Tales of the Aggronaut

Secret Story of the Galaxy

May 4, 2017 by Belghast

This morning is one of those days. I just literally got out of the bathroom where I held my hands under the tap to wash them… and then could not figure out why the tap was not turning on automatically. Moments later I realized I was in fact at home… and that we don’t have the same sort of magical faucets that the rest of the world does. This week has been a bit of a challenge because I am just straight up exhausted all of the time. No amount of caffeine seems to be able to break me out of whatever haze I seem to be in. It does not help that it has been cold and rainy… in May. By this time last year we already had the pool open and I had a yard full of flowers. This year however it just hasn’t been warm enough for either, and the yard is so water logged that before long I will have a grand primal swamp. My evenings have been spent watching various things on Netflix and working my way through the Agent storyline in Star Wars the Old Republic.

In a way I am glad that I left this storyline for the last, because it seems to be making a bunch of callbacks to the other stories that I never would have gotten had I not already played the other seven classes. There are constantly folks being mentioned…. and I am like “I know that person” or in some cases “I killed that person in another life”. For years I have thought that the Jedi Knight main story arc ultimately was the most “canon” of them all… but in truth I feel like maybe Imperial Agent is also deeply canon because it shows the underside of the world and all of the pieces shifting slowly into place. While Jedi Knight is the “big damned hero” tale, Agent seems to be the “truth” that happened while the hero tale was playing out. The story behind the story is always interesting, and I continue to be intrigued at just how much I am getting into this. I think it is a testament to just how good the game really is that it can plop me down in a role I would never actually play…. and make me love it. I also deeply dig Kaliyo and my dark side murdery nature seems to play well to her brand of violent sarcasm.

However after all of this skulking about and subterfuge… I am really looking forward to switching back to my Jedi Knight main and continuing through the rest of the story that I never got around to playing the last time. When we played December 2015, I got caught up in the 12 times story bonus that allowed me to play through all of the classic stories without having to worry about any additional questing. Once I finish the Agent that particular mission is complete, and it will allow me to pick back up where I left off… which is the beginning of the Shadow of Revan content. I really want to see how that storyline goes, and I also want to see how exactly the transition to being “The Outlander” happens as well. I love the original game, and in part I am wanting to see just how the game changes once it shifts to the Fallen Empire model. I mean I realize I have plenty of boosts available and could just catapult a character to near maximum level. However most of my enjoyment in SWTOR comes from actually playing through the content, much like the same is true with Elder Scrolls Online. So while it feels like both games are taking forever… I don’t really want to rob myself of the experience.

Netflix and Turtle

May 3, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday when I wrote my post I was deeply looking forward to the Tuesday night FFXIV shenanigans. However as the day went on things went sideways. Its not so much that a sequence of bad events happened… but more a sequence of events that robbed me of every single “spoon” I had to give. I am very much a person who recharges my batteries by milling around by myself doing piddly things. Each social engagement, even if it is just saying good morning to the security guard on my way in the building… consumes a bit of energy that I have stored up in reserve. Now that I am in management… it feels like those batteries deplete all too quickly flitting between meetings and making sure my team is taken care of. One might question if management is really a great choice, but in truth it is one of those things that just sort of happened over time. I never set out to lead a guild, it just was something that I did because it needed to happen. Similarly I fell into my current position because it just needed to happened, and the alternative was to hope someone else did it.

As a result I came home last night, cooked some dinner… and by the time I had cleaned and sat down on the couch I completely lost sync with time as a construct. So at 8:30 I found myself apologizing to the FFXIV crew for needing some “turtle time” where I pull my head into my shell and pretend the world doesn’t exist. I feel like this has to suck to experience from the other side of the equation, because I don’t always know when it is going to hit or what the ramifications are going to be. All I know is when it does I just cannot deal with communicating with other people. I have friends who experience the same sort of thing, and it is at least comforting that I am not the only person who goes through it every so often. The only problem is the more I do it… the harder it is to break out of the cycle. It reminds me in the days of this blog before I went on the whole crusade of regular posting. The longer I went between posts… the harder it was to make the next one because it felt like this invisible audience was somehow expecting me to poop sheer brilliance out on the page every time I posted anything. Similarly it feels like each time I withdraw, I have to psyche myself up to be some sort of rockstar version of myself to make up for the fact that I was in hiding. I mean I know that is not actually the case, but it is super hard to explain that to anxiety brain.

