World of Warcraft Archives - Page 89 of 108

Faffing the Steppes

March 24, 2014 by Belghast

Fitbit Logic

So this is the point where I am supposed to come up with something interesting to talk about for a blog post. I kinda over did it a bit yesterday with the double posting, but that family drama piece really needed out of my head. Once I finished posting it, we both dressed and went out into the world to run the errands that needed running. The fit bit does funny things to you. I find myself parking way the hell out in the middle of nowhere just to be able to get some extra steps in. This also permeated our grocery store trip. I am normally one of those people who goes exactly to the areas of the store for the items I need and then zips straight out. I used to be able to do the weekly shopping trip in about fifteen minutes.

However yesterday we purposefully meandered up and down every possible isle, not because we didn’t know exactly what we needed… but we were trying to milk the trip for as much walking as humanly possible. So we wandered up and down the isles, saving the frozen foods for last. Not unexpectedly we probably bought a lot more groceries than normal but we got our maximum amount of walking from the trip. It feels like cheating, since I am going out of my way to try and put in as many steps as possible into everything I do. However… I guess that was really the point of gamifying exercise. Funny thing is, last night at one point I got up to get a drink while watching the walking dead. When I got back I ended up pacing around for a bit while watching the television before sitting back down.

Faffing the Steppes

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVMost of yesterday was spent faffing about in World of Warcraft. With the impending launch of Reaper of Souls tomorrow, and the headstart for Elder Scrolls Online soon… I really want to get my mage to 60 so I can boost it. My gameplan in general has been to work on quests while not in a dungeon. But I am pretty much habitually queuing at every chance I get. This has been interesting to say the least. Normally speaking I can stomach pugs if I am not tanking, and for the most part this has been the same with playing a mage. The only problem I run into is when I have a tank that simply doesn’t know what they are doing. To make it worse, many of these tanks in question are not speaking English. I really question the logic behind blizzard lumping non-english and english speaking servers together.

Granted this happens with European servers in pretty much every single game. However speaking more than one language is a much more common occurrence there. While I can pick out a few words here and there of Spanish, I am by no means fluent enough to get my point across. At one point last night the tank in question skipped half of the zone. Since we were all leveling, and killing things means more experience… I didn’t really get the point. Since the tank was only speaking Portuguese I had no real way of conveying my questions. Maybe blizzard needs to look into embedding Google translate into their API, or maybe that is an add-on idea waiting to happen. There have been many games that have bridged the language gap very well with some auto translation. I think maybe it is time for Blizzard to look into doing the same.

Veronica Mars

I finally got around to watching the Veronica Mars movie this weekend, and I have to say I liked it quite a bit. I started watching the series on a random whim, and thought my wife might also enjoy it. So together we worked our way through the entirety of the series when it was on Netflix. It is one of those rare instances where a TV show appeals equally to both of us. Mostly for me… I like the title character. I love the random quirky smartassery that comes out of her mouth, and the creative solutions to awkward situations. I find it odd just how this show, much like Firefly has found such an active “life after death”. If nothing else this proves to me that Hollywood knows exactly jack shit about what people want. Kickstarter and similar community backing seems to be a way for the huddled masses that don’t fit into the neat bubble of “pop culture” to finally get the things they have always wanted.

I did not back the show, mostly because I was feeling more than a little bit of Kickstarter fatigue when it happened. Thankfully not everyone was me. When it came out I bought the $20 digital copy from Amazon, because I wanted to put my money where my mouth. The only problem with the digital offerings here is they are all pretty much heinous, and none of them are really compatible with my chosen method of watching television and movies. Namely I prefer to stream things to my television using Chromecast and Plex. Granted I could do the crappy tabcasting thing, which is fine for say a twitch stream, but ends up annoying me when trying to watch something more “long form”. As a result I went out an acquired a downloaded copy of the movie to back up the one I paid for. Dear Hollywood… your DRM is dumb for making me pirate the movie after paying legally for it. You are doing it wrong.

As far as the movie itself goes… I liked it a lot. I am not sure exactly how I can give it a proper review without absolutely giving everything away. The characters I liked from the television show that I cared about, all made cameo appearances even if they didn’t always factor heavily into the plot of the movie. The quality of acting and cinematography was great, especially considering this did not go through the traditional channels. That said however… the movie felt a bit off at times, or more so it just felt like I was watching an hour and a half long episode of the television show. The movie ends in a perfect place for them to pick up a sequel or even another television show. So here is hoping this is not the last we see of Veronica Mars.

