Tales of the Aggronaut

Literal Ankle Biter

December 12, 2016 by Belghast

This was a bit of an odd weekend. Lets get the bad out of the way. For several months we have been trying to figure out how to get Luna to a point where she does not attack the other two cats on sight. We’ve kept her sequestered in my wife’s office and each night I grab her and we hang out in my office while I play games. She almost always ends up snuggled on my desk, and in truth is just about the sweetest cat ever… when not around our other two. This is an important distinction before I tell you this next bit… because she is adorable and cuddly… when she is by herself. In my infinite lack of wisdom I decided that I wanted to make one last attempt to socialize them since she had seemingly bonded with me so tightly after our many many weeks of chilling in my office. We locked our eldest cat up in the bedroom and brought Luna out, at first carrying her and holding her on the sofa. Before long thought she wanted to explore… and for the most part our youngest and her were not interacting at all. However there came a point where we were moments away from a cat fight, and I tried to gather Luna up and carry her off to my office. She struggled to try and get away but I got her up to the office without much issue. I turned to shut the door and I felt this searing pain on my leg around my lower calf. She had bit me… and now I was left with the decision of how the hell to get out of my office without letting her out so she could go after Kenzie.

I snuck out and by the time I got downstairs I was bleeding pretty badly. There are five marks… so I am guessing one is maybe a claw mark or she drug off of me and raked me with her fang again. Two of them are about a half inch in length and pretty deep… and two others are deep puncture wounds where she chomped down hard on my leg. It hurts quite a bit to walk and just generally exist in the world right now, but I don’t think there is any real damage. After going through the crap with my wife when she got bitten we are being extra cautious, and using the super duper antibiotic creme that they gave us back then. Walking is not comfortable and today is going to be interesting. I had to venture out to get more extra large band-aids, because in theory you can hit all of the spots with two of the largest size. After getting bandaged up I went back upstairs where she seemed as freaked as I was by the event. She sat on the floor in the back of my office up against the accordion closet door for a long while looking freaked. Eventually I peeked down underneath the desk towards where she was at and said “it’s okay, I’m not mad” and almost instantly her demeanor changed and she bounded over and hopped up on the desk laying down beside me. The thing that is breaking my heart is that I now know that this is probably never going to get any better, and we really do need to find her a new home. Unfortunately the friend that we thought was going to take her… had her landlord say no. It was in their contract that they could have pets if landlord approved… but I am guessing the asshole is biased against cats, because he assumed they were talking a dog.

Other than the cat thing…. and hurting… I streamed a lot of Iron Banner. I think it was Friday night at some point that I managed to hit Rank 5 with the Banana, and from that point on it was just gravy as far as loot went. I guess in theory I should have been swapping to the Warlock or Hunter to get them to Rank 5 but instead I simply made a poor attempt at farming some more gear to increase my light levels. This last 10 points is going to be slow as hell, but I entered the weekend at 390 and exit at 392 which I guess is reasonable. According to beam I have now streamed seven hours of game play, which I guess isn’t a bad start for my first week. Now a good chunk of that on Sunday at least was to an empty audience, but I entertained myself and have a bunch of footage to sift through. There was one Iron Banner match where for whatever reason I started humming the Super Mario Brothers theme song inserting “Nope” instead of some of the notes. All in all I think I like Rift for an Iron Banner match type, but like I said before I struggled a bit at first because the game play feels so vastly different from anything I had been used to. The best item I got all weekend is still the above Branded Lord with Hammer Forged, Enhanced Battery and Range Finder… which I now have fully leveled and am almost using exclusively.

Lastly I played some “Let It Die” as evidenced by the first screenshot in the post today, and streamed it as well… except for whatever reason my audio was being overpowered completely by the game audio. I will have to fiddle with that and adjust it some. This game is just strange as hell, and I guess in many ways it feels a little Dark Soulsian, in that the mobs that you encounter are somewhat brutally powerful at times. There will be times that you get stunlocked to the point where you simply cannot do anything to deal with the encounters other than die. The strangest part so far is the types of weapons you encounter… hot irons, router drills, hammers… firework launchers. As you ascend the Tower of Barbs you encounter all sorts of monsters that should be in a silent hill game with bizarre implements that are trying to kill you, all the while you are using a zombie corpse thing as your avatar. You start out buck naked each time and have to scrounge up armor and weapons to be able to survive for terribly long in the tower. This is of course a “free to play” game and where the money aspect comes in is that in order to resurrect yourself using “death insurance” you need to spend a rainbow skull currency, that the game gives you a handful of to start out. However in the brief period of time I played yesterday I wound up using two of them before realizing… that in truth I had not really made any actual progress and should stop doing that. I’ve not quite figured out what the point is yet… as far as how you actually improve your character. I thought after I cleared a level I would be taken back to the lobby… but apparently I have to do that manually so I essentially lost all progress on that character and had to grab a fresh corpse to start the climb all over again. It has some deep rogue like elements, all the while mixing in bizarre Neo Tokyo and Silent Hill tropes…. with a dash of Dark Soulsian difficulty. Given that several of those checkboxes are things that Kodra likes, I think he maybe should try this game out. What I am wanting to know is if you can play it multiplayer, because this would probably be super enjoyable with friends.

Four Years of Thought

December 9, 2016 by Belghast

This is going to be a bit of an odd video this morning, and largely one without any screenshots. There has been a side project that I have been working on for some reason. Like I am not purposefully being vague, but more that I am not entirely certain why I started down this path or what exactly has kept me going. In theory it is going to lead to some sort of a year end post, but I am still working out the details there. The important part is that this side project has caused me to go back through every post between 2013 and 2016… aka the period where my blog has actually been prolific. For reference… there are a little shy of 1500 posts on this blog, and all but about a hundred of those have occurred during the window above. It is really when I started doing the daily posting thing, that my blog became of any actual relevance… and even then I have backed off that significantly with only doing week day posts. The strange thing about this process is that you can learn an awful lot about yourself when you sift through roughly four years worth of posts… or in truth 45 months. It was bizarre seeing how I have changed and how my thoughts have evolved during that period. I’ve always prided myself in being someone in a constant state of flux… picking up new ideas, evaluating them and then either keeping my old one… or jettisoning it in favor of the new information. This is extremely evident when you look at that first year versus what I am currently writing.

The weirdest take away that I was not expecting… is that I am simply not interacting with other bloggers as much as I used to be. At face value that seems odd because I am actually talking to other bloggers on a daily basis be it through social media, a private chat network like slack/discord or now the brand new Imzy forum. What I mean instead is that there is not quite the blog to blog exchange of ideas that there once was. While going through my posts I noticed that so often there was another blog post that would ultimately spawn me to talk about the same issue, or a tweet that kicked off an idea. That just isn’t happening nearly as much as it once did, and I think that is a multi fold issue. Firstly I am much more sluggish in reading blog posts than I used to be, thanks to trying to write a blog post column… and as a result ballooning my RSS feed to include over six hundred gaming blogs. However the other thing going on is that it feels like as a broad community we are simply not creating the same gaming think pieces that we once did. We are no longer dragging out mechanics and tropes and investigating what works or does not work about them. That is not to say that some people are not doing this… but it feels like less of the community is and as a result the constant flow of ideas is not really there.

The other thing that I noticed is how much of a chilling effect Gamer Gate had on our community as a whole. There are a whole lot of folks who simply left the game blogging community during that time and have never really returned. Some of my most constant collaborators from the past… simply don’t blog about games anymore. Even more however seemed to greatly reduce their regular posting around that time. It is as though we all got afraid to talk to one another, at least in a public venue like our blogs. Now that same discourse is happening, but it is playing out through walled gardens like slack and discord, and not out there in the open for anyone to spawn an additional topic off of. I know that personally I am significantly more guarded for fear of a wave of horribleness washing over my blog and sweeping me out to sea. The fear of this wave however has eroded more of the community than the wave probably could have itself. The new normal after these events seems to be that we largely have kept our thoughts to ourselves, or shifted our attention to other communities to talk about. Movies and Media for example seems to be a popular offshoot from our community for example.

I am not really presenting any remedy here, but just mourning the way the community felt… and how it influenced my blog. I’ve always been a bit of an island here on the Aggronaut, but in the past I would take in ideas from outside myself… sift through them and present them in my own way, and I just find myself not doing that nearly as much as I once did. I think there is a general feeling that something is missing however, because of the rapid effect that a random twitter storm ended up spawning the Imzy forum. I think there is a general sense that something changed, without a real understanding of how to get back to normal afterwards. I might just be talking out of my ass here, but I have definitely felt it and for the last year and some change I have largely felt “off balance”. It is only recently that the clouds have felt like they have tangibly parted for me… and that I can once again see any glimmer of the sun. The past year and a half has been a time when we are constantly barraged with a shit storm of forces well beyond our control, and I honestly felt battered by it to the point of not being able to think much past the current week. Things are not better, in fact things seem to be getting worse… but in many ways it feels like I maybe have my “sea legs” and have figured out how to return to some sense of stability. I am attempting to stream again… and I am contemplating trying to reboot “Bel Folks Stuff”.

