Tales of the Aggronaut

Daily Creative Thing

July 26, 2017 by Belghast

No Blaugust

It’s been ages since I have done a heading in my blog, but I didn’t really have an image I wanted to put with this. Considering it is getting dangerously close to August and I have had a few people ask me… I will not be hosting some large Blaugust event this year. For three and a half years I did my blog every day thing, and it was interesting. In that process I learned a lot about myself and a lot about my readers. However I am no longer the bastion of regular blogging that I once was, and similarly I don’t really feel like I can carry the banner of “blog every day” quite so highly. Now the truth is Blaugust was never really “my” thing… firstly because there was another group that had independently been using that hashtag for ages apparently. Secondly the “festival” for lack of a better terms was more about the community than it ever was about me. So if you find yourself really wanting to do Blaugust, then go for it. This has been the year that the institutions have failed in the blogosphere. We had no Newbie Blogger Initiative and would not have had Developer Appreciate Week were it not for Rav picking up the torch and carrying it onwards. I hate that I am adding Blaugust to the pile but I am just not feeling it right now, and in truth wasn’t last year because I did a fairly halfassed job of trying to make it happen without requiring a lot of support.

If someone is interested in picking up the mantle and making it theirs… I welcome you with open arms. That said what is happening this year that is not exactly Blaugust but similarly themed is “Daily Creative Thing”. My good friend Grace felt like she was not taking the time to do creative stuff anymore, and had let some of her hobbies fall by the wayside. As such in the spirit of Blaugust she decided to start trying to force herself to do at least one creative thing every single day. What classifies as a “Creative Thing” is pretty open to interpretation, but as a side effect of this process she spawned a secondary blog where you can see a bit of her daily process. Some days it has been a drawing, others working on some crocheting, and one day some origami. The purpose being just to keep doing something interesting and fun and creative every single day… and then posting the product. I myself am contemplating doing this throughout the month of August, because there are a lot of creative things that I just stopped doing for some reason along the way. Namely I just don’t sketch like I used to, and I am not entirely sure why I stopped. I used to be one of those kids that was rabidly sketching in every single class… and then at some point I just stopped. Its like going to art school some how tarnished the fun… because instead of going and drawing goofy things… everything was deadly serious and representative. I would love to unblock myself and let the creativity flow once more, so maybe this is the time to do it.

Minuet 42

July 25, 2017 by Belghast

A few days ago I said I had more or less “beat” the Destiny 2 beta in part because there is so little to actually do in it. That said for whatever reason I keep returning and playing. Since writing my initial post I have done the strike several times and spend a bit more time in the Crucible. Some of my initial comments about not really liking the 4 vs 4 format and the small map sizes, is in part me likely just getting adjusted to changes and not really having a weapon load-out that I would have preferred. Traditionally my crucible build has been an Auto Rifle in the primary slot… usually my extreme stability Haakon’s Hatchet or if I am feeling squirrely… my Genesis Chain. From there I generally have either a Shotgun in the secondary slot Invective or Party Crasher +1 or I go for one of my Fusion Rifles… traditionally Saladin’s Vigil. The heavy slot varies greatly because in truth… I am not really expecting to get heavy ammo in Crucible matches so I am not super concerned. If I have an exotic slot available I go with Gjallarhorn and if not probably my Silvered Dread machine gun. The problem with the Destiny 2 weapon loadouts is that on my preferred class… the Titan there was nothing that I could really replicate this feel with so I in part had to feel out what worked for me in the new scheme.

What finally ended up feeling good and seeming usable is to run a Submachine Gun in my primary slot, namely The Showrunner seen above. However in truth I was using this weapon much in the same way as I would have used a secondary in Destiny 1 only swapping to it at certain times. For my main weapon I relied heavily on the Minuet Hand Cannon sitting in my energy weapon slot, because it had some significant stopping power and actually allowed me to win non-teamshot firefight engagements. Where the sub machinegun was handy is any time that someone ran up on me, I could hang out just outside of melee range and grind them down with a rapid fire hail of bullets. In theory I think this is more or less what folks who loved the sidearm used to do… but I never could make sidearms work for me in this fashion. As far as the heavy/power weapon slot… once again I didn’t care too terribly much about this given that I was similarly not expecting to ever get ammunition for it… so instead just relied on the grenade launcher in case I ever did. I am by no means “good” at the new Crucible, but I managed to find a setup and style that worked for me and I managed to keep climbing higher in my efficiency number as the night went on.

The thing that I find the most impressive about the Destiny 2 demo experience… is the fact that it is so damned short yet I kept returning day after day to keep experiencing it in any way that I could. In part it has made me want to actually dig in and try and finish some of the book achievements that are sitting there unfinished, and bask in the glory of the Destiny 1 experience before it is gone. All in all I am anxiously awaiting the release of this game and even more so the upcoming PC beta that we are getting at some point in August. I have a lot of concerns relating to the PC version, namely how it is going to feel and how well it plays in my various systems. I am really hoping that I can figure out a set of tweaks to get it to play with passable performance on my i7 Geforce 960m laptop. I am not expecting the world and would be completely fine with running 720p on it… pending that the performance is at a minimum 30 fps. One moment of sadness last night however is that the left thumb stick on beloved Hori FPS Plus controller started tearing. I am seemingly particularly hard on left thumb sticks, and as Squirrel pointed out last night… since it is not our aiming stick we are way less gentle with it. I ordered a set of cheapo aftermarket thumb stick caps, hoping that maybe just maybe it will fit. I tried one of the Kontrol Freaks PS4 caps that I had laying around and it kept popping off because the slightly smaller than normal size. All in all though I am going to be really sad to see Destiny 2 beta ending tonight, but will be looking forward to actually getting to play the game at launch.

Discarded Hulk

July 24, 2017 by Belghast

I know I have started out many a Monday post with something along the lines of it being a weird weekend, so I am going to refrain from doing so today. The odd factor comes from the fact that we were pretty busy… but also mostly busy around the house. I’ve talked about my wife who is a teacher several times in the past, but one of the side notes that you need to know is that teachers here in Oklahoma have very little support for all of the things that are required to make a classroom work. My wife for example gets a $25 credit… per school year to buy anything she needs for her classroom from what is in effect the school district storehouse. Most teachers don’t even get that… so we spend a lot of time doing things in an effort to augment her classroom experience. Anecdote aside… how this factors into our weekend is that for years we have had what is effectively a office work group printer that I happened to adopt when a workplace was sending it out to salvage. They were more than happy to have me truck it away… instead of having to pay some electronic recycling people to come and do the same thing. I was trying to figure out about when we got the Laserjet 5si… and to the best of my knowledge I would guess around 2005-2006 ish. The piece of this that you need to understand is that it was effectively a 23 inch by 23 inch by 23 inch cube that weighed about 150 lbs. It effectively sat in the corner of my office taking up tons of space… and any time there was a paper jam I had to try and balance the unit while turning it around because it was way too big to actually get to the back side without doing so. The other thing you need to know is… that there are several times a year where my wife will print up to a ream of paper worth of materials for her classroom in a single evening. So it is simply not cost effective to try and do that with a consumer grade laser printer.

This week the computer she had in her office finally gave up the ghost, which is not terribly surprising given that it was an ancient Gateway FX P6831 laptop circa 2008. So like always this lead us to craigslist to see what all was available in our area on the cheap. While we didn’t really find anything, given that our craigslist seems to be entirely made up of laptops and custom built rigs that someone overpaid for… and still thinks is extremely valuable. However in her travels she happened upon a reasonable looking printer that in theory could replace the mammoth beast and give us some more desk space. It turns out a company was surplussing all of their HP Laserjet P3005 printers and we were able to pick up a relatively low print volume printer for $40. This however left us with the daunting task of moving the beast downstairs… something that I am shocked I was able to do by myself years ago… I know at the time it involved using an office chair as a makeshift handtruck and then slowly lifting it a single stair at a time. Thankfully I am much older and wiser… and simply opted to remove the two addon printer trays, duplexer and toner cartridge which turned it into something that was way more manageable for us to get downstairs. This left me room to set up the new printer, and also coincidentally gave me room enough for the Canon Pixma MG3620 color printer that I picked up off Amazon for $30 a week or so back. Which means for the first time in probably a decade we have a reasonable color printing option. However the directions that came with the printer… were for a completely different model and it only took me a couple of hours of trying to set things up in vain for me to realize this fact and to grab the correct directions from the Canon website. Unlike past wireless printers… you cannot apparently set it up over USB and then set its wireless credentials… you instead need to do some bullshit mobile phone set up process. However once I got the correct directions it went pretty smoothly.

This was just one vignette of the random stuff we did this weekend, and most of it isn’t really worthy of writing about. However now we have the mammoth printer sitting in our living room because the person who had said they wanted it… backed out when they realized just how damned big it was. Thinking about sitting it out on the porch one day and posting a “free” craigslist post to see if anyone will come get it. I would love to give it to a school or a church or a non-profit agency because it still prints insanely well… and the toner has gotten to the point where you can get it for like $20 in the secondary market and it will print something along the lines of 60,000 copies off that single toner. Until then however the cats think they have a new toy and one of them has taken to periodically laying on it. As far as gaming goes… I largely played Diablo 3 and with significant help from friends am nearing the point where I get my pet in the seasons journey. Right now I am on a more annoying objective step which involves running bounties until I get five jewelry patterns, which will then unlock the last few pieces of the Rathma necromancer set. After a few seasons of playing Demon Hunters…. everything feels slow… but the Necro in particular feels extremely slow when pushing Rifts and Greater Rifts. Getting the two piece weapon set has greatly improved this but it still feels slower than I am used to even when being drug behind a much much higher leveled friend. All in all though the Necromancer is still insanely fun, but as we talked about this weekend… I am curious how many previously devoted Witch Doctor players have made the swap to Necromancer permanently.

Four Necros

July 21, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was the beginning of a brand new season in Diablo 3, and once again Grace and myself did our hang out and level new characters thing. Traditionally these season opens happen on a Friday night, so there is always the ability to stay up until we hit the level cap. Granted that has not actually happened in awhile with us usually crashing somewhere in range of 60. Yesterday was a bit of a weird situation with the season open happening on a “School Night” as it were, which curbed our play session around 10 pm my time. I finally called it because I was starting to drift off at the keyboard and when I did none of the other three players seemed to complain much about it. I’ve been on this odd kick of going to bed around 10/10:30 which is significantly earlier than my traditional midnight. Maybe my age is finally catching up with me? Whatever the case… we managed to hit somewhere in the range of 47 before calling it a night.

Considering this is the first season post Rise of the Necromancer… you can probably already imagine that we were a party of four… and an army of dozens and dozens of undead following us around. Can I just tell you how glorious it is to see four Necros doing their Necro thing? We ran a bunch of Neph Rifts as is the traditional best leveling practice… and we got some insane spawns out of the gate that wound up boosting our characters significantly in the few hours we actually played. There was one relatively small rift map that literally had almost nothing but yellow and blue packs which mean’t we had summoned the guardian well before we were actually prepared for it. Necromancers have a really weird power curve in that they still start out a little weak, at least when it comes to raw damage output. That Rift Guardian took forever for us to whittle down with our undergeared level 5 selves… but within a few levels we were easily breaking apart and churning through a full round of bounties solo style. At the point I left the seasonal content last night, I had reached effectively the same build of abilities that I was using on my level 70 necromancer.

Left Click – Bone Spike (Path of Bones)
Right Click – Blood Rush (Transfusion)
1 – Revive (Purgatory)
2 – Command Skeletons (Frenzy)
3 – Command Golem (Bone Golem)
4 – Skeletal Mage (Skeleton Archer)
Fueled By Death Passive
Commander of the Risen Dead Passive
Extended Servitude Passive

Path of Bones is my favorite builder in part because I can sit back a long ways from the targets and still be gaining essense while my bone army chews stuff apart. Transfuion is largely as a reasonable way of getting back some health while also providing an escape mechanism. There is rarely a time when I would need to use it… that I am not going to at least pass through a few enemies during the travel time. Bone Golem just makes for a really nice AOE damage dealer… and it was hilarious when the four of us needed to do a boss and unleashed that all at the same time. Revive becomes the bread and butter way of getting extra attackers and quickly becomes more useful than the meat firework option that is corpse explosion. What I like about purgatory is that it means I can keep recycling targets because when your revives die they turn back into corpses. Functionally what I do is play with Flesh Golem up until the point I get this ability and then thankfully you can switch over to Bone Golem without losing a source of corpses. The necromancer is insanely fun and if you have not played it yet, I highly suggest checking it out.