Tales of the Aggronaut

So Much Cheese Pizza

April 3, 2016 by Belghast

April Fools On Me

ThePizzaOrder Yesterday morning began with a really interesting turn of events. I got up, got dressed, went out to get breakfast… and as is often the case when I finally got set down I opened email to see if there was anything important for me to deal with. In my inbox was an order receipt from Domino’s Pizza… which at first in my sleepy state didn’t seem all of that odd. Then it dawned on me… that it has been weeks since we last ordered anything from Domino’s so I opened it to figure out what was going on. Much to my shock… it was a very real looking order statement for some $600 worth of stuff… ordered at 1:30 in the morning and to be delivered to my address at 11 am Saturday. The list goes something like this…

25 Large Hand Tossed Cheese Pizzas
13 2-Liters of Coke
3 Stuffed Cheesy Bread with Bacon and Jalapeno
25 Side Marinara Dipping Cups
6 Side Garlic Dipping Cups
6 Side Ranch Dipping Cups
25 Side Blue Cheese Dipping Cups
25 Chocolate Lava Crunch Cakes
25 Side Icing Dipping Cups
1 Sweet BBQ Bacon Specialty Chicken

It seemed like someone had gotten into my account on Dominos.com and placed an order, using an old credit card that was on file there that expired sometime in 2015. At 8 in the morning on a Saturday neither the local Domino’s or the corporate Call Center were open, so I instead called my credit card company who assured me that they denied the order. So for a little bit I went on about my business yesterday morning with the intention of calling the local office around 10:30 when they opened to make sure they realized it was a fraudulent order. I had been in the backyard spraying weed killer for a bit, when I went back inside and realized I had a few missed calls. Apparently the manager of the location had physically come by the house to verify that the order was legit before processing it. His workers however apparently thought nothing of it, and were just about to start in making the pizzas. I mean who orders 25 cheese pizzas? I am not sure if this was a targeted attack on me in particular, or if this was just some sort of scripted attack, whatever the case it made for an interesting morning… and a very interesting story.

Day of Chores

RemotePlay 2016-04-03 09-17-13-72

Yesterday as a whole was a day filled with doing stuff around the house. I got to play exactly one match of Iron Banner yesterday before shutting back down to run some errands. It was largely a day for doing a bunch of stuff that had been needing to be done for a bit. One of the major goals of the day was to get the new wireless multi-function printer hooked up, and working with all of our devices. Other than taking a bit to install drivers on each machine this actually went pretty smoothly. There is some strangeness with Google Cloud Printing, in that the printer must be owned by one google account, and then shared to other Google accounts. But I have to credit my wife with figuring that bit out. It is kinda cool being able to print from a chromebook finally, or print from chrome itself anywhere and have it come out on the printer at home. I could see that useful sometimes, especially for printing order receipts. The next mission was to try and figure out why our high volume printer just stopped working last week. When I went to investigate whether the Parallel to USB cable was still hooked in tightly… the entire thing fell apart in my hand. Not sure what happened but it seems like I simply need a new one of those.

As far as today my goal is to play some more Iron Banner because I really want to be able to hit rank 5 and maybe see some of the weapons as drops. I am not sure that any of the rolls available on Lord Saladin are really worth purchasing, but in theory if I got some better perks it would be well worth my time. I still need to get several heavy kills to complete the weekly bounties. I am holding onto all of the brown bounties because I have been told that they greatly increase in value as the event comes to a close. We have the usual laundry and cleaning to do, but my hope is that unlike yesterday… today can be largely a day of gaming and chilling out. Yesterday was a really strange day, but other than the pizza thing a good one. I was super excited that for the most part AggroChat went off without a hitch. We recorded a fairly long show about a bunch of interesting things, and there was zero occurrence of chipmunk Belghast.

Chasing Unicorns

April 2, 2016 by Belghast

Random Number Generators

For a bit now I have been trying to sort out why Destiny as a game is so damned appealing to me, and more so why it isn’t appealing to a lot of the AggroChat folks. While I am still very much enthralled by the game, the rest of the crew seems to be having that same experience with Warframe. While there are absolutely aspects of that game that I enjoy, as a whole I just find the experience less interesting. So while trying to reason out one day what the difference was… other than he design aspect and third person view. Then it finally hit me… that I really find the whole modding system in that game far less interesting than the random item rolls in Destiny. In theory Warframe is predictable and you can build each weapon to function exactly like you want it to, through the application of very specific mods. Once you have those mods and have leveled them you can then apply them to any weapon you can equip, allowing you to have a very predictable experience. The problem is I think it is that predictability that I find boring.

I’ve come to realize that I really do love chasing unicorns. What I mean by that is that for as long as I have played MMOs I have been enthralled by the random number generator aspect of loot. From the early days of Everquest, to Dark Age of Camelot and their completely random drops that came with Shrouded Isles… to even modern World of Warcraft with its chance of dropping Warforged items… I love the possibility of getting something truly amazing to drop for me. I think in many ways this is why I am so susceptible to grinding, because I know every single thing that I kill has an admittedly slim chance of dropping something truly magical like a BOE world epic. So when I play a game like Destiny I love knowing that the weapon I just got to drop for me, is a fairly unique package of stats… with randomized perks. I also love knowing that somewhere out there is a “God Roll” just perfect for my playstyle.

Imperfect Items

However the thing I appreciate the most is how I honestly enjoy using “imperfect” drops. Because while they may not work exactly the way I want them to work, there is always a way to make them function, and in doing so they give me a window into different play styles. Like I love the Rodeo perk on almost anything, but there are lots of weapons that I use without it and in each of them it has just made that gun feel more unique in the way it handles and the ways I can use it. So I love seeing what some might call a bad roll, and then trying to make it work for me. This keeps the game fresh and keeps me constantly falling in love with new weapons until I find something else that catches my attention. Through the course of playing Destiny I have played with so many different guns, and each of them had their own unique style and feel… and often times I get nostalgic when I dust them off in the bank and take them out to do bounties again. The Zarinaea-D for example I have used so many times, and each time I pick it up I get warm fuzzies over the way it handles and the way the gun sounds and looks.

The problem is I just don’t feel that in Warframe. Weapons have stats and then those stats are augmented by mods… that themselves are always going to be the same as they level up. Tam and I talked about this at length one day, and for him that is the perfect scenario… because it makes him feel like he is never using something inferior. For me however I actually kinda like knowing that there is always a slightly better version out there somewhere. I am admittedly focused on loot when I play any game, and when I reach a point of having the “best in slot” I get bored and the game starts to stagnate for me. I like situations where there are lots of “potentially right” answers to a problem, and that I can choose whichever option feels the best. Right now this is one of the problems I am having with The Division is that while I enjoy the game… the loot feels realy boring, or at least it doesn’t seem to be doing anything interesting to my game play. I’ve not picked up a weapon that completely changed how I approach combat, and that forces me to focus on this aspect or that rather than continuing to do the same thing I always seem to be doing. In the meantime however I will keep chasing those unicorns and looking for that really awesome item to drop just around the corner.

Attack of Miitomo

April 1, 2016April 1, 2016 by Belghast

Strangest Social Network

Yesterday is the day that Nintendo finally rolled out it’s My.Nintendo.Com rebranding of their account system. For years Nintendo has made some pretty confusing choices when it came to social connectivity in their applications. The obtuse friend code system in the 3DS was often times more trouble than it was really worth to connect up with your friends under most situations. The short lived Nintendo ID seemed to work better, but since I only recently purchased a Wii U I have not had a ton of experience with it other than accessing the eShop. “My Nintendo” is their new attempt at gluing together all of these old systems along with the social media that we actually use on a regular basis… namely Twitter, Google Plus, and Facebook… with what appears to be integration with Instagram and Line but these are not super intuitive. With this network they also rolled out a new app called Miitomo that attempts to be something along the lines of those street pass apps that let you play with your friends Mii avatars.

The only problem is… that the app refuses to work on my phone. They have chosen to block rooted phones from being able to use the network… which honestly accounts for a not insignificant portion of the android market share. The only problem here is… my phone isn’t rooted. At one point I absolutely unlocked root so I could run tethering apps, however since then I restored back to the factory settings. When you use any of the “root checker” programs my phone gets as clean bill of health, and Samsung KNOX is still showing a valid warranty so zero strikes there either. So for all purposes my phone is not rooted and the app should not be able to tell that it has EVER been rooted. However I am still encountering the same damned black screen and crash that rooted users seem to experience, so I am guessing somehow the Nintendo app still thinks I have a rooted device. The only problem here is… if my phone were actually rooted I could fix this problem easily by using cloaking software to keep the Miitomo app from seeing the root access. So honestly if I ever want to run this on my phone it is looking like I am going to have to redo the root and install Rootcloak… which sort of defeats the purpose doesn’t it Nintendo?

All of this said I did manage to get it to install on my Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, which in itself is a bit of a goofy situation given that this is not on the Amazon app store yet. If you also have the $50 Kindle, and would like to be using the Google Play store instead… check out this video that I used to install the play store and the related applications on my tablet because it doesn’t require root to actually make it happen. The only game I have yet to get to work on the Kindle is Final Fantasy Record Keeper and I am guessing if I did some digging I could probably make that work too. On the Miitomo front… I am not entirely certain I get it. I mean it is a very cute presentation and it allows me to dress my Mii up however I want. The only problem is I am not really seeing the point, other than earning nebulous rewards on the “My Nintendo” website like 15% off coupons. Once you get past the window dressing, what the app ultimately ends up being is a super cumbersome chat program that lets you comment on your friends status updates. If I could take items earned in this app and have it trickle down into the 3DS and Wii U then that would be really awesome, or if I could unlock extras for the games I am already playing… then that would be really cool. For the time being however it falls into the “nifty” bin but I am not sure how much myself or anyone else will really be using this once the new and cool factor wears off.

[Edit] – as of this morning I noticed there was a 1.1.2 update waiting on my phone. I tried that and sure enough it seems to have fixed the crash. I do have to admit this is a much better app for a phone than a tablet, so maybe I was overly harsh in my initial review. I am not sure if this actually fixes things for rooted users, but it fixed my problems.

Super Good Advice

I’ve been playing a silly amount of Iron Banner over the last few days, because I am finding that I really do enjoy PVP in Destiny. This is just such an odd revelation for me given that I have purposefully shied away from fighting other players in any other game. At least on some level it makes me wonder if I should dust off some of the other titles and give PVP a real chance to see if it sticks with me. I remember enjoying playing Arena in World of Warcraft during Burning Crusade, but in large part we were doing our matches to get epics… to help our characters in raiding. That is the most interesting thing for me is that I thought I was going into Iron Banner just for the loot, and while I have managed to get two of the chestpieces… that really doesn’t seem to be my core drive. I actually like playing the maps, and while there are some that I absolutely hate… several of them are beginning to feel extremely comfortable. The other thing that I find shocking is that I actually seem to be improving quite a bit. There have been a few matches where I topped the score for the entire match, which is something I find completely bizarro. I still consider myself a very shitty Destiny player.

I think my ultimate goal for this weekend is to be able to get up high enough in the ranking to start to see the weapon drops. I believe these start at rank 4 with the hand cannon, and rank 5 for the machine gun. Both of them are weapons that I would probably actually use, but I am more excited about the Hand Cannon right now for some reason. I miss using my Hand Cannon, and it feels like maybe this one would be a good legendary to run around with. I need to honestly just dust off my Hawkmoon and give it a go again… but the big problem that I always run into is the fact that I never seem to have enough ammunition. It is my huge hope that in the weapon re-balancing coming in the April patch that we see some love for the reserve ammunition size of the various Hand Cannon archetypes. For now my weapon of choice in the Crucible is the Antipodal Hindsight that I now have up to 303. There is just something about this weapon that I love, especially now that I have a roll on it with Rodeo. Seriously… Rodeo on any weapon will take it from crappy to completely viable for me at least. It is my hope that through today’s daily bounties I will hit rank 3 and get my first Iron Banner package.

Life in Tornado Alley

March 31, 2016 by Belghast

Closer Call

Last night was an interesting night to say the least. In the morning folks were talking about the potential for serious storms, but in Oklahoma we tend to take that with a grain of salt. From the months of March through June pretty much every week there is some severe thunderstorm either hitting or looming on the horizon. Living in “Tornado Alley” gives you a strange relationship with the weather. It is something you fear at least a little, but also something that you get used to. There are close calls and then there are close calls so when you hear a storm is a few miles away, you get to the point of being able to look at a map… knowing the general topography and deciding that will never make it to me and going on about your business. Last night was not really one of those nights, because the storm in question was a bit of a sidewinder. At first it looked like it would miss the suburb of Tulsa that I live in, so I was milling around upstairs not thinking much about it. Then I got an urgent series of messages from my wife saying that they were watching it out of the window of the church and that it was coming straight for town. I of course did the most Oklahoman of all things that I could do… I went out on the front porch and tried to see the storm. In the above picture I circled the area of the cloud that was starting to lower, and moments after taking this photo I watched it slowly rope its way downwards towards the ground. It was at this point that I started to take things deadly serious. The below video that I found linked to a local news site shows the same area as I pointed out in the picture, but as it was actually lowering.

