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Daily Creative Thing

July 26, 2017 by Belghast

No Blaugust

It’s been ages since I have done a heading in my blog, but I didn’t really have an image I wanted to put with this. Considering it is getting dangerously close to August and I have had a few people ask me… I will not be hosting some large Blaugust event this year. For three and a half years I did my blog every day thing, and it was interesting. In that process I learned a lot about myself and a lot about my readers. However I am no longer the bastion of regular blogging that I once was, and similarly I don’t really feel like I can carry the banner of “blog every day” quite so highly. Now the truth is Blaugust was never really “my” thing… firstly because there was another group that had independently been using that hashtag for ages apparently. Secondly the “festival” for lack of a better terms was more about the community than it ever was about me. So if you find yourself really wanting to do Blaugust, then go for it. This has been the year that the institutions have failed in the blogosphere. We had no Newbie Blogger Initiative and would not have had Developer Appreciate Week were it not for Rav picking up the torch and carrying it onwards. I hate that I am adding Blaugust to the pile but I am just not feeling it right now, and in truth wasn’t last year because I did a fairly halfassed job of trying to make it happen without requiring a lot of support.

If someone is interested in picking up the mantle and making it theirs… I welcome you with open arms. That said what is happening this year that is not exactly Blaugust but similarly themed is “Daily Creative Thing”. My good friend Grace felt like she was not taking the time to do creative stuff anymore, and had let some of her hobbies fall by the wayside. As such in the spirit of Blaugust she decided to start trying to force herself to do at least one creative thing every single day. What classifies as a “Creative Thing” is pretty open to interpretation, but as a side effect of this process she spawned a secondary blog where you can see a bit of her daily process. Some days it has been a drawing, others working on some crocheting, and one day some origami. The purpose being just to keep doing something interesting and fun and creative every single day… and then posting the product. I myself am contemplating doing this throughout the month of August, because there are a lot of creative things that I just stopped doing for some reason along the way. Namely I just don’t sketch like I used to, and I am not entirely sure why I stopped. I used to be one of those kids that was rabidly sketching in every single class… and then at some point I just stopped. Its like going to art school some how tarnished the fun… because instead of going and drawing goofy things… everything was deadly serious and representative. I would love to unblock myself and let the creativity flow once more, so maybe this is the time to do it.

Discarded Hulk

July 24, 2017 by Belghast

I know I have started out many a Monday post with something along the lines of it being a weird weekend, so I am going to refrain from doing so today. The odd factor comes from the fact that we were pretty busy… but also mostly busy around the house. I’ve talked about my wife who is a teacher several times in the past, but one of the side notes that you need to know is that teachers here in Oklahoma have very little support for all of the things that are required to make a classroom work. My wife for example gets a $25 credit… per school year to buy anything she needs for her classroom from what is in effect the school district storehouse. Most teachers don’t even get that… so we spend a lot of time doing things in an effort to augment her classroom experience. Anecdote aside… how this factors into our weekend is that for years we have had what is effectively a office work group printer that I happened to adopt when a workplace was sending it out to salvage. They were more than happy to have me truck it away… instead of having to pay some electronic recycling people to come and do the same thing. I was trying to figure out about when we got the Laserjet 5si… and to the best of my knowledge I would guess around 2005-2006 ish. The piece of this that you need to understand is that it was effectively a 23 inch by 23 inch by 23 inch cube that weighed about 150 lbs. It effectively sat in the corner of my office taking up tons of space… and any time there was a paper jam I had to try and balance the unit while turning it around because it was way too big to actually get to the back side without doing so. The other thing you need to know is… that there are several times a year where my wife will print up to a ream of paper worth of materials for her classroom in a single evening. So it is simply not cost effective to try and do that with a consumer grade laser printer.

This week the computer she had in her office finally gave up the ghost, which is not terribly surprising given that it was an ancient Gateway FX P6831 laptop circa 2008. So like always this lead us to craigslist to see what all was available in our area on the cheap. While we didn’t really find anything, given that our craigslist seems to be entirely made up of laptops and custom built rigs that someone overpaid for… and still thinks is extremely valuable. However in her travels she happened upon a reasonable looking printer that in theory could replace the mammoth beast and give us some more desk space. It turns out a company was surplussing all of their HP Laserjet P3005 printers and we were able to pick up a relatively low print volume printer for $40. This however left us with the daunting task of moving the beast downstairs… something that I am shocked I was able to do by myself years ago… I know at the time it involved using an office chair as a makeshift handtruck and then slowly lifting it a single stair at a time. Thankfully I am much older and wiser… and simply opted to remove the two addon printer trays, duplexer and toner cartridge which turned it into something that was way more manageable for us to get downstairs. This left me room to set up the new printer, and also coincidentally gave me room enough for the Canon Pixma MG3620 color printer that I picked up off Amazon for $30 a week or so back. Which means for the first time in probably a decade we have a reasonable color printing option. However the directions that came with the printer… were for a completely different model and it only took me a couple of hours of trying to set things up in vain for me to realize this fact and to grab the correct directions from the Canon website. Unlike past wireless printers… you cannot apparently set it up over USB and then set its wireless credentials… you instead need to do some bullshit mobile phone set up process. However once I got the correct directions it went pretty smoothly.

