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2013 Retrospective

January 1, 2014 by Belghast

Grand Experiment in Review

2012 was an extremely horrible year for me and at least professionally I would rank it as quite possibly the worst year I have ever had. I would put it as worse than the year I was out of work for six months after the dotcom crash. On September 11th 2012 my company suffered what they thought was a network attack, that only later the security guy pulled his head out of his ass and realized it was a regularly scheduled security scan… that he himself authorized. The results of this was a massive overreaction that caused me and my team to spend the rest of the year and a good chunk of the beginning of this year rebuilding damned near everything that touched the web. Why did we have to do this? Because they quite literally pulled the servers out of the racks and sent them to the FBI, leaving us next to nothing to work off of.

So next to that year, this year has seemed like an absolute dream. However it has been more than that for me. 2013 has been a year of personal growth and exploring new things. In April when I finally pulled my head above water after the “faux” security incident, I really wanted to make a break back into blogging. I fell off of the planet shortly after the security event and simply could not bring myself to write about anything. Coming back I devised what I called a “grand experiment”, namely to blog each and every day even if I didn’t think I had much to write about. At this point there are 237 posts categorized as “The Grand Experiment”, and without fail I have blogged every day even when it was a struggle to do so.

Has the experiment worked? Well functionally yes I have managed to blog every day, but more importantly has it provided an interesting stream of content? Quite honestly I don’t know. Most of the time I feel like I am a little kid writing to a make believe audience. When I talk to someone who mentions something I have written… I am always shocked. I feel like no one actually reads my stuff, that I am mostly just writing it for my own benefit. People seem to enjoy what I write, and I have a regular stream of readers… but I will never have the type of audience that the bigger bloggers have. I am just too rough around the edges for that sort of thing. For the most part I am happy with the results of a year of blogging and my long-term goal is to make it at least one full year of posts without pause. That of course will be up April 26th of 2014, which seems like it is far in the future right now. However I don’t see myself losing steam at any point soon.

A Healthier Me

Another big change in my life over the course of 2013 is that I am considerably lighter. In March my wife and I began to shift the way we relate to food. I say it in terms like that because really we have completely changed our relationship to food as a whole. To say we went on a diet doesn’t really encompass the level of change. Diets are about the short term, but we wanted to make permanent and long-term changes in the way we ate. Namely we focused on trying to find a new and sustainable way to live. At this point I am 70 lbs smaller and have hit a bit of a plateau over the last month. However the fact that I survived both Thanksgiving and Christmas without breaking that plateau makes me happy enough.

My wife on the other hand continues to lose at a steady pace and is now down roughly 60 lbs. At some point I need to get super serious again, as I have become lax of late. However the current weight seems to be a place I can comfortable stay without any real intervention. I have reached my goal and it is time for me in this new year to refocus myself and set a new one. I will never be a small man, I come from a long line of really big people. I am however happy enough being able to say I am a “smaller” man. The thing I was not expecting to be honest were the health benefits. As a whole I am far healthier than I was a year ago, and the primary benefit is that my Asthma that I have struggled with my entire life… and have even been hospitalized for… is really a mere nuisance these days. I can go months on a single inhailer, and that is not a thing I have ever been able to do in my life.

Professional Growth

In the last year I have grown more into the role of the manager of my group. I have learned to delegate more, which is something I have always struggled with in my life. I was good at accepting assignments, but never very good at passing them on to my troops, instead trying to take them all on myself. My team is pretty amazing and I would be lost without them. I guess in some small way I have learned to have more faith in them, and trust that they will do as much diligence with an assignment as I would have. As a result I have shifted more into the architect role for my group and part-time project manager and full-time traffic cop. Making sure all of the assignments are going to the right places and all seeing at least some progress.

We usually have 50-60 active projects for a team of three people. So it involves lots of juggling. Various forces in my company want me to move up into a permanent management position. However I simply do not want to distances myself from the “real work” enough to take them. Additionally right now I am responsible for three extremely highly functional people, and I don’t think I could cope with being put over less functional people that I would some how have to whip into shape. I am not really great with confrontations, and as a result I think I would flounder. Either that or it would be similar to me as a raid leader, and I would turn into a real asshole. For the time being I think I am happy with where I am and what I am doing.

I Wrote A Novel

One of the things I have always wanted to do in my life was to write a novel. I made several false attempts at various times over the years but never could seem to push myself to do it. This November I joined the NaNoWriMo event, and over the course of the month knocked out my first novel. I have no idea if it is actually any good, because honestly I have not even read it since finishing it up. I plan in the new year to tear it asunder as I edit it, and fix any issues. However regardless if it completely sucks, I have accomplished a goal. I managed to write a novel, and that is a thing most people can’t say about themselves. I didn’t do it to get famous, or be published, I did it mostly just to prove to myself that I could.

