podcast Archives - Page 8 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

World Without Warcraft

April 20, 2014 by Belghast

Replace all the Tech

Yesterday was a really odd day for my wife and I in that it seemed to end with some results that we never really planned ahead of time. The key focus of the day was to get out and move around so that hopefully we could get some steps in. It is funny how the fitbit has gamified our lives, in that both of us want those extra steps whenever we can. So when we went to a shopping center we parked purposefully way the hell out in the boondocks so that we would have to walk extra steps to get to our destination. Thing is I find myself doing this little tweak almost everywhere. It feels like cheating, but I guess in the long run it will be far better for my health to force myself to walk more. The fact that I get “acheesements” for doing so just reinforces the behavior.

I wish we had gotten the fitbits a year ago when we first heard about them, because it makes me wonder where we could be today if we had. One of the various errands we had to run was going to Sams Club to pick up a few things. They have these amazing apples, and I was getting low on oatmeal. Now that we have one around the corner from my house I tend to go there quite often. We actually got our fitbits at Sams because they were significantly cheaper than anywhere else, even considering internet pricing without the shipping. Turns out we need to shop there more often for tech, because we noticed they had the Samsung Galaxy s5 in stock and at a pretty massive savings. Currently to get one through AT&T the carrier we use is $250 a 2 year contract, through Best Buy it was $199 with the same contract, but Sams had the price down to $160.

After we walked around the store for a bit and thought about it, we decided to upgrade our phones. My wife decided she would rather have the maroon s4 instead of the s5. So for about the same amount that we would have spent to upgrade one phone through AT&T we upgraded both. The best part is that the mobile tech managed to keep our original phone plan. We have been grandfathered into the AT&T unlimited data plan for years, and if we ever lost it… we would jump providers in a heartbeat. So really in the grand scheme of things it is beneficial for them if they want to keep us as customers… to keep moving that plan down the road. We are not massive data users, but I just like knowing I don’t have to ever think about that.

Now I am coming from the Galaxy S2 that I have had for over three years now, but so far I am liking the S5 quite a bit. It has a lot of features that I had been missing like the extended bluetooth support that allows me to sync my fitbit directly with the phone. Additionally it works with chromecast allowing me to use my phone as a remote control for plex and other chromecast apps. We spent a good chunk of time after getting the phones trying to set them back up again for usage. The battery life overall seems much better than that of my s2, which is odd considering how much larger the screen and everything else is about the phone. I have not even attempted to play with the camera yet, but I have heard it is a big jump forward. The oddest thing about yesterday is using our phones without our contacts… since apparently most of them were stored on the sim card and not in google contacts. Sams did not have a data transfer cable, so I guess that is the one negative about using them to swap phones out.

Chromebook Time

Have I ever mentioned that my wife is amazing? I believe I have in the past but here is yet another instance of this. I am a habitual craigsist shopper but I go in slumps. I will furiously check it daily for something and then ignore the fact it exists for months. My wife on the other hand tends to do so pretty regularly, and if she knows I am looking for something keeps an eye out. For awhile now I have been interested in a Chromebook because for me it seems like the perfect note taking machine. I religiously use chrome already and pretty much use nothing but google docs as it stands. I wrote my entire nanowrimo novel last year in google docs… and I still need to edit that. Basically I needed a machine that I could take with me into meetings at work and take copious notes and then have easy access to them later to mail to my boss or anyone else who so needed them. The chromebook really seems like the ideal solution for this, but I balked at paying full price for one… since really I was only going to use it for a super limited purpose.

At the suggestion of friends I had mostly been looking for an Acer Chromebook instead of one of the Samsung models. Yesterday my wife asked me “what brand chromebook were you looking for?” which generally means she’s found something on Craigslist. Sure enough there was an Acer c710 Chromebook for sale that looked to be in pretty good shape for $150. I hem hawed around a bit and thought about it, and decided that still I did not want to pay that much. So instead we counter offered $100 and figured that would be the end of it. After awhile the guy responded back that he would take $120, which was better but was not exactly an immediate purchase type situation. We were heading on our way to our favorite Indian restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner so we told him we would think it over and get back with him.

I realize it was only $20 but it seemed like a significant difference at the time. Mostly because I feel like in buying a chromebook I am only going to use it for the most basic of things. I already have a really nice full fledged gaming laptop, and this is really just for carrying with me to meetings or any place I need to show off something on the web. My wife’s school system is getting chromebooks for her students, so there was also the side benefit of giving her a machine to play with in seeing precisely what she can do with it. After thirty minutes or so of discussion we decided to just pass, and tell the guy we really didn’t want to spend more than $100 on it. Apparently he was wanting to sell it and we were the only decent offer all weekend, so we shifted gears and went all the way across town to meet the guy.

The funny thing is, the kid grew up in the very small town my wife hails from, so any question about reputability was out the window there. We’ve dealt with some pretty sketchy people over the years of using craigslist and sometimes you just get a bad feeling about things. Anyone who is willing to admit that they are from a town of 3,000 is obviously not looking to do something untoward. I actually used it last night while podcasting to bring up our show notes, and so far it seems pretty much what I expected. Chromebooks are really just a machine that runs nothing but a chrome web browser. Anything that would work in chrome seems to work great on the chromebook, for my needs it seems like it is going to be perfect.

World Without Warcraft

Last night we recorded our second broadcast of the Aggrochat podcast. I am shocked, amazed and absolutely humbled that people seem to have listened to the first one. At last check we were around two hundred downloads, and for our first effort that seems insane. Last night we followed the same basic format we set up with the first show, and ended up getting caught up in a quagmire of a topic. There was a thread on twitter during the week where someone made the statement that they thought the gaming world would have been better off without World of Warcraft. We spent the majority of the hour and fifteen minute run time of this episode discussing what that world would be like, and what things simply would not exist without WoW. Between the four of us we managed to take a bunch of different angles and the end result was this nostalgia filled romp through MMO gaming.

#AggroChat #GalaxyS5 #ChromeBook #WorldOfWarcraft #Podcast

A Wild Podcast Appears!

April 13, 2014 by Belghast

The Birth of AggroChat

This mornings blog post is going to be heavily related to what we did yesterday. Firstly… I have long thought that some of the conversations we had on the House Stalwart mumble sounded pretty damned close to many of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. While I did not think we would ever be as polished as Alternative Chat, or as awesomely thematically focused as the Battle Bards… I thought our people had something interesting to add to the mix. This is happening super fast to be honest, but that is probably a good thing. I was afraid that this would end up being yet another idea we had, that we never quite capitalized on.

We first talked about doing this on April 9th, and here it is the 13th and we have our first show up. I am sure at this point it is somewhat awkward of a recording but we will get better. Additionally at some point I will lean how the hell to use audacity and make a better sounding introduction. We have a super ghetto libsyn page up right now, and that will also be changing hopefully over the coming weeks. Rae is working on some really awesome chibi versions of the co-hosts and she would likely kill me if I posted the pencil versions before she has time to pretty them up. If you guys did not know it was Rae that drew the original Belghast chibi that adorns this blog, so the new ones are truly awesome. Since libsyn needed a 1400×1400 square image I threw together a truly obnoxious placeholder image.

A Wild Podcast Appears!

As I alluded to above… last night at 8pm EST we did our very first recording. It was a little awkward starting out, but as the night went on things felt more natural. There was a point at the end where I finally looked at the clock and noticed we had been rambling on for an hour and decided to cut things off. In truth we hang out on mumble damned near every night, so I knew that once we got over the hump of doing this “for real” things would begin to flow again. We covered a pretty wide gamut of topics from ESO Craglorn Adventure Zone, to Heroes of the Storm, to My Little Pony Card game and many many stops in-between. I will leave it up to you guys to determine if it is a worthy pursuit. I am pretty happy with the way things turned out, for it being our very first podcast… and none of us really know what the hell we are doing. Leave a comment and tell us what you think of the end result.

Right now we are very much in a “finding our format” mode. Functionally we have been keeping things really simple. We all share access to a google doc that is a running show topics of sorts. In this first episode we barely scratched the surface of all the things we ended up brainstorming. Mostly I would like to see us keep things pretty lose, but we might start doing a section for news after the what we are playing bit. While the “what everyone is playing” thing is pretty generic, it seems to work really well to break the ice and get things rolling. I’ve seen numerous podcasts and video casts do that one… so I felt not shame in blatantly stealing it.

Rivenspire is Serious Business

Yesterday morning pretty early I finished up the content in Stormhaven and moved up into the Rivenspire area. The transition between Glenumbra and Stormhaven was pretty extreme, but there seems to be an equally steep divide between Stormhaven and Rivenspire. Single pulls are pretty much a thing of the past, and it is very unlikely that I now find smaller than a three pull when I am running around. As a result of this and a result of the fact that I have a really awesome onehander right now… I am back to mostly playing as sword and shield instead of two hander. I am still really enjoying the content, and if you played through SWTOR at all… Rivenspire feels a lot like Alderaan.

You have these competing families vying for control of the land, with one of them having gone completely off the deep end. Additionally there is a very “Castlevania” feel to the zone, which tells me as I get deeper in I will like the content even more. Few things make me happier than slaying Werewolves and Vampires…. and the zone also has a pretty heavy contingent of Daedra to boot. In fact one of the public dungeons I ventured into thinking I could solo it… and ended up getting bailed out by my friend Warenwolf. It easily had to have a dozen different bosses in it including the ones associated with the quest chain. It is truly insane the amount of loot you get in a group public dungeon like that. We both had to resort to “mail banking” where we mail the items to a friend and they return it back to us later.

Tag Team Farming

While recording the podcast last night, Rae and I spend most of it faffing about in Landmark. The thing that has had me high center in my building project is a complete and total lack of stone. My structure is almost entirely made of stone and it took over 200,000 to get to the point at which it is today. Last night I went out into the desert and dug down, as underneath sand is generally a solid bed of stone as far as you can possibly dig. Before I knew it Rae had joined me and we were carving out a massive swath of stone beneath the ground. While recording we managed to harvest up over 300,000 and as a result I went back and added in floors/ceilings to my stone superstructure. This makes me happy as I was getting tired of seeing the grass growing up in the middle of my keep. From here I am not quite sure where I am going next but I have a few ideas.

If you are in game you should totally swing by Liberation/Levee and check out Rae’s adjoining claims. They are located on a hill southeast of the spire, and the low settings I have to run the game on for my laptop to not completely die… are not doing it justice. She has this really awesome garden area, and then down the hill she has a guest house. Her main house is carved out of the hillside and a subterranean area. If you are in need of a crafting hub she also has pretty much all of the machines. She has another super secret project, but I won’t be showing it since i think she is going to try and enter it in the “Landmark’s Landmarks” contest. Here is hoping she does well because it is looking really cool.

Cyrodil Bound

April 11, 2014 by Belghast

Prouds, I has them

Yesterday was the second day in a row I managed to hit the default goal of 10,000 steps since I got my fitbit. While I normally clock in at the 8,000 steps range I have actually hit 10,000 four times so far. As I wrote when I got my fitbit, it makes interesting tweaks in the way you look at the world. These last two days I mostly performed a simple tweak to my routine. I spend most of my life pushing as many things as possible to autopilot, and as such… unless it is super important I try and make things absolute routine. As a result I prefer to park in exactly the same place every day, so I don’t have to think about where I parked. The only place that is reliably open is the roof of the parking garage, and while I do try and find a covered place when there is bad weather… it works for me.

Normally speaking I have been going up and down the stairs from the roof for a while now, but I opted to make a slight tweak in this routine. Instead of walking the stairs, I decided to walk the long winding ramp between the 6th and 4th floor. This is a large number of new steps to add to my routine, and I think is really the difference between consistently having 8,000 days and 10,000 days. My other friends that are also using the fitbit tend to skew the results by walking in place at night or pacing the halls to try and finish off their steps. I however wanted to try and tweak my routine to a point at which it was sustainable and repeatable, and slowly over time I am getting there.

A new thing my wife and I have been doing in the evenings is attempting to walk to dinner. Granted we live in the suburbs and it is not exactly designed for walkability… but we are making it function. There are a number of restaurants that are within a mile of the house and Wednesday night we walked a grand total of 4200 steps to RibCrib and back. Last night she got home super late so we didn’t do this, but instead walked around the corner to the grocery store to buy a ream of paper and some advil. It seems that if we are walking someplace with a purpose in mind, it is easier. This is still very new to us, but so far we both seem to be adjusting well. The only negative is that I seem to have developed shin splints which hurt like hell, but hopefully they will lessen over time.

Cyrodil Bound

If you remember some weeks back there was a question as to which campaign to choose. After much discussion we ended up picking Wabbajack, and apparently this was a very good choice. It seems as though the Daggerfall Covenant is doing extremely well there, and when I logged in last night we had the faction wide buff indicating that we had crowned an Emperor. In addition we managed to hold all of the elder scrolls, but as my friend Kodra reported it looked like we were about to lose one of the keeps holding a scroll. I feel a little bad that as cool as Cyrodil seems, last night was the first night since the mandatory pvp testing weekends that I had set foot in it. I completely skipped the tutorial quests, which are apparently really good, and worth a lot of skill points… and jumped straight into combat. I had more fun than I have really had in PVP ever… or at least since Dark Age of Camelot.

We successfully defended the keep, and took several objectives around the keep. What was nice about defending the keep is that we were able to consistently push Ebonheart Pact away from the siege weapons and destroy them, giving our keep time to repair. I died a ton, but also managed to get in my fair share of killing blows thanks to being able to shield charge into targets. I pvp’d as sword and shield and overall I was pretty pleased with the results. I might tweak things up a bit, to add a bit more annoyance to my toolbar. I managed to get three skill points and at the end of the night was halfway through realm rank two. All in all it was a fun little outing and something I could see doing again in the near future.

Podcast In the Air

For some time I have been streaming in the evenings from time to time, and in doing so I hop on mumble and join a channel called “Bel is Streaming”. Folks pop into the channel and we end up chatting about damned near everything but the thing we happen to be playing. When I went back and listened to some of the videos… they almost sounded like impromptu podcasts. This started a discussion among a few of my friends and is slowly working its way towards a real podcast. There is a group of friends that I have been hanging out on mumble with on an almost nightly basis. Over this time we have developed a really good chemistry, and the goal is to take that same chemistry to a podcast.

So sometime in the very near future we will be recording our inaugural episode. I will be joined by my good friends Rae, Kodra and Ashgar. Between us we each have just enough overlap of tastes to make it work, and just enough divergence to hopefully make for differing points of view. Rae is currently working on some really amazing Chibis of us to eventually become a logo. Special thanks to Sypster to answering some questions and helping me pick a libsyn package. We don’t really know what we are doing… but that is okay, we all have to start out not knowing what we are doing. Right now the gameplay is to keep a google doc going with potential topics, and then just see what happens on air. Hopefully it will be something worth listening to.