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Newbie Blogger Initiative 2015

May 1, 2015 by Belghast

It’s That Time Again!

Well folks it is once again May the First and as such time for us to begin the Newbie Blogger Initiative. For those that are unfamiliar with this program, I thought I would take a few minutes this morning and talk about what exactly it is and what you can expect from it over the coming month. May is essentially the month that bloggers set aside to helping create more bloggers. In order to do what we do we need a thriving community to live in, and this is our version of a neighborhood block party. I once referred to NBI as the BlizzCon of the gaming blogosphere, because really this is the event I look forward to each year. It is exciting seeing all of the new faces filtered into our world, and seeing others rededicate themselves to creating more frequent content. Others of us just enjoy helping folks out to get their start with whatever projects they are wanting to do.

For New Bloggers

If you have ever thought about creating a blog, a podcast, or a youtube channel this event is solely centered around you. For years we have heard that “blogging” is dead but the fact that I have over five hundred active blogs in my feedly account would disagree. Each time I go to read through my gaming blogs it is like drinking from a firehose. I love this and I love the fact that there is so much creativity packed into this community. However in order to keep this a vibrant and fresh community we keep needing to infuse it with some new blood and new ideas. One of the most difficult parts about starting any new venture is getting an audience. It can be frustrating to feel like you are writing into the void, and in part the Newbie Blogger Initiative is here to give you what you need most… exposure.

During this month the gaming blogosphere turns its eyes to the Newbie Blogger Initiative and by choosing to start a blog during this month we are essentially hand delivering you readers. Now of course starting the blog is the easy part, creating regular and creative content is the challenge. Throughout the month veteran bloggers will be giving you tips and tricks that we have to help ease your transition. This has always been a very blogging centric event, but we want to embrace all gaming content. There have been quite the number of new podcasts spawned out of this event and the connections with other bloggers, as well as a few folks dipping their toes into video creation. Essentially the sky is the limit on what you can do, but you have to start someplace and we are here to help.

For Veteran Bloggers

While all of this love is getting thrown around on the new bloggers, it is really the Veteran bloggers that make up the backbone of this initiative. We need you, your ideas and your wisdom. Blogging is rough, and getting up and doing this on a daily basis means we need some tools to be able to lean on. Each of you started out as a fledgling blogger at one point or another, and many of you got a massive boost by the Newbie Blogger Initiative in the past. Now is the time for us to step up and help the next generation to become the awesome bloggers of tomorrow. Many times these new bloggers just need someone to talk to and bounce their ideas off. I personally am always open to new blogger queries and during the course of this event I will end up trying to make a personal connection with as many of the new folks as I can.

What we need more than anything however is for you to keep making awesome content. Let the bloggers know what works for you, what you have figured out doesn’t work, and general ideas about how to make a blog successful. I’ve talked about a lot of topics in the past, and there are a few of them I end up dusting off almost every year. More than anything we need you showing that this is an achievable goal, and that given dedication you can succeed. Each of us has tricks that we use to keep us going, and at the end of the day someone starting this is going to need a big bag of tricks to lean on. Channel your gifts in whatever direction you feel best be it with writing prompts, tutorials or lessons learned, but whatever they might be we need you to make this work. There are already folks signed up on the forums waiting for us to find them, so I suggest you sign up as mentor today.

For Wayward Bloggers

Now especially I want to address a special kind of blogger this year that I might not have in the past. Have you lost your way blogging, and somehow lost the will to put pen to paper and create new content? While I am generally thought of as this prolific daily blogger, there are some pretty massive lapses in my blogging history. I recently celebrated my second anniversary of making posts every single day… but prior to starting that there was a seven month lag in my blog. It is easy to “fall off the wagon” for lack of a better term. Life gets in the way and your font of inspiration dries up… then the longer you wait to make a post the more pressure you put yourself under about making said post. We are our own worst enemies, and as the months tick you suddenly realize you are no longer really a blogger.

