Tales of the Aggronaut

The Family I Know

August 28, 2014 by Belghast

Of Large Families

I grew up Catholic which also means I come from a long line of extremely large families. My Grandfather was one of five children, and each of them for the most part had five or six children of their own. My mother for example is one of six siblings, and my “aunt” that just passed away is one of five. The end result is that the get-togethers on that side of the family where relatively massive. As a child I was completely comfortable with the way that “mom” and “dad” worked and “grandma” and “grandpa” but most of the other relationships just baffled me. As a result pretty much any adult female that was not either my mother or my grandmother ended up being my “Aunt”. No one decided to correct me so it stuck.

My Aunt Marilyn while technically my first cousin once removed, was an Aunt in every since of the word that actually mattered. She was this quiet presence in everything that happened in my life from the occasional little league game, to getting my eagle scout and to countless band concerts. She had a way of showing up at exactly the right moment. She also had this magical way of knowing exactly what was hip and trendy and whatever us kids might be into at the time. This morning I woke up to an alarm clock that she got me when I was 12 or 13, and every time I wake up to it I think of her. It was little things like that, something that she knew I would need but I didn’t even realize myself that just baffle me.

The Family I Know

At the Rosary on Tuesday night I got up to talk about my Aunt which is something I had wished I had been able to do at my Grandmothers funeral recently. I had regretted not saying something then, so I figured I shouldn’t pass the occasion now. In many ways this is the family I knew the most growing up and as a result they feel most like home. As kids my mother and my aunt Margaret Ann decided that me and my second cousins would be closer than that. As a result they tried to create as many opportunities for us to get together and play. Growing up I spent huge swaths of time either at their house or them in my hometown. When my wife and I decided to elope, it was my cousin that I called upon to stand up for me on the spur of the moment.

As we have all gotten busier we have drifted apart but seeing them yesterday was an extremely good thing. We exchanged the most current cell phones and promised to make plans to get together, and I sincerely hope we will. My generation is just going to have to start putting out the effort to make occasions to get together just like my parents generation did. As each of these members of the previous generation passes on what is going with them is more than their life. What is leaving is the glue that held us together. We will have to step in to make sure that bond doesn’t break. Each of us has reached a point in our lives where we are more or less stable, so it is time to start trying to see each other more often.

Down the Rabbit Hole

When I finally got home and put out a few fires, I was able to log into Final Fantasy XIV and check out the festival that started today. It seemed fitting that while I had been remembering family, the game had been having an in game remembrance event called the rising. For those that do not realize it, “A Realm Reborn” or FFXIV 2.0 is both literally and figuratively rising from the ashes of the previous game. When 1.0 came to a close they destroyed the world with the dread comet Dalmund and the arrival of the Primal Bahamut. The Rising event commemorates the rising of the world out of the ashes of the previous one. There is a single relatively short quest, that comes long with an extremely charming bit of storyline. Completing the quest gets the players a “Huzzah” emote that at least as a warrior causes me to jump up high into the air with my axe held aloft.

My focus over the last few days has been on getting my White Mage to thirty four so I can cast stoneskin. The problem is I have noticed I am sorely lacking another ability that comes from Thaumaturge. There was a point last night when I was healing a dungeon that I simply could not cast fast enough to save the tank who had moved out of range of my healing. If I had swiftcast which is a Thaumaturge cross class ability I likely could have saved him. Seeing the need for it I opted to start working on my Thaumaturge to at least get him to level 26. This is the way that everything seems to go in Final Fantasy XIV. In order to be truly efficient in one thing, you need a whole bunch of other things leveled as well. For the moment my goals are gearing the Bard through the hunt quests, and then working on Thaumaturge to 26 so I can continue onwards with my White Mage to the level cap.

White Mage Soul

August 27, 2014 by Belghast

The Best Intentions

Yesterday I read a post by Missy Mojo lamenting just how “un-fun” Blaugust has become for her. I fear that there are a lot more people out there feeling the same. I hear the same sort of lament in Kodra’s voice each night as he says he really needs to do his blog post. The idea behind Blaugust was simple, to challenge people to do the same thing I do and write something, anything every day. The thing is that the challenge grew legs of its own and sucked in a lot of newly minted bloggers along with the veterans. I figured I might have five or so veteran bloggers take up the challenge as I did a year and a half ago. The thing is I didn’t get there over night, and in fact had been blogging for around four years before I decided to post regularly.

This is probably the worst kind of event for someone new to the craft to start under, and we had huge participation by folks who started just for this even or started under the Newbie Blogger Initiative. I promise my intention was not to grind people down with daily blogging, but instead to fill the gap that often happens in later summer for content. In many ways it has worked better than I could have imagined, and tragedy in my own life has caused me to fall behind in the reading department. My biggest fear is that this whole experiment will cause large lapses in content for the newer folks like Missy. If you are doing this every day and not enjoying it, then it kinda defeats the point of blogging in the first place. I give you complete permission to drop out of the contest with no hard feelings or lamentation.

White Mage Soul

The primary goal of yesterday for me was to get my conjurer to 30 so that I could become a White Mage. Since I already have a 50 tank, 50 ranged and 50 melee… I felt like I needed some sort of max level healer at my disposal as well. As far as healers go, I have enjoyed my time healing dungeons on the conjurer far more than I have enjoyed any healer in a long time. The style just feels natural and I can usually land in a relaxing rhythm during each dungeon. I figure the healing will get more complicated as I get more tools at my disposal but for the time being I am enjoying myself. I had leveled Arcanist to 15 over the weekend in preparation for nearing 30 conjurer, since White Mage is a combination of the two. I might return to leveling Arcanist at some point so I can become a scholar, but I feel no real pressing need to either.

The thing I found funny was that the level 30 Conjurer quest was far more difficult than the quest to actually become a white mage. Even moreso I found it odd that in order to do my quest to get the unicorn mount I had to shift back to Conjurer as well. In any case I finished both and am now an up and coming white mage ready to take on the world. After coming home from the rosary last night I worked my way up to 32 so that hopefully someday tonight I can start running Brayflox for gear. I have two pieces of the battlemage set but I would really like to get the rest of it, or at the very least the robe. Additionally I would not mind seeing the white mage ring drop either.

Gearing the Warrior

Since it is pretty certain that I will be needing my Warrior for when we start Binding Coil of Bahamut hopefully soonish, I opted to start rolling on Warrior gear in Syrcus tower. Yesterday Tam and I decided to queue together for our weekly loot run. Unlike other games you can run Syrcus as often as you like, but you can only take a single piece of loot from there each week. The nice thing is this allows you to keep running it in the hopes of getting that one item you need. Since most of the people in there are after the item to craft their weathered weapon almost all of the gear rots, or at the very least it isn’t terribly contested. The run started off really smoothly, and our group had a warrior tanking… which to some extent made my heart sink a little. My goal going into the place was the pick up some warrior loot, but I brought my dragoon just as a backup in case something phenomenal dropped.

The first boss went extremely smoothly, and I was feeling like our tank was doing an amazing job. On the first boss the warrior gauntlets dropped and moments afterwards the tank was asking for us to pass or roll so he could equip them. We all did as asked and the moment he got the loot he dropped from the party. This was the first time I had seen this happen, but apparently it is a frequent occurrence in Syrcus. The awesome part though is that he was replaced by a really well geared Gladiator, and on the very next boss the Warrior chest piece dropped, allowing me to pick it up easily. So that combined with picking up the soldiery tome ring takes my Warrior to 91 ilevel and more than ready for the Coil.

#FFXIV

Family but Not Family

August 26, 2014 by Belghast

Sleeping In

This mornings post is coming significantly late because yesterday was extremely draining. I am not sure how much of it I said in previous posts but yesterday I went to the funeral of my Great Aunt in Oklahoma City. Both my Mother and Father have their own medical issues to where if they were forced to drive it on their own they would have struggled seriously. Right now my mother is going through some back problems, and my dad vision problems… so I knew that I really needed to offer to drive. They are the type that would not likely have come out and asked for it, but the moment I offered they latched onto the idea with both hands. Multiple times during the day my mom said how grateful she was that I drove. I hate driving, especially on longer trips, but I figured it was a thing I needed to do.

The draining aspect was that I felt like I was essentially parenting my parents. My mothers hearing has been going through the years and the multiple hour trips to and from the city involved a lot of me yelling at the backseat so she could hear me. Anytime my father and I would attempt to carry on a conversation she would mishear a snippet of it and start off on a tangent. Which was fine but trying to jump like that all day long including when we were inches away from each other… really can wear you down. I am starting to wonder just how long it will be before we need to get her a hearing aide. Her mother/my grandmother wore one for as long as I can remember, so I am sure that bad hearing is simply another ailment that runs in the family. Since I seem to be a sponge for the bad ailments that both of my parents have… I will likely inherit that one as well.

