Tales of the Aggronaut

Open Data

August 16, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people. I am mostly conscious today but feel like I am coming down with something. While it has not fully hit me yet, last night I felt relatively horrible. It is one of those mornings where I have been staring at the blank screen for ten minutes… finally comprehending that I am supposed to write something thoughtful or interesting. It is mornings like this that I question my decisions in life… and why in the hell I ever decided to do this blog every morning thing. However I shall persevere and push on… and try and be thoughtful and or interesting or at least something other than comatose.

Armory

I am addicted to armory systems. When I am playing a game that has them… I happily check up on literally everyone I meet just to see exactly how they are doing things. I am not a terribly competitive person by nature, but I love peering into the inner workings of other players. I have learned so much from sifting through the specs of other players. Additionally when I have gotten a good drop, I used to sift through the profiles of level appropriate guild members, to see if any of them could use it as an upgrade. If they could I would send that doodad off in the mail, because I would always rather an item go to use than end up as pocket change when sold.

The funny thing is… I thought EVERYONE liked Armory systems. I made a comment yesterday about how much I wished that Rift had one… and immediately got a couple of responses from twitter talking about how much each of the players disliked them. One player took the stance that they had never seen any good come of them… and that in generally they only served as a point for players to trash talk or tear down others based on their gear. The second player said she liked to keep her spec and gear secret, that she felt like it gave her an edge in PVP.

I guess I can see both points, but they are also both foreign concepts for me. Firstly I rarely if ever pvp, and when I do it is on a lark and only to help complete some world event or guild quest. I am pretty much anti-competitive and want everyone to just get along and work together towards some glorious common goal. That said I can also see how if you do not have a protective bubble of guildies surrounding you… how you could get exposed to players that want to pick apart your gear and “call you bad”. I’ve always found armory systems to be amazing diagnostic tools that provide easy access information sharing of how exactly a player is out performing you by so much.

Open Data

I think the king of all armory systems exists in Everquest 2. The odd thing about it… it was built by a third party developer. I have a friend that works in the tools division of SOE, and I can remember all these early attempts to make a reliable and excellent mobile application. Ultimately they decided as a company that they simply did not have the manpower to adequately support an extremely detailed data visualization and armory tool on all available platforms. So instead they shifted their focus and made an amazingly intricate data service. This would allow third party developers to build the ultimate armory application for whatever platform they chose to. The end result I feel was a master stroke, and they have provided better access to data than any other company out there to date.

After the data service was released, EQ2Wire a long time supporter of the community and the best news source came along and released a truly phenomenal armory system. Essentially it provided full access to everything you would care to learn about your character. In fact in many ways it provided more information about your character than you could actually access in game. It had all sorts of nifty auxiliary functionalities like lists of all the dungeon maker items you had collected, or all your spells with the ability to create a shopping list for reagents to upgrade them. When EQ2 did a massive reworking of the AA system, they offered the ability to look at the previous version of your AA profiles so you could easily see just how exactly you had specced your character.

So when I say that I would love to have an armory system in Rift. This is the system I would most like to see it patterned off of. I would love them to take the data they already provide about the game to fan sites… but roll into it all the information about the players and serve it up as an active data service. Hell I would even devote development time towards working on an armory system if one decided to pop up and turn into a github project. Likewise I am sure lots of other people would devote their time to it as well. It would be awesome to return to being able to scour the guild roster to see who can use an item, or who has an amazingly artful spec.

One of the nice thing that EQ2 did when they rolled out their system was adding the ability for your to go off the grid of sorts. When you check that box, your character information becomes cloaked from the data feed. This would satisfy those players who want to keep their spec and gearing close to their chest, for PVP purposes. A scenario like this is the best of all worlds since it would finally allow me to integrate an armory system into our guild website. I have been working on a social roll-up page that lists various pieces of meta data from our forum profiles in one place. So I have been able to integrate WoW Armory, and TSW Chronicle… but am missing the game we are playing the most often… and as such is what prompted this whole line of discussion.

Redeemed

Several of my friends are super devoted to League of Legends. For the League E-Sports crowd, I am going to sound like a complete moron… but my friends were watching whatever event was going on last night. I pay about as much attention to e-sports as I do to traditional sports… which is absolutely none. This was a funny realization for me, because I feel exactly the same way while watching both. Zero interest in watching someone else play a game, regardless of what that game is. I guess I get bored watching other people do things that I could just be doing myself if I cared enough to do them.

