aggrochat

Satisfaction of the Year

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The Birth of a Community

I think this year more than any other we say what was previously an island of disconnected city states merge into a real community.  Last January I posted a rather grumpy piece lamenting the lack of community, and throughout the year you all have strived to prove me wrong.  I am not sure what exactly it was about this year in particular that seemed to draw everyone together, in part I think it was because this year was the year of multiple events, that I hope will repeat themselves this coming year.  Since we have reached the end of a pretty epic year of community, I thought it was a good time to reflect back upon what we have achieved.  There were individuals who say that blogging is dead, but I think wholeheartedly we have proved them wrong.

February – Birth of Alliance of Awesome

While not really an event in the truest sense, it was still a pretty significant event in the year for me.  In February of this year some events happened that ended up in the forming of a much larger gaming community to be known as the Alliance of Awesome.  With the launch of the Landmark alpha… we quickly realized that each of us needed to be in as many as seven different “guild” based server channels to be able to keep in contact with everyone playing the game… especially since friends lists simply did not exist at that point.  It was proposed that we found a much larger community made up of all of different parts.  This alliance of guilds would pool resources and eventually even a chat server.  While at the end of the year I realize that maybe some of the ideas didn’t work as well as we had hoped…  there are still more of us in almost daily contact than there are not.

The idea that there would always be a friendly Alliance of Awesome guild in whatever game we happened to be playing was something that has for the most part stayed true to the original intent.  The only part that didn’t quite work was trying to create an actual Alliance of Awesome branded guild in Wildstar.  I feel it is still best if we stay separate guilds, just ones collaborating in a larger sense.  The biggest change in this direction was moving to using the same Teamspeak server graciously hosted for us by the ever amazing Saia.  Some things have worked well, others not so much…. and other groups have faded away from the core.  At the end of the day I think this was a really positive move for the community as a whole, and anyone that wants to participate is still more than welcome.

May – Newbie Blogger Initiative 2014

This may we saw a return of the seminal blogging event that at least to some extent started all of the momentum.  Several years ago Sypster started this contest and last year I believe was the third year.  Essentially it is a month for the elder bloggers in our community to encourage folks to start their own new blog and join our community proper.  For this year the catalyst was Doone as has been for a coupe of years, but he was joined by an excellent cast of helpers in the forms of Izlain, J3w3l, ModeratePeril, and Joseph Skyrim.  It was a bit hard for me to find numbers this morning when I was pulling together this post but based on my best guestimates and this list, it seems like we had 45 new bloggers join the fray during the month of May.

I did a quick run through of all of those blogs and as close as I can tell out of that initial group of 45, at least 30 are still active…  and I judged activity by having any posts within November or December.  That gives us right at 66% of the participating blogs still alive and kicking today.  When you add to this that there are still a large percentage of blogs from past years up and running as well that graduate from being a newbie to a mentor…  this really is one of the best events to grow our community each year.  I am extremely proud to be a participant each year, and I am excited to see a new crop of bloggers arrive on my “Class of” blog roll.

August – Blaugust 2014

The idea behind Blaugust started on an absolute whim.  I did not want to lose the momentum we build each year with the Newbie Blogger Initiative.  While that event is going on, folks are posting hard and heavy… and then as it finished the posts start to taper off again.  The idea was simple enough, get some of the most seasoned veterans in our community to take up the challenge of posting something new each and every day like I do.  When I proposed this idea I thought maybe at most I would get five or six people that were willing to take up the banner.  However this absolutely developed a life of its own, and before I knew it I had 52 people signed up to participate. I have to say I was completely overwhelmed with the support I got from the community on this one… and for the most part my entire August became about nothing but keeping track of Blaugust.

What I was even more impressed by was the level of participation.  At the end of the month I had 50 that actually participated, and of those 28 actually had “won” the challenge and managed to post something each and every day.  The biggest frustration with the whole event was that I had not really planned very well, and keeping track of who posted when became a very manual process.  As a result this coming year I am going to have to engineer a different solution to make it less intensive on my part, and allow me to make the daily recap posts a bit easier.  I never intended for this process to be something that “new” bloggers partook of, and as a result we saw a marked decrease in posts after it… since most folks needed a break after running that marathon.

