podcast

We Kill Routers

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Running About in OKC

randompenandpaper My wife and I first got hooked on Half Priced Books during a random trip to Dallas Texas.  I had heard of the chain before, but had never been to one.  At that point we had a Garmin GPS and we punched “book” into the POI search and happened to find one nearby.  From that point onwards when we went to a new area we immediately searched to see if they had any of the stores.  During a trip to Madison Wisconsin we managed to hit three different stores up there, and on our last trip to Dallas I think we hit around fifteen of them.  Tulsa unfortunately does not have any yet, but an hour and a half from Tulsa in Oklahoma City they have three of them in the metro area.  So every now and then we make a trip down there just for the purpose of hitting all three of them.

I was trying to explain to my coworkers what makes them special, and if you have never been… and especially if you not a bibliophile it just would never make any sense.  One of the most magic things about the store is they have a rather large used role-playing games section.  On past trips I have found all sorts of wonders, but just the simple fact that a store exists in Oklahoma with this sort of stuff makes me happy.  This trip I honestly didn’t walk away with much from HBP.  I picked up a Minecraft book by scholastic, that is obviously targeting children but manages to explain Redstone wiring in a simple enough manner that I think I can “grok” it.  Additionally I picked up the second book in the Odd Thomas series, and the Silent Hill Collection for the PS3 since I have never actually played 2 or 3 in that series but loved the hell out of the first one.

Carpet Jesus

carpetjesus Another thing we did yesterday was run around to a series of pawn shops in my search for “cheap” Xbox 360 and PS3 games.  I managed to stumble onto a cache of $5 a piece PS3 games here in Tulsa at a Cash America pawn shop, and I knew that in OKC they had at least 11 of them.  We tried to hit as many of them as we could while weaving across town to hit all three of the HBP stores.  The lesson of the day seemed to be that OKC wanted more for their stuff than I was willing to pay for it.  Locally the most you will ever pay for a game in a pawn shop is $15, and while wandering across OKC I routinely saw them for as much as $30 in the same pawn shop chains we have here in town.  I even managed to hit a Game XChange which is a chain that used to be really big around here… and there they were selling PS4 games that you can buy brand new at Target for $39.95 for $54.

whatadeal When I see a price like that, maybe it is horrible of me… but the first thing that goes through my head is “that’s adorable”.  I feel like maybe Oklahoma City in general just doesn’t know how to price things.  During our travels we stumbled across a fairly nice looking thrift store and the carpet jesus picture above hails from it.  Among the various baubles is a brand new sealed box for an Intel EtherExpress LAN Adapter.  The one pictured above is an ISA card… designed to go in an IBM 286/386 machine and Novell Netware that is advertised on the back side.  This is pretty much the best technology Intel had to offer in 1992, and seems to be pulled off the shelf of someone’s closet and donated to charity.  The pricetag is not a mistake… they apparently do want $59 for this mint in box artifact of the pre-internet age.  Oklahoma City apparently lives in a bubble where they don’t have a clue what anything is actually worth.

We Kill Routers

This morning I woke to the fun surprise of having no internet in our house.  Apparently between the time that I recorded our podcast and edited it last night, and this morning our Asus router died.  The thing is we are exceptionally hard on routers it seems, because it seems that at least once a year I end up replacing one.  I have to think it is because we have so many internet connected devices.  We have 5 laptops, 3 desktops, 2 phones, 2 tablets, 3 chromecasts, and 5 gaming consoles connected to our wireless router pretty much all of the time.  That is a lot of strain on any device and they seem to just explode after awhile.  So this morning I connected the internet directly into my main desktop and got on long enough to do some research and write this blog post.

I found a device at our local Best Buy that looks like it might do the job.  It is supposedly designed to handle multiple devices at the same time, so we will see if we end up killing this one as well.  The last one only manages to survive 6 months… and honestly it might still be under warranty and I will try and dig that information up and try and replace it.  It would make a nice little router for the lake to be honest.  I did the in store pickup option on the new one, so right now I am just waiting on the email to let me know it is ready to go.  I had heard really good things about the Netgear Nighthawk, so we will see if it lives up to the marketing hype.

Exclusionary Subcultures

Last night we managed to get the entire AggroChat podcast crew together once again for another broadcast.  Tonight we talk at length about the various things we have been doing including Minecraft, VVVVVV, Adventure Time Battle Party, and a few other things.  The bulk of the show however is a discussion about various subcultures.  Gaming and geekdom in general can be a very exclusionary place.  Not that we solve any of the worlds problems, but we at least have a discussion about them.  We ran a bit longer than normal this time, but we had a lot of stuff to talk about.

Three Hours Well Spent

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Kidneys Safe, Vita Obtained

I have a running joke with my friend Rae, that each time I go off to meet someone to make a purchase from Craigslist that I am more than likely going to end up in a ditch somewhere missing a kidney.  What can I say… I have a dark sense of humor.  Regardless of this eventual fate, I am extremely cheap by nature, or more so I cannot stand paying more for something than I actually have to.  As a result there are a handful of things I search Craigslist for a few times a week, one of them is the Playstation Vita.  For a long while I have known that sooner or later I would get one, but seeing as I have a pretty lousy track record for playing handheld games…  I most certainly did not want to pay much for it.  Essentially handheld gaming is awesome if you travel a lot…  whereas I actually actively avoid travel.  If I am at home, I am more than likely going to be on my PC or one of my consoles rather than milling about on a handheld.  That said I am still very much enthralled by handheld gaming, and the since I have a PS3 and a PS4…  the Vita remote play functionality even as limited as it might be…  seemed intriguing.

So the other day when I found a Vita that had been posted for a few days for $100 that came with two games… both of them something I would play, I honestly thought it was too good to be true.  However over the course of a series of text messages I gleaned two things.  Firstly that I suspected the person that was selling the unit was female, and that they did in fact seem legitimate.  This is my own personal bias at work, but generally I consider women far more trustworthy than men, and potentially less likely to steal my kidney.  I could not meet up that day so we scheduled a meeting for yesterday after work.  Basically I did not want to mention it on the blog, because I really didn’t want to jinx it.  There was a comedy of errors however when it came to actually meeting up.  The person lived in a town roughly thirty minutes away from the southern most point of the Tulsa Metro.  Since I prefer to meet at QuikTrip for safety sake, and that town did not have one… we decided to meet at one in Glenpool, thinking I had been there multiple times and it would be in the path she had to travel anyways.

Wrong QuikTrip

The only problem is that apparently Glenpool is big enough to actually have two QuikTrips… both of which are apparently across the street from a McDonalds.  I must have looked insane walking around the QuikTrip parking lot looking for a pink and grey Chevy cruze.  Like I was confused enough at one point that I even googled what a Chevy Cruze looked like on my phone, because I thought maybe I was not remembering which model was which.  Once we realized we were at two separate locations she came to me because I had zero clue where she was.  Everything checked out, the Vita is pretty awesome and only has a few scratches here and there on the case.  It came with the vita unit, 4 gb memory card, charge cable, car charger, soft sided case, rubberized skin for the unit, Injustice Ultimate Edition game and The Walking Dead game.  The owner had wiped it back to factory settings so all I had to do when I got home was set the unit up and I was streaming Resogun from my PS4 in a matter of moments.

The main reason why I knew sooner or later that I would get a Vita is that I have been a member of Playstation Plus for awhile.  One of the awesome things about Playstation Plus is it is blanket subscription and does not care at all if you actually own the piece of hardware it is giving away games for.  So since the moment I started subscribing I have been picking up every Vita game offered through the web storefront.  As a result I now have a library of 35 good titles ready to download to my Vita.  The only thing I need to pick up really is a bigger memory card, because quite frankly 4 gb will not hold much of anything.  All in all this makes for another wildly successful Craigslist purchase.  One of the things I am going to have to test out soon is the ability to play across the internet from my PS4 sitting at home.  I’ve heard mixed reviews about it, but just the fact that something like that could possibly exist seems awesome.  Also if you are on PSN and we are not already friends… look up “Belghast Sternblade”.

Three Hours Well Spent

I have seen the Realm Maintenance podcast a few times before, but never actually sat down to listen to it.  I tend to listen to podcasts when I can during the day because it makes the work day go a little faster.  Yesterday Godmother of Alternative Chat had linked this weeks episode, which is a special 100th episode that included her.  The podcast was rather daunting, in that it was a 3 hour retrospective of a bunch of wow podcasters being interviewed and the results knitted together into a narrative.  While it took me literally all of the day to get through it, listening in bursts here and there…  I have to say it was three hours well spent.  Listening to the collective pet peeves, advice and challenges of all of these extremely successful and popular podcasts was rather inspiring.  I would not really put myself or the work we do with Aggrochat in the same league as any of these people, but it was awesome to hear that they had struggled with some of the same issues I had.

