discord Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Welcome to Spoopy Town

November 8, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! Sometimes I have an idea that gets stuck in the back of my head, and then I share that idea with a friend… and they convince me to make that idea happen. This is one of those times. I’ve talked about how the paranormal and macabre is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me, and how I deeply enjoy watching various ghost hunting youtube videos. I’ve discovered through my posting about things… that there are a lot of others out there that also enjoy this sort of thing. It is at this point that I joined forces with my good friend Jaedia and then shortly thereafter Rini to bring this project to life.

I get that the very last thing we all need in our lives is “Yet Another Discord”, but I offer you humbly… yet another Discord to clog up your sidebar. Basically, this Discord has two focuses… discussion of the Spooky as an Entertainment medium, and the Spooky as the unknown and unknowable. We’ve divided up the categories in such a way as to separate the Fiction from Non-Fiction type discussions.

This list is of course subject to change, but right now it looks a little something like this:

Spooky Entertainment
- Creepypasta and SCP
- Films and Series
- Books and Comics
- Args and Tabletop
- Video Games
- Music and Stage
The Paranormal
- Cryptids and Monsters
- Ghosts and Investigations
- Folklore and Legends
- Other Unexplained
Harmless Conspiracies
- Unexplained Visitors
- Historical Mysteries
- Other Dimensions

If this seems like your sort of thing, then I welcome you to join. First I guess let’s go over the rules. When you join our Discord you are presented with a Server Rules channel and in order to progress further you have to accept the terms. I feel like they are pretty straightforward but cover a lot of bases to protect our members.

Server Rules

Hey Friends! Welcome to the Spoopy Town Server

I love the spooky, paranormal, and unexplained, and am a pretty big aficionado of Horror as a genre. The goal behind this server is to create a comfortable and respectful place to explore those topics. Coming from a place of respect is the most important goal of this project because there are lots of different ideas about what goes bump in the night. We are not here to judge, but also not here to force our own belief systems upon others. If that sounds like an interesting adventure that you might want to embark upon then I suggest you keep reading.

In order to maintain the right vibe we have a few rules that we expect our members to follow. This community is universally supportive of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals. This community is also targeting adults as some of the themes we discuss might be scary, confusing, or harmful to those under the legal age of eighteen.

Here are some of the things that we will not tolerate:

Anything Illegal
Discussion of Current Politics or Religion
Racist, Sexist, Ableist, or Homophobic Remarks
Inappropriate uploads, profile images, names, or emojis including:
- Sexually Explicit
- Violence/Gore
- Racist/Sexist/Ableist/Homophobic
Abusive Behavior; Bullying, Trolling, or Name-Calling
The promotion of Cryptocurrency or NFTs

Content Warnings

To ensure everyone’s safety and comfort within the borders of Spoopy Town, please utilize the content warnings and spoiler tags within the server. While this is not a way of skirting the above restrictions, it is a helpful tool for discussing certain things within the context of paranormal events. Here are some examples of topics that you should be mindful of, but for anything outside the bounds of this list, I suggest you use your best judgment.

Suicide
Self-harm
Alcohol and Drug Use
Sexual Assault
Violence/Abuse
Well Known Phobias

If that sounds like the sort of place you are interested in hanging out, we would be more than happy to have you. Like I said before when you first join, you will be presented with the rules above, clicking the Yes button will give you access to all of the channels. Clicking the No button will place you into The Void without access to anything… and I am afraid it is a somewhat permanent choice. If for some reason you accidentally clicked the wrong button, ping me and I can reset your account back to the default state.

Anyways that is a lot of introduction but here is the link to the server. Enjoy… or don’t whatever is cool.

Bathtubs and Nonsense

February 27, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve been partaking in some serious nonsense of late, not the least of which has been Dragon Quest Builders… and streaming me playing Dragon Quest Builders. I figured I would lead off with this screenshot because it is absolutely amazing. My townsfolk decided to build me a bath tub… which I immediately installed in my private master suite. So the funny thing about Twitch in its most modern incarnation is… it makes it silly easy to be an Affiliate. From the moment you start streaming it starts ticking off little achievements, which in some bizarro world way made me want to get them. One of them is called “Path to Affiliate” and it shows up as a little quest of sorts in the sidebar of the achievements page. It includes…

Stream 8 hours in the last 30 days
Stream for 7 unique days in the last 30 days
Reach 3 average viewers in the last 30 days
Reach 50 followers

The last one was easy because I have had my account so damned long that I have more than 50 pity follows at this point if nothing else. In theory once you qualify and get that achievement checkmark… you are done. Lately I have been dabbling around with streaming, and one by one each of the boxes got checked… and now I am apparently an affiliate. I am not entirely certain why I did this thing, but it happened. Now I actually sorta want to try and come up with a proper schedule, which is super difficult because with my managerial duties my arrive home time is super variable, as is whether or not I feel like playing any games in “live” mode.