October – Bragtoberfest 2014

bragtoberfest_spooky

Bragtoberfest was the brainchild of Izlain from Me vs Myself and I and the Couch Podtatoes podcast.  During September there was the beginning of some pretty horrible stuff happening in the gaming community as a whole.  Bragtoberfest was Izlain’s way of combating that by trying to get back to the roots of gaming… playing to have fun.  The mission statement was simple:  Bragtoberfest aims to make it fun to be a gamer again. We all game, and most of us also either blog, stream, vlog or podcast about games as well. Why not combine the two into a month-long event? 

During the month of October there were several competitions bringing folks together for the purpose of competing in a game.  These ranged from Strife to Team Fortress 2 and everything in between.  Not being a super competitive gamer myself, I did not join in as much as I would have liked.  That said I felt like I supported the mission by helping to provide a few logos here and there. Additionally many of us gave exposure to the event with recap threads and announcements on our own blogs.  This morning as I was trying to pull together numbers for all of these things, I struggled to find firm numbers of participants.  That said I know it was well over 20 bloggers who joined in during the month of October.  Hopefully this one will happen again next year and like everything, we can grow upon it.  The Bragtoberfest tag on Izlain’s blog seems to be the best summary of the event as a whole.

October – Alliance of Awesome Extra Life Marathon

One of the best things to come out of Alliance of Awesome this year…  is the fact that we participated as a team in the Extra Life marathon.  This all started with a random conversation between Zelibeli and myself about how we had always wanted to participate in the Extra Life 25 hour of gaming event.  Both of us had not done so yet for the same reason… we questioned if we could actually manage to stream all 25 hours given our family lives.  With the birth of AofA we kicked around the idea of having a Relay style stream, where each of us took a 2-3 hour block and then tagged off to another stream.  This became a logistical problem since we were all using Twitch at the time, and you could not create a “team” unless you were at the partner level… and quite frankly none of us were popular enough to actually have that.

Thankfully along came Hitbox which offers the ability to create a team at the most basic membership… and we were off and running.  We created an Extra Life team… and not having a clue what kind of participation we would get, I set a very sober goal of $200 as a team.  We blew that goal completely out of the water, with a participation of 9 gamers…  we managed to reach $1728 which to me is an absolutely staggering amount.  My hope is this year we can be a bit more organized and maybe raise more by getting the awareness of what we are doing out there a bit more.  Additionally my hope is to find someone who is a twitch partner that is willing to get an Alliance of Awesome twitch team created for us.. since that will open the door for folks to stream from the current generation of consoles as well.

December – Bloggy Xmas

Finally we had one last event that wrapped up last week with Christmas.  My good friend Syl game to me with the idea of doing a sort of blogging advent calendar.  It seems there is a local tradition in her area where folks in the villages decorate the windows of homes and stores to represent a day of the advent calendar.  I started work on a logo, and she spruced it up by adding in the d-pad snowflakes and bam we had another event ready to run.  I think she originally intended to have one blogger per day, but just like with Blaugust she was a bit overwhelmed by the folks wanting to participate.  I tried to pull together some numbers this morning but it seems like for the 25 days of the event she had 45 participants, meaning most of the days had two different bloggers posting.

The overarching theme of the event was to write something about community, and I personally wrote a post about my need to keep growing my own communities by adopting awesome people.  For the full effect of the event you have to check out the Bloggy Xmas website that gave us a really awesome advent calendar layout for the months post.  My hope is that we will grow this to be an even bigger event next year.  The community focus seems fitting since this was a year of so many awesome events bringing the community together, all the while existing in a climate where there was so much negative being caused by other gamers.  I feel like our little community stood as a beacon for the fact that gamers could in fact get along, and not just get along but thrive.  I want to thank all of you out in the community who participated in any of the events, or just kept your own personal blog active throughout the year.  I feel we represent the best values our community has to offer, and I hope we can make next year even more amazing.