Newbie Blogger Initiative is also the perfect time of the year for you to get active once again. Sometimes we start down a path that doesn’t end up as sustainable for our interests, and other times life just simply throws us a curve ball. In any case I urge you to take this month to get back into blogging. We are here and waiting to help you with whatever you might need to tweak on your blog to make it sustainable. We are also waiting with a ready audience to consume your brand new and shiny content. Each year we lose a number of bloggers to life, and I am hoping to help resurrect some of them and get them making content once more. The Newbie Blogger Initiative is so much more than just a launch pad for new blogs. It can be the vitalization of our community every single year, giving us a new perspective to carry us through the next year. If you want to come back to blogging regularly, we are waiting for you.

#NBI2015

Hitbox Frustrations

July 29, 2014 by Belghast

Back to Normal

This morning signals the return to my normal routine. Over the course of the math camp I have allowed myself to veer significantly from the path I normally take. This means a lot of things, including being far more sluggish about making my blog posts within a scheduled timeframe. Additionally my diet and walking regiment fell completely apart in the face of eating out so many times. That said it is time to buckle down and return the tray tables in their upright position and prepare for landing. It feels so weird to be going back to work today, and I am dreading being deluged by a weeks worth of stuff that set unsorted out.

I have only slightly followed my email while I was out, and dealt with a few fires… and postponed a few others for this week. I know I have an extremely full plate waiting on me, and hopefully my coworkers will be forgiving as it is going to take me a little bit to get back into the swing of things. Unfortunately based on everything I read in my inbox, I really need to hit the ground running today and knock out several things. I know of at least one project that needs to be out the door and ready to go by August 1st, and another that needs to follow closely on its heels. Then there is our project list, and juggling in a new person into the group. So it is going to be a stressful rest of the week to say the least.

Hitbox Frustrations

This morning I logged into Hitbox.tv and completed a ritual I have done for the last several days… so many times I have quite literally lost count. I logged into my account, went into my pre-recorded video and attempted to push the videos to youtube. Like always it gave me the popup message signifying that my videos should show up on youtube shortly. As has been the case each and every morning, I am quite certain they will not actually show up there. Right now I have half a dozen videos that I have recorded playing various games that are in essentially limbo. While there are lots of awesome things about the service… right now you cannot download videos you have recorded, upload them to youtube or even embed them directly from the hitbox service. Which basically means the videos are not accessible anywhere other than through the hitbox interface.

There are so many things I like about hitbox, but presently it is relentlessly buggy. The streaming portion they have down pat, and I would say it is one of the best experiences since you can actually chat somewhat realtime with people watching your stream. It is all of the little things that I have come to take for granted with Twitch that simply do not work at all. Previously there was a really awesome twitter integration so you could have an automated message go out to your twitter feed when you were actually live and ready to go. In the last few days since I had last streamed, this apparently broke as well. Right now it feels like we have been sold a lemon, and while I am sure they are trying as hard as they can to straighten things out… they seriously need some better public relations.

The official pronouncement from hitbox support is that things should be fixed either today or tomorrow. The problem is that “today” and “tomorrow” were three weeks ago. Instead of following up with a legitimate estimate for when things will be fixed… they just keep giving out the same “today” and “tomorrow” statements. Now as my friend Ashgar pointed out, I can in fact record local and upload to YouTube as a separate process… which is fine for anything I do in the future. I however tend to stream sequentially, in a way that someone could go back and watch the progress I made along the way. This means a number of videos are now essentially stuck in hitbox jail and there is no way that I can get them to another service. I took for granted that the estimates of when things would be fixed were actually true, so I kept recording expecting that someday I would be able to upload them to YouTube without issue.

Right now I am in a holding pattern and still using hitbox, because really the streaming functionality is excellent. I just wish everything else about the service were up to the standards set by twitch. I don’t really want to go back to twitch if I can help it, because having to live in a minimum of 30 seconds of lag, is frustrating to me and frustrating to anyone who might be viewing what I was doing. I feel like my viewers are significantly different than the normal viewers that streamers get. When I get someone in my channel it is a friend of mine, and I feel like I should interact in as timely a manner as I can, because we have connections beyond that of viewer and streamer. Hopefully tomorrow will come, and they will fix their crap and let us start moving files again. At the very least I would be happy with either the ability to download what I have already recorded or at the very least embed it directly into my blog.

