Tales of the Aggronaut

Best Gift Ever

December 26, 2015 by Belghast

Star Wars Christmas

There are times when the best gift at Christmas… you are not quite sure if it was intentional or not. I’ve talked about our relatively chill Christmas day plans for the better part of a week, and I have to say after going through it yesterday it was far better than I could have imagined. First off we have all this amazing food… that we will be eating for a week. On the menu….

Chilli-Cheese Rotel Dip
Sausage Cheese Balls
Pulled BBQ Beef
White Chocolate Cranberry Clusters
Chocolate Cashew Clusters
Snickerdoodles
Ranch Pretzels
White and Milk Chocolate dipped Pretzels
Flakey Biscuits to heap the BBQ Beef on

It was not exactly the most conventional meal, but we grazed happily throughout the course of the original three Star Wars movies. You cannot have read my blog over the last few months and somehow missed the fact that Star Wars was a major part of my childhood. I went to see the original when I was roughly 2 years old in the local drive in… and was hooked from that point on. So for Christmas it was a given that I would end up getting a bunch of Star Wars merchandise from my parents. The best gift however was this marathon and the effect it seems to have had on my wife. I am trying to keep my expectations tempered, but maybe just maybe we have another Star Wars fan in the family.

Granted she has always been amazing about my Star Wars thing… and has brought me home various artifacts like Star Wars Legos, or just the other night a cool set of Kylo Ren playing cards. So even though she didn’t get why the movie was important to me… she was always super awesome about putting up with my thing. I remember in college she even used to get into the hunt for new action figures, helping me crawl through the racks of figures to find the one or two that I didn’t already have. The prequels pretty much killed my desire to be surrounded by action figures on my walls… but I do pick up the occasional figure every now and then and on the wall between my monitors I have Dark Jedi Luke, Jedi Leia, Clone Emperor, Mara Jade, Admiral Thrawn, a snow gear Plo Koon, and a badass Savage Opress figure. So yesterday I half expected the desire to watch the three originals and then go see the new one… was at least in part a gift for me. That is until she invited one of her friends along for the journey. After watching the originals and seeing the new one…. she came home with all of these questions that I can’t really answer before she watches the prequels. So right now the plan is to spend today marathoning through those as well… and I am happy as a clam when I say… it was not MY idea to do this.

Keeping it Chill

There are a lot of things I am into that I think she would also like. I mean she was a huge fan of the Harry Potter series and got into it long before I did, and is also a fan of the Star Trek series and has been amped to see the newer movies. So the raw DNA of a Science Fiction and Fantasy fan is there, and I think if I could ever get her interested in say the modern Joss Whedeon Marvel films she would really enjoy them as well. However with those… we would need to start at the very beginning chronologically and do another Marathon since each movie at least in part fleshes out another corner of the Avengers universe. All of this said…. I am trying to keep it super chill and not put any pressure on her to like things more than she actually does. However just having my wife ask me questions about Star Wars… might be quite possibly the best Christmas gift I have ever received. I mean I guess it was impossible to live with me for the last two decades and not have SOME of the Star Wars franchise to imprint on her. She has always liked R2-D2, Chewbacca, The Jawas and the Ewoks… and she used to laugh when I would throw a blanket over my head and say Utini.

One of the awesome things about our marriage has always been that we could have completely different likes… but each of us would be supportive over whatever the other person was into. She has been awesome about the daily blog thing… and the podcast… and this game or that… because I know they really do put dents in our schedule that are theoretically “untouchable” where I need to be at a keyboard. Similarly I am cool with the fact that there are many nights where she works in her classroom until 8pm or has this or that church activity that needs attention. It has always amazed me at just how well we work together, when in truth we don’t have that many shared interests. At the core has always been this willingness to go along with whatever the other person wants to do… because I think we enjoy seeing the other half excited even if we aren’t that excited ourselves. All of this said… I am not expecting a Christmas Miracle… and all of the sudden my wife will be as obsessed with Star Wars as I have been all of these years. I still think its amazing however for her to be asking the same sorts of questions that I pondered all throughout my childhood and even now have nothing more than vague guesses at. I think without a doubt though, there will be no question as to whether or not we will be going to the next several movies because if nothing else… she seems hooked on the new generation of films after watching Force Awakens last night.

Christmas and Catte Durids

December 25, 2015 by Belghast

Chillest Christmas

ChillChristmas

This year is turning out to be the most chill Christmas, since 2003 when we took a cruise to Cancun. At this point I am honestly not sure how we managed to get away with this low key of a Christmas, but I am not complaining. For most of our married life, my wife and I have spent both Thanksgiving and Christmas running around like crazy, trying to appease every household with an appearance of adequate length. The entire process leaves us not really enjoying any of it, and stressed about the next place we have to go while at any given house. Now the last decade has wreaked havoc upon our family, and with it has slowly whittled down the number of houses we actually have to go to. Previously Christmas Eve was this tradition of going to my home town and going to mass with my mothers side of the family, and then opening presents with them afterwards… and finally ending up across the street at my aunts house late at night. This meant Christmas Eve we often didn’t get home until after midnight, only to need to get up bright and early Christmas morning to be at another house before noon. Unfortunately the matriarchs of both sides of the family have gone, and with it a lot of the traditions.

We are trying to create new traditions among my generation, like getting together the other night at Phat Philly’s here in town just to share a meal and a conversation. But many of these new traditions are not necessarily dependent on a given day, the way the past generation was. In my family it has always seemed that if it did not happen on the actual day… it didn’t count. For me… getting together period and hanging out counts regardless of when it is happening. We originally had plans for Christmas Eve, but those fell through due to illness in the family. As a result last night we ended up going out to dinner with my folks, and then them coming back to our house to open gifts and chill out for awhile. It was really nice, and while we have yet to see my wife’s side of the family… we are somehow ending up with this perfect Christmas day where we get to hang out at home and snack on all the goodies that my wife baked yesterday. As I have mentioned the last few days, we are doing a Star Wars Marathon and then hitting the new movie at 7pm tonight. Since I have been asked… we are only doing 4, 5 and 6 largely because neither my wife nor her friend that is coming over are really big Star Wars fans. When indoctrinating someone into the franchise… I think the prequels do nothing but muddy the water… because they expect you to already know a bunch about Star Wars. I am more than happy to simply not include them for the time being, because from what I could tell they had no real bearing on number seven.

Some Assembly Required

Yesterday I got a message from one of my friends, saying they had a Christmas gift for me. The only gotcha was that I would have to make a character on a specific SomeAssemblyRequired server to receive it. This message came through at a time yesterday when I was babysitting the kitten… with us both locked in my office (to keep her out of the baked goods) so it worked out perfectly. I created Belgrave the Catte Durid and my friend met me in Newbie Cow Land. Next thing I know she had a trade window open and handed me the item on the right. At once I was both thrilled and understood what she meant when she said it might require some work on my part. On my blog I have talked about my current chase of the holiday Yeti mount, and how Lodur and I founded #team360nomount and unfortunately hunting this mount had kinda dominated my play sessions. Not only was my friend giving me the gift of a mount… but also giving me the gift of chilling the hell out and not worrying quite so much about doing every single holiday daily. The first thing I did every morning was work through my holiday missions, and I knew I would have ended up a ragey mess if I had done all of this… and still ended up without one.

This is proof positive that I have amazing friends, because so many times something like this has happened. One of my friends shows up to save the day… and my sanity. As a result however I am shifting gears and since The MooCowAdin is now my best geared character… I am going to start running up the catte durid instead of my Warlock. Right now the plan is to go a mixture of Kitty and Bear, which lets me tank and pewpewpew. I always say I am going to play Moonkin, but then never actually end up playing Moonkin because it is a super fiddly spec. The strangest thing about playing this character is how vastly different the leveling experience feels on a non-roleplaying server. On Argent Dawn and The Scryers in your open world zones you are playing with lots of other players from Role Playing servers. I have always said that RP servers just attracted a better caliber of people… and it seems like that really is the case. Within the first few minutes of playing my druid I had been spit on and slapped numerous times by other players, and while running around in Azshara last night I had people constantly trying to steal the skins from my corpses as I was looting them. Conversely while leveling my Warlock on the amalgam of Roleplaying servers… I constantly waving and blowing kisses at me while wandering around. There have been many times I was getting low on health that someone just shows up and throws a random heal. So I gotta say… the experience is so night and day that it just seems odd.

Merry Christmas

Christmas is a day that means lots of different things to lots of different people. So my hope is that whatever today means to you… it is in fact an awesome day. I don’t always sync up with my family, and there are a lot of times it feels like they don’t really “get me”. The person they assume I am isn’t always the same as the person I really am, but in the long run…. I think a lot of people feel that way. Otherwise we would never leave the home and strike out into the world. What I will say is that over the years I have carefully surrounded myself with awesome people that do get me. I am blessed with some truly amazing friends, and in the end… your friends are the family you choose. So whatever today means to you, or whatever your traditions happen to be… my hope is that you are spending it with the people that make you happy. I am going to spend the day chilling out with my wife and one of her friends and watching the hell out of some Star Wars while playing World of Warcraft. I feel like it is going to be an amazing day.

Donuts and Cards

December 24, 2015 by Belghast

Snowman Donuts

christmasdonuts

Every single year my wife and I say to ourselves… that this will be the year that we are not rushing around last minute to finish things up. However every year… Thanksgiving happens and it feels like we have so much time left until Christmas… because as a kid Thanksgiving to Christmas seemed like an eternity. In the adult world however, Thanksgiving is an early warning sign that you better get your shit together because the Christmapocalypse is coming soon. Every year we struggle to figure out what we are going to do, and then end up rushing around when inspiration hits us. Last night that meant an 11pm trip to Walmart to pick up the last few things, because we had been avoiding that store like the plague since before Thanksgiving. While there we opted to pick up something for breakfast, and this is when the most adorable donuts ever come into play. I absolutely ate a Christmas Tree and a Snowman this morning… and they were shockingly tasty. I guess if you put enough frosting on anything it becomes good right?

In theory once I wrap up this blog post I will have to sort out how exactly I am wrapping things, because this evening begins our Christmas festivities. This year is going to be a strange one, because up until this week we had planned on going to the house formerly known as Grandma and Grandpas, and having dinner and presents with my father’s side of the family on Christmas Eve. However due to medical difficulties that fell through, and instead my parents and coming here… where we are going to go out for dinner and then come back and have presents and such. This has been a stressful year as a whole, so as many low key gatherings as we can get away with… the happier I will end up being. The only bittersweet part of it is that we simply don’t have that many gatherings to go to period. My mother’s side of the family pretty much evaporated when my grandmother passed away. On my wife’s side we technically had Christmas with her dad before Thanksgiving so he could go down south for the winter, and her Mom hasn’t really had a bit formal Christmas gathering in years. There are celebrations we could go to, but they are their own kind of stress due to the large number of people. So instead… we are mostly going to hang out close to home and do largely relaxing things.

Awesome Cards

cardsbyawesome

I’ve never really received many cards, or at least not ones that were really special. There was the year I alpha tested Guild Wars 2, and got a really cool Santa Charr card signed by the team. I have that stuffed away somewhere, but this year… I got some that are even more special. I snapped a photo of them so you folks could see them. To the left you have a bear with sunglasses print that my cousin’s wife made. Now this is a literal print, not something mass produced… you can feel the ridges of the woodcut… or in this case my working theory is battleship linoleum. To the right is a really cool custom Christmas card featuring the artwork of the ever amazing Ammosart. She asked me for my address a few weeks back, but it didn’t dawn on me at the time why she was asking for it. When I got the card in the mail I was shocked, and super happy to have received it. Honestly I am lucky to have the friends that I do, because they greatly improve my mental state on a daily basis.

I’ve commented several times lately about just how awesome my social networks are, and I guess over the years I have curated them to the point where 99.9% of the time they make me happy. It’s not that I am purposefully trying to shut out the bad of the world… I hear plenty of that on NPR during my drives in the car. I just feel like social media as a whole is “my time” and for “my enjoyment”. The world is depressing enough without feeling the need to wallow in the bad parts while sitting at home on your sofa wrapped up in a warm blanket. I still have some pretty horrific bouts of depression… but I can only imagine how much worse it would be if I was not trying to focus on the good things in my life. Before I know it, this much needed break will be over and I will be rushing to catch up at work, but for the time being… I am just going to savor every moment of this relaxation that I get.

Sorting Packaging

I should wrap this post up and get downstairs to help my wife with the stuff she is fiddling with. Currently I am locked in my office with the kitten, to help keep her out of the baked goods. This is probably a crucial role to be played, but at some point soon I will need to venture outside. I have to brave the crowds and go find some packaging for gifts that will be delivered tonight. Last minute is a thing… that apparently I do well. I hope all of you have a wonderful Christmas day, because I doubt that many people will be taking the time to read whatever I have to say tomorrow. So have a very Merry Christmas, and if we try really hard we will all survive it just fine!

Bel’s Year in Gaming

December 23, 2015 by Belghast

Path to Madness

BelsYearInGaming

Firstly I feel like I need to lead off this morning by saying… I am feeling much better. Thanks for all the support yesterday, and I have to admit that a video shared to me by ChibiSeira helped a lot as well. Part of the problem is… I have been reviewing my blog for a project that you can see above. Normally this isn’t a big deal, but depression loves to lie to you. It makes things seem worse than they actually are, and in my mind… I have been in this present down cycle for months and months. The reality however is this current phase has only really been there since late October at the earliest and more specifically in this post Thanksgiving stress period that leads to the end of the year. Basically my down cycle is happening during the most stressful and hectic part of the year so it is absolutely expected. I’ve probably had one of these cycles every single year of my life, but where things wound up getting a little cross wired yesterday was the fact that at the time of posting… I had only actually managed to make it through June. So sifting through my blog it seemed like I was so active and so functional during the first half of the year… and the depression filled in the blanks and told me that I was absolutely useless for the tail end of the year. Hell to be truthful with August and September I have no clue how I ended up playing so many things… especially considering it is another massively stressful time of the year as my wife starts a new school year again.

Basically as I finished sifting through this years worth of blog posts… it made me realize that my brain was in fact telling lies to me. That sure the last few weeks have been a bit sparse, with me getting sucked back into World of Warcraft again… but that this is in no way indicative of the year as a whole. Essentially the above image started as me wanting to know the answer to a simple question… “How long of a break did I take from World of Warcraft?”. From here it shifted into… “wouldn’t it be cool to plot the various MMOs I have played this year” to finally “fuck it lets just plot everything I talked about in my blog”. To the best of my knowledge this represents all of the games that I wrote about this year in one form or another, which pretty closely marries to the games that I have played. If you are really curious you can see the actual google sheet that I built the image off of. I am sure there are little blips here and there that I poked my head in but never thought to write about them, but for the sake of this discussion we are safe just assuming that for one reason they weren’t that important to me. The list as a whole currently includes sixty eight different games, and I underlined the games that represented the AggroChat Game Club titles. The first thing you will notice is that I am absolutely very much an “MMO Gamer”. Thirty Six of the games fall into the loose bubble that is “MMO” or “Online” game, and in many months I was playing more than one of these actively.

The Win Condition

One of the things I have come to realize is that apparently I am wired oddly these days, and this has been highlighted through participating in AggroChat and namely the Game Club. My Co-Hosts often seem to focus on whether or not they have beaten a game, and honestly… this rarely ever enters my mind. My focus seems to be on the playing and whether or not that was enjoyable. The funny thing is… I was not always this way. I remember during the Nintendo era, my friend Wade and I had a running competition to see who could beat the most games and as a result we both had lists of the games we had beaten. My focus was always on trying to churn through the game as fast as possible to get to the end, and then something changed. I was introduced to the internet, and the social aspect of gaming through IRC and MUDs. Then when Everquest was released and I was subsequently “jumped into” playing it… to borrow a phrase from Beau Hindman… my focus became about the experience and the social aspect of playing an MMO. Years later… I still MOSTLY play MMOs and when I play single player games… it becomes about the exploration and savoring the moment to moment game play and less about the win condition.

I guess this makes sense as MMOs generally have no win condition at all, but are instead a sequence of small moment to moment game play experiences that continue to build upon each other making up the overall game experience. Basically I find that I don’t like my single player experiences to end. When I play Mass Effect 2 for example, I spend time doing every single side mission because I know once I start that one mission… it is all over but the crying. That zeroing in on the end of the game is the least exciting part of the equation for me. Similarly I tend to avoid the main story line in both Fallout and Elder Scrolls games like the plague, because in the past at least they have had a similar problem of ending the game… when you finish the main quest. Then there are games that kill your character as part of the main story arc, and I find them insanely unsatisfying because even if I am not playing it… I like to think my character is out there somewhere moving around in the world without me… still existing. I think this is ultimately why I will always favor Mass Effect 2 to 3…. and will always take that one option in Dragon Age Origins. Basically I have been conditioned through playing MMOs to not want the enjoyable experience to ever end. So often I get right up to the end of a game… and then just stop playing it. When I revisited Wolfenstein New Order for example… I was less than fifteen minutes away from beating the game… but there was a part of me that desperately did not want to do it.

Happy Festivus!

The fact that I managed to create a post this morning is a Festivus Miracle!!! That’s right folks… it is Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us. Right now the game play for the rest of the year is to dig into some of the things I played and talk about various experiences… like the game that surprised me or the game I struggled with the most. Not everything I played was amazing, but a lot of it actually kinda was. I am also hoping to finally beat the main storyline for Fallout 4, and maybe do the same for a few other games that I left stranded like Witcher 3. In any case, I hope you have a happy whatever it is that you want to celebrate. Be it Christmas, or Festivus, or a belated Chanukah… or ever a Super Christmas nod to my friend Grace… I hope you enjoy whatever it is that you celebrate with friends and family. Right now we have this awesome Christmas day planned of marathoning through the original Star Wars movies and then going to see seven in the theaters since my wife and one of her friends have yet to see it. I seriously could not think of a more perfect way to spend the day.