Tales of the Aggronaut

Too Close Calls

May 21, 2013 by Belghast

Yet another groggy morning as I try and cobble some words together that make sense. Pretty much last night was a repeat of the previous night, with us watching the news to see if and when it was time to take shelter. Not really sure how much I have to say today, but I feel like I have to write something or the experiment chain is broken. So I am going to push forward and see what comes out anyways.

Dodging Twisters

Last night was an extremely bad night in Oklahoma, regardless of where you are in the state you were at more than one point last night under a Tornado Watch. The worst of it hit Moore Oklahoma, which is where the above video comes from. As I was wrapping up my day at work, I heard the news that Moore was hit… and quite honestly at first I thought people were talking about the 1999 Tornado. I just could not believe that an EF 5 Tornado could devastate the exact same town, in roughly the same path as before.

Unfortunately it did, and this time the roughly 1 mile wide tornado was on the ground for over 45 minutes. During this time it destroyed a hospital, two elementary schools… and while I have not heard it since… when it was happening there was talk about it hitting tinker air force base. The last death count I heard was 51, and the hardest part of that is that roughly half of those were children from one of the elementary schools. Loss of life is always tragic, but it just seems even more unfair when it is a child.

The Close Calls

For the most part we made it through the storm fine. I wrapped up and left work about 4pm to head north to the suburb I live in. I had just gotten on the highway when I started getting panicked calls from my wife, turns out that a Tornado was crossing the highway roughly 5 miles ahead of where I currently was. There was really nowhere to get off the road, and I had no sign of the storm… I was coming in behind it, opposite from the direction it was travelling. I turned on KRMG since they have the best local weather, and by their reports it had already crossed the highway and was further down the road than initially thought.

During this time I also got another phone call from my Mom. Turns out that my aunt had an accident, fell out of her wheel chair, and was being rushed to the hospital from my home town an hour north of Tulsa. Based on the weather reports they would be travelling directly through the tornado path. But by the time I called back to check, they had already travelled out of the danger zone. In both cases each of us missed the twister by roughly 5 miles… which is a little too close for comfort.

I made it home safely, and as I waited on my wife to arrive… I went through the sequence of events to prepare the animal cages in the safest spot in our home… our laundry room. I kept my work clothes on and shoes, just to make sure I was ready in case something happened. Then we spent the next few hours watching the news as these slow moving behemoths tracked across the map, somehow moving just to the north or just to the east of us. All the while frightened of the prospect of the store that destroyed Moore heading this way.

The Stress

By the time that super storm that produced the F5 got to this area of the state, it had veered off course and was starting to lose its steam. By the time it reached Tulsa County it had mostly dissipated but the overall stress and tension never really eases. You know that there is still a huge trail of storms tracking this way, and that the conditions are right for any one of them to spin up another killer tornado. Knowing the worst was passed, I went upstairs to the loft and tried to play a game for a bit… but I really couldn’t enjoy myself.

Instead I ended up going to bed pretty early, of course turning on the news before doing so. It was another night I dreamed of tornados. At one point I woke up because the news had cut in, talking about another cell heading our way. Nothing however came of that, other than causing me to not sleep for a bit. I act nonchalant about living in Tornado Alley, and most nights are not that bad… but when you have a night of mega activity it takes its toll. Sunday night had pretty much absorbed my buffer of cool, and by the time last night rolled around I was left with nothing but frayed nerves.

The Aftermath

Right now I know that our state family in Oklahoma City is going to need a lot of help. That is one of the truly amazing things about living here, when something goes wrong people come out of the woodwork with support. It happened with the Joplin Tornado, it happened in 1999 for Moore, and I am sure it will happen again this time around. While last year was the first time I had ever been directly effected by a Tornado, when one hit my Grandfathers property… we grow up with this concept so deeply embedded in our psyche. That nature is dangerous, and that we have to band together when she causes destruction.

If you live in Oklahoma, I am sure there will be local churches or civic groups organizing assistance for the Tornado. I remember for Joplin, it was a local real estate agent that chartered a freight truck and piled it full of donations of water, diapers, clothing, blankets etc. I am sure over the next few days, when one of those happens I will be bringing it a jeep load of stuff to help out. In the meantime, the best way to support tornado relief is almost always the Red Cross. They are on the front line, and right now have a fleet of vehicles in Oklahoma City ready to launch at daybreak.

