Tales of the Aggronaut

Blizzard Spirit

November 8, 2014 by Belghast

Christmas Spirit

I tend to be a scrooge when it comes to holidays. I am not sure exactly why I have reached this point, but it wasn’t always that way. Over time the world seems to have warn me down, and each year that passes I find it harder and harder to get into the right frame of mind. There are lots of reasons why it might be the case, not the least of which is the fact that my family has gone through far more deaths around Christmas time than I care to recount. I think in part this is just the way I am, as I don’t really get excited over any of the holidays, or at least have a harder time with each passing year mustering some excitement. It might also be due to the fact that in general we start seeing Christmas decorations showing up in the stores around July, and by the time the holiday actually shows up I am in full tilt overload mode.

Without a doubt all of this changes the moment I am face to face with a child. I can see the amazement, excitement and wonder in their eyes as they take in the experiences of whatever holiday it happens to be. This raises a torch to the little fire inside of me, and causes me to remember just how magical these events used to be before I became a “grown up”. Ultimately holidays are for the children, and it is only in them that they can be truly appreciated. Since I don’t spent my time around that many kids, it takes longer and longer for this little flame to be renewed each year. So while I don’t necessarily want to be a scrooge, that is ultimately what ends up happening. I am not out on my lawn yelling at the kids, but nonetheless we don’t do much if anything to celebrate holidays on our own.

Blizzard Spirit

So you might be thinking… Bel… why are you telling me all of this? Well once upon a time, no matter how forlorn I was about Blizzard as a company, Blizzcon was this magic bullet to relight the fires of wonderment inside of me. Whether or not I was actually playing anything from Blizzard at the time, when Blizzcon rolled around each year it would hold a torch to the little fire inside of me and stoke my nostalgia to a fever pitch, causing me to renew my subscription. This has long been referred to as the “Blizzcon bump” and can pretty much be charted on the subscription numbers every single time. This is part the majesty of Blizzcon itself, and part the fever pitch of excitement that reverberates through the community as a whole. It becomes contagious as you watch friend after friend succumb to a certain kind of madness and raise their Blizzard fan flags high.

The problem is… the pilot light deep inside of me keeps flickering and as of yet no amount of fire seems to be stoking it. I tuned in yesterday to watch the Blizzcon opening ceremonies stream, because I knew more than likely something would get announced that we would probably talk about tonight during the podcast. I had heard rumors of a big announcement, and honestly I halfway expected that big announcement to be Warcraft 4, since it was the 20th anniversary and all. Other than that I expected whatever was announced to be on a tablet, since that has been a major growth market for them with Hearthstone. I was completely wrong in all accounts, and while what announced was awesome looking… it didn’t really do what I thought it would and reignite the flame.

This is the first Blizzcon since the introduction of the Virtual Ticket, that I have not watched. While I pre-purchased my copy of Warlords back when I was actually regularly playing the game… this also looks to be potentially the first Warcraft expansion that I will not actually be playing at launch. I am jealous of the folks like Alternative Chat and Qelric that have kept their fires of nostalgia burning brightly. Maybe this will be like Christmas, and I will be overcome with the “Blizzard Spirit” days or maybe even minutes before the official launch of Warlords of Draenor. I am not a person of firm stances, and absolute positions. I change my mind about at least one long held belief on a nearly daily basis. So maybe just maybe I will be a late bloomer in my nostalgia and end up happily playing this expansion. Currently the signs are pointing to no, and while my account is still active I have gone through all the preparations to not be playing at all. I quietly handed over the reins of House Stalwart to my friend Rylacus during the dark of night. In any case I will try my damnedest not to be a true Scrooge and ruin anyone’s fun during the launch festivities.

Overwatch Looks Awesome

All of this said, is not to take anything away from the fact that Overwatch does indeed look like a really awesome game. When it was first announced I had mixed emotions about it. It felt very much like “Blizzard Does Team Fortress 2”, and I didn’t quite understand why this was going to be a ground breaking thing. Then again in truth nothing that Blizzard does is really ground breaking. They have this way of taking an existing genre and polishing it to a mirror shine, improving the playability and accessibility during the process and making the gameplay itself infectious. I have no doubt at all that when we actually get our hands on Overwatch all of these adjectives will be true, and it will be yet another blockbuster game in the crown of a company that is known for them. We still don’t know a lot of details about the game but my general theory is this will be “MOBA” like in that we will more than likely have a rotation of free characters that we can play, with the option to purchase them permanently and also purchase nifty skins for them.

