Tales of the Aggronaut

Tarnished Hope

August 30, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday was a bit of a trying day for me personally. I’ve personally been bought into this notion that Mastodon provided a kinder gentler alternative to Twitter, but yesterday largely proved that notion completely wrong. The Fediverse has been the welcome home of the disenfranchised and marginalized, which is awesome since Twitter has not done a great job of protecting that group in any way. However some events happened recently and because of them I am glad that I joined up several weeks ago rather than right now at this time. I was able to see what I thought was the ActivityPub community in its native state, talking about interesting things openly and publicly and willing to friend each other just as easily. I was able to get settled in quickly with the help of a whole slew of people who offered useful advice as I docked myself into a corner of this big maelstrom of interesting things.

I started out on Mastodon.cloud which was a large overflow instance to the original flagship of Mastodon.social. However I quickly realized that maybe being on a big disconnected instance was not the best idea in the world. As such I made the migration to Elekk.xyz which is awesome and started funding the patreon a bit to help out in its maintenance. However when my good friend Liore decided to fire up her own private instance… I found myself making the jump yet again to Nineties.Cafe and I am extremely happy I did. It is sort of this protective bubble where the people I already knew and the friends of those people are hanging out and talking freely about our interests. It has made it very easy to drown out the events that are happening over in “fedi” aka the federated timeline.

Effectively some weeks back Wil Wheaton joined Mastodon and like any denizen of twitter had some difficulty adjusting to the weird mix of things going on here and all of the little social norms that I talked a bit about the other day. However with increasing fervor there was a move to push him off of the platform, and while there are folks who have very valid concerns… most of what I saw regularly in the form of shitposts from Fedi was effectively the consensus of “fuck him for being famous”. As such it felt like a defense coalesced with the goal of pushing the infection out of the system, and in that I saw a lot of behavior that I had seen on Twitter and other social media platforms that is normally targeted at those same disenfranchised and marginalized people that I talked about at the beginning of the post.

Essentially I was watching the bullied become the bullies, and it saddened me greatly. I thought I had found a quiet corner of the internet that functioned the way I remember the internet first feeling during those heady early days of the nineties. I’ve compared Mastodon to early IRC or to the BBS era… but the last couple of days have felt like anything but that. I am not saying that the folks who pushed back are evil or wrong, just that the tactics that they were employing were the exact same thing that I have seen employed against them in the past. The only real comment I have made on the issue was last night.

I guess today yet again proved that we can build a better technology, that has the potential for better community engagement. But we can’t necessarily guarantee that everyone is going to be willing to be better human beings. Human beings still suck, and I welcome the robot overlords that will come after us.

I still have a lot of hope in Mastodon and Pleroma and the rest of the little islands that live in the ActivityPub Fediverse, and I am super glad that I have found my little island full of refugees from the nineties. I just saw a lot of the same behavior that I have on other social media platforms and it made me a little bummed about the whole experiment. However I will keep moving on and keep looking for the good things out there happening. There are needlessly folks who feel safer after yesterdays events, and that is good I guess. I just wish it wasn’t at the cost of reverting to the same flavors of toxic gate keeping that had been used as a weapon against “the other” before. Yesterday just made me think a little too much about this quote from Animal Farm: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Reluctantly Fury

August 29, 2018 by Belghast

This morning is a hard morning, because I am struggling to wake up. I apparently had a way more active night than I realized, because in my mind I slept all the way through. However my wife told me a tale this morning that tells otherwise. Apparently I fell asleep with the television on and at some point during the night she woke up and decided that it should be turned off. The television remote was on the end table on my side of the bed so she proceeded to wake me up and tell me to turn it off. Instead of doing this… I apparently proudly proclaimed that “I peed”. At which point she tried to tell me no.. please turn off the television… to which I again proudly replied “but I already peed”.

This apparently happened a couple more times before I finally reluctantly turned off the television. I remember absolutely none of this happening at all. In my mind I went to bed and slept all the night through without incident, but I am guessing my generally groggy state this morning is due to the fact that I didn’t in fact do that thing. I have been taking a dose of nyquil before going to bed because I have been fighting this nameless crud, and I am wondering if the sleep inducing nature of that… lead to my odd behavior. Regardless it is blogfodder as I call it, and like so many things I probably shouldn’t tell you… I am telling you anyways.

Last night I managed to get the Demon Hunter to 114 and finish out the quests in Vol’dun. At this point I have moved him on to Nazmir which is a zone I never quite finished on the Warrior before getting caught up in the madness of world questing. As I was winding down on the Demon Hunter I decided to make one more pass on the Warrior to see if there were any quests up that I absolutely had to do. It was around this point that I decided to try out Fury in proper and get my bars set up. Now at this point I don’t have a great combo of weapons for Fury as I am have a spear from world questing that came in around 320 and an axe that came from a world boss I believe at 289ish. It is good enough to get started, but generally speaking I have had hell getting weapons this entire expansion so far. I was hoping that onehander fury was a thing again and I could just drop some fist weapons crafted by my leatherworker, but that is apparently not a thing.

The shocking truth is… Fury is amazing. It feels good and shockingly feels like I have more moment to moment survival than I do as a protection warrior. Basically this is now my world questing form and will probably run dungeons as such also to help build out the rest of my gear. This is the expansion where apparently I am maining Fury on the Warrior, however that is not enough of a consolation prize to give up my mission to level the Demon Hunter and tank on it. It does at least make me feel like maybe I didn’t completely waste the first two weeks of this expansion leveling a character that would be permanently shelved during this expansion. Maybe just maybe at some point they will apply some tweaks to the way protection feels and I can dust off the sword and shield.

Another thing that I poked my head into last night was Destiny 2, and for starters the lighting model feels totally different as evidenced by the way this ship looks. As far as the changes… I am still wrapping my head around what weapons do what. What I thought was going to happen was that we could put any weapon in any slot. What actually happened was that weapons are still divided by Kinetic, Energy and Power slots and then to confuse things further… the weapons are split by what sort of ammunition they use being primary, special or heavy. Fusion Rifle, Sniper Rifle and Shotgun all now are counted as special weapon types and are divided between the first and second slot. What I had hoped was that I could run around with Uriel’s Gift in the first slot, Merciless in the second slot, and then a Sword in the third slot. That is not a thing since Merciless and Uriel’s Gift both occupy the same slot.

None of this works exactly how I remembered them explaining it in the first live stream about Forsaken, however I have also not been following the changes terribly close. So technically there probably are ways you could have a shotgun in the first two slots, but I am not sure how viable that is actually going to be. The infusion however works much better to where it is slot based and not weapon type based. That said we still can’t do what we were able to do in TTK era of feeding trash drops from one class to become infusion fuel to push up another class which is unfortunate. Supposedly the changes feel really good, but I am on a mission to level the Demon Hunter so I did not give it that much time. I hope to explore it more over the long weekend break.

Abandoning Warrior

August 28, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve loved the Warrior class since the first time I saw one tank a raid. Back then I was attempting to tank with my Paladin during the “seal of rage” era and to be able to see the way the warrior could just do everything better than I could was impressive. I rapidly started leveling a Warrior up with my good friend Finni as she leveled her priest, and before long I was tanking all of the Late Night Raiders off night activities like Zul’Gurub. When Burning Crusade was released I used it as an opportunity to shed Hunter as my raiding main and embrace the life of the tank. It was a good choice and I was largely happy with it until the tail end of Wrath of the Lich King when I started straying from the path by playing a Death Knight. I kept on that Deathlord path up until Warlords when they reached a point where they felt horrible, and with that I shifted back to my original love and have been a Warrior main again ever since.

As it stands right now… Warriors are not in a great place. I’ve always prided myself on being the tank that was the most healable, in that I tried my damnedest to level out the amount of damage that I am taking so that I can be healed in a predictable manner. That is no longer a protection warrior, in fact as I have seen so far they seem to be the absolute worst at taking damage spikes due to a combination of all of our active mitigation abilities being on the GCD and not being able to maintain 100% up time due to cool downs. Playing a warrior tank right now is a stressful mess in a manner that it shouldn’t be at the low gear levels and challenge levels of content that I am focused on. I always feel like I am rage starved and essentially have to choose between active mitigation and dealing damage, and the more I sway towards damage reduction…. the more trouble I have holding aggro on large packs of things.

This is exacerbated by the fact that I cannot find a weapon to save my life and finally had to plunk down 11k on a weapon that I know will be replaced almost immediately just because it is something better than the 273 weapon that I had been using. To make things worse… even in the open world while doing World Quests… Warrior tanks feel like a mess. It is a constant juggling act trying to keep myself alive while slowly chewing down the health of mobs. Sure I can solo bigger content, but it requires me to be constantly vigilant and never miss an active mitigation… or simply pull a ton of trash mobs to make sure I can always be killing something and proccing another 20% heal from Victory Rush. Basically warrioring right now is the opposite of fun for me and it is at this point that I think I am stepping away… feeling like I wasted the last few weeks on a class that I just don’t want to play.

Instead I am spending my play time right now leveling the Demon Hunter because their tank ability is just complete nonsense. They are grossly overpowered and I think honestly I am okay with that… because it feels like a fun class to play. At this point I am 113 and have tanked Underrot… one of the dungeons that has just straight up murdered me as a warrior. It was only last night that I realized that the 8.0 patch reset my talents… I was apparently doing all this with absolutely no talent choices. It is nonsense and I cannot underline that point enough, but it is fun and it allows me to have a relatively stress free play experience. Sure I have to be a damned dirty elf… but at least my Demon Hunter looks cool.

The truth is at some point Demon Hunters are going to get the ban hammer… and that is frustrating because they feel like tanks in general used to feel. Sure it took you forever to kill something, but you didn’t have to worry about incoming damage while you were slowly chewing away at mob health. More importantly than anything… Demon Hunters right now are the easiest to keep alive for the healers and knowing that as a Warrior I am stressing out my healer… stresses me out. I took Friday off and I plan on using it to do a very hard push of the Demon Hunter to 120 and start gearing it. The tanking is enjoyable enough that I am likely going to just start pugging dungeon runs for gear immediately or grabbing anyone in guild that needs gear for an instant queue.

I am deeply saddened that I have reached this point, with warriors. I am even more deeply saddened that if you go on the Warrior forums you see a lot of people claiming nothing is wrong. If the healers tell me Warriors are in general harder to heal than any other Tank class and they consider them bottom of the rung… then I believe them. They are the ones keeping my ass alive and I don’t like the notion that my choice of class makes their lives worse. I like Fury just fine so at least my Warrior won’t go to waste… I just need to acquire two weapons… which is its own challenge. I guess I could craft two fist weapons with my leatherworker Demon Hunter and use that as a starting place. I can only hope that Warriors return to glory at some point in the near future.

Fediverse: Things I Wish I Knew Earlier

August 27, 2018 by Belghast

First off this morning you are getting a picture of Dolly and Dot for no apparent reason other than the fact that they are adorable and they should be your best friends too. Secondly this is going to largely be a Mastodon/Fediverse related topic, so your mileage may vary. Last week I started off the week with a post about my adventures in the “Federiverse” at that time. After some digging around I apparently used the wrong term, which was confusing given that both got used in equal parts as far as I could see. It turns out Fediverse as a concept dates back to at least 2008, whereas the Federiverse thing doesn’t have its own Wiki page and only really links to hashtags on mastodon… so I have edited my vocabulary to adopt the correct term.

Now I went through this little dance with the naming of the thing, largely because this is a sequence of events you are ultimately going to get used to if you truly blend into the culture on Mastodon and all of the other services using the ActivityPub protocol. Like me you will likely be coming from a background built upon using Twitter or “Birdsite” as a lot of the denizens of the fediverse refer to it as, and that came with a bunch of cultural norms. Mastodon and related services also have a lot of cultural norms and it can be sorta confusing getting adjusted to them. For the most part however folks seem to be genuinely nice about helping new users along the journey.

In gaming there have been several times where I was asked to join a guild or a clan with their own well established doctrine of “normal” behaviors. In many cases the choice was either to adapt to how things worked in that structure or to ultimately branch out and do your own thing. When I go into one of those situations I try and be hyper conscious about my actions and how they might impact others. Similarly I try very hard to not take anything for granted, and ultimately ask for permission rather than assume that I have it. This is also a complimentary mindset for joining Mastodon and making sure that you largely fit in with the flow of things. This morning I am going to talk about a few things that it took me a bit to sort out.

Gaming vs Gameing

One of the things that you are going to encounter as a gamer on Mastodon is that they regularly use an incorrect spelling of the word gaming. It took me a bit to sort this out, because for awhile I thought maybe this was a US English vs UK English sort of thing and maybe some people actually DO legitimately spell it with that E. Eventually I did what I have often done to learn things on the network… I asked the Fediverse and in response it spit back more than a few comments. Ultimately what it comes down to is “Gameing” is sort of their reaction to the “hardcoreification” of the “gamer” identity. There are folks that felt like that identity was co-opted by the super serious and elitist, leaving little ground for the more casual players who just want to enjoy gaming to its fullest without getting caught up in too much epeen braggery.

As a result they started using the misspelled and nonsensical “Gameing” to represent the more pure aspects of the joy that is discovering new and interesting things through video games. Understanding this now you will see me also adopting that hashtag at times when advertising my posts since I am not really the most serious person in nature. I lead off this post with a picture of Dolly and Dot afterall, so I am not exactly hard edge. This honestly dates back to a discussion that has sprung up numerous times in the blogosphere about how to identify a gamer, and if there is such a thing as “casual core”. Instead we can just skip past all of this and use the #gameing bit to indicate which side of that gulf we happen to reside on.

Caption Your Images

One of the things about Mastodon and the Fediverse in general is that they seem to really care about accessibility. What I mean by that is that your content is accessible by both sighted users and the visually impaired that may be using a screen reader app to check their social media. You will hear people talking about making sure to caption your images, but it took me a long while to actually sort out how that works. I thought by simply including text along with my image I was doing that. However once you have uploaded your image you can click on it with your mouse, or finger on a mobile client… and it brings up a box allowing you to had an explicit caption of what the image represents. It is a good habit to get into, but folks are understanding when you simply rush to post something and forget.

Delete and Redraft

Now say you post an image… and you want to fix the fact that you forgot to add a caption. Mastodon has this wonderful feature that is called Delete and Redraft… that is sorta like editing but not quite. Essentially it does what it says… it deletes your original toot and pulls the contents of it back into the editor so you can fix that typo or add that caption. This will of course nuke any interaction that has been done with a toot, but you are going to find that Mastodon is a network of people that don’t place quite as much emphasis on how many “favorites” or “likes” something got.

Using CW/Content Warning Tags

Another thing you are going to see a lot of is the wide and varied uses of the CW tag, or the collapsible [show more] [show less] blocks on posts. I am honestly still sorting out how I want to best use these, because there are a lot of different ways that they get used in the community. Firstly they should always be used if you are going to post NSFW content and when you click the CW button in your client it brings up a box that allows you to describe what sort of content is being posted. Additionally the community prefers that you use these in any situation where your post might trigger someone. For example I used them when I posted a picture of cookies yesterday, just in case someone out there with an eating disorder might be negatively influenced by that posting. I denoted in the description line “food, cookies” as a sort of short hand so people can understand why the tag is happening.

The other usage you will see an awful lot that I also have attempted to adopt myself, is using them to shorten long posts. For example the above image is of my Actively Playing pin on my profile. Without expanding it you just see the text “Actively Playing 2018-08-25” but then if you expand it shows all of the games mentioned and their equivalent hashtags. The interesting thing about CW is that if someone were to search for #MonsterHunter for example… they would eventually find my pinned toot even though the hashtag itself exists behind the block. The only negative of a CW is that it also always hides the visibility of the image. Basically this is the sort of thing you need to play with yourself to determine if you want to use it or not. However you are going to be urged gently (most of the time) to adopt some sort of regular usage of them by the community.

Pronouns

I have to admit here, I have never really put my pronouns in a social media profile not because I am oblivious to the need of such things… but more along the lines that I didn’t really mind whatever pronouns someone opted to using for me. If you want to call me She, it isn’t really going to bother me nor is referring to me as the more neutral Them. However in the middle of a conversation I had someone explain that seeing pronouns in your profile just makes them more comfortable, especially in situations where someone is trying really hard not to make any assumptions about anyone. Again this goes back to trying to ease into the water of a pool that is already full to the brim with people… and if it makes others more comfortable I will absolutely adopt that stance going forward. Similarly I suggest you move in that direction as well, and as such I am also going back and shimming the “he/him” bit into my older social media profiles as I come across them just to help ease the comfort levels of others.

Interact Freely

The other thing of interest about the Fediverse is that no one seems to consider it creepy if you just start commenting on random posts. That is absolutely a thing that happens due to the federated nature of the timeline… people who have no connection to you will find your posts and occasionally comment and no one takes offense to this. You are having a very public conversation and it is accepted that you are basically shouting into an open room, in part because Mastodon gives you the option to post privately or only to your followers along with the more public options. If you can see a post… it means it is perfectly fine for you to chime in on it. It is also perfectly normal to follow random people or boost their toots. This is one of the more refreshing things about the Fediverse in general is that there are not as many weird hangups about interactions. You are expected to branch out and meet new people through interactions, and generally speaking people seem to be way more open as a whole because the various content controls that Mastodon Instance owners have… tends to make it a much safer place for open discourse.

It has been an interesting experiment getting involved with this network. It feels more natural I guess the more I use it, and you too will go through a bit of an adjustment period. Granted I still very much use Twitter and I am not really looking for Mastodon to be a replacement. It is however a vastly different experience and as such I sort of treat it as its own thing. I’ve only scratched the surface of things I could say about my experiences but I figure at this point it is a long enough blog post. I would be curious to hear all of the little idiosyncrasies that you have found in getting adjusted.