For news on how you can help, you can always follow the Oklahoma Red Cross Twitter. The easiest way to donate money is to text in your donation… $10 at a time, by texting “REDCROSS” to 90999. I am sure Red Cross will be posting more details on the Oklahoma region homepage as they get them. I personally will be watching Newson6.com for any information and their sister channel News9.com. When something like this happens in Oklahoma or the surrounding area, they pool their resources giving them access to two helicopters, and an army of reporters to get the news out.

The Next Thing

Right now I still feel a bit shell shocked from last night. I could write about games and things like that if I forced it… but the entire point of this experiment was to be more honest and open. Right now the only thing on my mind is the outbreak of twisters from the last two nights, and what I can do to help out. I am sure tomorrow I will return to talking about other things… but today it just feels wrong to do so. I need to wrap this up and head into to work. I am glad we were safe, and my parents narrowly missed one of the Tornadoes. I hope everyone out there is safe and sound, and has a good day. Additionally I really hope we do not have a repeat tonight, because my nerves cannot take a third night in a row. I was able to stay calm and cool during the first night, last night I was stressed beyond reason, and if it happens again tonight… I will likely degrade into a basket case. Here is hoping we have a glorious day with no more storms.

To Boldly Go

May 20, 2013 by Belghast

I am extra groggy this morning. Last night was another episode of that familiar Oklahoma… try and sleep while also listening to the weather forecast because you are under a Tornado Warning. It is a fun game for a large group of players. The negative side effect is that you either don’t really sleep deeply at all, or you end up dreaming about a tornado hitting your house.

Twisteropolis

I have to marvel at just how good the weather is here in Oklahoma. We had been warned about this outbreak of tornados on Friday, and the warnings got steadily more and more dire until yesterday when the show finally began around 5pm. Additionally it is pretty miraculous that over the course of the evening there were 29 separate tornados and uncountable miles of destruction… but only one single fatality. It is just staggering to me that so much destruction could be caused, yet only one life be lost.

Here we live in a culture of constant preparedness for that big tornado, so early in the evening we had prepared our hidey hole, and I was texting people to make sure they were also aware of the imminent danger. Now like many nights, this ended up much ado about nothing… but it is because we take it seriously… that there were so few lives lost. We rolled the dice and lucked out on the path of the twisters, and had the conditions been slightly different they would have hit us for certain.

The closest tornado spawning super cell passed about 30 minutes to the north of our house. When that cell was extremely active over the Wellston area, there is footage of it being roughly a mile and a half wide. Think about that for a moment… there this is thing destroying literally everything in this mile and a half wide path. Tornados feel like a giant eraser tool, smudging out everything in its arc. We fared the night just fine, but this evening is supposed to be worse. Additionally, todays show is supposed to start at roughly 3pm, just in time for the drive home.

To Boldly Go

We had to do something to take our minds off the impending doom, so we went around noonish to a matinee for Star Trek: Into Darkness. I have to say I loved every minute of it. I’ve always been a shirt tail fan of Star Trek, watching whatever series happened to be on the air at the given time. However I have never really reached the point of ravening fanboy, because I just didn’t buy the “utopian experiment” aspect of the franchise. Deepspace 9 was my favorite of the series, because they were essentially in a constant state of war and chaos, it felt like it was Star Trek for the Star Wars fan.

J.J. Abrams has taken this very neat and tidy Star Trek universe and messed it up a bit, producing something that is far more enjoyable for me to watch as a whole. Just like the first one, I loved every single minute of the movie, and cannot wait to see it again. However as I am sitting there watching the movie, I am getting super excited in the back of my head. If Abrams can do this for Star Trek, a series I have always felt was a bit too sterile… it makes me absolutely giddy to think about what he can do to Star Wars.

If you have not seen the film yet, you definitely should. It was a great rollercoaster ride to go on. Essentially from the first moments of the film to the last there is nothing but nonstop action. Additionally it has some truly amazing moments in between that will play on your emotions like a harpsichord. There are purists that will hate the film, and I have already heard enough negative clamor about it… but it is just plain movie fun.

The Most Inappropriately Named Game Series

With the return of having an Xbox console in my loft, I wanted to play a game on it. While over the last few days I have played a good deal of my old friend Castle Crashers, I felt like I wanted to play something more substantial. For whatever reason I never managed to finish Final Fantasy XIII, I just stopped playing it and got out of sync with the storyline… never to return. I have this love/hate relationship with the series as parts of me are super nostalgic about the Nintendo and super Nintendo era titles… and other parts of me are frustrated with what the series has become overall.

The game as a whole feels extremely rehashed at this point. Something is causing the world to end, and only your team can stop it… with the help of super unrealistic armor and needlessly intricate weapons. It will somehow involve god like creatures that you can either summon or will help you in some fashion, and also include insanely unrealistic armor, needlessly intricate weapon designs… and quite possibly take up large amounts of real time to manifest themselves. The game is just drowning in the same tropes every single time.

The final fantasy trope that just kills me though, is the fact that they give you this one character that they want you to hate. In FF13 this is Hope… when you use him he is markedly weaker than every single character you have gotten to that point. He literally has half of the hitpoints of Vanille the character that is introduced to pair with him. Additionally he wields this goofy boomarang, and seems to do far less damage than Vanille.

To complete the arc of hatred, he is annoying as shit… and throws the game into this entire arc of falsetto emotion. I think we are supposed to feel sorry for him, or identify with him in some way… but all I see is a kid with goofy hair, crappy weapons, no hit points and no personality. Final Fantasy as a franchise has a history of setting up completely useless character and intending for us to like them… need I mention Edward the Bard from Final Fantasy IV?

All this bitching aside, I rather enjoyed playing FF13 again last night. The story is kinda lame, and the characters are overly dramatic… but I still enjoy it for whatever reason. I think one of my impediments from enjoying console games in the past is that I always felt rushed when I played one. Since it was hooked up to our main television, I always felt like I was somehow imposing by playing the game. Now that I have a television of my own, set up in a gaming area of my own… I can take as much time to play whatever I like and not have to worry about rushing through the cut scenes to get to the action. I don’t feel like I have to hurry and get my fill so I can return the television to its intended purpose.

Alucard Again

I find it completely unsurprising that my favorite game right now on the PS3 is the same favorite game I have had ever since first playing it. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is that game for me, that is so far ahead of every other game I have played in matter of deep personal enjoyment. No matter how many times, and on how many different platforms I have access to it… I still return to playing it. Thanks to the PlayStation network, there is a really great emulated copy of it running inside my PS3.

I had started the game just prior to the whole tornado madness last night, so only made it past the first boss before shutting it down and heading downstairs. I am sure I will be tag teaming back and forth between this and Final Fantasy 13 for a few weeks. The funny thing is, that while I can remember large chunks of the game, every time I play it I cannot remember the exact order and locations of items I need to get… so the gameplay never gets stale. This is for me as close to a perfect game as it gets, and sadly nothing has ever really come close.

Guacamelee! does a really good job of invoking the same feeling. But for whatever reason I just don’t feel as connected to the Luchador, as I do to Alucard the son of Dracula. I won’t lie, I love vampires… I always have. I was a pretty rabid player of Vampire the Masquerade, and did not really get disenfranchised with the genre until the last few years and the whole “vampires are people too” movement. So the thought of running around in Castlevania as this sword swinging badass that you also played in Castlevania 3… is pretty much the pinnacle of awesome.

I need to hurry up and finish my net top PC so I can also be playing Super Metroid from the loft. I feel like I am old now, because I would rather play a side scrolling sprite based game, than any of the new shiny 3D titles available for the console. I think this is ultimately what the process of getting old feels like, mind crushing nostalgia about the things you used to love and still do. I can remember thinking about consoles like the Gamecube… that no one will feel nostalgic about this… but sure enough the generation that grew up with Super Smash Brothers is going through the same exact thing. Oh well I guess we just have to enjoy whatever we can when we can.

Constant Vigilance

I need to wrap up and get on the road. It looks like we are going to have another beautiful day of thunderstorms ahead of us. All indications say that today will be far worse and far more likely to hit the Tulsa area. The thing that freaks me out the most is the fact that the deluge will be hitting as we begin the drive home. Here is hoping if it ends up looking bad enough, that we can duck out early. I have so much to do this week, and so many non-work things to try and arrange for. I hope you all have a great week, and I hope you too can get done all the things you need to do.

XBOX Necromancy

May 19, 2013 by Belghast

I really overdid it yesterday, and this morning I am paying the price. I am kind of sitting here in an extended allergy inflamed stupor. I quite honestly had forgotten about blogging until my wife reminded me to do so. It is a relatively cheery Sunday morning outside, which is a stark contrast to the stormy night we had last night. Breakfast is now digesting, and it is time for me to think of something worth writing.

