Blog, August, Blaugust

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Pronunciation Guide

Yesterday evening I had a weird sequence of events happen, that I feel like I have to share with you all.  As I said yesterday my wife has her own version of Blaugust that is part of the Math Blogging/Twitter community she spends most of her time in.  When I stumbled onto the awkward name that is Blaugust, I jammed Blog and August together because for me they have the same “Og” sound so they fit together well enough to be a word.  I took for granted that this would be the case for everyone, and they would immediately grasp why the name is what it is.  The truth is I didn’t invent the word, as apparently there had already been something called Blaugust going on within a circle of bloggers in Australia for years, and without realizing it I co-opted their thing and made it OUR thing.  So in part because of this… last night I had an awful lot of trouble grasping the above tweet.

This spawned a whole sequence of tweets within the alternate reality Blaugust community about how they pronounced Blaugust, and even spawned a hashtag.  So after a bit of passing back and forth various clips of folks pronouncing the words and saying the phrase “I’m going to blog in august”, I was drafted to record something along the same lines.  I am not sure if my wife was too embarrassed to do so, or simply as she says I had a headset on.  So the first recording was simply me saying some equivalent of the phase.  Which spawned a request for me to say the words Blog, August and Blaugust within the same clip…  and I obliged as well.  I just found this sequence of events funny because I never thought that someone else might not get the jammed together nation of this event.  I mean “blog” itself is a crude concatenation of Web and Log, so it only makes sense that the name of our event is an equally crude joining.

Raidy Bits

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As far as proper gaming news… well last night was once again our new raid team night in Final Fantasy XIV.  A good number of us took a significant break after the launch of Heavensward and as a result we are super behind the current content curve.  As a result over the last few weeks we have been working our way through Alexander Midas.  We would have gotten through sooner but there have been several occasions where we did not have quite the same make up of folks, which lead to us repeating certain sections of the raid.  Tonight we started with Midas Seven again to catch up Kodra who was absent when we last attempted it, and oneshot it with a pug… and no explanations.  We zoned in last week and warned the pug player that none of us had done the fight, and when he proceeded to start explaining we said “thanks but no thanks” and I pulled.  I am sure the random was expecting a complete wipe, and it was not necessarily our neatest kill… but we did the thing that brings us great joy and that is learning a fight on our feet as we go.

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I am not one of those people that can really gain any knowledge of an encounter while watching a video.  By the two minute mark I have already zoned out completely and lost any real information that might have been useful.  Now if you can find a proper guide written out in long form, I can usually get lots of information there,  however for me to truly grasp the fight I need to be doing it.  That means I need to wipe over and over and adjust to things that are going wrong until at some point everything clicks and we win and get tasty loots.  Last night in this case was about learning the most insane Voltron fight ever, and that is Midas Eight.  It took us a handful of attempts but we managed to get through the encounter and even look like we knew what we were doing.  From there we moved on to our old friend Ravana Extreme, that we never actually beat.  While we were a little rusty, we managed to piece together enough of the fight to die horribly to final liberation.  Which means once we conquer that we will down us a bug… and I fully expect that will be the case next week.

 

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Happy Blaugust

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Blaugust2016

So this is really happening I guess.  It is funny how something can go from “I am thinking about not doing it” to a completely fleshed out and active thing over the course of a week.  As of this morning there are thirty two folks signed up to participate in Blaugust this month, and I think that is pretty great.  My wife has even spun the event off into her own thing within the MTBOS math community, and I created a completely separate logo for them.  This time around as I said before it is a greatly revised event, mostly focused on producing more content, rather than having folks attempt to run a gauntlet.  The gauntlet concept was cool, but a bit misguided given that the end result often times caused folks to take a few months off after the event.  I didn’t want the month of August to feel anywhere near as stressful as say NaNoWriMo for example, so as a result this year we are dialing it back a bit.

