Tales of the Aggronaut

Mercenary Kings

September 28, 2014 by Belghast

Dinklebot is a Great Name

It was not until last nights stream that I had heard anyone refer to the Ghost in Destiny as the “Dinklebot”. Kodra credits Matt Lees as originating the term, but whoever did it… it is absolutely priceless. Not only does it clearly identify that the ghost is voiced by Peter Dinklage but it also adquately sums up just how useless the Ghost as a whole feels in the storyline. Last night once again we recorded AggroChat, and this week we had our regular cast of hosts Ashgar, Rae, Kodra and Tam. Destiny has caused so much angst that we started talking about it even before we went on air, and finally I had to say “guys, we should save this for the show”. This week a letter from the producer came out as well as some patch notes talking about upcoming changes to gameplay. We lead off the podcast by talking about these changes and how they personally effect us and our gameplay. I somehow doubt that any of us in particular will be mourning the loss of the loot cave.

From there I think we dove into Kodra and his morning stream of Hatoful Boyfriend. I tuned in when he met a bird that is totally reminiscent of the vespa riding mad woman from FLCL… except she drives REALLY slowly. Carve it into your soul! The game feels like it is complete madness… and also created using lots of clip art… and Christmas tunes. I commented in the stream that I think the game probably cost about $50 in shutterstock credit to make. The storyline is absolutely insane, so it is totally worth a watch. From there we dive into Trove and the Closed Beta gameplay that just started. Rae and I have been playing a ton of it, and we even managed to get Tam and Ash to try it out. Then things turn to our present obsession with Fallen London. I think everyone but Rae is currently madly playing this game.

Finally I give over the floor and let Tam, Rae, Ash and Kodra verbally faff about what is going on with League of Legends Worlds. At this point my eyes glaze over as while I enjoy playing League of Legends… I do not grasp the concept of watching other people play it yet. It was a good show that ran a bit longer than we had intended… but oh well. In a rush to tie things up, I totally forgot to do the where you could find us bit… so instead I recorded a snippet later telling folks to please leave comments either on our AggroChat Nook or the @Aggrochat twitter account. We apparently have some loyal listeners out there, and would love to hear from them. By the time I record the show and post it Saturday night, to the moment I get around advertising it Sunday morning… we generally have a couple dozen listeners. That seems like dedication to me.

Steampowered That Wasn’t

This morning I had every intent to play Witcher 2, as I have had many people in my thread talking about how much they love this series. I have tried multiple times to play Witcher 1… and the controls on that game feel like absolute shit. I will boot it up, and the last time I didn’t even make it through the first action sequence before tossing it aside. It might have the best storyline ever, but if the controls are horrible… I cannot bring myself to suffer through it. Maybe at some point I will see if there is a lets play series where I can watch someone else play the game… or at very least all of the cut scenes edited together. Since folks had been talking up this game again in anticipation of Witcher 3… I figured I would play it for Steampowered Sunday. Apparently I figured wrong.

I have had this installed on my machine for some time, and when I went to launch it this morning nothing happened. After digging through the forums it seems to just not work for some users. There were a bunch of red herrings that I chased down, but none of them ever caused the game to launch correctly. The only thing I didn’t try was downgrading it to run under XP Compatibility mode… because honestly I just thought about it this very moment. In any case it does not seem to like Windows 8.1 64 bit, or at least my machine. There are numerous supposed problems that it runs into with virus scanners… but given my frustration with the first game… there is a plateau to just how much bullshit I am willing to go through for this game. Maybe at some point I will pick up a console version of it, because at this point I am done with the franchise on the PC.

Mercenary Kings

Instead I fell back on a game I have also had installed for awhile but never gotten around to playing. Mercenary Kings is a Metal Slug like shooter from Tribute Games with the amazing animator Paul Robertson. I was originally made aware of him several years ago when I watched the video Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006. The animation is in fact as insane as the title might suggest. Later on he went to animate the amazing Scott Pilgrim vs The World console game, so quite frankly I picked this up because of him. This morning… I flat out sucked at playing a side scrolling Contra/Metal Slug style shooter. Maybe it was my frustration after trying to deal with Witcher 2, maybe it was the controller…. or maybe I just flat out suck. In any case I died a lot, and die in some pretty silly ways. I think I died to a kitten at one point.

