Coffin Dude Get

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Good Morning Friends! Whelp I took a bit of a gamble and it paid off. I was running out of time to get Luocha with the new banner arriving soon. To be honest… I don’t really love this character but after playing with him… he is freaking broken as far as healers go and I needed a second healer. So I spent $30 in additional pulls and managed to luck out and get him. I had hit pity off free pulls at the beginning of his banner only to get a different 5-Star champion, so I was hoping that would not happen again. Now I can rest on my laurels and gather up pull currency because Blade is next up, and I don’t need him at all. My hope is to be able to gather up a stockpile and take a run at Kafka when her banner opens.

I’m really looking forward to the next patch dropping because it looks like we might be finishing up the Luofu story arc with another big boss fight. I am not super enthralled with “Space China”, and am very happy to be leaving it behind. What I am probably looking forward to the most… is a new boss theme because both the Herta Station and Jarillo-VI boss fights are absolute bangers. It will be interesting to see what themes they choose to go with for this boss theme. I’m also looking forward to some of the events that are going to be happening. The museum event essentially proved to me that this team can do some really interesting stuff with mini-events. If my information is correct, this should drop tomorrow, which may or may not actually be “tonight” my time.

In Blaugust news, the other day I did this dumb image showing off the ten different logos we’ve had over the years. So far the whole Vaporwave/Arcade/Yearbook thing I have going on this year seems to generally be better received than my Stranger-Things-inspired look last year. Truth be told… I don’t really consult anyone when I start crafting the yearly nonsense. Maybe I should, but honestly… this has always sorta been my thing and I am shocked as fuck that anyone follows along. One thing that is a bit different this year from previous years is that I have taken over the generation of the OPML file to make importing into an RSS reader a bit easier. My long-term goal is to automate this, but for the time being I am doing some dumb stuff with Google Sheets and =CONCATENATE().

We still have fourteen days until the official beginning of Blaugust, and each day more sign-ups are flowing in. I sorta regret the way the event is falling with me being in training all day every day this week. Normally speaking I would be a bit more active on social media to keep the interest levels high. However I just can’t really do that, and after not “peopling” for the last three years… by the time I get out of training, I am just drained. I didn’t even do anything resembling coherent gameplay last night as I bounced from one game to another. I am pumped however that regardless of my lack of support this week we are already sitting at 38 sign-ups as of the time of this posting. Given that we always have a number of “buzzer beaters”, and even some folks who decide to start after it is already in progress… I have a feeling this is going to be a rather “lorge” year.

There is still plenty of time to sign-up and add your blog, and no shade at “buzzer beaters”… because I habitually am one. I’ve seen a lot of new traction on Discord which is really nice as well. I feel bad that I am not active this week, but I hope to make up for it next week when my life begins to shift back to normal. I’m really looking forward to this Blaugust because even if no one else signed up… we already have an interesting mix of new people interested in our yearly nonsense. Still not sure how many of these morning posts I will be able to knock out this week, but I am going to try and get as many of them as I can before exhaustion claims me. It does not help that Gracie was an asshole and started screaming at the top of her lungs at around 10 pm… and finally got locked out of the bedroom around 1 am.

I hope yall are having a most excellent week though! Unfortunately, since I have to pass three certification exams by the end of the week… it isn’t like I can do my trick of just disassociating until I am on the other side of the frustrating thing that I don’t want to deal with. I need to soak up knowledge so I can regurgitate it back on an exam.

Sushi and Yuzu

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Good Morning Friends! I have no clue how many morning posts I am actually going to make this week. This is the week where I have to do in-person training from 8 am until 5 pm. At least for this morning, I decided to vary my sleep schedule a bit and go back to my 5:30 am wake-up. This honestly isn’t a bad idea given that during the school year this is what I am going to end up doing anyways, and maybe this gives us a month or so of getting back into the swing of it. I had every intent of making it super far into the Guild Wars 2 story progression, but that never really happened. Instead I spent my weekend playing a whole slew of other games. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants. As is often the case… this Monday’s post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of different topics. As the week goes on I might drill down into each of them a bit further.

I am continuing to move forward in Honkai Star Rail, and tend to put in 30 mins or so every day to do the assorted daily content. There has been an event that allowed for double rewards from Calyx, and I have honestly been using this to stock up on experience gain items. I am nearing the next break point in adventure level which should allow me to take my characters up to level 80. I know I do not have anywhere near enough materials banked to bring my entire squad up in level, but my goal is to at least get a few of them up, and then grind more materials to pull up the rest. I still have had zero luck pulling Luocha and am rapidly running out of time to snag him before the next banner starts.