This did force me to contemplate what would happen if someone actually subbed to me. As a result I named them appropriately to attempt to encourage people that this is not a thing that they should actually do. I keep expecting Twitch to lower some hammer on me for discouraging people from giving them money. Basically I would feel super awkward to actually take any money from anyone. This is mostly a thing I did for myself… and in part because it will allow me to create a spiffy twitch emojii if I so choose. I am not even sure what else Affiliate includes otherwise, mostly it was just… a thing I felt like doing because it was available.

Now however I find myself involved in all sorts of other nonsense as a result. I talked yesterday a bit about StreamLabs OBS… or SLOBS as apparently people are calling it… why people why. I’ve also been dabbling with their custom Chatbot that is apparently what happened when they gobbled up Ankhbot. As a result I now have the beginnings of a custom channel bot named MrAggroBot that will do some of the basic functionality you see in chat bots… and at least in theory also works on Discord.

Similarly I have set up a “BelStreamTime” Discord with the sole purpose of joining it while streaming, and as a result allowing anyone else who cares to hang out with me join as well. I realize no one actually needs a new discord to join… but I also did not want to dirty up any of the other discords I am part of with my streaming nonsense. The highlight of the night had to be getting everything actually working so that the Chatbot joined my quickie Twitch test stream, accepted commands and also announced that I went live through the Discord. It was more proof of concept than anything useful but I sorta felt like Doctor Frankenstein bringing life into the world… if that life was complete and utter nonsense.

As far as doing actual gaming stuff… I grouped up with Grace and took down some low rank monsters. I never really reached the point where I farmed Low Rank content the way I now do High Rank, and as a result I am missing a ton of parts to make lower level items required to make the higher level versions. I’ve been working slowly on building a Tobi Kadachi Longsword for its lightning damage, and we wound up farming Tobi a bunch of times for parts. From there we started doing more esoteric hunts, like an Anjanath and a Pukei Pukei with a 30 minute timer in which I tried to hammer. I am not exactly completely effective as hammer, but it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately I apparently completely phased out the fact that Tam was trying to invite me to a party and wound up heading to bed around 9:20. It was a fun night, but also one where I did a bunch of silly things with minimal use to anyone. So yeah… I am apparently a Twitch Affiliate now and am starting to build up the infrastructure needed to do “stuff and things” on that platform.

Week Three Thoughts

November 15, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was if I am counting correctly the third reset we have experienced on the PC version of Destiny 2, and as a result that seems like an interesting time to take a sort of postmortem of my experiences so far. In fact I apparently also made a similar post three weeks after the PS4 launch, that could serve as an interesting comparison. At that point I was sitting at 291 light with the rest of my characters sitting in the 285ish range, and now I am knocking on the door of 305 with my Titan sitting at 304 without completing any of his weekly milestones, and the rest of my characters in the 300-302 range. In fact it was not until October 18th if I am looking at my posts correctly that I could hit 304 which I believe was somewhere in week six after release. There are a bunch of variables at work here, namely that I am trying to get a Nightfall every week and I did not do that before. Similarly I am dabbling in the raid and did not do that before… however the raid itself is not providing much in the way of gear yet other than a higher than normal level engram every week. What I am missing however is that after the second or third week I had access to a raid engram every week on the console side and we have yet to finish the raid on PC side but are getting close. I think when you balance everything out I have had access to roughly the same amount of gear so it isn’t simply that I am getting more of it more frequently. According to WastedOnDestiny.com I’ve spent 126 hours playing the PS4 version and 84 hours so far playing PC… so all things considered I have maybe been playing a little bit more on the PC than I was on the PS4 at this point.

Now the piece that is much harder to account for is ancestral knowledge. By playing Destiny 2 on the PS4 I essentially gave myself an extended beta test period with the game and by playing it as hard as I did I gleaned a bunch of knowledge that I then attempted to share on my blog. I know how things work and more than that I know how to best spend my time at least in the early game when I probably wasted some potential power gains on doing certain things too soon. In the console I was in a rush to see and do everything and now I more or less know what I like playing with and what it takes to get those things again. As a result I am now sitting on stockpiles of tokens that I can then use later as leverage when playing the 300 engram game trying for max level loot. I for example am sitting on 131 EDZ tokens largely because I know there isn’t much on that loot table that I don’t already have. On the converse I burn down my stock of Crucible and Vanguard tokens as soon as I get them because I am still looking for weapon drops from those activities. I could also be doing a lot more, like for example I don’t think I have touched Ikora’s memories at all during the PC launch and they are an additional draw at Vanguard loot that I should potentially be tapping. Essentially I progressed so much faster than I was expecting to… and I would chock that up to experience were it not for the fact that a lot of the Aggrochat crew are also progressing at similar levels. Are they simply getting the benefit of my experience as well, or did the PC game loosen the throttle a bit and let everyone’s item levels drift a little higher than was the case on the console?

The Achilles heel of the PC launch seems to be something that was almost completely overlooked. Destiny 2 added this fairly detailed clan system that allows players to benefit from the actions of other clan members… but does absolutely nothing for helping them communicate. What I mean by that is that while we have a weird text chat system on the Bungie website… that does not exist anywhere in game. The only options for chat in game are /fireteam, /team, and /whisper leaving out the very critical /clan. I mean I realize Bungie is still in denial that they made an MMO but this is the most basic functionality that PC MMO gamers expect from a game. Blizzard introduced this whole “social” section of the battle.net client… but that doesn’t work in game either leaving this huge gap for now to glue people together. Prior to launch I shared out the Beyond the Light Discord as a sort of multi-clan hangout and several weeks in I am still thinking that is going to be the best option to help people connect up for groups. I feel like they largely did not consider how vastly different the PC community would be and what sort of cultural norms we would expect going into the game. The end result however seems to be “use voicechat” as the way to connect up with folks… and there are just times where I don’t want to be talking on voice chat. My dream for Blizzard games is to have some sort of guild chat that spans across all of their games and allows me to talk to people playing Diablo 3 or World of Warcraft while I am playing Destiny 2. However that dream is seemingly still a long time coming, but in the mean time… Bungie please put in /clan.

Beyond the Light

October 10, 2017 by Belghast

For the last few weeks I have been making contact with a lot of players in preparation for the launch of Destiny 2 on the PC platform. One of the patterns that I have noticed is that while there will be a ton of us playing, there are a significant number of different clans in the works. Even among my own guild-mates it has been decided to go with a Greysky Armada clan rather than joining another, so I will end up splitting time between that on the PC and Tequila Mockingbird on the PS4. Basically the common theme that I kept seeing was that we were going to be a pretty fragmented bunch going forward. Ages ago I created the Beyond the Light discord, and then never really did anything with it. The theory behind it was to have a clan agnostic place for folks to come together and get help doing stuff in Destiny. Since the early marketing material for Destiny 2 talked about us losing our connection with the light… it seemed like a really fitting name. The idea is to create a sort of hub for our little corner of the gaming verse, and facilitate cross clan activities. The channel names themselves are pretty general purpose and I decided to follow a pattern of the various weapon foundries for voice channels. The idea being that anyone can use any channel for any purpose that is needed at the moment.

The reason why I chose a discord rather than a slack or even a new Blizzard Social area… is the fact that Destiny 2 PC based voice chat is horrible. I am not sure how many of you actually tried using this during the PC beta, but it was horrific. Currently we only have about fourteen members, but I figure the discord will grow as we get closer and closer to the PC launch. There are break out channels for the various classes and we’ve already gotten into some discussions on Warlocks and Titans thus far. I’ve largely treated the PS4 launch as a sort of extended paid beta process for the eventual PC launch, and I have attempted to gather up as much information as I could along the way. If nothing else it should be a good place to find people to go do heroic public quests with and maybe even eventually pick up raids. There are already Destiny themed discords out there, but honestly they felt huge and impersonal… or in the case of the one associated with the reddit… fairly toxic at times. I wanted to create a happy place to hang and enjoy this game with all of the people who may or may not share the same banner as me. Effectively everyone is welcome pending they behave themselves. There isn’t a lot of formal structure right now but I figure that will come with time.

The other big news of the week is that Iron Banner is back and its reset day! Like every other activity this one is going to be based on a token system, and I have to say I really like this. There are a lot of complaints from players who like seeing weapons drop, and technically they still do in modes like the Crucible. However I would far rather have a predictable path to get rewards that I can work my way towards than to rely entirely on luck. The other aspect of this that I absolutely love is the fact that tokens go into the shared account inventory, meaning you can grind out the rewards on one character and then swap over to another character to consume them. I personally plan on holding all of my Iron Banner tokens until I have completed the powerful rewards milestones for the week so that I can potentially get items at a higher light level than where I am currently standing. Right now I see a handful of weapons that look really interesting, including an Iron Banner themed version of my beloved Origin Story. Additionally I think the gear set this time is amazing for Titans at least, so I hope to gather up most of a set there as well. This evening my goal is to eat some Tikka Masala that I have going in the crock pot… and play a bunch of Iron Banner. Side note you should be able to double dip the Call to Arms weekly milestone while doing Iron Banner so if you have not unlocked that… I highly suggest you do Lord Shaxx’s two early crucible milestones so you can start working towards yet another luminous engram.