Twenty Legs

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Double Feature

Last night was both amazing and horrible at the same time, for so many different reasons.  Since it is holiday season our ability to record AggroChat is going to become increasingly strained.  In fact last night both Rae and Tam were recording on location at their respective parents houses.  For some time we had been kicking around the idea of having a “Game of the Year” podcast.  The problem with this concept is it would require us all to actually agree on what we felt was our game of the year.  While there is a lot of overlap in our tastes, there is also an extreme amount of divergence.  The end result had us recording our “Games of the Year” podcast, in which each of us picked five games we felt were significant to us in the past year, and then we as a group talked about all of them.

The end result is that between last night and this morning I had over three hours worth of recorded audio to sift through.  Thankfully we totally did this on purpose as it allows me to split this one episode into two still significant episodes worth of discussion.  As such I have released part one today, and I will release part two next Sunday, giving everyone a much needed break from recording to go hang out with family and friends and not care about being home by 9pm on a Saturday night to strap into a chair and record a podcast.  The other side effect of this whole thing is that I was up until 2 am last night, and then back up this morning at 8 am to finish editing.  I quite literally just finished editing everything and uploading the first part when I sat down to write this post.  It is going to be a really long day.

Shrine to Geeks

VintageStockJoplin The reason why it is going to be a really long day, is that yesterday was ALSO a really long day.  I got up fairly early, and as my wife was getting dressed and ready knocked out yesterdays rather frantic blog post.  Then from that point until I literally sat down to record AggroChat last night, I was either driving or shopping.  We took my mother in law with us to Joplin Mo, because one it is a really cool town and two it is not terribly far from where she lives.  We had a whole bunch of things that we wanted to do, but one of them was to go to the Mall.   It really is borderline suicidal to go to any Mall on the weekend before Christmas, and by the time I got out of there I was absolutely done with humanity for the day.  One of the cool things about the Joplin Mall is that several years ago Vintage Stock went in and created this insane flagship store.

Now I have talked about Vintage Stock before, but it is really hard to grasp the scale of this place until you are actually in it.  Imagine going to a Wal-mart, where everything in the store somehow pertained to geekdom.  The amount of consoles, comics, rpgs, videos, puzzles, books, board games, and action figures is really hard to grasp.  I tried to snap a picture to show you folks the scale of this place but it extends out on either side from the vantage point I took up.  Hopefully at least you can get the idea.  On a normal day it is absolute sensory overload… but yesterday with all the people packed in… it was a bit too much for me to handle.  Thankfully we make it to Joplin fairly often so even though I did not really get to enjoy the bounty that is this store…  there will always be another trip to explore it under more calm circumstances.

Twenty Legs

20legs One of the regular themes of my blog is that we like to go to Flea Markets and junk stores.  One of my favorite activities here is to take photos of the random strange things I happen to find.  Sometimes you find an item that creates far more questions than you could ever possibly answer.  For example the above photo is a box of 20 Furniture legs… for $5.95.  While I am not really sure what the going rate for disembodied furniture is, that seems like not too bad of a deal.  The problem is… why do they have a box of 20 furniture legs…  and better yet who is going to come along and NEED a box of 20 furniture legs.  I have a feeling these are the sort of thing that are extremely specific to the piece they came off of, so unless you happen to need exactly these legs for your furniture…  you probably have no interesting in this box.  Better question is why would someone purchase furniture without the legs in order to need said box of 20 legs.

DisembodiedPeople r2d2cooler There were a ton of strange and cool things to be found.  For example I thought this Igloo style R2-D2 cooler was pretty awesome.  The inside of it was roughly the same size as one of those large drink cooler that sports teams use to dump Gatorade on their unsuspecting coaches.  While it was pretty great…  it was not $75 worth of great.  Had it been somewhere in the $20-$40 range I probably would have snapped it up, because seriously when the hell else am I going to find an awesome R2-D2 cooler.  Then there is the just straight up bizarre collectables.  The above photo is this group of mannequins dressed up in various outfits.  For starters…  I struggle to wrap my mind around why these were created in the first place.  Secondly I also struggle to imagine who decided it was a good idea to purchase them.  Thirdly…  I find it even stranger that someone thought that selling them as another really good idea.  I picture somewhere someone has a whole set of these disembodied figures in various bright outfits, because while I snapped a picture of four standing side by side, there were probably a dozen different ones in the booth.  Since they appear to be missing legs… wondering if I can somehow reunite them with the furniture legs above.