Tales of a Junktown Trader

Yesterday after milling around a bit and blogging I went upstairs and tore into my office. It tends to be a catch all for things that need to be removed from the rest of the house. Generally things migrate there in the form of these miscellaneous boxes of debris that has not really been sorted. Since previously I had packed up all of my classic consoles in boxes to clear out the loft, I now had tons of these boxes sitting in the way of progress.

At some point soon, hopefully Thursday… I need to call the cable company to get them to install cable to both my office and the loft. This is part of the greater scheme of switching off of DSL and onto 50 meg cable. Thursday is when we get the new sectional delivered for the downstairs, and since I will have to be there anyways it would be nice to get it all over in one day. With this time table in mind I knew I realistically had to get my office in order this weekend.

Essentially I sorted through the boxes, tossed anything that was essentially unusable junk, donated anything that would be valuable to someone, and kept anything I really needed. The end results was the above picture… essentially a jeep load full of stuff going to goodwill. There are roughly 9 boxes of stuff, 2 partial cpus, a HP LaserJet printer and a floor lamp. This was the culmination of 3 1/2 hours of hardcore cleaning.

XBOX Necromancy

The hardest part was trying to make sure I did not junk up my game loft too badly. After all the cleaning was finished I set forth trying to resurrect my Xbox 360 so it could join the ps3 in the loft. Basically my Xbox unit is old enough that it is no longer covered by Microsoft for the Red Ring of Death fix. As a result I was basically left with the options of trying to perform rocket surgery on it, or one of the various homebrew “fixes” that have circulated around the internet.

The most notorious method is the towel trick, but I was really wanting to avoid that as I could totally picture my office going up in flames as the towels caught on fire. So the first homebrew method I tried was the “Better than towel trick” method. It made sense enough, so I doctored some qtips and proceeded to block the fans. However after 30 minutes… my unit had still not flipped to the 2 lights shown in the video. So the better than… method had failed me massively.

Next I tried this truly insane Rube Goldberg method… it has 15 steps… none of which are explained clearly. However oddly enough I was able to get my unit to respond as expected until about halfway through the maneuver. Firstly it took me a bit to figure out that they were calling the reset button… the panic button. Once that was determined the method just became technically difficult and far less mind boggling. Of course, as expected it didn’t actually do anything at all, except make my power button look like a red strobe light.

Finally I decided what the hell… I would try the towel trick. This is the most famous of the towel trick videos, but there are literally hundreds of them. Basically the idea is to wrap your xbox in a towel, force it to overheat… and this somehow resets whatever warning sensor has been flipped. I wrapped my xbox up tightly, and powered it on. I let it set for 45 minutes, and then after cooling down… it still did nothing at all. So I started doing some research… and it turns out that once again conventional wisdom is wrong.

Conventional Wisdom Wrong Again

Essentially the two red rings of death is the only error that actually means your unit has overheated. The three ring message I was seeing ultimately means “General Hardware Error”… which could literally be almost anything wrong. Basically in easiest terms my Xbox is screwed, and not likely to come back. I would have to take my unit into a repair place, and the cost of repair would be completely variable based on what was actually wrong… and ultimately I would still be left with an ancient xbox with only a 20 gig harddrive.

I did some looking around at local used game shops, and they wanted roughly 330 for a used 250 gig newer style xbox. My wife suggested that we look around at some pawn shops, and at the very first one I found a good deal on a 250 gig matte black finish newer style xbox. We went ahead and paid the extra 20 bucks for a 6 month warranty… as a just in case. I got it set up last night, and started redownloading things… and at this point I am almost back to where I was before.

I am super happy that now I have both a working PS3 and XBox up in the game loft. The next step will be to tackle getting the nettop set up and the emulators running. But that is a job that can wait for another day. I still have not decided if I will be going with windows based XBox Media Center or the Ubuntu based variety. The windows based gives me a bit more freedom to do other things, but the Ubuntu version seems more shake and bake and might take less time to configure.

Snap Crackle and Pop

I am really not sure how much will get accomplished today. Right now when I move I make a snap, crackle and pop sound… which is not amazingly good. I maybe over did it, since I hauled a load of boxes to goodwill, and another load of cardboard boxes to the recycling center by myself. I could have gotten help with both had I waited, but I wanted the upstairs to be finished… and the clutter, bags of trash and empty boxes were just making it look like a complete and total mess. We realistically need to do a few things downstairs to prep for thursday, but I am not sure how much of that will happen. I hope you all have a great day out there, and that you keep from creaking and moaning like I apparently am right now.

