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Turtles and Tunnels

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I don’t have an awful lot to talk about this morning.  I seem to be sliding into another deep turtle mode, and a pretty good indicator of that is that I have been playing a significant amount of Minecraft lately.  I don’t have screenshots to go with this post so it is going to largely just seem like a giant wall of text.  There are lots of different ways to play Minecraft, but I am a base builder.  What I mean by that is I extend my reach out into the world crafting safe enclaves that keep me from having to ever deal with the monsters that inhabit it.  As such I craft vast tunnel networks that allow me to move around without ever leaving the safe zone.  Sure I occasionally venture out purposefully to go collect resources, but I tend to bring with me this umbilical cord like network of safety from area to area.

It is though Minecraft that I realized how much I would love to live underground.  Things feel so safe there, and I think this is why I keep returning to the game when I am going through periods of stress.  I almost always start the same way…  for my first nights shelter I dig into a hillside and hollow out a little chamber, that serves as my first foothold into the dangerous world.  From there I start expanding this warren until I have a firm base of operations.  From there I decide which direction I want to expand and build my first outpost, and then start digging a 3×3 tunnel in that direction until I decide it is time to pop back out of the earth.  I tend to dig a staircase upwards and then build some sort of a tower like structure that will serve as the anchor of that outpost.

Last night for example I spent a good deal of time hollowing out a hillside next to where I popped back out of the ground, crafting three block high levels moving slowly up towards the top of the hill where I started crafting an external structure.  I tend to build all of it out of cobblestone at least as a start, and as I get access to better looking materials I start swapping pieces of it out.  My tunneling nature however pretty much guarantees I have plenty of cobblestone and dirt to do pretty much anything I can dream up.  Similarly the bulk amounts of rock that I end up clearing means I am bound to find a ton of coal and steel which helps to feed this machine.

Another thing that I regularly do is dig a staircase down to bedrock, and which point I start digging mine shafts in search of diamonds.  My first diamonds this time I found as I reached the bottom without much effort, but I spent a chunk of last night clearing things out, trying to avoid the magma and an underground lake that I found.  Magma is always the real challenge when you get down to the bottom level of the world, because if you dig long enough you are going to eventually encounter it and risk it flooding your tunnel network with fiery death.  I crafted this tunnel network underneath my first cave base, and in the second outpost I am slowly crafting my way downwards by building a series of rooms and a ladder network.

It was through this ladder network that I broke into a cave complex that goes potentially all the way down to bedrock on its own.  I managed to clear my way down to a ravine in the middle of the earth, but that is as far as I went because I was running short on torches.  I could however see magma down at the bottom lighting the structure up so in theory that is another network to explore.  I need to spend some time clearing out the cave structure to craft a more deliberate path downwards so that I will not get lost down there.  That is always a problem I have in cave structures and I have tried to adopt a “torch on the right” methodology so that I can sorta see which direction I should be going based on the side of the cave the torch is on.

I think ultimately I find it relaxing reorganizing a chaotic world and crafting safe little areas for me to live in.  You know that feeling you have when you are bundled up in a blanket but it is raining hard outside?  That warmth and safety is how I feel when I am wandering around my tunnel networks.  It is a safe world that I ultimately crafted for myself… a bubble that lets me explore without ever placing myself in danger.  I know I play Minecraft way different than a lot of folks, but my methodology feels calming and relaxing.   Which ultimately is apparently the thing I am seeking out when I go into one of these turtle modes and return to the game.

Farewell Google Plus

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A few days ago we got news that Google Plus had a vulnerability that exposed profile information, even when the users had flagged that as private to the circles based visibility system.  They didn’t report this until Wall Street Journal was about to break the story, so for starters that is kinda bad.  Their response to this whole situation however is interesting an unique in the tech world…  but also very google.  Instead of agreeing to fix the bug… they just decided to sunset the service as a whole.  So within the next ten months or so Google Plus as we know it will cease to exist and join the long graveyard of services that google decided to axe…  the most important of these for me personally being Reader their RSS Feed Reader.

One of the problems with Google is at the end of the day you have to remember they are primarily a search engine and advertising company.  Anything that does not align with those two missions is suspect to disappearing at a moments notice.  Part of me would like to believe that Gmail and Google Docs are safe since they are both products being sold…  but even then I think the only thing that is sacred is Search and the Advertising services that fund seemingly everything.  That means all of these products that people rely on…  Google Voice, Google Fiber in their homes or anything they may have purchased on Google Play are honestly likely suspect to the whims of whatever seemingly random business decisions Google Corporate makes.

As far as Google Plus…  I was an early adopter and had an awful lot of fun on the network.  There are a bunch of people that I never would have known were it not for the service.  It seemed to have a very high adoption rate among MMO gamers, and I used it almost rabidly around the launch of Star Wars the Old Republic with a good deal of our guild coming from connections made through Google Plus.  It was almost a simpler version of the internet, when no one seemed to worry about follow counts or were afraid of interactions…  and instead sort of widely followed anyone who seemed to have anything even vaguely close to similar interests.