This was just one vignette of the random stuff we did this weekend, and most of it isn’t really worthy of writing about. However now we have the mammoth printer sitting in our living room because the person who had said they wanted it… backed out when they realized just how damned big it was. Thinking about sitting it out on the porch one day and posting a “free” craigslist post to see if anyone will come get it. I would love to give it to a school or a church or a non-profit agency because it still prints insanely well… and the toner has gotten to the point where you can get it for like $20 in the secondary market and it will print something along the lines of 60,000 copies off that single toner. Until then however the cats think they have a new toy and one of them has taken to periodically laying on it. As far as gaming goes… I largely played Diablo 3 and with significant help from friends am nearing the point where I get my pet in the seasons journey. Right now I am on a more annoying objective step which involves running bounties until I get five jewelry patterns, which will then unlock the last few pieces of the Rathma necromancer set. After a few seasons of playing Demon Hunters…. everything feels slow… but the Necro in particular feels extremely slow when pushing Rifts and Greater Rifts. Getting the two piece weapon set has greatly improved this but it still feels slower than I am used to even when being drug behind a much much higher leveled friend. All in all though the Necromancer is still insanely fun, but as we talked about this weekend… I am curious how many previously devoted Witch Doctor players have made the swap to Necromancer permanently.

Week with Axon

July 14, 2017 by Belghast

zteaxon7

I have now now been using my new phone for a week and thought I would talk a bit about some of my impressions this morning. Firstly I feel like I need to explain my decision process a bit and how I ended up with a non-AAA manufacturer phone. For some time I have balked at the price of cell phones. Yes I am old enough to remember a time when you just walked into the cellular carrier and they gave you whatever phone you wanted along with your one year contract. After a point that became a two year contract, and eventually a discounted rate on the phone… and now they just charge you a monthly fee as part of a rent to own style scheme to dilute the cost of your insanely expensive hardware. I’ve not swapped phones nearly as often as the manufacturers would really like me to… my first “smartphone” being a Samsung Blackjack 2 which upgraded into an iPhone 3gs which caused me to venture into android land… where I have had a Samsung s2 and a Samsung s5. My natural upgrade path would then probably be the Samsung Galaxy s8 but those are around $800… and I didn’t want to spend that amount of money on a phone.

As a result I started looking at a handful of other phones, the less popular brands looking for what is essentially the best bang for the buck. I looked at the product offering from OnePlus, Moto, HTC, Huawei and ultimately ZTE. The finally decision point came down a duel between the ZTE Axon 7 and the Huawei Honor 8… and after reading a whole slew of reviews I finally pulled the trigger and ordered my Axon 7 for around $350 from Amazon carrier unlocked. For sake of reference in the marketing image above… I have the dark grey model on the far right. I was honestly expecting to get what felt like a second rate phone, but what I got instead was something that seems almost indistinguishable from the traditional quality of the flagship phones I have owned. The phone arrived in this weird white leather texture box that was extremely thick that slid apart to reveal a whole bunch of pack in items. Firstly there was the phone, that came out of the box with a screen protector installed. Secondly it came with a rubbery phone case for you to use if that is your thing… until you likely went out and got your own case later. It would probably provide a bit of shock proofing, but more importantly some grip which I will get into later. There was the ubiquitous charging brick with a fairly long usb type c cable, but what I was not expecting was a little adapter that let you use a micro usb cable and convert it to type c. Finally there was a pack in SIM removal tool on a rubber keychain, allowing you to in theory take it with you… though any straight pin or paperclip will do the trick to eject the SIM card tray.

Relevant Specs

Operating System: Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow (upgraded easily to 7.1.1)
Display: 5.5-inch, 2560×1440 AMOLED Gorilla Glass 4
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Quad-core 2.15GHz
GPU: Adreno 430 GPU
RAM: 4GB
Onboard Storage: 64GB
Expandable: microSD up to 2TB
Rear Camera: 20MP f/1.8, PDAF, OIS, 4K/30 video
Front Camera: 8MP f/2.2, 1080p/30 video
Battery: 3250 mAh
Charging: Quick Charge 3.0, USB Type-C
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11ac dual-band, Bluetooth 4.2 LE, NFC, GPS, GLONASS
Networks: Both GSM and CDMA supported
Dimensions: 151.7 x 75 x 7.9mm
Weight: 175 g

The phone was released a year ago so in theory to compete with the Samsung Galaxy S7, but for sake of reference the specs are pretty comparable to the S8. It shipped with a ZTE android distribution called MiFavor which I have opted to simply go with because it seems to have really solid patching support via a software updater. It shipped with Android 6.0.1 but through the course of a handful of patches I was able to take it to Android 7.1.1 and it performs really solidly. One of the weird things going on with this phone is that like many international focused devices it comes with dual SIM card slots. What makes it interesting is that the second SIM card slot also serves as you micro SD card, which means the device only has the one card tray and everything fits neatly in it. So far the battery life is excellent and for reference I wound up playing Final Fantasy Record Keeper from bed last night for about two hours and only used 15% of the battery. The graphics are and screen are beautiful and everything seems to run so much better than it did on my Galaxy S5… but granted that was a really aging phone at this point.