The weird thing about it is, November seems like a lifetime ago. The whole concept of writing 1500 words per night was just absolutely draining. My entire life revolved around that novel for those thirty days, which is honestly longer than I have stuck with anything like that in my life. More than anything I feel like it was a venue of personal growth. I did a thing I never thought I could, and I did so in a methodical way in which it felt like success was assured from the moment I started. Sure I faltered a few times along the way, and there were a few days I didn’t write a blessed thing. However I kept moving forward towards the eventual 50,000 word count goal and I achieved it. I think more than anything I am proud of this accomplishment from 2013.

A Year of Gaming

This is a gaming blog afterall, so during 2013 I played a lot of games. I played way more games than I can ever manage to remember, but I will try and run down a few of the big ones. The list of major titles is as follows.

Oddly enough I am beginning this new year not entirely differently than I began the last year. January 2013 I was still involved in the launch of Mists of Pandaria, and it was not until April that I really began to distance myself from that game entirely. World of Warcraft and I have this love/hate relationship. I get frustrated with it so much, because it seems that they always seem to take the most short sighted solutions to problems, and there are so many games that there that do various things it does…. so much better. However as a total package I feel like the game is unbeatable. It offers the most good things in one package. The realization for me however after my 2+ years of absence from being serious about the game is that it is not about the game at all. World of Warcraft is about the people playing it, and I had missed the ragtag group of people known as House Stalwart immensely.

The game I probably played the most often during the year however was Rift. I want to love rift so badly, the promise of the game is really great. The problem is it just lacks something that I can’t quite put my finger on. It is a technically superior game in every aspect, but it is like it lacks a cohesive narrative that makes me care about the world every single day. The dragons were a thing I thought I could get behind. But now that we have systematically killed each of them off, I cannot say in a single sentence what the world of Rift is. I think that might be the problem, there is no one clear narrative to the game. You cannot say “this game is” and have even half of the people agree on it. I still play it occasionally and there is still an incarnation of House Stalwart there that Psynister and Fynralyl are keeping alive. I thank them so much for being there, but I just can’t seem to care about the game right now. I am sure at some point I will again.

Final Fantasy was another major force for the year. This was a game I never intended to like because really I feel like me and Japanese RPGs had a messy divorce quite some time ago. I had a group of friends actively wanting to play it, so against my better judgment I went along for the ride. What I found however was a really well crafted narrative and dungeon experience. If I could have kept experiencing new bits of immersive content, I would have likely stuck around. However once you reached the end of the game, it was exactly that… the end. All paths lead to massive amount of grinding, and for whatever reason… while I can stomach grinding all day long in World of Warcraft… I could not stomach the particular FFXIV brand of grinding. Namely I blame this on the overall lack of meaninful drops in the game. If I have a chance of getting something cool while killing mobes, no matter how remote the chance… it feels exciting to me each time I open a loot window. There was nothing that could drop from mobs in the world that I would ever care about. Additionally gearing up to get to a point where we could raid, was just not a bridge I was willing to cross.

Games for 2014

There has been a game I have been in super secret closed door testing since February. I cannot name the game by name, but I have to say I am still extremely excited about it even after most of a year testing it. I have watched the game grow from something that felt polished to something that really is amazingly rich and polished. I don’t think I will quit WoW this time for another game, because I have set down some pretty solid roots there again. However I know I will also be playing this game, at the very least two to three nights a week. It is probably the least wow-like game I have played in a long while, and because of that I feel like there is room in my heart for both games to have a unique space.

Past that I am really not certain what 2014 will hold. I know that I am not really interested enough to purchase a PS4 or an XBox One, so I think I will be exiting the console mainstream once again. I am mostly a PC gamer to be honest, and since my gameloft has been taken over by my wife I am okay with not having access to the consoles. More than anything I am looking forward to the various stores beginning to liquidate their stocks of PS3 and XBox 360 games, so I can pick up the titles I always wanted to play but didn’t have the desire to pay for. Additionally there are still a lot of things on the DS/3DS that I want to play, and I am looking forward to picking up the newest Zelda game. I am sure there will be a number of surprises along the way, games that catch my fancy enough to deserve lots of blog posts.

