July 2016 – Page 2

A Chill Blaugust

July 26, 2016 by Belghast

Over the last few weeks folks have been pinging me, asking if Blaugust would be returning. I feel like I have put off this post as long as I could possible do so. Originally I was planning on calling Blaugust this year because I simply did not have it in me. However when I finally got around to posting that statement… I had folks come out of the woodwork to suggest that the contest was cool and all, but not terribly essential to the concept of Blaugust for them. They also started brainstorming ways to make it less stressful for me personally. Essentially last year was a perfect storm of events that made Blaugust extremely hard. Firstly we had a truly irrationally large number of people participating jumping from 52 the first year to 88 the second year. There was a period of time that I thought we would be breaking 100. The thing is… for whatever reason I decided to make this thing a contest, with a win condition. That means that I needed to take the tallying of numbers and such super seriously, because I would ultimately be handing out rewards at the end of the journey. The only problem with that was that due to the participation and the large number of folks “winning” each year the concept of having a true single winner seemed super silly. As a result the last two years I have relied on a random number generation to finally pass out the prizes, and that felt somewhat icky. So this year we are rolling back to a previous revision in our magical source control system… and taking a stab at what the root of the idea really was.

Blogging on a Schedule

If you were to ask me what caused me to launch this thing in the first place, I am not sure if I could actually pin it down to a single thought. However I wanted Blaugust to be about posting blog content on a schedule. I went from being one of the least prolific bloggers to one of the most prolific in a matter of weeks when I embarked upon my “grand experiment” of blogging each and every morning. In truth it was madness that I would ever suggest that someone do the same. Ultimately this year I broke my streak on purpose just to have it done and buried and behind me. However I did manage to make it a little over three years without skipping a single day, and it is a feat that I am rather proud of. However the rhythm I have settled into as a result of posting every single week day also feels pretty great. Additionally it is far more manageable because at least for my wife and I.. the weekends are the only time we really have to do much of anything together. I can bang out a post in 30 minutes when I am under the gun of having to get to work on time, but for whatever reason my blog posts on Saturday and Sunday often times took hours. I tried a bunch of hacks to get around this, like having a reoccurring movie/television column, or a summary column that recounted the best highlights of what I did that week. However none of it felt really fresh or meaningful, and instead just superseded any planned activities that we might have wanted to do that weekend.

The core message of Blaugust has always been that blogging on a schedule is a good thing. My thought was by challenging people to blog every single day for a month, then when they decided to roll that back to every other day, or only week days… it wouldn’t seem near that daunting. For some this absolutely worked and Blaugust has seemed to make a lot of blogs more active. The only problem is it has the opposite effect as well… the challenge “broke” some people and they would go for months without making a post after the challenge wrapped up. This was absolutely an unintended consequence, and one that really bothered me from the very first year. The last thing I want to do is in some way bully people out of the blogosphere by setting up some sort of artificial gate. Additionally the whole concept of having winners bothered me as well. If you sit down and create a blog, and commit yourself to posting on it and baring your soul to the rest of us… you are a big winner in my book. Blogging is one of those things that gets in your blood, but it also takes a lot out of the person doing it. So everyone out there posting on their own blogs be it MMO Gaming, Cooking or Stamp Collecting… you are all awesome to me. So in this reboot we are no longer going to think of this as a contest, but instead a festival of sorts. I want to embrace the positives that the event can bring, without adding to the pressure everyone is already under when trying to do their own thing.

Blaugust 2016

So what we end up with is a Festival of Blogging on a Schedule. What schedule you intend to stick with is entirely up to you, and honestly even if you do keep a schedule at all. 2016 has been this year when a lot of bad stuff has happened around the world, and I don’t want my artificial contest to be something that adds stress to anyone. If you want to push yourself to blog every day, awesome. I will be watching and will be tabulating those folks at the end, with probably a special sidebar image that denotes that. However I am not putting any real prizes on the line this year. This is the year that we are doing this thing for the sake of doing it. I always got the impression that no one was really in this for the gold at the end of the rainbow… so I doubt this will make any real difference. However I am trying to de-escalate the stress of the event, and I think by no longer making it a contest that might help. The hope is that you will take this month and make your own content creation more active than it has been in the past months. That is it.. that is the ultimate goal to get folks out there creating more awesome content.

The Rules

There really is only one serious rule, and that is the sign-up sheet. If you are going to start participating in Blaugust 2016 please take a few minutes to fill out this Google Form. It doesn’t ask an awful lot but what it does is important. It asks for…

Name of Blog
URL of Blog
Schedule if you Plan on Sticking to One
Twitter Handle if you use it
How you Heard About Blaugust

That’s it, nice and simple. I will tabulate the results and keep some sort of sidebar or event page with the collected information on it.

The other thing that I would ask is if you post to twitter please use the hashtag #Blaugust2016 just as a way of making things easier for folks to see as they are posted.

Resources

There is the Blaugust Nook over on Anook, and it is a great place to ask questions and have conversations with other bloggers that are doing this thing. Twitter as well is also a great resource, and I know personally that is where I end up holding most of my conversations with other bloggers. As far as Discord that seems to be the popular thing to be doing right now… I would prefer not to start a brand new server just for this event since I already have like twenty servers in my app. There are a couple of ones devoted to blogging so going to be pestering the folks who run those to see if they mind sharing. Additionally for anyone wanting to see what has happened in previous years there is always the Blaugust Category on my own blog, which I have been more or less fairly decent about tagging related posts.

Back to the Roots

Personally I will be going back to posting every day during the month of August. That said I might be staging some of the content on Saturday and Sunday so that it posts in the morning, rather than getting up and doing them and thereby impeding whatever activities we have planned. Giving up Saturday and Sunday was a strange thing for me when I did it, and on some levels I think it was a positive effect. That said there are lots of times that I have events that happen on the weekend that it feels artificial to wait until Monday to talk about. For example the passing of my cat Chloe this weekend… happened Friday night, and by the time Monday rolled around posting about it just felt like ripping a barely formed scab off the wound that was trying to heal. So for the first time in the history of Blaugust me posting every single day won’t just be my default interaction. It is going to take work to get me back in the habit of doing it, so I will essentially be struggling with you all to up my game and make more interesting content. One last word that I want to leave you with… is while everything about this keeps saying Blog, I don’t want to limit any creative outlet. If you are a vlogger or if you do twitch lets plays, or honestly any form of regular content creation, I don’t want to exclude you from this “festival”. Please sign up and let us know what you are creating and where you are creating it, and while blog means something specific… in my mind any sort of regular content creation be it blog, vlog, stream, or podcast feels like blogging to me. Additionally this is not just an MMO or Gaming thing… if you are out there blogging about your own personal stuff or another completely different industry… I want you to know that you are welcome as well. This thing started as a part of the MMO Gaming community, because most of the other bloggers I knew… were MMO Gamers. Last year Blaugust expanded quite a bit, and I hope it will as well this year into new and interesting areas.

Goodbye Chloe

July 25, 2016 by Belghast

This is going to be a bit of an odd post given that I am making it at 4:30 in the morning. Friday we had to move completely out of our cubes at work, which meant disconnecting everything in it and toting it elsewhere in the building temporarily. They are in the process of swapping out the carpet squares, and it was my hope that they would have been done by yesterday so that I could maybe go up and hook everything back up. However I spoke with my boss who tried to do the same thing, and they had yet to get to our aisle. So as a result I am getting up silly early this morning and planning on going in and trying to get everything hooked up and ready to go before most of the office gets in. This post will also be odd given its content. It was a bit of an emotional roller coaster of a weekend, and those that follow me on twitter might have a clue as to why. Friday evening we lost our eldest cat Chloe, because it was time to make the hard call. A little over a month ago we discovered a tumor that was growing beneath her jaw, and after getting her checked out the vet said there wasn’t really much we could do other than palliative care. Given the fact that she was fourteen, and given the fact that it had already consumed part of her jaw… there really wasn’t much that could be done to truly “fix” it.

So we took her home not really knowing how much time we would have for her. For the first bit things seemed pretty okay, and I had a false sense of hope that she would just be the normal cat we have known and loved all these years… well with a big growth hanging off her jaw. However the tumor continued to grow and the first sign something was wrong was that the right side of her mouth started pulling open causing her to drool. So we spent quite a bit of time chasing her around with a wash cloth trying to clean up the constant string of drool following her around. Around about this time she also started having trouble grooming herself, but my wife being off work for the summer was awesome and did an amazing job of trying to help her out. Friday night however she had developed what I can only describe as a parkisonian tremor, and instead of just drool for the last several days there had been a pretty constant bit of drainage of some sort along with it. She had been picking at food at best, and each morning it seemed like she was spending less and less time at the food dish and more and more time laying down… or hiding under the bed. When she has started scratching herself and making her jaw bleed, I felt like it was time to go back to the vet.

I feel so damned guilty about that too, because I knew going back to the vet was going to ultimately mean them suggesting that we put her to sleep. I’ve spent much of the weekend agonizing over this fact, that I was the one who ended up deciding it was time. The vet did his best to reassure me that it was more than time, and even described an anecdote of him going through something similar with his own animal. I realize that it was supposed to be comforting but really in the end it didn’t help much. I mean it was time… I am absolutely certain of that fact. They administered an anesthetic and the vet took the opportunity to let us look inside of her mouth. The entire lower jaw had essentially been consumed by the tumor, and instead of just extending down and out… it was also extending up under the tongue to a point where within a few days it was probably unlikely that she would have been able to swallow at all. All of this doesn’t really help though, because I feel the guilt of having to say goodbye to one of my babies. No amount of logic or evidence is every going to make me feel less horrible about the conclusion of events.

Cats switch allegiance throughout their lives, and for the last little bit Chloe had been mostly my wife’s cat following her around and sleeping on her pillow. However she started off her life as very much my little buddy, and there were absolutely times where that was still the case. All of our babies have been rescues of one sort or another, and Chloe was no exception. I don’t even remember the circumstances of her arrival other than the fact that we went to a veterinary clinic on Utica avenue in Tulsa to look at a bunch of kittens who had been found abandoned. I had wanted a tuxedo, because I had always been pretty fond of them. I college we had an amazing stray that hung out around our trailer that we ultimately named Pepper, and that my parents adopted. However when I got to the clinic there was this adorable little reverse tuxedo, that pulled at my heart and made me know that we had found another cat. Thinking back now… we had signs early on that something was up but they only really make sense now in retrospect. One of the defining characteristics of Chloe was her good nature, and her often times annoying habit of licking quite literally anything within range. I mean to the point of using her paws to pull something closer to her face just to lick it. This meant often times hiding your face or arms under the covers to keep from constant barrage of kitty slobber. The thing is… about two months ago the licking largely stopped, which makes me wonder if that was about the point which the tumor started bothering her.

There have been many a raid night that she was draped across my arm. As far as we have been able to figure out, she was more than likely a ragdoll mix of some sort given her habit of plopping down and almost melting into the ground. As she got up there in age she couldn’t really jump up onto the bed or the couch, so we started putting pet stairs around the house to help her ascend. She was also among the most social cats we have ever had. She never really had trouble with any of the other cats, and when someone came over she was always among the first to greet them… and likely annoy the hell out of them with attention until they finally resigned themselves to being licked. The funny thing is… she was not entirely a pushover. There have been a few times our current youngest Kenzie pushed her a little too far, and unleashed a flurry of attacks… but then moments later she would be back to normal and grooming her again. I think she groomed other cats more than any other cat we have had throughout the years, so it wasn’t only human beings that got licked… it was pretty much anything, she even tried grooming the ferrets. This mornings post has been difficult to write, but also at the same time I think maybe it helped. I had all these pent up feelings all weekend long, and while I have cried a little while writing this morning… it has almost helped to commit things to the page. I want to thank all of the folks on twitter who flooded me with support Friday night. I just didn’t have it in me to respond to each of you, but know that every single message meant the world to me. Tomorrow we will be back to normal posting, or whatever passes for normal on my blog. However today I just had to get this post out of me.

AggroChat #116 – Legion and the Deep Dungeon

May 21, 2019July 24, 2016 by AggroChat

This Week Ashgar, Belghast and Tam are abandoned by their compatriots and talk FFXIV, WoW, Starbound and Overwatch

This week we had a really strange sequence of events that lead to quite literally half of our crew being out for one reason or another. Of all of them I think we happen to be the most jealous of Grace who managed to score tickets to the Final Fantasy Symphony tour thing that is roaming the country. This was the week of big patches with both the 3.35 patch in Final Fantasy XIV bringing us the Palace of the Dead, and World of Warcraft getting 7.0.3 containing all of the Legion class changes and new Transmog system. Additionally we saw the actual launch of Starbound and with it something unusual in the early access community… significant changes being patched into the final version. So this week we have a whole slew of topics related to all of those points.

