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Tiny Featherballs

June 3, 2016 by Belghast

Babby Birbs

Right now the highlight of our backyard adventures is the fact that my wife found a nest full of babies. I am guessing these are “Babby” Robins, largely because anytime I got near the nest a Robin would make a horrible racket I assume trying to drive me away. The cute little things have been trained well because they went from happily playing around with each other to being completely still the moment I got anywhere near them. I am guessing that is a defense mechanism to freeze up completely as to keep motion from attracting a predator. They are freaking adorable and they are in a location where we can pretty easily watch them as they do their stuff. There is a leaf in the way so I had to get pretty close to get this clear of a shot, but as far as seeing their general well being we can track that from the comfort of our patio. I am absolutely certain there are more babies out there, but I am guessing this might be the only group that is actually inhabiting one of our bushes… that they probably mistook for a tree considering how overgrown they were. It makes me wonder if there have been Robins nesting in it all this time. I know last hear there was a group of Robins that nested in a gap in the stonework on the side of our house near the garage. Unfortunately a huge windstorm came up and the next morning I found that nest on the ground with both eggs cracked open. I am kinda worried about how precarious this nest looks, but I guess since they have already hatched and are already fat little feather balls… hopefully they could function if something happened to the nest.

I talked yesterday about the batch of flowers that I thought were the first fatality of the backyard. Sure enough all of the red flowers died out, and the white ones looked pretty sickly for a bit. However yesterday after finally getting some solid sun, the white ones seem to be pulling out just fine. It is my hope that now that we have freed up most of the space from the dead plant, that the white flower will go ahead and fill that space in. I snapped this photo largely because of the droplets of water on the pedal. All of the other flowers seem to be thriving which is awesome, especially after getting some tasty sunlight. Honestly I wonder if the red one struggled not because of the watering situation but due to the fact that we went several days without much direct sunlight. In any case the backyard is just as peaceful and relaxing as ever… with the slight problem of it being insanely muggy. The pool however seems to have finally warmed up so I am looking forward to using it in the near future. I had stuff to do last night or I would have potentially taken a dip.

Challenge of Thursday

On Thursday nights I have a standing date with Jex and Squirrel to do some Challenge of Elders, and often times a Nightfall. Now the entire idea behind this is just to make sure that no matter what we get at least one set of characters through the Challenge of Elders that week. Often times folks start running these like mad on Tuesday nights, a night where I already have a commitment in the form of the FFXIV Pony Farm/Raid night. So that means I miss out on a bunch of the easy clan pick up group action. Now most weeks I slide into another Clan group without problem, but we simply set aside this night as a way of making sure that we get at least one set of drops from the challenge. I look forward to the night because I greatly enjoy hanging out with Squirrel and Jex, because the two of them are the folks that revitalized Destiny for me and introduced me to the amazing Axioma clan. Last night we got started a little earlier which means we also had time to squeeze in a Nightfall afterwards. This weeks Challenge included a score bonus for super abilities, so a couple of us were rocking the Bad Juju as a way of feeding our super/orb generation machine. One of the rounds we managed to score around 50,000 points which I am pretty damned proud of. Unfortunately we still were just shy of the 90,000 armor score, which allowed us to have one match where we broke out our Sleeper Stimulants and just tore down the bosses.

Aegis of the Reef

Darkblade Helm

As far as drops worth mentioning… I picked up a 330 Aegis of the Reef, which is the Taken themed Pulse rifle. So far I have to say I am in love with this thing and it dropped with a solid set of perks. In the first slot it came with Send It and Reinforced Barrel… which since the gun already has decent stock stability I have chosen Send It. In the second tier it came with Full Auto, which is an interesting perk to get on an already stable pulse rifle, but unfortunately you can really burn through your ammo reserves quickly. In the last slot it has a very interesting situational case of Third Eye and Life Support, letting me swap between the two based on what I need worse. For the time being I am rocking Third Eye because I love having radar up all of the time. When we got around to running the Nightfall I managed to pick up a second Darkblade Helm, this one sitting at 335 with almost exactly the same stat package as my original one that was only sitting at 305. It was a straight upgrade and I guess I will wear it for awhile to get it nice and upgraded as an option. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed running around with this helmet just because it looks cool. All in all it was a pretty great night, and through all of our shenanigans I managed to gain rank from Variks, Vanguard, Future War Cult and the Cryptarch netting me a bunch of random infusables and legendary marks.

