Real Life

Flowerbabies and Bounty Caches

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This morning should be the beginning of a return to normality for me. The flood related stuff seems to have wrapped up for me and with it my weird alternating work schedule. I still feel somewhat jet lagged from the experience of having to rapidly shift around my schedule for a week and some change. I am sure as I return to my normal rhythm of getting up at 5:30 each morning and going to bed around 10-ish each night those effects will fade. Last night did not help since it was both the return of Fear the Walking Dead and a documentary series on a local murder mystery and we wanted to watch both.

This weekend also signaled the return of the “flowerbabies” in our back yard, as well as the return to having to add another step to my morning routine of watering them. We are getting a really late start to the season in part because our nursery of choice was flooded. We went by on Memorial Day but they seemed to be cleaning up and not actually open for business. Saturday however they were ready to go and we picked up a number of hanging baskets to go on the hooks that we set out around the pool. You never quite know what you are going to get until you go and then sorta pick out whatever happened to speak to you at the time. I am quite partial to the Purslane because those orange and magenta combination is stunning. Also a big fan of the white petunias with the eggplant centers. We have a mix of colors but they now need tending so I will have to start cutting my blog time a little short each morning.

As far as gaming goes I spent the vast majority of my weekend running bounties. I’ve reached the point where I can easily survive Torment XVI so I am now chaining my way through objectives. I finally realize how Grace always seems to know exactly where she is going in these levels, and I feel like once I have reached my final objective… I will have most of the semi-random map layouts nailed as well. At the very least I will hopefully stop going the opposite way given that for the most part the areas around the warp pads are somewhat static. This is not something that I had caught onto in all of my hundreds of hours playing this game. I am sometimes pretty dense.

At this point I have gathered up 25 bounty caches. The majority of these are from Torment 15 with some of the more recent additions to my pile from Torment 16. The caches apparently have a memory for what level you were on when you got the cache even though I can’t seem to see any external indicator of this. Ultimately I am working on knocking out the Conquest of Avarice which is to loot 50 million gold in a streak. Since I don’t want to have to do this insane amount of farming twice… I am probably going to significantly overshoot my target but i am loosely following this guide I found on the forums.

A T13 bounty cache contains 1,190,000 gold.
43 T13 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

A T14 bounty cache contains 1,440,000 gold.
35 T14 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

A T15 bounty cache contains 1,540,000 gold.
33 T15 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

A T16 bounty cache contains 1,640,000 gold.
31 T16 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

So in theory right now if I figure everything I have looted at this point is a T15 even though I know some are not… it would get me to 38 million gold. I think my goal is going to be to farm up about a page and a half of caches in my vault and then do the mass open. Basically I don’t want to have to do this grind twice so I figure well overshooting my target is the best course of action. 52 caches would be roughly a page and a half and that should in theory net a minimum of 80 million gold… so MORE than enough to hit my target.

It was probably nonsense for me to pick this one as my first conquest… but in doing so it has given me a sense of purpose to grind out an incompatible number of items that have ultimately bolstered my ability to take down content. While I have only picked up a couple of primal ancients… they have seemingly made a difference. The weird thing about this season is that I have yet to see a single Ramaladni’s Gift. I have an ancient Pigsticker waiting in the bank for me to get one since I don’t want to have to re-roll to get a socket… although I guess I could just re-roll one of the stats that I would have re-rolled anyways and roll to something other than the socket when I finally find one.

Whatever the case… I am super into Diablo 3 this season and have been more driven to solo grind than I think I ever have. This somehow transitioned from a social game experience for me… to something that I am finding even more deeply relaxing than it previously was.

Tornado Watching

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Last night was effectively a repeat of Monday, but seemingly with more activity going on. I lost track of the number of Tornado warnings we were under at various points during the evening. The above photo is not mine but it is of a tornado that formed in my town. I quite possibly did the most Oklahoman thing ever and stood out on the front porch watching it happen. Before you chide me for not being safe… the storm cell was headed the opposite direction and at this point it was several miles away. Now this is not the first Tornado I have watched, but there is something mesmerizing about the process of watching it. It isn’t like the movies… the clouds feel like they are moving impossibly slowly as a plume of clouds begins to snake down towards the ground. In truth they are moving insanely fast but you just happen to be watching something massive occurring and the scale throws off any gauge of speed.

While we spent the night watching out for storms… the more insidious concern is the fact that we are having significant flooding. Thankfully where I live specifically… there isn’t much of a chance of flooding as I live outside of even what is the 500 year estimate floodplain. That said it is making travel around the area pretty rough as several of the roads that are normally completely safe to take are under water. Essentially we are in a rough spot as a state because all of the dams in this area are beyond safe capacity… meaning they are having to release way more water than they normally would. Effectively I think we are going to be past the 100 year floodplain estimates and will be setting ourselves up for the levels we have not seen since the “great flood” of 1986.