8trackadaptor Finally I always end up finding things that make me feel extremely old.  I guess that ultimately is the sign of aging, when a good chunk of the things found in a flea market are things from your childhood.  On the right we have the infamous Kraco Stereo Cassette Adaptor for your 8-Track tape player.  This was awesome for vehicles that had an 8-track deck in an era that rapidly adopted the Cassette tape instead.  I say infamous because it had a notorious reputation for completely eating tapes.  I remember using this to survive a family trip to Colorado with my cousins, and as we went across country…  it slowly mangled a Phil Collins tape until it was completely unrecognizable.  Ultimately mangled or not… we considered the ability to actually play tapes in the massive conversion van worth the risk.  I posted about this on twitter yesterday and it turns out a lot of other folks that follow me also had mixed memories of this device.  In any case seeing it hanging there in relatively good packaged condition brought back a ton of memories.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

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AggroChat Episode 35

Last night we recorded our 35th episode of AggroChat, featuring myself, Ashgar, Tamrielo and Kodra.  Last night the show became mostly about raids and raiding.  I am not sure if this started with our progress in Final Fantasy XIV working on Turn 5 of Binding Coil of Bahamut or if this began with Tam talking about the new “It’s A Wipe” game from steam.  It’s A Wipe is essentially a raid simulator in that you are the raid leader of a group of players trying to make it through progression content.  Having lived this world… the more we talked about this game the more it seems like the creators of the game were raid leaders themselves at some point.  When Tam got into the section talking about the descriptions of the various players and their traits…  I could seriously associated names to each of the people he was talking about because we had those exact personalities in our own raids.

From there we wound our way through lots of digital card gaming with Kodra, as he talked about the new Hex and Hearthstone expansions.  Tam talked about the sweeping changes to the Infinity miniatures game and the ramifications it is having on the various factions.  Finally we delve into my relapse into raiding.  This past week I raided Monday in Final Fantasy XIV, Tuesday doing Highmaul progression content in World of Warcraft, Wednesday a casual foray into LFR with the guild, and Thursday Highmaul progression again.  All total that was four nights of raiding… and I was having an absolute blast.  As Kodra pointed out, I am raiding as much as I ever did in Late Night Raiders… just doing it in a more piecemeal and casual fashion.  I am really enjoying splitting time between Final Fantasty XIV and WoW and seeing how each game does raiding.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

Wow-64 2014-12-13 19-01-17-902 A few hours before the raid my friend Kinral mentioned that he had an impending invasion in his garrison.  I volunteered to do one as I had not gotten one done for the week.  In theory you can do as many invasions as you like, but as far as I know you can only receive rewards from one a week.  Additionally there is an achievement for having done all of the available factions, so I have been looking to spend my weekly garrison fight on a new faction.  Kinral thankfully had the Shadowmoon Clan, which is the one you fight during your “trial” garrison invasion.  We got all prepared to do this, teleported to his Garrison…  but for some reason he could not accept the quest.  So we ran out to the edge of the phasing and waiting as he logged in and out and fiddled with various bits to try and get the quest to show up.  While doing this Odie and I did what any bored players do…  start breaking out the Paper Zeppelins.

Yesterday I learned a very important lesson… firstly that you can outrun the paper zeppelins.  More importantly however that you can keep throwing more Zeppelins at the player and end up with an army of them following them.  The above photo only shows four, but I did managed to get all five chasing him at one point.  After some more figurations… we found out that Kinral had not upgraded his Garrison to the Tier 3 Town Hall…  which is really strange because when I teleported to his Garrison… I saw the Tier 3 castle layout.  He upgraded really quickly and we were able to do the invasion.  We were roughly 50 away from getting gold, and none of us got anything tangible from our loot bags.  So here is hoping that next week I can manage to get in on one of the gold invasions and get something cool from it.  I mostly just want to get gold so I can prove to myself that I can do it.

