Tales of the Aggronaut

Permission to Suck

May 6, 2014 by Belghast

The Ugly Baby

Something that is probably useful to know about me is that I am absolutely an NPR junkie. Several years ago I made the decision to stop listening to music and instead use that time to catch up on the worlds events. There is a concept among NPR listeners, called the “driveway moment” where you have reached your destination but you cannot leave the car because you are enthralled by whatever is happening on the radio. Yesterday I had one of these and in a way I found it extremely relatable to the Newbie Blogger Initiative. Ed Catmull is most well known for being one of the founders of Pixar Animation Studios. Yesterday afternoon on the Diane Rehm show, he was talking about his new book. But he dwelled upon a specific chapter, and I was able to dig up the same basic discussion in the youtube video above.

The chapter of the book is “The Ugly Baby and The Hungry Beast”. In his example the “Hungry Beast” is the part of Pixar or any creative studio that is the most productive. They are the ones churning through content and making things happen. The front of the studio, the creative side however is the “Ugly Baby”. He said that when Pixar starts a new project the output is always horrible. Nothing looks quite right, nothing fits together, and generally speaking it is rather ugly. The creative ideas need time to grow into something fully fleshed out, and during this period they need to be protected and given time to nurture. When you are just starting out blogging, your blog is this Ugly Baby. Nothing quite works the way you want it to, things don’t quite flow, but you have a vision for where it can be and you have to give it time to mature.

Permission to Suck

One of the hardest things about creating anything, be it a blog or a web comic or a podcast is giving yourself permission to suck. We intellectually see failure as being a necessary part of the creative process, because it allows us to grow and change. However as people… we never want anything we do to fail, because culturally we have placed all of this weight upon that happening and attached all sorts of meanings to it. In order to make a blog work, you have to give yourself permission to suck, and to not know all the answers. Like most things in life you can figure things out as you go. My blog has evolved over time into what it is, because quite frankly the first two years of it were pretty lousy. Still on a daily basis as I sit down at my desktop and put fingers to keyboard each morning, I question if I know what the hell I am doing.

As a writer you need to create enough space around your work to allow it to grow and mature into what it can be. At least when you are getting your feet about you, you need this judgment free zone. Realize that in six months most of what you create today, is going to embarrass you. That is part of the process and if you somehow manage to get everything right immediately… then you are some sort of freakish prodigy. That said… no one gets everything right immediately. Blogging is one of those things where you learn more by doing, and doing often. I don’t feel like I really learned much about myself or the process until I was forcing myself to do it every single day. While I don’t suggest anyone follow me down that path of madness I do suggest you pick a schedule and stick to it. This can either be a fixed number of posts per week, or an actual schedule like Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Just Write Anything

There are going to be days where you are scheduled to write something and you don’t have a clue in the world what you are going to say. I’ve found it is important to observe the routine, and brute force your way through the issue. If you look through my blog there are massive several month long lapses in content. Each and every single one of those started with a day when I just could not think of anything to say. I used to get to the point where I would feel like, each time I made one of these lapses that I would need an extremely epic post to start back up again. As sort of a payoff for those who still had me in their RSS feeds, that I needed to make a really good one to make the outage worth it. Problem is… this only complicated the process and make it all the more unlikely that I would be making a post to start things up again.

When I have days where I am quite literally experiencing writers block, I just start writing. I might rattle off three paragraphs of completely banal bullshit, but there is something about the act of writing that gets the process started. Flowing words out onto the page, somehow clears the logjam in your head and within a few paragraphs of crap you start seeing genuine content. So when this happens I keep writing my way through the post, and end up deleting most of the “bullshit header”. Ultimately relying on inspiration is not sustainable, so many times you have to make your own inspiration. This could be playing a game that inspires you, or crawling through your RSS feed looking at what others are writing… or it could be just forcing yourself to produce content by sheer will alone. In any case, the more you force yourself to write, the better your content will be and the more mature your blog will become.