One of the things that you don’t expect in Oklahoma is the fact that we have the largest inland shipping port, and with it a huge navigational system. To add another monkey wrench into the works, last night two barges loaded with stuff broke free of their moorings and were heading towards one of the lock gates. The tugs were not available to try and round them up, because they had already rounded up two other barges that broke free earlier. So the concern is that if they slammed into the dam that is part of the lock system, and if it were to break… an entire town would effectively be wiped off the map not to mention other less immediate ramifications. For the time being however they appear to be hung up on some rocks and are still tied to each other… so folks are scrambling to try and anchor them in some more permanent fashion. Regardless the town in question has been evacuated in case things go south.

Basically right now we are living in a really weird time, and as such my game time has suffered. What you are getting from me instead in the meantime is a lot of random commentary about my life. I want to emphasize that I personally am safe and that my home is safe. The world around me however is less so… and it is interesting to be a spectator to all of the calamity going on around me. The area will most certainly be dealing with the ramifications going forward for a long time. I did however get some time to briefly play a bit of Necromancer in Elder Scrolls Online… and I have to say that the new game experience is a little weird. I am used to having the entire skill tree available to me from the start, and it seems like you only get access to something once you have used it? I didn’t get Two Handed Weapons for example until I had killed some stuff with one, at which point the skills opened up.

I still more or less plan on trying to play a Necromancer tank, but I probably should have gone through the tutorial to at least get some starter weapons. All I have found thus far in Elsweyr is a Two Handed Sword so I am using that for the moment. It feels really weird to be starved for skill points… seeing as on my main I have a stack of them that are sitting unspent. I figured a Dark Elf was probably the most likely to be a necromancer, so I went with that and with the scarred appearance. I hope to spend more time playing this when I am not dodging twisters. We were going to go buy flowers this weekend… but the Nursery is now sitting completely underwater so that won’t be happening. Memorial Day is going to be an odd one this year.

Bugout Bags and Hidey Holes

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I made an attempt to write this post earlier… but my internet at home seemed to be having issues due to the storm and WordPress ate the entire thing (even though I thought it had saved a draft…  not sure what I think of the latest version).

The last twenty four hours have been exceptionally strange to live through.  First you have to understand that I have lived in the area known as “Tornado Alley” for my entire life, growing up an hour north of Tulsa and living in the Tulsa area since 1999.  We largely take Tornados with a grain of salt, and while most of the cells that do pass overhead produce a Tornado at some point… the likelihood that you are going to get hit seems fairly small in the grand scheme of things and the prep work you go into seems often times for naught.

Yesterday however was a different beast entirely from what we are used to.  We had been hearing for days that we were going to get bad storms… but given that it is May in Oklahoma that is effectively like telling me the sky is blue.  What made us really take notice is when several of the school districts decided to preemptively cancel class. On the same day in 2013 a EF5 Tornado hit Moore Oklahoma and killed 24 and injured 212…  including directly hitting the Plaza Towers Elementary School. When the weather folks tell you that there will be multiple major storm cells throughout the day… I guess we have learned the lesson the hard way to take note.

My wife got out a little early and I left right at 4, which allowed me to get a couple of errands done before making it home before anything major had started.  My wife scrambled around and gathered all of our important stuff and some basic supplies and packed them into a rolling carry-on style duffle bag, sticking in in our “hidey hole”.  The rules of shelter are basically that you need to get to a room on the lowest level of the home with no exterior walls. The problem with our house is the only place that fits these requirements that you can actually get human beings into…  is the laundry room. So we created a little makeshift pantry of sorts on top of the washing machine and prepared for the worst.

There were a few of what I would call close calls, as in a storm that had produced Tornados passed within 10 miles of the house.  One of which was close enough to trigger the sirens… at which point we went to the laundry room to ride it out, at least until the news that was blaring in both the livingroom and the bedroom gave us an updated trajectory.  That is the thing about Tornados… they tend to behave in a fairly predictable manor. That is not to say that you should not respect every single one of them… but there are certain areas that get hit more than others. Often times the storm turns right before it gets to where I live and passes a little south of us… as did the two cases above.

The double whammy however is that as we were getting ready this morning… the news was projecting a Tornado headed directly for our house.  It was serious enough that the Tornado Sirens blew seven separate times during the course of the thirty minutes it took to clear us. I am uncertain if there is any damage, but I am guessing it passed by the outskirts of my town.  When it hit Tulsa International Airport however the storm turned… much like the others had and passed just south of us… by about five miles. What it largely caused is a delay in me getting ready and blogging… but we did hide out in the laundry room for a bit to make doubly sure we were safe.

Today I am sorta living in a permanent state of stupor.  When you live in this region you do this thing when you finally surrender and decide you are perfectly okay with death so long as you get some sleep in the process.  I finally reached that point around 10:30-11 pm and I have no clue when my wife fell asleep, but we left the television blaring in the thought that if something major was about to happen we could jump up and get into our shelter quick enough.  I changed into night clothing, but I think my wife more or less slept in the clothing she had been all night long. You don’t exactly sleep soundly when you fall asleep in that state.