Gadgetzan Bound

March 20, 2014 by Belghast

Obligatory Update

Yesterday while I was in training I got a text from my mother. It seems as though the lasix is doing what it is supposed to do and my grandmothers kidney function is improved. At this point they are talking about maybe taking her off the ventilator today, and trying to wake her up completely. For the last several days they have kept her sedated with propofol aka “the Michael Jackson drug”. This has been allowing her to rest and hopefully heal. As always I want to thank you all for the support. I am not sure if I want to hope that things are turning around yet or not, because I really don’t want to jinx things. If they can take her off the ventilator that means she moves out of ICU and up to something called a telemetrics floor. Which I believe means all the monitoring of ICU, just without the critical nature. I of course will report in with what has happened one way or the other tomorrow.

Gadgetzan Bound

Last night I did not get a ton of playtime but the time I did get I continued working on my Night Elf Mage. At this point I am 45 and sitting in Gadgetzan, having more or less completed Thousand Needles. Tanaris feels much the same, even though it has changed massively since when I was first out here leveling my Hunter back in 2005. The flavor of the zone is still there… namely the conflict between the goblins of Gadgetzan and the south seas pirates. While not as hard hit as thousand needles, the zone has lost a significant amount of dry land during the Cataclysm. In many ways this has made some of the places more enjoyable. I especially liked the shallow lake full of sea giants.

Back in Everquest, the iconic “dangerous” mob was the Sand Giant, and Sea Giants have that same sort of feeling. I remember the first time I encountered one, and I also remember it completely kicking my ass. So while it feels odd that I am openly hunting them during a kill quest, it also feels cool to know that I can now take them down. Additionally you might notice that I finally got off my duff and made some glyphs. I have to say the “unbound” elemental is so much cooler than the stock frost elemental. On top of that it has a much more soothing sound as opposed to the default “water boiling” noise.

I only managed to put on a few levels last night, but mostly because I was not feeling up to pugging. There are days I can deal with the frustration and stress and there are other days I cannot. Last night I just wanted to wrap up in my cocoon on the sofa and vege out for a bit. I ended up going to bed fairly early, which I am sure is something my body needed. I still feel like I am half coming down with something, half allergies going haywire. According to fitbit I managed to get over six hours of sleep last night, which is pretty damned good for me. Traditionally I barely get five hours on the best night.

Out of Touch

The oddest thing about being in a serious training class, or at least one with the word “bootcamp” in the title means that I really am disconnected from the world while doing it. This has been odd, I am so used to knowing about everything happening within minutes thanks to twitter and google plus. Being disconnected has created this sense that I am missing something important. Yet instead of trying to catch up last night, I mostly just kept ignoring it. I guess my mind is going into weekend mode when I really don’t check into stuff much at all. Training has been good, but it was one of those situations where I did not realize quite how much I already knew about the software. Day one was pretty much just a review of concepts we already knew.

Hopefully today we will get into the hardcore nuts and bolts of tearing stuff apart and reassembling it in a fashion we want. The instructor is pretty hardcore, in that I guess at one point he was over the hardware division at Microsoft, as well as other things. Nice guy, seems to know what he is talking about. The time has gone extremely quickly, and I think it helps that I am taking it with two other co-workers. I guess right now it just feels like I am in this bubble that is not entirely “the real world”, but instead some odd “training world”. Oh well just today and tomorrow and then we are back to normality.

Steamboat Willy

March 19, 2014 by Belghast

Good Thoughts

I guess I was wrong to post yesterday that I thought things were getting much better with my Grandmother. While eating dinner last night I got a rather frantic call from my mother. Turns out that things are not going as well as we had thought. Her kidneys are functional, but not working nearly as efficiently as they should. Now it might be that they are just overwhelming from not working for so long that the toxins built up in the body are too much for them to deal with. It could be a lot of things, but basically she is not moving fluids like she should be.

Now at this point they are trying a few things, the first of which is to give her Lasix. When my mom told me that I listened but was thinking in the back of my head “what the hell does eye surgery have to do with kidneys”. Later I googled and found out that both “Lasik” and “Lasix” are two completely separate things and one of which is in fact for fluid retention. Essentially at this point one of several things is going to happen. Either the Lasix does it magic and she starts moving fluids again normally, helping her kidneys chew through the toxins. Next possibility is that it increases her blood pressure enough for her to take normal dialysis to help the kidneys catch up. Final option is that if her blood pressure remains low or drops, they will have to transfer her to Tulsa so they can do a “slow dialysis” which I don’t fully understand, but apparently it is a thing.

