friends… it has been kind of a shit week. First, there was the whole crisis with my left eye that started on Saturday, continued through Sunday, and got some minor resolution on Monday. I still have trouble seeing out my eye but at least I know with some measure of certainty that I am not going blind in an immediate timeframe. Then on Tuesday, we lost power for about four hours, which thankfully happened after we had both gotten ready for the day so we did not have to do all of that in the dark. Then last night around 7 pm I was chilling out and working on the Nayos story quest and got disconnected. We lost internet and it has been out for almost 14 hours at this point. I was a dumbass and decided to just go ahead and go to bed around 7:30 since everything I wanted to do required internet access.

This caused me to wake up around 12:30 with no sign of being able to get back to sleep. Normally in this case I would go upstairs and fuck around in some game for 30 mins to an hour until I got tired again, but without internet that was off the table. Then at 2:30, I got a call that there was an issue with one of the applications my team supports… which kept me on the call until 3:30 at which point I attempted to get some sleep. I struggled to get back to sleep but managed to do so around 4 am and then the alarm went off at 5:30. I decided to ignore getting up and walking and ignore my normal routine and sleep in until 7 am. Only to wake up to find that we still did not have internet.

Right now I am tethered to my phone, which I am thankful is an option. We’ve always bought carrier-unlocked phones so that they do not come with any of the “disableware” and bloat that carrier phones have on them. One of the things that gets disabled is the ability to Tether and then you have to pay your provider to sell that default functionality back to you. Buying unlocked phones allows you to tether with impunity and there is nothing that your provider can really do to stop you. Anyway were it not for this functionality I would be in considerably worse shape because I can function fairly well running off a cellular connection.

Today is the start of a five-day weekend… and I need things to stop being awful for a while. I need to start being able to see normally again and I need to have power and internet function like they are supposed to during that break. Next Tuesday is my Birthday and then Wednesday we are off for Juneteenth so I opted to just take Monday as well because it seemed silly to work that one day before having two more off. Anyway… not going to syndicate this one since it is mostly just me ranting about first-world problems.

I hope you have had a better week than I have. I also hope you have an amazing weekend.