Tales of the Aggronaut

Robots Made Me Keys

May 15, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people. I know it’s a bit of an odd greeting, but it feels like my brain is struggling to boot this morning. Here is hoping that the coffee in my cup with help along the process. I may have to wiggle the power cord or something, but I can’t seem to find it… Last night I finally successfully completed a server move, so that is a huge weight off my shoulders. Maybe this grogginess is just the afterglow of that success.

Adventures in Locksmithing

So far this morning is going a bit better than yesterday. After writing up my blog I went downstairs to get ready, and attempted to leave the house. The door would not lock, neither by the pushbutton on the back of the door or by the key. I texted my boss to let him know I would be late, and that I would likely have to call a locksmith. I just did not feel comfortable leaving my house without a lock on the door.

Then I remembered… once upon a time… when we first moved into our house back in 1999… the real estate agent had given us a new set of locks as a house warming present. Lazy happened… and we never actually installed them, but they should be around the house somewhere. After rifling through the laundry room cabinets… that tend to be the catch all for that sort of thing… I found the package. Inside were in fact two nice bronze colored keyed doorknobs.

I scurried around to gather up the necessary tools, and changed the front door lock as quickly as I could. Unfortunately in the process I got grease all over my shirt… so I had to go change that. But all in all I rapidly changed out the front door lock and was on my way in not much time at all. I purposefully left the back door the old lock, just in case for whatever reason my wife needed to get in before I had a chance to get her keys. I managed to make it into work only thirty minutes behind my normal schedule.

Robots Made Me Keys

At lunch I decided that I should probably go make some keys, since both myself and my wife need one, and our neighbor down the street as we care for each others animals when either goes out of town. Normally I tend to just go to Wal-mart to get keys made, but I needed to run a few more errands and Lowes was in the shopping center I was going to. I thought I had remembered in the back of my head seeing one of those little grinder stations, so I charged ahead assuming surely I could get keys made there.

Upon entering Lowes, I was pointed towards a little automated Kiosk. The system prompted me to put my key in the slot, in a specific orientation. I could hear servos whirring as it clamped down on my key and evaluated the shape. On the touch screen I was able to place an order for what kind of key blanks I wanted, and the quantity. I started off only planning to make 2 keys, but the third was free… and the fourth was half off… so I ended up putting in an order for 4 keys for $7.

The machine sprang to life, going through a process of grinding the key, polishing it… and then spitting it out into a little receiver tray with a very satisfying ka-thunk. All the while there was a little progress bar telling me what key I was on, and how long an individual key was likely to take. The whole process was pretty amazing, but I may or may not be old… and just not used to this concept. I collected my keys and went on my way, overly amused by the entire process.

Always in the past I had made way more keys than I ever needed, because when you got them made at Wal-mart… at least half of them didn’t actually work. I am guessing robots trump some random kid with some random machine in some random store… that maybe had a 5 minute talk on how to use the thing… because all four keys work perfectly, no scraping or anything of the sort. I hail our new robot overlords… the future will be amazing.

Gorilla in the Room

So the big news of yesterday was that Rift would be going “completely free” in their words, and involve “no trials, no tricks, no traps”. I am of mixed emotions myself about the news, but overall the community seems to be taking it very badly. Personally I like the subscription model, it feels just and equitable and provides support for the company. Whereas the free to play model tends to involve “going whaling”, and looking for some mega consumer to subsidize the gameplay for a bunch of folks who will likely never actually spend money on the game.

My opinion is that if you are not actively supporting a game, you are actively harming it. Additionally my brain makes a sort of calculus of… if a game is not worth paying for… is it really worth your time? But that ultimately gets into the equation of why these games work. For me personally, my time is worth more than my money to me. As a result I am willing to spend extra to avoid having to spend time doing boring things. This is what the free to play model counts on, is that someone will buy extra stuff to make up for the fact that a large number of players are spending nothing.

