Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

A Darker Doctor

August 24, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 19

Last night we recorded the latest episode of AggroChat, and welcomed back Kodra from GenCon. For the most part the AggroChat crew has had their heads firmly planted in Final Fantasy XIV and that much hasn’t changed. Kodra regaled us with the tales of what he did with his time at the convention. LARPs are one of those things I have always been interested in but never really participated in. I did a little bit of a local World of Darkness LARP in High School, but it wasn’t really my scene. As Kodra talks about the ones that happen at GenCon it feels far more like improvisational theater than gaming. In any case it sounds awesome and if I ever make it to GenCon I will totally join in the fun with him.

Additionally we talk a little bit about MMO design and theory and how Final Fantasy XIV has made tweaks to the game in order to support the community aspect. So far it is working because that is the overwhelming thing that I am enjoying the most from our time playing. We also talk a bit about Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition and our upcoming campaign. There has been some talk about maybe streaming it, but I somehow doubt that is actually going to happen. Rae talks at length about her awesome character concept, and I talk a bit about the Grudgebearer Cleric I will be playing as well. This weeks episode had a very non-video gaming feel to it, and it was pretty enjoyable.

A Darker Doctor

Yesterday was the day the world was introduced to the new Peter Capaldi Doctor Who. So as the world was enthralled by the BBC airing of the show and subsequent BBC America rebroadcast… where was I? Well I spent my afternoon shopping with my wife and then my evening recording AggroChat. With all of the weight loss my wife has gone through, she pretty much is in dire straights on trying to find a new wardrobe for the school year. I figured it was far more important to help her find that, than to sit at home and catch Doctor Who as it was originally broadcast. As a result I have just finished watching the show this morning, and I have to say so far I am very pleased. I don’t want to go into any spoilers really, because hopefully you are going to watch it yourself.

First off I have to say I am of mixed opinion on the new Doctor Who intro theme. You can listen to it here as someone has uploaded it to youtube already. It just feels over produced to me… and extremely “muddy” if that makes sense. I can tell that they went went back to the fourth doctor theme and sampled it heavily…. and that aspect I like, but all of the modern crap that they seem to have layered on top of it is frustrating. I would love to see them just make a nice clean Doctor Who opening theme without all of the auditory graffiti. I am sure over time I will get used to it, but right now it is just grating on my nerves. As far as the show itself the production quality was impeccable as always. I always like the episode that happens right after a regeneration because you get to watch the doctor in his most vulnerable state, when he isn’t quite sure of this new body.

With Capaldi it feels like gone is the zany doctor that flails about, and a different form of “Mad Man” has replaced it. I am liking the darker take on the doctor so far, and I am also liking the fact that the series is distancing itself from “companion as love interest”. I am sure to some of the more modern fans this will be a point of frustration, but to someone who has watched a lot of Doctor Who over the years, I prefer the days when the companion was just that… a travelling companion for the adventure. I think the franchise will be in solid hands for awhile now, and I would love to see Capaldi have a run to rival Tom Baker. I am tired of the Doctor changing quite as often as he has been, especially since we have long retconned the original storyline of a limited number of regenerations. Overall I enjoyed it, but I look forward to seeing more episodes to really set my opinion of it in stone.

Return of Ultima Weapon

While waiting on the audio to render last night for AggroChat I got pulled into an 8 man raid with the rest of my Final Fantasy XIV guild on Cactuar. One of the quests that was added to the game post launch in Mor Dhona takes unlocks the Hard Mode version of the Ultima Weapon primal encounter. I won’t go into any of the details surrounding the Ultima Weapon itself because spoilers… but in theory we had heard that everything about the Hard Mode of the encounter is significantly harder than the first few turns of the Bahamats Coil raid. After last night I am guessing that was in fact the case. This fight is absolutely insane, but I am pleased to say after three tries we managed to down it and clear it from all of our quest logs. I returned to my role as a tank, and since at this point I somehow managed to pass Ashgar in gear I ended up starting off the fight and playing the role of Soak of a lot of the bombs that happen during the fight.

What makes the fight so cool is that it is the first tank swap encounter that I have run into here in Final Fantasy XIV. This is a common mechanic in World of Warcraft now as a way of keeping both tanks engaged in the fight, and they seem to do it very well here as well. Now the swaps have to be timed carefully, but since Ash and I have worked together on many occasions this ended up fine. Essentially you have to hit provoke which raises your threat to 1+the highest targets threat, and then start spamming your highest aggro ability to make sure you gain a decent lead. Basically during the swap I would hit provoke and then spam butchers block a few times to make sure I had a nice lead. At this point the target would peel away from Ashgar easily and I would be in control again for another three stacks of the debuff.

Now the coolest aspect of the fight is that we didn’t even realize there were weapons to be gotten. I feel like this fight is worth more than an ilevel 80 item… but in any cases it was one hell of a fun encounter to be done with guildies. As hard as it was, I could totally see myself doing it again because this felt like a true challenge. It required each of us to do something to add to the fight. Towards the end of the fight we had to have a few DPS sacrifice themselves to make sure all of the bombs got blocked, and then we slowed dps allowing the healers to catch up and ressurect them. It was awesome seeing each person fully engaged in what had to be done. I am so proud of my guildies for accomplishing this, and now I have no doubt at all that we will do fine making progress in the Coil.

