Tales of the Aggronaut

Precious Underwear

January 25, 2014 by Belghast

Spicy Chicken and Tots

During the school year I am pretty much the cook, the maid, the laundry service, and of course the pet care. My wife is extremely hardcore about her job, and as an educator spends a good 70-80 hours a week doing work for the classroom. I have far more disposable time so as a result I pick up 99% of the household chores. I am not saying I am Martha Stewart and keep a perfect household, but the shit that has to get done gets done. Any time I don’t have to worry about one of those chores I am ecstatic. Last night my loving wife went to meet some friends at a local chain called Ron’s. While there she picked me up a takeout order of one of my favorite meals ever… spicy chicken and cheese tots.

I bragged on her on both G+ and Twitter last night, but it means a lot to me… so I am leading off tonight’s blog post as well. While it drove me into a food coma and I was pretty much useless for the tail end of the raid last night… it was absolutely amazing. Additionally it gave me a much appreciated break from trying to figure out what in the hell we were going to have that night for dinner. More than anything I think that is what is worth raving about. The figuring out things and being a responsible adult all the time… wears you down. As she commented her “credit card cooks well”.

The Wi-Fi MIracle Redux

Speaking of last nights raid… leading off with a really cool screenshot we took all decked out in our Sky Golem mounts. I had no clue that damned near all of the raid had one. Granted this section really has nothing to do with the raid, but it is entirely too cool of a screenshot not to use it. Today was a weird day, as I said over twitter I did not go through my normal morning routine and as a result you are getting a post a lot closer to 8 pm than early morning like normal. Essentially last week I mentioned that we had promised to come up this weekend and attempt to fixorate my mother-in-laws Wi-Fi connection and install the printer we got her for Christmas. So with these things looming on the horizon the goal was to get up there and get them done as early in the day as possible.

Over the week I ordered a Cisco RE1000 Wireless repeater thinking it would do the trick to help piggy back the signal across the large gap between the two houses. In theory yes it does in fact work, and I was able to get the wireless printer configured as a result. In practice however it is so insanely slow I am not sure anyone will be able to tolerate it. On the positive side we have gotten her in the practice of surfing on the laptop out in the addon with a straighter shot to the original wifi access point. Out there the speed doesn’t seem half bad, in the rest of the house it is slower than dial-up. I went to download a printer driver and it was going to take over three hours for a 100 mb file.

Precious Underwear

My hope is that once we get electric run to the RV pad we have placed between the two houses, I can install an additional repeater in our RV, which will hopefully complete the piggyback chain, or at least speed it up. For the meantime however she can check her ever so important facebook, and she seemed mostly happy. We ate lunch and then wandered along our way to run more errands. My wife this year is teaching a forensics class along with a science teacher. Like always we end up footing the bill for most of the materials for the various labs that she leads. One of the things that she will be doing a lot of in the forensics class is finger printing, which requires a really fine brush.

During the 80s there was this magical device called the Static Duster. For the most part microfiber has replaced it, but somewhere along the line my wife found a very small one, about the size of a makeup brush. Now we both know we have seen a place that sold them recently in a dollar section. So today we spent most of the day running to every dollar store we could think of. We sadly came up completely empty, but when we went to Family Dollar we saw a truly bizarre sight that made the trip worth while. Down the men’s underwear isle, every single package of briefs and socks had antitheft devices attached to them. Do people really steal that many pairs of underwear to warrant this? If you notice, it is not just on the package but also there is one attached to each pair in the pack. They apparently take their underwear security seriously.

Da na na na na na na na na na na na na…

So here we are in the same place as we were this morning… with only one of these magical static brushes, and ten lab groups that need them. The last place we can really think to look is the Wal-mart dollar section, but quite frankly after all the running around today neither one of us really had the stomach for a trip there. There is no such thing as a quick trip to Wal-mart, and just in setting foot there you have to deal with so many frustrating people. I may be a good guy and run out there tomorrow while she is working on lesson plans. Hopefully she won’t hold her breath, because that is a serious act of commitment… however she did bring me spicy chicken.

If you recall back to the junking episodes over Christmas break, one of the things I had been looking for were some awesome coffee mugs… more importantly awesomely geeky ones. The last place we went tonight before picking up some food and heading home was Ross. A few weeks ago my wife had found a pair of pants there… and for whatever reason she did not pick them up. So of course when we went tonight they were nowhere to be found. I have to get her in the habit of buying the thing she wants when she sees it instead of waiting around.