My big hope is that it will make it more likely for players to try the game. Right now it is extremely hard to get anyone to try Rift, because a good chunk of my friends have WoW inertia. Hell during the Raptr promotion, I got a free copy of the game, free expansion, and 30 days of free playtime… gave it to a friend of mine who is interested in Rift… and after a couple of weeks he has yet to even create an account. If knowing that it won’t cost them anything ever, helps players try the game… I am all for whatever actions cause that.

On top of that, I continue to still subscribe, which means I will begin to get premium “Patron” access to the game. Usually games paywall off features, but Rift in their infinite wisdom seems to be giving Patrons some huge and very tangible benefits to keeping their subscription active. The two big ones for me are that all of my mounts will travel a base 10% faster, and that all money drops will increase by 15%. Those alone would be enough to get me to keep subscribed. However they are also adding in all sorts of xp bonuses, and token bonuses that just sweeten the deal. The whole thing begins June 12th, so in less than a months time we will just have to see what it ends up being like.

Another Shitty Morning

So this morning has turned out to be far worse than yesterday, but it a totally different way. Roughly halfway through writing about Rift, my wife yelled up and told me to “get outside now”. I of course am freaking out, wondering what has happened… turns out that once again we forgot and left our cars unlocked, and once again someone had rifled through them. We live in a pretty decent part of town, in a super quiet neighborhood, but this has happened to us 3 times since 1999. This is why I did not want to leave the house yesterday with the door unlocked.

Essentially we have nothing of any value in our vehicles, we have stock radios and keep no electronics in them. There is nothing of value that can be gained by them rifling through our stuff, but it feels so damned violating. This time they look to have taken one thing… my prescription sunglasses. You have to be pretty damned dumb to steal prescription sunglasses. They didn’t even get the current set of sunglasses out of my jeep, they got my old set out of my wife’s vehicle. I mean my eyes are complete shit, so they are thick as the bottom of a pop bottle… so it is completely obvious even looking at them that they are not normal sunglasses.

I am not really sure what they were looking for, but they obviously didn’t find much. But the frustrating part is having to stuff everything back in their cubbies that were tore out. In my jeep this means gathering up a bunch of wow tcg cards from my habit of picking them up every now and then, and stuffing the paperwork back in my glove box. If I had to guess they were likely looking for prescription drugs, money or electronics. They didn’t grab anything from the back of either vehicle, and in my wifes there were a few items neatly boxed up.

Anyways. this makes another shitty start of the day. I sincerely hope yours goes much better. Hard for me to muster my attempt at a cheery greeting right now. Need to be finishing this up and getting on to work.

Late to the Dance

May 14, 2013 by Belghast

Yesterday for whatever reason was extremely rough. I felt like I spent the entire day sleep walking, so when I finally got off work I came home and took a nap. Naps are such glorious things at times, I wish I had known that back as a child when I tried to actively evade them. When I got up I cooked dinner and while still extremely groggy settled in for a bit.

Elite Ready

One of the things I have been attempting to accomplish over my lunch time gaming break is to finish all of the Ashora and Steppes daily quests in Rift. Usually I manage to chew through Ashora, but rarely do I make a significant dent in Steppes. However yesterday for whatever reason I seemed to be able to do both without much issue. This put me fairly high on the daily infinity stone count, and creeping close to that piece of gear that would tip me over 300 hit.

After all was said and done, I was sitting at 2 stones away from the gauntlets. Last night I went back out to the Steppes and wandered down along the coastline. I knew I had left a carnage quest partially finished down there, and as a result I pushed through those last few stones rather quickly. Still feeling pretty worn out, I decided to go ahead and port back to Tempest Bay and purchase my upgrade. While I knew I did not have the juice to do any random elites last night, I at least was Elite ready for the grouping tonight.

