podcast Archives - Page 16 of 20 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Friendtime Storything

April 28, 2017 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff

Once upon a time I recorded a podcast called “Bel Folks Stuff”. I am extremely talented at giving things super specific names. The idea was pretty simple, AggroChat in a smaller setting allowing me to branch out and record shows with individual friends. The central conceit of the show was that it was going to be somewhat of an interview show, where in theory I asked all of the participants the same questions each time. There were things that worked about the show, and there were things that didn’t really. It never gained much traction which was a bit of a bummer, but it is extremely to gain momentum when you are only releasing a show each month. In the grand scheme of things I am still fairly proud of the shows, and every so often someone asks me when exactly I am going to record some more of them.

In truth… while I want to do something similar, it feels weird to consider just starting up three years later and recording new episodes for the same show. I cancelled the show in June of 2015, largely because I was going through a bit of a rough patch in my life and something needed to change. At that point I was publishing Tales of the Aggronaut each morning seven days a week, recording AggroChat each Saturday, writing two weekly columns for MMOGames.com, and trying to squeeze in time to figure out when I can record with someone and get a Bel Folks Stuff episode in each month. Additionally work was a little insane with me stepping up to more of a managerial role, and then also attempting to raid in two different games at the same time. The show didn’t have a whole lot of listeners in the grand scheme of things, so it felt like it was the obvious thing to drop. Ultimately in the long run I wound up cutting back more severely in that I am no longer really associated with MMOGames.com at all… and I have dropped this blog down to a weekday morning only thing.

The show had a good run however of seven episodes where I got to hang out and talk with eight different friends. There was in fact a bonus episode where I got both Rowan and Scooter together to talk about gaming as a couple. For those who didn’t even know the show existed… here is a full list of the episodes that I now keep on the AggroChat.com page.

Huge thanks as always to @Gypsy_Syl, @RowanBlaze, @Sctrz, @Petterm, @QelricDK, @HeyItsLiore, and @Jaedia for making the show awesome and interesting to listen to. The biggest problem that I ran into as a whole with the show is the fact that out of the eight folks I had to schedule time with… only three were in anything even vaguely close to a drift compatible time zone. That meant the whole process of finding a time that they were conscious and I could record was a challenge. Unfortunately that is not really ever going away since a lot of the people I really want to sit down and have a chat with are European. However trying to juggle that along with everything else on my plate was a bit much. The problem is that I still have the desire to record something along these lines, but like I said before it felt weird just to start up doing the same thing again.

For awhile I have been trying to sort out how I wanted to functionally reboot “Bel Folks Stuff” and what changes if any I wanted to make to it. I got completely hung up on the concept of having a friend on the podcast and having them tell me… and our listeners a story. One of the constant threads among gamers is that we file away these experiences to recall at a later date as we tell tales to our friends and guildies. I mean I have spun a yarn about the “Bunny Incident” numerous times in the past, enough that you can just say those words and most of the people I play with know exactly what I am talking about. As I mulled over the concept a bit more I decided that I didn’t necessarily limit it to gaming stories only. Sure that solidifies the niche of listeners I had for the show… but in truth I am just not that super concerned about soliciting a huge number of listeners. There was a period of time I thought maybe this would be an alternate career path, but after attempting to do the writing for pay thing… I’ve come to realize how not compatible I am with that idea.

I name things oddly… and that is pretty much a given. The name “Friendtime Storything” came from a lot of mulling things over and some brainstorming with my friend Neph who is going to ultimately be a victim of this process. Now I simply need to figure out the list of people that I want to talk to and start scheduling times. In truth this mornings post is intended to be somewhat of a recruitment vehicle. What I am wanting to do is hard to explain without understanding what I was trying to do with Bel Folks Stuff in the first place. Mostly it will be me sitting down with a friend and having a good chat, with as the tag line states… a thinly veined excuse to make folks tell me a story. I feel like I need a show like this to pull in the people that I don’t have time to talk with on AggroChat. Right now we have a fairly fixed and reliable crew on that show with myself, Ashgar, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen. That has been “the crew” for a few years now and apart from missing an episode here or there, or bringing in some additional folks for a big show… that mix feels good the way it is. This show is going to let me snag people and do something different. The main plan is to release these episodes as sort of bonus material in the already existing AggroChat podcast feed. In theory I SHOULD have enough free bandwidth on Libsyn to sneak one of these shows in each month. There are a lot of things I would do differently had I a second chance… and one of them is to quit spawning secondary sites each time I had an idea to do something.