What made Google Plus special however was the Circles system, or a way of walling off certain groups of users from seeing content not intended for them.  I had tons of circles for various interests, and it felt safe to be open and free with ideas and opinions… when you are targeting a specific community in mind.  Granted what this meant in practice for myself and other bloggery types is we sort of made Plus a massively multiplayer chat engine.  I regularly posted these massive diatribes about various in game things…  instead of posting them on my blog which in itself was a bit of a problem.  The rapid fire nature of getting interaction and commentary made it super appealing, and I think there were some folks who largely switched to “blogging” through G+ at the time.

It was not a network without controversy, and the biggest one for me personally was the enforcement of Real Names sometime in 2011.  I started dinking around with the internet as a whole in 1993-ish which in some minds makes me an early adopter… and in other minds makes me a babe in the woods.  Regardless… back then there was a golden rule of using the internet…  NEVER SHARE PERSONAL INFORMATION WITH ANYONE.  You never knew who was on the other end of the connection talking to you, and as such you really shouldn’t give them any information that they might be able to use to harm you.  As such I have a really hard time actually using personal information online, and this is why you either see me posting as “Bel Temple” or “Belghast Sternblade”, because I grew up in a culture that used handles to relate to each other and real names.

It is not that I am trying to hide my identity or troll anyone, because I have been using the name Belghast as a static gaming moniker for decades… and honestly before that I went by Exeter on IRC.  Those are real identities to me, much like the handles that I know people by are similarly real.  I know Ashgar’s real name, and have met face to face with him on several occasions…  but I still end up calling him Ash because that is his name in my brain.  I mean gaming culture sort of does this, in that we relate to each other by tags and handles that seem just as real as any other attribute that you might associate with someones name.  Regardless I played along for awhile and branded my Google Plus by my actual name…  and it made me deeply uncomfortable the entire time.  “Bel Temple” was my eventual half way point, since I do actually respond to “Bel” in real life just as often as I do “Mark”.

Ultimately it wasn’t a controversy that drove me away from Google Plus, but instead a whole sequence of things that are likely unrelated.  In April of 2013 I rededicated myself to blogging and started posting on Tales of the Aggronaut every single day of the week and managed to carry that forward for a little over three years.  During that time… any energy or thoughts that I might have posted on Google Plus… I instead directed towards the blog which was in constant need of fodder.  It took several months before I realized that I just wasn’t interacting on the network anymore.  Even then… I couldn’t seem to find the oomph to get reconnected.  Folks faded away, things started getting more political… and my interest in social media in general waned.

The truth is…  my appetite for interaction is in twitter sized bites and not grand multi paragraph posts anymore.  I miss the golden age of Google Plus much like I miss the golden age of any thing that I have interacted with and then ultimately out grew.  It bums me out a little bit that it is going away, but at the same time… much like other things I have mourned like Toys R Us or City of Heroes…  I wasn’t actually using it myself.  I think the future of Facebook like interaction will ultimately belong to things like Diaspora that allow you to carve up small but interconnected communities, much like we have with Mastodon and Nineties.cafe.  I find myself feeling less comfortable being part of the hive, and instead wanting to be part of smaller guild sized communities.  I don’t really think I am alone in this.

Whatever the case though…  Google Plus is leaving and with it I do mourn the promise of what it was for awhile and what it could have been.  I noticed this morning that when the news broke on October 8th they apparently did something to break the syndication process, and with it all of my posts went back to being shared only with myself.  However I plan on syndicating this one specifically with Google Plus manually.  While I have a ton of different social media accounts, in truth the only three that actually matter are as follows.

I can be pretty slow to respond at times unless I am actively engaged with a given network at that moment, however those are the three that I actually use by choice.  Everything else I am mostly just using as a syndication platform for Tales of the Aggronaut and is ultimately not likely going to get an interactive response from me.  If we only have contact through Google Plus, and you don’t want that connection to die… then I suggest you follow me from one of those.  Then again if you have made it this far…  you can just quietly watch from the wings as I continue to do my daily blog posts and weekly podcasts.

Outdoor Cat

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This morning there is not going to be much of a blog post because reasons.  I am just flat out struggling today to get my act together enough to string coherent words today.  Additionally my middle cat has made it her job this morning to try and walk across my keyboard as many times as humanly possible this morning.  Additionally I spent some time playing with the outdoor cat.  We don’t know the cats name, but it is a super sweet bobtail tabby that started following my wife while walking…  and to keep him from getting super lost she started feeding him as a distraction.  This turned into a morning ritual where he shows up at the door looking for food…  and since he is super sweet and friendly we feed him.  Still a little skittish, but from what we have found out.. he technically belongs at a house about five doors down…  who also regularly feeds him.

Regardless …  adorable cat…  wanted food this morning so I stopped what I was doing and obliged and then proceeded to get headbutted periodically while the vigorous “monching” proceeded.  I mean it is a pretty great start to the day and I am pretty sure the rest of the day will be downhill from here.

As far as gaming goes I attempted to run Looking For Raid last night… and wound up bailing on the last boss of the new wing that opened up.  There is some heinous trash before hand and a combination of the tanks and dps kept trying to pull all of it at the same time summarily wiping us.  I suffered through three of these wipes before I finally said screw it and bailed.  Maybe by the weekend people will have sorted out not to do that…  or it will get hotfixed to remove some of the trash.  Regardless I got a nice trinket…  which is when the begging began.  Shortly after it dropped I started getting random tells from people wanting to get it from me.  I had already equipped because I liked it better than one of my trinkets.  However one person went so far as to berrade me for equipping it since I already had a 350 in that slot, and that I should be sharing.

This is the point at which I blocked the person and moved on with my life, but this sort of behavior has seemingly become more rampant.  Any time I decide to pug something I’ve seen a significant uptick in loot beggers and it is just annoying.  I really wish there was a flag to keep your loot from showing up publicly, and thereby masking you from any of those addons that try and determine if the person who got the loot deserved it.  The truth is I don’t really want to be in a LFR in the first place…  it makes it worse that I now have to deal with a line of randos vying for the single item that I managed to get during the week from ANY content so far.  I think this feels worse right now than it did in other expansions because the loot feels super scarce and unsatisfying.  As a result when someone begs for an item my guttural knee jerk reaction is “fuck you, get your own damned loot”, which again… is not a healthy stance to take towards a video game.

Essentially as I talked about last night, there is a certain set of circumstances that have created this environment that just feels bad.  No one factor is the cause, but instead in some sort of a SimCity-esc RCI meter…  all of the settings have been tweaked to awful at the same time and it is making the entire experience feel suddenly worse than it ever did.  That is not to say that there are also not an awful lot of things going right.  I have legitimately enjoyed the storyline quite a bit, but the story…  is a limited quantity that is over quickly and instead what remains is all of the repeatable content loops that now feel sort like an off balance washing machine careening towards eventually spilling its load.  The artwork as well is completely on point.  The alliance side areas for example are some of the best looking I have seen in any expansion.  I feel bad about complaining all of the time, but ultimately that is the experience I am feeling so as such I share it with you my readers.

Distraction

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Yesterdays post was super negative, and I apologize for being down a bit.  I am dealing with some mental stuff and fighting through it, but it has colored my world view decidedly darker for the moment.  Yesterday over on Mastodon, someone commented that it sounded like I simply wasn’t having fun anymore.  To some extend I have been having less fun, but I feel like MMOs in general require a lot of grind to get to the fun parts.  Right or wrong that is just sort of the nature of the beast and something I accept as part of the package deal.  My hope is always that the moment to moment gameplay is enjoyable, but even when it isn’t the hope is that there is a lot of enjoyment beyond the grind.

It was around this time that I came up with a reasonable analogy to explain MMOs.  Say you are a person that is really into knocking down dominoes and watching them fall into intricate patterns.  In that hobby it would often time take days to painstakingly set up the tiny little slabs, and then eventually when you are finished you get to start the chain reaction causing them to do all sorts of awesome things…  for a few minutes.  Hours upon hours worth of work…  for a very short payoff.  This is what playing an MMO feels like most of the time… a lot of painstaking work managing factions and consumables and all of the assorted trappings that come with doing endgame stuff…  all to have a few minutes of joy every week.

All of the faction work leads to something…  but that something is often times short and sweet and leaves you wanting more of that awesome endorphin hit that it gave you.   However for the moment I am distracted by the fact that Brewfest is happening and with it comes the Coren Direbrew event.  Sadly the trinkets that are provided this year are only 335, when I was hoping they would be something more sustainable like 340-345.  Regardless it is a thing that gives a much needed slot and my hope is to farm up a set on the Warrior and maybe get the Warlock leveled enough to get some as well.  Additionally there is a pet that I have never picked up before that I hope to get the tokens for.

After that will be the Halloween event, and another grind to chase…  since I have never managed to get the mount to drop and am only slightly bitter about it.  The positive is that it seems like all levels can participate in the Coren Direbrew event, so my hope is that similarly all levels can participate in the Halloween one as well.  That means if I so choose to do this nonsense… I could run around thirty characters through the event every day…  with thirty shots at the mount each day.  On the Brewfest side I have the Kodo and Ram and am not sure if other mounts drop but I think I am in good territory.  Whatever the case this adds up to a large package of distraction that may or may not keep me entertained until the 8.1 patch releases and we can see if anything feels better in the world.