What made me excited about the game was when I watched the above video of an actual match. I am not your traditional FPS player, in that I don’t really enjoy twitchy deathmatch back and forth gameplay. As such I have always favored games with hard fought objectives be it capture and hold or capture the flag. My all time favorite competitive FPS is Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory because it gave me something to focus on other than just my kill count. Watching the above video… feels like Wolfenstein. I love that the maps have tight corners, because the last few generations of shooters just feel too open to me. I prefer to play run and gun, and wide open maps pretty much mean certain death from above for my particular style. Though from the looks of it these maps seem like they will provide adequate places for folks who like to ambush like snipers as well. The focus on the objective tightens the focus of the map, since everyone will be swarming that one location, and the six versus six group size makes for more intimate play.

So while I am not just enraptured by the Blizzcon conference as a whole, that does not mean that I am not absolutely looking forward to this game. Right now the champions that I am looking forward to playing the most are Reinhardt because he is tanky and melee, and Winston… because he is an gentleman ape. Another champion that looks really awesome is Torbjorn because if you have followed me for long, you will know my love of Dwarves. Additionally when it comes to Enemy Territory games I almost always play the engineer, so that pretty much seems to fit right down his alley. Another champion that looks interesting is Symmetra for her awesome mini turret placing mechanics. The champion that I am not sure if I will like or not is Bastion, because he seems really quirky… but often times quirky is also interesting.

It has been over a decade since Blizzard launched a new IP, and I have to say so far I approve. The cinematic trailer is great, when it started I was like “Blizzard does Super Heroes? Sign me up!”. I really want to play an MMO in this universe because I have not given up hope on a really good super hero MMO. DC Universe Online is fun enough, but it feels really limited in scope, but it is still the best we have. City of Heroes was a long time favorite of mine, and I miss it quite a bit at times… that said it had been years since I had actively played it when it shut down. Champions Online on the other hand has been a barely playable abomination… which is sad because I had so much hope for it. If project Titan was in fact going to be Overwatch the MMO… I mourn its loss. However the game that rose from its ashes looks amazingly fun. At the end of the day… I just really want to see a full length movie dedicated to the adventures of Winston and Tracer. Hopefully I can manage to get into beta because I am very interested in seeing how this game progresses.

Open-mindedness

This one is going to be a bit of an odd one, but in part it syncs up with what I have said today. I am thankful that my upbringing has instilled in me a sense of curiosity towards new ideas. I can’t really say how it happened, but I have a pretty malleable sense of self, and as such I’ve always been hungry for new viewpoints on different subjects. I gobble up as much information as I can, and each piece of information could potentially “upgrade” one of my existing views, or cause me to trash a “rough draft” and start over. There are very few things in me that are not open to discussion, other than a core barometer of justice and basic human decency. So at this very moment I can’t tell you how I will feel about something next week, or a year from now… because I am constantly evolving.

I think this is a strength and not a weakness, and it has allowed me to adapt to the line of work that I do and the ever changing cavalcade of new technologies and programming practices that I have to evaluate. All the while I try my best to keep a firm sense of all of my experiences, and the history behind them… while still putting myself out there and looking to take the best bits of knowledge that I happen to find along my journey. So Mom, Dad, Priests, Scout Leaders, Teachers… all are to be thanked for somehow instilling in me this sense of willingness to pick up new ideas and abandon the ones that no longer make sense.

#Blizzcon #Overwatch

Great Time to Start

November 7, 2014 by Belghast

Good Time to Return

This weekend is going to be a huge hyped filled occasion, and twitter will be full of news trickling out of Blizzcon from the stable of Blizzard games. However if you are not enthralled by that I have something to entertain you as well. With not surprising timing, Square Enix has announced that this weekend that officially started at midnight PST all players who have ever played Final Fantasy XIV will be able to return and play for free until midnight PST on the 10th. This means if you have the client already you just have to patch it up, if you do not have the client however thankfully Square Enix makes that relatively easy to find as well. I literally just typed in “Final Fantasy XIV Client” and was taken directly to the easy to find download link. Additionally if you are a Steam user, you can download a “demo” of the game which should download the full client as well.

For the my own purposes and the purpose of linking to friends I have maintained a playlist on my youtube account that contains each of the major patch trailers. Square does an amazing job of highlighting all of the content that they add into the game during these trailers, and some of them are over ten minutes long showing off new features. It has been two weeks now since the release of the 2.4 patch that added in a round of new stuff including the brand new Rogue class and Ninja job. This admittedly has thrown the world out of whack a bit, and be warned that DPS queues in the duty finder are a bit longer than normal… however this appears to be coming down rapidly as folks finish leveling their rogues and start playing the endgame. The positive is that this has been a slow trickle and the server is still super active with FATEs actually viable in practically every zone. This is also booned a bit by the improved Atma drop rates, making folks willing to work on Atma weapons for alts. If you haven’t played in awhile… none of what I just said probably made much sense… but just know that these are good things.

Great Time To Start

If you have never played Final Fantasy XIV before, it is now the perfect time to start as well. For starters there has been a 14 day trial system in place for a few months now, allowing you to get in and play for free. If you prefer to go through steam I believe clicking the demo option will do the same thing… but I am not sure how the billing works through steam. In theory everything has to go through the Mogstation, which admittedly the worst part of playing any Square Enix game is dealing with their extremely confusing account management system. The reason why it is such a great time to start is that right now until November 12th, Steam has the complete Final Fantasy XIV game for half off. That means the normal version is only $12.49 and the Collectors Edition that comes with a bunch of spiffy stuff including the adorable Fat Chocobo mount among other things is only $22.49. This seems like an absolutely insane deal, and I may have ninja gifted the game to a few people yesterday as a result.

One thing of note, in the world gone mad with F2P games… this is a traditional subscription model. One interesting twist however is that there is something called an “Entry” subscription that is $12.99 a month and allows you to play a single character per server. In truth this tends to be the sweet spot for most people, as you really only need one character in the game period. The job system allows you to swap back and forth between many roles at will, allowing that one character to do damned near everything there is in the game. For example right now my character Belghast Sternblade is a 50 marauder, 50 gladiator, 50 archer, 50 lancer, 40 conjurer, 33 pugilist, 26 thaumaturge, 19 arcanist, 15 rogue and 35 miner. So for awhile I have considered dialing back to the one character account because the likelihood that I will ever care about another character on my server is supremely unlikely.

Better For Not Being Free To Play

Yesterday I had a bunch of folks say essentially the same thing. “I would be excited if this was free to play”, which frustrates me a little bit… but I can see saying it. There are some games that free to play would ruin, because in truth the “free” aspect of that name is generally a bold faced lie. Sure there is some stuff you can do for free, but at the end of the day everyone needs to make money to keep their doors open. As I have watched games go f2p, I have watched two things happen. Either they greatly slow down the pace of content releases, or they start erecting paid walls between you and that content. In truth ONE of the two has to happen or quite frankly the companies end up going out of business. The once lightning pace that content dropped for Rift players feels like it has slowed to a trickle. Then you have games like Star Wars the Old Republic where each and every thing in the game has some price tag associated with it.

The thing that has impressed me the most with Final Fantasy XIV is the pace at which they have released content over the last year, and more so than that the sheer volume of content that gets released. Roughly once a quarter they release a new major patch, and roughly once a month they release a minor patch… that is not just bug fixes but serious new system improvements. For example… these are the 2.35 patch notes… that are several pages long full of new systems and usability improvements. When they add content they add it not just for the highest end players, but they trickle it through all play styles. There are new max level dungeons, new raids, new crafting recipes and materials to go find, as well as a continuation of the really awesome storyline that is woven through the game. They seem to care about all of the different playstyles that make up their community, and are wanting to give each of them a reason to keep logging in and playing. Quite frankly… free to play and having to worry about getting enough money to survive would absolutely tarnish the spirit of this game and its community.

Cactuar Server Community

I figured this was a good bookend to the post I made above. Today I am going to talk about something probably strange to be thankful for, but I am going to anyways. I am extremely Thankful for the existence of the Cactuar Server community and how awesome the people there are. Once upon a time I was deeply connected to most of the server communities I was part of when I played games. I was a huge supporter of Gaheris in Dark Age of Camelot and Xegony in Everquest… so it was not strange when I landed in World of Warcraft to get involved with the Argent Dawn community as well. The problem is that Argent Dawn broke my heart, the longer I played on it. During those heady days after release we had a vibrant and thriving community, full of lots of interesting groups of people more than willing to work together towards larger goals. Argent Dawn was a hotbed of non-guild based raiding and it was awesome. Over time, especially with the release of Cataclysm… this all changed and the old guard of players that were community focused slowly drifted off into the nether.