New Challengers

In many ways “winning” NaNoWriMo has forever changed the way I look at things like the Newbie Blogger Initiative. While I still have so much editing to do, the focus of that exercise was not necessarily to write really amazing content, but instead to focus on getting my 1500+ words a night. During the Newbie Blogger Initiative I really see the focus on getting your blog off the ground, and posting content regularly. The content can be horrible, but the act of doing it over and over will improve your own personal process… and similarly improve your blog. So far the Class of 2014 seems to be busting down all expectations I might have for them and producing some really great posts. Additionally there have been several new people added to the mix since my last post so I wanted to post an updated roster.

I highly suggest you check them all out and add them to your RSS reader. We have a few that are on their first or second post, but we have quite a few that are cranking them out on a pretty regular basis. Just remember to give yourself room to post things that you don’t immediately like. Cranking out the posts is the only real way you can develop your own process. The Newbie Blogger Initiative is this great judgment free zone, where each and every established blogger wants you to succeed. Use the hell out of this space to experiment and try new things. Figure out what it means for “you” to write “your” blog. This experience is worth what you get out of it, it is like an optional boot camp, and those who really take that to heart seem to be well served by it. As I look out on the class of 2012 and 2013 I see many well established voices, and I look forward to being able to say the same about 2014.

Reaching Out

May 5, 2014 by Belghast

I’m a Leaf on the Wind

Yes I am in fact expecting to get skewered at any moment here. I did a very dumb thing this morning, or at least I did it last night. My wife crashed considerably earlier than I did, and by the time I ended up trying to put the house to bed… I was dragging horribly myself. As a result I seem to have managed to deal with everything, except one of the most important items. I forgot to set the alarm clock. Since we are both well trained automaton drones… we only actually over slept 30 minutes. However that thirty minutes is enough to throw the entire morning into a state of panic. All of my nice buffers are completely gone and I am having to do things by the seat of my pants.

One of the negative side effects of being a man on a mission, is that even when a minor catastrophe strikes like this one… I still have to perform that mission. I guess in the light of the Newbie Blogger Initiative this might be a useful post anyways. I have set down a schedule and I am for the most part sticking to it regardless of the consequences. This means that occasional I am going to have to knock out a very rushed posting. Sometimes this is done the night before because I know I wont have time to deal with it in the morning, other times it will be like this morning and I am in an extreme rush to plot words down on the page. In either case I have devoted myself to the routine and even if I were to miss a morning, the routine would dictate that I put something up before the end of the day.

Ash’s Adventures

I had a really odd weekend for me, in involving doing lots of non-gaming things. As a result I have felt pretty out of it, and disconnected from my normal gaming group. We all coalesced together for the AggroChat podcast on Saturday, but then I filtered off and was not heard from much on Sunday. Somewhere during all of this I completely missed that our very own Ashgar decided to enter the Nehttp://www.newbiebloggerinitiative.com/wbie Blogger Initiative fray. While currently he has the standard boilerplate “this is me” first post up, or in this case the standard programmer “hello world”, it is a start into a much bigger world. Funny thing is… as a programmer my very first post was a “hello world” as well, and his is much better than mine was.

All of this happened under my nose, and in my lapse in checking the forums. It looks like he did this on Friday, so he completely neglected to mention it during the podcast. I must scold him for not mentioning it on the podcast and giving himself a plug. I am sure at this point he is in that odd phase where he isn’t sure if he made the right decision or not. I’ve been there with my own blog, and you kinda just have to keep pushing forward until it starts to make sense. The whole “fake it, until you make it” concept works well for blogging. The only problem is at this point 5 years and 540 posts later… I still very much still feel like I am faking it. I will do whatever I can to help bolster this effort.

New Crop is a Good One

One of the things about the Class of 2014 I have found the most impressive is how seamless they seem to have integrated with the existing community. At this point I have already had a couple of length conversations with both Caewen and Missysmojo about bloggery things, and I had talked already to Braxwolf for what seems like ages. Maybe that is the difference this year, much like with my friend Ashgar… this year seems to be full of folks who have been sitting in the sidelines and are now stepping forth into the game. A large chunk of this years class are somehow already connected to established bloggers, and that is definitely easing the transition. However for those who aren’t… I am still impressed by the amount of activity that is happening over on the Newbie Blogger Initiative forums. I still stand by my statement that as a whole we look like we are going to have one of our strongest years yet.

