Tales of the Aggronaut

Steamboat Willy

March 19, 2014 by Belghast

Good Thoughts

I guess I was wrong to post yesterday that I thought things were getting much better with my Grandmother. While eating dinner last night I got a rather frantic call from my mother. Turns out that things are not going as well as we had thought. Her kidneys are functional, but not working nearly as efficiently as they should. Now it might be that they are just overwhelming from not working for so long that the toxins built up in the body are too much for them to deal with. It could be a lot of things, but basically she is not moving fluids like she should be.

Now at this point they are trying a few things, the first of which is to give her Lasix. When my mom told me that I listened but was thinking in the back of my head “what the hell does eye surgery have to do with kidneys”. Later I googled and found out that both “Lasik” and “Lasix” are two completely separate things and one of which is in fact for fluid retention. Essentially at this point one of several things is going to happen. Either the Lasix does it magic and she starts moving fluids again normally, helping her kidneys chew through the toxins. Next possibility is that it increases her blood pressure enough for her to take normal dialysis to help the kidneys catch up. Final option is that if her blood pressure remains low or drops, they will have to transfer her to Tulsa so they can do a “slow dialysis” which I don’t fully understand, but apparently it is a thing.

I am not a very religious man, but my grandmother very much is. She is as staunch of a catholic as I know, and even if I don’t believe something… I have to respect anyone that puts that much faith in anything. As a result I thank you all for all the prayers and good vibes you are sending her way. While I may not be completely sold on prayer, I do feel like the power of positive thinking is definitely a thing. So I am hoping that the prayers and thoughts help. Grandma is one of the biggest influences on the person I am today, and I am just not ready to lose her yet. She is the last Grandparent my wife and I have… and she really has whole heartedly adopted my wife as one of her “grandchildren”.

Steamboat Willy

As a result of the news that I got while eating dinner, I really didn’t feel like being around people much last night. At the very least I did not feel like streaming, because I really was not up to trying to hold a one sided conversation with myself. I continued pushing forward with my mage and managed to ding I believe 42 before I called it a night. This lead me from Feralas to Thousand Needles. It has been quite a long time since I had completed any of the new “raceway” quests… with the raceway under the newly formed lake. I have to say I found them enjoyable, and I am thankful they used the same underwater tech here that they did in Hyjal. The highlight of the quests for me is the fact that you get a really awesome boat to ride around in while you are in Thousand Needles.

The frustration of leveling with full heirlooms is that you generally only get to do a single quest hub before moving on to the next zone. Granted the fact that I have been queuing for dungeons has really escalated this factor. I want to get to 60 so I can use my boost, but at the same time I don’t. That said I know if I do not end up boosting this character, it will languish a slow death in outlands and northrend and never quite make it to the level cap. I am enjoying my Mage quite a bit, but not enough to get me to push through the segments of content that I am bored with. The problem is that one you get higher in level the dungeons become a slog, and the difficulty ramps up meaning there is a lot more failure. Right now pugging is relaxing because we could literally do anything and make it through the dungeon, when we actually need to care about damage and a bit of strategy… the enjoyment drains.

Adventures in DRM

Much like the 15 games that influenced me project, there is another one that I have been obsessing over. My friend Beau Hindman mentioned this the other day, that he was trying to distill his musical tastes down to a single 10 song play list. For me this mission has morphed quite a bit. Back during the 80s and 90s I was a “mix tape” maker. I rarely if ever listened to music as intended, or if I did… it was because the arrangement of songs on an album was absolute perfection. As we moved into the MP3 era I have continued this trait, making sublime little mixes of music for specific moods. So the project at hand has been to create a mix tape that talks about my tastes in music. Since it is so damned easy to use youtube for this purpose I simply strung together a sequence of music videos and while streaming Monday night, I had that playing in the background.

I didn’t really think much about it, and when I checked my stream over on the second machine… I didn’t hear the music coming through. So I mentally shrugged and figured it was something to do with codecs and whatnot. Turns out that the music was in fact recorded, and as soon as I did the twitch export to youtube, the DRM klaxons twanged. Their song matching system is ruthlessly efficient, and they properly identified every single track that was playing looped in the background. So I thought to myself “great, this means they will likely strip the audio from my videos” or even worse un-list them completely. Apparently no, that is not the case at all. Basically the key stipulation is, that I cannot monetize the videos now that I have acknowledged I have used someone else’s music.