Final Fantasy XIV 3.35 – Palace of the Dead – World of Warcraft 7.0.3 – Legion Class Changes – Survival Hunter – Outlaw Rogue – Starbound Launch – Pre-Launch is Launch – Overwatch Healing Sniper

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Dankest Dungeon

July 22, 2016 by Belghast

Palace of the Dead

Last night I was not terribly certain what I would be doing with myself. For the last several days I have been heavily focused on transmoggy things over in World of Warcraft, but on the same day that patch was released the newest patch landed in Final Fantasy XIV. Before I left work I saw Tam ask if anyone would be interested in taking a trip into the Palace of the Dead… or as he has begun referring to it the “Dankest Dungeon”. This had been something on my radar for a long awhile, with the theory being that you had a brand new leveling path for alts. I have an army of alts and honestly you can only manage so much FATE grinding before you need some other path. It seems like everyone on my server has gotten the same idea, because apparently to queue for the dungeon you have to be standing in Quarrymill. I snapped this photo last night but if you looked in any direction you would have seen pretty much the same density of players. In many ways this reminded me of the wall Revenant’s Toll felt on raid reset day. Neph wanted to play her Dark Knight, Tam his Black Mage, and Thalen his Machinist… which left me needing to do the team focused thing and play a healer. Anyone who knows me very well will know I am not really the best healer in the world. The irony there is that I started my MMO career in Everquest as a cleric… the go to healer for any serious content. I also feel that experience pretty much generated a massive mental block against ever wanting to do it again.

Now I have had a White Mage for a good while, and actually enjoyed myself leveling that. However for whatever reason the Scholar class has never really clicked with me. Before the launch of Heavensward I managed to get Arcanist to 30 and actually claim both the Scholar and Summoner jobs but pretty much stalled out shortly thereafter. I felt like I sucked at the class and simply stopped queuing for dungeons, because for ever Tam Tara there would be five Brayflox that I struggled to deal with. The interesting thing about the deep dungeon is how it has its own parallel leveling system, and how it apparently invents things that simply don’t exist. For example when you go in as a job… you don’t exactly get the path that you took to get to your level. For example I had Eos and Selene really quickly rather than my Carbunkle friends, which is I guess the same thing that happens when you get leveled down in a dungeon. On the other side of the equation, Kodra commented about having a serious challenge dealing with trying to function in the dungeon as an Arcanist without the Scholar job. Arcanists play this strange role of not quite but almost healer, that I remember struggling with when I ran dungeons… because I was also note quite a dps. The early levels seem to heavily favor dps, with the last set that we completed before I was literally falling asleep at the keyboard… needing us to actually do proper group tactics to get through.

Weapons of Light

So as you move through the dungeon there are chests that you open that do a bunch of different things. Firstly you get a shared group inventory that contains these items called Pomanders. These cause various effects both to buff your party, and to counter act the negative effects of the dungeon. For example there is one that shows the entire map so you can navigate to only the rooms that contain chests, or another that will disable all traps in a floor. There are still others that are designed to counter act very specific negative effects gained from certain encounters, like Pox that stops all health regeneration. This one is particularly nasty if placed on the tank… which it was for a significant period of time last night. The natural instinct for me is to clear every room, but you are timed from the moment you set foot inside and have sixty minutes to clear ten floors. At first this seems like an easy task, as we quickly breezed through the early levels. However once we got onto the third set of floors that timer started to make a big difference, and in theory you are given roughly six minutes per floor. As a result we started pulling the levels in a minimal clear fashion with our dps fanning out at times to scout ahead and try and determine which path we should go down as a group. The name of the game is finding the blue and silver chests that contain “gear” upgrades… and by that I mean +1 to your arms and armor score which serve as the gear for the dungeon.

The most interesting thing about the experience is how you gain your abilities during the normal arc that occurs as you level up. However for whatever reason I thought I would hit a ceiling and simply stop getting abilities when I hit level 31 which is what would have happened were I running dungeons. Instead I continued to move forward and am now in my 50s gaining heavensward scholar abilities that are unlocked through quests. So in theory this is a crash course in how to play your class… long before you actually get the abilities. As to whether or not this worked… I started out the dungeon run extremely rough and almost all of the healing was coming from Selene the murder fairy. As we moved forward I started to get the hang of it, and was using adlo like a mad man followed up with some direct healing. People died, a bunch… or at least more than I am happy with… and we ended up wiping on a really bad luck trap spawn. However as the night progressed I started feeling significantly more comfortable healing as a scholar. In theory I would feel much better stepping into a dungeon now than I did before last night. All in all I got roughly three levels which is a slightly faster progression rate than running dungeons, but not the sort of speed that is going to lead to a lot of chain power leveling. I had a lot of fun and just wished that we had been able to start earlier in the evening so that I could see the end of the dungeon. I definitely want to do this again soon.