I hope that 2014 will be as positive force in my life as 2013 has been. Additionally I hope each and every one of you out there can say the same. My friend @AlternativeChat has declared 2014 the “Year of Faff”, and I am down with this notion. I think we all need to learn how to faff about in the game worlds we are in, because stopping and smelling the roses is the only real way I know to break the cycle of burnout. I have tried my best to embrace this concept, and hope to continue to do so in the year to come. More than anything, I feel like I am sick of jumping games every three months, and I get the sense that the gaming world as a whole is somewhat sick of that as well. I hope we can each embrace our own faff, whatever that might mean.

Enter the Shado-pan

December 30, 2013 by Belghast

Who Needs Sleep?

It is amazing just how quickly your sleep schedule can be thrown off balance when you are on vacation. Generally speaking I wake up at 5:30 in the morning and tend to go to sleep around 11:30 to midnight at the worse. Since being on break for the last week I have managed to shift that to getting up around 10 am in the morning and having to take Nyquil to be able to have a hope of getting to sleep at 3 am. Sleep has never been something that came easy for me, and in High School I even took a series of sleep studies to try and figure out the source of my frequent bouts of insomnia. There would be days I just didn’t sleep at all, and as a result it became progressively harder to function.

The problem is because of my weight the doctor wasn’t actually looking for insomnia but instead he was dead certain he would find out that I really have sleep apnea. Clearly he didn’t listen to me at all, because I told him I simply could not sleep at times. So I got hooked up to all these machines, with electrodes super glued into my head… put in an unfamiliar room and told to sleep normally. Apparently I had to sleep six hours for the test to be valid… I don’t think I slept at all. As a result I have never attempted too investigate what is actually wrong with my brain that keeps it form shutting down at all.

I am jealous of my wife, because she can take two naps in the same day and still manage to get a full nights sleep. Me on the other hand if I doze off for 30 minutes during the day I am screwed and will not be able to get to sleep at all during the night. I have another week before I go back to work, so during this time I am going to work on trying to train my body back into a normal schedule. This morning I woke up at 9 am, so it is happening gradually. I just know 5 am next Monday morning is going to be pure hell if I don’t act now and try and do something proactive to fix this.

Enter the Shado-pan

Yesterday morning shortly after blogging I did my recent scan of the auction house and found another one of the extremely amazing Fist of Fate weapons. These things really are ideal for leveling a combat rogue or enhancement shaman, as they quite literally cannot be beat before 90. Since I had a pair of claws… I decided I had to go get my favorite claw graphic ever. During Zulgurub era the coolest you could think as a melee was the matched set of claws. One dropped from the tiger boss, and the other from the panther boss, and to my knowledge I have only known one person who actually wielded the set during the time they were viable weapons. Vexa looked amazing with both of them, and even more amazing when the weapons would proc and she would turn into this awesome were-tiger.

During Burning Crusade they introduced a set of rare vendor purchased claws that had the same graphic. So immediately after equipping the second Fist, I made the trek out to Dealer Jayden at Stormspire in Netherstorm and purchase the Nexus-Claw. In the above shot you can see me wielding the set and looking otherwise badass. Sadly the lookalikes don’t proc, especially when transmogged… but that would be a nice change for the future. If you transmog something it would be awesome if it also transmogged the proc graphics. Who doesn’t want to be a badass looking werepanther? Honestly the trinket that I am loving is the one my paladin has that turns me into a random troll tribe. I feel like I am one of the few people out there who is not sick of troll instances. I have a special love for Zul’gurub, Zul’Aman and was supremely disappointed that we never had a Frost Troll raid in Wrath of the Lich King.

Yesterday I had another one of those days where I simply did not want to leave the house (much to the chagrin of my wife who is getting more than a little bit stir-crazy). As a result I worked my way through my normal leveling path, taking off and going to Kun Lai as soon as I could, and then again transitioning to Townlong. I am currently 89 and working on the totem of rage quest series in the second Shado-pan hub. My hope is this evening to finish leveling to 90, but we may or may not have a flex raid. I have a feeling we are going out into the world today, as my wife wants to hit some stores. My hope is that Monday things will not be terribly busy as most folks will have had to go back to work today. I still have another week off, so plenty of time to faff about and finish leveling the rogue.

Accidental Achiever

December 29, 2013 by Belghast

Outside is Evil

Yesterday we recuperated from the whirlwind shopping trip around Joplin Mo. It was a pretty glorious day to be honest, because we were both in hibernation mode. We talked for a bit about getting out, because it really was a lovely day. But when it came to actually getting up and doing it… we both failed the willpower check. Personally I am completely fine with this notion, that we both stayed in, ate three meals in, and overloaded on relaxation. I hung out in my fuzzy blanket cocoon on the sofa and she upstairs in her loft of power (that you all will remember once it was my game loft).

I have a feeling that once summer happens the roles will switch with me inhabiting my office and the loft and she the downstairs, but it is cool that we have our own places and are still within vocal range of each other. I played a ton of World of Warcraft, attempted to play a closed beta I got into… but suffered from severe graphical issues that made it completely unplayable, and snuggled with my ferrets each and every time I passed their cage.

Accidental Achiever

I rarely if ever set out to master a tradeskill in a game, but instead it is a thing I usually do out of an odd sense of commitment more than anything. Lately I had been on a mission to level my rogue so I could get a transcriptionist up high enough to be able to start making living steel. I want the 30 bars that it takes to craft my Sky Golem pretty badly. So yesterday I was not paying much attention was I was pushing my way to 600 alchemist when immediately after getting it, I also got the Master of All Achievement. Sure enough… now that I think of it… I do have a max crafter of every profession. The only disappointment is you get exactly nothing for it… except for 75 achievement points.

This is a pretty massive undertaking if someone was to actually set out specifically to do this achievement. I think it is worthy of a crafting tabard, mount, or at the very least a title. I feel like this is a pretty massive oversight on the part of blizzard. Then again crafting is kind of its own reward. Being completely self sufficient feels amazing. Additionally you end up needing to hit the auction house far less often because your army of crafters can make damned near everything you would ever want made. It is a pretty great feeling knowing that you can make an entire set of gear for a friend, as I did for Scarybooster yesterday. In a matter of moments I had a starter set of gear for level 85 ready for him, and I did the same thing for my rogue Gloam.

A Vicious Sneak Thief

Speaking of my rogue, I am roughly halfway through Jade Forest and as of yesterday am about halfway into 87. I should finish up and ding 88 before I finish the area, and will likely skip Valley of the Four Winds entirely and go straight to Kun Lai Summit. When I am trying to power my way through to 90 the path I tend to take is to milk every last drop of experience from Jade Forest, transition to Kun Lai immediately after and then transition to Townlong as soon as you get the quest starter to go there. Finally this ends up with you either dinging 90 in Townlong or doing so just inside of Dread Wastes. Granted this is complete shit for your quest completion, but I figure it also gives you a lot of “questing to make gold” time if you so choose it at max level since xp gets converted up to gold.

Granted I have yet to actually do that one of of my 90s… since as soon as I hit maximum level I start going through the paces of trying to gear out the character and such. I am such a sucker for getting my characters those purples and am willing to sit through all manner of horrible LFR experiences just to do so. I should however have most of a set of timeless leather stocked away and ready for this guy when he needs it. I will just have to figure out how best to get the weapons. This time around I will likely just craft him a set of 463 agi swords and call it good until I can get something decent from LFR. Once I finish his leveling the characters I really need to work on are Belghast, Exeter and Belgarou as they are woefully behind Tallow and Belgrave in gear levels. Oh well… the faffing about with my characters never seems to end.

Gloam the Conqueror

December 28, 2013 by Belghast

Handbag of Fury

As mentioned yesterday we headed up to Joplin to go shopping and took my mother in law with us, since she wouldn’t tell us anything she actually wanted for Christmas. The goal was to take her shopping and hopefully find something along the way. This process involved me getting drug to a bunch of stores I would never actually visit on my own. I brought my 3DS with me, but oddly enough I never actually used it. I mostly piddled around on Twitter, Tumblr, and occasionally guild chat via the WoW Armory application. I did pretty well for the first three or so stores, but after that I started hanging out in the car while they were shopping inside.

I am sure by doing this I missed numerous things that were photo worthy, but the highlight of the day was the above handbag. It quite literally has a set of brass knuckles built into the clasp. I am not sure if this was really intended for self defense, but it certainly would hurt like hell to get hit by that. I tried to convince my wife that she needed it but she was un-swayed. I am not sure how we ended up together, because if it were my choice there would be skulls on everything. Hell I play a Deathknight… that class is all about beating down things while wearing skulls. My wife on the otherhand wants none of that nonsense.

I keep finding these awesome scarves with cute little skulls, and she is completely uninterested in them. She is not exactly a girly girl… but I guess bedazzled skulls is a bit too far in the other direction for her. Both her and her mother found several things during our trip, which is good. I found a few interesting clearance Legos, but decided not to pick them up because really I would have just been picking them up for a few interesting parts… and had no interest at all in the thing they were intended to build. These were originally 90 dollar sets that were selling for 40, but that still seemed a bit pricy to purchase just for a handful of nifty thingamajigs.

Gloam the Conqueror

When I finally got home from the whirlwind trip of shopping madness I built myself a fuzzy little cocoon on my comfy sofa and settled in for some World of Warcraft. I did my normal crafting cooldowns crawl, making sure everyone had created their trademarked rare daily craftable, before settling in on Exeter my Paladin Blacksmith. The first goal of the night was to farm up the rest of the Motes of Harmony needed to craft two Ghost-Forged blades for my rogue. While I was trying to get a hold of Fists of Fate, I was unable to do so and gave up on that mission settling for the two crafted blades instead. I still think it is almost criminal at this point that Motes are not bind on account, since I seem to have way too many on some characters and never enough on others… but I have settled on a decent way to farm them.

I badly photoshopped a map of The Dread Wastes to indicate where I go to farm motes. There are supposedly better drop rates elsewhere in the world, but I find this to be my favorite spot. Firstly no one is ever out here… granted by me saying this there will automagically be tons of people out there next time I need motes. Secondly and quite possibly the most important reason… all this stuff is level 90, easy to kill and gives Black Prince reputation. Most of my characters need this badly to be able to progress their way through the cloak quest chain. Especially now that I have the repair mount, this is an awesome place to go mindlessly kill things and make tons of money doing it. Additionally the mobs die pretty fast once you are in timeless isle gear and you can make a big loop of the island and by the time you reach the other side everything is completely full spawn again.

Finally I got my 40 motes and crafted the blades, enchanted them with windsong and was up and running on Gloam. I have to say having the crafters to built a starter set of gear for Pandaria eases the transition. You hit the ground running and are able to slaughter pretty much everything, even on the super squishy classes like the rogue. I made my way through the first few sections of Pandaria before sleep claimed me. My goal for the day is to make it through all of Jade Forest. Not really sure if this will happen or not as today is supposed to be the last “nice” day for awhile, and I have a feeling I will get drug from my cocoon and out into the world. If that happens no promises on how far I will make it on my goals.

Redragon Perdition

At this point pretty much every MMO gamer is familiar with the Razer Naga and most are also familiar with the Logitech g600. They each provide a different take on the concept of the large number of button MMO mouse. Each has its strong points and its weaknesses. The Razer for example, I have had three of them die in exactly the same way after about two years. Similarly I recently had a g600 kick the bucket after about the same two year threshold, granted the g600 did not die so spectacularly. The Nagas started “jumping” in that the cursor would mysteriously accelerate at high speeds in one direction or another. The g600 on the other hand started missing mouse clicks. One of the actions you do more than any in an MMO is holding down both the left and right mouse buttons to move forward. The g600 would stop registering that my right mouse button was clicked and as a result I would stop forward movement.

When I was looking on amazon for a replacement, I noticed the Redragon Perdition, that literally looks like a combination of the best features of the Naga and the g600. At the time it was a little over $20 cheaper than either of the other mice so I figured I would give it a chance. The reviews were really favorable and it featured a naga like shape but with g600 style buttons. The mouse itself was a little late getting to me, as it was shipping during our recent ice storms. However when it arrived I was pleasantly surprised by the built quality. This is after all in theory a chinese knockoff of a Naga and g600, but it is a very good one. One of the problems I have with both the Naga and the g600 is that they don’t feel nearly as good as the old Logitech mx500 gaming mice. These had a really great slightly rubberized pebbled texture to them, that just felt nice in the hand.

Much to my surprise the Perdition has almost this same texture. Additionally like the mx500 it has counterweights that can be removed from the base of the mouse to give it a solid feel in your hand. I find weight mice easier for me to use since I have extremely large hands. The perdition also sports a truly insane 16400 dpi resolution… which I immediately had to scale back as it was insanely twitchy. If you have ever wanted to play a game by barely moving your hand at all… then that might be the resolution for you. Additionally the software that it comes with lets you customize pretty much everything about it, including creating damned near any possible color of LED light, and controlling the “throb” motion.

So far I am a fan, I have gamed normally with it for roughly two weeks and it still feels great. My only complaint so far is that middle clicking the mouse wheel requires more effort than any other mouse I have had. Luckily I don’t really middle click anything but in my browser window to open new tabs. However if this is a hotkey you regularly use in your keybindings, just be warned for my sausage like fingers… it takes quite a bit of pressure to get it to register a click. I like the shoulder button quite a bit because it is comfortable to hit with the side of your finger, but not as prone to accidentally hitting as the third mouse button was on the g600. If you are in the market for a new mouse and not opposed to taking a gamble on a chinese knockoff… I highly suggest you check it out. I really am enjoying it so far.