Player Commendations

After dropping off our British friend at the airport, and one of our ferrets to the vet… we went home and pretty much vegetated. I had a rather glorious day playing some Final Fantasy XIV and even doing a little bit of streaming. For the most part the day was spent working on my Dragoon in an attempt to get him to level 45 and acquire the awesome dragon armor set that waits for me there. Right now my leveling method of choice is to run around a zone, this time Coerthas doing FATEs while waiting on the Duty Roulette to pop. For years I have been completely gunshy about doing random dungeons, thanks in part to just how horrible and toxic the community in World of Warcraft dungeon finder can be. That said I have to say that the community so far in Final Fantasy XIV has been an utter delight.

Sure I have run into a few players that are relatively horrible at playing their class or their chosen role, but I have yet to find a single player that I would consider rude or abusive. I can take playing with folks who struggle, but it was always the “internet tough guys” and general jerks that kept me away from the dungeon finder. The most interesting thing for me is that apparently I have made a positive impression on the groups I have been in. After I had left the first time, FFXIV introduced a system of positive reinforcement called “Player Commentations”. The idea is at the end of each dungeon run each player gets to commend a single player for their actions in the run. Generally speaking I assumed these would be limited to the tanks and healers, since they tend to run the show. That said I have managed to rack up ten of them so far through the course of my random dungeon runnings.

Granted I try to go out of my way to make the dungeon run smoother, interrupting all of the AOE effects that I can. In Stone Vigil last night I even managed to double interrupt a pack using Legsweep for one and Spineshatter Dive to interrupt a second one moments later. That said I expected this sort of thing to go unnoticed, or get attributed to the tank… since tanks also have stuns… but at least in PUGs seem to rarely use them. All of this said it feels like the community in FFXIV has reached a point where all of the negative forces have wandered off into other games, and what is left is a cohesive group of players who are bound together in their love of all things Final Fantasy. This might be a great oversimplification but so far I’ve greatly enjoyed all of the random dungeons and guildhest groups I have been a part of. People seem to be genuinely willing to talk through problems without resorting to name calling.

I closed off the night sitting at 43.5 and working on the final Dragoon hunt. Something awesome is that apparently when we were not looking they added in some extremely awesome rewards for completing the hunt logs. When you complete your class hunt log you get a ring that is honestly as good as Darklight if not slightly better. When you complete your grand company hunt log, you get a pet. You can collect your rewards by telling Jonathas in Old Gridania a “tale” of your deeds. I still think this is a pretty cool way of handling a epic turn in like this, that your character literally tells the NPC a story about how you succeeded in battle. This is going to give me the drive to finish up my Immortal Flames hunt log, so that I too can get a pet from it. So far I am really enjoying my time back in the game, and it is starting to stir the attention of some of my guildies. Here is hoping that at some point we can return to doing 8 man content. For now I will just settle with being able to do guild groups.

#Hitbox #FFXIV

The Impossible Plateau

April 23, 2014 by Belghast

Forced Fasting

This blog post is going to suck, I just wanted to get that out of the way now so you can avoid reading it. In the mornings I muster the “oomph” to blog by channeling the dark arcane magic of coffee. I am completely un-caffeinated today and it is horrible. I am having to fast this morning as part of some blood work, and I have no problem with the not eating part… but no coffee is hitting a little below the belt. I totally imagine that once I have had my blood drawn I am going to go to the nearest QuikTrip and like try and drink straight from the coffee pot or something like that. I’ve never really understood the purpose of fasting before blood work, since don’t you really want to see the persons stats how they actually are all the time? What is the point of having this fasted idealistic state, when you know the person is going to screw everything up with caffeine anyways.

As part of our insurance plan at work, we are having to submit to a “biometric screening”, which seems really damned Orwellian to me. The last few years I had been a conscientious objector to the process and as a result paid a significantly higher insurance premium, but this year that reached a critical mass. If you do not take the screening your monthly insurance rates are literally over double what they would be if you submitted to the finger prick. We did not find that out until after all of the normal screening sessions were finished. So now I have to go to some massive last call session this morning. I still think this entire process is bullshit. I’m curious, are any of you having to do this for your work insurance? My working theory is still that our HR department is incompetent and just simply cannot negotiate for new insurance plans worth a shit.