The Final Stretch

WoWScrnShot_121414_003037 While I am about to talk about Belgrave and my progress leveling… I had to share the above screenshot just because I thought it was pretty amazing.  I spent a good deal of time yesterday while recording the podcast faffing about in Pandaria, either farming Dinosaur bones for the 9999 mount or trying to get Zandalari Warbringer kills.  During one of the long stretches flying across the continent I noticed I flying against the moon and snapped a screenshot.  I really really love the Grinning Reaper Ebola charity mount, and especially when it is flying… because it seems so improbable.  Anyways onwards to Belgrave… last night I managed to hit 99 so I am in the final stretch towards 100.  Unfortunately he is not having the best luck in the world.  I keep completing these quests, and almost every time I am walking away with the default green reward instead of an upgraded version.  While Cuppy chimed in yesterday telling me that it was in fact possible to hit 615 without the Dwarven Bunker…  I think maybe she also had a significant amount of luck going into it too.  I plan on completing Nagrand and seeing where I am at the end of it… but I have a feeling I am going to be significantly shy of 615.

I have to say when you are used to getting upgrades from quest rewards…  you die a little inside each time you get a green.  Similarly not a single on of the lootables scattered around the zone have become upgrades either.  At some point I am going to make an attempt on the 620 sword on top of Oshugun.  Here is hoping that ends up purple, because it if does I will be set for awhile.  One of my big frustrations with Blizzards design through the years is their seeming inability to ever put a full set of gear in an area.  Since Nagrand is a gearing up zone basically…  would it not have been better for them to have enough treasures in the zone to make a full set of gear?  Better yet…  why is there not a blue set of Smithed gear that the player can wear while trying to gear up?  I feel like gear in general has been a frustrating point this expansion, especially considering most heroic gear has a chance of dropping from any boss in any dungeon… making it feel extremely generic.  I feel like Blizzard tried to do a lot of things with this expansion, but most of them are not working as intended.

AggroChat Episode 34

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Bad Name Great Cat

lilshitgametime This is going to be a really rough post to get through, so I am sitting here avoiding writing.  That said I need to actually get through this, otherwise I will sit here staring at the empty page all day.  Yesterday started off fairly normally, I got up, got showered and went out for breakfast like I have for years.  The problem is what happened during the middle of the day pretty much broke my heart.  Fifteen years ago this past Thanksgiving weekend, the above cat entered our lives as we rescued her from the cold of my parents barn.  There is some confusion about her name, because I originally named her Sasha having always liked the name.  My wife however had a living terror of a student named Sasha in her class that year…  so the name actually stuck.  The only people who ever called her that were the veterinarian and my mother.  When we got her, she was tiny and into everything like kittens always are… there was a common refrain of “you little shit” as we cleaned up one mess she made after another.  Well the name stuck and she was forever called “Little Shit” from that point on.

conkedwithcats She never would have guessed her name was a bad thing however because we said it with the utmost love.  She was my baby girl, but she spent as much time being my wife’s baby as she did mine.  There were so many nights I fell asleep with her purring loudly on our pillows.  She had the most amazing purr that you could literally hear like three rooms away.  For most of her life she always wanted to be somewhere near us, as evidenced by the two pictures above.  In fact I always tried to make sure she had room to lay down either at my feet or on the sofa near me.  You don’t realize how much you have changed your life to fit someone else.  She had all sorts of quirks, like while we were getting ready in the morning she would hop in the shower first and get a drink of water while the shower was running.  Actually that was only one of two ways she was willing to get a drink, the other being from a bright red cup we left on the bathroom floor.  There were many times in the middle of the night I woke up to the sound of that cup banging around, letting me know that I needed to get up and fill it up for her.

Some Rough Times

lilshit We have had two boy cats that had thyroid issues, so we were well aware of the tell tale signs.  A bit over two years ago we started seeing them in her, so we got her into the vet and had been treating her with a topical cream that I had to smear into her ear morning and night.  She was an absolute trooper and stayed still as I “greased” her ears as I referred to it.  About one in three cats experience some digestive problems associated with thyroid disease, so when she started having issues with inappropriate elimination… we thought it was all tied to the issues as a whole.  It became a nightly task for me to come up and pick up the messes left by her during the day.  Frustrating as it might have been, she was worth every bit of the effort.  Over the last two weeks however it had gotten noticeably worse.  She was spending pretty much all of her time sleeping on the couch, and then barely making it off the couch before having to go potty.  Yesterday afternoon we took her into the vet to see if maybe we needed to tweak the dose of thyroid medicine again.

Little shit had always been a waddly cat with a huge belly, and we always attributed it to her just being built “stocky” she reminded us of one of those strong country women, that while they might not win a beautify competition had the sheer presence to get job on the farm done.  As she lost weight her belly became more distended, which again we attributed to her odd body shape.  However upon seeing it the vet was immediately concerned.  Upon taking some X-Rays the news was pretty grim.  There was a massive growth in her stomach region pushing in on her bowels and likely causing pain to eat and got to the bathroom as well.  With her age there was nothing really surgery wise that they would recommend as the likelihood of recovery was pretty slim.  We were left with the extremely hard choice of either taking her home and waiting for her to get worse and die, or letting her go.  She had always been a very clean girl, with extremely preferences in her potty habits.  She hated a dirty litter box, and there were certain kinds of litter that she absolutely refused to use.  I could tell the last year was rough on her, because when she was force to used to bathroom in a bad place there was a look of panic on her face.  With the extreme increase over the last two weeks it felt like we were not terribly far from her messing herself in her sleep, and that is something she would not have wanted to happen.

kitties_sunning So we made the decision that seemed like it was going to be the best for her.  She had struggled with many things over the last few years.  She was struggling to move around the house, and we had to install pet stairs on the sofa for her to get up and down easily.  She had not slept with us for about a month, spending nearly 24 hours a day sleeping in my chair on the sofa, snuggled into blankets that I am sure smelled like me.  When we tried carrying her to bed, she would last for a bit but ultimately hop down and return to the sofa.  Cats do an amazing job of hiding what ails them… and I think she was trying to keep away from us from showing how much she hurt.  I wish I could have fixed her, made it all better…  but I couldn’t this time.  Truth is she has probably always had this mass in her belly, and we always thought it was just her unique shape.  This might have been the first time she ever had an x-ray… and unfortunately it happened far too late.  I wish I could go back in time and have caught this earlier, but I am not really sure how we could have known.  All I know is that I lost one of my best friends, and one of the sweetest animals we will likely ever have.  Yesterday it felt like my world was falling apart, and I am still not sure if the gravity has really hit me.  Laying down last night, as I called for the cats to come to bed… I had to stop myself from yelling for Little Shit.  We will miss you baby girl.

AggroChat Episode #34

I am so thankful to the awesome people that I record with.  During the day yesterday I was not sure if I could go on that night and record a podcast.  Then something happened over twitter.  Someone mentioned me stating that they had found the podcast that day and was really enjoying it.  Turns out they listened from show 33 to 24… so some 14 hours of our podcast in a row.  I have to say hearing that greatly improved my day and gave me that push to keep going last night.  I just was not sure if I could be my normally jolly self, and carry the show…  so Kodra stepped up and did an excellent job as master of ceremonies.  Actually he did a phenomenal job matching pretty much everything that I normally do and then adding his own flourish.

There was much discussion of Final Fantasy XIV as usual with Raven talking about completing her second Novus weapon and beginning a second Nexus grind, and several of us talking about our victory over Ultros and solid attempts on Tier 5 in Binding Coil of Bahamut.  I talk World of Warcraft raiding, and looking forward to beginning the Highmaul Raid after missing Thursday and my raids first two boss kills.  We talk Heroes of the Storm, since this week they finally saw fit to give Rae an invite.  That game is exceptionally fun and better suited for a more casual gamer than League of Legends is.  Over the course of the week we have played quite a bit of it and talk about our personal hero preferences and playstyles.  Kodra runs a much tighter ship than I seem to, because we actually clocked in at just barely over an hour once editing was finished.  Extra special thanks to Kodra for steering the ship while I couldn’t quite muster the oomph to do so.