One of the most interesting takeaways from the whole show is that for the most part, all of the podcasters list radio and more often than not NPR as being an important influence.  I guess to some extent that makes sense, because what is a podcast if not an online radio show.  If I am in my car I am pretty much always listening to NPR, and I know personally I wanted to do a podcast out of a sense of awe of everything that radio can be.  I’m a huge fan of This American Life and have even gone and seen Ira Glass in person, when he did a lecture here in town.  One of the tougher questions the various guests were asked…  was who their favorite podcast is.  Most of them gave extremely diplomatic answers, but I have to say for me at least there are two podcasts that I pretty much drop everything I am doing to listen to when they are posted.  The first of these is Alternative Chat, because Godmother somehow takes the production value of This American Life, and condenses it into a fifteen minute bite sized chunk.  It is very easy to listen to because I know, no matter what else I have going on, that I will receive this fifteen minute vignette of awesome.

The other podcast that I listen to as soon as it is posted is that of the Battle Bards.  There are two things that make this experience awesome.  The first is the chemistry that has evolved between Sypster, MMOGC and Syl.  Their tastes in music and games have this weird way of fluttering back and forth between complimenting each other and diverging at the same time.  So on a specific topic you might get two of the three to agree, but I have never really seen all three agree on something at exactly the same moment.  This chemistry aside, I love the focus of the podcast because I too am extremely passionate about video game music.  While I might not know the whys and hows like they do… or even know the composers by name…  when I am not listening to podcasts at work, I am listening to soundtracks.  Video game music has always stirred my imagination in ways that nothing else quite can.  It is this warm blanket of nostalgia that I wrap myself in regularly, and it is always awesome to listen to the Bards as they dissect various tracks that I know and love.

Overly Cerebral Morning

Divinity2 2014-07-01 22-22-07-779 As is the case with so many mornings, I sat down to write with a vague idea of some of the things I might talk about.  However as a whole this morning shaped up to be far more cerebral than normal.  I wish I had pictures to at least accompany some of my giant walls of text, but alas you are going to have to settle for a really cool shot from Divinity II last night.  When I got home from my adventure I piddled around with my vita for a bit, logged into Wildstar to claim another boom box and then after our walk settled into Divinity again for the rest of the night.  I find it so odd that I have fallen so in love with a game that is over six years old at this point.  Everything about the game still feels fresh and new to me, and I am loving exploring this world.  All my of my friends are busy and enthralled with Divinity: Original Sin… but at this point I don’t even want to look at that game until I “finish” this one.

I have a feeling that “finishing” Divinity II is going to be a lot like “finishing” Skyrim.  That there will always be something left unfinished and begging for me to wander around and finish at a later time.  The only thing that makes me question this, is that already the game has made some significant changes that caused me to lose access to a number of quests.  The world keeps getting stranger, and I am not really sure how I feel about the chief antagonist.  He keeps showing up to taunt me, and then instead of actually attacking me… sends an army of fodder at me claiming it will “finish me off”.  While I am sure I cannot take him down yet…  I am level 30 and wondering how long this game actually runs.  I am only in the second “area” so far, but not sure just how many more there are.  I know of at least one more that is connected to the area I am in currently, but at this point I have put almost twenty hours into the game and feel no closer a finish than I did at the very beginning.  I love when a game feels like it could go on forever like that.

Podcast That Almost Wasn’t

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Graduation Day

ducks I just thought I would start the post off with a picture of two ducks.  These are the ducks that we encounter quite often on our evening stroll around the neighborhood.  I guess they have decided that we are not really a threat, because shortly after snapping this photo the male duck decided to come up close enough to almost touch.  Granted he might have just been putting some distance between me and his mate, but I would like to think we are a recognized thing by now.  Now that you’ve had a lovely vignette, let me tell you about my day.  My nephew graduated from college today, and being the loving family we are… we attended.  This was an experience in both vertigo and insanely uncomfortable seating.  For starters the basketball stadium it was held in had some of the steepest seating I had ever experienced.  When they asked us to stand for the singing of the national anthem… I literally felt like I was going to topple over the “cliff” and down into the stands below me.