All of the talk of League however made me want to pop in for a bit. I had some RP sitting in my account and Riven is probably the cheapest I have ever seen her. I have been told multiple times that this was a champion I would probably like a lot. Previously I would say my three favorite champions were WuKong, Garen and Darius… all of which have an extremely similar play styles. Essentially I seem to be unable to get into any champion that is NOT a top lane bruiser style champion.

I fired up a quick 1v1 custom game to put Riven through the motions, and man… I have to say I love her. I have never gravitated towards female avatars in any game I play… I just find an inability to really get into playing them. However I had already found at least one female champion that I really liked… and that was the super murdery Vi. I can now add Riven to that list. Firstly she is another champion limited only by her cooldowns much like Garen. I really love that style of gameplay, as I hate having to watch my mana bar… and I think in many ways that is why I love Garen so much. Additionally she has an extremely high sustain, especially once you throw a bloodthirster on her.

She is kinda like my perfect fusion of WuKong with his insanely ganky E-Q-W combo that lets him hop in and bash things then sneak away… with my love of Garen and his complete lack of resources to fiddle with. I still suck horribly at League because I am diametrically opposed to its click to move control scheme… but when I play Riven I feel like I suck a little less. Additionally her combination charge/shield attack is extremely awesome at getting out of jams… like getting too close to a turret… which I may or may not do way the hell too often. At least I can add one more champion to the arsenal of ones that I really enjoy.

Wrapping Up

Well this has rattled on long enough… and I should really be getting on my way. Here is hoping that I get to feeling better, and that I really am not coming down with something. I figure it is likely just allergies as it has been all summer. My boss is out of the office today… which normally folks would think it is a good thing. However in my case that just means I have to fill in for him when a crisis arises. I really hope no crisis arises… I could use a nice and chill day. I hope you all have an excellent one, and that it begins an amazing weekend.

Bank Overflow

August 15, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people. Today is a day for rampant forced cheeriness because quite honestly I feel like crap. My sleep patterns have been off for the majority of this week, and it has left me completely drained most of the nights. Last night for example I wanted to do many splendored things… but ended up slumped at my keyboard fighting sleep. Hopefully I will adjust to the environmental changes, like my wife starting the new school year… but whatever it happens to be it is a pain in the butt.

Bank Overflow

My life’s mission… at least as far as gaming is concerned… has been to try and gather as many awesome and community minded people as I could together. Then I abscond with them and stuff them neatly into House Stalwart. My guild jokes that my “panel van has the best candy” as I am constantly finding someone else in need of a good home. Last night yet again we welcomed a new member, and I am hoping he enjoyed himself. I was a little off my game in the whole engaging people thing… it was all I could really do to stay vertical. In fact at one point last night I decided I was done being vertical… and went downstairs to try playing on the sofa. Unfortunately that only hastened sleep… and roughly thirty minutes later I was logging out.

One of the negative side effects of putting all these awesome people in one place… is they tend to be extraordinarily generous. The above image is a shot of one of our bank tabs. They are absolutely stuffed to the brim with random things our guildies thought might be useful to other guildies. As a result I am going to need to do a massive cleanout. Some of the items are pretty easy… for example all that raw meat I will just ship to my survivalist and convert to level appropriate food. Other things like the gear… I would really prefer to see them find a home. The other option is to runebreak them and turn them into level appropriate runes.

We have long used tab one as an artifact exchange program. Essentially the idea is that as you are out collecting artifacts, you dump the ones you already have in the guild bank and then extract the ones you need. This has been a great program, the problem is… there are a lot of people that put in way more artifacts than they extract. So hopefully we can induct a few new members into the practice that will hopefully soak up all the unused artifacts so we can start fresh. I funded the first two bank tabs but unfortunately the third one is just too far out of reach. I don’t have anywhere close to the 1500 plat needed to buy it. So for the time being we are going to have to make due with the limited space we have.

Granted having a guild that helps each other so freely… is the kind of problem I enjoy having. I think tonight I might start packaging up various tidbits from the bank into care packages and just sending out to guild members that are in the appropriate level ranges. There are a lot of things in the bank that I view as clutter… like the on use scrolls that give a short term stat boost. But if packaged with a rune and maybe some food… it becomes a nice care package for a leveling guild member. I just don’t want the generosity of the guild to go to waste.

