aggrochat

Conference Prep Work

As I mentioned yesterday morning my day was filled with helping my wife prepare for the conference this week.  One of the goofy things about a school system is that you cannot take for granted any two rooms being configured the same way.  I have no doubt that at one point or another they were probably all working exactly the same.  However a series of teachers with their own way of doing things has meant that no two projector systems were set up quite the same.  So over the course of the morning we went from room to room turning everything on, and making notes as to how exactly you got sound from the system, and video to the projector.  To add a monkey wrench in the works, some of the rooms had what is called an Elmo, which I guess is some sort of modern age version of the overhead projector.

Some of the systems routed through this device, others you simply had to switch the VGA port over to if it you wanted to use it.  In each room I left instructions on a sticky note as to how to access both Audio and Video, and where needed how to use the Elmo machine.  All of this said I will be around on the first day of the conference playing A/V support if someone has any issues.  I am not phenomenally good at this role, but I can usually figure things out.  Where things get dicey is in the few rooms that have bad connections run through the walls… and for those they were going to just have to deal with it.  Most of the rooms go from an RCA jack to an optical connection that gets run through the wall, and it sounds as though maybe some of the optical cables have been damaged over time.  The approved method of fixing this is apparently randomly wiggling the cords… which is probably what fractured the optical cables in the first place.

For the most part it took an hour or so per floor and then we broke for lunch.  The highlight of the day was getting to have spicy chicken and cheese tots from Rons.  The above picture represents the fruition of our work after lunch.  I should have taken a before photo because the room had been previous configured with tons of tables strewn about.  The tables didn’t fold and stack, but instead the top flipped up and you had to drive them carefully into the closets in a way as to compact them.  I am rather proud of just how compact we managed to get them in there.  The next thing was these heavy iron trays that the stacks of chairs sat on, which I carried into place and figured out a way to stack them in the closet as well.  Finally this allowed us to arrange the chairs all 180 of them in 12 rows of 15 chairs.  It was a busy day, but it looks awesome and is starting to feel ready for guests.

Weary Podcast

When Kodra finally came online we ran pretty late but I think we recorded an enjoyable podcast in spite of the overall tiredness that we all felt.    A major event that happened this week was the  complete and utter failure of the Yogventures kickstarter, and the scandal surrounding it.  We talk at length about this and the potential ramifications it has for kickstarter projects in general.  Additionally we talk about the Destiny Beta and FFXIV free weekends and how crazy it is when so many things are going on during one single weekend.  We also talk about how our sense of community has changed and that it seems to no longer be connected to one game, but instead we take it along with us.  Finally Kodra and I geek out talking about Wolfenstein New Order since he has recently played it.  We had to cut a few sections to trim down time, but we kept the best stuff in there and have it ready to listen to.

Frog Fractions

I feel like I might be the last person on the planet to have experienced this game.  For some time it has been coming up in both the podcast and just in regular conversation among my circle of friends, and I felt bad because I really did not give the game any time.  My patience for web browser played flash games is pretty much non-existent.  My line of thinking is, I cannot get away with playing this at work… so when I am home I would far rather be spending my time playing a “real” game instead of a web browser based one.  Granted that probably sounds a little harsh but I have yet to find a web based game that really provides me as meaningful of a gaming experience as a traditional PC or console game.  So when the absolute hype cycle surrounding the game happened I booted it up, clicked a few bugs saw some random shit appearing over their heads and walked away bored.  I guess I didn’t pay close enough attention to realize… there is some really strange shit going on in this game.  Be warned… there is no real way for me to talk about this game in any meaningful way without spoiling the fun.  If you have not played Frog Fractions you should do so now before you progress any further in this post.

The game starts out as this somewhat charming if not low tech game where you are trying to protect fruit, allowing them to ripen by keeping bugs from eating them.  You left click with your mouse to fire out your tongue, gobbling up the bugs and at the end of each round you earn points for each fruit you saved.  The ones that you did not save fall into the water, and at first there is nothing really you can do about this.  The moment at which the game starts to get odd…  is when you start getting power-ups.  Like the point at which I thought maybe this game was a bit strange was when I hit Cybernetic Brain.   You can also upgrade your lilypad into a turtle friend, that allows you to move around with WASD to catch the fruit as they ripen.  There is so much I don’t quite understand… like what the hell Zorkmids are or how you earn Indignity… which I assume is a bad thing.  At this point I kept clicking away with the help of the upgrades…  of which lock on targetting and static tongue seem to be the most game changing.

Then Shit Gets Weird

At some point you can unlock an upgrade that turns your turtle into a flying dragon… at which point the game suddenly becomes a bullet hell shooter.  So you fly around trying to avoid the multicolored balls while still gobbling up the bugs and trying to save the fruit from falling into the water.  By this point I had upgraded the fruit to durians… which smell bad, and cause the bugs to eat them more slowly.  This is the video game equivalent to Axe Cop, in that it seems like it was almost designed by using madlibs and a 8 year old kid.

It was at this point I figured out that I could go underwater….  where all the lost fruit was apparently waiting on the bottom of the lagoon.  You can see that apparently now the fruit score does not matter at all, because it now simply reads “Like a billion”.  I have no clue why but I made five or six passes through the fruit watching them all fail to register.  I thought maybe something would happen if I did it enough, but finally gave up on the process and went back up to bullet hell land.  One of the funniest things is the whole lock on vision upgrade.  First you get it, then you get the ability to uninstall it, and then you get the ability to reinstall it…  which finally unlocks the ability to uninstall it again.  Each time this happens it is not like the previous slot becomes available again… it just keeps tacking new upgrade slots onto the grid.  I kind of want to play again and see just how many times I can unlock and remove this option.

Starfox Has Nothing on Me

After a few more waves of bullet hell madness…  my dragon apparently decides to shoot off into outerspace.  So now I am inexplicably trying to save flying fruit, while dodging asteroids and bug attacks.  Apparently I am going to attack the bug homework… which is apparently “Bug Mars”.  All the while this phase is going on, various characters keep showing up and giving me words of advice in Starfox fashion…  I was disappointed that none of them told me to do a barrel roll (which tam will tell me is not a barrel roll at all).  This continued for six or so waves, all the while it getting harder to get at the bugs because my frog tongue could not go through the asteroids.

In the weirdest of possible events… some how I get captured and taken to Bug Court.  Where basically I am forced to choose between becoming a naturalized citizen of Bug Mars… or forced labor.  I am not sure you actually have a choice here, or if you are pretty much forced to become a citizen either way.  They ask you a series of questions about Bug Mars culture, and either I got really lucky or quite literally answering anything… is the correct answer.  Some of the responses are really damned funny, but man this is not anything I ever saw coming before playing this game.  In a way it kind reminds me of a modern version of “Takeshi’s Challenge”, and for those who have no ideal what this is you should totally watch the JonTron playthrough.

So there you have it… I am now apparently a naturalized Citizen of Bug Mars.  You would think that maybe this is as weird as the game gets, but you would be wrong.  Shortly after this I rode on the back of my dragon through an underwater world while a narrator explained to me the true meaning of boxing…  and how this modern punching thing is just a strange bastardization.  Which then lead me to a rocket ship…  and a text based adventure game.  This is the point at which I stopped playing this morning.  This game…  is insanity bottled.  I keep wondering just how deep the rabbit hole gets.  I mean like what is on the other side of the text adventure game.  The best thing about all of this is the fact that the name of the game is a complete and total lie.  Nothing at all about this game has to do with fractions.  Even if you have against my warning made it this far in my post without having played the game yourself…  I highly suggest you experience the madness for yourself.

#AggroChat #FrogFractions #SteampoweredSunday