You can check out the full post over here where I announced that we were in fact doing it this year.  However a quick rundown of the rules are simple.  First just fill out this Google Form with pertinent information about your blog, to make sure it ends up on the radar of the community.  Next blog… and this time around set your own intended schedule.  Whenever you post your blog on twitter please use the hashtag #Blaugust2016 to make it easier to track and so that folks can simply subscribe to that and see all of the content.  There is also the Blaugust Nook for folks who want to hang out and share ideas and topic prompts, also a great place to share your post content.  Finally and most importantly…  get to know the other participants.  Common struggle makes a great means for bonding… and for those who are not used to posting on a schedule this might be a bit of a struggle.  Reach out to the other Blaugustians and get to know them, because it is a great time to make new friends and rekindle old friendships.

The Participants

I hit refresh on my google sheet just to make sure I am including everyone, but as of this very moment we have thirty two participants in the 2016 running of Blaugust.  There is still plenty of time to sign up an participate but for the moment these are the folks you can look forward to seeing content from.

Daily Posts

Weekday Posts

Three Posts a Week

Some Other Schedule

As Time and Inspiration Allows

I believe that is everyone represented that has signed up currently.  I cannot be 100% certain however because in true “Belghast” fashion I decided to complicate things at the last minute and attempt to list everyone out by the schedule they signed up for in the google form.  I believe however I have all thirty two blogs accounted for, and that no one is duplicated, however if I somehow made a mistake please let me know.  I look forward to the next month and seeing how this “kinder gentler” Blaugust goes.

[Edit] as folks sign up been adding them into the post as time allows.  Right now we are up to forty!

Revising Memory

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Of Pedestals

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For quite a while I have held the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft on a bit of a pedestal.  That was the last time I was truly and completely devoted to the game, and is the point where I for better or worse thought the game took a sharp detour.  It was shortly after the launch of the next expansion Cataclysm that I began this on again off again tourism with the game.  So this year when the talk of “Vanilla” servers came up, I thought to myself that I had no desire to ever return to the launch of the game…  but Wrath of the Lich King most definitely.  It felt like the right mix of progress and promise wrapped up into an extremely playable package with awesome lore events and truly phenomenal raids.  Sure there was the shit storm that was the Crusaders Colosseum, but for the time being we are going to forget that was even a thing.  Yes I realized that it served a key story arc, but as a raid goes it was thoroughly disappointing after Ulduar.  I can also remember really enjoying the questing in Wrath of the Lich King and some of those zones are ones that I still count among my favorite in the game.  That was until I recently returned while leveling my Warlock.  In part the distinction was made clear after recently leveling both my Rogue and Druid to 100 in the Warlords of Draenor quest content, then dropping down to my level 75 Warlock and attempting to push him up into the Cataclysm zones.

The key problem I noticed was the fact that content rarely synchronized terribly well.  In the later expansions, you are allowed to collect a whole series of quests for a specific area and then do a whole bunch of different things there before returning to the quest hub to move to the next area.  That simply doesn’t work in practice in Wrath of the Lich King, and I found myself constantly reaching the same point at different times, with the absolute worst of it involving sending me back to the same Harpy filled ravine in Storm Peaks each time after something slightly different.  If that was the exception and not the rule life would have been golden, but zone after zone I found myself staggered just enough in my questing to be annoying and greatly drag out the leveling process with a ton of movement from one edge of the zone to the next.  This of course was exacerbated by the fact that my Warlock only has slow flight, which makes traversing the bigger areas extremely painful.  That said I remember definitely having to do all of these zones before flight, which only would have made them that much worse.  I tried doing my stair step approach to the content, and found that not entirely working as intended… namely because there is no hero’s call quest that leads into Icecrown.  At 79 I finally decided to pop over and see if I could start the quests, and sure enough I was able to finish up there and ding within fairly short order.  The quest sequence inside of Icecrown is probably the best I experienced in my abbreviated push through Northrend.

Evolutions Were Made

So regardless of what I have said about Wrath of the Lich King in the past, I have to admit that significant upgrades have been made to the way we level characters.  I mean I knew that The Burning Crusade quests were frustrating and slow, but even then there seemed to be a lot more batching up of related tasks than I experienced during the several zones in Northrend.  Ultimately my big complaint with the more recent expansions has not been the leveling content, in fact I think questing through Pandaria and Warlords to be some of the most fun I generally have on a character.  Even Cataclysm from what I remember was pretty fun, with the only real problem there being that each zone is an entirely linear experience and if you lose the quest chain somewhere you are simply dead in the water.  I am sure as I level with my demons through the Cata zones I will find the same frustrations there that I found with Wrath, just in different ways.  The little bit I have played of Legion feels like they have once again made a leap forward in the way the flow of questing feels, and I am sure at some point I will be complaining about all of the past content when I level my next batch of alts.  When you spend a good deal of your time playing alts, the way the quests fit together really matters, and in games like Final Fantasy XIV where I don’t have quests to level alternate jobs… I miss it greatly.

We tend to lock things in our mind, that are colored by feelings and emotions that were happening at the time.  In many ways the Wrath era had some of the most turmoil in my life in dealing with a job that I hated, and a downward spiral of events brought on by deaths and other traumatic events.  However I will always think fondly upon that time because of the stability that my guild and raid team provided me during that time.  They were always there and always supportive even when I decided I wanted to stop leading anything.  It is because of all of this that Wrath was this shining moment for me in a long list of World of Warcraft experiences.  However that sequence of events is nothing I would ever want to relive, and it is impossible to try and piece that era back together.  In many ways my fondness for Wrath of the Lich King is no different than a parent trying to relive their own high school sports glory days through forcing their kids to make the same decisions they did.  I need to come to the realization that there is no going back, and we can only keep moving forward and adapting to the changes as they happen.  I still completely reserve the right to disagree with the direction various games are being taken in, but ultimately my only choice is whether or not I play.  I can’t claw back change, and somehow bring things back to a state that I remember so fondly.  My recent trip through Northrend has made me realize that even if I could… I wouldn’t actually enjoy the results.

Peak Pokemon

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Nothing but Zubats

AWildZubat

There are several news outlets reporting that Pokemon Go has reached its peak and is now starting to trend downwards.  This is zero surprising to me, simply because it would be hard for any game to reach this level of viral saturation… and then somehow manage to sustain it.  There are a lot of factors at play here, not the least of which is our apparent short attention span when it comes to internet fueled phenomena.  That said I personally am still playing it quite regularly, but with a lot less of the reckless abandon.  On my drive into work every morning there are still a couple of parking lots I pop by and check that have given me good finds in the past.  However I am largely not doing the evening walking thing, because we have had a streak of 100 degree days with some silly humidity going on.  Whenever I stop anywhere however I still habitually whip out the phone to check if there is anything interesting around.  I’ve made several trips to local hot spots in a constant search of something new.  The game however has a lot of problems standing in front of it, and I believe that they more than anything are what is standing in the way of player retention.  The truth be told, I feel like we are at a point of being rolled out to every market that really makes a difference, and that was probably never the intention… or at least not this soon.  However the social pressure of players wanting to play desperately, and being willing to find other ways to do so… meant that if they did not push to other territories that they were ultimately losing their shot at that income stream.

The biggest problem with this game is that the experience is not equitable.  I count myself lucky that I work in a town of 500,000 and live in a metro area of roughly 1 million.  That said other than a dozen “hot spots”, Tulsa seems to be a wasteland of Pidgey, Rattata, Weedle and oh so many Zubats.  When you get out to the suburbs where I live, even those seem to be few and far between that when I go on a walk I am catching them more out of a sense of boredom than any desire to actually waste the pokeballs on them.  Similarly I get excited when I see the next tier of “mostly trash” Pokemon in the form of the Doduo, Caterprie, Venonat, and Spearow because it breaks up the monotony of an ocean of Pidgey candy.  I said that I count myself lucky, because as miserable as it is to go a week without seeing anything interesting… I am still sitting just shy of level 20 with 76 Pokemon caught and 77 seen.  Thusfar “the one that got away” was a Dratini that I lost due to the once super common “pokeball lock up”, where the screen would freeze on catch and you had either caught the Pokemon or not, but had no real second chance because you would have to restart the app to get control again.  The folks that are in really dire straights are those who are unlucky enough to live in rural areas.  I know when I have traveled to various small towns here in Oklahoma I have seen nothing but the regular assortment of random trash Pokemon, even surrounding Pokestops.