Farewell Flower

June 2, 2016 by Belghast

First Casualty

One of my big concerns about our trip last weekend was not so much the long lag in blog posts… but the lack of ability to take care of my “flower babies”. I have become oddly emotionally invested in the lives of our flowers, and while our animals are super hardy and resilient… flowers seem to constantly teeter on the brink of death. Some of our more thirsty flowers I had been watering morning and evening just to make sure they were nice and happy, and unfortunately it is an insane request to ask someone else to do that. So we left Friday hoping everything would be fine, and my flowers would survive until I got back. For the most part things are fine but we have a few of these “c word I cannot pronounce” plants… I think it is something like Catharanthus. We got them as hanging plants… and the purple/pink mixture and yellow/orange mixtures are still thriving. However over our disappearance the red/white mixture started to struggle. In fact the entire red plant withered and died, and in truth given how happy the others seem to be I don’t feel like I can really blame it on the care.

The plant probably would have struggled even if I was there babying it along. However it still is a little sad to see it… and while we removed as much of the dead plant as we could… and by dead I mean spaghetti brittle stems… the white half of the planting seems to be struggling as well. My hope was that by removing the dead plant it would give the thriving plant more room to spread out. The other awkward problem we are having is… it is raining constantly and it is hard striking a balance of when we should and should not water ourselves…. and when the rain water is good enough. I realize the plantings that we have currently are annuals and at some point they will all die out, but I am not looking forward to seeing it. Of the two of us… I am definitely the nurturer, and I just want to take care of the flowers so that they live forever. Even thought I know that is not something that is actually going to happen. The other flowers are lovely however, and if the white half of the planting does die as well we will likely replace it with something else in that planter.

Senor Sabotender

As far as gaming goes, last night I split time between Destiny and Final Fantasy XIV. I feel like I am still getting into the swing of things after returning from our trip, and as a result I have wound up getting super tired significantly earlier than normal. I am sure the extra sleep isn’t hurting me either, so I am largely indulging in the earlier bedtime. As far as Destiny goes I spent a bit of time piddling around on my Hunter and running strikes to knock out some quests. On both the Warlock and Hunter I have really done very little of the post level cap missions that the game throws at you, and as a result I don’t have legendary artifacts on either of them. This is the single slot that is dragging down my gear score the most, so I attempted to solo some Court of Oryx. Unfortunately I kept getting the twins, which for whatever reason is very hard for me to solo as a hunter. I initially summoned thinking that folks were actively running court, however as soon as I popped the coin I saw the familiar animation of them going to orbit. I did however knock out several strikes towards the “run 5 strikes” quest.

As far as FFXIV goes I decided I should probably spend my evening working on the current event that is going on in the Gold Saucer. There is a murder mystery that ends up rewarding you an /eureka emote that makes you look like the stereotypical MMO quest giver with an exclamation mark over your head. Instead of showing you this emote however I am showing a picture of Memusu Tsuuma who I happened to log into the game the other night standing right beside. I love seeing orange names while I am out running around, though so many of them I cannot remember exactly where I knew them from. That was not the cause with Memu however, how I have absolutely abducted into all of my regular multi-game shenanigans. Something I noticed about hanging out in gold saucer…. random people come up to me and give me a hug. I am guessing it is the Bunny Samurai thing, which has become sort of my trademark look. As far as the questing went, it took a long time to gather up all of the evidence needed for the mystery… but thankfully the game will tell you when you have found all ten of the items with a little message saying that you cannot find anything else of use. Now I just need to devote some time to finishing out the 3.2 story line to be ready for when 3.3 lands on supposedly the 7th.

Letter to New Bloggers

June 1, 2016June 1, 2016 by Belghast

A Newbie Month

This is one of those mornings where I apparently forgot to set my alarm clock and am damned thankful that apparently I only woke up thirty minutes late. So everything feels rushed and it is not exactly the proper mood for a contemplative post. Today marks a few things… firstly it is my mothers birthday and I have already remembered to send her a text so she would have a message waiting on her when she wakes up. I will of course follow up later with a proper phone call… but I wanted to get that early strike in there first. Secondly this is the beginning of the rescheduled Newbie Blogger Initiative month. This is something I have participated in since 2013, and feel a sense of obligation each year to do so again. The problem is that after all these years I am questioning if I have any fresh wisdom to give out to the participants. Blogging is one of those things that while we can commune as a group… there comes a point where you are sitting in front of the tyranny of the blank page and only you can push through it. We all have mornings when thinking let alone blogging is a difficulty, and for me this is one of them. However as per my own statement… I am going to push through and make something happen.