Late to the Dance

Since redoing the loft I have found myself playing around on my PlayStation 3 a good deal more. Quite honestly, the loss of my gaming loft as viable space pretty much marks the end of me regularly playing console games. I simply did not have a TV that was dedicated to gaming, and I never wanted to monopolize the tv downstairs in case my wife wanted to watch something. So as a result I have essentially been a non-console gamer during this current generation of systems.

As a way to catch up, I went ahead and signed up for a years subscription to PlayStation Plus, as this gives me around a dozen games immediately to play around with. Namely there were a bunch of titles that I had wanted, but never really had picked or played… namely Sleeping Dogs, Darksiders, The Cave, Ratchet and Clank All 4 One, and Little Big Planet 2. Since they release new titles for free over the network on a regular basis, I figured it would be an excellent way to passively acquire titles.

Darksiders

I knew this game would be right down my alley, but for whatever reason over the years since its release I have never actually played it. Big dude, in bigger armor, carrying an even bigger sword really is my ideal game archetype… and this game does not disappoint. Everything controls extremely well, and it feels a lot like a modern golden axe at times. I had heard this in the past compared to Legend of Zelda, and I can kind of see the similarities but to me it feels more in line with the old school final fight style fighting games. I played this for quite awhile last night before my ADD kicked in, but I am sure I will be devoting many hours to running around as a badass horseman of the apocalypse.

Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One

Since I was pretty tired still, my gaming wanderlust was in full effect… also I had a whole stack of games I was wanting to try. The next on the list was Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One. I remember being a big fan of the Ratchet and Clank games on the PS2, so this was pretty much a no brainer for me to try out. I went into it knowing that this was basically a streamlined experience designed to be played with four players. I was okay with this, and while the world was not nearly as intricate as the ones I was used to from the PS2, it still retained all of the enjoyment of the earlier titles.

My only takeaway is that the game seemed really easy with Ratchet and Clank as an AI controlled bot. Clank seemed to always be targeting and taking out the mob types that were difficult for me to get with my wrench. All of the controls were essentially the same as before, so I regained my ability to play the game rather quickly. I did not play terribly far but I thought the “driving a space taxi” sequence was extremely fun, with me steering by moving to one side of the taxi platform or another. Should be a great game to return to and give it more time.

The Cave

The last game I went on a tour of last night was The Cave, and I did so on a very cursory level. I fired it up, and selected a team of the Knight, the Monk, and the Twins. Each character feels extremely interesting and has some special ability… that I have yet to really figure out what it is for. Right now the game seems like it is going to be a puzzle and exploration game. Essentially you have three characters to control, and various puzzles will require one or more characters to solve. It has the interesting and humorous writing that is trademark of Double Fine games, so given the time I am sure I will get into it. Having not played it terribly long, all I can really say is that the world is gorgeous and full of interesting visuals.

Crashing

At this point I was past going, so I decided I needed to head to bed. I still have Sleeping Dogs downloading as well as a couple others. Having access to a fresh font of games will definitely make the ps3 feel more useful. Also having access to a place to set it up, on a dedicated tv… with a comfy love seat to sit on will make it that more likely to get used on a regular basis. It was absolutely glorious sitting up there with a fan on me happily playing away in our newly renovated loft. I am going to have to try and resurrect my long red-ringed xbox 360 and get started back playing those games as well.

I have a ton of things to deal with, and today is trash day… so I bid you all goodbye. I hope you have a great day, and that you survive the rest of the week. I will be heading downstairs myself to take out the trash, and try and deal with the front door that appears to not be wanting to lock. It is always something…

Nature Sucks

May 13, 2013 by Belghast

This morning being coherent feels like I am running some kind of cruel race. Honestly being coherent any morning is rough, and the fact that I can string together multiple words into sentences is pretty freakin amazing. This one is particularly rough because it feels like I did not actually get much of a weekend. Between yard-a-palooza and furniture moving on Saturday, and the mothers day visiting marathon yesterday I feel like I just need to sleep forever. I keep reminding myself that sleep is for the weak, and myself keeps giving me the middle finger.

The End of a Ploy

Over the past few years, my wife and I had decided that for mothers day we would divide and conquer. I would go to my places, she would go to her places, and we would theoretically meet back at home in a shorter amount of time than normally needed. Apparently my wife realized that she was getting the shaft, and while I also had two people to visit… those two people could be easily coaxed into being at the same location. Whereas her two people were in completely separate towns.

The divide and conquer meant that usually I was back home by 1 or 2 in the afternoon, and could chill out and relax and enjoy the rest of my Sunday. That said, my wife would roll in around 4 or 5 and have the rest of her day as well… which is still better than going together. However since we were both exhausted, she was determined that we should go together this year, if nothing else than to try and keep each other from falling asleep at the wheel. Reluctantly I agreed knowing that Sunday as a whole was a completely gone day for both of us.

Mommy-ball Run

So yesterday got up with our horribly annoying alarm from 1988 going off at 7am… me rolling out of bed, showering and setting down to blog as rapidly as I possibly could. I grew up catholic, so we had to get up that early to be able to attempt to meet my mother for breakfast immediately after mass at 9 am. My mom has always talked about going out to eat with a “group of friends” after church, so assuming this was still the case we grabbed a largish table when we got the the restaurant shortly after 9. We had no clue that it would just be Mom and Grandma, and that they would not be showing up until closer to 10 am.

Our original plan was to eat breakfast, and then go back to Grandmas house and chill out for awhile. We did not however take into account that if given the choice between talking and eating, my mom will always choose talking. As a result it took roughly two hours for her to finish her veggie omelet, and by then we needed to start getting on to the next house. We gave our hugs to mom and grandma, made sure grandma got safely into the car and then moved on down the line to then next house.

All Roads Lead to Bernice

We travelled the almost hour to the next destination, my wife’s mothers house. She was happy to see us as always, and hugs were exchanged, however she had an agenda. Over the last few months my wife and I have both gotten into photography, and one of the things we had been searching for were old timey rickety metal bridges. My wife’s mom thought she knew where a few were… 8 or 9 years ago… so we set out on an adventure to find them. One of the things we quickly learned that a short distance means something completely different to her than it does to anyone else.

Over the course of the next few hours we drove along the backloads of Craig County in search of the illusive “old metal bridge”. The first candidate was in a place that kept sounding like folks were saying “Car Salami”, but once we got there we found out that at some point recently it had been replaced with a very spartan concrete bridge. The river still looked cool so we got out and snapped a few pictures, and played dodge the oncoming cars while doing so.

The next candidate was in what felt like the exact opposite end of the county, honestly maybe 10 minutes from where we started our journey. We started backtracking with furious vengeance, all the while my wife’s mom telling us tales about what used to be there and who used to live where… all of which were a super confusing tapestry of references that neither of us actually knew. We arrived at our destination and low and behold it was a real live rusty metal bridge. A placard on the bridge announced that it was built in 1913, and while extremely cool it was bizarre how every so often the bridge would shudder and sway. We had been on the bridge a few minutes when my wife noticed that on one end it was being held together by only a few pieces of rebar… as you could see all the way down to the river below through a crack with only little toothpicks of iron rebar holding it together. Yeah… we totally drove across it anyways.

The Final Leg

After finding the goal of the mission, we needed to be getting on the road to our last destination. We travelled the 20 minutes there and at this point we are both extremely sore and tired. We had a good visit with my wife’s step mom and her dad. Also got to see my brother in law and his significant other, which was pretty awesome. We have not seen them much since they moved away from Tulsa. We talked about my wifes mothers addiction to the kindle, and just how many books she has read. Her dad showed off his new tablet, that he purchased entirely for playing games on. It was a pretty chill time of just hanging out and talking, which at that point was roughly all I was capable of doing.

