Tales of the Aggronaut

The Search for Internet

July 25, 2014 by Belghast

Gopher Belghast

Yesterday was the first official day of the conference and it went far more smoothly than we could have hoped for. Everyone seems so full of excitement and just brimming with ideas that when put together with the other teachers seem to cause random outbursts of inspiration. When you see the number 180 written out it doesn’t seem like that many people, but when you are confronted with that many at one time… it seems like a rather large group indeed. The conference has folks from around the country and many from outside of it. There is a pretty huge contingency from our neighbor to the north, and a few from across the pond as well. I’ve heard there is an Irish teacher here, but I have not met her. While watching the twitter hashtag during the day everyone seems to be getting so much from the process.

My morning was extremely busy, as I played gopher for any teacher that had forgotten something. I did a lot of runs to the store to pick up this or that and deliver it to their class room. From a tech support standpoint everything seemed to go smoothly, as the morning sessions tended to be put on by folks who are already seasoned presenters. After lunch they had the keynote session and twitter blew up after that, so I am guessing the guy was extremely dynamic. In the afternoon I finally sprang into action with a few last minute games of “trace the cable” to figure out what exactly had gotten unplugged in the shuffle. A number of the issues were ones we simply could not resolve due to the fact that my wife’s school employs a rather draconic web filtering system.

The Search for Internet

I admit much like a student I spent a good chunk of my time yesterday in search for a way to circumvent the web filtering system. It seemed like every other site I attempted to hit was either blocked for partially malfunctioning because some content delivery network they use as actually the thing being blocked. You find out just how many things you read are hosted off things like Imgur when you encounter a web filtering system like this. A few weeks back we lost our router, and I am still in the RMA process with Asus to get a replacement, but one of the nice features of the Nighthawk is that it comes with a really cool OpenVPN client. So a good chunk of my morning was spent trying to configure this.

For starters I could not remote into my machine at the house, as apparently RDP was blocked by the draconic filters. So I did one of the most truly contorted things to gain access to it. Apparently my workplaces web based SSL vpn worked just fine, so I remoted into work… and then turned around and remoted into my machine at the house. I was pretty sure I was moments away from ripping a hole in the internet. There I configured the client the router, and when it came to downloading the OpenVPN client… I had to do that on my home machine and gmail it to myself, since the OpenVPN website was blocked as well. Finally when I got everything installed I fired it up… and for a moment I thought it might be going to work… but the packets kept timing out.

So not only did they have a web filter in place but they also had a packet inspection firewall in place that was knocking down the packets coming in that it recognized as OpenVPN. In utter futility I flailed around a bit trying a different combination of port, maybe hoping I could disguise the traffic as something common. The problem is since I am on Cox internet, all of the common and benign ports are being blocked on my end since they don’t want you hosting a web, ftp, or mail server at your house. So after trying a dozen or so ports and going through the contorted process of transferring the configuration over gmail just to make sure it was working… I gave up and resigned myself to playing some Bejeweled 3. This is how you can tell I am really bored… I play Bejeweled because at this point I can play it on auto pilot.

Towel Day

After giving up for a bit and playing a few rounds of bejeweled I had another idea. For some time I have known exactly how to root my Samsung Galaxy S5, but didn’t do it for one reason or another. Like I felt like that was just a mess I didn’t want to deal with, and any of the potential ramifications of doing it. I want to be able to fiddle with my device freely, but at the same time I have no interest in doing a lot of the reasons why you root an android in the first place. Essentially I wanted to hold off doing it until I had a solid reason to. The complete and total lack of decent internet at the school was apparently that reason. The Samsung S5 has a built in Wifi hotspot but in their infinite wisdom AT&T seems to have installed a piece of software the blocks it anytime it tries to start. You have to be on one of the metered plans to use it, and since we are on the old grandfathered unlimited plan… this means we cannot.

The thing is I see the reasoning for blocking it. They don’t want someone using their phone as their ONLY internet provider and doing all sorts of random stuff like bittorrent over their wireless network. For me however I want to be able to use is as a backup network when I cannot for some reason connect to one. I feel like if I am paying for this device, I should be able to use its internet connection in any way I see fit within reason. The rest of the world can do this without problem, and carriers outside of the United States don’t throw up these artificial restrictions. So emboldened by my frustrations… I installed the Towel root on my phone, and turned to the dark side.

It still took me a little bit of doing, but right now I have my phone connected to my laptop via bluetooth and PDAnet and the connection is amazing. I figured all of this out pretty late in the day but I was able to get out and play some FFXIV with little to no lag. I just have to figure out how to also connect it to my chromebook, and then I will have a way to use it when I do not have access to WiFi. Even cooler this also means I should able to finally use a Dualshock 3 controller with my android to play some emulator games! Everything that I have heard tells me that the android is a truly amazing emulator system, but in order to get it working well you need root access. Now that I have finally crossed that threshold I figure this is dawning a new age of random crap I use my phone for.

Through the Looking Glass

July 24, 2014 by Belghast

Human Trafficking

Yesterday to some extent was the pre-game show for today’s beginning of the conference. I got up at 5:30, blogged, ran out and got breakfast and then played a very small amount of Injustice on the PS4 while my wife got up and around and ready. Once we left the house we had a whole list of things that needed to be done before the people started arriving. The first thing was to swing by the hotel and make sure that they were ready to start receiving people and that the room we had rented as a social room was set up. There were 15 tables that we would need to find table cloths for. They of course had table cloths that they were willing to rent us… but at $7 a table for a conference that already runs entirely on donations… that was pushing it a little much.

After this we ran by the High School to make sure that everything was set up there. The conference room we spent Saturday setting up, had gotten completely torn down Monday because of a meeting that was not on any of the publically available calendars. They made promises to set the room back up after they were finished, but when we arrived yesterday morning it was only a few rows away from being done, so instead of hoping and praying that it was finished… we opted to roll up our sleeves and finish the job. I figured a few minutes worth of work was well worth the piece of mind knowing it was completely finished. From here I dropped my wife off at Staples and ran across the street to Dollar Tree, where I went table cloth shopping.

They did not of course have round table cloths, by my wife had the idea to simply lay one over the center of the table and another one over the center in the opposite direction. She did the math and thought it would worth out perfectly, and sure enough in practice it did work great. I opted to pick up a bunch of different colors, the idea being that this was a mixer and it would be easier to remember what table you were at if folks were up roaming about if you could remember “the blue one in the back”. I started setting up the tables after our first run to the airport of the day, and had gotten a few done when the cavalry arrived. Being the math teachers that they are… they figured out a scheme so that no two colors touched and finished the job for me as I headed back to the airport for round two.

Towards the end of the day we joked that I could add human trafficking to my resume, because surely someone there was starting to get suspicious since the same person kept showing up and collecting more new arrivals. Over the course of the day I ran three loads to the hotel from the airport, and another load from the main hotel to the overflow location. For the bulk of the day my wife was there at the airport playing welcoming committee as folks arrived, and making sure they had either a rental car or a ride with someone else. It is really damned good that she was doing this, because as the day went on a number of plans fell through. While we thought we would be hauling a single passenger on the final leg of the trip, we ended up with a full load of five in the car. For the most part everyone was extremely appreciative of the impromptu shuttle service.

Through the Looking Glass

I still believe that at some point my wife was abducted and replaced by a doppelganger. I guess this is fine since the one she was replaced from seems to be absolutely bubbling over with excitement and enthusiasm. There were several points during the day where I thought to myself… who is this woman beside me that is visibly bouncing at the thought of meeting new people. My wife and I are both introverts, and for the most part home bodies. However in our own little online circles we are the social glue that often times holds groups of people together, and play the role of welcoming new people into the fold. So at some point it dawned on me… that she had become the visual embodiment of her online personality, much in the same way as I guess I would were I around a bunch of my twitter friends.

That is the part that has been the strangest for me. I often talk about the Twittersphere and Blogosphere like it is some sort of monoculture, but in reality I am only ever referring to a very small slice of the community as a whole. So this week as I am watching all these twitter folk interact, it feels absolutely foreign to me… because there is absolutely zero overlap with my own community. It just feels strange that there could exist two completely different countries inside of the same online service. This country is solely based on a love of Mathematics education, and looking for ways to better themselves and their classrooms. I mean there is a reason why my wife and I do not follow each other on twitter, because our twitter timelines are completely packed with a specific kind of information about our passions. It is absolute irony that I would end up married to a Mathematics teacher, considering throughout school that was the only subject I did not effortlessly excel at. I guess in the best relationships we look for people with the qualities we ourselves lack.

Growing up I spent a lot of time with my father at weddings. He we a professional photographer on the side, and from the moment I showed any sign of aptitude with a camera I got drafted into a life as a photographers assistant. I always struggled with being in weddings, because as the wedding photographer you are adopted into whatever family unit exists for that day. You become a crucial and vital member of the wedding party, and have to learn the ins and outs and how to get the pictures you are paid to take while everyone there wants to simply hang out and converse. You are brought into the vortex of this deeply personal moment in someone’s life, but at the same time you have absolutely no meaningful connection to it. This to me has been Twitter Math Camp. These teachers all know each other in deeply personal ways after years of interaction on twitter, and I feel like I am just a passing interloper peering in on the proceedings.

That is not to say that I don’t already know several of them, or at least know OF them from conversations my wife has regarding her math circles. I am sure by the end of the conference I will know several more considering I am acting in the role as tech support monkey. Given that this a twitter group, I suggested that folks just tweet me when they have issues. So I expect I will see a bunch of new faces showing up in my feed. I am trying really hard to be cordial and outgoing and meet the onslaught of new people with a smile. This conference has just ballooned since its start in 2012. I have no clue what the numbers for Philadelphia were like, but the first conference in St. Louis was around 30-40 people. This year we set up 180 chairs in the conference room and we might have people standing in the back of the room as it feels like we are probably going to end up with considerably more than that.

Board games a Plenty

I feel like this is a group I could get along with just fine, were it not for the fact that there were so many of them. By the time we made the third run to the airport, there were enough people in the hospitality suite that my fight or flight instincts were starting to kick in. I have this thing, that has been passed down through the generations from my grandfather, to my father, and now the older I get the worse it is getting in me. I do not handle crowds at all. Like I can handle twenty or so people in a really open area, but the more tightly packed the people get… the more on edge I get waiting anxiously for my opportunity to bolt and get free from the pack. In my father it has gotten so bad that he cannot stand to be in a store for any length of time. I luckily have not gotten to that point, but I definitely have issues… especially with a tightly packed conference room or elevator.

Last night I was having a battle with myself. I wanted to stick around and play board games and possibly even Magic the Gathering. However two things were at work here. Firstly being cordial and friendly in person has a severe toll on me. I had reached my saturation point for humanity and I just needed to get away. I could have handled a small group of twenty or so playing board games, but based on the pictures I saw posted in twitter later in the night… the room was apparently packed with people and a huge success. So no only was my buffer full, but had I gone back to the hospitality suite I would have definitely struggled with the whole fight or flight instinct thing.

I always feel horrible when my antisocial tendencies keep me from having fun. Like I don’t want to be known as that malfunctioning person that is never part of anything fun or entertaining. I didn’t want to seem rude or standoffish to all of these guests… which I at least feel partly responsible for since my wife and I are representatives of the host city as it were. Unfortunately there are just some things that no matter how much I will it… I simply cannot push past psychologically. As a result I am sure I missed out on a really fun time, but instead I had the needed time to recharge my batteries and prepare for what is more than likely going to be an extremely frenetic and stressful first day. Wish me luck!

Hunting Malboros

July 23, 2014 by Belghast

The Night Before

This mornings post is going to be a little scant on visuals so I am just going to leave you with this amazing cinematic trailer that Riot released yesterday called A New Dawn. You should totally watch it and marvel at just how awesome Graves is. If you watch the making up they talk about the whole video having a meme running through it “Graves is not impressed”. Onwards to the real post. This morning is the beginning of the Mathematics conference, and throughout the day today I will be playing chauffer to a group of folks who need ferried from the airport to the hotel. As a result we spent some time last night cleaning out my wife’s Pontiac Torrent since it has the most comfortable seating for a large number of adults. The thing that makes that vehicle awesome is that it has a sliding bench seat so you can push it back for extra leg room but still have a significant amount of cargo space.

I went comatose around 10:30 last night, but apparently my wife is having schoolgirl jitters. As a denizen of twitter as well… I guess I would probably be jittery about meeting a bunch of folks all at once from the twitterverse. Granted this is the third running of this conference, but it has never been anywhere near as large as it is this year. We have apparently completely sold out two hotels and they are booking in a third overflow hotel now. To give me fortitude to get through a day of meeting all of these people I don’t know but will be expected to be cordial with… I am leaning on both coffee and a monster ultra. Mostly I just wanted to show off this awesome WW2 Dalek poster coffee mug we found the other day. My wife actually spotted the Doctor Who mugs first, and there were a bunch of designs to choose from… but I have always been partial to the WW2 era propaganda poster from Victory of the Daleks.

So while I conked out completely around 10:30 my wife was apparently up until 1 am. Then when I woke up this morning at 5 to get around and showered, she was awake again and responding to tweets. I think its adorable that she can be all hyped up on nerves and I will likely be the same way when January rolls around and I go to Pax South. I am not sure if have mentioned that on my blog or not yet, but as of right now I have tickets for all three days to Pax South. I may or may not be attending Sunday, but I am definitely going to try and be there for Friday and Saturday. I figure the last day of a con is likely the “anything you missed” day and all the major stuff will likely occur on Friday and Saturday. I might be completely wrong, but that would at least give me Sunday to drive home. If you are also going to Pax South give me a shout, because I would love to arrange some sort of a twitter/blogosphere/whatever meetup.

Attack on Deathshead

I made it a bit further in my play through of Wolfenstein New Order but I am still struggling with crash to desktop issues. I had a spot in the moon base that was doing it, and now am having a spot in Deathshead compound that is kicking me out. Last night I gave it a few attempts but just didn’t have the patience. I think next time I try it I might shut down EVERYTHING, including DXtory that I generally have running so I can take screenshots. I know some games get a little pissy about overlays, or it might simply be that I need to disable the steam overlay. In any case this game is really amazing and it gives me totally unrelated hope. This past weekend at Quakecon, ID Software gave an exclusive peak at Doom 4 that has apparently just be renamed Doom and is somewhat of a reboot. If Machine Games can give us a game as awesome as Wolfenstein… I have high hopes for what Doom has in store for us.

As my friend Kodra has said before, Wolfenstein is very much exactly what games felt and sounded like in the 90s. Everything was industrial metal… and we liked it. I am perfectly fine with this throwback syndrome, because the modern FPS is nowhere near as much fun as the first generation of them used to be. We have come so far in trying to make everything more and more realistic, and I think in that struggle we lost sight on what actually made the games fun. If Wolfenstein and the reboot of Doom herald in an era of interesting level design with secrets and multiple paths to the objective… then hell yes I want to return to the 90s. Right now my goal is to make it through Wolf one way or another by this weekend, so we can potentially talk about the ending on the podcast. We will of course warn people ahead of time before the spoilers start flying.

Hunting Malboros

This is one of those moments when I really wish Hitbox.tv knew what “today” and “tomorrow” actually meant. For the last several days they have said that they would have the export to youtube functionality back up and running today or tomorrow. I realize they are a small company and this is a beta product, but at this point it is seriously making me consider going back to Twitch. I don’t want to, but I also like having the ability to embed video recorded from the night before in my mornings blog post. Complaining aside… one of the things that I have been enjoying since coming back to FFXIV is the hunt system. Each day you can go to a hunt board in your grand company offices and grab a new set of wanted posters. They call them bills… but “handbill” hasn’t really been used popularly in the United States in decades.

I love that the various wanted posters just list a bounty and a basic location for where the mob will spawn. In general I can remember where in each zone that type of mob already exists, and usually the type you need is intermingled within the pack. This system would totally be a quick enjoyable jaunt out into the world if it were not for the two FATE based encounters each day. Here you are either super lucky or have to wait around for hours. Last night I streamed a fairly boring stream, because it was me killing Malboros and Dark Sylphs while waiting on an apparently rare fate to spawn. The positive is this is causing me to actually level my chocobo. As of last night I dinged level 3 on it and made a goodly dent into 4.

The big thing I have noticing is it is super horrible about standing in stuff. Like I had to do all sorts of crazy to try and position the Malboros in such a way as to not let the Daedalus (my chocobo) get breathed upon. Hint… I am pretty horrible at this and probably went through a dozen gysahl greens during the course of the night resummoning him. I find this game extremely relaxing compared to the spastic pace of Wildstar. I have lots of love for that game, but just watching the world absolutely wears me out. Coming back to FFXIV and its more sedate pace felt like crawling into a warm bed. Granted the combat system is still interesting in that I am constantly having to move out of stuff while keeping up my combos, but it is far less button mashy since everything has a sizeable cool down. In any case I am enjoying myself, and at some point I am going to get brave enough to do Duty Roulette for the big prizes.

#WolfensteinNewOrder #FFXIV

Moon Raider

July 22, 2014 by Belghast

Edition Madness

I feel like the colorful descriptors that companies tack onto iterative versions of games has hit an all time low. Since the 80s we have been forced to play a progressively extreme number of versions of a game. During the 90s the Street Fighter franchise for example proved to us all of the ways it could not actually count to 3. We’ve suffered through Super, Hyper, Ultra, Zero, Alpha, Game of the Year, Ultimate, Legendary and innumerable other hardcore and extreme versions of the games we love. This morning as I idly checked Steam I spotted something that made my eye stop dead over it. We really have a game that is a “Velvet Edition”? What is next suede or cordura?

I keep thinking maybe this is a translation error somehow, but “Samten” doesn’t really sound much better. Maybe it is me, and I just have a negative connotation towards the word velvet, and maybe it is completely normal for someone to use that word in place of say “deluxe”. This is just a first for me, and I think maybe this whole descriptor thing has gone a bit far if we have arrived at fabrics now. I mean even though “game of the year” bundles are completely inappropriately named, considering very few of them have actually won a “game of the year” award… at least for awhile they were something standardized. I personally would rather they go with something like “complete edition” considering that is what we are talking about… the version that includes all the damned DLC in one place. Though I guess game companies would probably frown on admitting they have been rationing game content to us for years.

Moon Raider

We had a few errands to run last night, and by the time I got home I was not sure what exactly to play for the evening. Since this weekends podcast, Kodra has been urging me to finish up Wolfenstein so he could have someone to talk about it with. So I opted to work on that, and while I did not quite make it through the game I figure I am pretty close to the ending. I suffered a series of technical difficulties where I would crash out and have to load back in restarting me at the previous save point. When this happened the last time I figured I would call it a night, as it seemed like I was probably going to have to repeat a significant chunk of the previous level. It seems to be related to when I go into a cutscene and then come back out of it.

It is really hard to find screenshots that I can show off that don’t really give away anything major about the game. Well other than the fact that you get to experience Nazi’s on the moon… but that doesn’t really give much away plot wise. I feel like that is the aspect of the game I enjoy the most is seeing how this alternate reality evolved without the influence of the United States. So much of everything we experience today is because of the global export of American goods and American values. As a culture we have had a death grip on the entertainment industry and the internet as well… and as a result everything that comes from other countries often feels like an odd remix of something we would see in the United States. So to see this reality that evolved entirely in a different direction is interesting to me. I applaud the level designers because all of the little details feel like they come from a completely different place.

This game is definitely going to warrant a second play through, because there is a single decision that you make early on that causes the game to go in different enough directions that from that point on the chapters of the game branch depending on your choice made. It seems that Kodra and I picked completely different routes, and I think it will be interesting to talk about the differences between them. I don’t feel like this is probably a discussion we can really have on AggroChat because it would be impossible to do this in a way that is not spoilerific. I really hope all of you took advantage of the QuakeCon pricing and picked up this awesome game when it was essentially half price. I have a feeling that this game is going to experience quite a bit of third party modding, and I hope that sooner or later they bring out a multiplayer addon. One of the more enjoyable game play and narrative experiences I have had in awhile.

Sparse Next Few Days

The next few days are going to be interesting for me. Today is technically my last day at work this week, but just because I am off does not mean I won’t actually be working harder. My wife is part of a crew putting on a mathematics conference here in town, and I have opted to take off from work to help her with it. I know Wednesday for example I will be operating an impromptu shuttle service, and then the other days I will likely be filling in a tech support role and general “gopher”. With all of these constraints it will be interesting to see what I end up blogging about, as I doubt I will be playing that many games.

That said it sounds like at least one of the conference attendees is a Magic the Gathering fan, so I will be bringing up a box of decks just in case that happens. Speaking of Magic… I really have no clue what Wizards of the Coast was thinking when they came up with the 2015 product designs. Once upon a time the off brand products that you can get in your grocery store that are branded as Always Save or Best Choice or even Sam’s Choice were simply called “Generic”. They featured white labels with start sans-serif writing on them, similar to government commodities. So I cannot look at this magic the gathering set without thinking “oh its generic magic”. I feel like we arrived at this point out of some sort of hipster minimalist design ethic… but yeah it is just not working for me. I guess they have used every other color of the rainbow lately for the primary theme of a set… so sooner or later they were going to get around to white.

It will be interesting to see how the next few days shake out. Likely you will be getting some more personal posts. Right now the plan is to take my laptop and work on editing my NaNoWriMo novel between times I am needed. The only problem with this is that the guest wifi at the school is horrible. My phone will allow me to tether to it, but not sure how much I can do that without AT&T getting pissy with me. We are grandfathered in on one of the unlimited plans, and I don’t really want to do much to jeopardize that. The positive is that the Galaxy S5 shipped with unlocked tethering software, and it is not like I had to do anything to get it up and running. I just expect that all of the websites I would want to look at would be blocked without it.

#Wolfenstein #MagicTheGathering