Servers On Fire

Another huge problem up until this point is that the servers have been anything but reliable.  Another way that I am extremely lucky is that I have a wife who is super understanding about my desire to go hunting invisible creatures.  She has suggested multiple times that we take road trips to check out other areas and see if maybe I can get far enough out of our zone to find something new and interesting.  The problem there is that until this week you never really could rely on the servers actually being up at any given moment.  It is impossible to tell the difference between what is just the servers on fire from usage, and what is Niantic actually performing maintenance.  The reason being that the company behind this game seems to think the best policy is zero communication with their customers about basic up time information.  So the one time a few weeks back when we actually decided to take a road trip, the servers looked fine when we left our house.  Then by the time we actually reached our destination I could not catch anything without getting a string of constant application lockups due to the servers not responding.  I went to a park that I thought would be loaded with Pokemon, and ultimately it was… however after trying to catch four things and getting four pokeball lockups, I gave up and headed home frustrated.

Now when I say that the experience is not equitable, I think it is worth mentioning the experience that the faction of AggroChat is having up in Seattle.  They seem to have a cavalcade of hot and cold running Pokemon all of the time.  Tam apparently lives across from some park that is an absolute hot bed of activity in the evening, and while we have those here they are nowhere near my house, and would be horribly awkward to drive to at 9/10 pm at night.  Here in Tulsa there is a reddit that keeps tabs on what folks have seen and caught… and I know in Seattle they seem to be regularly catching things that we have never seen.  So ultimately I feel like they need to tweak the base population to be a little more fair, and a lot less based on cellular activity which was the case with Ingress.  I am sure this game is a phenomenal experience in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and Chicago…  but significantly less for those of us stuck in smaller population centers.  So if we have reached “Peak Pokemon”, I feel like a good chunk of it comes from the frustration of wanting to play… and when you finally can keep connected to the servers, the only thing you see are the same critters you see everywhere.   My kingdom for a Vulpix or I would quite literally wet myself if I probably saw a Pikachu or a Charmander.

Still Playing

All of this said… I am still very much interested in this game.  The part of Pokemon that I enjoy the most is roaming around and catching new things, and for the most part this app lets me do ONLY that.  However at some point I am going to get bored with the assortment of common and slightly less common Pokemon that I can regularly find here.  I caught a Machoke on Monday, and that had been the first new wild Pokemon I had seen in over two weeks.  Most of the new finds I am getting, are through sheer brute force evolution of less common critters.  For example I got an Arbok yesterday, by finally getting enough candy to evolve and Ekans.  While in part I am happy to tick off another checkbox in the Pokedex… I would have far rather seen an Arbok in the wild, or a Seaking, or a Gloom… or the countless other evolutions I have finally gotten enough candy to do.  I am admittedly jealous of the folks who live in active enough areas to see that sort of stuff in the wild, without actually resorting to making Pokemon Go into a lifestyle.  Sure there are folks that have been hanging out at the handful of hot spots every single night here in Tulsa, and I am certain they have seen some pretty awesome stuff.  However what I am looking for is a game that I can play in the times between going and doing other things, and for the most part this game fits that bill awesomely.  I am just hoping that at some point they give me something more interesting to see than another Rattata.  Right now my app is telling me that I have caught 660 Pokemon, and quite literally I figure at least 300 of those have been Zubats.  Largely I am just hoping at some point the game changes in a way that makes me still have hope that I will find something interesting in the wild.  That is a huge part of what has nerfed my nightly walks is knowing that a trip around the neighborhood is maybe going to get me a couple Pidgeys, a Rattata and if I am super lucky an Eevee.  I am curious what your own experiences have been?  Are you having much luck “catching them all”?