All in all it wasn’t really a bad day, but it was most definitely a tiring one.  I did however manage to top 10,000 steps on the fitbit, instead of my usual 8,000 to 9,000.  This was in part because we parked four blocks away from the stadium and walked it rather than fighting for parking.  The whole side effect of today and what will inevitably happen tomorrow is that I simply do not have the “oomph” to stay up late enough tonight to do a Steampowered Sunday.  In fact as early as we are going in the morning to see my mother, I won’t really have a chance to write a blog post in the morning either.  As a result I am writing this one Saturday night, and will publish it in the morning.  I hate when I have to “cheat” like this, but it is far better to do that than to miss posting something at all.

Podcast That Almost Wasn’t

robins This morning I talked about the little family of robins, that had nested in the white rock.  When I came home tonight there were two chicks poking their heads out of the nest until I got close enough to investigate.  They instinctively ducked down to try and remain hidden but I was able to get my phone up enough to snap the photo on the side.  I feel like each of these photos is somehow softening the blow of what I am about to say.  This week you damned near did not get a podcast.  Admittedly this is one part miscommunication and one part poor planning on my side.  It was Friday during the day when I realized that I would not be home in time to record the podcast.  Originally for some reason my wife and I thought my nephews graduation was early in the day.  However upon further investigation Friday, we realized that it was at 4 pm in the afternoon.  That meant in a best case scenario figuring 2 hours for the graduation, an hour for anything after the graduation, and another 2 hours drive to get back home… this put me being back around 9 pm, and hour after we normally record.

To make things more interesting it seemed as thought both Ashgar and Kodra were not able to record at all this weekend.  Ashgar had a similar situation to me and when I spoke with him Friday it was from an airport as he was flying home for his sisters graduation.  Kodra on the other hand, I am not really sure what was going on, but he was neither available Friday or Saturday evenings.  He would potentially be available very late on Sunday, but that didn’t really give me much time to get things posted, since I normally post our new episodes Sunday.  After some scrambling, it seemed as though Tam was also not available.  As the day went on Rae and I discussed whether or not we even wanted to record with two people down.  I was of the opinion that we would just take the week off, but I guess Rae was really gung ho about going forward.  She thought in a worse case scenario it would just be the two of us and we would do a relatively short podcast.

Doctor Hannah to the Rescue

While my wife and I were walking Friday night, Rae was able to get ahold of a good friend of ours Dallian and he was able to fill in for us.  I had long thought that Dal might be a really good fit for the show, and him being able to do it on such short notice was almost serendipitous.  So we almost did not record the show, but in truth it ended up being one of the more enjoyable ones to make.  We talk about a number of gaming topics from Wildstar, to ArcheAge and the obligatory Elder Scrolls Online discussion.  We also dip our toes into the world of comic books and Magic: The Gathering and Dallian tells us the riveting tale of how he created the @Doctor_Hannah twitter account.  Hopefully the amount of fun we had recording this one translates to our listeners.

Hopefully next week things will be at least partially back to normal.  We should have Ashgar and Kodra back, but I believe Rae may not be available.  Dallian is coming into town to visit us, and either we will have both Rae and Dallian or neither of them.  In any case next week should be interesting as well.  At this point I am going to close off this post and crash, as I need to get up super early to make my Mothers Day visitations.  I want to wish all the Mother’s out there a very happy day, and I will see you all Monday morning for another early morning post.

#AggroChat #Podcast #ESO #Wildstar #ArcheAge

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD

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Steampowered Sunday #12

This weeks episode of Steampowered Sunday is chock full of self indulgent cheatery.  Firstly we have plans on going out and about Sunday morning, so I am technically playing the game and doing this review Saturday night shortly before recording AggroChat.  The second bit of cheatery is that normally I play through a game in my steam back catalog.  That however is not the case this week as currently steam is having a sale on all Activision titles.  Among the list was one that caught my eye.  I had noticed it a few times in the past but was never at a price point I was wiling to snap it up for.  However yesterday for $5 I figured it was well worth that just for a trip down memory lane.

THHDGame 2014-05-03 19-32-02-65Something you need to know about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise is that I played the hell out of it.  I was one of those little skater kids, and I even went so far as to have the “Tony Hawk” style “hangover” haircut.  As a result when this came out for the original Playstation I latched onto it with both hands.  One of the things I always wanted was a really good skating game, however we were stuck with either Skate or Die that at least had a free style ramp mode, or 720* which lacked any kind of free skate option… and if you took too long you were chased by an angry swarm of bees.  No game gave me what I wanted, which was the ability to faff about without a timer ticking and do all sorts of nifty tricks.  This game franchise had exactly that, and I spent countless hours playing and it and it’s higher resolution cousins on the Dreamcast.