As we headed back home, we had run the marathon for yet another year. Four people to see, three households and it took roughly 12 hours to accomplish it all. So this is why I am exhausted this morning, and why no amount of sleep would satiate me at this point. We had a good time all around, but overall it just wears you out to run around and visit that many people in one day… attempting to make sure that no one feels slighted in the process. So instead of me getting home around 2 and my wife around 5… both got home at 7 pm.

Nature Sucks

The big take away from the weekend is that nature hates me and is trying to kill me. After all the yard work, dusting, and running around Sunday, my allergies are declaring war on me. I have sneezed more in the last 48 hours than I have in the last 4 to 8 months. As I write this blog entry, I am clearing my throat constantly and praying that the Allegra kicks in without bringing me into an allergy medicated coma. It is going to be a crazy busy week, but at least I can enter it knowing that a ton of things got accomplished.

I hope the mothers out there had a great Mothers day, and I hope the children out there survived it. I managed to get in a little bit of Rift last night before collapsing in bed, and the highlight was getting a friend of mine guilded with the Catari Honor Guard. I will go into my debate over the positives of Alea Iacta Est and Catari Honor Guard another game, but I brought him into the Cats for the simple reason that we have the ability to invite people there. I hope you guys have a wonderful day.

Double Shower Day

May 12, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I am barely capable of movement. Essentially we worked our little butts off yesterday but I will go into more detail below. Also I am groggy as shit, since I am having to get up way earlier than normal on a weekend morning so that we can get up and around and try and intercept my mother when she goes to breakfast after church with her friends. I am not a huge fan of holidays in general, but since mothers place the utmost of importance upon this day I try my best not to disappoint.

The Trash Pile Grow-eth

Over the week we had decided that the project we were going to tackle was getting the gaming loft back in order. Essentially for the last several years it has been unusable space. We had robbed the entertainment center of its television when we started RVing. When we got Sugar Gliders, the cage needed a relatively dark location, and the loft is habitually so. In addition all this clutter made its way out there, so without comfortable seating options, and a viable tv it just stopped getting used for anything at all.

The problem with cleaning the loft is that we needed to clear a path through the backyard to start a trash pile. We had an entire year of leaf litter and random debris that had accumulated back there, so my wife decided that we needed to start the day by clearing a path. The scope was relatively small at first but we went well beyond the intended stopping spot.

Red Tipped Laurel

With the help of my brother in law we got the hedges and trees pruned back. Previously the hedges had overgrown to the point where you could not walk along the backside of the pool at all. Now the pathway is mostly clear, or at the very least passable. When the pool guys hooked up the cover to winterize it, they were not able to hook up one of the tethers because it was underneath the hedge. In our normal fashion, it just took us ages to actually get around to seeking someone with the equipment to trim them.

The other huge surprise is that our trees have flourished. Not sure why but this year is the first year I have noticed just how big they have gotten. When we moved it they were half that height and there was a clear delineation between each of the individual trees in each cluster. All this time we had thought they were just sickly, since every few leaves was a reddish brown color. According to my brother in law who is a borderline arborist, these are red tipped laurels, and that color mutation is on purpose. Apparently the trees are excessively healthy.

Winter Debris

The main thrust of the backyard outing was to clear away all the leaf litter, and assorted debris that had collected over the winter. Honestly I wish I had taken a before shot, because the backyard was a mangled mess of junk everywhere. We had gathered leaves at a previous time, but neglected to collect the bags… and over the winter they had disentigrated. So those were an extra pain to clear. In addition all the furnature, and pool toys were strewn around the yard. The majority of pool toys are not even ours, but one of our good friends keeps bringing them over and leaving them.

That is actually the story of our yard as well. There were so many things just left in the back yard that we didn’t even recognize. There was a stereo that had been left out over the winter, and now had little bugs crawling in and out of the back. There were what felt like a couple dozen cups in various shapes and sizes that once contained a drink. All of this basically is the assorted debris accumulated by the kid that does our lawn. He is extremely forgetful, and just leaves things laying around constantly. We used to get home and find his bike just sitting in our yard for no apparent reason.

Enter Junkman

This would be disturbing to most, but we’ve seen him grow up and are used to it. We are as close to these neighbors as humanly possible, and they have listed us in the past as emergency contacts. Nonetheless this added up to a bunch of junk that we had no idea what to do with. We had looked into getting a dumpster rental, we have done that in the past when we knew ahead of time there was going to be an excessive amount of crap we would be throwing in it. However that is always a pain, and you feel that your time is ticking down since you only get it for a short period of time, and when one is in your front lawn… all sorts of random things seem to show up in it over night.

I had looked into the Bagster, which is a portable dumpster that you pick up at home depot, and then just call Waste Management to pick up when you were done. However while reading the reviews on Amazon, someone mentioned something they do instead. Basically they pile the stuff up in their yard and then call a junk and debris company to come get it. After a quick google I found the Junkman service, and that idea stuck. Basically you pile your crap up, and then they come load it up for you charging you based on volume. The cool thing about their service is that they will clean the area to the ground, and try to recycle everything they possibly can from your stuff. Seems like a win in all possible directions.

To the Loft!

We did not shower in the morning, since we knew we would get filthy working out in the yard. So both of us went in, showered, put on relatively clean clothes and went and got some lunch. My wife ended up taking a cat nap, and I ended up getting sucked into a couple of relatively quick bots matches in League of Legends. When we got started again we tackled moving the stuff out of the loft that we had intended to… namely these three weird doctors office seating chairs we had picked up ages ago. We thought the little unit was interesting, but they never really were comfortable, especially for long gaming sessions.

In addition the chairs were massive cat hair magnets. We corralled the cats into the bedroom, and carried them out one at a time, adding them to the junk pile. In addition we took out to my Jeep an old HP LaserJet 4 printer that was sitting up there, waiting to be donated to good will. We had an old male cat that was given to marking everything, regardless of what we did to try and stop him. So initially we had thought the entertainment center would be in extremely bad shape.

Turns out for whatever reason he had barely touched it. This combined with the fact that it was extremely well made, which means extremely heavy… we modified our plans and decided to just use the existing center. We cleaned it off completely, and changed the orientation, to make hooking the cable up easier. The loft is extremely screwy to be honest. You have a power outlet on the side behind the loveseat, and it would be near impossible to run cable over there, since that is the side that backs up to our rock chimney.

Loveseat Juggling

The last major chore was trying to figure out a way to get the loveseat up our very narrow stairwell, and into the loft. This involved so much odd maneuvering, and brute force that I am certain it is the cause of the majority of our aches this morning. It is amazing how something so relatively small looking can be such a pain in the butt to maneuver. There were several times we managed to get hung up and stuck on walls, banisters, railings etc. The final push to where it rests today essentially involved me pulling and lifting with all my might, while my wife got under the other end and lifted it almost straight up in the air.

To be a gentleman, I had tried to grab the end of the loveseat where Mac had sprayed… and even though we had cleaned several times it was still absolutely permeated with the stuff. As a result once we managed to get the loveseat upstairs and everything arranged… I took my second shower of the day. I was absolutely filthy from the dusk and cleaning up fermented cat urine. At this point the sunburn from working out in the yard, combined with the soreness in places I am not sure I even had… left me in a rather catatonic state. However it was all worth it, when I was able to hang out in the loft and play PlS3 last night in comfort.

Happy Mothers Day

I am needing to wrap up and get on the road. Going to meet up with my mother after she gets out of church and meet her at the local watering hole for breakfast. In addition after that, I need to see my grandmother, then travel an thirty minutes and see my wife’s step mother, and ultimately another thirty minutes to see her mother. It is going to be an extremely hassled day, and as sore as I am right now I am completely not looking forward to it. However it is Mothers Day, so what are you going to do. I hope you all survive the madness as well, and for the mothers out there… I hope you have the happiest of Mothers Days.