real world

Pile of Shame

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Good Morning Folks! I took the day off because I have several doctors appointments stacked up. A few weeks ago I dealt with a medical issue brought on by a change in medication, and that has triggered a bunch of referrals to specialists. The positive is all of the tests have turned up nothing special, and everything being normal… the negative is we still have no clear indication as to what caused me to react to the medication swap so drastically. I don’t want to go into too much detail but essentially I lost 22 lbs in 3 days… on something that was not designed to make you lose weight like that. Essentially threw my body into a state of shock and we are fishing for the reason behind it. We will see how things shake out over the next month or so of going to specialists. Here is hoping I don’t have something tragically wrong with me that can’t be fixed.

So here is where I share some of my shame with you. Over the pandemic the Garage became a dumping ground for everything from boxes that I had yet to break down and take to recycling, to dead electronics, to all of my wife’ stuff from her classroom. I don’t have a proper before and after, because things were far worse than the picture on the left when I started this mission over the last two months… but essentially I have been working on the garage and getting it into a workable state. Essentially when my wife switched schools during the pandemic, she dumped everything from her previous classroom in a pile of boxes on the left side of the garage. When I had to hurriedly move her out of her out of the classroom when she passed away, those boxes got crammed into the right side of the garage. So since September I have been plugging away at improving things… effectively moving everything to the south side and then putting up shelving on the north side, and then doing the opposite. I have a ton of boxes that will need to be gone through and dealt with, but at least most of it is now up on shelving units, and the work table that has not been clear in over a decade is now almost completely clear… allowing me to move forward with the purchase of a 3D Printer that I am going to set up out here. I still need to do a bunch out here, but I was pushing to get to clear enough for me to be able to move all of the furniture in from the backyard before the truly cold weather hit.

In other news I recorded one of my dumb little gameplay videos of my Icetrap build, and have since pushed it up another level. Right now this has become my mapper and I play it while gathering up the sulphite to go back into delve and grind out levels on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. For the moment I am running a bunch of scarabs that just add additional monsters to the map, while also running legion and expedition with the node that gives me a single large explosion. It has been years since I have run either of those mechanics so I am having fun. It also makes for some pretty chill experience loaded mapping. For the moment, the next few points I spend on the tree are going to be adding a couple more power charges to see how things scale from there. If by some miracle I can ever stack all 18 traps on the same target and have them overlap… POB claims it will deal 16 million dps. I do not however believe that is even in the realm of possibility.

I am now sitting at 20 of 40 challenges and have my first tiny totem pole joining the role of totem poles in my hideout. I’ve knocked out most of the simple items and what is left requires quite a bit of grinding. I need to open two more of the currency wombgifts and then I will knock out the achievement for those. After that I need to focus on getting things like the cross contamination achievements, and quite honestly… just grinding a bunch of content to finish out the gear grinding goals objective. My goal is to match the same size totem pole that I have had the last few leagues which I think is 34 of 40. So I have a long ways to go before I accomplish that.

I just dinged 98 on the RF Chieftain and now I plan on knocking out a few more difficult things that I had been putting off, because I did not want to risk backsliding on experience gain. So i will be knocking out Sirius for another map slot, and potentially doing some stuff like Uber Atziri which should be reasonable with the current state of my build. I might even try some of the other proper ubers to see how well I can tackle them. I might do some more T17s and a few T16.5s since it will be awhile before I really care about how far progressed in experience I am again. 98 is really where the experience curve grinds to a halt, and those last two levels are super painful. However I expect to push to 100 again, because it knocks off a component in the last achievement.

Anyways! I need to gather trash and get it out to the curb and then start prepping to go to a doctor appointment. I hope yall are having a great week, and I will see you tomorrow for more nonsense.

Nineteen Years

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AggroChat 59 – The Shadowrun Dragonfall Show

Last night we got the folks together to record the fourth AggroChat game club show, this time devoted to Tamrielo’s pick.  Shadowrun: Dragonfall is the second game in the Shadowrun: Returns series from the wildly successful kickstarter process.  While the first game focused mostly on getting the engine correct, this game focuses more on weaving an interesting narrative in the Shadowrun setting.  In tonights show we delve deep into the game and talk about the various choices we made while playing it.  Please be warned this is a full spoiler show, and we will talk about some of the plot twists and the alternate choice paths that you can make in the game.  I highly suggest that if you intend to play this game,  that you revisit this show after doing so as not to spoil any of the content.

