Tales of the Aggronaut

The Missing Piece

February 14, 2018 by Belghast

My wife is amazing and if you were expecting a game based post… you are instead getting a second real life post in a row. My wife decided to do this thing in her classroom where each day she would post on the board a note talking about why she enjoyed being their teacher. She likely saw it on pinterest or from one of her other teacher friends but it was a pretty cool idea and a good way to mark the month of February leading up to Valentines day. As is often the case when we got close to go time, she needed a little assistance coming up with something to post on her bulletin board. As I have done countless other times I knocked out something quickly, figured out how to print it across multiple pages and then thought nothing more about it. The above image is what I came up with and it looked pretty good printed on a nice pink paper that she ultimately cut out to put on the white board.

Each morning I go through a specific routine. I get up and take the first shower so that she can sleep a little bit longer. Then I start making the coffee, each of ours to a slightly different order… hers going in a travel mug because she doesn’t like to drink it when it is piping hot. From there I venture upstairs and drink my “probably still piping hot but I don’t actually notice it” cup of coffee and sit down to talk to all of you out there reading this blog. About thirty minutes later my wife hollers up at me telling me to have a good day and I reciprocate. I wrap up my thoughts, post something to the blog and rush around downstairs feeding the animals and doing whatever else needs to be done before I head to work. I am very much a creature of habit.

In February however these stared showing up along the bottom of my monitor. At first I had not really caught on to the scheme because I am dense and also I usually see them first thing in the morning. Each one a little note, along the same idea as the ones in her classroom but directed at me. I am hoping that she does not mind the ones I chose to show, because I had to give an example of how cute they are. This morning I found my favorite candy… a Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg on the Keurig… in my coffee mug… and two upstairs in my chair along with a package of heart shaped butter cookies (also a favorite of mine). The amount of work and detail that she poured into this scheme is both adorable and impressive and while I feel horrible for not coming up with this concept myself… it’s been a delightful experience.

The thing is… I’ve never quite figured out when she has been doing it. Firstly she goes to bed way earlier than I do and when I leave my office to go to bed… there is no note. Generally speaking I wake up when she leaves bed or at least notice it… and I have not been waking up or noticing it. Then when I get upstairs after I take my shower… there are notes or this morning candy. The only thing I can reason is that she must be doing it when I go to the shower and sacrificing some of her warm bed time to make it happen. I would think I would hear someone upstairs given how squeaky our floor boards are… but maybe the sound of the shower drowns it out? Whatever the case it is precious and baffling at the same time.

My wife and I are a really interesting case study of two vastly different people who compliment each other nicely. There are certain ways where we are very much the same, and others that we could not be more different. However at the end of the day the two blend together into a more complete human being than what we had before. I notice this most clearly when she has to travel to go to a convention or something of the sort. There is something missing the entire time she is gone and isn’t really back until she has returned. I don’t sleep well without her laying beside me, and the house feels eerie and cold without knowing she as at a maximum a room or two away. We can be in the same room doing two completely different things… and still feel connected and happy to be around each other.

Recently I went through an exercise at work where we have been attempting to standardize our interview questions. One of the ones that was thrown out and ultimately shot down… was something along the lines of “If money was no object, what would you do with your life?”. The thing is… I had to stop and think about this because in truth other than maybe shifting the way and where I work… I really wouldn’t change much. It really made me realize just how good my life generally is. So much of that is because I have a amazing partner to go through it with. Sure we might be deeply introverted and prone to fits of social awkwardness… but we work. This is our 22nd valentines day, and in August will be our 20th year of marriage. I cannot fathom going through this journey without her. She supports me in the various madness that I find myself engaged in on a regular basis and I try my best to do the same.

While it is cliche’d and the subject of memes… I wish for each of you out there reading this blog the sort of happiness that I seem to have stumbled into. Sure I battle depression on a regular basis, but that is the process of malfunctioning chemicals in my brain and not a by product of my generally awesome existence. My wife fits neatly into the various spots where I am deficient and together we can pretty much take on anything. The stress of dealing with potentially having to spend significant amounts of money yesterday on home repairs brought this home. I felt uneasy and unstable up until the point when I had my wife at my side and then I knew that regardless of any of the circumstances we could handle whatever was coming at us together as a team. So ultimately I hope for each of you that you have someone in your life that makes you better than what you are alone, and that as a team you can take on the world.