I guess at the end of the day I am fine with this. I have trouble with the concept of monetization in general. Like I am not against someone else profiting from their hard work. I have however always been against putting advertisements on my blog, and I tend to feel the same about my budding youtube feed. If I thought I had a shot in hell of actually making enough income to offset my position as a senior developer… I might feel differently. What I do with my gaming is a hobby, and I just don’t think what I do is good enough that it is actually worth making money on. Anyways long story short… I am fine with this stalemate I seem to have created over copyrighted works. I get to listen to whatever the hell I want to, and apparently continue making videos. The only negative side effect is that apparently these videos are now banned in Germany.

Radio Silence

I will likely be pretty quiet on most of social media this week. Today through Friday I will be attending Sharepoint development training. So while I will check into the world periodically I won’t be very reachable. You guys hold down the fort while I am gone. Additionally I figure my evenings will be spent at the hospital again. I had stayed away for a few days because I felt like I was coming down with something. However I think that something is just “allergies” and the negative side effect of nature deciding to wake the hell up again. So yeah… don’t do anything I wouldn’t do?

The Gospel of Faff

March 18, 2014 by Belghast

The importance of pee

I just thought the sub heading would be humorous, but really it heralds some good news. Yesterday my Grandmothers kidneys started working again. Apparently when the body is dehydrated they completely shut off. The body is all “nope!” no one can have any moisture at all. This apparently was the last crucial step before she was mostly out of the woods. She is still in pretty bad shape, but they have been waking her up periodically to make sure she is responsive. They are keeping her mostly sedated however so she will sleep and rest. All of the hospital staff have been impressed with just how much of a fighter she is.

So I want to thank all of you for your thoughts during the last few days. This is the woman who at least gets half of the credit for raising me to be the person I am today. I didn’t go to daycare, I went to Grandmas house, because she was local and available… and more importantly willing. We’ve always known she is strong, but this whole episode just proved that to any shadow of a doubt. So while we are not in the “all clear” yet, we are probably up to a 70% chance of her making it out of this little episode unscathed. I am sure she will need some therapy after laying in bed for several days immobile.

The Gospel of Faff

This word has been in my vocabulary since I believe high school but I don’t really know how exactly I picked it up. So when I encountered the Godmother of Faff, I latched onto it with both arms to represent a certain game play style. However the more I use it, the more it seems to draw confusion among my friends. Sometimes it gets misread with a certain “self flagellating” connotation, or if you are Scary you apparently read it as some kind of shorthand for flatulence. So I thought I would spend a bit of time this morning clearing the air about all things faff. Since this is essentially British slang, I felt we had to go to the official source… the Oxford dictionary.

So there is the definition, copied and pasted via greenshot from the oxford dictionary website. The thing is… this leads one to believe that it is a bad thing. I tend to take a much more zen approach. “Faffing about” is just another in a long line of words used to describe enjoyable but often purposeless activity. I’ve used many versions of this over the years. I’ve “piddled” and I’ve “dinked around” and occasionally “goofed off”. I had a bit of an odd childhood, in that my mother to some extent lived vicariously through me. She wanted me to do all the things she always wanted to do… but never could afford. So as a small child I was drug through a series of activities like piano practice that I had no real interest in, but felt no less obligated to do.

As a result I felt like I never got to just be a kid, without purpose or direction. When I was allowed that time I savored it. Now as an adult, I am really cautious about anything that places undue burden on my “free” time. While I feel like Godmother and I probably use the term “Faff” in different ways, our viewpoints are very complimentary. For me “Faff” represents a play style of allowing myself to get lost in the minutiae of little things that happen along the way. It is a freedom of not having to have a goal or a focal point for the evening. That I have permission to log into a game and “mess around” for awhile without necessarily having a tangible reward at the end.

So as I have begun to stream my game play when possible, I have brought this same idea there as well. I am not doing something important or grand, but instead just doing what I always do. I log into mumble, into a special channel called “Bel is Streaming” and then proceed about my normal business and what happens… happens. Sometimes I do something really interesting, other times I just piddle around leveling. Last night for example I recorded one of my normal Onyxia and Tempest Keep clear nights, where I run through characters through Onyxia and the two that can solo Tempest Keep all in search of mounts. Sure there is purpose there, but it is not the kind of big overarching and soul crushing purpose that you feel forced to do it. Before last night it had probably been three weeks since my last mount farm night… and I am perfectly okay with that.