The Impossible Plateau

Last night I decided to faff about again in Alik’r and start the stream going while I did so. There is a spot on the map that seems like it should have something cool at it, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get up there. During a good chunk of the video I am trying to get up to the place and failing miserably. I go for a really long swim, which I am sure was boring for everyone watching… and by everyone I mean no one. Actually to be truthful over the course of the video I did manage to pick up two viewers. First I was joined by ShinyWhip who apparently was bored and was willing to watch me go for a swim. She got to watch me fail miserably at trying to solo a world boss as well. Eventually I was joined by my guildie Saia who also got to watch me fail at a few things. That is pretty much the subtext of my streams… me failing at playing video games.

At some point I had to go afk for an extended period of time and I cut off the stream after returning. Later in the evening I attempted a public dungeon with Warenwolf but we seemed to be missing a lot of the bosses. Turning in the quest from inside gave us credit for the place, but I have never seen a public dungeon without a slew of optional bosses. In grand total I think we found three, and none of them actually seemed to drop anything of use. Honestly I have been on a bad streak as far as bosses go. I am reaching a point where the greens I craft seem to be significantly better than the blues I am getting as drops. Crafting in this game is extremely overpowered, and I now have enough skill points dumped into blacksmithing that I have a pretty great chance of getting a temper off anything I deconstruct.

I dinged 38 last night, so In theory I could craft up an entirely new set of gear. Not sure if this is really worth it however. Thinking I am going to try and limp on with the 36 set I have until I ding 40, and then craft all new gear then. The problem with crafting sets of gear is that it is a serious drain on your available tempers. I am really not sure how many I have, but I don’t think I have near enough to be throwing them away randomly. The big frustration so far with Alik’r is that I am still mostly finding Orichalcum. I thought by now that I would be swimming in a sea of Dwarven Ore, but so far it has been extremely rare… which means I may not even have enough ingots to craft a full set of anything right now.

On Streaming

I am really bad about not touching social media or my RSS feed on the weekend, and as a result I usually have a significant backlog that starts sometime on Friday night. Since I was off for Good Friday this past week, it mean this void started on a Thursday night. As a result I missed this post by Scopique on his thoughts about streaming. I am honestly not sure how I feel about streaming in general. Twitch is one of those weird things that I am not really sure what to do about. While I have a twitch channel and I stream somewhat regularly, and then dump said videos on Youtube… I really don’t watch twitch much at all. Well there was that period of time when all of us were watching Twitch Plays Pokemon… but that was more of the “trainwreck you just can’t help but watch” thing than something I genuinely enjoyed. Generally speaking the only time I watch anything on twitch is when there is some presentation relating to a game I am playing.

As a result I feel kinda bad that I am streaming and love it when people watch my stream… but I don’t ever actually end up watching anyone elses streams. I feel like that is a big reason why my stream and youtube channel will never really be successful on their own. They will always be attached to my blog, since the blog is what is really important to me. I don’t fully get the twitch or youtube cultures, and in order to get either to really work it feels like you need to fully immerse yourself into said culture. Right now I am streaming mostly because going back and listening to the things that my friends and I say on my stream entertains me. I say all sorts of stuff and fifteen minutes later I cannot remember what the hell I just said, so it cracks me up the random stuff that comes out of my mouth while I game. Ultimately I stream for the same reason I blog, because for whatever reason I find it entertaining and fun, and would probably be doing both even if I never had a single reader or viewer. The stream however is just not something I think of as meaningful or permanent… it is very much a throwaway experience to me. Entertaining for the moment it is happening, but not something to really ponder once the stream has been turned off.

That is not to say that there are not some absolutely amazing and entertaining folks out there. Qelric for example does amazing videos, and her production value is just great. I tend to watch whatever videos come down the pipe from her, because I find them equally entertaining and informative. That said I have never really gotten into the “let’s play” culture on YouTube. I tried doing some of it with my series on Trove… and really I just didn’t like the way it felt. For a period of time I was trying to get people to do the like and subscribe thing… before I realized that I just didn’t really care much. If people watch my YouTube channel and like my videos… awesome… if they don’t… equally awesome. I think the big difference is I am not trying to make a career out of being an internet persona. I don’t need viewers or clicks or likes or whatever to get a pay check. At the end of the day my blogging and my faffing about in streams and videos… is just something I do for entertainment. I respect the folks who are trying to make this work as a career but I don’t think I could ever deal with the inherent instability that is trying to make a living off the whims of others.

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?