Memory Lane

THHDGame 2014-05-03 19-34-59-10 When the I got my Playstation 2 one of the first titles I picked up was Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3.  So I knew one of two things was going to happen.  Either I would have a wonderful romp down memory lane, or I would be severely disappointed by the crappy remake.  Thankfully the game is pretty much a 1080p remake of the original playstation title, and this is a good thing.  Playing the game with a XBOX 360 controller on my PC feels almost exactly like I remember playing it on the PSX.  All the tricks worked essentially the same, and I struggled with the same problems I ever did.  The game works the same way, each map has a ton of objectives and as you move your way around the area you get bonus scores for collecting them.  As always the first objective I generally go for is for grabbing the letters S K A T E scattered around the room.

THHDGame 2014-05-03 19-35-37-03 Additionally all of the old secrets are exactly where I remember them, and accessed through the same kind of tricks.  I really was not expecting anything more than a graphical update, so I was not terribly disappointed to find that literally nothing had changed.  I got the same enjoyment crashing through the room on top of the ramp as I ever did.  One of my favorite things about the series was trying to find all the named “gaps” and a lot of these work the same as they always did.  The only thing that is confusing really is that the game is like a remix of all of the Tony Hawk titles.  There are maps from the early THPS games as well as the later Underground games.  Overall this gives you a good mix of things to go and explore, and Free Skate mode is just as much of a guilty pleasure as it ever was.

Stripped Down Game

THHDGame 2014-05-03 19-34-43-14 My biggest complaint about the game is that it is greatly stripped down.  Gone is the ability to create custom skaters, and also gone are the weird unlockable characters like the Neversoft eyeball guy, and Spiderman.  The lack of ability to create your own skater really hurts my overall enjoyment of the title.  I liked creating a skater that was a reasonable facsimile of myself and customizing his stat package to be only the things I cared about… namely street skating.  I found that overall Eric Koston has the closest stat package to what I would want, so I have been using him.  The game has been out for two years, so I doubt that we will be seeing any kind of DLC that adds in the missing functionality.  My only hope is that maybe just maybe someone cares enough to create a mod that lets you do the same thing.

The other missing feature is the skate park creator.  I spent hours building interesting skate parks to go explore, and I remember THPS 2 for the Dreamcast had a wide variety of items you could choose from.  I realize this title was released not only on the PC but also tablets and phones… so there is a limited amount of stuff they could realistically squeeze into the game given those constraints.  Even with these missing features, I have definitely gotten my $5 worth of fun.  Sure I still have my playstation, playstation 2 and dreamcast…  but I am not going to go dig them out of the closet and hook them up just to play Tony Hawk.  This little download has allowed me to relive some of those memories without having to do that.

Watch Me Suck at THPS!

As has been the trend lately, I recorded the entire play though of THPS, or at least a good chunk of it.  You can see just how bad I suck at the game these days, and how many jumps and tricks I miss.  I had a blast doing it, and I need to figure out a better option for a push to talk key while playing a game that requires a controller.  As a result there are huge blocks of time where I say nothing.  But it is fun nonetheless.  If you had good memories of the game like I did, you might check out the sale while it is still going on.  Well worth the few bucks, and the game performs extremely well.  I didn’t notice anything glitchy about it, so it seems like a pretty solid experience.

Episode 4:  Mentors for Everyone

Last night we recorded Episode 4 of the AggroChat podcast, and once again we had our regular cast in place.  Kodra was back from his business trip, and Rae was no longer trying to join the circus.  I tried a little experiment last night, that I probably won’t repeat again.  I had been concerned that I had been overly directing the flow of conversation, so I tried to take a step back and let the rest of the hosts introduce topics.  The end result lead me to do way more editing and massaging on this episode than normal as I deleted a ton of awkward pauses.  The end result is still fairly interesting.  We ended up talking about the current state of Elder Scrolls Online with its launch and remaining bugs.  We talked quite a bit about ArcheAge and how intrigued I am by it.  Finally I nudged the rest of my panel into talking about League of Legends.  They had been threatening for weeks to derail the podcast, and I encouraged it… and the end result was not terribly derailed after all.

#SteamPoweredSunday #AggroChat #TonyHawkProSkater #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO