Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Friendtime Storything

April 28, 2017 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff

Once upon a time I recorded a podcast called “Bel Folks Stuff”. I am extremely talented at giving things super specific names. The idea was pretty simple, AggroChat in a smaller setting allowing me to branch out and record shows with individual friends. The central conceit of the show was that it was going to be somewhat of an interview show, where in theory I asked all of the participants the same questions each time. There were things that worked about the show, and there were things that didn’t really. It never gained much traction which was a bit of a bummer, but it is extremely to gain momentum when you are only releasing a show each month. In the grand scheme of things I am still fairly proud of the shows, and every so often someone asks me when exactly I am going to record some more of them.

In truth… while I want to do something similar, it feels weird to consider just starting up three years later and recording new episodes for the same show. I cancelled the show in June of 2015, largely because I was going through a bit of a rough patch in my life and something needed to change. At that point I was publishing Tales of the Aggronaut each morning seven days a week, recording AggroChat each Saturday, writing two weekly columns for MMOGames.com, and trying to squeeze in time to figure out when I can record with someone and get a Bel Folks Stuff episode in each month. Additionally work was a little insane with me stepping up to more of a managerial role, and then also attempting to raid in two different games at the same time. The show didn’t have a whole lot of listeners in the grand scheme of things, so it felt like it was the obvious thing to drop. Ultimately in the long run I wound up cutting back more severely in that I am no longer really associated with MMOGames.com at all… and I have dropped this blog down to a weekday morning only thing.

The show had a good run however of seven episodes where I got to hang out and talk with eight different friends. There was in fact a bonus episode where I got both Rowan and Scooter together to talk about gaming as a couple. For those who didn’t even know the show existed… here is a full list of the episodes that I now keep on the AggroChat.com page.

Huge thanks as always to @Gypsy_Syl, @RowanBlaze, @Sctrz, @Petterm, @QelricDK, @HeyItsLiore, and @Jaedia for making the show awesome and interesting to listen to. The biggest problem that I ran into as a whole with the show is the fact that out of the eight folks I had to schedule time with… only three were in anything even vaguely close to a drift compatible time zone. That meant the whole process of finding a time that they were conscious and I could record was a challenge. Unfortunately that is not really ever going away since a lot of the people I really want to sit down and have a chat with are European. However trying to juggle that along with everything else on my plate was a bit much. The problem is that I still have the desire to record something along these lines, but like I said before it felt weird just to start up doing the same thing again.

For awhile I have been trying to sort out how I wanted to functionally reboot “Bel Folks Stuff” and what changes if any I wanted to make to it. I got completely hung up on the concept of having a friend on the podcast and having them tell me… and our listeners a story. One of the constant threads among gamers is that we file away these experiences to recall at a later date as we tell tales to our friends and guildies. I mean I have spun a yarn about the “Bunny Incident” numerous times in the past, enough that you can just say those words and most of the people I play with know exactly what I am talking about. As I mulled over the concept a bit more I decided that I didn’t necessarily limit it to gaming stories only. Sure that solidifies the niche of listeners I had for the show… but in truth I am just not that super concerned about soliciting a huge number of listeners. There was a period of time I thought maybe this would be an alternate career path, but after attempting to do the writing for pay thing… I’ve come to realize how not compatible I am with that idea.

I name things oddly… and that is pretty much a given. The name “Friendtime Storything” came from a lot of mulling things over and some brainstorming with my friend Neph who is going to ultimately be a victim of this process. Now I simply need to figure out the list of people that I want to talk to and start scheduling times. In truth this mornings post is intended to be somewhat of a recruitment vehicle. What I am wanting to do is hard to explain without understanding what I was trying to do with Bel Folks Stuff in the first place. Mostly it will be me sitting down with a friend and having a good chat, with as the tag line states… a thinly veined excuse to make folks tell me a story. I feel like I need a show like this to pull in the people that I don’t have time to talk with on AggroChat. Right now we have a fairly fixed and reliable crew on that show with myself, Ashgar, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen. That has been “the crew” for a few years now and apart from missing an episode here or there, or bringing in some additional folks for a big show… that mix feels good the way it is. This show is going to let me snag people and do something different. The main plan is to release these episodes as sort of bonus material in the already existing AggroChat podcast feed. In theory I SHOULD have enough free bandwidth on Libsyn to sneak one of these shows in each month. There are a lot of things I would do differently had I a second chance… and one of them is to quit spawning secondary sites each time I had an idea to do something.

I am not entirely certain when this process is going to start, but I have a feeling that within the next few weeks an episode should appear.

Generations are Weird

April 27, 2017 by Belghast

This is absolutely not a topic I would have chosen for myself, but it is one that has been swimming around in my brain since last night. Last night my good friend Liore posted an article called “F*ck You, I’m Not Millennial” from Huffington Post. I initially braced myself for yet another “Millennial Bash” article, but what I found was something that articulated the general sense of confusion I have felt my entire life. Generations are an odd construct, and it could be argued that they don’t exist. However there are significant differences between mindsets and outlooks every so often. I think vastly different than my parents or boss who are firmly planted in the Baby Boom era. My parents thought vastly different than my grand parents who were the children of the Great Depression. I was born in 1976 which lets me claim the late 70s, entire 80s, and early 90s… as my formative years. So I have various traits of folks who grew up in all of those… and not an entire matched set of any specific generational stripe.