I am not a very religious man, but my grandmother very much is. She is as staunch of a catholic as I know, and even if I don’t believe something… I have to respect anyone that puts that much faith in anything. As a result I thank you all for all the prayers and good vibes you are sending her way. While I may not be completely sold on prayer, I do feel like the power of positive thinking is definitely a thing. So I am hoping that the prayers and thoughts help. Grandma is one of the biggest influences on the person I am today, and I am just not ready to lose her yet. She is the last Grandparent my wife and I have… and she really has whole heartedly adopted my wife as one of her “grandchildren”.

Steamboat Willy

As a result of the news that I got while eating dinner, I really didn’t feel like being around people much last night. At the very least I did not feel like streaming, because I really was not up to trying to hold a one sided conversation with myself. I continued pushing forward with my mage and managed to ding I believe 42 before I called it a night. This lead me from Feralas to Thousand Needles. It has been quite a long time since I had completed any of the new “raceway” quests… with the raceway under the newly formed lake. I have to say I found them enjoyable, and I am thankful they used the same underwater tech here that they did in Hyjal. The highlight of the quests for me is the fact that you get a really awesome boat to ride around in while you are in Thousand Needles.

The frustration of leveling with full heirlooms is that you generally only get to do a single quest hub before moving on to the next zone. Granted the fact that I have been queuing for dungeons has really escalated this factor. I want to get to 60 so I can use my boost, but at the same time I don’t. That said I know if I do not end up boosting this character, it will languish a slow death in outlands and northrend and never quite make it to the level cap. I am enjoying my Mage quite a bit, but not enough to get me to push through the segments of content that I am bored with. The problem is that one you get higher in level the dungeons become a slog, and the difficulty ramps up meaning there is a lot more failure. Right now pugging is relaxing because we could literally do anything and make it through the dungeon, when we actually need to care about damage and a bit of strategy… the enjoyment drains.

Adventures in DRM

Much like the 15 games that influenced me project, there is another one that I have been obsessing over. My friend Beau Hindman mentioned this the other day, that he was trying to distill his musical tastes down to a single 10 song play list. For me this mission has morphed quite a bit. Back during the 80s and 90s I was a “mix tape” maker. I rarely if ever listened to music as intended, or if I did… it was because the arrangement of songs on an album was absolute perfection. As we moved into the MP3 era I have continued this trait, making sublime little mixes of music for specific moods. So the project at hand has been to create a mix tape that talks about my tastes in music. Since it is so damned easy to use youtube for this purpose I simply strung together a sequence of music videos and while streaming Monday night, I had that playing in the background.

I didn’t really think much about it, and when I checked my stream over on the second machine… I didn’t hear the music coming through. So I mentally shrugged and figured it was something to do with codecs and whatnot. Turns out that the music was in fact recorded, and as soon as I did the twitch export to youtube, the DRM klaxons twanged. Their song matching system is ruthlessly efficient, and they properly identified every single track that was playing looped in the background. So I thought to myself “great, this means they will likely strip the audio from my videos” or even worse un-list them completely. Apparently no, that is not the case at all. Basically the key stipulation is, that I cannot monetize the videos now that I have acknowledged I have used someone else’s music.

I guess at the end of the day I am fine with this. I have trouble with the concept of monetization in general. Like I am not against someone else profiting from their hard work. I have however always been against putting advertisements on my blog, and I tend to feel the same about my budding youtube feed. If I thought I had a shot in hell of actually making enough income to offset my position as a senior developer… I might feel differently. What I do with my gaming is a hobby, and I just don’t think what I do is good enough that it is actually worth making money on. Anyways long story short… I am fine with this stalemate I seem to have created over copyrighted works. I get to listen to whatever the hell I want to, and apparently continue making videos. The only negative side effect is that apparently these videos are now banned in Germany.

Radio Silence

I will likely be pretty quiet on most of social media this week. Today through Friday I will be attending Sharepoint development training. So while I will check into the world periodically I won’t be very reachable. You guys hold down the fort while I am gone. Additionally I figure my evenings will be spent at the hospital again. I had stayed away for a few days because I felt like I was coming down with something. However I think that something is just “allergies” and the negative side effect of nature deciding to wake the hell up again. So yeah… don’t do anything I wouldn’t do?