Many of my deaths could have been avoided to be honest if I had just read the tutorial level. Me being my normal self… wanted to simply rush head long into fate and totally missed the fact that I could do things like proactively reload my weapon for example. No matter however as bad as I played I still had quite a bit of fun. The game is not really your traditional Metal Slug or Contra clone, in that the game map can be traversed in many different paths. One of the missions involved me hunting down and taking out 8 snipers, and as such this involved me covering the entire game map multiple times looking for the last sniper I had missed. A lot of the terrain is gated by obstacles that you cannot cross in a specific direction, so many times you have to go a different way to get where you were hoping to get. The game has a checkpointing system of huts that allow you to respawn in various points in the map… and I respawned over and over and over.

I saw this screen an awful lot during the time I played the game. You have two meters for failure of a mission. Either you run out of fixed number of lives, or you run out of time. I believe the initial timer is set to 20:00 and I mistakenly took this as having plenty of time to poke around the map. If you know what you are doing I am sure this is more than enough time to find your objective and move along. For me… I ran out of time several times. The game play is not the stage after stage progression that I was expecting. Instead you have a village full of members of your team, each of them interacting with you in different ways. There is a village store, someone that will allow you to toggle on internet play, the general that will allow you to pick your missions and the chopper pilot that will drop you off as well as a few other characters that I didn’t really interact much with. The game is at times reminiscent of a lot of classic arcade games, but it ends up being a really unique mash of of them.

You can check out my entire horrible play of the game in the above embedded Hitbox video. It is still making its way to Youtube, but if you would rather wait for that copy you can check it out here. I think I was mostly just having a bad morning. I woke up late and am still in a state of stupor, and then combined with the frustrations with Witcher 2… that I has psyched myself up to play… I was maybe not in the best place to do a recording. In any case I had enough fun that I will be playing it some more. It falls in a camp of being frustrating, but just frustrating enough to make you learn how to do things better. In the little bit I had played I had already improved quite a bit. When I got rushed however I would still make really dumb mistakes. There are some enemies I could avoid, and others I couldn’t. Quite frankly at this point I am really not that great at side scrolling platformers, even thought I continue to try and play them mostly in part to a huge sense of nostalgia for that genre.

On a positive note I did manage to actually complete one of the missions. The find the snipers mission, mostly was about exploring the level and not so much about rushing towards a final objective. As such it seemed to fit my playstyle a bit better. I got the first 7 snipers pretty easily, but it took me forever to find that 8th one. It ended up being back near the start of the mission… which Ashgar kept trying to tell me… but unfortunately I was not watching my stream chat. I didn’t advertise this one so I didn’t expect anyone to actually be tuned it. I just fine the process of streaming a considerably easier way to get a video up onto youtube than through actually uploading it myself. If you like Metal Slug, Contra, Gunstar Heroes, or any of those style of games I suggest you give it a shot. I might end up repurchasing this at some point on a PS4 because after getting used to that controller… I have to say the Xbox 360 that previously had been my controller of choice felt really really odd. I am wondering if I can hook up a PS4 controller to my PC… but I guess that is a mission for another day.

#AggroChat #Witcher2 #MercenaryKings

A Proper Paladin

September 27, 2014 by Belghast

Capitalism Ho!

This morning I am getting around a bit later than normal. I am not sure why exactly I slept in so late. I got up to go to the restroom at 6 am, and then next thing I know my wife is getting up at 8:30 telling me that her tummy is grumbling. I apparently took from 8:30 until 9 to actually raise myself from the stupor. I showered and got dressed and wandered out like usual to find some breakfast. When I got to the QuikTrip just down the street from my house it was absolutely packed with people. When I exited the car I immediately realized why. Across the street is the high school and I was confronted with a barrage of the sound of that can only come from a dozen marching bands warming and tuning.

Since there were band parents and potential competitors wandering in and out of the store, I half expected that everything would be picked over. However it seems like they were prepared and pretty much everything you could want was in stock. I ended up getting my traditional Jalapeño Sausage Cheese Roll, and for my wife a chocolate long john. For the moment life is good as I have consumed my breakfast and am now writing for you lovely readers. It was around this point that I remembered that my friend Kodra and fellow host of AggroChat was planning a stream this morning. If you catch this post early enough you should totally tune into his Hitbox stream and watch him attempt to date birds. We have been joking for a few weeks that he needed to play this game… and the subsection title comes from a comment he just made over the stream when he was offered to get a job.

All Grown Up

Yesterday I was feeling absolutely like crap. I woke up and it felt like someone had filled my head with concrete over the night, and took after my throat with some sandpaper. I struggled around yesterday morning trying to get psyched for work, and it just wasn’t working. I texted one of my co-workers to make sure he was in the office, and that things were going smoothly. After reporting back in that all was well I decided to just stay home. I stayed remoted into work most of the day, working on this and that but took breaks to work on leveling my paladin. Considering I technically took a sick day, I didn’t feel bad at all about doing this. They were essentially getting free work from me as it was, and I was mostly just dealing with little issues as they came up, and responding to email.

After doing my daily low level dungeon roulette and getting Haukke yet again… I decided to pull everything in the zone and skip nothing. The boost of XP managed to take me through the rest of 48 and halfway through 49. I didn’t really feel like tanking another low level dungeon considering my precious bonus was gone, so instead I went out to Mor Dhona and worked on some leves. It is almost as though they had intended folks to do just this because all but one of the Leves spawn in exactly the same corner of the zone. So I could run to the vendor get four quests, complete all four and just say no to the free teleport between them. It took a couple of rounds of this to get close, but what actually dinged me was completely the “do 5 different types of leves” challenge log entry. Those things are worth a truly prodigious amount of experience.

The awesome thing about having so much Syrcus tower and Weathered gear, is that all of it is dual class for both Warriors and Paladins. This means the second I dinged 50, and bought 3 pieces of ilevel 90 gear from the hunt master… I was sitting at I think ilevel 89. My weapon and shield being the only thing dragging down my overall score. The problem is I had glamoured most of the hideous looking Syrcus tower gear to look like the default warrior set, and class specific glamours won’t show up when you equip it as another class. Instead I opted to go for a mix of the chain tunic I loved so much, and some of the heavy allagan bits I had managed to connect. For the paladin I keep the golden crown, and for warrior I use the bunny samurai hat. So far I am digging the look.

A Proper Paladin

Yesterday afternoon and into the night, my mission was to push through the Relic Reborn quest line and become a proper Curtana wielding paladin. One of the unintended consequences of the Nexus relic system, is that folks tend to be ONLY farming whatever happens to be the dungeon or trial that gives bonus light. Players have figured out there is the equivalent of the “Hot Zone” that Everquest and Everquest II used to have. Where if you run that one thing, you get a significantly boosted amount of nexus light. The result is that it took absolutely forever to get most of my primals done. I think at this point folks are still busy farming nexus light, and not working on alts… which I think is what keeps the group steps for the relic moving along quickly. You would figure as a tank I would get damned near instant queues… but unfortunately that was not the case.

I spent large blocks of time dancing in various places. Here I am dancing for two NPCs in Uldah… both of which seem thoroughly unimpressed by my skills. I think a rundown of the waits looked a little something like this… Chimera took around 45 minutes to finally pop and when it did I was the most seasoned tank so ended up tanking it. Hydra on the other hand took only about 25 minutes… and the other tank a Cat Girl in a Bikini wielding a huge axe rushed in and tanked it. For Ifrit it was more like a 15 minute wait, and oddly enough once again a Cat Girl in a Bikini tanked it, but from what I can tell it was a different one. Finally we come around to Garuda and it was almost instant pop. It turns out that I lucked out and hit a spot where Garuda was the Hot Zone… and as such it was the fastest Garuda run I have ever experienced. Folks were ignoring all of the mechanics and pretty much just burning her.

That just left Titan, and after another fifteen minute run I was volunteered to be the primary tank. This is fine because really as far as fights go Titan is one of the easiest fights to tank. For the most part you just stand in one spot occasionally shifting slightly to either be next to the red line or to avoid a bomb. Like every titan I have seemed to be in ever… it took a couple of wipes and echo stacks before we finally pushed through. On the time we won we were down to a single Scholar healer and a few dps and me. This seems to honestly be easier than trying to keep alive eight people on this fight. Sure it was a pain in the ass and took a really long time, but you reach a point where the healing and movement is manageable and you just keep repeating the same loop. With that I had my Curtana and shield. Moments later I had upgraded it to Zenith level and finally felt like a real paladin tank. This makes level 50 job number four and my fourth Relic Zenith.

#FFXIV #Paladin

Neon Ninjas and Knights

September 26, 2014 by Belghast

Its A Voxel World

Yesterday something pretty awesome happened… Trove Beta launched and overall everything went pretty smoothly. I have been a fan of the game since I got into the very first Alpha wave. You can check out my first video from November of last year and see just how much the game has changed. This is one of those titles that has changed at an almost staggering pace. I would pop my head in about once a month… only to find that the framework of the game was in a massively different place than when I last left it. I have to say during the Alpha this became a bit of an impediment to me playing it. I would want to just pop in and do something interesting and essentially have to relearn how to do anything at all. That said my friend Rae showed interest in the game early this week, and oddly enough we happened to both log in together on the very last night of Closed Alpha.

We had such a good time running around and smashing things, that we decided last night when the Beta launched to skip playing Final Fantasy XIV at least for a bit and dive straight into leveling up in Trove. The above mounts we found during the final hours of closed alpha, and they are essentially rainbow piñatas that shoot rainbows and confetti out of their butts as you ride along. Basically it is my goal to manage to get this mount again during beta. Nothing says Trove quite like leaving a trail of sprinkles everywhere you go. Unfortunately the mount comes from their version of a lootbox. I have no clue what the drop rate is for one of the piñata mounts but I know I purchased 10 of them last night and Rae purchased 5 with the points we were given going into the beta… and all we managed to get were a few crafting recipes.

Neon Ninjas and Knights

One of the brand new things for Beta was the introduction of the Neon Knight class. For most of the night this is what Rae ran around as while I played my Knight. The class is a bit of a stealthy melee in that your right mouse click causes you to drop a decoy and shift into stealth. From there you can throw shuriken at your target for a fairly devastating effect. The purple rings around you seem to be some sort of a charging up mechanic that indicates when you are ready to throw shuriken. Other than that if you attack from stealth you do a significant amount more damage. I personally found the class a little frustrating, since I like to rush headlong into combat and bash all the things in the face. For someone who wants more tactical game play however this might be the ideal option.

Fortunately or unfortunately I feel like the most “Bel” class in existence is still the Knight, which is essentially your default. For starters it is a melee class with pretty high survival in up close confrontations. The secondary attack is this impressive weapon slam that can knock back enemies and deal a cone of damage. The first ability you get is a charge and god knows I love charge attacks, but this one also doubles as a movement ability and a way to dash across gaps to get to places more easily. Finally the last attack is this shield that you can put up that causes you to take no damage for a period of time. The last one is on a long cooldown, but it serves nicely as an “oh shit” button for doing some of the harder content.

Content Density

One of the coolest things about late Alpha and now Beta is just how diverse and dense the content is. Early on in the game each biome section would have a single objective be it a castle or a tower or something of the sort. This time around you would be hard pressed to go for very long before discovering something that has a boss or a challenge or something of the sort. Granted by the time I came back later in the night, the world was getting more than a bit picked over… so I am hoping that the world reset happens pretty frequently. In any case we were able to roll around the map going to areas that had not been touched and doing the challenges we encountered along the way. The above shot is from this insane rainbow dungeon in the clouds that you get to by climbing up through the hollowed out tree pictured in the back. Each biome has its own challenges with is own mob types which make the gameplay feel fairly fresh.

Essentially the challenges that I have encountered break down into a few themes. The first involves triggering an event. These tend to say that there is something dangerous inside in the upper right hand corner of the screen. When you trigger the event you have to survive a few waves of enemies, and if you do so a chest appears. The negative is that both you and the mobs you are fighting have to stay inside a blue ring that spawns when the event starts. We had issues when fighting mobs up in the air, that they would fall off the edges. The positive is you can retry the event over and over by simply moving out of the ring and waiting for it to reset. The part that makes these challenging is that generally the area with the totem that triggers the event is covered in spikes or surrounded by these pillars that shoot fireballs in a Castlevania fashion. So while the half dozen mobs really isn’t a huge problem… keeping them from knocking you back into environment obstacles totally is.

Something Minecraft Doesn’t Give Me

At it’s core the gameplay of Trove is similar enough to Minecraft that you cannot talk about it without at least mentioning that game. You could call Trove Minecraft with more meaningful combat and MMO style loot, but the game itself feels richer than that might denote. One of the aspects of the game that I like the most is the existence of my Cornerstone. This is basically a plot of land that I control and can build permanent structures upon… but that also moves with me around the world. I can walk up to any plot that is presently unclaimed and the game will rebuild my cornerstone before my eyes. So I can have crafting machines travel around with me, and each time I do this it resets my spawn point. This gives me some permanence that I crave in an otherwise very flexible world. This however does not make for a great community, as folks are constantly picking up their home like a hermit crab and moving it with them.

What is more interesting is the fact that players can create clubs, which in essence give you guild like functionality. I’ve created a Club for the Alliance of Awesome, and as such we have a “Club World”. This is a fully instanced biome where we can control everything in it. This means you can build super intricate guild houses and give other players the ability to teleport into them. This is the more permanent structure from the looks of it, and gives folks a way to link up and meet in user created worlds. While ours does not really do much of anything at the moment, I have plunked down a few machines and will likely keep adding to it as we go along. You are given only the smallest of islands to start building on, but it looks like more or less you can freely build out over the ocean for quite some ways. There are a number of websites giving away beta keys right now, so I highly suggest you track one down and give this game a shot.

Of Social Networks

September 25, 2014 by Belghast

A New Challenger Awaits

Yesterday morning I rather easily allowed myself to get talked into a brand new social network account. Over the last few days there has apparently be inordinate amounts of buzz surrounding the self proclaimed “Anti-Facebook” known as Ello.co. The folks behind it posted a rather lengthy manifesto talking about their high minded ideals.

Your social network is owned by advertisers.

Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.

We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.

We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life.

You are not a product.

Yesterday evening it got me thinking… do we really need another social network? I am a sucker for all things new and more than anything I accepted the invite as a way to go ahead and sign up and claim @Belghast like I have done so many times in the off chance that I want to use it. This morning I thought I would talk about the various social networks that I use and what they mean to me.

The Network I Care About

During the launch of many of the social networks I dabbled in them, but the first one I found myself using on a daily basis was Twitter. When I entered the world of games blogging it became my front doorstep allowing me to communicate and collaborate with other bloggers. It doesn’t hurt that the WoW Blogosphere has such a tremendous twitter presence, but even after fading out of those circles I stuck around and found new cornerstones of the non-Warcraft landscape. Over the years twitter has been a source of much enjoyment and much frustration, but at the end of the day it still remains one of my primary means of conversation with a lot of people that I care about deeply. Ironically I would not likely be as connected to twitter today, were it not for the fact that my wife found such deep and meaningful connections there before me.

There is something genius about the sheer brevity of the 140 character limit. It is just big enough to express a thought, but too small to go into much detail about it. I’ve found the more I blog, the more I need my social interaction to be in small bite sized chunks. So right now Twitter fits me perfectly. There was a time when I was not blogging when I craved something more. Ultimately if it is going to be a long discourse I end up posting it here, and simply echoing it to all of my networks for the sake of stirring up discussion either in the comments here or in the threads I post them there. The biggest problem I have with twitter is the fact that it is a very closed community to anyone who did not get in on it early. It also frustrates me that I have friends who cannot get the name they want because someone who doesn’t use twitter at all and never has, camped it years ago.

The Network I Had Hope For

When Google Plus rode into the social network scene I latched onto it with both hands. It was telling me everything I ever wanted to hear and more. I shuffled into that network during a period of time when I was not blogging at all. I’ve always found that I craved dumping my thoughts to the page, and need it as some sort of mental reset button. Google Plus became this reset valve for me and I essentially started blogging regularly through the network. The early days were pretty great when the only people that were on Plus were the people who cared enough to be on it. There were some really valuable networks of gamers and geeks to be found there, and it reached a critical mass around the launch of Star Wars the Old Republic. Folks used it as a way to find other guilds and collaborate with them for events bigger than themselves.

Then Google opened the flood gates, and the awesome people got diluted by a sea of all the frustrating parts of the internet. I watched awesome women go from being able to start genuine conversations about things… to having to constantly fend off the sexual advances of men making inappropriate comments in their threads. I watched the people I cared about on the network slowly taper off their usage or retract into private circles. Something happened for me at the same time… I started blogging again and more regularly, and my need to dump out my thoughts onto social media changed. I started to favor brevity again, and as such retreated back into Twitter. I still poke my head into Google Plus a few times a day because there are people I do care about that use it as their primary network, but I just don’t feel nearly as engaged as I once did.

The Network I Wish More People Used

When Anook launched it was yet another website that I signed up for but had no real use for. I simply didn’t get it. I expected it to be Raptr, but I saw none of the automatic games tracking hooks that I had come to expect. In a moment of frustration I exclaimed to Twitter that I didn’t understand what was so great about this network, and why various people were using it. At that moment as if by magic one of the hardest working community managers I have ever met appeared to explain. The fact that he dealt with my frustration and quite frankly abrasive commentary… and stuck around to try and explain the mission statement in earnest says a lot about his character. Lonrem explained that what they were wanting to create was not a new Raptr but almost a Facebook for Gamers for lack of a better description. I made it my mission to start trying to use the site, and I have really enjoyed the interactions I have had there.

In fact I use Anook often enough that I have started to fear that people might think I was somehow being paid by them. Truth is… no one is getting paid, not even the amazingly hard working community manager. This is very much a grass roots by gamers for gamers network, and that is why I have latched onto it so hard. The problem is that right now it is inconvenient, and simply doesn’t play nicely with other things. I can’t automagically syndicate my blog posts each morning to it, and there is no mobile client which for most of us is the real killer. The thing is… I believe in its mission and I want to see it grow so I keep trying to force feed it to people. I just wish it was a more active community, at least more active by the corner of the internet that I really care about. The biggest feature for me is the Nooks themselves, because it allows you to carve up little communities related to the games you play but still all be in the same broad network. I would really love it if more of you became active participants in what could really be an amazing community for gamers.

The Network I Actively Despise

Once upon a time there was this fledgling social network called Facebook. At the request of some friends I signed up for it, and I somewhat enjoyed the interactions there. There were these cool apps that let you do interesting things like draw pictures with other users, or make interesting buttons and post them on a virtual bulletin board. It was a fun place full of light hearted interaction. Then something changed… the world found out about it. Over a series of months it found like everyone that I really didn’t care about knowing still existed found me. There is a weird social pressure to accept an invite from people you don’t even like. I unfortunately did this over and over until my Facebook was full of things that frustrated me. Essentially it became all too much like High School all over again, as the majority of the people who tracked me down were folks that I went to school with. I decided I did not need that negativity in my life, and went through the overly difficult process of actually deleting your facebook account not just cancelling it.

The problem is in this world… not having a Facebook account can be a severe detriment. There are lots of things that can only be reached THROUGH Facebook. There were various contests and product giveaways that I wanted to participate in, and they all required that I have access to that network. As such I started a new Facebook account connected to my blog, with the express purpose of only ever friending other bloggers or gamers. It is pretty much a broadcast only medium for me, and I use it to syndicate my blog posts for the people who use Facebook as their social network of choice. It is an account I really wish I didn’t feel like I needed to have, but until companies stop focusing so heavily on Facebook… it will remain there. You can follow me and I will likely follow back, but just realize that everything you are seeing is an echo of either Twitter or my Blog, and I don’t actually log in and interact there.

The Network Of Lofty Ideals

Now it brings us full circle to the network that started this present discussion. Right now I have not made up my mind what I think of Ello. There is a lot of what they are saying in their manifesto that I really do like. The problem is the realist in me also thinks there will be a significant degradation of those ideals over time. Google Plus started out this awesome place to interact with other like minded individuals… but mutated into a frustrating mess that is for some reason integrated with the world possible place on the earth for discussion… Youtube. At some point they have to stop being a boutique network and think about becoming a business… and I simply don’t see that their feature focused approach is going to bring them enough operating capital to stay afloat. Granted the premium thing might work, especially for a niche site like Anook. I would totally pay money to unlock more automated functionality to make my life easier.

For the time being I am using it… because to be truthful it is the new trendy toy. I have a very small group of friends there, and for now it is a cool place. The problem is that there are literally no privacy settings of note. You either have a fully public account or a fully private account. As such I think that everyone is posting very censored bits of information until they figure out how things like that will work. Basically I would not post anything there that I would not also post on twitter or publically on Google Plus. The design ethic pisses me the hell off to be truthful. There is minimalism… and then there is crippling minimalism… and Ello tends to be the later. I’ve learned over the years that I am really just not a fan of minimalist design at all. Give me lots of buttons and gadgets that let me configure things until my heart is happy. For the time being I am somewhat rationing my own invites to the network until I see just how limited they end up being. It feels very much like those early years of Gmail, when you had to know someone in the know to get access… which has its positive and negatives. Folks seem to be broadcasting, but not that many people seem to be actually interacting.