So You Want to Blog

It seems like almost every year I start the proceedings off with something along the lines of that paragraph. The truth is, only you can really look inside of yourself and see if there is a blog there waiting to spring forth into the world. For me personally… I guess I was always a blogger and just never quite realized it. I was extremely prone to posting “big damned walls of text” in on any subject I happened to be passionate about. Early on the topic of choice were the White Wolf World of Darkness role-playing books or the Palladium system. Later it became games as I even started writing reviews of Saturn and Playstation games for a small emulation and general gaming website. I really came into my own when it came to MMOs and I haunted the forums of pretty much all of the games I played be it Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes or eventually World of Warcraft. I had this burning drive to talk about the things I was interested in and to share my ideas, and while a lot of my topics were fostering the community… a lot of them were just talking about my experiences.

On the forums for the server I used to play on… I became one of the white hats that regular rode in to chastise the evil doers, but at the same time freely shared game advice if I had any to give. If you have ever found yourself doing these things… chances are you really do have a blog inside of you waiting to get out. Now the real challenge is trying to direct that unfocused information into a meaningful form. Many bloggers will tell you that the secret to success is to pick a niche and stick with it… and become the be all end all site to go to for that subject. That is probably some absolute truth, but it is also something I was never terribly good at. This blog after all launched as a “Warrior Tanking Blog” just about as niche as you can possibly get… but the problem is I felt like a fraud doing that. I was no real expert in being a warrior, nor was I an expert in tanking. Both were things that largely came naturally to me, and it was baffling for me to try and explain what was largely pure instinct. So I took a step back and decided to refocus on Raiding… until I realized that I wasn’t a particularly brilliant raider either. We did what we did to win and at our own pace, which isn’t exactly a sterling example of the craft. As a result I kept setting up branding and then knocking them down… until I finally wound up with this simply being “my blog” without any other pretense, because “bel saying things” was a focus that I could actually stick with.

You’ll Need a Name

Ultimately where I am going with this… is that you are going to need a name to call your blog. Some people have created perfectly brilliant names… that they quickly outgrow when they go through a similar digression like my own blog did. I am lucky that “Tales of the Aggronaut” was fairly generic and that I could keep adapting it pretty easily to whatever I happened to be doing. Aggronaut was my attempt at a clever name for a tank… and since I rarely don’t tank at least a little it has continued to work. Other folks have created a perfectly lovely name for say a Warlock blog… only to find out later that playing a Warlock is not their primary calling in life and as a result they have to come up with something else. Ultimately my advice I guess would be to come up with something that represents you the writer, and not necessarily the subject. Clever names are awesome, but only so long as they actually are something that you feel comfortable sitting down and writing posts behind. There are an awful lot of famous blogs out there… with completely boring or descriptive names.

I think most people envision brilliant branding of their website from the starting gate, but in truth you are probably better of just picking some minimal window dressing until you get a feel for where exactly you are going. I maybe jumped into this whole concept with two feet hitting the ground in that I bought my domain name and had it completely set up and ready to go before I wrote a single post. I guess that makes sense given that I write code for a living, but in truth you don’t need to do any of this quite yet. Your best option is to simply lean on good ole WordPress.com or Blogger.com rather than to try and do the self hosting thing right out of the gate. I lean heavily towards WordPress simply because you have a lot more options for if you decide to transition to self hosted at a later date. Technically you can do the same thing with Blogger but the process is less seamless and from what I have read in “how to” articles way more hassle than the other option. There is of course Tumblr as an option, but you are exposing yourself to a way more problematic community right out of the gate than I would suggest for any fledgling blogger.