As far as gaming goes I spent the majority of the night playing Diablo 3 in little doses, but did manage to group up with my friend Grace during part of it.  My lack of attention to detail and the fact that I am still under her level a bit… meant I largely spent the night dying a lot. That said I knocked out a few steps in the seasons journey and managed to gather up a few pieces of gear.  I am one step away from completing Slayer… but that step requires me to do rounds of bounties until I gather enough crafting bits to cube a piece of jewelry. The challenge there however is that as the night went on I kept getting disconnected making a round of bounties impossible to complete.

I’ve decided that my favorite part of this season and the patch that came with it is the fact that you can now peek ahead in game to what is needed by steps in the seasons journey you have not yet reached.  Previously you had to keep open a wiki and keep alt tabbing back and forth to see what you could be working on while you were waiting on something else that you could not necessarily complete at that moment.  I really want the fiery cosmic bat wings that come from finishing ALL of the seasons journey steps, so I have a feeling over the coming weeks I will be spending a lot of time playing Diablo 3.

MMORPG Social

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mmorpg-social

Over the last few days I have found myself playing around with Mastodon quite a bit more.  For those who remember I wrote a series of posts about Mastodon, talking about its potential as a twitter replacement.  The two posts of note are probably “Adventures in the Federiverse” where I largely botch the agreed upon “Fediverse” name, and a later one where I talk about the customs I wish I knew about going into it.  I still have a lot of hope about the concept, but I also found myself largely falling out of frequency in using it.  Nineties.Cafe had this great run of regular activity and then almost simultaneously we all sorta wandered off more than likely because we got busy.

This recent flurry of activity has in part been do to the very excellent Gazimoff aka Gareth Harmer and creating the MMORPG.social mastodon instance.  At first I thought this was something connected to MMORPG.com since well you know… he is one of the writers there.  After some digging however I guess the root is with the loss of Wildstar, the idea seems to be bourn out of trying to create a neutral non-game based MMORPG community that lets people continue to stay in touch.  This is something I can definitely get behind, plus the launch of a new instance is an awful lot like the launch of a new MMORPG itself… and everyone appears to be happy and busy and active.

The only negative is that I seem to be leaving ground strewn in my wake full of past instances.  For those who have not followed my madness I have ended up unintentionally being a bit of an instance jumper.  Thankfully Mastodon by default has a system that allows you to forward users from one profile to another… but they are effectively disconnected personas.  MMORPG.Social is my fourth experiment with the platform…  let me run through them all.

  • @Belghast@Mastodon.Cloud – my first attempt and I only started here because Mastodon.social the flagship was full
  • @Belghast@Elekk.xyz – I rapidly realized that this instance had way more of “my people” on it and jumped because of its game focused local.  I still sub to the Patreon to help support it.
  • @Belghast@Nineties.Cafe – I jumped yet again when my good friend Liore founded this instance to create a permanent niche in the mastodon network that we had a bit more control over.  The truth is I don’t plan on abandoning this but over the last several months it has become pretty inactive.
  • @Belghast@MMORPG.social – Finally I am here because I thought this was a really interesting experiment and thusfar has been a very charming local to hang out and talk MMORPGs with.  At the moment it seems to be very FFXIV focused, but folks have commented on some of my Destiny related posts as well.

Now can I say with certainty that I won’t jump again?  Nope not at all, but the cool thing about Mastodon and the ActivityPub based Fediverse is that you don’t have to care much about it.  You can export the people you follow from one instance and move them forward with you to the next.  You are by no means limited to communicating with your local pool of users, but can instead drink from the firehose and go out into the much larger global fediverse and interact with hundreds of other instances each with their own specific goals and purposes.

I think the biggest challenge that Mastodon has is we keep looking to it as a replacement for Twitter as a whole.  That is a lot of responsibility to be placing on a fledgling network, especially given that personally I have been actively using Twitter since April of 2009 and racked up in that time some almost 58,000 tweets.  My gut reaction when something happens is to still hop on Twitter and say something about it.  There is a lot of inertia there to overcome, and if you go into it expecting it to be the new thing that everyone is going to use…  it is more or less just setting it up for failure.  Instead I am largely angling for the stance of “This is something else fun to use” and setting myself for those expectations.  I know that I will never convert the critical mass of twitter folk to take up the banner of tooting…  but instead I am finding it interesting to branch out and meet some new and interesting people there instead.

I have goals of sorta tweaking each of the four profiles I have on Mastodon to be different things, because I still want to use Nineties.cafe, but probably as a more personal account, and MMORPG.social will become the account I use more to talk about gaming stuff.  I know several users who have done an excellent job of separating the streams, and each account gives me access to a totally different Local feed.  I just need to sort out a better Android client to use that has good multi-account support since Tusky as much as I like it… requires you to log out completely to log into another instance.