Another game that I spent some time playing this weekend was Dave the Diver. This honestly seems like the perfect Steam Deck game, though I’ve only played it on my Gaming Desktop so far. I saw this dumb game all over my feed over the last couple of weeks, and when it showed up on the AggroChat topic list I figured I needed to check it out. It is somewhat hard to describe this game… because it is so many different games rolled into one. You spend your days diving into the ocean gathering resources for various folks… and then you spend your evenings waiting on customers at a seaside sushi bar. While gathering resources you are under constant pressure to make sure you are catching enough fish so that you can open the sushi bar that evening. Instead of a health bar, the game uses your oxygen meter as a single combined resource. If you “die” you only get to keep a single item from your inventory. I definitely want to play more of this, and if you need a charming oceanic game… maybe check it out.

The other revelation that I made this weekend is that Parsec now supports Dual Sense controllers. Right now the Dual Sense is probably my favorite controller, and use it whenever possible. I noticed a few weeks back that Yuzu the Switch Emulator is now smart enough to interpret the gyroscope built into the Dual Sense and map it over as the console gyro. The challenge was that up until this point, Parsec had essentially read every gamepad as an Xbox 360 controller, effectively dumbing down the input to only the buttons that allowed. However in my research in how to make a Dual Sense work… I found that it is just now natively supported, pending you download the parsec USB Driver for it. It works shockingly well and even the gyro has next to no latency.

So that means that I am way more interested in emulating Switch games than I was previously. If I could play them over parsec, it means I can hang out and play them on my laptop or even figure out some shenanigans that also let me play them over a mobile phone maybe. I get that making a thing that is already portable… portable by jumping through a bunch of hoops sounds dumb but I am who I am. I finally got around to trying out Pokemon Arceus, and I gotta say… I already like this FAR better than the traditional mainline Pokemon model. I have a weird relationship with Pokemon given that I was an adult when they came out and I played Blue for the first time on a Gameboy Emulator. I don’t have the built-up nostalgia for the game that so many folks are roughly a decade younger than me do. I hope we see more of this formula because I really dig it so far.

I also spent a bit more time playing Tears of the Kingdom, and honestly… this is the game that I mainlined yesterday. The main reason why I am playing it on Yuzu is that I can apply cheats that remove weapon durability from the game. This honestly ruins the entire game experience for me, and I didn’t really love Breath of the Wild until I played through on Cemu the Wii Emulator with a durability patch to just remove that system from the game. I get for some of you fine folks out there, the durability system is way more important to your experience… but I hated that aspect of Halo… needing to constantly swap weapons, and I hated it in Zelda as well. I already really like this game far more than I did Breath of the Wild. I will probably talk more about it later this week, but essentially I got far enough yesterday to get off the initial “tutorial island”.

The extremely astute might have already noticed that there are a couple of new additions to my masthead of nonsense. Either that or you might have been around the fediverse this weekend when I talked about it. For a bit, I have wanted some of the cute critters from Guild Wars 2 to fill in a few gaps. I’ve had my set of “Streamer Moogles” for a while, that have stolen my keyboard, mouse, headset, etc. I love my Choya Pinata miniature and I have a deep adoration of the Quaggan… and the cutest version is the one with the Turtle shell hat. So when Ammo wrapped up my Path of Exile commission, I threw out another one for her to work on whenever she got a chance. Over the weekend she wrapped them up and then of course I immediately incorporated them into the banner. Some people get Tattoos… and apparently, I just keep adding stuff to the masthead of my blog.

Anyways! It is time for me to go get ready. I hope to be able to knock out blog posts each morning… but just in case that doesn’t actually happen… I wish you all an amazing week and I am hoping to survive mine.

AggroChat #442 – Cute Fish and Eldritch Horror

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo

Hey Folks! This week we are down a Thalen which bumps a topic that we bumped last week, but whatever we have more! Bel starts off the show with a discussion about Blaugust coming soon and how the changes in the social media landscape are introducing it to more people.  From there we talk about the One of One Ring search being over, which dives into a discussion about whether or not the Sol Ring being an auto-include is good or not. Kodra has been using the SteamDeck as a primary travel computer and this works shockingly well.  We talk about the weird game that is Dave the Diver and then branch off into a discussion about whether or not Pizza Tower is actually good.  Tam shares some nostalgia of revisiting the Battlezone ‘98 Remaster and how it is a type of RTS that never really had its day.  Finally, Kodra and Ash share some of their progress in Four Job Fiesta as it is nearing the end of that event.

Topics Discussed:

  • Blaugust is Coming
  • 2 Million Dollar Card Found
  • Debate about Magic the Gathering “Auto Includes”
  • SteamDeck as a Primary Machine
  • Dave the Diver
  • Pizza Tower is Good?
  • Battlezone ‘98
  • Four Job Fiesta

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Ten Years of Blaugust

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Good Morning Friends! This is potentially going to be the last reliable blog post from me for a bit. Next week I am going to be dealing with the in-person training that I talked about in a post the other day. As such I expect to not be able to blog in the morning, and when I come home I fully expect to crash very fast and very hard. Last night was a bit of evidence of that happening already. I had a fairly stressful day of work and by the time I wrapped up around 6 pm, I was just dead to the world. I left off in Guild Wars 2 sitting outside the Tomb of Primeval Kings having only made it part of the way through that quest sequence before crashing the other night. While the will was there, I was struggling to stay asleep so I really made no forward momentum yesterday. I’m thankful I at least hit a checkpoint in the quest that I was on so that I can continue at a relatively straightforward place.

I’m exceptionally happy that I managed to get everything ready to go for Blaugust this week instead of having to deal with it in the evenings next week. While the sign-ups have only been open for a few days at the time of writing we have 25 bloggers, four of which are brand new this year. There has also been a significant bump in activity in the Discord which has been cool to watch. There was a bit of a screw-up on Wednesday when I announced everything… somewhere buried within the wall of nonsense was apparently a link to the old sign-up form. Thankfully I could tell by date range who had signed up and copied them over to the participant list that I maintain. I use this list to drive my blogroll which I keep updated as often as I can. I’ve been keeping everything updated on the Media Kit page as it serves as the true permanent resting place of all information assorted with Blaugust in general.

I’ve come to the realization that I think this is the 10th Blaugust. I probably should have made a much bigger deal about that when it came to the design.

What always throws me off is 2017… the year that I didn’t do a Blaugust event. I had allowed the naysayers to convince me that I was doing more harm than good with this event. That entire year was a rough one for me, but by the time 2018 rolled around… I had so many people come out of the woodwork to tell me how much they missed Blaugust and hoped that I would be running one that year. It was really that moment that lit a fire in me to keep me moving forward in spite of how exhausted I might be. So while we missed a year… there was also 2020 when we technically had two Blaugust events… one of which we called Blapril and the other gave us the prompt list.

Every year I seem to try something slightly different, while also keeping all of the things that worked well in the past. Whatever year we added Discord was probably the single best change for the longevity of the event. The first Blaugust was run more or less through the ill-fated Anook platform, and they even went so far as to sponsor an award in 2015 the second year. I still think that platform idea was really cool and is sort of what we are trying to do with Gamepad now… carving out a community. The “new thing” this year is that I set up a Blaugust account on Mastodon, and the idea is that I will use it to boost all of the posts that come across with the #Blaugust2023 hashtag. I tried to do this, but I always sort of hated spamming everyone that had no clue what the fuck Blaugust was from my personal account. This also gives folks an option to follow Blaugust without following me… given that I can sometimes be an acquired taste and I know of at least a handful of people who occasionally participate in the event that have zero love for me personally.

Not directly related to Blaugust, but it has been cool to watch Gamepad grow over the last half a year. I think we went live in November of last year, and during that time we’ve picked up a little over 120 accounts, and currently, at the time of writing this, 106 of them are active…. which is a pretty dang good retention rate. Mastodon and the larger Fediverse are really the social media of choice for me. Sure I am putting my thumb on the scale by choosing to run this out of Gamepad, but ultimately it is my event… so I am going to do the thing that I find most comfortable. A lot of bloggers had already moved to the platform so it doesn’t really seem too far-fetched to make it a home base for the event going forward. I’ve posted about the event on Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram… but none of those really feel comfortable to me. I am not sure how many folks we will get from those anyways.

I think my hope in running it out of Mastodon, is that it will introduce us to an entirely new community of folks. We already have several sign-ups from folks who had no connection to our core group before we started talking about it on the fediverse. That is EXTREMELY exciting for me. My hope has always been for this thing to spread to different communities and spider out so that we have LOTS of blogs active and happily posting away throughout the year. In this year of internet bonfires… and the if not death of Twitter… the mutation of it into something I no longer want to be associated with… having a place to call your own is way more important than it ever was before. I had the realization that because of my blog… I am exceptionally easy to find. If I lost touch with someone along the way, they can always find me here. For most folks… the tapestry of connections that we have woven between each other is relatively tenuous. If you put your faith in corporate social media as your digital sense of place… then when you lose one of them you also lose your foundation. While self-hosted bloggers have gone out of fashion… we represent a sense of permanency and stability that is hard to remove.

Anyways… did not mean to ramble off in the direction of techno-religiosity… but there you have it. I feel like we need to take back control of more of our internet presence. Gamepad for example is run by folks that I trust and I believe in… and if something needs to happen to it, the portability of Mastodon allows me to migrate elsewhere. Worse comes to worse I can fire up my own private instance just for me, and continue to truck along with the same social connections. My blog is my digital front step, and anyone can find me here along with any of the other connections that I might be active on. That is a weird peace of mind in this time of digital uncertainty.