You’ll Need Readers

Now for the hard part… you’ve named yourself and set up a site… now you need to hang out yours “open for business” sign and wait. This is the part of the equation that can drive you completely insane when you realize that no one is actually reading what you are writing. This is going to happen to everyone, but the positive of starting a blog during this month means that the other bloggers are going to at least help try and get you started. Self promotion is one of those things that I am particularly bad at. In theory you want to put your blog in front of as many eyeballs as you can, which means syndicating it to pretty much all of the available options. I syndicate my posts each day to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google Plus… and this is essentially like casting a net out into the water. If you get a nibble more than likely folks will add your blog to their RSS feed and be done with it… and then you have a potential reader for life. That is unless you do something so horrific as to cause them to go through the effort of actually removing a blog. For me at least… once a blog makes it to my RSS feed I am pretty much going to read them forever.

The problem is… your stats will always seem insignificant. You can drive yourself completely mad looking at them for too long when you watch as this post that you spent five minutes on got ten times the readers than that gem you spent several days on. Amassing regular readers is a bit of a waiting game, but I will say that there are a few factors that seem to factor in. Firstly you need to have some sort of a schedule. Since taking my recent breaks my readership has gone to shit, but previously when I was doing the post every single day thing I had a fairly steady stream of readers each and every day. Secondly you have to give them something interesting to read, and this can come from several different directions. My personal theory is that if someone is going to read you for long one of two things are going to be happening. Either you are posting such a wealth of information about a very specific subject as to turn yourself into the “resource” for that community, or they are sticking around because they care about you as a person. I’ve tended to focus on the second part of that statement, and as a result have shared some super personal information with my readers. It sometimes works, but ultimately you are going to have to figure out the points that work for you. The problem with giving blogging advice is no two blogs are the same… nor do they even have the same goals. We can throw information at you, but you will have to figure out which bits are relevant to you.

I wish you luck and look forward to reading your blog

Bel

Regularly Playing

March 7, 2025May 27, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday I decided to start “truing up” my “Regularly Playing” section of my hot bar. This area has been through many changes throughout the years and the whole idea was just to let readers know what I am actually playing right now. It originally started as me simply i-framing in the information from Raptr… but since I don’t actually use that server or any other equivalent games tracker that isn’t going to work. I shift games quite often, and I wanted a way to indicate what games are currently “on tap”. So this shifted from “Now Playing” to “Frequently Playing” and eventually wound up with the verbiage of “Regularly Playing”. The goal now is to evaluate the list once a month and make adjustments to keep it “mostly true”. I realize I am finger quoting a lot of shit in this post, but the truth is I come home and log into whatever seems enjoyable unless I have a specific activity planned that night. Over time some stuff fades away and other games get added, so I thought as part of this process I would talk a bit about where I am currently in each game on the list, as well as a bit about any that I might have removed or didn’t quite make the cut.

Destiny: The Taken King

I am still just irrationally enthralled by this game, though over the last week I have not played quite so much because I am starting to get back into MMOs once more. This week has been all about Iron Banner, because I am trying my best to get my Hunter to Rank 5… in spite of not being here for the weekend due to travel plans. The major goal of the month was to hit 335 light and I have managed to do just that on the Titan, however I am still lagging on the Warlock and Hunter with the primary slot that they need the worst being literally any legendary quality artifact. I need to sort out what I can do to get one of those because I have plenty of infusion fodder to feed into an artifact… they just have 320 blues currently equipped. The only real frustration that I have with Destiny right now is that Bungie is apparently shit at math. We were told that several activities would drop an item equal to your current light level of better. However now sitting at 335, there are still a truly silly number of activities that drop 334 items. From Challenge of Elders turn-ins last night I got both a 334 weapon and 334 arms, and from an exotic engram I got a 334 secondary… all while showing up in game as 335 light. This is pretty maddening since 334 is useful for infusion if you are desperate but what you want to see is 335s so you can bring up ALL of your gear to that light level. Regardless I am still loving the game and I am hoping that the next big patch will address this problem. Also hoping that when I get back from my trip I can finish the push to Rank 5 because I am roughly halfway to Rank 4 at the moment.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

This marks the second week of me being “back” at least as far as doing the Tuesday night raid content is involved. I am still very much in “catch up” mode, but I am enjoying myself. As far as downtime activities I have started the grind to get elemental crystals for the first Anima weapon, aka the Relic 2.0 or 3.0 depending upon how you are counting. I am loving being Lala-Bel once more and I guess whatever funk I was going through that was keeping me from playing MMOs has passed because I am enjoying myself again. I very much need to be doing a nightly Expert but that has yet to happen quite yet. After yesterdays post however I found a whole slew of people willing to be tagged and pulled in for expert running. Now I just need to get back from this weekend and get started on this proper. Also apologies ahead of time for the nightmares that will be induced by the creepy-assed Calcabrina dolls.

Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls

Season Six is very much winding down to a close, and I have managed to accomplish pretty much everything that I could have hoped for… at the very least I got my additional stash tab. I have friends who still have things to knock out to get theirs so I am very much in a help as needed mode. That said I am still poking my head into the game on a regular basis to farm for Menagerist Goblins…. something I have yet to actually see. The highlight of the season was something that I did not even realize was a thing until it dropped. I guess the cosmic wings are among the rarest item this time around.. because it is RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG. You have to get one of the rainbow goblins to show up… and then have to get it to drop the Whimsydale portal… and then have to get a specific mob to show up in there to get them. In any case pretty much any time I get a Whimsydale portal I holler at anyone who happens to be on to come along with me now just in case they drop again. I’ve made it way further this season than at any other time… the only thing I am not looking forward to is trying to merge my current seasonal bank into my non-seasonal bank once more.

Overwatch

This is the newest addition to the list and also the one I have spent the least time playing. This week was the official launch of Overwatch, and my friends list has been completely on fire about this game. I played it enough in beta to know that I liked it, and then ceased to play it any further waiting for launch. Now that launch is here however… I have all of these competing priorities. The game is really good and so far I have yet to find a champion that I don’t like… pending I give them a serious chance. I was largely diametrically opposed to D.Va largely because the mech looked like a killer whale mixed with a guardian mode veritech. However after getting the carbon fiber skin from a loot box… and giving her a proper try I found out that I really enjoyed it. The game is probably the best designed shooter I have played in a very long time. The thing that is going to keep me from really sinking my teeth in however… is it has no PVE/Exploration gameplay like Destiny. If I could have Destiny set in this universe with character progression and collecting awesome weapons… I would be completely hooked. This will likely always be a game relegated to the “once or twice a week” column for me largely because I am just not that competitive. Earning loot boxes is a cool reason to keep playing, but eventually there will come a point where I run out of things I care about that came come from lootboxes.

World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor

This is the backburneryist of backburner games for me right now. I’ve gotten in the habit of logging in daily and collecting my free money from the garrison… especially now that I put a massive dent in my finances and bought the Grand Expedition Yak. That said every now and then I do play one of the characters that I am still in the process of leveling. I have this grand idea that it would be fun to roll into Legion with a full list of level 100 characters, however I somehow doubt that is going to happen… much the way as it has never actually happened during any of the other expansions. However that said the alt of choice right now is my druid that I am slowly pushing up. In truth I am in a holding pattern until Legion and largely not paying a ton of attention to the game in the meantime.

Things Removed From List

Elder Scrolls Online

The truth is the MMO Funk hit and I never really returned to playing this regularly. I still very much want to, but it is going to need another lag in some other game for me to really sink my teeth into it. The game that exists today is amazing and they have done a really good job of keeping the content fresh. The biggest problem is I really don’t have anyone to play with over there on the North American server cluster. Now if I were playing on the EU side… I know lots of active and happy guilds. I would absolutely play with the Whitestar folks were that really a viable option.

Warframe

While initially interesting to me, this game just did not sink its teeth into me the way it did the rest of the AggroChat crew. There is just something that I don’t like about it… and I have tried to reason out what exactly it was. I still have an account and still have some cool stuff on it, so I might at a future date return to it, but it never really replaced my love for Destiny.

The Division

While technically it was never actually on the sidebar… it probably should have been. I was all about The Division at launch and that excitement did not even manage to carry me through to the level cap. I am sitting around level 26 and I am just not sure what is holding me back. Largely the content at that level doesn’t feel nearly as interesting or rewarding as it did at lower levels. The packs of mobs out in the world seem to be scaled for group play, and when you down folks… they don’t seem to be dropping anything interesting. In theory I could hold my nose and grind through it… but what would I be grinding for? I am so far behind the curve in gear and it doesn’t feel like the game really gives you a lot of great options to catch up. There has been a sequence of changes that I really didn’t feel like had me in mind. At first I liked that it felt like you could progress through the game on many different vectors and end up at the same loot goal. However the crafting material nerf really hurt that feel for me. This is something I might return to later, once they offer some Destiny like catch up mechanisms to give players a hand up.