Friends… it has been kind of a shit week. First, there was the whole crisis with my left eye that started on Saturday, continued through Sunday, and got some minor resolution on Monday. I still have trouble seeing out my eye but at least I know with some measure of certainty that I am not going blind in an immediate timeframe. Then on Tuesday, we lost power for about four hours, which thankfully happened after we had both gotten ready for the day so we did not have to do all of that in the dark. Then last night around 7 pm I was chilling out and working on the Nayos story quest and got disconnected. We lost internet and it has been out for almost 14 hours at this point. I was a dumbass and decided to just go ahead and go to bed around 7:30 since everything I wanted to do required internet access.
This caused me to wake up around 12:30 with no sign of being able to get back to sleep. Normally in this case I would go upstairs and fuck around in some game for 30 mins to an hour until I got tired again, but without internet that was off the table. Then at 2:30, I got a call that there was an issue with one of the applications my team supports… which kept me on the call until 3:30 at which point I attempted to get some sleep. I struggled to get back to sleep but managed to do so around 4 am and then the alarm went off at 5:30. I decided to ignore getting up and walking and ignore my normal routine and sleep in until 7 am. Only to wake up to find that we still did not have internet.
Right now I am tethered to my phone, which I am thankful is an option. We’ve always bought carrier-unlocked phones so that they do not come with any of the “disableware” and bloat that carrier phones have on them. One of the things that gets disabled is the ability to Tether and then you have to pay your provider to sell that default functionality back to you. Buying unlocked phones allows you to tether with impunity and there is nothing that your provider can really do to stop you. Anyway were it not for this functionality I would be in considerably worse shape because I can function fairly well running off a cellular connection.
Today is the start of a five-day weekend… and I need things to stop being awful for a while. I need to start being able to see normally again and I need to have power and internet function like they are supposed to during that break. Next Tuesday is my Birthday and then Wednesday we are off for Juneteenth so I opted to just take Monday as well because it seemed silly to work that one day before having two more off. Anyway… not going to syndicate this one since it is mostly just me ranting about first-world problems.
I hope you have had a better week than I have. I also hope you have an amazing weekend.
Morning Folks! I’ve loved toys and assorted video game/nerd culture kitsch for my entire life. The problem that I have run into is that I just don’t really have any more room for anything… and I am not exactly displaying what I do have in a reasonable manner. This has deeply curbed my desire to pick up things that I otherwise think would be cool. Don’t get me wrong… my office is stacked full of nonsense that I could not pass up and that I have not had a chance to deal with. For example… the pile of “mini” consoles behind me that I got on closeout but never really did anything with. Thing is… there is a specific brand of YouTube material targetting folks just like me. I’ve been collectively referring to this as NostalgiaTube which is centered around Toy Stores, Video Game Stores, and assorted Garage Sale and Flea Market pickers. This morning I am going to share some of my favorites in this relatively broad genre.
Toy Federation
This is probably my favorite channel of the bunch because it is also potentially the most professionally run. Essentially this is the marketing wing of a very popular toy store of the same name in Greer, South Carolina. The channel is sort of a “day in the life” type view of running the store and evaluating trade-ins and collections that come through. This style reminds me quite a bit of the way that Alpha Investments felt when I got heavily into that channel during the “Rudy owns a Store” phase of that channel. As a result of folks bringing in a non-stop chain of collections, you end up getting to see so many items that summon forth “member berries”.
Would I love to have a showroom full of complete collections of all of the things I remember fondly? Hell yes. Will I ever actually collect this stuff? Very unlikely. Also of note, this store and team are behind Retro-Toy Convention which also lends its way to seeing a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff of setting up a convention. Probably the best aspect of this is it is part of a “Saturday Morning Cartoons” block of channels that tend to release content each week on Saturday mornings and I often watch the latest video while eating my breakfast.