TORNADO NORTH OF AIRPORT pic.twitter.com/tHZJT39een

— Brandyn (@BAK_yn) March 31, 2016

The problem is… if a Tornado hits our house we are probably dead. The conventional wisdom is that you need to get to an interior room, as close to the center of your house, with no windows and doors. The way our house is laid out this room doesn’t really exist. We do however have a very tiny laundry room crammed between the garage and the hallway outside of the bedroom. From the garage side there is a steel core door, and from the other side a wooden one. So I proceeded to hang out on the floor of our laundry room crammed between the washer and the dryer with a thick blanket to pull over my head if things went really bad. I tried to gather the cats, and as any cat owner will know… the best way to get your cats into an area is the shut the door. So I shut myself in the laundry room and within a few moments the cats were scratching at the door so I let them in and shut it again. I had the bedroom television blaring so I could somewhat tell where the storm was, and this is when it shifted course drastically again. This time instead of coming straight for us like it seemed, when it hit the reservoir it shifted go to more straight east than north east and ended up passing just to the south east of us. Since I mentioned it last night, we are fine just was a much closer call than I was used to. Had the Tornado continued on its course it would have hit us, but instead it went off and hit a neighborhood about a mile and a half from us. I spent the rest of the evening watching the weather as the storm picked up strength and hit other communities. Unfortunately this is going to be the norm for the next several months as we make our way through another “Tornado Season”. Huge apologies for missing the raid last night, but when shit like that is going on… I kinda need to prep to duck and cover.

Obsessions

I originally had a post for this morning talking about “chasing unicorns”, but I feel like I want it to have its own full post, and with the happenings of last night I felt the need to talk about that instead. So instead I am going to talk about another one of my Craigslist dealings. I am cheap… and if you have read this blog for very long you will know that I really hate having to pay retail price for something. I’ve gotten countless laptops, desktops, and gaming systems from Craigslist, but using the local site is an absolute craps shoot. Some days there are amazing things out there, and then there are weeks or months of absolutely nothing. When I get something stuck in my head that I would like to have… I tend to start searching Craigslist for it. Recently one of those obsessions has been a Wii U and I had it in my head that I wanted to try and get one for under 200 bucks. The bane of my existence however is that apparently on the Tulsa site no one EVER removes anything once they have sold it. So you always have to start every discussion with the same message “Hey do you still have X thing you posted on Craigslist?”. Last week I thought I had found my Wii U. It was not in the Tulsa metro but was within easy driving distance… was $180, came with a pro controller, and I believe a single game. The problem is by the time I contacted the guy he already had someone coming to look it at 4pm that day. After not returning a text asking if they did in fact buy it… and the person still not having removed the ad from Craigslist… I was back at the drawing board.

The only problem is at this point the obsession set in completely. I don’t have a clue why I decided I needed a Wii U, but apparently it was one of the more important things in my life for a period of days. There was a point where I had text conversations going with four different sellers, trying to talk them down to the price range I was willing to pay. All of them had positives and negatives… and none of them were willing to go all the way down to $200 for this reason or that. The biggest problem in Tulsa is that everyone thinks their stuff is worth more than it actually is. Then my wife suggested that I contact this one newer seller that had a bundle of stuff they were trying to sell for $300. I had completely ignored it because it seemed so far out of my target price. Amazingly enough after a few back and forths I got them to a $250 price tag for a very new looking system and four games: Mario Kart, Hyrule Warriors, Splatoon, and Bayonetta 2. All of the games being ones that I would have eventually picked up for myself… except Bayonetta. I figured if nothing else that game could potentially be traded off for something else, or it might surprise me. Once I got the unit it actually ended up being a better deal because also installed on the system was Super Mario U/Luigi U and Megaman Battle Network 4: Blue Moon. So a total of six games and a unit with no scratches that I could see for $250. While the price was not as low as I was hoping I think the end value of the deal was worth it. At some point I am going to pick up the title that ultimately made me want a Wii U in the first place… Mario Maker, but I want to spend some time playing the games I just got before going down that road. Now I need to keep my eyes peeled as we are junking for some of the Wii titles I never actually played.