I am not entirely certain when this process is going to start, but I have a feeling that within the next few weeks an episode should appear.

Restless Weekend

January 23, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, because at least for me it centered around recording our “Games of the Year” show on AggroChat. This is generally speaking a huge ordeal given that our show is made up of six very different minded people. Back during the days when we had four regular hosts it was less of a proceeding but now that we essentially have six people each picking three games a piece… that means we wind up talking about 18 games, which as it turns out divides neatly into two 9 image panels. The above image is the first of these and serves as the backdrop for our normal show card of sorts, however with the text over it you can’t necessarily make out all of the images involved so I decided to post it here. You can as always find the show on AggroChat or my method of choice for sheer simplicity of listening… YouTube. The reason why this largely dominated my weekend is because we ultimately recorded two podcasts that were both two hours long before I set down to edit them. Post edits they both clock in around an hour and twenty minutes, which really is shocking given that I did not actually time anything out in an attempt to make them work as relative set pieces. I guess however if you set out to record nine games per show… the end result comes out fairly evenly. I did make an attempt to shuffle the deck in such a way as to put the games I thought we would most likely talk the longest about divided evenly among the shows.

So we recorded from 8 pm CST until just after midnight, and then I got up around 7:30 Sunday morning and edited until 12:30… and as a result every other element of the weekend felt like it was shoved to one side or the other. Of course all of this madness has a purpose since the double episode is timed perfectly to cover the absence of myself and Ashgar as we go to Pax South. Now in theory Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen could record without me… but that would mean I had the forethought to have the mess that is our show in a state that I could easily hand over the reigns to an understudy. I have not planned ahead that far, and while I do have a series of Audacity and Photoshop projects to speed up the process… I am not sure if I could even properly explain what exactly I do each week. It is my hope however that I managed to not only publish yesterday, but also schedule everything else to publish next Sunday while I am driving home from San Antonio. Staging a publish to happen without me is always a fraught thing for me… because so rarely does it actually work as intended. Even if it does… I am literally stressed beyond reason until I see the tweets show up in my timeline from the publish process actually doing its thing appropriately. In the grand scheme of things however… it is not the most important thing in the world… but it is important to me.

As far as gaming went this weekend that was equally scattered. I patched up Final Fantasy XIV and made it far enough to hit the first instance gate, before ultimately walking away. Similarly I patched up Wildstar, created a Chua Warrior and played to around level seven before once again walking away like a bored child. As far as gaming that managed to last for more than an hour… we had World of Warcraft where I finally hit 35 points on my Protection Artifact and started pushing up Fury instead. I have gotten back in the habit of logging in each day to do my Emissary quest because now there is also a potential legendary upgrade waiting at the end of the grind. I started doing my Time Walking dungeons… but only managed to make it through the first one tanking it before once again wandering away. The game that seemed to stick the hardest was Elder Scrolls Online where I completed a good chunk of Malabal Tor, a zone where I am already completely enthralled by the storyline… even though it involves largely nothing but elves and their internal politics. I’ve decided that the Bosmer are what it takes to make me really enjoy Elves. I am really enjoying the whole lore regarding the Green Lady and the Silvenar, and I guess in truth that was an aspect of the lore that I had either forgotten or ignored in playing other Elder Scrolls games. I even managed to have a few emotional gut punches last night, when I lost characters that I actually really liked during one quest chain. In truth all I want to do right now is hide in my blanket cocoon on the couch and play more ESO, but that said I do want to at some point get a Mythic+ in for the week since I have a +5 Maw of Souls key.

Breaking Routine

October 17, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, namely when it came to Sunday morning. Generally speaking I have the process of finishing up an AggroChat episode down to a fairly regimented process. Saturday night before I crash I try to do what I call the initial edit, which is most of the actual edit work. Then Sunday morning I write the small bit of copy, and upload and syndicate the podcast to the various sources where it gets put. However this week was the first week doing all of this on the new machine… and I was not prepared. For starters we recorded a really long show mostly about the Final Fantasy XIV 3.4 main story quest. We did not unfortunately ONLY talk about that, and that meant we had almost three hours of recorded audio to process… and didn’t actually finish things up until around midnight my time. Instead of staying up further, I decided to crash and deal with it in the morning. Then Sunday it was a carnival of errors, as the version of audacity on my new machine was apparently slightly newer than the version I had been using which means a lot of the filters had different options… or at least were arranged in different ways. Additionally there was the process of trying to find all of my source files off of the old machine, which is thankfully still accessible over the network.

The worst part of it however was the changes to the Truncate Silence filter…. which is a crutch we lean on heavily for AggroChat. We are fairly pensive folk, and as a result there are a lot of lengthy pauses in conversation. With truncate silence that 3 hours of audio becomes 2 hours… but on my first attempt it maybe clipped a little more than actual silence. For whatever reason it was clipping the hell out of anytime Kodra talked, giving his speech a record skipping characteristic. However this is not something I realized until I was just about to upload the files to our host. Thankfully I caught it in time and was able to redo that portion, lowering the granularity of the filter. This mean’t what is normally a couple hour process… ate up I think four hours in total. Admittedly I was piddling around in Guild Wars 2 during much of it, so there were probably moments when I didn’t notice a filter had finished here or there. The positive however is that every filter applied went massively faster than on the previous AMD FX-6300 based processor. That was really my hope with the new i7 based system, is that it would be able to chew through rendering tasks far more successfully. As with any system there is going to be an adjustment and moving in period, and I am hoping that now that I have finished a single podcast on this machine additional ones will be much quicker.

As far as the weekend itself went, I was all over the place. I played a significant amount of Destiny, completing a bunch of bounties and discovering the Archon’s Forge… or more so how easy it was to get a pick up group. Much the same way as the court of Oryx, you seem to be able to just show up and folks will either be doing it… or quickly swarm when they think anyone else is. I also played a lot of World of Warcraft, completely a few mythic dungeons as well as successfully completing my first Mythic+ keystone. I’m looking forward to seeing that upgraded loot in the weekly order hall chest. In addition to that I completed the five time-walking dungeons on both Belghast and Exeter, and on the later I used it as a way to gear him up. I am now sitting over the 825 cap needed to get into LFR so my hope is tonight I will be able to run the two parts available and potentially get more upgrades that way. Generally speaking on Belghast the 835 rewards are not super enticing, but I still ran it this week for the purpose of getting some rune stones. I also need to do a bunch of fishing, as I now have the pattern to turn the 300 versatility food that I spent a chunk of the weekend crafting… into a 375 version. I am only using this stuff for raiding and mythic+ attempts, as I keep a bank full of Faronar Fizz for other stuff.

The biggest take away from the weekend is that I am actually finding myself legitimately enjoying Guild Wars 2. Recently it had been a game that I was dipping my toes into for the sake of my friends that were also playing it. However before the podcast we ran several of the story mode dungeons and they were pretty enjoyable. Enough so that when I sat down to decide which game I would play during the podcast, I decided to go ahead and stay with Guild Wars 2. That means that I spent the next three hours roaming aimlessly completing little objectives here and there, and mostly finding my way to the next story mode dungeon. The post 80/ Heart of Thorns mastery leveling is pretty slow. In all of that time I only managed to get about half of a mastery level… and then I ended up wasting a bunch of experience because I didn’t notice I needed to click through and train it. I am pretty not sure what my purpose in game is, but I am still fairly dead set on the warrior… and more importantly hammer warrior. That makes me the make shift tank for the group, and I have been using rifle lately as my dps weapon because it allows me to have something that I can hit things with at range. At some point I want to pick back up where I left off in attempting to level armor smithing, but right now my craft window looks somewhat like madness to me. All in all I feel like I have come to terms with the game in accepting what it is… and more importantly what it is not.