Family but Not Family

Something about this batch of the family that you have to understand is that even though we are only two hours apart… I have not seen most of them in years. The last time I saw any of them I believe was at my grandmothers funeral almost a decade ago. I do not believe that any of them came up for my grandfathers funeral, which I guess makes sense as he was not related by blood to any of them. So a few of them I have seen within the last decade, but the bulk of them I have not seen since I was five or six. A couple of the people were recognizable from my memory banks, others were not at all. One of them I only remembered as the person who bit me once at a family reunion at Great Grandpa Smiths house… and he has been dead for longer than I can remember. Another one of the daughters wasn’t even alive back then, so I had never met her in any form.

This brand of the family seems to have a genetic disposition for girls… my great aunt had two daughters, and then each had two daughters… then when you get to the grandchildren there were something like 25 daughters and 1 single boy. But if you think about it… my grandmother and great aunt came from a batch of four girls and a single boy, so maybe it is just a thing with the smith DNA favoring females. My grandmother and great aunt talked every single day until my grandmother passed away, so there was an extremely tight bond there. Most of my recollection of my great aunt and uncle was from them coming to my hometown to visit. My grandparents were dairy farmers so they didn’t really go anywhere… they could only go so far as they could get back home by milking time. As a result people came to visit them… not the other way around, so large swaths of time passed between visitations.

It is weird to step into a room where everyone knows you, but you barely know them at all. Maybe I just wasn’t listening as my grandmother tried to relate all of the details of their lives, and maybe it was just simpler because my grandma only actually had three grandchildren to talk about instead of a veritable army of them. In any case it creates this whole situation where you know they are all related to you, but none of them really feel familiar like family should feel. They all have really amazing families from the looks of it. I went up to one of the girls husbands, and asked if his name was “Mike” because for some reason I knew that it was. Finally we figured that that he manages a nearby QuikTrip store that I go to pretty often. I would love to get to know them all better, but unfortunately the connective glue is gone. With my grandma gone and great aunt gone… as sad as it sounds I doubt the family will get together again like this. My generation just doesn’t seem to be as well connected to the past as the previous ones.

Another Weapon Down

When I finally got home last night I decided to start working on my Bard relic weapon quest line. As we have gotten people up to fighting level I spent a bit of time over the weekend barding it up. There are just situations where double dragoons is not the best idea in the world, and I don’t necessarily mind playing at a bard, in fact for short periods of time I find it extremely relaxing. Over the course of a series of dungeons run to catch Kodra up to being able to do high level roulette, I picked up enough upgrades to take my bard to ilevel 65. The biggest problem was that I still had a less than optimal weapon, and that more than anything was limiting my damage output. Since I was not feeling up to playing with the big kids last night, who unlocked the various zones needed to do elite roulette I decided to quietly plug away on the relic weapon.

Thankfully I had the foresight to get Warenwolf to bind my materia to the precursor weapon some time ago. All I needed to do was start in on the quest chain proper. The Dhorne Chimaera was as easy as they came, and within moments of queuing it popped and then about ten minutes later I had collected that first piece. The next piece involved running Amdapor Keep, and I have to say this was probably the trickiest part of the night. The queue took about 20 minutes, but when it finally popped the team that I ran it with went extremely smoothly… zero wipes and other than the tank pulling things a little differently than I was used to I had my rune in about thirty minutes time. After some running about I was on the kill 24 mobs step, which took a little bit of time to do but with my healer Chocobo out it went pretty easily.

Next up was the Hydra in Halatali, and it died extremely quickly as well. I think it might have died faster than the time it took me to queue for it. Finally was the last three primal fights, and this would have gone quicker had I not queued for normal mode Ifrit first instead. I guess I was more tired than I realized. Both Hardmode Ifrit and Garuda died in a single attempt, and then Titan took about three before we managed to beat the boss. I still have yet to get the whole rock bomb thing every single time. Like there is one specific pattern that always gives me fits, but overall while it took all evening it was definitely a doable task to get my relic weapon quickly. I hear there was a bit of a rollback last night due to the massive denial of service attack going on… so here is hoping I log back in again this morning and have my relic. Now I just need to finish collecting the bookrocks to be able to make it a Zenith weapon.

#FFXIV

Adventures with Sound

August 25, 2014August 25, 2014 by Belghast

The Crab Boss

Over the last several years every computer I have owned has had one thing in common. The onboard sound card has been made by Realtek, and with each of them I have experienced various quirks. Sometimes the mic output is too low, sometimes there is mechanical noise that I can never seem to filter out. In all cases I have been annoyed to no end with dealing with them, but for the most parts too lazy to really change. In part this is because I remember days when the only real option for a sound card was a Creative Soundblaster, and I’ve had my own series of issues with them. Additionally I remember add-on soundcards rivaling at least a low end graphics card in overall expense to pick one up.

About six months ago my on board sound card decided to go flaky. I made a mistake to decide to update my Realtek drivers when I was doing the same for my LAN drivers. After installing the reference drivers I lost all use of the soundcard. No sequence of uninstalling and reinstalling various community drivers, the reference drivers from realtek, or the ones posted on the MSI support page seemed to restore full functionality. In the past I have used a USB headset before with decent success so I shopped around to find one that I found comfortable. The end result was picking up the Logitech g430 headset, that comes in a rather fetching blue and black color palette. The install was easy enough, but early on I noticed a few quirks with it, in that I had to plug it into one of the two USB 3.0 ports on my machine. Once I figured out that this was what was happening, I resolved the issue and soldiered on.

Adventures With Sound

For the most part these headphones were excellent and the Logitech drivers provided some really nice 7.1 surround sound emulation. As far as communication went I seemed to be understood well, and transmitting both clearly and with plenty of volume. It was during this time that we birthed the ideas of our podcast, and it was with this headset that I have been recording all of the episodes. As I listened back to the recording however I noticed something that bothered me. All of the other guests came through with much more full sound than my own voice. My voice sounded very flat and tinny and no matter how much I fiddled with the settings did it seem to actually improve it.

After some research I found that this was pretty much a universal complaint with this particular headset and namely the usb soundcard that accompanies it. It seems like it does a great job of output, but a pretty poor job of input, only allowing for 16 bit audio. The result is the “flat” sound that I had noticed and that frustrated me. The suggestion universally was to hook the headset to onboard audio for the microphone, and the usb for the 7.1 surround output. This seemed like a hack at best, but no amount of fiddling with the drivers and settings managed to fix the problems I noticed. This eventually lead me to start looking for other options, and as always that ended up with me searching Amazon.

Xonar Ping

For years I have had an unnatural love for all things Asus. As a result I have owned a number of products and when I buy something I always tend to start with seeing what their product offering is. A search of Amazon lead to what I expected, there to be a lot of Soundblaster options, but mixed in among them was a Asus Xonar sound card that had relatively good reviews. The best part was it was cheap, currently $26.99. I ordered one with my Amazon Prime membership, and it arrived on my doorstep Sunday morning. I was shocked to find that something actually delivered on a Sunday, and it was not like I actually paid for overnight or anything of the sort. Within a few minutes I had popped it in my case, and booted back up. I grabbed the latest drivers from the Asus website and popped into a game… and the sound was amazing. It was every bit as good as the Logitech software was capable of and then some.

Then I hopped on Teamspeak to hang out with my friends and test it there. Immediately upon speaking I got “Is there a Helicopter in the background?”. I recorded some test audio and sure enough there was a very noticeable mechanical disturbance in the background of my audio that seemed to get worse the longer I talked. My heart sunk, and immediately I had flash backs of all of the fiddling I had done with both the Realtek and Logitech sound drivers to see if I could get something better than what I was. I could get the sound to go away momentarily, but it always returned regardless of the settings. Once again I took to the internet and found people complaining of this, and leaning towards that I would need to RMA the card and get a new one.

New Drivers New Hope

There in the middle of the stack I found a glimmer of hope. There was a thread by a poster saying that he had all of the issues I was having, and ditching the Asus drivers fixed his problems. I guess the Xonar drivers are notoriously bad, and that there is another group that has released a Unified Driver for the Xonar family. I downloaded the drivers hoping that this would maybe fix my issues as well. It took a series of reboots to uninstall the current driver and install this new unified driver. I booted into a game and it sounded amazing just as before, and this time upon firing up Teamspeak, I was greeted with “the helicopter is gone!”. This is the part of technology that I like the least, the wide variance in which drivers work best for which cards.

I realize that it has become tedious for companies to release a specific driver for a specific revision of a product, but I feel like the age of the universal driver for a “Family” of products has been riddled with this sort of issue. Right now for example I am currently self locking myself to a specific version of the GeForce drivers, as I had all sorts of hell when I tried to update to the latest version. In any case, I have recorded a few audio samples and am extremely pleased with the results, so here is hoping with future episodes of AggroChat there will be far less disparity between our voices as there was in previous episodes. Hopefully the tinny flat audio is a thing of the past.