What did I do instead last night? Well I spent some quality time with Netflix… and tried to chill out and remember that everything is okay. Over the last couple days I have watched the first episode of American Gods… which makes me realize how damned long it has been since I read that book. Things felt familiar in a fuzzy melange of the details I sort of remember about the book, so I guess that is a good thing. I also watched Maria Bamford’s Old Baby… which was delightfully bizarre. I mean I suggest it, but you need to go in expecting it to not really be like any other comedy special you have ever seen. I watched a handful of episodes of Dear White People, which I really enjoyed on a bunch of different levels. Finally I finished the night watching the three available episodes of Handmaid’s Tale that were on Hulu. The last one I am not sure if you can actually enjoy… because it is fucking disturbing. I am hooked but on a stomach turning level… I mean for whatever reason I never read the novel, and I think I probably should. Probably not the best thing for an anxiety riddled mind, but I am glad that I watched it.

Taris is Horrible

May 2, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend we went through some insane weather. Namely just torrential amounts of rain and constant wind. Thankfully the only “damage” is the fact that our outdoor furniture got strewn about mercilessly. Last week we had a leak in the living room, on one of the days we were getting some horizontal rain. Thankfully the roofer was able to come out Wednesday, and while he didn’t see any smoking guns… he did notice that our flashing was raised. After tamping back down and re-caulking everything, it seems to have worked because we more or less made it through the weekend without any more water slowly dripping down from the beam running across the room. So far so good… and while I am joking with the image above I am thankful that nothing bad really happened. I know within an hour and a half of the house there was some massive flooding that for the most part caused houses to disappear in the rising waters. Even within my own town while I drove around on Saturday and Sunday there was a significant amount of flood happening in small pockets. The only thing that really seemed to take on water was a little bit seeping into the garage underneath the garage door. Our front lawn however looked like an archipelago… with lots and lots of standing water.

As far as gaming went I spent a significant amount of time snuggled up on the sofa in a fuzzy blanket playing Star Wars the Old Republic on my laptop. I am going through what always feels like the rough patch empire side, which is Taris to Hoth. No matter what game you play it… Taris is a shithole. I mean it is less horrible when you are visiting it at night like you do during the empire campaign… but it is still horrible. Similarly Hoth is this giant bluewhite wasteland with music that seems to put me to sleep in a way that only snowcloak can. As a result I am just trying to stay focused on the end goal, which is finishing up this class and getting on to other things. The positive however is that the Imperial Agent storyline just keeps getting more interesting, which is shockingly not something I expected. I don’t really go for the whole espionage thing, and while I found bond movies interesting as a child… it was never really a life goal. Whatever the case however I am finding myself drawn into the story, at the very least enough to keep moving forward. I am however looking forward to taking a break tonight to get some Final Fantasy XIV friendtime in before returning once more to the story grind.

Regularly Playing: May Edition

May 1, 2017 by Belghast

I had a realization over the weekend as I stared at my sidebar… that it has been a significant amount of time since I last did the regularly playing thing. The last one I was able to find was on October 3rd of 2016… some 210 days ago. I may or may not have completely fallen off the wagon on this concept. The original intent was to take a moment once a month to “true up” the side bar and shift out what I was no longer playing for what I was currently playing. As a result we are going to see some significant moving and shaking in the list as a result.

To Those Remaining

Final Fantasy XIV

I am still going fairly strongly in Final Fantasy XIV, and while I might not log in every night I am logging in multiple times a week. I am definitely still making the Tuesday night raid thing, and while we don’t always make progress each week we get together to do something. Thanks to the wonder of cross server grouping we have been able to pull in our friend Kelesti into some stuff as well. Largely we are all in a big holding pattern until the release of Stormblood which comes in July, and as a result I am still in the middle of my “level everything” binge. Right now my Machinist is just shy of 40, and that leaves Astrologian the only thing that has yet to be touched. The whole purpose behind all of this madness is so that I can purge my vault of anything at minimum sub 30… and the grand hope is to sort through anything sub 50 and be extremely judicious in what I choose to keep. Still having a lot of fun in Palace of the Dead, just have had other distractions of late.

To the Returning and New

Skyforge

This is one of those games that has not graced my sidebar in a very very long time. In July of 2015 I played quite a bit of the game around the time that it launched, and while I enjoyed it… it always felt like it was missing something. Apparently October of last year an expansion released that added in pretty much all of the features that I am finding myself enjoying now. Additionally the game just works better with a controller than it ever did with a keyboard and mouse and while I returned primarily on the PS4… I am also dipping my toes back into the PC experience as well. Both are extremely fun and I am not entirely sure how long I will be splitting time before I officially pick one platform. Whatever the case if you have ever played this game I highly suggest checking it out. It has some issues… namely you are limited to three classes at the start with no clear path to add new ones. However each of the classes is doing something somewhat unique which makes them more enjoyable than the standard Tank, Mage and Healer that they represent.