In part I blame the internet and computers for shifting my focus on what I found important in life. In High School I remember having to make an appointment at a big library an hour away to use the internet for a research paper… which then largely involved WAIS and Gopher searches to find information to then download and print out. Years later I met my wife over IRC and while we grew up 30 mins apart… were introduced by a mutual friend living in Belgium. So I largely grew up just accepting the fact that I was yet another Generation X member, even though I didn’t necessarily feel like I had all of the traits of Generation X. According to the “sanity” version of the timeline in the Article above… I am instead the first year of Generation Y, which is the generation that demographers largely forgot they spawned. That break out honestly makes a lot more sense to me for a lot of reasons. Firstly while my first console experience was Pong…. and we had an Atari that I remember fondly… my gaming formative years were absolutely on the battleground of the Nintendo Entertainment System that I got in late elementary/early middle school. So calling us the Nintendo generation seems fitting for a whole slew of reasons.

I still largely feel like I am out of sync with the generational construct. Growing up I consistently hung out with folks way older than I was, and now that I am an adult thanks to the magic of the internet I tend to skew the opposite direction. A large chunk of my friends are in their late 20s to mid 30s… so while I feel like I definitely do not always see eye to eye with them… I can at least understand their thought processes. As a result I think my generation more than anything is a translation layer between what came before me, and what comes after me. There are so many times at work I get pulled into discussions to do just this… and somehow explain to the Baby Boomer management what exactly the Millennial generation is saying or meaning. Generations are this sort of social shorthand for trying to identify significant differences in the way groups of people were raised. The problem with this is that I think the number of differences are accelerating, and before long there will really be no meaningful generational breaks.

Growing up when I did more or less in the 80s… most families were fairly similar. There were a lot of specific cultural touchstones brought on by the fact that we more or less had three channels of television to watch at a given time. However as I aged everything was a sense of constant change… we went from records to cassettes to the Walkman to the CD to mini disc and finally ending up with the MP3… and now streaming music services. Media and entertainment was a moving target, that kept changing…. so we just accepted this as normal. I remember I was a late adopter of the CD largely because I could purchase 2 cassette tapes for the price of 1 CD… and that allowed me to get more music into my life. There was also an element of scarcity in everything because I grew up in a town of 2500 people… deep in flyover country. To find any store not deeply constrained by limited stock, I had to travel roughly an hour to the south. As a result we did a lot of experimenting and enjoying whatever the hell was available… which lead to some extremely eclectic tastes pulled from the clearance bin at the mall.

Events felt larger and more homogeneous. Everyone watched the Oscars because there was nothing better to do… same goes for every awards show or movie of the week. You could go to school the next day and it was pretty certain that everyone would be talking about the same things… because there were a limited number of things actually happening on any given day. Now other than shared interests… I don’t have a clue one what is going on in most peoples lives unless I am intimately aware of the details. To give the example above… I’ve not watched an awards show or even really had one playing in the background as I did other things for at least a decade… probably pushing two. The internet gave me access to so many better ways to spend my times, and as I grew up… it grew up too. My first internet experiences were like many on AOL, but after racking up a $250 phone bill calling the next city over… that door slammed shut pretty fast. It wasn’t until 93 / 94 ish when I got proper unlimited internet… which involved a contorted system to actually get access. I had to pay $20 a month to the phone company to make the next town over a “local call”, and then $40 a month to Galaxy Star Systems… a budding regional ISP to get unlimited internet access at blazing 96000 baud dial up speeds. So a grand total of $60 a month… but it gave me doorways into completely different worlds.

I think in part this feeling of being an “Internet Pioneer” is what always drives me to keep trying new things. It almost seems as though it is my duty to be the beta tester for everything that comes down the pipe since I have seen and experienced so much of what came before. This feeling however I think is also what makes me feel out of phase with whatever generational boundaries I am supposed to be feeling. My world has been one of managing change and figuring out how to deal with it. I will claim that I do not like change at all… but when it happens I am generally the first to roll with the punches and sort out what the new normal is going to look like. Maybe this is bombastic of me… but I would like to think of myself as being part of some Cipher generation… that uses our weird irregular experiences to help bridge the gaps between these other more traditional generations. So while I might not understand the way a Baby Boomer thinks… I can at least translate what I am saying in a way that is going to land and resonate with them. I mean I do this as a job anyways… translating deeply technical terms into a sequence of metaphors and easy to digest chunks that the business can understand. Maybe I just always did this… and maybe the properties of whatever generation I happen to be really part of is a chameleon like sense of adaptability. The only real normal we have ever experienced for any length of time… is change.