Random Buy Fail

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I am a huge fan of “random buy” videos, especially the ones done by Booster Tutor and Tragic MTG. The idea is simple, buy a random pile of Magic the Gathering cards and mine for gold. So when I was posting my blog yesterday on Facebook, I saw the marketplace link in the sidebar and randomly decided to search for MTG cards in my area. I found one that looked interesting. Now the goal of a random buy tends to be to find someone who knows nothing about Magic the Gathering so that they have not sifted out anything worthwhile.

So when I happened across this image it seemed to fit the bill. You see a random assortment of cards improperly stored in what appears to be a cassette tape carrying case. Upon zooming in I saw an assortment of set symbols from a specific area somewhere in the Lorwyn and Alara block era so somewhere around the 2008 to 2010 time frame. This is an era in Magic with a lot of really interesting cards. The seller originally had a price of $125 for the whole bundle, which I knew was completely unreasonable and over the course of a few messages talked them down to $40 which I felt was a reasonable amount to gamble away on potentially nothing.

I arranged to meet them on my way home at a QuikTrip, aka a very busy and very public gas station in case they were nefarious. I tend to always do my Craigslist purchases at some QuikTrip because you are guaranteed to have a massive number of people coming in and out. When I pulled up I saw a very mad-maxian vehicle loaded to the brim with various bits of scavenged stuff. They had parked under the awning of the adjacent car wash, and while I was dealing with the wife the husband was rooting through the vacuum trash cans to see if anyone threw away anything useful. The cards had been transplanted from the tape carrying case to the bottom of a family sized cheerios box making this seem all the stranger.

The heartbreaking part of the story is that the cards had seemingly either been out in the elements or stored in a really humid environment. They reportedly came from a storage unit, but I am guessing one of the ones that is more storage shed than climate controlled environment. What was left was a weird mix of cards from that era. Of the likely 700 cards probably 300 or so are in reasonable condition. Large chunks of them however were stuck together or just completely toast. The Thornbite staff for example would have been worth around $8 were it not completely garbaged out. There were a bunch of things that were in the dollar or two range but almost all of them had some measure of damage.

I am guessing that the Yu-Gi-Oh cards probably came from a different source and they just lumped them together with the Magic cards because they looked “similar”. They were in much better shape but also largely worthless because they all seemingly came from some unlimited series. I’ve never even held a Yu-Gi-Oh card before now and I am realize they really are crappy quality. The artwork is not good and they are printed on what feels like the same sort of card stock as business cards. I am however super disappointed that the Beaver Warrior isn’t worth something for at least kitch value.

The reality is… I just wasted $40 on a questionable lot of Magic the Gathering cards. However as a result I have a fun story about that time I bought cards in a cheerio box. One thing that I thought of after the fact is that I really should have been wearing some sort of gloves while sorting through the cards because god only knows what sort of things were growing on them. I thoroughly washed my hands afterwards in hopes that maybe I didn’t get some sort of harmful fungus on me. Do I think the Facebook seller screwed me? No not really because I legitimately don’t think that they knew what the hell they had. They also tried to throw in some 80s non-sports cards that were badly warped because all cards are similar right?

The truth is I think that they did some quick googling on what the hell Magic the Gathering was and saw that some cards are worth hundreds of dollars and went with that on their initial pricing, but were all too happy to be talked down a bit. I read them as junkers that are constantly looking for the next thing that they might be able to sell for some cash. It is a lifestyle that you see a lot around here of folks who are at flea markets on the weekend selling everything from electronics to novelty shower curtains. Anything that might be valuable to someone gets picked up and carried along for the journey, and the vehicle told the tale of a serious picker. Would I do this again? Probably. It was at the very least entertaining.

Kind Words and the Chillest Beats

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This weekend on the podcast Tam tipped me off to something called Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to), which started as a humble monthly bundle exclusive game in July but is now available through other platforms like Steam. Weirdly it doesn’t actually seem to be purchasable on the Humble store, just through that one bundle. The biggest challenge about the game is that I am not entirely certain it qualifies as a game, but is instead more of an experience. I realize that is not exactly selling it strongly yet, but hang on and stay with me.

The idea is sorta simple. You are a character sitting in a room listening to this radio that plays the chillest of music, and as you sit there paper airplanes come zooming through your room. You can click on them and open them up for a note from some anonymous stranger on the internet. The catch however is that the notes are supposed to be positive or helpful. It might be a kind word, a favorite quote or even a recipe for some excellent brownies. The notes themselves are heavily policed to keep from allowing anything to disrupt the friendly ecosystem of chillaxing.

Your interaction is through Ella the Mail Deer, which is super shocked that you have never had a Mail Deer before. She folds your notes into airplanes, and in the case of requests which I will get into later she serves as a go between to keep the whole arrangement private and secure. The idea being you are placed in this box where everything you say is kept secret, and not subtly nudged in the direction of positivity rather than negativity. The thing is it works, just a few moments into the experience and you find yourself being willing to share advise or stories with complete strangers, or at least I did.

The most basic interaction is to send a note out to the world via paper airplane. There is no interaction involved with these and they just blast your comment out to the world. I’ve opened dozens and dozens of these and not a single one so far has been anything bordering on toxicity. The internet has taught me that anonymity is a bad thing… but generally speaking those relationships are when only one side is anonymous. When both you and your audience are anonymous, and you are placed in a box and told to do good things… weirdly people seem to do exactly that.

The other kind of interaction is that you can make or read requests from others. These are situations where the other person is wanting some sort of feedback to something they are going to say. As a result you get 14 lines worth of text instead of the usual 7 lines on a paper airplane. Reading these confessions if you will invoked two different reactions. Firstly it made me realize that so many people have exactly the same fears, which sort of binds us all together. Secondly I started wanting to share my own wisdom with these folks, or whatever passes for wisdom.

You find yourself trying to help out in situations where there really isn’t a clear answer. I can tell a lot of the people I am reading notes from are significantly younger than me, and at age 43 I have gone through a lot of these same experiences. For example the one that I am responding to in the above screenshot is someone bemoaning their friends getting involved with relationships and other things that make them no longer available to them. This happens and it is a part of the natrual flow so I attempted to summarize that concept in a note with the advise to keep putting yourself out there to meet new friends. I went through this especially as my friends started having kids and dropping off into a void that they are only now starting to emerge from.

There is also a low-key sticker collecting mini-game where when you reply to a request you can attach a sticker to the bottom. Everyone starts with one of the random stickers, I started with the blobfish sticking its tongue out. So when I wrote replies I always remembered to attach the sticker because as soon as you get a sticker you can start sending it out as well. When someone has replied to one of your requests you are given the opportunity to attach a sticker as a thank you, and as you get more stickers you sorta developer a larger vocabulary of options for thanking other players.

The only negative about the “game” is that you wind up losing time while sitting here responding to things. This is in part why AggroChat yesterday was so late getting out because I just kept clicking on paper airplanes or responding to requests. I even shared some of my own fears in request form and got back some pretty cogent responses. This as a whole is a really interesting social experiment and it seems to be working. I greatly approve of their inclusion of a Mental Health Resources button on pretty much any page where you can put input. That said in many ways this is a form of therapy as you send your troubles off into the void and get back a satchel full of positivity in return. If you too suffer from depression or anxiety… or just have a bunch of worries, I would suggest checking Kind Words out. I definitely feel better after spending a little time in this super chill isolation chamber.

AggroChat #268 – Chatroulette but Wholesome

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Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we have a handful of things to talk about that are not World of Warcraft Classic and were smart enough to start with those.  First up Ash has been playing a lot of Fire Emblem: Three Houses and seemingly Tam and Ammo are stuck at the same point before things get interesting.  From there we talk about Greedfall and confronting the legacy of colonialism in a fantasy Action RPG. Tam talks a bit about Kind Words, something that is not exactly a game but is most definitely a joyful experience that has conspired to make me late getting the podcast out this morning.  Finally we talk at length about World of Warcraft Classic and some of the design differences we are noticing between it and Retail.

Topics Discussed

  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses
  • Greedfall
  • Kind Words
  • World of Warcraft Classic
    • Zone and Dungeon Design
    • Sound Design

Original Blog Post on AggroChat.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Fun with Irradiated Sludge

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Last night I participated in something and will pay today for it. I’ve kept a fairly firm rule that I try not to get engaged in much within Classic after about 8 pm CST. The reasoning being that I generally head to bed around 9:30 pm and go do my winding down activities before falling asleep. Very few dungeons take less time than a minimum of an hour and a half. Gnomeregan was one that I had expected would take roughly 2 hours, and was ultimately right. When I got home however we had all of the members of a group minus one player, that was expected to be logging in soon… so I allowed myself to commit to tanking.

The challenge there is that soon was a little longer than I expected and we had not started the instance until about 8:40… which had us leaving the instance around 10:40 two full hours later. It was a lot of fun, but I also need to not allow myself to get pulled into this practice on the regular because I definitely can feel its toll this morning, as I am a little groggier and creakier than I normally am. 5 am comes really really early. There was a time when I was in the habit of going to bed at midnight every night, but I have gotten out of that habit and it is probably for the better health wise. Classic and timezones are conspiring to try and shift that however.

I think everyone has memories of Gnomeregan being a giant pain in the butt, but to be honest I wasn’t exactly sure why until setting foot into the dungeon last night. There are a bunch of mechanics that just conspire to make the player suffer. Everything seems significantly higher aggro than most areas, and there are a bunch of “gotcha” mechanics that allow what was a stable pull to snowball with a large number of adds quickly. There is also the deep level range of the stuff at the top of the zone being level 25 and the final content being around 36. That deep level range is felt significantly as you gain confidence on the early packs and start paying for it later on the final trench clear to Thermaplugg.

For the most part I had been praising the fact that we had the old feel with some of the more modern conveniences of reasonable pathing. Pets for example do a good job of not pulling everything in the zone if you hop down off something. For the most part they now just despawn and you summon them back. Chain aggro also had seemingly been less of a thing, that was until getting into Gnomeregan. While doing the final clear the mobs are packed so tightly between two sides of a trench and the basin of the trench… that things get really twitchy making it extremely easy to wind up with a massive train of Dark Iron Dwarves seemingly coming from out of nowhere.

The above image shows what happened to us twice as we started pulling that last stretch. At first we were trying to hug the lefthand wall and pull only the mobs along that catwalk, and managed to get a massive train from the trench. Then we opted to pull our way down the trench and had almost reached the bottom… when we got a massive train coming from either side. There was no fighting through the sheer volume of mobs that came at us. The first time we had shaman reincarnation to get us back up and running, but the second time we remembered the back door to the instance and the fact that ghosts can apparently run through doors. We had the key in our inventory from a previous encounter and were able to get back down to the Thermaplugg area rather quickly.

We successfully completed all of the quests associated with Gnomeregan that were available to the horde, and I finished off one level and managed to make a little bit of a dent into the next. Another funny thing happened on the way to the irradiated cesspool however. We were waiting on the boat at Ratchet and up rolls another Undead player named Blodghast. We were talking about it in party chat when he sent me a tell saying something to the effect that “we might be cousins”. I need to friend the character and actually run some stuff with them given they have a good taste in names.

All in all it was a really fun night, but I need to ration this whole staying up way later than I intended thing. I guess Thursday is a reasonable night to do this on given that my Fridays are generally fairly light. Given that it is Friday however we might do some more late night shenanigans because I am starting to collect quests for Scarlet Monastery. I do feel a bit bad because Grace is going to more or less be out of commission for the next three weeks. By that point I will have leveled well out of her optimal range, but I plan on running a bunch of dungeons to help her catch back up.