Cthulhu Expansion

I am extremely late to the bandwagon of even bringing this up… but a few days ago Blizzard trademarked the name “The Dark Below” and that set the world a twitter… pun intended. At first there was some debate as to whether or not the name belonged to World of Warcraft, or if it was intended for the upcoming Diablo 3 expansion. However additional data came out yesterday that pegs the name of the D3 Expansion as “Reaper of Souls”. Prior to this however… I assumed that Dark Below was going to be the 5th World of Warcraft expansion simply due to the fact that the name has roots in the Warcraft universe. Apparently the term “Dark Below” was mentioned in the original Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans manual… as well as a section in the Warcraft roleplaying books from which WoWWiki References this quote.

The Dark Below is a place inhabited by demons, devils and infernal creatures, from where some sorcerers take their power directly and sometimes have a patron beast to foster their magic

So on that alone I assumed that this would be the beginning of the fabled “Burning Legion” expansion. I hate to bring this list out… but I still find it curious just how closely the franchise has followed it all these years later. This list first started circulating before the release of The Burning Crusade, and more or less was pretty accurate until Cataclysm. I feel like the whole idea of rebooting the world was a complete monkey wrench thrown into the “master plan”. But I am wondering with the release of Pandaria… are we going back to trying to pick up items from the list?

The Pre-Burning Crusade Expansion List

Draenor Set

Azuremyst Isle – 1 to 10
Bloodmyrk Isle – 10 to 20

Eversong Forest – 1 to 10
Quel’thalas – 10 to 20
Hellfire Peninsula – 58 to 62
Zangarmarsh – 60 to 64
Terokkar Forest – 61 to 65
The Deadlands – 63 to 67
Nagrand – 64 to 68
Blade’s Edge Mountains – 66 to 70
Netherstorm – 67 to 70
Shadowmoon Valley – 69 to 70

Northrend Set

Borean Tundra – 67 to 70
Howling Fjord – 67 to 70
Dragonblight – 69 to 72
Grizzly Hills – 70 to 73
Crystalsong Forest – 72 to 75
Zul’drak – 73 to 76
Sholazar Basin – 75 to 79
Storm Peaks – 76 to 80
Icecrown Glacier – 78 to 80

Maelstrom Set

Gilneas – 77 to 80
Grim Batol – 78 to 81
Kul Tiras – 79 to 82
Kezan – 81 to 86
Tel Abim – 83 to 85
Zandalar – 84 to 87
Plunder Isle – 86 to 88
The Broken Isles – 87 to 90
The Maelstrom – 89 to 90

Plane Set

Pandaria – 1 to 10
Hiji – 10 to 20

Wolfenhold – 1 to 10
Xorothian Plains – 10 to 20

The Green Lands – 88 to 91
The Dying Paradise – 91 to 94
The Emerald Nightmare – 94 to 97
The Eye of Ysera – 97 to 100

Deephome – 88 to 91
Skywall – 91 to 94
The Abyssal Maw – 94 to 97
The Firelands – 97 to 100

Legion Set

K’aresh – 96 to 99
Argus Meadowlands – 97 to 100
Mac’Aree – 99 to 100
Maw of Oblivion – 100+
The Burning Citadel – 100+++

As you can see from the list… up through the close of Wrath of the Lich King… everything pretty much synced with what we were seeing in the game. Some of the zone names were inaccurate, but the list is too close for it to be a complete aberration. So as I said above… when I saw the name and the reference from WoW WIki… I immediately thought this was going to be what is mentioned above as the Legion set. But further evidence has come out that leads elsewhere. Yesterday an article caught my attention pointing out that Ozumat the fiend in Throne of the Tides was in fact from the Dark Below.

So now I have to wonder… is this finally them doing a proper treatment of Nazjatar and Queen Azshara? I almost immediately ruled out this concept when the name first started circulating… because just among my friends Vashj’ir was pretty much a hated experience. So I really could not see blizzard returning us to an underwater setting again. However so far the evidence points in that direction. If the Dark Below lies beneath the crust of Azeroth… then it would make sense that the entry way would be some underwater trench. My biggest concern would be if they do another confused expansion like Cataclysm where there is content scattered throughout Azeroth without one central point of focus.