Eternia Dreams
Eternia Dreams is another channel that is based out of a Toy Store that has a location in Gettysburg Pennsylvania and another in Westminster Maryland. In addition to two storefronts… one of which that is located in a still functional mall, there is a lot of footage as the team goes and sets up as vendors at toy conventions. As the name would indicate, the channel focuses a lot on the Masters of the Universe toy line but largely covers pretty much everything else that is out there. I’ve seen way more focus on newer toylines on this channel than say Toy Federation, which is sort of cool. Mythic Legions for example is a hot property targetting these independent toy sellers. Again however probably the most interesting aspects are the “day in the life” stuff focused on what it takes to keep the stores and convention business running.
Pixel Dan
This is a channel that I found through some of the other channels and tends to be focused on a lot of stuff that was coming out when I was in high school or college, so a bit younger than me. I think Pixel Dan is probably most widely known for his work as an archivist on a Masters of the Universe photo reference guide, or at least that is where I first heard his name. There are a number of tomes that have been created featuring some of the best reference photos for various figures and equipment along with assorted variants, which end up getting used by the various toy stores to “complete” disparate parts of figures. The channel itself tends to focus on his trips out to find various stuff with his family and is edited in a sort of montage style where he talks about things from his studio/office and then shows examples. Worth watching, especially if it looks like it is going to be something interesting. He also visits a lot of other toy stores around the country giving you a glimpse into what each of them is like.
Froggy Flips
Froggy Flips similarly gets a lot of traction but instead of visiting stores he largely visits big regional toy and vintage shows. He is based out of Greenfield Indiana and tends to cover a lot of the upper Midwest area as he roams around. What I dig about him is his focus on Madballs and assorted early Horror and Monster toys. He also seems like a genuinely cool dude and comes off as very respectful towards everyone he meets. I appreciate that he has a following but his videos are peppered with moments of him stopping to have a chat with a viewer. He also seems to genuinely get to know all of the vendors that he interacts with, but I guess if you are making a lot of regional shows you are going to see a lot of the same faces over and over. I remember when I worked at a card and comic shop in high school, we saw the same vendors time and time again when we worked shows. I often have videos like this on in the background while I am doing something else and it is cool to see the various stuff that he finds.
Little BIG Robots
This one is a bit of a departure from the rest, mostly because it is less a show about acquiring vintage toys and instead about what is new or interesting that is currently on the market. Some of you who have been around the MMORPG blogging world for a while will know Beau Hindman and Little Big Robots is what he is up to these days. He takes a less holistic approach towards toy collecting and instead focuses on the things that he really likes for one reason or another. I don’t watch every video that comes out but if something interests me like the D&D remake line for example that I linked above, it is well worth a watch.
Retro Rick
Shifting from Toy Collecting to Video Games I thought I would throw in a few different channels that are similarly feeling. Retro Rick is effectively a picking channel that sort of branched out into a bunch of different things. Last year he purchased a game store in his area and as such has branched out into another channel called Retro Rick’s Game Point and from that point on… the two channels have sort of blended a bit where they are part “day in the life” of running a video game store and part going out into the field and hunting for stuff either for personal collection or to restock the shelves. Mostly a large chunk of why I dig this channel is because he exists in my area. It is not out of the realm of possibility to go up to Conway Arkansas at some point to visit the store. Additionally, he has hit a bunch of stuff in the Bentonville>Rogers>Fayetteville sprawl which is an area I am in way more often.
Arkansas Picker
Lastly, there is the Arkansas Picker which I found through Retro Rick, and I am mostly including it because the above video is from a show in my area that I did not even know existed. I would have potentially gone to it just to look around. As the name would indicate the channel is way more about going out and “picking” for items but there is also a little bit of running a booth in a flea market. He had some issues where folks stole from his booth and there was a whole saga of trying to secure it better while also tracking down the thief. I’ve just started watching the channel and again don’t watch every single video but given he operates in my neck of the woods it is interesting to see places I have been before.
Do You Watch NostalgiaTube?
Do you partake of NostalgiaTube? Are there any really cool channels that I am missing? The other thing that I really dig are found footage from the 80s/90s of folks walking around toy stores or just stores in general. I miss the existence of the Toy Store. When Toys R Us was a thing, I went there probably once a month at a minimum just to roam around and see what was there. I dig that there are independent stores that are stepping into that niche, but I do miss the existence of giant walls of toys in physical stores. Nothing used to be as magical as getting to roam around one of those stores and spend your birthday money. Anyways different post from my normal posts but thought someone out there might enjoy it.