However while I roamed aimlessly around the store looking for something to entertain me, I noticed these two coffee mugs. The first is a really awesome classic batman mug, with the symbol on the opposite side, and the other is a really huge mug with a skull on it. Pretty much to me putting a skull on anything makes it awesome. My wife however does not understand this, and keeps balking every time she finds a scarf or other garment of women’s clothing with a skull on it. Quite simply put…. skulls make everything better and this mug is no exception. Now I have six mugs that I like, and will be proud to use. So despite a relatively frustrating day, that involved absolutely nothing I wanted to do in the first place… it ended on a high note that involved geeky mugs and a really amazing smoked chicken salad.

Veritech Pilots Unite!

January 24, 2014 by Belghast

Profundity is Gone

For those that followed me during the recent couple day bump of new readers… I am rarely as cogent or pointed as those topics come off as. Most of the time the Tales the Aggronaut spins are yarns of faffing about and doing scattered things in the games I play. That is not to say that I won’t again be overcome with feels and post something dreadfully important, but most of the time I just ramble on about whatever is in my mind. This is the side effect of my whole “blog every morning” crusade I embarked upon nearly a year ago. So if you have a limited appetite for game ramblings, I apologize ahead of time.

My office right now is like a magma chamber, and I am not really sure how long I can keep up this mornings post before I wither and melt away. The heating and air system in our house is pretty horrific, and for some reason there are two heat vents in my very small office. As much as I have tried to block them off completely… the heat continues to radiate through the wall. So the rushed feeling I am having is likely going to cause this to be one of my extra “special” mornings. Right now all I can say is thank god it is the weekend… and even though I have to pull a wi-fi miracle out of my hat tomorrow… I am ready to be done with work for the week.

Veritech Pilots Unite!

One of the side projects that has been underway for roughly a month is the coordinating of my crafting cooldowns each day in order to eventually produce the amazing Sky Golem mount. I realize I am way behind the times in getting it crafted, but hell it is news to me. Last night I managed to make the last two components and then went on an absolutely giddy flight around the Vale. I loves it so much in all of its mechanical glory. I feel like a Veritech pilot from Macross/Robotech. For the next few weeks every single character of mine will be zipping around on this goblin machination. Then I am sure like always I will get bored and pick a new mount for a few weeks.

I have already set my sights on the next big crafting project. I am a horrible engineer… or at least I have traditionally been a very poor one. I never raised the bankroll to get my chopper back in Wrath, and during the expansions after I simply lost sight on it as a goal. Now my intent is to farm up everything I can farm and then raise the required monetary commitment to craft one of these puppies. Not that I think I will ever actually use it… I have so many cool ground mounts like the Fiery Warhorse’s Reins or Rein’s of the Swift Spectral Tiger that I am always anxious to break out when I am in a flight limited area. I feel like getting a chopper is just one of those things I want to do moreso than really have a reason to do.

Blackwing Descent

Finally on the silly activities front, several of us were hanging out on mumble last night. The question was posed… how many people would it take to clear the old raids, namely Blackwing Descent. I surmised that we could probably limp by on three, 1 tank, 1 healer, 1 dps. Next thing I know we are on our way to blackrock mountain and giving it a try. Thing is… I remember nothing about this raid at all really. Granted while we were doing it several things came back, but I had literally not see any content past the first two bosses. I left WoW shortly after the launch of Cataclysm and at that point we had only managed to down Magmaw and Omnomitron (yes I know that isn’t the name). So for the most part it was a completely new place for me.

We of course entered for the purest of faffing reasons… the druid in our party wanted these shoulders for transmog. I myself would not have minded getting an Ashkandi 2.0 to drop, simply because the fidelity of the weapon is so much higher than the one I keep in my bank for transmoggy goodness. All in all the run went pretty smoothly. We struggled a few times, including several attempts at Chimaeron just trying to figure out how to work the fight mechanics. For whatever reason my purgatory talent seemed to be glitching out the key fight mechanic, so I popped outside real quick and summoned my vendor mount and changed that talent.

The trippy fight honestly was Nefarian because I was the only one to survive the initial flood everything in lava phase. So for the most part I solo’d a good chunk of that fight, namely the swimming around the room in lava killing the guys on the platforms phase. Then the monk healer and I duo’d the final kite him around the room phase. Since it was a 10 man fight, we only had one battle rez, and as such it seemed like a better idea to rez the healer than the druid dps. It was a fun night and I could see myself doing it again. I am really hoping that we can mostly trio the rest of the content. Funny enough we managed to get an achievement during the process without really intending to. I really want to go off and do firelands so I can hopefully get my druid friend his fire kitty.

People Are Not Pixels

January 23, 2014 by Belghast

In Black and White

Yesterday was a really weird day for me, past that I really don’t have the proper words to describe it. Firstly I made a post, and it seemed to resonate with a large group of folks. I will get back to that in a bit however, other than that it was one of the more stressful days I have had in awhile. The concurrence of the two things happening at the same time was a bit of a godsend, as the internet literally got me through the day. I am this odd dichotomy of social and anti-social. When I am in my zone with people or topics that I feel comfortable with… I can become a social butterfly. When in the guild mumble or conversing in game or on twitter… I become an amped up version of myself.

However in the real world I am considerably more subdued, and wary of the spotlight. Over the last few years I have been pushed more and more into a role of leadership within my job. For a long while my goal was to avoid doing anything that got me into the paper. Growing up I was in my small town local paper damned near every week… and it was a pretty claustrophobic experience. One of the things I have always loved about living in the “big city” is that I could function more or less anonymously, and only show up on the radars of the folks I cared about. However yesterday I had a scheduled meeting to be on a panel for a follow up interview to an earlier article.

The first time I was part of one of these panels, I thought I had dodged the bullet. The article came out and there were no quotes attached to my name. However over the course of that weekend another story came out outlining some of our development efforts. Sure enough, almost every line had my name attached to it. It is not like there is anything I want to avoid saying, or any problem I have with anything I said… but the whole experience stresses me out greatly. I am hoping that I have actually managed to dodge it this time, because the reporter really did not seem all that interested in what I had to say. However I had to psyche myself up so much for the whole experience that I just felt like I was crashing down afterwards.

Skewed Perspective

Most of the time I feel like I am blogging in the morning in a complete vacuum. The fact that I choose to blog when I do doesn’t really help this much. Generally it is dark outside, the house is completely quiet other than the hum of the various computers in my office and the occasional visit from cats. To misquote Rowan, it sometimes feels like I am shouting into the void and never really hearing a response. When you spend a lot of time operating in that mode, your perspective gets more than a bit skewed as was apparently the case yesterday. I was bummed, and all the sudden it was like the entire damned internet gave me a flying tackle hug. I am so amazingly humbled by the show of support from people I didn’t even realize were out there listening. Much like Ardua is on a mission to hug everyone… I just want people to feel as loved as I did yesterday.

While what I said seemed to strike a chord with a lot of people, and the spontaneous explosion of a post I expected to just wither quietly away came on exactly the day I needed a boost. Some folks seemed to really “grok” what I was saying, and others simply thought I was asking for comments. To be truthful… comments are awesome, and I won’t lie that seeing that many passing through my blog was an amazing thing to me. However I would like to think this is not about ego as at least one person suggested. What yesterdays post was about more than anything is connecting with people, on a real and permanent level. People are simply not pixels to me, and that is really the point I tried to make more than anything else. If we talk and interact, then I care about you and your own personal destiny, not just in ways where it is convenient for me to care.

People Are Not Pixels

Folks are amped about Wildstar, or Eve Online or Neverwinter… none of which are things I care about at all, or have any real interest in. However I am always excited to interact with folks on the level of things that they care about. When a blog turns from gaming to more serious topics, I am interested as well, because it unravels the puzzle of each person and what makes them tick inside. As Syl mentioned yesterday, the community is what you make of it. So I am going to endeavor to comment more often on more blogs. Quite honestly… I get self conscious at times. “Tales of the Aggronaut” is my space in the world, and my buffer of comfort that allows me to get away with saying whatever happens to be on my mind at the time I say it. When I leave my blog and visit others… I feel somehow like I am intruding on someone else’s space.