As bored as I got with Pandaria… it was less about the content and more about my general malaise with World of Warcraft. Everything about that expansion was well done… and had I really cared about the game I probably would have enjoyed it much the same way as I enjoyed the hell out of Northrend. Cataclysm on the other hand felt like a haphazard journey across existing areas of the world. I hope whatever they do for this expansion that they give the players an entire world to explore rather than more piecemeal crap.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to get on the road. Today was a multiple cup of coffee day as my mind wandered quite a bit through the course of this post. While I don’t play World of Warcraft, and I really have no intent of returning… I am still a sucker for Azeroth. You can’t spend a decade immersed in a world and not care about its evolution. I keep hoping that Blizzard will “do the right thing”, but they always seem to make decisions that are half-hearted. It will be interesting to see what Blizzcon provides. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope I make it through the day without falling asleep at my desk.

Whim Republic

August 14, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks. In many ways last night was a far worse night than the previous… but for whatever reason I am feeling awake and rested this morning. I wish to god I understood sleep patterns, and why getting significantly less sleep ends up with me feeling better in the morning. Previously I had been used to 5 to 6 hours of sleep, but here lately consequence has ended up with me getting to bed a little bit earlier. More often than not… getting extra sleep just ends up making me feel horrible as a result.

Harvesting Moonshade

I spent a little bit of time when I first got home helping out a guild member orient herself to Ashora. However after assuring that she got all of the porticulum points… I logged back in Belgaroth and continued down my rabbit hole of leveling as a pure harvester. At the point at which I left off yesterday I had just finished up Freemarch and was entering into Stonefield. Stonefield actually went extremely quickly as I found that all of the rock golems gave extremely fast skill-ups. Additionally there were large fields of the mountain goat like creatures that I could gather up and AOE down.

Once I moved into Moonshade everything slowed down quite a bit again. Firstly I was finally catching up to where the character was at foraging wise… so this meant now having to manage leveling a third skill. I managed to push up rather quickly in harvesting on the various ram like creatures near the Defiant portal. The only problem is they petered out about 200 and the transition point to train the next tier is 225. I found the same essential problem killing boglings and skinning them out in front of the Dwarven Relcaimer camp. At roughly 200 everything slowed down.

Unfortunately the zone did not have any lower level golems or earth elementals… so I had to run around the zone randomly pushing up my mining from picking up Cobalt Lodes. I noticed that the Golems up near Hammerknell all required 170 mining, so that was ultimately my goal. After about 30 minutes of farming Cobalt I managed to push up to that point. The Golems all give skill-ups but they are fairly annoying since after killing each one it spawns three little phantoms. Additionally if you do not harvest the golem immediately it fades often times before you have killed the three phantoms. So it is this delicate juggling act of trying to mine the golem as the phantoms are spawning and before they have really begun attacking you.

This is the point at which I left off for the night. I figure tonight before we pull together the guild night festivities I will try and finish up pushing my trades to 225 so I can learn the next tier and move into the endgame zones. Hopefully I can find a ready source of mobs to mine, forage and butcher as that makes it go so much quicker than having to run around and try and find nodes to harvest. I would rather kill hundreds of mobs at one camp, than try and find 50 nodes spread out throughout a zone.

Whim Republic

Early in the evening one of my friends on mumble had been playing Star Wars the Old Republic and talking about it. After we got finished with our walk I decided to patch it up and pop in for a few to poke my head around. When I was last playing I had been alternating between leveling a Dark Side Sith Sorcerer and a Light Side Sith Juggernaut. I have to say I almost immediately regret my decision to log in when I was confronted with the warning screen letting me know that I was no longer a subscriber and should as a result feel horrible. They gave me a nice chart showing me all the ways I should feel horrible in the various basic features of the game that I would be losing by logging in.

I guess to some extent I had forgotten exactly how miserable an experience it is to try and play SWTOR as a free to play title. There I sat with my no-crew skills, my one hotbar, my inability to use various sundry features like displaying titles, my bank, the auction house. I had a stack of credits that had apparently built up from the last time I subscribed so I decided to start trying to make my character playable by unlocking various things. Essentially each one of these items can be unlocked permanently at an account level, but it would literally cost you multiple hundreds of dollars to get your account back to a state at which it would not feel absolutely horrible to play.

All the while I am going through this… I am marveling in the back of my head just how horrible an experience this is as compared to Rift. When I was trying to do my now dead in the water “How To Rift” series, I created a brand new account for the purpose of seeing what exactly the limitations were. Surprisingly enough logging in and playing on a free to play character pretty much felt exactly like logging in and playing on my main. There are a few limitations, but they are essentially unlocked through the loyalty system the moment you spend any money. You are gimped on the number of bag spaces, but as compared to SWTOR this seems like a truly minor thing.

Lack of Loyalty

I guess what feels so exploitative about SWTOR is the fact that I spent a good deal of money with that game. I bought the collectors edition package at launch, and subscribed for I think a total of 9 months. That is far longer than most players did, I feel as though I should get some of these features grandfathered in. I fully expect to be limited on total character slots, or the ability to play the newest content… but it feels like complete shit to log into my characters and have zero recognition for money spent when they were struggling along trying to make the subscription model work. What they are missing essentially is a loyalty system along the lines of what Rift has put in place.

When I logged into Rift after the free to play conversion… I was literally showered with loyalty rewards and the in game credits currency. I want to say I had roughly 100k credits and was at roughly 3/4 of the way through the purple tier of loyalty. I felt like they cared about me as a longtime subscriber, and they were more than happy to welcome me back and shower me with gifts. Granted I am STILL a subscriber, there has only been about a three month period since the release of the game that I did not subscribe. The experience all feels so much nicer however that they give me rewards I want to build towards, and make me want to spend money on the game because I want to support them.

On the other hand in SWTOR I feel like I am a cow being milked for whatever money they can get out of me. Everything about their system just feels cheap and insidious. Instead of adding new features to the game and pay-walling those… they seemed to have chosen arbitrary basic features to hide away from the unwashed masses of non-subscribers. So essentially without paying that monthly fee you get an extremely broken feeling gameplay experience. I know I have commented multiple times about how horrible their free to play model is, but I guess I forget just how bad it really is… until I experience it again each time.

The above video was compiled by Rift Scene and compares and contrasts the features of SWTOR, TERA and Rift. If you are not really familiar with the differences between the Rift and SWTOR free to play model it is well worth watching. I hope I will remember just how bad it is, the next time I get the urge to patch up the game and log in. There really is nothing there for me there unless I choose to subscribe, and I have no desire to do that since I know the next time I lapse I will be treated the same. The main difference for me is that I feel like EA Bioware really does not deserve any of my money. Trion on the other hand, gives both the outwards appearance that they care about me as a player, and as a result I feel like giving them all the support in the world.

Wrapping Up

Well time to get on the road. Todays post ended up far more ranty than I had intended it to. I am just still shocked at how bad the SWTOR free to play model is when it actually comes to playing it. On paper it looked horrible, but as a non-subscriber attempting to play the game it feels even worse. I hope you have a good day and you find absolutely nothing to rant about. I have a massive list of things I need to get done, so here is hoping I have the “oomph” to do them.

Wrong

August 13, 2013August 13, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks, and welcome to another episode of “Bel tries to think of something to write about in the morning”. Last night was kind of an odd night. We had to run a number of errands so it ended up with me getting home fairly late and missing most of the “nda” event. Afterwards I logged into Rift for a bit, but kept getting disconnected. I think it was jealous for cheating on it with another game. When it finally stabilized I did a bunch of silly things and finally it was time for our evening walk… and I was in bed by 10:30. Theoretically I should be recharged and ready for the day… but I feel all sorts of fuzzy mentally.

Silly Things

One of the things that I spent my massive amount of points on that I got from being a longtime subscriber to rift… was on the tradeskill extension unlocks for my main. As a result he has Mining, Butchering, Foraging, Weaponsmithing, Armorsmithing and Artificer. Which to some extent has started me down the road to madness. Since I have pooled the majority of my tradeskills on one character, I have the overwhelming desire to rework all my other characters so that they are pure harvesters. Lately we have lacked a healer when I attempted to pull together dungeons and such with our 50+ crowd, so I thought I would bring my cleric Belgaroth out of retirement since he was already 50.