It was hard to watch the Argent Dawn community fall apart, so as I played other games I really never took the time to dip my toes into the larger server. I stayed fairly insular and only really cared about my own guild and its well being. This changed this summer when I came back to Final Fantasy XIV. I think in part it is because when I first renewed my account, I was the only one to do so for a few weeks. This meant I no longer had my life support system of known good players to run dungeons with, and was forced to get out and meet people in the community. I am so thankful that I did because I have met some amazing people on this server and found it to be a throwback to a simpler time when people generally were nice to each other. I’ve embraced our community whole heartedly and while it is not terribly well used yet… I’ve built a nook for the community and will be trying to get folks using it over the coming weeks. So today I am thankful for finding the Cactuar community, because it has revitalized my faith that servers are a thing that can be super important to my game playing experience.

#FFXIV #Cactuar #MonthOfThankfulness

Littlest Odin

November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 by Belghast

Flirting with Viral

Last night when I got home I had a message waiting on me, wanting to know if I had talked to a certain blogger. At which point I gave my perspective, that I thought they were trying to keep a fairly low profile lately. This started the gears in my head working, thinking about the fine line each of us walks each day when we post. I admit that I live in a small amount of fear of one of my posts ending up going viral for some reason. I mean ultimately as a blogger you want readers, but there is a limit to that. Right now I have a dedicated group of a couple hundred regular readers and this feels comfortable. It feels like I group I could reasonably have a conversation with, and remember the names and faces of each of them. I write some fairly personal posts, and this feels like a small enough community to share that sort of intimate details with.

The problem is there have been a few of my posts that have for one reason or another gotten picked up in a much larger sphere of influence. When this happens I find the whole experience stressful. While it is cool to suddenly see your readership spike, at the same time personally I feel almost invaded. Like this group of people that are not “my” people are trampling my lawn and ruining the flower beds. The group of readers that I have now feels organic, and they have one by one found my blog for their own personal reasons. Having a huge influx of people brings with it wholly different ideas of what community means, and what proper interaction between a blogger and reader is. There were a few posts of mine that got picked up by WoW Insider back when this was for the most part a WoW blog… and it was as though the Mongol Horde was knocking on my front door step.

It is awesome to feel like your blog is a popular thing… but at the same time I think most of us live in fear of our side project getting too big. That someday something will happen to cause it to grow out of control and develop a life of its own, rather than this thing that we have fought hard to develop in just a certain way. With the recent strife in the gaming community, I admit I have been more afraid of my blog suddenly being found by the “unwashed masses”. I am still uncertain if I was the target of a DDoS a few weeks back, because it seemed like only my sites on the provider were actually effected. We live in this climate where having a differing opinion to that of the riot mob has serious consequences, and that doesn’t exactly give me warm fuzzies. Still however i put myself out here every morning, hoping that the right people will see this… and the wrong people will get bored before finishing the first paragraph of one of my posts.

Littlest Odin

A few nights ago I happened to be paying attention to chat at exactly the right moment, when through one of my many social Linkshells I saw a call that Odin had spawned in South Shroud. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Odin is one of the coolest primal forces to have existed in the Final Fantasy universe. In each incarnation there is generally the mechanic that if you take too long in attempting to defeat him he will cast Zantetsuken and destroy the entire party in a single attack. Zantetsuken of course is the name of his sword which apparently roughly translates to “Sword of Vengence”. The Final Fantasy XIV incarnation is just as painful, and involves him casting massive area of effect abilities that are extremely hard to get out of, and in some cases can in fact one-shot the player. When Odin spawns it is as part of a fate, and players fight desperately in this chaotic mess to generate enough threat to qualify for Gold level participation.

If you participate at all in the fight you get an item called Odin’s Mantle, and if you manage to get gold you end up getting five of them at once. Once you have collected five, either through getting Gold once or something else multiple times you can take them to Revenants Toll in Mor Dhona and trade them for some interesting stuff. The king prize at least as far as I am concerned is Zantetsuken itself, which while no longer that good of a weapon is still an amazing item for the purpose of glamouring onto other items. Another really popular item is Slepnir’s barding, that makes your Chocobo look like Odin’s mount Slepnir. However since I actually picked up Slepnir itself from the cash shop, that was no longer a big deal to me. So this time around I picked up Hjalmr aka Odin’s trademark helm. In honor of the new look I dyed my Soldiery chest black to blend things together a bit better.

When the Dark Knight becomes a reality, I am really hoping that they release a two handed version of Zantetsuken that I can then glamour onto my weapon. Even though I am wielding an axe, I still think I make a pretty badass tiny Odin. The funny thing a bout this is that Odin actually spawns as the race of the person that landed the last killing blow. So when I fought him the other night in South Shroud, he had actually spawned in Lalafell form. Nothing says awesome like a tiny bundle of death oneshotting players left and right. Both Odin and Behemoth are really cool experiences, and while I hate that I am constantly missing them… there is something about the extremely slow respawn timers that gives them a sense of mystique. I am not sure what the actual timer is, but at least as a player it seems to be several days. In any case it is the sort of thing that I drop whatever I am doing to join in the fun… or will at least until I have gotten all of the shiny baubles that are available to win.

Dungeons with Friends

I have always liked to tank for my friends, but for whatever reason in Final Fantasy XIV I have always found the experience to be a bit stressful. I am not sure if it was just lack of confidence in my abilities, or still getting used to the subtle differences of the way tanking works in this game… but for whatever reason I have tended to prefer dpsing in dungeons and letting my friend Ash take the tanking lead. However over the course of the last few months I have been “feeling my wheaties” and with the release of brand new content I find myself actually preferring to tank. I guess this is a good thing since Ash right now is in the middle of a move and will be without internet for an undetermined amount of time. Additionally for the longest time I DPS’d in part because he had no “non-tank” jobs to play, and since I had multiple dps we could pick and choose whatever we needed the most. That however has changed as he now has a monk available, and it is allowing me to climb back into the tanking seat.

As such I have spent a lot of time lately tanking the new expert dungeons of Snowcloak, Sastasha Hard, and Qarn Hard. In fact I am starting to get requests from outside of the guild to tank for people. Last night I finally accepted one of these after turning them down for various completely legitimate reasons. I felt horrible for having to keep declining because I was generally either already spoken for by the guild, or in the process of trying to wind down enough to log out for the night. I have to say I had a blast tanking for folks that I am less familiar with, and maybe just maybe I will gather up the courage to start tanking for complete strangers as well. I am not sure what has changed but upon getting my 110 weapon threat generation seems to no longer be an issue. The encounters just stay glued to me, which allows me to have more freedom and less watching of “bejeweled” making sure someone doesn’t get eaten by a stray mob. In any case that sense of unease I had while tanking seems to be dissipating and I am enjoying myself more each time we run something.

My Readers

I would like to think that even if I had no readers at all that I would keep doing what I am doing on a daily basis. Most of the time I write my posts like I am talking to myself, but in truth it is really helpful to know that I have people listening on the other end of the line. I have always been impressed with my readers, at how thoughtful and kind they are. The moment I first knew I had a dedicated audience, was shortly after I had started my blogging each day thing. For whatever reason I did not get a chance to write my post that morning like usual, and I had intended to write it over lunch. That morning I was deluged with folks asking me if I was okay, and making sure everything was alright. They were concerned when they did not see a post waiting there for them when they did their normal crawl of blogs. I’ve always tried to respect my audience and keep my blog a mostly positive influence in their lives. Here is hoping that I can continue to do this, but please know how much it means to me that you all are dedicated to taking this journey with me.

MOBA Crash

November 5, 2014 by Belghast

Falling Down

Yesterday we had an interesting bit of news released as the first big MOBA, or multiplayer online battle arena if you are not familiar with the term, announced that they would be closing their doors. Dawngate was the product offering by Electronic Arts and entered closed testing in May 2013 but quickly fell from the buzz cycle. Quite honestly when I saw this announcement I had quite literally forgotten there was a game called Dawngate. Some of the complaints about the game was that it felt like a rather lifeless clone of League of Legends. Many of the Champions or “Shapers” as they called them seemed to have one to one relationships to league of legends champions. However the game did try to fix some of the things that were broken with the existing Summoner’s Rift map type, adding in more interesting gameplay elements.

The problem is that no one that I knew was actually playing it. There were a handful of people who got into the beta process last June and then I never heard anything again about the game. For whatever reason they lost at producing enough forward hype for their game to drown out the other MOBAs or at least fight for a place at the table. The game looked very pretty, but I just don’t think they did enough to excite players. My only hope is that Riot will take some of the ideas that Dawngate had and try and incorporate some game modes that are similar to that into League of Legends. I am not the biggest fan of MOBAs in general, but I have played enough of them to know some good ideas when I see them. The fact that Dawngate had this mechanic where taking down each tower was essentially the equivalent to like 1/3rd of an inhibitor seemed like a cool idea. Instead in League you reach a point where taking down additional towers is a waste of time… and I don’t think you would ever reach that point in Dawngate.

MOBA Crash

One of the interesting things about the games industry is how much it repeats itself. When someone has a successful idea, it seems that the “investors” all get involved to dog pile on that genre and try and crack out as many look alike games as they can. That is not to say that each of the new games does not have merit, nor is it to say that they are not good games. The problem is there is a certain point at which the market has reached saturation and can support no new offshoots. Unfortunately I think we have reached that point already with the MOBA genre. Dawngate was really the first major game in the genre to call it quits, and Turbine the developer of Infinite Crisis does not look terribly strong right now after a round of layoffs in October. I feel like we are just about to enter the same area we have been with MMOs for some time now… where there is no “easy money” left in the market.

Right now you have the juggernauts of League of Legends and DOTA2. To a lesser extent Heroes of Newerth still has a bit of a following, but their latest product offering of Strife seems to be struggling to gain traction. Smite on the other hand… seems to have found a niche in the fact that it is a WASD controlled MOBA and for folks like me that hate click to move… it offers a new way to play this game genre. Heroes of the Storm on the other hand has done what Blizzard does best… polish a game to a mirror shine and lower the barrier of entry. As such HoTS is a much easier entry point into the MOBA genre for non-MOBA players. Personally of all of the titles it is my favorite in part because it leverages characters that I already know and love and just extends that nostalgia into another genre. Apart from these few games though I think pretty much every other MOBA is suspect, fragile and vulnerable to be the next announced cancellation.

The Cycle Repeats

I think my first experience with this cycle of trying to cash in on the next hotness was the massive amount of vaguely playable games that came out after the release of Doom during the early 90s. For every Dark Forces there were a few Depth Dwellers or Nerves of Steel that were barely playable. Then Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans came on the scene… which itself borrowed heavily from the mechanics of Dune 2. But immediately following was an equally confusing cavalcade of RTS genre games finally ending up with only a handful of series surviving. We are seeing this same thing playing out currently with the string of “Minecraft clones” fighting for your dollar. Essentially if a game comes out that is popular enough you can bet that somewhere in a back office someone is willing to pour money into something vaguely similar in an attempt to rush their version of the trend to market. Eventually someone comes along with a box full of straight pins and the bubble popping begins.

The thing is that I don’t really even think this is a bad thing, other than for the folks who get caught up in the round of layoffs that almost always follows. It is possible for a game to move the genre forward even if it doesn’t end up a success itself. Warhammer Online for example had quite possibly the best quest objective visualization system I had played with, and many other games came through after its launch and offered a similar system for their own product. The next release of World of Warcraft offered a version of quest visualization that looked almost exactly like this one. So even though Warhammer Online turned out to be a failure, it imparted on the genre a few features that have stuck around. As such I feel like if we are starting to head towards a MOBA crash, the ones that failed to find a niche will still have an impact on the games that ultimate end up dominating the market. There will always be a market for MOBAs, just like there was always a market for Adventure games, FPS, RTS, Survival Horror, MMO, Sandbox Building or whatever the next big fad becomes in gaming.

Fuzzy Blankets

This month I am talking about something each morning that I am thankful for. This morning as I am wrapped tightly in a fleece blanket while typing this… I am reminded just how thankful I am for our array of very warm and very fuzzy blankets. Oklahoma is an interesting place, in part because we go through this seesaw act with our weather towards the end of Fall. Until a week ago it was pretty reliably 70*-80* days and I was mostly wearing shorts on the weekend. Then a cold snap hit is and it has gotten down to the 30s. The problem is I fully expect that we will be back in the 70s within a weeks time. During this back and forth I am always reluctant to turn on my heating, just because I know it isn’t “really” winter yet. As such we spend a month bundled up in blankets and honestly due to the weight loss I find myself more cold natured than I used to be. So this year like so many years I am thankful that fuzzy blankets exist to keep us warm, when our weather is still deeply confused.