The only gotchas I have run into thus far is a combination of two things. Firstly this is a really heavy phone… like if I got into trouble I legitimately feel like I could chuck the phone at someones head and potentially knock them out… or maybe give them a concussion. The second part… is that the full Aluminum body is slick… like insanely slick which is magnified by the fact that it is heavy. In theory that flimsy rubber case that they give you in the box is probably to help counteract this. However there have been multiple times I have had the phone damned near slip out of my hand while pulling it in and out of my pocket or just while holding it and using it. I purchased an aftermarket case that I liked to try and negate this so it isn’t a deal breaker but just something you need to be aware of. The size of the phone is fine for my giant sized hands… but for most people this is probably going to feel like more a “phablet” and less like a phone. So far I am loving it and I have zero buyers remorse. The only problem that I can see with this product is that the pricing seems to be extremely volatile. I purchased mine for around $350… and yesterday when I went to link it to a friend it was selling for closer to $450. If you can find one for the right price though I think its an amazing flagship replacement, and very worthy of going up against the more well known phones. As I continue to use it I will probably do follow ups to this quick review as the device ages.

Netflix Castlevania

July 11, 2017 by Belghast

It would be a bit of an understatement to say I was excited about the new Netflix anime series based loosely on the events of Castlevania III. I have a deep relationship with this game series and while I have not played a lot of them, it was nonetheless extremely important during my formative video game playing years. The original was the very first game that I saved up money to purchase for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Back then at roughly age 11, it took a long time to scrounge up the money to buy a $50 video game… but that was really only half of the obstacle. To get the game itself required going someplace that had video games… or at least in the case of Castlevania a trip to Toys R Us… the closest of which was an hour and some change away from home. To say I devoured the game is a bit of an understatement as well… there are sequences in the original game that are burned into my brain just as indelibly as the Vampire Killer theme is. I have said this plenty of times… but I count Castlevania Symphony of the Night as my favorite game of all time and consider it pretty damned closed to perfect. When Koji Igarashi started the kickstarter for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night… I threw money at my screen and backed it as soon as I could. Since then I have played through the demo version that backers got a few times… so to say I am the target audience is also probably a bit of an understatement.

The show released officially over the weekend on the 7th but I just finally was able to sit down for a period of time and watch through it last night. Prior to doing so I had been seeing a bit of confusing press floating around with folks generally being unsatisfied with the new netflix offering. Firstly this is probably the most bingeable Netflix “series” I have ever seen… with only 4 episodes weighing in around 100 minutes of total watching. This honestly felt more like a pilot and less like a complete series, but I won’t get hung up on those details. What the season is more than anything is setting the stage for the second season. Since this series is roughly based on the third Nintendo Entertainment System Castlevania game… we go into it knowing some of the major plot points and it seems like the show more or less is following them. During the four episodes we are introduced to a cast of characters that will play out over the series… but I found it curious that at least one major character was completely absent. I am hoping this was just a situation of not having met him yet through the course of the very short few episodes that we got, and will join the team as a later reveal. The show sets up the central conflict between the early science hating church and Dracula… and to a lesser extent the general forces of the enlightenment. For the Christian viewers… I could see some of the dialog being a little hard to swallow. For me personally… it did an excellent job of setting up the central conflict that made Castlevania III so different than some of the others in the series.

One of the complaints that I have seen online about the show is that Dracula is not set up to be a sympathetic character… and frankly I disagree. I found myself sympathizing with Dracula quite a bit honestly, and were I in his position I probably would have wanted to burn everything to the ground as well. As far as matching the tone of the games… you are supposed to hate Dracula because ultimately that is the core conflict. Castlevania more or less is about the central conflict between the Belmont family and Dracula. More or less every 100 years Castlevania materializes in our plane of existence, and the Belmont clan trains to be able to stop him each time. This series has a Belmont and a Dracula… so I feel like it met all of the necessary requirements for being able to call itself a Castlevania anything. I honestly thought all of the character introductions worked extremely well, especially Alucard… who isn’t 100% on our side and we get that impression. The real problem with the series as I see it is that I want more of it. Four episodes was just not enough because it essentially serves as the pregame cinematic setting everything up… and we haven’t really gotten to any of the meat of the game yet… or in this case the series. I mean they had to functionally tell an origin story given that they cannot really guarantee that anyone who is watching the show has ever actually consumed any of the source material. I feel like they did a great job of setting the stage… but I am not really looking forward to the likely two year wait until the next batch of episodes. This time I am hoping they give us way more than four in a single sitting. This won’t be the show for everyone… but I am not looking to nitpick something that I never thought I would actually see in my lifetime. I am more than happy just to sit back and enjoy it.