Half Sleeping

May 17, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 57 – Preparing for Heavensward

Tonight we have Belghast, Ashgar, Tamrielo, Kodra and Thalen and once again we felt like we didn’t have much to talk about. However once we dug in a little bit I noticed a trend. Each of us was busy working on this item or that in relationship to Final Fantasy XIV each with our own goals that we have been trying to finish before the expansion. Ashgar just finished his Nexus weapon after the length grind, and talks about how it compared up against other grinds he has completed. Kodra talks about working on Turn 9 with two different raid groups and how he hopes we can get through it within the coming weeks. I talk about my own quest which involves me descending into the dark madness that is crafting and slowly stair stepping each and every crafting class five levels at a time.

In addition to this there is some more Shadowrun talk as we each continue our play throughs. Kodra goes into yet another dark place by playing some Demon Souls and talks about those experiences. He and Tam spent a good deal of time this week watching the first season of Sword Art Online and we get into a discussion about that as well. I talk about my experiences working on the Blackhand encounter in World of Warcraft, and we talk a bit about the lackluster numbers released by NCSoft regarding Wildstar sales. Yet another night of varied topics here on AggroChat.

Automotive Struggles

It is now officially “weather season” here in Oklahoma and over the last few weeks we have been deluged in rain storms. In fact we skipped Mother’s Day last weekend due to the fact that there was rampant flooding in the area of the state that our Mothers live in. This meant this weekend we had to make up for that fact and venture out to see all three mothers. Friday night we met my folks for dinner and chatted with them for a good while, and then Saturday we ventured to the northern part of the state to see my wife’s mothers. The only problem with this notion is that there was the constant fear of bad weather hanging over the day. The national weather service had used the term “life threatening” and “super cell” in relation to the storm that was supposed to be arriving that night. To make matters more tense we opted to drive my wife’s Pontiac Torrent because it is more comfortable on long trips. That said it has also been having some issues lately.

There is a point between second and third gear where it “chugs” for lack of a better term, or as my wife calls it “hiccups” while trying to change gears. This seems to hit most often on inclines but over time it has gotten worse. While driving north on the turnpike it happened again around 75 mph and this time had a corresponding check engine light. I pulled over to the side of the turnpike and shut down completely, and upon powering back on everything seemed happy. We were just outside of town, so we popped off and went to the local GMC dealer. While the service department was not open, the shop foreman just happened to be working on his mothers car and was able to at least hook up the Torrent to the computer and tell us what was happening. Turns out that the engine was misfiring and after some research there is a factory recall that we were never notified about. He promised that our vehicle would not strand us, but instead it would just get horrible gas mileage until we got it taken care of. Nonetheless with impending weather issues it made the rest of the day feel far more tense than it normally would have.

Half Sleeping

The national weather service originally predicted that a huge batch of Tornados would be hitting the Oklahoma City area around 3pm CST. The storm however stalled out over the state and by the time we started up the podcast last night it still had not fully hit us. The problem with a late night storm is that it pretty much destroys any semblance of sleep. Today I am completely dragging ass because we did not get the “All Clear” until about 4:30 in the morning. This means it was yet another night of sleeping with the television blaring the weather so that if something went horribly wrong over night we would hopefully hear it. Sleeping while half paying attention to the television means you don’t actually get much rest. I have a feeling I will be taking a nap at some point because right now I am struggling to get through my morning blogging routine, let alone do anything more productive. The good news is that for the most part we made it through the storm unscathed. The bad news is, that not every suburb in the Tulsa area can say the same thing.

The Broken Arrow area seems to have gotten hit the hardest from last night. Earlier on the news they showed footage of what like the remains of a trailer part strewn along the country roads. At that point the reporter was uncertain where exactly the debris was coming from, but there was a lot of it. My hope is that everyone made it out alive. It is always surreal to talk about Tornados because they are equal parts commonplace and revered here in Oklahoma. Everyone knows someone who has been effected by one in the past, but at the same time… when you spend every spring dealing with the warnings it also seems “commonplace”. For years I used to wonder how the folks on the west coast dealt with Earthquakes, but since we also have those… I am guessing it is much the same. When you are used to a natural disaster, it just becomes a bit less scary. Right now it seems like most of the issues happening today are just massive flooding. After years of drought, I had almost forgotten what “real” rain was like. At this point all of the rivers are well over flood stage, but fortunately I don’t live in an area that actually floods. Expect normal gaming blog posts to resume this week I hope, but today… was all about the weather.