real life

Precarious Potty

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Good morning friends. I had a bit of a stressful weekend. So we have a bathroom adjoining our main bedroom and for a while now the toilet has been a bit wobbly. Saturday morning I noticed that it was more wobbly than normal. I thought maybe the bolt just needed to be tightened a thing that I could in theory do for myself because I have the barest modicum of mechanical aptitude. When I reached down to pop the plastic cap off that covered the bolt on the right side… the entire apparatus including the head of the bolt came off in my hand. The bolts themselves were just corroded and rusted messes and seemingly disintegrated. Like I had not put any effort into it… I could have just brushed it lightly aside and had it come toppling off the base. Turns out that the same thing was happening on the left side and essentially the toilet was not securely bolted to the floor anymore.

Thankfully there was no leak that I could find… but in a severe panic, I called the plumber who was able to work us in that afternoon. However, the meant for the entire day the arrival of the plumber became the “main character” of that day. I am thankful that they were able to work us in but it also sort of wrecks the momentum of the day, but anything is better than a continued “precarious potty”. Everything is fixed now and the toilet is “strongk”, but the plumber seems to have used quite possibly the slickest substance on the planet when they cleaned up their work area. I have no clue what exactly they used but it had hints of Orange Oil and Anomia and feels like the floors have been permanently coated with Teflon. Despite several attempts to mop the nonsense away… we are having to cautiously tiptoe into the bathroom like we are walking on a sheet of ice so that is less than enjoyable. We did thankfully have a roll of the clingy rubber rug underlayment that we put under our bathmat so there is at least one section of the floor that is firmly anchored for when we step out of the shower.

Other than this I spent a good chunk of my time not worrying about the bathroom playing Baldur’s Gate III. I had hopes of being able to complete this game prior to the launch of the Affliction League in Path of Exile on Friday. I am no longer under this illusion because last night I finished up Act II. I realize that technically I only have a single act to go… but every act seems to get longer than the previous one. I screwed up Act II, but am mostly fine with this. Apparently, I was not spending enough time talking to Halsin and as a result, missed a critical quest chain that was required to buy off his loyalty. So basically he is no longer in my camp because he is sticking behind in the Act II area for “nature reasons”. So I am attempting to say this in the least spoilery method possible but… maybe talk to Halsin a lot so you will have a clue what this quest is and do it before leaving the Shadowlands. Also also… Owlbear Cub and Scratch are pure beyond words. I sorta wish “Owlbear Cub” had a proper name though.

I’ve continued to play a little bit of Final Fantasy XIV each day and am slowly chipping away at my jobs leveling them. I am working on Red Mage currently, and honestly… it kinda feels bad to play it in PVP. Essentially each day I have been doing a round of Elephant-Friend dailies and the Frontline roulette. This combined adds up to roughly a level, meaning that I enjoy playing a tiny bit of the game but not so much that it begins to feel bogged down. Essentially it takes me about 10 days to level a character from 80 to 90 and feels like I am making some progress. I am not really taking a logical approach to leveling, and more so I am leveling whatever characters that do not have broken gear profiles. I realize this is lazy… but I don’t want to figure out WHY the gear profiles are broken and instead just want to pop in and do my daily nonsense before getting back out and moving on with other things.

Similarly, I have been popping into Guild Wars 2 on a daily basis and playing a bit of the expansion content, and doing whatever it takes to knock out my “wizard chores” aka Astral whatever dailies. One thing that I want more than anything… is for the dumb Krait monument in my Home instance to be able to withdraw from my bank. It sucks trying to remember to pull out some Quartz crystals before I do my home instance farm for the day. I realize that a lot of the older systems of this game are prodigiously hard to update… but there are times I daydream about getting a job for Arena.net just so I can fix some of these things. The game is so fucking close to absolute greatness at times… that if you pushed a few kludgy bits out of the way it would really shine for all the world to see. Friction can be good, but the sort of friction that Guild Wars 2 has… is the unfortunate friction of “tech debt”.

Lastly I did pop back into Path of Exile since Righteous Fire may be a dead spec going forward… which will mean I have three basically useless characters from three different leagues. I had never run a simulacrum before now, and the other day Kodra mentioned that he was able to get to wave 22 and I wanted to see how far Righteous Fire could get. Essentially I gave up after wave 29. I was not going to die… but also Kosis was going to take like 20 minutes to kill and I got tired of waiting. I am certain that if I was not impatient… I could have probably cleared wave 30 because I was more than capable of surviving the incoming damage. It just took so long to rip through Kosis’s constantly regenerating energy shield and begin to whittle him down. I am still holding out some hopium that maybe there is an alternate quality version of Righteous Fire that will work like the previous one did. I don’t really want to play an Inquisitor going forward and would prefer to keep playing Juggernaut.

I am really hoping that we get the big dump of information that includes all of the alternate versions of gems. I could legitimately see them favoring the edge case for Righteous Fire and wanting to push more players toward it, but I feel like they really need to keep the current version around in some form rather than decimating the best-documented build in the entire game. For the moment though I am really leaning towards Explosive Arrow Champion and maybe muling a ranger just to make it easier to start with a bow and go Lightning Arrow until the switch.

Future Disappointment

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Future Is Disappointing

BackToTheFuture2

I am home sick today fighting some sort of flu like chest crud, and as a result I am taking a bit longer than normal to knock out a blog post.  It will soon be evident that today you will be unable to escape the fact that this is “back to the future day”, or at least the day that Marty McFly supposedly went forward in time to.  While I have a heaping helping of nostalgia about Back to the Future in general, I have to say the future is always a bit of a disappointment.  If you asked my thirteen year old self, what the future would be like…  he probably would have bought into the fantasy of Back to the Future 2.  At the very least I expected to have flying cars, and to have colonized the moon…  but what happened instead was potentially stranger and more interesting.  Futurism is almost always inherently wrong.  We envision the future as delivered by the things we can dream about today.  As new technologies evolve they shape that vision, and we are historically bad at guessing what trends will look like in five years…  let alone ten… or in the case of this vision of the future twenty six years.  Something odd happens when you place a goal on the horizon…  people tend to start working towards that.  So in a swell of nostalgia… we have actually seen hoverboards, self lacing shoes, and even the goofy pepsi bottle…  because this movie TOLD us to make it.

This happens all the time and more often than not we don’t even notice.  The bright colorful ubiquitous Verbatim 3.5″ floppy disks I am sure look like they do, because almost the exact same thing existed on Star Trek as a means of reading and writing data.  Similarly the iPad looks an awful lot like the handheld LCARS tablet device carried on Star Trek the Next Generation.  The internet as we know it… seems to have patterned itself off of the futurism of William Gibson.  The reason why this happens is that technologists are generally geeks… and geeks love geek culture.  Even if you don’t mean to… we are all subconsciously influenced by the things we love.  The problem is…  in the case of Back to the Future…  none of the technologies that have showed up are really “true”.  They are media stunts that have been created to prove that it “could” be done, but not necessarily something that is a widely accepted and adopted technology.  The flying car for example, for the majority of my life has always been ten years away.  The problem is that ten year mark never actually arrives… and my big concern is that we just are not investing enough in the future as a whole.  Our space program is in shambles, and the corporate sector is constantly focusing on what brings them profits six months down the road instead of six years.  It feels like we have stagnated, and most of what we are getting as far as innovations go are just constant iterations on the same ideas.  This makes me concerned that the future will never actually arrive… or at least when it gets here it will be Shadowrun instead of Star Trek.

The Height Poll

heightpoll

If you follow me on twitter… or any other network that my twitter re-syndicates to… you may have noticed a poll that I sent out yesterday.  Some people called it the strangest gaming poll they have seen… and I feel like maybe I need to supply some explanation.  I am tall in real life… sitting around six foot four inches.  This is tall enough that you realize that the world was not built for someone of your height.  I am constantly banging my head on ceiling fans, the occasional low door frame, and have to be super careful when getting in and out of cars.  As a result when I play games… especially MMORPGs I tend to play significantly shorter races.  My first character in Everquest was a Dwarf, and I have had an affinity for little races including my current Lalafell in Final Fantasy XIV.  In a conversation with another friend I found out that she was short… and had a similar experience…  preferring to play taller races.  So that got me thinking… which lead to the poll wondering if this is common place or if we are outliers.  I thank everyone that voted in the poll, because it produced the image you see above.  If anyone else wants to join in the question you can either click the link above or the image to launch into the strawpoll.

One thing I left off the poll is the folks who are medium height and prefer to also play medium height characters.  I am assuming that a lot of those people voted “no real preference”, but in truth I was mostly interested in the relation between the extremes.  It turns out that I am apparently not the normal, at least in terms of this question.  Based on the poll it seems like the majority of players either have no real preference or prefer to stick with their same height regardless of the games they are playing.  Only a few of each type preferred to play the opposite of whatever they are in real life.  I guess that says a lot of things, and mostly that people tend to be happy with themselves.  For me at least when I play a character in a game I tend to create a revised version of myself, where I fix the things that I dislike about myself… creating a “Ultimate Belghast”.  I guess if I were being completely honest with myself… were I to “fix” my height I would not actually go “short” but instead trend towards medium.  For a man it seems like six feet tall is about the sweet spot… the point at which the entire world seems to be built around that height.  I’d never have to worry about leaning down in hotel showers so that the shower head can hit me… never have to worry about banging my head on things…  and wouldn’t have to constantly search for “tall” sizes.  Four inches doesn’t seem like much of a difference but in terms of functioning in the world it really is.  Nonetheless I thought it was an interesting poll question and it was awesome that folks were willing to take it.