The problem is… this also began my descent into insanity as I noticed he had the odd combination of Weaponsmithing, Apothecary and Foraging. None of the tradeskills were terribly high, so I decided this was the opportune time to rebuild him as a master harvester. The only bad thing about this is that I spent all of last night roaming around Freemarch collecting ore and skinning wolves. When it came time for our walk last night I had just finished up on Freemarch and was headed into Stonefields. Since I have recently done this whole level all the tradeskills thing on Belghast when I picked up foraging… I am hoping it goes more quickly since I pretty well know the areas I need to be in for each type of material. I don’t really want to get too much further into the Storm Legion content without having his harvest abilities up to snuff.

Wrong

So two things happened yesterday… firstly I stumbled across the video above… and one of my posts got picked up by MMO Melting Pot a site that aggregates posts from the community normally relating to World of Warcraft. I like the site, and they do a decent job of promoting various blogs, but almost every trolling comment I have received has happened when they have featured one of my posts. Normally the trolls don’t really bother me but this one just stuck in my craw.

No, sorry the author of this post is flat out wrong.

So I have no problem with someone disagreeing with my opinion. It happens on a regular basis and people seem to be able to do it well. I have a problem with the fact that this poster said my opinion was wrong. It is impossible for an opinion to be wrong. It is not a fact based statement generally, but the way someone feels or believes, and as a result there is no right or wrong. It is in fact their opinion until they decide to change it. My blog while it has little factual nuggets at times, is pretty much my view on the world as I know it. While you can get grumpy or disagree with what I say, saying that said opinion is wrong just is not an option.

Now to the video above… I linked it into this segment because in some small way it is addressing as the video calls it the “nerd on nerd violence” aspect that is trolling. I disagree vehemently with folks all the time… prime example is the whole “tank” series of posts. All the while I was posting my good friend Rowan was posting the counter point on his blog. We don’t always see eye to eye and we disagree plenty… but at the end of the day I still love him like a brother… and I would never dream of calling his personal opinion “wrong”.

I’ve tried super hard myself to present a mostly positive outlook into our community, which in my case is the collection of gaming blogs out there. While the above video has nothing to do with that, I feel like it has a lot of threads of truth about our own community or ANY geek community in general. Geeks seem to like eating their own, because they do not measure up to some standard they have set in their heads. I have been guilty of this multiple times myself, and I try and take a step back and realize that we are a niche of a niche of a niche… and the quite frankly we need all the awesome people we can get. I have so much respect for the cosplayers out there, whereas I put my ideas on paper and hit a publish button from the comfort of my office… they wrap themselves in those thoughts and parade it for the world to see. I cannot imagine how much self confidence it takes to do that… and I have nothing but the utmost respect for ANYONE who even vaguely attempts to cosplay something.

Gearpunk Dice

My good friend Tesh is making another run at Kickstarter, and this time it seems to have gotten massive traction. The above dice are just a production sample from his blog but gives you a feel for what the gearpunk dice will ultimately look like. This campaign is for metal dice and he is offering essentially three designs… Tinker Dice, Gearpunk Dice and Fudge Dice. Essentially through a combination of the Gearpunk polyhedral dice, and the tinker dice you have what is like the ultimate gear punk dice collection for your gaming needs. I was a big fan when they were plastic, and I am an even bigger fan now that the metal seems to be going over like gangbusters.

[edit] Apparently I was extremely tired this morning… because I completely neglected including the Kickstarter link….

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tishtoshtesh/tinker-dice-steampunk-metal-dice

This one is easy now… the initial project requested $1000 and now they have received enough funding to do that almost ten times over. Essentially the dice are now a guarnteed thing, so make sure you do not miss out on this offering. They have been available through his shapeways site for some time, but this is a much better deal. I am extremely happy to see this campaign doing so well, and it could not be supporting a nicer gamer and blogger.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this thing up. Today is the first day back for my wife, and as a result it has thrown my morning into a complete state of disarray. I am not used to having to get ready with another human being roaming around the house. Additionally now pretty much begins hell for me until roughly mid September as the whole back to school ritual dominates my life. I am essentially bracing for it now, and expecting my time to be whittled away as we need to run this or that errand to prepare. I hope you all have a much better series of days ahead of you, and that the work week has been going well.