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The Impossible Plateau

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Forced Fasting

Screenshot_20140422_193251 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

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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

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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?