There are many times I intend to comment, but backspace away the statement because I feel that it doesn’t really add much of worth to the discussion. Jaedia mention that yesterday, the whole concept of having to take a deep breath and push the publish button. That is me so many times, I don’t often value my own opinion… so why should others? Twitter and G+ are like this great neutral ground, where it feels like it is okay to bother people. Since Twitter comments are so short, it feels like having to distill your comment to 140 characters somehow makes it more innocuous, less imposing. Basically I am a bundle of self doubt and neurosis and I am going to try really hard to get past that.

I am sure I will have another downer of a day, but you all overwhelmed me with your giant group hug. I care about each and every one of you, even if you silently supported my topic and didn’t muster the courage to say anything yourself. That is me most days, so I fully understand. There will be days I still feel like I am shouting into the void, but I need to keep adjusting my perspective. Yesterday proved to me just how blessed I really am. Some days I simply need to be reminded that I have a really awesome life, filled with so many amazing people that are there to support me when I falter. So on that note… before I gush any further… I just want to give you all a heartfelt thanks.

Blogs Are Not Community

January 22, 2014 by Belghast

Social Gaming

I am breaking my own rules a little bit with this mornings post. Generally speaking I sit down at the keyboard and write something fresh each morning, in the 30-45 minutes I have before I need to leave for work. There have been times in the past when I have broken this rule due to me needing to leave for work early the next day. Today however I feel that this topic needs a bit more care and feeding than my half awake brain can really muster. As such I am getting started on this topic the night before my intended date of posting. I am sure that sounds just as contorted as it did to me as I wrote it… but bear with me.

Today I spent a few minutes sifting through my Twitter list, and pruning folks who either are not active any longer, or that have never really engaged with me in the past. I may have accidentally pruned someone that does not fall into that category in the process, and if so I will go ahead and apologize now. If this happened and we talk regularly I will definitely want to correct that mistake. Essentially I view the people I converse with in games and online as more than “just pixels”. I think this is the side effect of growing up an only child, that I have a deep yearning for being people… despite also having an introverted streak in real life. So as I approach people, I see them as not someone from whom I can benefit… but instead a potential life long friend waiting to be discovered.

Blogs Are Not Community

This viewpoint towards social media and other gamers has caused me more than a bit of heartburn during my almost five years of blogging. As I pruned my twitter list today, I noticed that a number of people that I thought I had made a connection with along the way no longer followed me. There is a time that this would have absolutely devastated me, but over time I have gotten used to a sad fact of the gaming blogosphere. While at times we think of ourselves as a community, in truth we are more like a collection of independent nation states. While we may make occasional alliances, and share resources… these alignments are all too temporary and fleeting.

This is not to say that I have not met some really amazing people that I will hopefully be lifelong friends with, but over the years a handful of folks I trusted ended up stabbing me in the back. I have come to accept that unlike my guild, these are not always people that I can rely to always be there for me. My craving this permanent connection is likely a side effect of the amazing guild I have been a part of since 2004, and the similarly amazing community that got me started in blogging in the first place. I have given credit to Blog Azeroth and the Twisted Nether Blogcast in the past, but had this extremely nurturing community not existed, I likely would not have set down roots in the blogosphere at all.

Blog Azeroth

I’ve always enjoyed writing and found it extremely therapeutic, but the BA folks offered me support and fertile environment. There are several truly amazing and completely selfless people out there. I’ve talked a lot about how amazing @RowanBlaze of I Have Touched the Sky is… and I cannot highlight this fact enough. However I have to take a moment to talk about @Fimlys of Twisted Nether Blogcast. This man has made a career of highlighting the amazing work going on in the World of Warcraft blogging and podcasting community. Similarly from the Blog Azeroth roots I met so many amazing people like Stop, Triz, Rev, Linedan, Llanion and so many others that I may have met initially through BA that I now associate with other things. So these forces combined gave me a somewhat unrealistic viewpoint of what I felt being a gaming blogger was all about.

When I made the decision to leave World of Warcraft and venture off into other games, I was simply unprepared how tentative this “community” of friends I had built really was. I joined Twitter initially as a way to hang out with other blogger types, and within a few weeks I had amassed a large group of people that I chatted back and forth with regularly. However as soon as I stepped forth outside of the WoW Bubble I found that a good chunk of those people disappeared. Since I was posting content not related to WoW, they were simply no longer interested in me and my non-wow discussion. I tried to make connections within the more game-agnostic circles, but set forth with the false notion that it would be just as easy as it had been within WoW circles.

Cold Outside

It is funny how a one game can instantly bring people together. If you meet anyone in real life, and find out that you both play WoW… regardless of the Horde/Alliance divide… you are pretty much instant friends. You both share this large shared set of experiences to draw upon, and it gives you immediate common ground. Going out into the outer reaches of the mmo landscape, was tantamount to leaving civilization behind. I expected to find the same kind of fast friends I had experienced before, and instead had some pretty harsh reality checks. Like I said, I go into almost every encounter with a new person open minded and entirely too trusting for my own good. This is likely a side effect of growing up here in Oklahoma, but I generally expect the best from people.

The problem with the non-wow MMO blogosphere is that there is no common point of reference that we all have. Sure I would imagine that most of us have WoW in common, but each of us exited that experience with a kaleidoscope of different experiences not all of which something you want to build a friendship on top of. If you go a little further back there is likely a common thread of Everquest, however not everyone views those days with the same rose colored lenses. So instead of immediate bonds over shared experience, what I found instead were a bunch of wholly independent personalities, not all of which were that open to new people operating in their shared space.

Lessons Learned

I had a bunch of bad experiences early on, and it has made me a bit more guarded. I still try and be as open as I can be, but at the same time realize that I am “just pixels” to a fair number of the people I meet along the way. This has made me cherish all the more the people I do feel genuinely care about my well being along the way. I want to thank @Sypster for creating the Newbie Blogger Initiative and @ModeratePeril and @TRRedSkies for carrying the torch forward this year. You three and everyone who has participated in the initiative in any way are selflessly trying to create the same kind of nurturing environment that lead me to start blogging. The problem is, that once the initiative is over we all fail pretty miserably at keeping the ties we created going. I’ve picked up several of the new bloggers on Twitter, but I could be doing so much more as well.

I think all of this comes down to the fact that once you leave the rather large and protective WoW-based blogging bubble… the community is somewhat flawed. We lack a single focus, a single rallying cry to unite behind. For a long time there has been a zeitgeist of players rushing to whatever happens to be the newest thing. So for a short period of time, we have a rallying call, a thing everything wants to talk about. When the magic fades from whatever shiny new toy we have, we are left again with a bunch of separate islands floating in the same stream. I can wish things were different all I like, but I know at the end of the day I have a very few individuals that I can really count as true and long lasting friends. Overtime I have learned to accept this and just expect folks to drift apart and forget or be forgotten.

What Was the Point?

Quite honestly… I am not really sure what I was trying to say before I started down this path. I still find it disappointing when someone decides they no longer want to interact. I know for example one individual who has followed and un-followed me at least a dozen times by now. I feel like I am the same person I was the day I began blogging, or at least I am at my core. I have always tried to be myself and be open to meeting new people, and hopefully integrating them into my own personal monkeysphere. If you want to interact with me, and do so in a way that does not stress me out… then I want you in my sphere. Chances are I am also going to try and adopt you into my guild family… it is a thing I do.

This year I really want to surround myself by more positive influences, and be willing to accept that there are going to be some negative ones I need to let go of. I cannot make everyone happy, and I am sure I will annoy the hell out of a good number of people along the way. My hope though is somewhere between I will keep finding a lot of loyal and true friends along the way. I also hope that by some small way I can do my part in trying to fix what is broken with our “community”. I am not really big on making new years resolutions, but if I did make one it would be to continue staying positive and try my best to find the good in people. Here is hoping that some folks will stick around long enough to find the good in me as well.

Factoid February

I have to credit @TheChindividual for the name, who is as a matter of fact one of this years crop of Newbie Blogger Initiative graduates. This February I am going to do something to put more of myself out there in front of everyone freely. During the twenty eight days this year I am going to start off each mornings post with a true factoid about myself. @Ithato had a great idea of posting two falsehoods and one truth… and as much as I like that, I think it defeats the purpose of baring my soul for all the world to see. So I have a few days before this starts, and I am going to begin jotting down things… hoping by the time I need them to have all twenty eight ready to go. Hopefully at least someone out there will get some enjoyment about my little tidbits.