Star Wars the Old Republic

There are two things that are shocking about this game gracing my list. Firstly that apparently I never actually made a “now playing” widget for it, and secondly… that I am back playing it again. I blame a sequence of nostalgic events happening at exactly the same time… all of the hype about the next Star Wars movie, the love of Rogue One, and my deep enjoyment of Mass Effect Andromeda has lead to an upwelling of love for both Bioware and Star Wars. As a result I have returned to an old mission, which is trying to level through all of the class stories. I managed to finish off the Sith Sorcerer and am now through Hoth so far in the Imperial Agent. It seems as though I picked one of the best storylines for last, and even though I am not traditionally a stealthy/shooty type class… there is something extremely awesome about this one. I largely went Sniper because my Smuggler on the other side of the fence is Sawbones/Healer. I am having a blast right now, so I am going to ride the enjoyment until it lasts. The goal is to push forward into the story I have not touched on my Jedi Knight main after finishing the Agent story… which involves Shadow of Revan, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I do not normally put many single player games on the regularly playing list, but we have this sequence of amazing ones being released in short order. One of those is Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a game that I hit hard at launch… and then for whatever release lost momentum to Mass Effect Andromeda. As a result I have been slowly playing it here and there as time and desire allows. I could force myself through the story, but I want to play it when I want to play it… and that is right now involving the occasional hour long session of hunting giant robot dinosaurs rather than pushing forward the main story. I am still very much enjoying the game, but I need to find some catalyst that really gets me back into it and dying to play the next chapter. In the mean time however I am still enjoying the “bowplay” if I can coin that term.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is very much another “as desire hits me” sort of experience. When the game came out I picked it up on the Wii U and in the time between then and now I have managed to pick up a switch effecting starting back at square one. This stalled my progress a little bit but for the most part I have returned to where I left in the Wii U and am once again moving forward. I have designs on starting to take this to work and playing a little over lunch and on break times. While I have the switch I really have not done a lot of handheld play with it remaining largely docked upstairs so I can play it with the pro controller. It is a great game and in spite of having a lot of things that frustrate me about the game… is yet another in a long list of titles contending for my game of the year bid.

To Those Departing

World of Warcraft

While I still have an active account, I am just not really playing at all. I logged in shortly after the last patch and got bored and logged out again. I fell off the raiding bandwagon about halfway through Nighthold, and honestly just sort of reached the point I have in so many other expansions. I think in theory I could come back and play casually and enjoy the experience but there are just simply too many other things I would rather be playing right now. So as a result this is going to find its way off my side bar, but I did have the forethought to simply comment it out rather than remove it because I am sure at some point around Blizzcon time I will get hit by the bug once more.

Rift

Much like with Nightmare Tide… I just failed to gain traction with the latest expansion the Starfall Prophecy. A large part of my struggle with Rift is that I can never seem to find a warrior spec that I really like anymore. What I ultimately want is a juggernaut for doing PVE/Leveling content that can burn through the mobs with nonexistent downtime. If I ever find that spec again I will return to the game and happily finish up leveling. The other huge struggle is that the game lacks a reliable current font of knowledge. The forums in theory have a lot of the information but it is this blend of current information and ancient and no longer reliable, and I just lack the mental fortitude to sift through it. I am hoping that after writing this… Muspel or PK will come to the rescue once again with a viable Warrior build like they have in the past. The other huge challenge with Rift is the fact that none of my gaming infrastructure is playing the game, nor do any of my regular suspects have any interest in the game at this point.

Destiny

It hurts more than a little bit to be adding this game to this space on my list. The truth is I am just not playing it right now and I don’t see that changing for the foreseeable future. I have too many other games fighting for my attention, and while I absolutely know I will be returning with Destiny 2… the amount of stuff that I can do solo or want to so solo is pretty limited. At this point it feels like I would be working towards something that is ultimately going to disappear. I also have a lot of questions because as it is right now… I am looking at making the leap to PC from PS4 for the second game… and I am not sure what if anything might transfer.

Guild Wars 2

Adding this one to the list really doesn’t take a lot of effort. I was only into this game so long as some of my friends were actively playing it. Once Tam and Ash and Kodra faded away… so did I. It is still not my favorite game but I have developed a certain appreciation for it. Most of what it is doing however isn’t really all that interesting to me. I largely got to play along with my friends only because I had maxed out my Warrior soloing for ages without them. He was geared and ready to go… and will still be there if it ever has a resurgence. Much like Warframe this is a game that was not ultimately for me… but somewhat enjoyable so long as I was playing with friends.