Good Morning Folks! I guess I will probably keep giving health updates at the start of posts for a bit. So far there isn’t a lot of change from yesterday. I think maybe having chunks of my vision occluded periodically by floaters is just my new normal. Most of the time I can get used to it but then every so often something moves around in there and it feels like I am losing my mind. Anyway, I am stable and thankfully my right eye continues to function normally. This morning I thought I would tackle a topic that I have been poking around with for a while… and that is using a third-party bridge to connect my Fediverse account to BlueSky and my BlueSky to the Fediverse. This is not as straightforward as I would have hoped, but I am going to talk about how this has worked so far.
In the great social media shakeup of 2022 I wound up in a position where I only really care about two networks. The vast majority of people that I want to keep in touch with exist on either the Fediverse aka Mastodon or on BlueSky. Both of these are platforms that claim to be federated, with Mastodon being more open and wild west about this statement and BlueSky being more proprietary and authoritarian about their implementation of this concept. The dream is simple… I want to be able to use my Gamepad.club account which is the one that feels most like home to me, and talk to all of my friends over on BlueSky without really needing to ever log into that client. I “live” in the Fediverse and that is my home now, but I still want the ability to keep a foot in the other domain… but in a perfect world, I would be able to never actually leave my home to see those folks.
While the perfect scenario of ActivityPub and the AT protocol just working together seamlessly does not exist, various sites that act as a bridge between the two networks do. The idea is pretty straightforward, if you have an account on the Fediverse you can follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy and it will create a faux account for you over on Bluesky. For example the BlueSky account that copies all public content from my Mastodon account is @belghast.gamepad.club.ap.brid.gy following a predictable pattern based on what your handle and instance name is. The other direction works similarly and if you are primarily on BlueSky and want folks on the Fediverse to be able to follow you then you would follow @ap.brid.gy and all of your public posts on BlueSky will flow to the other network. Similarly, my BlueSky Account copied over to the Fediverse can be found at @belghast.com@bsky.brid.gy which does not have a proper Fediverse profile and just links directly to BlueSky instead.
This is without a doubt an imperfect solution. The first problem is that the average length of a Fediverse post is MUCH longer than BlueSky currently allows. So even when I am trying to be brief with my thoughts, the end result when it transfers across the wire ends up getting truncated more often than not. The post ends up awkwardly linking back to my Gamepad.Club post so that someone can view the rest of it… feeling very unnatural. Like I said above this also only works with “public” posts, so I pretty regularly limit my visibility on Mastodon to “Followers Only” which allows me to post things without spamming my local server feed. These will not translate across the bridge because they are not fully public posts, and similarly, I don’t think this works at all for accounts that are set to private on either side of the connection.
So while a very imperfect solution… it is still better than nothing. Will it ever live up to my dream of being able to have full connectivity to my friends on both sides of this federation protocol divide? Probably not if simply because it requires someone to take action on either network to allow themselves to be “findable”. Following an account does not seem like a lot, but it is enough friction to keep a lot of folks from ever doing it because it is not the default state of the network. This is an opinion informed by years of watching folks use the default client for Twitter despite it being full of advertisements, having a mangled timeline, and not having half of the features that the third-party ones did. The default state is as much as most folks will ever interact with these social networks, and as much as I would love to have my BlueSky friend discoverable from my home account on Gamepad.club, I figure it will only be a handful of edge cases that ever adopt this technology.
Hopefully, this demystifies the process a bit. It really is as simple as following either the Mastodon account if you want to bridge to Bluesky, or the Bluesky account if you want to bridge to Mastodon. I will warn you however that it takes a few days for things to really get up and running properly. Give it time and before long your posts will start beaming over to the other network within a few minutes of originally posting it. If you have any questions feel free to ping me as I am still regularly checking both networks.