The Gospel of Faff

March 18, 2014 by Belghast

The importance of pee

I just thought the sub heading would be humorous, but really it heralds some good news. Yesterday my Grandmothers kidneys started working again. Apparently when the body is dehydrated they completely shut off. The body is all “nope!” no one can have any moisture at all. This apparently was the last crucial step before she was mostly out of the woods. She is still in pretty bad shape, but they have been waking her up periodically to make sure she is responsive. They are keeping her mostly sedated however so she will sleep and rest. All of the hospital staff have been impressed with just how much of a fighter she is.

So I want to thank all of you for your thoughts during the last few days. This is the woman who at least gets half of the credit for raising me to be the person I am today. I didn’t go to daycare, I went to Grandmas house, because she was local and available… and more importantly willing. We’ve always known she is strong, but this whole episode just proved that to any shadow of a doubt. So while we are not in the “all clear” yet, we are probably up to a 70% chance of her making it out of this little episode unscathed. I am sure she will need some therapy after laying in bed for several days immobile.

The Gospel of Faff

This word has been in my vocabulary since I believe high school but I don’t really know how exactly I picked it up. So when I encountered the Godmother of Faff, I latched onto it with both arms to represent a certain game play style. However the more I use it, the more it seems to draw confusion among my friends. Sometimes it gets misread with a certain “self flagellating” connotation, or if you are Scary you apparently read it as some kind of shorthand for flatulence. So I thought I would spend a bit of time this morning clearing the air about all things faff. Since this is essentially British slang, I felt we had to go to the official source… the Oxford dictionary.

So there is the definition, copied and pasted via greenshot from the oxford dictionary website. The thing is… this leads one to believe that it is a bad thing. I tend to take a much more zen approach. “Faffing about” is just another in a long line of words used to describe enjoyable but often purposeless activity. I’ve used many versions of this over the years. I’ve “piddled” and I’ve “dinked around” and occasionally “goofed off”. I had a bit of an odd childhood, in that my mother to some extent lived vicariously through me. She wanted me to do all the things she always wanted to do… but never could afford. So as a small child I was drug through a series of activities like piano practice that I had no real interest in, but felt no less obligated to do.

As a result I felt like I never got to just be a kid, without purpose or direction. When I was allowed that time I savored it. Now as an adult, I am really cautious about anything that places undue burden on my “free” time. While I feel like Godmother and I probably use the term “Faff” in different ways, our viewpoints are very complimentary. For me “Faff” represents a play style of allowing myself to get lost in the minutiae of little things that happen along the way. It is a freedom of not having to have a goal or a focal point for the evening. That I have permission to log into a game and “mess around” for awhile without necessarily having a tangible reward at the end.

So as I have begun to stream my game play when possible, I have brought this same idea there as well. I am not doing something important or grand, but instead just doing what I always do. I log into mumble, into a special channel called “Bel is Streaming” and then proceed about my normal business and what happens… happens. Sometimes I do something really interesting, other times I just piddle around leveling. Last night for example I recorded one of my normal Onyxia and Tempest Keep clear nights, where I run through characters through Onyxia and the two that can solo Tempest Keep all in search of mounts. Sure there is purpose there, but it is not the kind of big overarching and soul crushing purpose that you feel forced to do it. Before last night it had probably been three weeks since my last mount farm night… and I am perfectly okay with that.

As is the way with Faff

I had every intent last night to play some more Heroes of the Storm, however that simply did not happen. Sometimes you get caught up in doing the things you are doing and next thing you know… it is bedtime. Part of the “Gospel of Faff” is accepting that this is going to happen and being somewhat okay with it. Some people thrive on goals, and lord knows I have a bunch of little ones. But for me it is the journey that is so much more important than the destination. I think in part that is why I have enjoyed The Elder Scrolls online so much. The game presents before me a whole bunch of rabbit trails that I can get hopelessly lost following. It is arranged in a way that keeps me from being able to “quest efficiently”. WoW has made me really good at gathering a bunch of quests, and doing them all before returning to the hub to get more.

The freedom to wander around and get lost in the process of leveling is a really awesome thing. While World of Warcraft is a really on-rails experience most of the time, I am trying to embrace ways to play it where the objectives don’t matter nearly as much as the journey. This is far more about my mental state while playing, than what I am actually doing. However I am trying really hard to always endulge the rabbit trails. If my addon alerts me to a rare mob in the vicinity… even if I am on my way to some important objective I try and pull myself from the path to try and track the foe down. As a result I end up seeing things I may have never seen before in the process. I had spent most of my time playing WoW trying to avoid the quagmire that is Kalimdor, and now I feel like I am trying to embrace it.