As is the way with Faff

I had every intent last night to play some more Heroes of the Storm, however that simply did not happen. Sometimes you get caught up in doing the things you are doing and next thing you know… it is bedtime. Part of the “Gospel of Faff” is accepting that this is going to happen and being somewhat okay with it. Some people thrive on goals, and lord knows I have a bunch of little ones. But for me it is the journey that is so much more important than the destination. I think in part that is why I have enjoyed The Elder Scrolls online so much. The game presents before me a whole bunch of rabbit trails that I can get hopelessly lost following. It is arranged in a way that keeps me from being able to “quest efficiently”. WoW has made me really good at gathering a bunch of quests, and doing them all before returning to the hub to get more.

The freedom to wander around and get lost in the process of leveling is a really awesome thing. While World of Warcraft is a really on-rails experience most of the time, I am trying to embrace ways to play it where the objectives don’t matter nearly as much as the journey. This is far more about my mental state while playing, than what I am actually doing. However I am trying really hard to always endulge the rabbit trails. If my addon alerts me to a rare mob in the vicinity… even if I am on my way to some important objective I try and pull myself from the path to try and track the foe down. As a result I end up seeing things I may have never seen before in the process. I had spent most of my time playing WoW trying to avoid the quagmire that is Kalimdor, and now I feel like I am trying to embrace it.

Heroes of the Storm

March 17, 2014 by Belghast

Odd Weekend

With all the excitement of the weekend, yesterday I needed to just recharge a bit and do a bunch of stuff around the house… namely lots of laundry. My wife got up early yesterday morning, as she had planned a trip to Dallas for the day with friends, so this left me completely up to my own devices all day long. I ended up sleeping in until around 9:30 at which point I did my FTL Steampowered Sunday play, and the subsequent blog post. Then it was lots and lots of laundry for several hours. I feel like I might be coming down with something, so I really wasn’t much more useful than that.

On the Grandmother front, she is doing as well as could be expected. She woke up yesterday for a bit before they sedated her again. Her kidney functions have not returned, but she was severely dehydrated. They have a nephrologist coming into the hospital today that is going to look at her and see what they can do to stimulate activity. Once the kidneys start working again they will be much closer to “in the clear”. Mostly they think she just needs to rest and let the body do its natural recovery. She is a really tough woman, so I have faith that she is going to pull through this. Her vitals all look okayish and seem to be improving by the day. so here is hoping time is really all she needs.

As far as the sick cat, she seems to be doing much better. She was extremely needy of attention yesterday, and her appetite seems to have returned. For the majority of the week she had not eaten much of anything, so yesterday whenever she acted hungry I was opening a cat of food for her. I think she ended up eating five different times yesterday. She had lost quite a bit of weight over the course of this ordeal so while I will taper back her feeding eventually… for now I am just happy she is eating. She demanded attention, which is good… because while she was sick she was pretty scarce. Preferring to just lay down on the couch by herself instead of wherever we happened to be in the house.

Elder Scrolls Final Beta Weekend

Since this past weekend is the final beta weekend before launch in a few weeks, and since we had been given leave to stream whatever we wanted… I did as much playing and streaming as I could fit in. All told I think I streamed a little bit over four hours, split up between four different videos. Most of the time was spent faffing about on my Orsimer Dragon Knight in the Daggerfall covenant area. I closed the weekend sitting a little bit away from thirteen. However because of the absolutely illogical pattern I followed I know I missed a good number of the quests from the first area of Glenumbra. I would love to say that the beta weekend was completely smooth, but it seemed as though a lot of the systems were bugged out. Dark Anchors for example seemed to spawn, and then just stay active even after the forces had been defeated and a player got credit for destroying them.

One of the systems that was completely new to me, were the Dark Fissures. These are essentially mini versions of the Dark Anchors and can just spawn almost anywhere around the map. Think of these as “soloable” Rifts. I say soloable in quotes because really unless you are prepared to take on boss level monsters they will be pretty freakin hard. I defeated two of these and did so just barely. If you go into them make sure you have your health potions hotkeyed and ready to go. The awesome thing about the Dark Fissures is that they seem to drop really awesome stuff. The final one I closed out yesterday evening dropped a level 12 blue fire staff, which I am sure would have been awesome… had I used staves. If the beta weekend were going longer I would have tried to find that a good home.

Heroes of the Storm

I know I mentioned this the other day, but I am still pretty pumped that I am in the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha. One of the really cool things about it is that it is completely sans-NDA. This means that I can stream the hell out of the game, and I intend to. I recorded a few videos over the weekend, the first of which was just me playing around in practice mode working on the weekly quests for getting victories with heroes from each of the franchises. The second video however I dipped my toes into cooperative mode fighting bots with other players. I have to say I found the jump in AI to be quite extremely between practice mode and cooperative. I earned enough gold through the various quests to purchase two of the cheaper heroes Muridan and Raynor. At some point I hope to pick up Falstad, because while he is in the free to play rotation currently… I am sure this will change similar to how it does in League of Legends.

Right now I am enjoying the game far more than I ever did League. Basically it has all of the aspects of league that I really enjoyed… namely fighting people with awesome champions, and none of the aspects that I didn’t like. League build path was always an enigma to me, and I tended to play champions that I could use the same build on over and over. League gameplay is far more nuanced, but Blizzard has done for League what they did for the MMO genre. Streamlined, simplified, polished and created something that the masses can latch onto. Instead of a huge list of items for you to purchase, you build your character by making a few simple choices. In the beginning at least all of these are either or choices like “survival” or “damage”. Over the course of the map this ends up building a semi-custom champion.

However once you reach level 8, they open up these choices significantly. While playing Muridan yesterday there was one of these levels where I had five different choices for how I wanted to proceed. Each choice causes you to give up other options with no real way of getting those back. For me… a player that found the item buying system of League completely unfathomable this works so much better. For a player who wants a deeply nuanced and unique approach to each match… they are probably still going to favor League. The champions as a whole feel more well rounded than League champions, in that they have a wider “kit” of abilities and the option to choose between two different “R” attacks really seems to help this.

The place where the game really shines is in their map creation. At their core, each of the maps is essentially “Summoner’s Rift”. That said each of the maps has a unique sub game to them, while League tries to do this with the various map types… it simply does not work as well as it does here. For example in the map shown above Blackheart’s Bay… you have a really awesome coastal city/pirate theme going on. When one team collects enough doubloons they can turn them in to call in a bombardment from the pirates on the enemy team. In one map the mini game is all about controlling two shrines which allow you to waken the Dragon Knight. When you do so the player transforms into this unstoppable juggernaut perfect for diving straight into towers and destroying the enemy resources. I have only played the game a little bit, but I have to say I am deeply hooked.

Gamer Hangout

Another odd happening this weekend is that I ended up participating in Beau Hindman’s Gamer Hangout show. I’ve been friends with the members for some time, and there was a week where they had asked me to join in the show… but I until recently I simply did not have a camera. Now you will be able to see the WHY I didn’t have a camera. I have always been pretty closed with separating the real me from the gamer me… so it took quite a bit of courage to appear on camera like this. I am always far more comfortable behind the scenes than being out front and animated. What was cool about the show is that in essence they based this week on one of my blog posts.

It just happened to be where I was available to join in and chat about it. While most of us only actually got through two different games on our list, we somehow managed to talk over an hour about them. They have apparently extended an open invitation for me to participate more in the future, so I guess that means I did not completely make an ass of myself. My office is a pit, and if I do this more often I think I would want to rearrange things some… however that involves me cleaning and moving and not sure how likely that is to happen. It was really enjoyable, and the other folks were great. Was very much an odd end to an odd weekend. I just wish that youtube would not have picked a thumbnail of me talking for the video.

FTL: Faster Than Light

March 16, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #9

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTV

This week I am doing something a little differently with my Steampowered Sunday post. Since streaming is new and shiny… and as a result I am doing a ton of it… I decided to livestream my playtime in FTL. This was after all the game you chose for me to play this week. Previously I had done a few things wrong with my voting. Firstly I made the link super hard to see at the bottom of my post. Secondly I gave you guys like ten choices to choose from, which ended up with a bunch of widely dispersed results. This go around I opted to have you all choose from the three that did not win last week, but had the highest number of votes. You all apparently wanted me to play FTL, because it managed to net 53% of the vote.

Steep Learning Curve

Like most of the games I play for Steampowered Sunday, I went into FTL with absolutely no information. This is one of those titles that was insanely popular in the internet zeitgeist a few months back. I picked it up on a steam sale but never actually got around to playing it. As a result it sat there sadly in my steam library until you guys resurrected it. This is one of those games that is really hard to go into cold. I liken it to trying to play Minecraft for the first time without any guides. So I had no clue how to do anything in the game, and ended up dying horribly to the first encounter I happened across. I thought my weapons would fire themselves I guess. It was not honestly until my third ship that I managed to glean that you could toggle on and off your weapons with the number keys, and fire them that way as well.

Similarly it took me a bit to understand that moving your crew around the ship would help to put out fires, fight boarding parties and repair damaged systems. Essentially playing FTL you die a lot, and hopefully you learned something from the death that you can carry forward into the next ship. That said sometimes you just get fucked by random chance. In the above screenshot I happened to wander into a star system with active solar flares. Just like in Star Trek episodes… solar flares are murder on your shields. Had I happened across the system with no hostiles I could have potentially pooled my resources in the shield room and kept myself repaired long enough to jump out. That said I had a pretty nasty fight with a mantis drone and by the time that was finished my system was a mess. I fought the death of my ship in vain as the solar flares slowly destroyed me.

Belghast Gameplay Not Suggested

I really do one thing in video games… I run in guns-a-blazing and hope for the best. In an FPS I am the king of the spray and pray arsenal. In an MMO I am the guy that habitually charges everything. It is the thing I do. This is very much not the way you want to play FTL, unless you like resetting constantly. If you wander into a system and encounter an “advanced tactical drone” chances are you should really not screw with that. I had that happen, and it started neutral to me… but moments after attacking it, it had disabled all of my ships systems and I was left to sit and watch as all things blew up around me. I feel like that is the real lesson of FTL… stuff happens, often times bad… so hope you can learn from it and not be dumb in the next iteration. The game is pretty brutal about punishing you for your bad decisions, and that is okay… because it tends to be brutal about everything.

I feel like there are so many things I am still missing about success. While playing one of my friends told me over twitch chat that I could vent the compartment to space to put out fires. Which is awesome… except I couldn’t seem to do that when I had attackers in a compartment. The learning curve is exceedingly steep and unforgiving. Much like that first time I played Minecraft, I feel like I need to spend an entire afternoon wandering around a wiki somewhere to figure out what exactly I was doing wrong. I feel like there is a “oh! That is what Coal looks like” moment waiting to happen.

Deathcab for Cutie and Starships

One of the things I enjoyed the most about the game is the soundtrack. It is this really pleasant postal service/deathcab type soundtrack that makes you not care so much that the world is burning down around you. This is one of those moments when I happened to get trapped behind enemy lines and had to fight a far more advanced ship than I had. Notice how they pretty much disabled everything I had and are essentially unharmed. I feel like this is where tactics come in, which is never a strong suit of mine. I tend to be a “shoot first, ask questions never” type player… and this is going to be something I have to get over if I ever want to succeed at FTL for more than a few minutes. Tactics matter a lot, and one of the things I learned early on is… if they have drones, for the love of god kill the drones.

Right now I am really bad at deciding what thing to attack first. I tend to have the best luck destroying ships by killing their engines. That said I feel like i would have a lot more success disabling their weapons, then shields, then engines. When they are charging the engines to escape it seems like a single shot to the engine can slow them down enough to kill them before they jump. So I know this is a good theory, but getting me to do that when everything is burning on my ship seems to be the problem. To quote Wash… “Oh god, Oh God, We’re Gonna Die”. I have trouble keeping focused when my cute little people are dying horribly fighting fires. In the immortal words of my friend Vexa… “Fire is pretty much the worst.”

More Play Warranted

I feel like I am fundamentally bad at this game. That said I feel like this is an okay thing. Much like MInecraft, one of the simple joys is rolling the dice and seeing what combination of events you happen to get this time. I felt completely fine resetting and starting over from scratch. In many ways this reminds me of an early Shareware title called EGA Trek that I used to play the hell out of. The gameplay basically was the same, it involved warping around the galaxy looking for trouble. I played this game for hours upon hours… rolling the dice and seeing what trouble I could get myself into. Combat was very similar, and I would not be shocked at all if the FTL folks had played this game at one point or another. Granted FTL is all of this in much higher detail, but the same pure fun is there. Sometimes it is just fun to die over and over horribly. May the “SS Were Gonna Die” continue to fly onwards.

Mystery Game Time

I’ve decided to shift things up a bit, and start giving away random games instead of a specific title per week. This weeks winner will be contacted today and given a copy of Brutal Legend. However this coming week I will be grabbing something from the stack of mostly indie games that I have laying around. If you win, and it is a title you already have… share the love and give it to a friend that doesn’t already have the game. Another thing I am doing is leaving the two losing titles on the list, and replacing FTL with a brand new title… this week Evoland enters the ring. This way I actually have a shot of playing through the games that were the losers of previous weeks. As always to take the survey click the big bright button below.