Value of a Hot Shower

February 13, 2018 by Belghast

This is going to be one of those posts that likely has no image… or at the very least a completely non-sequitur image. It always feels weird to say “own a house” when in truth the bank owns it and you are just paying it off very slowly. However that is in fact the correct term, and the biggest problem with that equation is that you are on the hook when things go horribly wrong. At this point our house has had most everything major replaced but there are still a few outliers that exist from when the house was built in 1979. Yesterday morning things went horribly wrong and the end result was me taking a very very very cold shower.

For a few weeks we had noticed reduced water pressure in the shower on the hot side and the fact that it was no longer blending the hot and cold water. This lead us to take very quick showers because the water reached scalding temperatures, but was something we more or less were living with. The goal was to somehow make it to spring break and then deal with it then as my wife could be around the house to schedule someone to come check it out. As of yesterday morning however we had no water pressure on the hot side and the only option was a very frosty shower experience, which I opted for… my wife being the smarter of us figured out some other solution.

Now we do have a shower upstairs in what is more or less the “cat bathroom” and where we keep the litter boxes. The only problem there is we have never actually used it and while I have this awesome Tardis themed shower curtain up there… we never actually got a proper shower liner to turn it into a functional experience. This has since been remedied in case we were stuck using that shower until we were able to sort out what was going on. The truth is when I was confronted with the ice cold north of a full on cold shower on a 15 degree outside day… I completely forgot about the upstairs option.

Our heating and air company also does plumbing work, so we opted to call them and see if they could work us in. I did have a fairly busy day of meetings, and my wife decided she was going to get a sub and take the afternoon off so she could deal with that. They originally had us scheduled for some time late afternoon around three or four. I got a call at 10:20 in the morning saying they had an availability if I could meet them there… so as a result I wound up rushing home and taking the afternoon off anyways. The fact that we were both ultimately going to be off at the same time was a bit of a blessing but at first it seemed annoyingly redundant. However with my wife needing to get a last minute sub, we didn’t want to cancel and ultimately screw someone out of a job.

When the plumber got here… he took one look at our 1979 original shower faucet and quite honestly didn’t want to touch it. In modern systems there is a water shutoff valve that goes to the shower and allows you to turn that off separately. In our house so many things were done in a less than intelligent manner, and as a result the only way to shut the shower off is to shut the entire water off to the house. Even this is its own hassle because we have no water main shutoff in the house and instead have to turn it off at the curb. Basically his concern was that he would get into the shower and be unable to fix it…. and have the whole thing basically disintegrate in the process leaving us with no water at all to the house.

His assessment is that we had something jammed inside the shower valve, and that it more than likely came from the hot water heater which in itself says proudly on the unit that it was made in 1974. His remedy was that we ultimately needed to replace the hot water heater to keep this from happening again, and replace the shower. The problem with the second part of that equation is that it would involve either tearing out the existing fiberglass shower surround… or ripping into the wall of our bedroom that backs up to the shower. They would be able to handle cutting the hole, installing a shutoff system and a new shower… but we would need to purchase our own shower fixtures and get someone to take care of putting in an access panel when they had finished.

This was less than a simple process because for the hot water heater… we had to schedule another person to come out and give us the estimate. Thankfully they could come out yesterday and around 1:30 or so they popped in for literally less than ten minutes and via an iPad app emailed us an estimate. Once you added everything up… the shower work, the hot water heater, bringing things up to code and getting the end product inspected it tallied roughly $3000. There was a lot of sticker shock in that equation as well given that a hot water heater at a big box store is in the $500-600 range.

This set us down an alternate path, because if we were looking to spend that sort of money… we wondered what just replacing the shower and having a contractor take care of all of it would cost us. My wife put out a message on Facebook and one of her friends that she trusts mentioned that her brother was a contractor. We called him to see if we could get an estimate on what it would take to just replace the downstairs shower completely given that we have never really liked it. It turned out that while he worked in other towns, he actually lived in our town and could swing by that afternoon.

Within a few minutes of him being there, he decided that we should just try and fix the problem before getting entangled in a bigger project. He balked that the plumber was unwilling to work on this unit and figured it was far better built than he had given it credit for. So he started dismantling the shower faucet all the while my wife and I were hoping things would end up being okay. He got everything taken apart and sure enough… there was a little bit of what looked like paint or maybe thin plastic that was jamming up the valve. With some tweezers he extracted it and then for good measure turned the water on to blow out any other debris.

This caused some minor flooding… but only because the water shot out so hard that it bounced off the back wall of the shower and out through the crack in the door and onto the floor. My wife and I hurried scrambled to get some towels to soak it up but in the grand scheme of things it was a minor hazard to deal with given that the problem was actually being fixed. It took a bit longer to reassemble than to take apart because lining up the screw holes was a little awkward. However within thirty minutes start to finish we had a working shower again.

The funny thing is… he didn’t want to take any money for the work he has just done. We had to basically force him to take some because ultimately his few minutes of time that he thought nothing about… saved us from having to deal with $3000 at that moment. This morning I took the best shower I have taken in years, and it is funny how much better a day goes when the little things like that are working as intended. I think the best part of yesterday is that we now have contact with a really excellent contractor and handyman type for when we need him in the future.

At some point we really would like to properly remodel the bathroom, and I am sure when we do we will give him another call. However for the moment he was absolutely our savior in being willing to take on something that scared the hell out of both of us. Sure we still need to replace a hot water tank and sure we probably should make it so that you can get into the shower from our bedroom via an access panel. All of those things though can now be carefully planned instead of pure blind reactionary mode, which is a huge positive as far as I am concerned.

A Social Weekend

February 12, 2018 by Belghast

It was a pretty great weekend as far as hunting monsters goes. I got to hang out with so many different groups of people and do so many varied things. On Friday night it was all about hanging out with Tam, Ash and Kodra as I was finally up late enough to allow our schedules to align. On Saturday it was all about hanging out with Pizza Maid, Wolfy and Rakuno… and then in a little pre-podcast gaming some more with Tam, Ash and Kodra. Then Sunday I streamed for a bit in the morning between editing two podcasts. Then in the evening I spent quite a bit of time in the evening running around with Sushi Geisha and Smashy doing some high rank egg birb killing among other things. The variety and quality of my company was absolutely the best.

The other thing that really happened this weekend is that I spent a ton of time hanging out with various groups of folks on twitch. I’ve never really acclimatized to that community but right now I am spending a significant amount of time with folks connected to the very awesome casual/positive Moogle’s Pom Tavern. They have all accepted me as one of their own and call me a streamer even though I barely qualify as one. Just to give some shout outs… some of the folks I spent time lurking or actively hanging out in are…

Right now my jam seems to be playing Monster Hunter on the 43 inch 4k monitor while trying to cram a bunch of windows on one of the 23 inch monitors. As a result a lot of the time I have spent soloing, has been hanging out in a twitch stream and occasionally throwing random comments. During the shenanigans of Saturday and Sunday I actually wound up on voice chat and as a result “on stream” with Pizza and Sushi. The world got many opportunities to watch me fail at longswording and miss attacks as monsters shifted on me in combat. It was a lot of fun and I need to sort out a time when I can stream for myself more regularly. I had a lot of fun with the little bit that I did this weekend and the whole Sunday morning is starting to turn into a routine.

As far as Monster Hunter itself… I have now progressed into High Rank hunts but have not done a whole lot of them. I’ve taken down Pukei Pukei which is the gatekeeper of sorts to unlock High Rank, and then taken down Kulu-Ya-Ku a bunch of times to farm bits so I could upgrade to this crazy two handed scimitar of sorts called Last Dance I. I am wearing a mishmash of gear because I basically went to the workshop and crafted whatever the hell I could as soon as I hit high rank. As a result I have 1 piece of Zorah Magdaros gear, 2 pieces of High Rank Bone and 2 pieces of High Rank Alloy gear. This shockingly has wound up being a fairly reasonable set of gear to run around and do stuff with, and the added defense helped a lot as compared to the amount of damage I was taking during the Pukei Pukei fight.

I could go into a bunch of detail about the various hunts I did, but for this morning I am not. The weekend as a whole was all about hanging out with various groups of people for me. That is always the problem I have when it comes to online gaming. There are so many different groups that I want to be hanging out with. I spent a lot of the weekend as a sort of fill in, but still had a blast in doing so. Right now the timing for me is just weird in actually hanging with the AggroChat crew given that the majority are now on the west coast. On most nights they are starting to get active around 9 pm… as I am starting to wind down and prep to head to bed. This has made organizing anything in a time other than the weekend a pretty fraught experience.

The whole grouping experience in Monster Hunter does not make this easier, given that for much of the weekend folks were having trouble joining specific sessions. I know last night we kept trying to get a 4th in to help them with some quests… but the sessions kept timing out. What I crave the most for Monster Hunter World is some form of a viable friends list, with the ability to invite to parties from it… and even more importantly have a Diablo 3 style “request to be invited” system. I hope as time passes that the whole cludge that is grouping in this game improves. That said… the core experience is compelling enough that I can look past all of that nonsense as I obsess about getting monster bits to make awesome weapons and outfits.

Apex Predators

February 9, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I participated in a little bit of non-game related nonsense. Over the Christmas break I rearranged my set up so that I am essentially sharing a 43 inch 4k display for both console and PC gaming. I still have access to the PC via the secondary monitor to the side, but the main display will be showing my PS4. The idea was that this would give me access to my proper mic while playing console games and allow me to hang out on teamspeak or discord while playing. The only problem there is that my only sound option for console gaming… has been to have it play through the television speakers, which means while streaming… it gets picked up by my microphone. My alternate solution was to try and string a usb headset to my PS4 while playing but it was less than optimal and I didn’t have a long enough cord to route it around where it was not in the way.

So I set forth with a mission… figure out a way to pipe the input from my television into my PC. The television only has optical toslink out and the pc has a 3.5 mm mini jack for input, which meant I needed some sort of a bridge to make the connection work. After some googling I stumbled across this little device that will convert a digital input… like toslink to an analog signal like RCA/Mini. After a bunch of fiddling and some rewiring I got it set up… and once I set my system to “listen” to the line in port… I had console audio coming in through my PC sound card. This left me with the problem of needing some way to have a microphone for PSN chat.

After some rummaging I found my first Blue microphone… the Nessie and decided to give it a shot. This is the point where I am thankful I have a rudamentary system of storage boxes because I needed to find some way of stringing a micro usb cord from the other side of my monitor all the way around the back of my desk and over to my PS4. The final solution was an old samsung charging cable combined with an amazon basics usb extender, but after some fiddling it worked. Now I can comfortably swap between PC gaming and PS4 gaming without having to grab a new headset or do any manipulation. While it doesn’t seem like much… it felt like a major victory to me last night.

As far as my night in Monster Hunter…. I spent a lot of time doing minor content while watching Sushi’s stream and chatting with the other folks in channel on my second monitor. This is the other use case I have found for this setup is letting me hang out on twitch while playing console games, which is a good deal of fun. The only negative is I try and cram discord, slack, hangouts and a twitch window on a 23 inch monitor… that seems ridiculously tiny next to the 43 inch I am playing the game on. I’ve been on this mission to repair my cash flow problem and as a result I have been doing a bunch of investigations that reward around the 4000-5000 zenny mark. Essentially there are two wants right now… being able to craft a new sword from the egg bird line to see how well it works with its high affinity rating. The other is to craft a new set of gear but I am sorta up in the air as to what to go with.

Basically in the coming evenings I should really start doing focused hunts and going after specific monsters to get parts. I hate fighting the Radobaan, but right now… it is one of my favorite armor sets. I need Radobaan parts to complete the weapon I am shooting for as well… so in theory it means in the near future I am going to start going after the tar dragon with seriousness. It was a pretty straight forward fight, but was just annoying getting good hits on it and knocking off bits of the bone armor. I am bad at actually seeking groups for things and instead just end up piddling around on my own most of the time. Regardless… my current set of armor feels like it is starting to be a little dated.

When I finally got back to doing more serious content, I picked up on the quest line that asked me to go to the bottom of the Rotten Vale. I am not exactly sure what I expected down there, but the supposed bottom floor is a lot more survivable than the one that Great Girros roams around. There seemed to be way fewer poison clouds going on, and not much in the way of annoying adds. While down there I ran into my favorite character that I have no clue what she is called… but a wiki is telling me she is called the Field Master. I question if she is actually another hunter, or if instead she is just one of the handlers that decided to break out on her own.

This lead to the appearance of a monster called Odogoron that was honestly one of the more annoying fights I have dealt with in awhile. Much like Legiana, this one can deal a lot of damage in a really short amount of time and I wound up fainting a few times because I simply was not watching my health bar as closely as I should. The other problem I ran into is this thing is insanely fast, so the only times I could really just go to town on it were when my palico had it distracted or I had blinded it with a flash pod. The rest of the time I was constantly in a state of trying to make sure it was not about to turn on me and decimate my life bar. I am not even sure how this works, but once I cut off its tail it seemed to be super susceptible to being knocked down which allowed me to unleash some spirit blade combos.

After wrapping that fight up, I decided to keep going with the story rather than retreating into a chill expedition. After some tracking around I found myself on a quest to essentially kill the Apex predators of the Ancient Forest and the Wildspire Wastes… aka Rathalos and Diablos. I did not have the energy in me to start either of those so I went back to investigations for awhile. I now have two quests in my log ready for me to start the hunts for these two big beasts… and I am guessing I am not terribly far from starting high rank once I knock them out of the skies. I really could use Rathalos parts because I believe they unlock some interesting crafting options. Still very much enthralled by this game and looking forward to venturing deeper into it.