Literally everything in this post might just be a “from my perspective” sort of thing. Maybe it is just me who has been in an odd place, and have detached from the community. My entire life I have alternated between periods of engagement and periods of retraction when things got too chaotic. I tend to think of these as “turtling” when I pull my head back up inside of my shell. The past year has felt like one long turtle period, where I was constantly in hiding from whatever perceived thing was chasing me. All of that said… it still feels like our community has also retracted during that same period. Folks are largely doing their own thing now and I think in a large part it has been our way of forward momentum. I guess I am ready to poke my head back out and return to what used to be “normal”. I am wondering if others are feeling the same thing. I am not happy with myself, and have not been for a very long time… but that too can change. I realize this is a bit of an odd morning post, but it largely has some things that I have been mulling over and wanted to throw out there. Reading four years of your own writing can make you extremely introspective… and in truth I wouldn’t suggest doing it. That said I still think the project I am currently working on is going to be interesting at least.

Helya Defeated

December 8, 2016 by Belghast

In the past I have talked about our youngest cat Kenzie and her proclivity for playing fetch with rubber bands. Well the game has changed… and it has shifted from being one of those “once in awhile” things to an all the time thing. We will often times wake up with a rubber band beside us in bed and her expectantly prancing back and forth next to it waiting for us to throw it. This morning for example as I got up, showered, and got dressed I threw the rubber band a couple dozen times. Sometimes she would shift things up and bring the rubber band back to my wife instead of me… but nonetheless it was certainly clear that it was fetch time. I am wondering however if I can also change the game… and teach her how to fetch things like balls. The first cat that would play fetch that I had ever seen was Dee Dee the now fat and sassy cat that a neighbor of ours has. She however tended to favor these foam balls that you could get from PetSmart. We tried this with several of our cats but it never really took… however now that the fetching behavior has firmly planted itself in Kenzie I am wondering if we can also teach her to fetch balls.

We had a pretty great raid night as far as raid nights go. Some time ago we shifted into having a progression night which is Wednesday and a farm night which is Friday. On the farm night we attempt to clear Emerald Nightmare normal as fast as we can, and on the progression night we have been working on Trial of Valor with the initial hopes of being able to clear it in time for the launch of Nighthold. However with the 7.1.5 patch being pushed back… it seems like we have all the time in the world for that goal. Last week we managed to get our first Guarm kill and we were able to repeat that feat this week… however it took a few tries. The part I am proudest of however is the fact that we managed to defeat Odyn this week as a one shot, which given how many moving parts there are on that fight…. I am pleased and amazed and even phase three felt pretty solid. I think folks finally started dropping things where they should be dropped which allowed the tanks a lot more flexibility of placing Odyn where he needs to be during that final burn. As far as Helya goes… it still feels like a mess but the attempt where we managed to push her into phase 3 with most of the raid up… we also managed to kill her. I was recording last night while we raided so was able to pull screenshots of the exact moment she went down and in truth… the raid as a whole was still in a pretty decent position.

Since we still had a lot of night left to go we went over into the Emerald Nightmare and started working on heroic bosses. Previously we had made a few attempts on Nythendra and more or less had the correct positioning and such down. We lost a handful of people between the zone switch because they needed to go for early work and such, and we adjusted a little bit. The shocking thing is… in theory we made a one shot as we were sorta in a slow wiping state when the boss finally went down. As you can see in the screen shot my entire team was dead, and I had just literally blown up from the rot debuff when the boss went down. It was messy… but I will take it because she dropped the best possible loot. She dropped me an exact upgrade, stat for stat… simply the heroic version of the Insect-Etched Chestplate that I was already wearing. From the previous encounters of the night I got a few pieces of loot… that I am unfortunately going to have to do some simulation to determine if they are truly upgrades or not.

There was a bit of back and forth to determine what exactly was our next encounter to attempt. Some folks were leaning towards Ursoc, but even on normal that is a healing battle to try and keep the tanks alive. Emerald Dragons however seemed to be a little more attempt-able for the next step… and did not actually introduce any new mechanics. So we set forth to take down the dragons that used to give us nature resist gear back in the day. All in all it went pretty smoothly with the first pull almost netting us a kill. We reached a point where normally we thought we could simply burn them down without doing a tank swap… and because we didn’t swap it stunned the entire raid. Still kicking myself a little bit about that judgement call, because while I asked the raid… it was ultimately myself and Art that decided not to swap. We did however come back and get the kill almost immediately after. There was a vote to see if we wanted to keep moving… but we were already sitting at our normal raid end time and considering that I didn’t get much sleep last night I voted against it. I like the way our raid does this thing… in that if we want to extend and make attempts on a boss after our normal raid end… we simply throw up a readycheck and if anyone… or at least a significant unrecoverable portion says no we stop. I have to say this whole recording thing is handy as hell because it was super easy for me to pull screenshots of the moment of death this morning.

Derpy Banana

December 7, 2016 by Belghast

Last night I moved a little bit out of my comfort zone and decided to do what I had hoped to do some time ago… and test Beam.pro. Firstly you have to understand that I have gone around and around with streaming services because none of them really seemed to fit me. Twitch is the ten ton juggernaut in the room, and in a way that generally makes all other services irrelevant. That said… I feel like it is a generally inferior experience for both the viewer and the streamer. The lag delay between video stream and chat is horrendous and it pretty much makes any attempt at having a conversation with someone watching you impossible. Hitbox seemed really cool other than some weird issues I had regularly with stream quality. It however had little to no lag between video stream and chat and made it super easy to have conversations over. They also seemed to have way better back end tools to support the day to day management of your stream and syndicating it to various social media platforms when you go live. Beam however entered the ring some time ago, or at least came into my general consciousness when my friend Maeka decided to switch over to streaming on it exclusively.

Destiny_20161207062529 — Braced Frame – Snapshot – Range Finder

So Beam represents a more twitch like experience in quality, but with far better chat delay and an interesting reward model for viewers and streamers. Watching streams earns folks sparks, that can then be spent on either unlocking features for your own channel… or spending those sparks on other streamers who often offer weird things like sound boards for you to play with. I admit the gamification aspect of the streaming interested me, and I find myself way more connected to the concept of letting a stream run while I am doing other things because I know that eventually it is going to benefit me. For example… something I have always wanted was the ability to create an AggroChat team, and that functionality apparently unlocks when I hit 5000 sparks… to which I am sitting at roughly 2000 currently after a few days of usage. Over the weekend I got my setup rearranged and organized so that things were going through the appropriate devices, thinking that sometime in the future I might maybe start streaming again. However a thread on the That Gaming Forum Imzy was the catalyst needed to go ahead and push me across the line to trying to stream something properly. When I got home last night I quickly assembled a fresh OBS install and pulled in the artwork I had from the previous attempts and before long I was up and running.

Destiny_20161207062455 — Perfect Balance – Snapshot – Headseeker

The end result is me playing some of the absolute worst Iron Banner ever, but you can check out the VOD here on Beam. I spent way more time turning my head to the left and checking chat than I did actually playing the game. This is compounded by the fact that before last night I had played a half dozen Rift matches period, and it is a vastly different style of gameplay than I am used to in the Crucible. Generally speaking I am used to the “rush to the choke point” style of game play that comes from Control or Supremacy, and in trying to play Rift that way… I died a lot. Later on in the night after I chilled the hell out and started taking things more slowly… I started doing better but unfortunately this was LONG after I ended my stream. I was still recording, however when I configured OBS I ended up accepting the default flv format… which Adobe Premiere seems not to know what to do with. So I am either going to have to find a plugin that lets me import them… or find something to convert that to a format so I can actually properly edit it. I did get one really solid match recorded, and I would like to edit that up and post it on my youtube channel at some point.

Perfect Balance - Extended Mag - Zen Moment — Perfect Balance – Extended Mag – Zen Moment

One of the big positives about Beam is that they are now owned by Microsoft which in theory means they are going to get more support. The negative there is that Microsoft has a long and storied history of abandoning products… zune anyone? However the killer feature seems to be that it integrates perfectly with the Xbox One… which also adds to a little platform bias. Most of the streams I have watched were streamed from an Xbone… so it confused my viewers when I said I was playing Destiny on the PS4. Ultimately I have a pretty cool setup that I am happy with in that in my office I have my desktop beside what is essentially a console gaming area. In a storage cabinet beneath my 48 inch television I have a PS4, PS3, Xbox 360 and now Xbox One all connected through an HDMI switch that then goes through a splitter before going into an Elgato HD that I picked up off craigslist for around $35 used. That then feeds into my PC and is served up by OBS using the Elgato streaming tools. So that means quite literally anything I can connect to my television through HDMI can then end up getting streamed out. At one point I had my WiiU connected here, but I took that downstairs so I could hang out in bed and play on the weird remote device. Also Nintendo has some pretty draconian practices surrounding streaming and youtube videos so I figured it was probably a good idea NOT to do that.

At one point I drew up this diagram quickly to show how my set up works. The key element there is the splitter and you can read more about that in a previous post I made back in June 2014 when I got the setup running. As far as Iron Banner itself… I have interspersed some of my best rolls from the night in amongst the paragraphs. In total I am sitting 3/4 of the way through Rank 3 and have picked up 3 fusion rifles, 1 scout rifle, 1 pulse rifle, 2 legs, and a helm… that I then bought the 100% roll from Lady Efrideet and infused that into it. I feel like I made a decent start to getting to Rank 5 and I finally grasped the unique rhythm of the game mode as I went through the night. I suddenly stopped being the lowest person on the team to vying for the top spot once again. I am not terribly great at crucible but I am generally not as bad as I am in the stream test. However that wasn’t really the purpose of the stream… it was to test out Beam.pro and I think so far I am saying it passes with flying colors. I accepted the absolute default settings and it performed admirably. Now is the time for me to actually set my channel up properly and try and sort out how precisely is the best way to use the service.