Hey Folks! I’m getting around to a bit of a late start because we lost power for a few hours this morning essentially throwing my entire day into disarray. I figure I probably owe you all an update to yesterday’s post, so I am going to attempt to condense things down a bit. I had an eye doctor appointment at 1:20 and they poked and prodded me and performed maybe the most powerful dilation I have ever had… to largely arrive at a conclusion. The viscous fluid in your eye hardens around the edges of your eye and when a chunk of this breaks off it becomes a “floater”. The fluid also hardens around the retina and when a chunk breaks off from there… it can cause all of the same effects of a retina detaching save for the permanent curtain of vision loss sweeping across your field of vision.
This is what happened to me and now I am dealing with the ramifications of having some pretty massive new floaters. Given time they should break down into smaller and smaller pieces to where my brain can largely ignore them… much like my other existing floaters. Until this happens though I am basically stuck dealing with the constant desire to wipe something out of my eye. Ultimately my eye apparently looks healthy… or healthy for someone who is hyper nearsighted and very much legally blind without correction. Basically, I am waiting to either get used to it or for the impact to lessen because there is not much that they can do to help me out.
In other news, I got my Maelstrom upgrade this morning and can now buy loot boxes… which means that I will start churning through more gear to clear out my banks. I’ve already dumped my first round of 60,000 seals into three loot boxes and got a few pets that I did not already have. Now I am going to start trying to ease back into tanking on my Warrior. Right now I am level 85 and have been mostly leveling through a daily pvp roulette and a round of hippo dailies. Of note this is a super chill way to put on a single level in a job every single day. However, I really want to dive more into some of the other roulettes and get back used to tanking for strangers. The whole full inventory and full on seals problem was an obstacle that I am now pushing past.
Instead of playing Final Fantasy XIV, I spent much of my evening roaming around in Guild Wars 2. Yesterday was the reset day for weekly wizard chores, and one of them this week was to complete 10 events, and more specifically to do 5 Bounties in the Domain of Vabbi. I figured the later in the week I waited, the harder it would be to get a bounty group. So I spent about two hours roaming around with a commander taking down bosses. I stayed far longer than I needed because I figured I would pay it forward a bit for folks just now joining the group after I got my five.
I have to say that Commanders are really what makes Guild Wars 2 community what it is. I see the Mentor system in Final Fantasy XIV and it is largely made up of people grinding away trying to get 2000 done so they can get a shiny mount and bragging rights. Commanders in GW2 on the other hand… really get nothing for their time spent save for the undying respect of their community. The effect a commander can have though is absolutely magical. We had a moment last night when someone shouted in map chat asking for help, and our commander veered us all to their rescue. It was fun flying in like the cavalry as a group of 20ish players on wildly differently skinned skyscales. When a commander is leading, they always have a number of players following in their wake who may not have actually joined the squad and we absolutely had some of this going on last night.
One of the other weeklies involved doing the Gyala Delve meta event, so I spent a good chunk of the night working my way through all of that with a squad. I did not like the Wizard chores at all when they were first released, but at some point, they updated to be a bit better. Now they serve as a bit of a guidebook in determining which areas of content I focus on, and I dig that. It had been months since I last set foot in Gyala Delve, but going through the motions made me remember how much I actually enjoyed this meta-event. It will never be as epic as something like an Auric Basin or a Dragon’s End… but it is still a fun romp filled with an outrageous amount of loot. So much so that when I indentified my gear I filled my inventory entirely.
Now that I have completed the Maelstrom unlock though, I think I am probably going to focus on some dungeoning this evening. I really want to work on getting Warrior geared up and ready for Dawntrail. There is something about stepping back into playing Warrior that makes me happy. It feels a bit like coming home. I liked Paladin quite a bit, but I had mained Warrior all the way through Shadowbringers and it is really a key part of my FFXIV identity. Especially now that Overpower is an AOE attack… it basically destroys any reason why I was so focused on playing Paladin. Removing the benefits of running out of tank stance was also a huge boon to me, because I was one of those players that hated stance dancing.
Anyways! Thanks to everyone who shared their words of support yesterday. I am going to be okay and I am slowly stepping down from the sheer panic state that I had been over the weekend. I think it will just take some time to adjust to having some more obtrusive “floater friends” along for the ride.