 

This title is auspicious for various reasons, primarily because it is the first title that everyone joining in the show either beat or came extremely close to beating it.  Kodra and I started recording tonight and during the course of the show actually defeated it.  Ash however is in the final stretch making him only about thirty minutes away.  The other extremely unique thing about this game is it is quite literally the first game we have played that we all were able to give a big thumbs up to.  Join us next month for Kodra’s title as well called There Came an Echo, which is a voice controlled real time strategy game… that is certain to lead to some strange conversations.  Additionally if you played Shadowrun: Dragonfall along with us, please head over to AggroChat.com and drop the team a line with what you thought about the game.

Nineteen Years

It was roughly nineteen years ago yesterday that my wife and I first got together as a couple.  In truth we use May 30th as a close approximation of our “dating anniversary” because honestly neither of us really know the EXACT date.  For the most part we consider it to be the more important anniversary and try and at least acknowledge it every year.  We are not big into gifts and never really have been.  We tend to label things we were already going to get as “anniversary gifts” after the fact.  Like apparently the wooden rocking chair I got my wife awhile back is her anniversary gift, and according to my wife my new SUV and the used iPad 2 I will be getting Monday is my gift.  It seems like I made out like a bandit until you learn how we spent our anniversary.

Friday was the last day with kids for my wife and thus begins the yearly ritual of packing up her room.  This year however it is a bit more stressful for her because she is having to entirely vacate her cubical.  When they moved into the building they created this “collaboration room” for the teachers, and set it up in quite possibly the least collaborative method known to man…  the office cube farm.  This summer however it seems like they finally got the memo and are going to tear down the cube farm and replace it with a much more open shared workspace.  That said she has to completely move out of both her own personal cube and another cube for a program she manages.  So yesterday I spent my anniversary packing up these cubes in boxes and moving them as she worked on packing away stuff in her classroom.  It is not the most glamorous anniversary in the world but it was me helping her be less stressed so I think in the grand scheme of things it was a win.

End of School Stress

There are times in life when I have to fight my nature.  I tend to be fairly protective of my friends and family, and I especially feel protective of my wife.  She is a strong badass of a woman, who does not need me to fight her battles for her… but there are occasions when that instinct still kicks in.  Part of the reason she is so damned stressed right now revolves around an event that happened Friday night.  She is a rockstar of a teacher, and I mean that in every sense of the word.  She will fight for these kids and bend over backwards to try and make sure they are doing whatever they need to be doing.  This week was one of those cases where she bent over backwards to try and make sure one of her students was doing what they needed to be doing.  The problem being this isn’t always appreciated and sometimes misguided parents can add to her stress level.

It is extremely hard for me to see her in the frustrated state she was in Friday.  Every fiber of my being wants to protect her from the people who were stressing her out.  Thankfully school is over and due to the extremely supportive administration things will work themselves out.  But for the time being she has been wrestling with whether she did the right thing, or enough to help her students.  For this reason and many others I am happy to help her try and at least get one stress out of the way.  I know I would not be half the teacher she is, because quite frankly if I had to deal with half of the things she suffers with a smile…  I would have gone postal a long time ago.  She however has a level of dedication that can only be admired and respected.  So I spent our anniversary packing up boxes, moving file folders, and moving it around the building.  It might not be a glamorous chain of events, but if it lightened her burden then I think it was a successful way to spend our day.

Half Sleeping

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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.

Munchkin Mania

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Too Old for This

Every now and then I will say something like “I am too old for that”, and I don’t really believe that is ever the case.  It is just a shorthand for “I am old enough to release that it has consequences and am unwilling to deal with those.”  When you get older, you realize that your actions have severe negative effects on your wellbeing at times, and attempt to avoid these at all costs.  The funny thing is… staying up until midnight is not a huge deal, I do it all the time.  However this usually means that I have had a gradual winding down throughout the evening and am at a super chill place when midnight actually comes.  Last night I was out driving through town at 11pm, and it had a vastly different effect, and this morning I am paying for it.

While I greatly enjoyed my evening, I now feel groggy and useless this morning as I sit here attempting to assemble a post.  It is a sort of post excitement hang-over of sorts, and as I think about it… it really feels like a mild version of an actual hangover.  I am sure I could have slept in more, but my wife brought one of the ferrets in to “play” this morning, and when I looked at the time and felt the grumbling in my tummy I figured it was “good enough”.  I can’t be grumpy with my wife for waking me, because in reality it was a good thing I was up at 8 am, will keep my schedule from being thrown off too much.  Additionally I wake her up with the ferrets at pretty much any opportunity I get…  so turn about is fair play.

Munchkin Mania

So what exactly doing that caused me to drive home last night through the rain at 11:30 at night?  Well as I said yesterday a good friend of mine is in town for the weekend to attend the Muskogee Renfaire.  As a result Rae decided we needed to have a game night, where we would play board games, eat pizza and generally have a good time.  It had been ages since any of us sitting at the table had played munchkin, so we had to relearn the rules.  Honestly it probably would have just been faster if we had called up the Munchkin episode of Tabletop on my chromebook and watched it to “grok” the rules a little faster.  I am known for being all about the death, destruction and ultimately loot in the games I play, so Munchkin is one of those games that is ideally suited for my sensibilities… even before you factor in that the cards are hilarious.

Our mistake however was the fact that Rae owns both the base set and the Cleric and Ranger sets.  We decided to just jumble everything together and play with some massive decks of cards.  The problem with this is that in doing so it drags out the game immensely.  I should have taken a picture of my hand, but at one point last night I had some dozen bonuses in play and I felt like a little kid playing dressup.  I feel like somehow Rae stacked the deck or something, because she managed to win BOTH of the rounds of Munchkin that we played.  She is a sneaky one, and kind comes out from nowhere.  At one point I was set up to win, and I thought no one could do anything about it.  However she was sitting all that time on a card that allows her to right the monster instead of me.  Unfortunately my cards were in play, reducing the monster to something we could not buff enough to defeat her.

This is the fun of munchkin, there are no such things as permanent alliances.  Essentially anyone that is level 9, just became everyone on the boards enemy.  Dallian had the bad luck of drawing a lot of instant level up cards, meaning he became the focus of our aggression early in each game.  Like I would manage to sneak in the level up cards every now and then to kinda keep people from noticing that I was gaining power.  He on the other hand would lay down 3 in one turn, making folks realize “oh crap! he is winning!” at which point we all turned our guns to bear down on him.  I kinda feel bad that this happened since he was the visitor to our fair city and all, but all is fair in love and loot.

Warming Coldharbor

eso 2014-05-14 19-51-12-450 At some point I need to get out and pick up the dry cleaning today, but other than that my key mission is to get through Coldharbor, or at the very least ding 50 trying.  At this point I am really amped and ready to move on to the veteran level content.  Aldmeri Dominion is the first stop on the veteran content for the Daggerfall Covenant, and this is the faction that I have played the least of.  In fact I have not even got past Auridon, or even halfway through it on any character in beta.  So I am really looking forward to exploring this area, and killing copious amounts of elves in the process.  As my friend said, if you like killing elves… you get to do that more in Aldmeri than any other faction.  Unfortunately I kinda wish I could align with the Maromer… angry snake worshipping pirate elves are so much cooler than the Aldmeri.

Other than this I know I want to play some more wildstar at some point.  I would really like to see if my Chua Engineer remains fun as I start getting more abilities.  Additionally I feel like I have been neglecting ArcheAge, so I will probably be playing some more of that.  Basically today I want to vegetate and play lots of games.  We have to go to a wedding tomorrow, so today is my one real shot at messing about happily in various games.  Hopefully you too can have a relaxing weekend, and I am hoping that Dallian and Rae have a blast at the Renfaire.  They really are not my thing, but from everything I have heard says that the one here at the Castle is one of the better ones in the country.  One of the absolute best things I have ever heard of is one year when a guy went dressed as Spock, and he kept scanning people with his tri-corder and muttering “fascinating”.