Of course this is nothing to detract from the class of 2012 and 2013. You guys rock because if you are still posting you’ve more than won the test of longevity. I feel like the Class of 2013 and most definitely the Class of 2012… no longer get to call themselves Newbies. You guys are now well established bloggers with our own readers and followers. You guys are the proof that this month long madness seems to work really well in renewing our ranks. The month serves as two things… firstly and most importantly it is a way to try and bolster the community. If you read the news, they will tell you that blogging is dead. Certainly Google demolishing Reader was a significant setback in my readership, and I figure it has been for lots of other bloggers as well. However we are still here and still plying our trade.

Reaching Out

The new reality is that we have to work harder to reach our readers. For me this involves a complex sequence of events that involves a lot of automatic syndication to lots of different social media networks. I want to make it ever easy for my readers to find me, regardless of the platform… and this has involved me branching out into networks that I have zero interest in actually being a part of. However the end result feels like a much more connected experience. I don’t care if someone is commenting on my blog, retweeting or replying on twitter, or writing a really awesome and long form response on G+. I am interacting with my readers on whatever platform is most comfortable to them. However it also means that I have a whole lot of hoops that I have to jump through.

I’ve come to realize that each of the social media platforms is like a little club. I know personally I get frustrated as hell when someone tries to force me to use Facebook. However I am there posting my content, because I know for some people Facebook is their comfort zone. Similarly I have started trying to branch out into Anook, after a length conversation with their community manager. Sure it is a little more work on my side to make sure I am spreading my content everywhere it can be spread, but in doing so I am trying to reach the most people I can. Sure the numbers in the analytics look nice, but for each person I reach out to they are a potential new friend. As much as I pretend to espouse a philosophy of “hating people” the opposite is actually true. Growing up an “only child” has made me want to surround myself with awesome people, and the way I meet more awesome people… is by first reaching out.

So while I first intended to simply syndicate to Facebook for example, I am actually starting to use it when someone replies. I am also finding a surprising number of people interacting with me over Tumblr, which previous was just that place where I reposted interesting comic and gaming photos. The same is starting to happen as I allow myself to get more involved in what appears to be a community of Twitch streamers. It takes effort on my part, but I am finding that each one of these new ramparts is not by any means impassible. It seems that if you put yourself out there, folks will generally embrace you. Essentially with the great reduction in the traction that RSS has, I am trying to include pretty much everyone as I move forward. Trying to tailor my content so that it appears in whatever format they feel most comfortable consuming it in. I am by no means a heavy traffic site, but I am seeing the fruits of this effort. At the end of the day I write these words to be read, so if more people are reading them… it is worth the extra work.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD

May 4, 2014May 3, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #12

This weeks episode of Steampowered Sunday is chock full of self indulgent cheatery. Firstly we have plans on going out and about Sunday morning, so I am technically playing the game and doing this review Saturday night shortly before recording AggroChat. The second bit of cheatery is that normally I play through a game in my steam back catalog. That however is not the case this week as currently steam is having a sale on all Activision titles. Among the list was one that caught my eye. I had noticed it a few times in the past but was never at a price point I was wiling to snap it up for. However yesterday for $5 I figured it was well worth that just for a trip down memory lane.

THHDGame 2014-05-03 19-32-02-65 Something you need to know about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise is that I played the hell out of it. I was one of those little skater kids, and I even went so far as to have the “Tony Hawk” style “hangover” haircut. As a result when this came out for the original Playstation I latched onto it with both hands. One of the things I always wanted was a really good skating game, however we were stuck with either Skate or Die that at least had a free style ramp mode, or 720* which lacked any kind of free skate option… and if you took too long you were chased by an angry swarm of bees. No game gave me what I wanted, which was the ability to faff about without a timer ticking and do all sorts of nifty tricks. This game franchise had exactly that, and I spent countless hours playing and it and it’s higher resolution cousins on the Dreamcast.

