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November 17, 2015 by Belghast

Streaming Providers

I am a fairly horrible streamer, mostly because I do it so infrequently. Before I jumped to Windows 10 I had Virtual Audio Cables set up and working awesomely to exclude Teamspeak from my stream. Then the upgrade to 10 seemed to bork all of that. As a result I am finding myself less likely to stream random stuff, because quite honestly I don’t want to accidentally catch someone that does not want to be recorded. What ends up happening is that I only actually stream on “special occasions” when I know I have a block of time where i can just leave the mic open. The problem I continue to struggle with is the choice of providers. YouTube gaming had peaked my interests… until I participated in Liore’s stream during Extra Life. Considering I was on voice chat with her, the lag between the stream and what was actually happened seemed painfully bad, and the stream itself would go loopy on us. I would load it up and suddenly it was trying to play what was happening thirty minutes ago instead of what was happening now.

Twitch seems completely ubiquitous but the problem there is that it is equally painful to try and chat with people while using. I get so few people popping into my channel that when a friend does pop by I want to be able to hold a conversation with them. Even when you are running Twitch with the limited delay options… there is still a painful delay when you try and hold a conversation with anyone. I ultimately switched back after some experiments of trying to stream to both Hitbox and Twitch at the same time. When given a choice people always picked Twitch because it was the interface they were familiar with. The truth is however… when someone fires up my stream it is because they are there to hang out with me… not because they really care about what I am streaming. I never get random people popping in my channel because it truth I don’t tend to play the sort of games that people care enough about to go hunting for. For awhile I was using Twitch primarily as a way to export my streams to YouTube, and their interface just works so much better than Hitbox. Now however I record the video separately and then do some minimal editing in Adobe Premiere before uploading, so that functionality no longer matters.

Team Green

I am a Blogger first, Podcaster second… and I dabble poorly in both YouTube and streaming. Those are just not my native mediums and will likely never be, so long as I have a deep aversion to being on camera. So I will never have the sort of followers that would allow me to become a partner and have the better streaming options, nor will it ever really matter… considering I am super adverse to turning on advertisements on even on my YouTube channel. The truth is… I have always liked Hitbox better. The dashboard is significantly nicer, you can have “teams” without being a partner… and the fact that there is little to no delay between the video stream and chat means I can actually have a comfortable conversation with someone watching my stream. I realize that I am essentially exiling myself to the service that no one is really using natively… but really… what is the difference? I have a clear preference towards one or the other, and it is not like I am looking to be some streaming internet celebrity. Streaming for me is a way to share what I am doing with my friends and pretty much nothing more than that, and in a way that is more custom than Forge.gg would offer.

Basically I feel like I am choosing BetaMax over VHS, which is not far from the truth. The experience I have while streaming on Hitbox just feels better than when I use Twitch. In part it is because the Hitbox interface has to be better in every way to get someone to even consider using their service. I realize there are third party tools that I can run that add in a lot of the functionality that the Hitbox dashboard has…. but I don’t want to have to. My favorite stupid feature from Hitbox is the fact that when I get my stream set up and I am happy with it… I can press a single button to have it broadcast my stream to social media. Twitch can do this for you automatically, but the problem I have there is it sometimes takes me a few tries to get things where I am happy with them, which ends up spamming the living hell out of twitter which gets frustrating. I really do want to start trying to stream more… which means I need to sift through the arcane machination that is virtual audio cables once more.. to see what it takes to get it set up and properly working for Windows 10. In the meantime I am probably going to switch my setup over to my Hitbox profile and just accept that I am picking the less popular pony… but its the one I enjoy better.

Misfortune Mordren

November 16, 2015 by Belghast

Boring Post Material

This morning I am struggling a bit to remain conscious. Neither myself nor my wife managed to get much sleep last night, because in our partially finished state… the rain kept dripping off a metal plate just outside our window. Which meant either try and sleep through this loud irregular dripping pattern, or sleep with the television loud enough to hopefully drown out the noise. We did the later which means we never really slept that deeply, kinda like we do when there is a tornado warning and we end up with the weather blaring all night hoping we would wake up if we needed to take shelter. As a result I am struggling a bit when it comes to stringing together thoughts into a sentence. This is absolutely the sort of day that I would just say screw it and not blog… but after several years of this madness I don’t really want to break the chain. That’s the funny thing about doing the daily blogging thing… is after a point you really don’t want to do something to break the pattern of posts. It is like the pattern itself becomes the important thing and not so much what I am writing about.

This weekend also was one where I did a surprisingly small amount of gaming. We recorded the latest episode of AggroChat on Friday night this week, and during that I piddled around in Fallout 4. Then as usual I stayed up way the hell too late wrapping up some minor details on the podcast. Then Saturday we had the very first of our family “Christmas” activities, I say it in quotes because it is technically a dual purpose Thanksgiving and Christmas that we have with my wife’s dad and step mom. They are snow birds and spend the winter in warmer climates… so for the last decade or so we have had this dual holiday day around Thanksgiving. Thing is they keep pushing it up so they can get down South “before it gets cold”, and admittedly they have a really nice place down there so I don’t blame them. It just ends up making for a strange holiday get together… when I am absolutely not even in Thanksgiving mode yet. When I got home from that… I had every intent of taking a nap, but instead the contractors were banging on the wall of the bedroom which would have made sleep impossible.

As a result I pretty much sleep walked through the day until we went to bed that evening relatively early. This is the point at which we realized that the drip was a thing… which woke us up about 4 am Sunday morning. My wife just stayed up, and I attempted to sleep through it… which I am guessing I eventually succeeded because it didn’t wake me up again until around 7:30. Over the last several years we have pretty much ignored we had a back yard. The siding had gotten bad and honestly everything back there was just overwhelming in that it all needed attention. With the bedroom door thing leading out there, my wife has become determined to fix the problems back there and reclaim it as usable space. Since we had a dumpster thanks to the construction folks… she was damned determined to use that to take care of some stuff. We had a few hour break in the rain, so my wife and I were trudging through the muddy back yard picking up things and carrying them to the dumpster. I am surprisingly sore from this, even though all I really did was act as the person moving stuff from the backyard to the dumpster, and she did a lot of the brute force gathering stuff into piles for me to move.

Star Wars Pen and Paper

The highlight of yesterday has to be our Star Wars pen and paper game. The AggroChat crew and a few friends have been doing a fantasy flights Star Wars system game through Roll 20. The way that game integrates with Roll 20 is amazing, and quite literally if you fill out your character sheet correctly all you have to do is push a single button when you want to do an attack. I am assuming there is a lot more going on behind the scenes that Tam is doing to run the game, but for the most part… this is the best possible remote pen and paper experience. Essentially we are a group of force users during the A New Hope era, with one significant monkey wrench thrown in. My character is the one that does not fit… I am not a nice person… I never claimed to be. My character has pretty much spent his entire life working as a Bodyguard/Hired Gun/Enforcer for one Hutt cartel after another. The problem is… I get these “bad feelings” and often times my employers don’t heed my warnings and end up dead. As a result I’ve developed this persona in the underworld of “Misfortune Mordren”, and it has been interesting to see how that is working out.

I built this persona because I thought it would be interesting to play… but apparently I am some sort of underworld bogeyman. We had an instance yesterday where our craft was about to get boarded by some pirates, and the mere mention of my name…. and some really high deception rolls on the part of Kodra… caused them to back off because they wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. Apparently I am considered to be so “Bad Luck” that even after interdicting our ship… it was not worth their time to try and take us on. Then again there is a whole other side to this tale, because I am racking up quite the body count. While I am playing a character from Edge of the Empire, we decided to make things easier and put me on the Force and Destiny conflict system. I feel like I am not understanding this system… because every time I take conflict I cheer out loud. Much to the horror of my otherwise party of “goody two shoes” that are trying desperately to avoid the Dark Side. We walked into a gang base yesterday, and I opened fire before they had time to even speak. To my defense though… I figure if you are in a gang on Nar Shadda you have made some poor life choices anyways. Also to my defense Kodra did ask me to create a diversion… so yeah I was just doing that.

Essentially I am becoming somewhat of the conflict sponge for my party, and I am perfectly fine in that role. The thing is… I never said I wanted to be a light side character… and additionally I never said I was a “good guy”. My character has spent his entire life living in Hutt territory, and in truth I am turning over a new leaf. As a Hutt enforcer I would have been expected to torture every single one of these people I took down… just for good measure, because that is what Hutts do. I have yet to feed a single one of them to some bizarre creature we are keeping in a pit to entertain the boss. So simply taking them out cleaning… is a bit of a mercy from what I have been used to. It is going to be interesting to see how my character and the rest of the party play out… as they so carefully use their stun settings… and mine has dust on it because it has never been used once. The game usually runs for several hours… and by the time it wraps up I just have enough time to grabs some food and head downstairs for my Sunday evening television time… including Walking Dead, Talking Dead… and now maybe Into the Badlands. I watched the first episode last night and I have to say so far I am digging it heavily.

Week In Gaming 11/8/2015

November 8, 2015 by Belghast

Reapers Attack

Yesterday was N7 day and what I can only imagine as reapers… continued to dismantle my house. What I mean by that is that this week contractors have been working on siding our house and other little home improvement things. Friday during the day and all day Saturday I have had to listen to them tearing parts of the exterior of my house off, and sawing bits to put back in their place. I have a headache that is completely insane and I think its simply from all the noise over the last few days. Another thing that happened yesterday was the ExtraLife Marathon, and at one point we had these grand plans to try and do it as AggroChat. I am extremely glad those plans fell through because with the contractors traipsing in and out of my house there would have simply been no way I could have done that yesterday. I did however get to hang out a bit with Liore on her stream, and my hope was that anyone who would have supported me would end up supporting her. Last I heard she raised something like $2200 which is pretty damned awesome!

Seeking Stimulant

This week once again has been largely devoted to me playing Destiny. As I had hoped it does in fact seem like the Sleeper Stimulant quest is going to be reappearing about once a month. I managed to complete the First Firewall and the follow up Shadow Call missions that are the ones that were time sensitive. Shadow Call in itself was pretty damned insane because it is a mission where you have to reach the top of a tower in three minutes. This tower is full of tons of Taken Fallen mobs, and essentially you don’t have time to fight ANY of it. You need to run past as best you can, and the only thing I ultimately took out were the blight orbs that robbed me of my ability to jump. When you get to the top you have to take down three Wizards all within the original time limit. It took me about eight tries to get to the top of the tower… but when I finally did I was able to take down the mobs without much issue. Now I am just left with the task of gathering up all of the elements required to recharge the Ikelos fusion core. The problem I am having is of course the Warsats… I spent most of last night waiting on Earth in the supposed area where the Warsat spawns. I waited through three different blights and did not see any Warsats at all during that process, so I am wondering if for some reason they have moved where the Warsat drops. I am getting conflicting reports of it happening in the Mothyards and Skywatch… which while next to each other are only connected by a series of tunnels that makes them hard to move between.

The other big thing I worked on this week was my Warlock, and I have managed to get him up to level 30. Doing the level 20 strikes I thought initially would be a great way to level, but for some reason I seem to only get the Omniguul one which is freaking annoying. I have a few more of those Red Bull experience stimulant things… and I plan on chain running some strikes with them up in the hopes of maximizing the experience gain. I still need to finish up the Black Garden quest, because ultimately when I am on I spend more time faffing about in patrol missions than I actually do in directed combat. I have a slew of quests that the various folks on the tower have given me as well that I should probably finish up. I am not sure what I have this drive to get the Warlock to 40 and geared, but in theory I guess I just want one of each. In an MMO it always bugs me when I get exclusive gear for a specific class but cant use it… and that has always been my strongest drive to level said class… because I knew I had it waiting on me when I got to level. I have most of a level 40 gear set waiting in my bank, and I am amped to be able to get the Warlock up to use it.

Halo: Combat Evolved

Another side project this week has been to go through and play the original Halo: Combat Evolved, or at least start it. The original Xbox and honestly the GameCube as well are like the biggest voids in my gaming history. They happened at a time when I was largely in an Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot shaped hole. As a result I never got to play Halo other than the pretty lousy PC port, and I never really caught back up when I finally got an Xbox 360. In my travels I have picked up copies of the Anniversary edition of Halo for 360, as well as 2, 3, and 4 and plan on playing through them at some point. What ended up peaking my interests is the fact that apparently on of the elder races in Halo were the Ecumene, which during the Book of Sorrows in Destiny you find out was a race destroyed by the Hive. So in theory at least it seems like the Destiny universe is the “future” of the Halo universe, or at least Halo is a universe that exists before the coming of the Traveler and the dawning of the golden age. I am not exactly sure why I am so fascinated with the lore of Destiny, but I guess in a way it reminds me a lot of the universe of Dune. Super complex… but you also have to dig hard to find that connective tissue that brings everything together.

I have to say that so far Combat Evolved holds up pretty solidly. My only real complaint is that I cannot actually remap my controls. You can choose from one of many presets, but you can’t actually swap around the buttons. If I had my druthers I would map things to match Destiny more closely… but I did manage to find a set that is “close enough” for me not to instinctively do anything stupid. I am mostly wanting to know the story of the Halo universe, so that I can maybe glean more information about the Destiny universe. Also I seem to be on an FPS kick so playing another one just seems to be in the cards. I am honestly considering playing Fallout 4 on the PC with an Xbox 360 controller just to continue this pattern. I do at some point need to get back into the swing of playing FPS on PC with the mouse and keyboard because I absolutely intend to play Overwatch that way.

Heroes of the Storm

As I mentioned briefly above… I ended up playing a bunch of matches with Liore and Elly yesterday during their Extra Life stream. It had been a really really long time since I had played any Heroes, more than likely not much since the game officially launched awhile back and reset. They have really added a bunch of nifty stuff, and I noticed that one of my previously “cool” but largely just a recolor skins.. has turned into this elaborate Diablo Tyrael thing which I absolutely approve of. Unfortunately while playing I just saw a bunch of skins that I really want to get… like Marshall Raynor… and Judgement Uther. Later last night I poked my head in again, this time alone and noticed that I had more than enough gold to purchase Uther, which is one of those characters that I have enjoyed on free weeks, but never actually picked up. I have also heard that Rehgar is equally enjoyable in the melee support role, but not really played him either. I ended up winning a game as Uther which completed a quest. I guess at some point they backed away from the concept that you could not complete quests in bots only games, which makes me happy because I can actually pop in and get stuff done on days that I don’t feel like dealing with other players. This is still a really fun game, and probably the only MOBA that I would actually play by myself and solo queue. Funny how making chat option improves my experience, the only negative is that you always seem to have one player that is off by themselves and not really paying attention to what the team is doing.

Rift

I also popped my head into Rift for a bit while we podcast last night, and continued to work on my primalist. At this point I am level 14 and I feel like I am starting to wind down the content in Silverwood. I guess I am just a die hard Defiant… because I just don’t have near as much fun when I am playing Guardian side. I liked the idea of a Dwarven Primalist, but man do I wish I had the option of choosing to play the Defiant content instead. I mean I know you can race change, but it simply was not worth it for me to roll a Defiant and then race change to Dwarf. I just kinda wish that races were independent of the path you choose to take faction wise… since the faction as fiction patch made all of that really a personal preference not a hard line. I mean Freemarch has all sorts of awesome Undead that you get to fight… and what does Silverwood have? Goblins… Fae… and more Elves… just not nearly as cool on the “fun to slaughter” meter. Complaints aside I am continuing to progress but not really playing that often. This is one of those games that I keep returning to when I want some low key activity, and I don’t feel like I have time to get into something more serious. I guess I play Rift much the same way as a lot of people play Guild Wars 2. Get in, do a few things… and get right back out.

Stress and Con Hype

November 5, 2015 by Belghast

Out of Sorts

Lately if I seem “out of sorts” it is essentially because life is stressful. There are just a bunch of things going on right now that make me want to run screaming into the night. So instead I tend to resort to “bullet therapy” and spend my evenings blowing things up in Destiny. The problem is… once I log out the problems are still there looming. Work is extremely stressful right now, and we have several projects that my group is working on in various states of completion. The stress there comes from the fact that I know we are quickly running out of time to get anything accomplished before the end of the year. From Thanksgiving through New Years nothing really happens… because not all of the right people are ever in the office to make decisions. So there is this looming dead zone, sprinkled with some actual change freezes around each of the holidays where we literally couldn’t do anything if we wanted to. So we are in that mode of trying to get as much shit done as possible before we run out of time.

On the home front, things just ratcheted up to twelve on the ten point scale. Back in I believe July we talked to a contractor about doing some work on our house, because really we are at that critical junction where the wooden siding is in such bad shape that it might potentially start doing structural damage. Instead we are going with a manufactured wood product, and we chose the contractor because they threw in a few nice to haves on our list, like taking a window out of the bedroom and replacing it with a door that opens out into our back yard. The problem is after inking the deal… the backlog of work kept extending. Originally the guesstimate is that they would get to doing out project in September, but due to weather and other things happening here… that got pushed to NOW. I came home from work Tuesday night to find a dumpster in our drive way where I park my vehicle. We expected to have maybe a week or so lead time before them just showing up. NOPE! They are apparently starting Friday… which I had originally planned on taking off anyways to chill at home, have a break from work, and watch some of the BlizzCon festivities unfold.

Now I will be juggling a contractor and picking out a door… and will be expected to have traditional conversations like a give a fuck about any of it. I mean I do care… but I am not that kind of guy. The problem with sporting a beard like I do.. is people for some reason start expecting me to know anything about home improvement, auto mechanics and sports. I am guessing when I was created I came with a malfunctioning penis because I have zero ancestral knowledge about such things… nor do I really care about them. I can fix your computer, and I can build you something if I have the shop and materials to construct it, but that is about as “handy” as I get. So essentially I am going to try and be avoiding as many conversations as I can with these contractors as they tear shit off of the house and make a horrible noise. To make matters even more enjoyable, since I was off anyways… we are going to deal with the heating and air folks… that LOVE to make constant small chat. Seriously I am the type of person that the happiest moment of my day is when I walk into an empty elevator because I know for the next few minutes I won’t have to fake a conversation with someone. Anyways… my anxiety is through the roof right now… so if I seem a little on edge or out of sorts… or at least not my normally happy person this would be why. My buffer is full and I am failing at adulting all over the place.

Convention Hype

The one saving grace right now… is my Twitter timeline is really amazing. At the moment everyone seems to be buzzing and happy about BlizzCon and meeting all of these people that they have only ever chatted with online. There is just something that is infectious about seeing all of these people who really love something… getting to spend an entire weekend doing nothing but that. This is how I felt about Pax South when I was there… it was just this bubble of happiness and acceptance where everyone seemed to think everything that anyone else was doing… was awesome. In part this is why I really tried to make Pax Prime work this year because it is like riding a high when you are in convention mode. I’ve watched my own wife go through this with the math conference that she helped to start, and there is a little pang of regret deep inside you when you see all these people having fun… and you can’t join in. I have some deep nostalgia about World of Warcraft, but right now I am in a phase where I am far more interested about the other Blizzard games than that. I am amped to see more about Overwatch, and secretly hoping for some sort of a Diablo reveal.

That said I am interested in seeing more about Legion and especially if they release a date. I won’t lie that I am finally starting to feel some hype around a Warcraft movie, and in a strange way I completely blame Force Awakens for all of these. Star Wars was a fandom that was nearly dead to me. I will always be a Star Wars kid, but surrounding it was always a giant twinge of disappointment and regret for what might have been. Now that I am nearly to the point of exploding with excitement about Force Awakens, it is changing the way I feel about other fandoms as well. It is like I am giving myself to be disappointed in one aspect of a thing… but still love the thing as a whole in spite of the bad bits. So while there are things that frustrate me with Warcraft, I can see the good in it as well that still exists. I posted earlier this week that I was jealous of anyone who can play the same game every night and be happy with it, and that is the truth. It doesn’t matter what that game is… they seem to be momentary love affairs for me while looking for the next awesome thing on the horizon. I’ve always been that way with fandoms in general… there is always something else that is awesome and shiny just over the next hill. The amount of focus and devotion to one thing is always impressive, but it just isn’t me. In the meantime I am going to enjoy this contact high from the folks who are super excited about BlizzCon because I need some happy to get through the stress.