Account Based Currencies

May 18, 2013 by Belghast

Yesterday I spent more money than I ever have before in my life on a single purchase. I am not counting automobiles… since those end up drug out over the course of years… and same goes with my house. We purchased a new leather sectional and it will be delivered on Thursday. This is pretty much the culmination of our whole “trying to make the house awesome” thing. The awesome thing is that thanks to having a really cool saleswoman, she called us when we could get free delivery and a 5% discount.

Declutteration

So pretty much today is going to involve cleaning out my closet in my office. It has 15 years worth of accumulated debris, and most of it needs to either be trashed or donated. Essentially this is important because I need to clear my office of all the consoles I packed up while clearing out the loft. Most of the crap in my closet is left over tech junk that I have either cycled out of, or not used in long enough that it no longer matters. Going to start making piles of, this is something I should donate to charity and this is something I should just pitch.

My ultimate hope is to clear the closet enough to be able to pack my consoles neatly in there, and maybe get the cable installer scheduled for Thursday as well. That way I can batch up all the annoying waiting around the house for an installer on the same day. Ultimately this would be the last step keeping me from switching to cable internet. Of all the improvements, this is the big one for me. We have been on 4 meg DSL for years… and bumping up to 50 meg cable is going to be massive for me and my sanity.

Eyecandy

Apparently there is an Elder Scrolls Online poster contest going on. A friend of mine linked me this and I thought it was so amazing that I had to share. Also I am looking for nifty things to share since I am still very much unable to share what I am doing over this weekend. You can hop over to Elder Scrolls Online page to check out the contest information… but the prizes seem pretty great.

First prize wins…

One Medium Wacom Intuos5 Tablet.
One The Elder Scrolls Online poster signed by the development team.
One canvas print of the Alliance Battle Concept Art.
Winning poster will be printed and signed by the Game Director, Art Director, and Concept team and mailed to the winner.
Poster will be prominently displayed at ZeniMax Online Studios and in ZeniMax Customer Support offices.
Poster will be featured in the ZeniMax booth at a future convention.
One The Elder Scrolls Online limited stein.
One The Elder Scrolls Online t-shirt.

This is from the Tumblr and appears to be one of the entries. I think it is going to be extremely hard to beat, but I highly suggest anyone with the skill to give it a shot!

Account Based Currencies

Keeping with the Elder Scrolls eyecandy theme… I found this nifty rendering of a Septim coin. Yesterday I was playing with the Rift Mobile app, and after getting hundreds of planarite that are completely useless to my main for the thousandth time… it got me to thinking how frustrating it is that currency in general is not account bound. So I threw out this tweet “I am of the opinion, that regardless of game… all tokens and currencies should be accrued at an account level, not character level”. It had several favorites, and a retweet… but it got me to thinking about how much better MMOs would feel if this were the case.

It feels like in general the long range endgame for all MMOs is to convince its players to roll more characters, and get more deeply involved in the experience. The problem that you run into is when you are working on your alts, but end up being needed by your friends and guild on one of your mains instead. I can remember how frustrating it was for me playing World of Warcraft, watching tokens sit unused on Belghast when I would love to have them on my other characters.

The game experience would be so much better overall if you knew regardless of what character you were playing, you were working towards whatever goals you have. I know personally, I would mind tanking that same instance for the 300th time a lot less if I knew that the shiny baubles I was acquiring were capable of going towards the character I was really wanting to gear. The problem with alting when you play a core role, is that it will always be in need.

I know that my opinion doesn’t really matter much, but it feels like a much more solid design… a longer range thought process. Right now the challenge with MMOs seems to be trying to get players to keep playing your game for the long haul. Doing anything to keep your players invested in more than just their first character seems like it is the best possible way to accomplish this.

This is one of the things I miss most from the era of non-binding gear. I could run a dungeon in Everquest, healing it on my cleric that was extremely needed… but be getting gear for my ranger or shadowknight. This made the experience more exciting, and less of a hassle. I realize we will never see an era of non-disposable gear… that is something long gone that will never likely come back. However if I could at least accrue tokens and currencies… I could benefit my alts when doing a favor to friends.

Its Cleaning Time!

Yeah I am not really exclamation excited… but it needs to get done. Time for me to get off here and head upstairs to work on my office. I hope you all have a great weekend, and that you do something far more exciting than mine is going to shape up to be.