#DoctorWho #AggroChat #FFXIV

Fears Verified

August 23, 2014 by Belghast

Death Visits

It is shaping up to be a bad week. I realize at this point it is Saturday and the week is technically over, but bear with me. Thursday I got a text from my father telling me that my Aunt Inez had passed away. Technically she is a Great Aunt and the sister of my Grandmother that passed away close to a decade ago now. So given her age it is not terribly shocking news, but I feel horrible that she lived roughly two hours away… and I have not seen her since my Grandmothers funeral. At the least I think she attended the funeral, but that day was such a blur that I can’t really be certain. I know she was not at my Grandfathers funeral a few years ago, because she wasn’t well enough to travel. I don’t know the details of when the service will be, but I was figuring I likely should make the trip.

That was at least until last night I got a call from my mother. Another Aunt has been in and out of the hospital more times than I can count over the last few years. I say Aunt but again that is a bit of a misnomer since she is technically my second cousin… but she treated me like a nephew pretty much all of my life and I was too young to realize that my cousins and I did not have the same relationship to her. She has been in final stage renal failure for quite some time and having to take eight hour dialysis pretty much every other day. In fact when my Grandmother on my moms side passed away earlier this year, I had thought my Aunt would go before her. Last night on the phone my mother said that she had been given a terminal diagnosis and was being transferred to hospice. Yesterday they stopped dialysis which gives her a prognosis of two to four days at the most.

As at peace as I thought I would be with this… it turns out I really am not. In fact my mother called my cell phone at 7 am this morning…. and I am scared to death to return it. My wife and I had planned to come visit her today, since we couldn’t go together last night. My fear is that I am going to pick up the phone and call my mother back and find out that she passed in the night. I have a complex mix of feelings about how exactly I am with this possible event. So long as I don’t call her back, it is like it hasn’t happened yet… and for all I know it might not have. There is part of me that thinks it is a blessing, because she has not had any semblance of a qualitative life in the last six years or so. The single solitary joy she had was mealtime, and if that is the happiest you are all day long… then it tells me life is pretty horrible. Another part of me deeply mourns the fun and interesting aunt that she was for most of my life, and that she hasn’t been able to be for the last decade. I know that once I finish my blog post, I will call my mother back and whatever it is that has happened will not longer be sitting out in a buffer somewhere… but will be very real. This mornings post I guess is a way of psyching myself up to receive the news.

Fears Verified

I did not actually make it through my post this morning before receiving another call from my mother. It was in fact what I had feared, that my aunt passed away over night. She drifted off to sleep and never woke up and passed early this morning around 2 am. I guess they had known about this for longer than they had told me. She found out sometime on Wednesday, and at that point her and my mother went into planning mode, planning all of the elements of her funeral. Apparently she also threw all of her renal diet measures out the window and ate the things she had been craving. The one that I found the oddest was the fact that apparently she had been craving a snickers bar. So much so that she asked my mother to go out and get her one right then. By some quirk of fate my mother had purchased a snickers bar that morning and it was sitting there in her purse just waiting for the request.

My aunt was one of people that when she made up her mind she did it whatever it was. If she decided she wanted to go to a craft show, she would show up at the house early that morning and say “get in the car, we are going to a craft show”. More often than not my mother would tag along for whatever adventure it was that they were off to, be it going to a movie or going on a road trip. When I was younger there were many weekends she would decide that we were going off together to visit my cousins, and me and my Aunt would go off on an adventure where I am sure I would talk her ear off about whatever thing I happened to be into at the time. It turns out that when she realized there was no getting better, she set her mind to planning on her passing. It sounded like during the day yesterday she had set all of her affairs in order, making sure my mother had transferred enough to her own account to pay for the funeral. After that it seems like she decided she was done with everything that needed to be done and simply drifted off peacefully.

Just Dance

As not to end this mornings post on a somber note, I thought I would mention something that warms my heart. Final Fantasy XIV is a very charming game, and as such it seems to attract a certain type of gamer that is more than willing to stop and smell the roses. When I go idle I am notorious for starting up one of the many dances that I have been collecting in game. Often times when I return to the keyboard I will be joined by one or more people who have decided to take up dancing beside me. This happens as an almost nightly ritual in the housing ward our guild has a plot in. I will go down to the market board, and while checking out what has been posted I will start up a dance. Before I know it Naine one of the neighbors will have joined me, and on occasion others will as well. The community is weird like that, and I am growing to love it.

The above screenshot is of me and a new friend going through our little dance ritual while waiting on something to spawn. I feel like if you stop to dance with a Lalafell, you are destined to become instant friends. So the next time you happen upon someone dancing in whatever game you happen to be playing… take a moment to join in. It is moments like this that make the virtual world seem so much closer than just an assemblage of pixels. On a side note I am extremely happy to see so many friends either renewing their accounts or starting new ones to come hang out on Cactuar with us all. I am really hoping this will be a game I set down roots in for a long while. We are already involved in a bunch of different active link shells and it feels like we have connections far deeper than just our immediate circle of friends. I have not felt that way in any game since the early days of Warcraft, and I have to say it feels really awesome.