Memory Lane

When the I got my Playstation 2 one of the first titles I picked up was Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3. So I knew one of two things was going to happen. Either I would have a wonderful romp down memory lane, or I would be severely disappointed by the crappy remake. Thankfully the game is pretty much a 1080p remake of the original playstation title, and this is a good thing. Playing the game with a XBOX 360 controller on my PC feels almost exactly like I remember playing it on the PSX. All the tricks worked essentially the same, and I struggled with the same problems I ever did. The game works the same way, each map has a ton of objectives and as you move your way around the area you get bonus scores for collecting them. As always the first objective I generally go for is for grabbing the letters S K A T E scattered around the room.

Additionally all of the old secrets are exactly where I remember them, and accessed through the same kind of tricks. I really was not expecting anything more than a graphical update, so I was not terribly disappointed to find that literally nothing had changed. I got the same enjoyment crashing through the room on top of the ramp as I ever did. One of my favorite things about the series was trying to find all the named “gaps” and a lot of these work the same as they always did. The only thing that is confusing really is that the game is like a remix of all of the Tony Hawk titles. There are maps from the early THPS games as well as the later Underground games. Overall this gives you a good mix of things to go and explore, and Free Skate mode is just as much of a guilty pleasure as it ever was.

Stripped Down Game

My biggest complaint about the game is that it is greatly stripped down. Gone is the ability to create custom skaters, and also gone are the weird unlockable characters like the Neversoft eyeball guy, and Spiderman. The lack of ability to create your own skater really hurts my overall enjoyment of the title. I liked creating a skater that was a reasonable facsimile of myself and customizing his stat package to be only the things I cared about… namely street skating. I found that overall Eric Koston has the closest stat package to what I would want, so I have been using him. The game has been out for two years, so I doubt that we will be seeing any kind of DLC that adds in the missing functionality. My only hope is that maybe just maybe someone cares enough to create a mod that lets you do the same thing.

The other missing feature is the skate park creator. I spent hours building interesting skate parks to go explore, and I remember THPS 2 for the Dreamcast had a wide variety of items you could choose from. I realize this title was released not only on the PC but also tablets and phones… so there is a limited amount of stuff they could realistically squeeze into the game given those constraints. Even with these missing features, I have definitely gotten my $5 worth of fun. Sure I still have my playstation, playstation 2 and dreamcast… but I am not going to go dig them out of the closet and hook them up just to play Tony Hawk. This little download has allowed me to relive some of those memories without having to do that.

Watch Me Suck at THPS!

As has been the trend lately, I recorded the entire play though of THPS, or at least a good chunk of it. You can see just how bad I suck at the game these days, and how many jumps and tricks I miss. I had a blast doing it, and I need to figure out a better option for a push to talk key while playing a game that requires a controller. As a result there are huge blocks of time where I say nothing. But it is fun nonetheless. If you had good memories of the game like I did, you might check out the sale while it is still going on. Well worth the few bucks, and the game performs extremely well. I didn’t notice anything glitchy about it, so it seems like a pretty solid experience.

Episode 4: Mentors for Everyone

Last night we recorded Episode 4 of the AggroChat podcast, and once again we had our regular cast in place. Kodra was back from his business trip, and Rae was no longer trying to join the circus. I tried a little experiment last night, that I probably won’t repeat again. I had been concerned that I had been overly directing the flow of conversation, so I tried to take a step back and let the rest of the hosts introduce topics. The end result lead me to do way more editing and massaging on this episode than normal as I deleted a ton of awkward pauses. The end result is still fairly interesting. We ended up talking about the current state of Elder Scrolls Online with its launch and remaining bugs. We talked quite a bit about ArcheAge and how intrigued I am by it. Finally I nudged the rest of my panel into talking about League of Legends. They had been threatening for weeks to derail the podcast, and I encouraged it… and the end result was not terribly derailed after all.

#SteamPoweredSunday #AggroChat #TonyHawkProSkater #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO

A Path Not Taken

May 3, 2014 by Belghast

A Question Answered

I am getting a super late start today, or more so I am sitting down to write my blog post this morning later. I dropped the dry cleaning off yesterday morning, and then shortly after decided I felt entirely too bad to exist in the real world. So I went home and took breathing treatments throughout the day, in an attempt to convince my lungs to stop being assholes. It has mostly worked, but this meant that I needed to get up relatively early this morning and go pick up the dry cleaning so we would have it for Monday morning. I still have plenty of shirts in the closet to cycle through, but my wife had reached the limits of her wardrobe.

It seems like at least once a year a new social media technology is released, and the internet zeitgeist all flocks to it. I generally sign up for these the moment they happen in an attempt to stake my claim flag and then they sit dormant for years until I finally decide that I want to start using it. One of these is Anook, and I asked a very simple question last night on twitter.

While I was expecting someone like Maeka who has been posting on the site for a good deal of time to chime in, I did not expect to be drawn into a length conversation with the Community Lead. As you can see, we talked a lot and I started to buy into the vision. The problem that they see it is that there are all these services, that you load up with content once… and then forget about. Facebook is this way for me, I have a profile because I know that certain people would rather be notified of my content through that vehicle… but I don’t actually USE facebook. I hate the service, I hate the way it feels, so I feel bad each time someone sees the content that somehow got set up to syndicate from twitter… and thinks I am actually using that as a means of communication.

I know going into this that Anook is not what I have been longing for. I would love to have a gamer focused site that acts as a social glue for everything else I have content on. A single point of syndication for G+, Twitter, Steam, Raptr, Battle.net, Glyph, Playstation Network, Xbox LIve… whatever services I happen to have accounts on including my own blog and podcast. I think this is a niche that if someone fills it, will be amazing. What Anook is instead is trying to focus on creating a community with the ability to talk about disparate topics. I see this as trying to be a social network, but almost from a guild website type of approach. In the short time I am going to start populating it with my content, be it youtube vids, the podcast or my daily blog posts.

In the long term I could see maybe starting to try and use this for some of our other ventures like Stalwart Gaming or the Alliance of Awesome. When I first signed up for the site at launch, it felt fairly primitive, and I really did not grasp the concept. It just felt like Raptr or Steam without the nifty automation and game tracking functionality. Now I can see what it is trying to be, and while I may not be 100% sold on it, I definitely appreciate their goals. More than that I appreciate the kind of specialized attention this Community Lead gave me in trying to win me over to their vision. Hell that along is going to make me loyal to the cause more than anything. I will always reward amazing service with my patronage.

A Path Not Taken

This morning is going to be a bit “gaming lite” again, but with the hustle and bustle of the Newbie Blogger Initiative I’ve sat on a tale for a few days. I wanted to make sure I got the posting underway proper before taking a lot of screen real estate for something personal. My wife is a teacher, and this year her schedule aligned just right to allow her to attend the junior assembly. This is one of those deals where someone inspiration comes and talks to the kids about the dangers of the world. This is the sort of thing I as a teenager used to ignore, taking a sketch pad and doodling up in the bleachers instead of actually listening. I am sure for some of the kids there this will definitely be the case.

As the speaker was introduced, my wife thought the name sounded familiar but shrugged it off. Then he started talking about living in a town of 3500 in Northeastern Oklahoma. At that point she started to wonder if maybe he lived in her hometown. Finally when he started talking about his son… it hit her like a sack of bricks. Growing up I was best friends with two other guys, and for the most part we were inseparable. The man on the stage telling his story was one of those two boys father. He had been almost a surrogate parent to me, as much time as I had spent over at their house throughout Middle School and most of High School. When we first got together in College I was still telling stories about him and his son with fondness.

The thing is something changed along the way, and his son was getting into some pretty bad stuff. Alcohol changed to Marijuana changed to Cocaine binges… and eventually I had heard he was even dabbling in Heroine… not that you can actually dabble in that. Two things happened my junior year, one I started distancing myself from him… and two I got really sick. The combination of the two ended up with me picking up some new friends, ones better for my well being… and while we had no falling out or anything… we just faded apart. At some point after graduation we had managed to get back in contact. He was running a record label out of Ohio, and prided himself in sending me lots of indie recordings of the bands he was working with.

Every so often he would call and we’d end up talking for a few hours. When he moved back to town he got married, had a couple of kids and settled down as the director of an area Arts festival. I thought that things were going pretty well for him, or at least on the surface he seemed to have gotten his shit together. I visited him at least once at his office, and we went out to lunch, and then at our ten year reunion we of course hung out. So it was with complete shock that a few years later I hear that he was not okay at all. At some point the drugs had returned, and one day while driving home at lunch to get a fix he hit a special needs kid who had been riding his bike along a busy thoroughfare. The report is that my friend didn’t even stop the car, and the cops followed him to his house an arrested him on the spot.

They say he was going fast enough when he hit the kid, he practically exploded. They had to cremate him because there simply was not enough to bury. So as my friends father was retelling this tale, my wife is sitting there in shock because she knows the other side of a lot of the tales he is telling. She has this cold realization that had I not made a change and distanced myself… that it could have very well been me. I hung in the same circles, but there was just a point where their behavior was getting a bit too risky for my tastes. My friend deserves his fate, he did not get there over night, but over a course of multiple years of bad decisions. However I feel horrible for his parents, because as parents go… they were awesome. They were always so good to me, and treated me like another member of their family.

Once the assembly was over, my wife rushed up to the stage and introduced herself to his father, and apparently he just gave her a huge hug. Then asked how I was doing and how things were in our lives. He really was like another parent, and I feel like I need to get a hold of him. He lost his son, in ways that he will never get him back, but maybe I can reach out and be a little closer to him and his wife. They were always so good to me, that I want to be there for them however I can be. So what makes the whole situation that much more odd, is that I was one of those kids who didn’t pay attention to this sort of thing. I ignored more than my fair share of drug assembly, and ditched them whenever I could. However I am living proof that changing the path you are going down can make all the difference in the world. I could have easily been my friend, and that alone is pretty sobering.

Bangkorai is Huge

Last night I spent most of the night streaming some Elder Scrolls Online gameplay. Bangkorai is freakin huge. Each time I feel like I might be nearing the end of the zone, I keep finding a pocket of stuff that I have missed. At this point I am extremely overleveled for the content at level 45, and the highest mob I have found at all has been 43. This is a thing that keeps happening to me, I seem to move extremely slowly through content. My whole general approach to Elder Scrolls Online is to kill every single thing in my way. This means I probably kill far more badguys than the average gamer. I have watched my friends play through content, and they go out of their way to skip combat. This game gives you really good ways to skip combat in the form of “disguises”, however I NEVER use them. The only time you will actually see me wearing one is when the quest literally cannot be completed without one.

A good chunk of the night was spent working on a series of quests in an occupied town. I could have skipped almost all of the combat entirely by wearing the disguise. However I ignored the fact that it was in my inventory and proceeded to lay waste to everything with a red diamond on it. Which is a big funny considering my character is racially imperial… but apparently I like killing my own kin? I am still enjoying the hell out of the game, and while I am super interest in ArcheAge I keep telling myself… to wait until I reach a point in Elder Scrolls Online where I am not quite so in love with it. The game keeps giving me sufficient reason to log in every night and play, so until it stops doing that I will keep playing it. ArcheAge will always be there when things start to get dull and I want to do some full on sandbox… however as time consuming as it seems based on the few streams I have watched… maybe I am better off with Themebox or Sandpark.

Contest Entry

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVToward the end of the night Rae pulled me over into Landmark. She has been working on the big contest that they have going on and wanted some feedback on her building. So far I think it looks pretty great, but this has been where she has spent all of her effort of late. Personally I still have so much to do on my temple complex that I am almost mired in a building funk because of it. Towards the end of the video I end up traipsing back into my own claim. I am not really sure where I am as far as the game is concerned. I like the game so much, but right now there is not something about it making me to want to log in regularly. I think maybe once there is combat or something other than “Lego mode” I might feel more strongly about the game. Quite truthfully lately I have enjoyed Trove more… and it is far more primitive. The reason behind that seems to be that there is more to “do” in trove. Definitely going to be active in the Landmark community, but right now past the initial rush of wanting to build something… there just isn’t much “stickyness” to the community.

#PathNotTaken #ANook #Landmark #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO