Good Morning Friends! I hope you had an excellent weekend. Last week was fairly dominated with guide posts about Mastodon/Fediverse, but hopefully this week we can get back to the regular sorts of nonsense that I provide. Today however I am bringing you the second new mix of what I am at least mentally thinking of as “season 2” of this project. For anyone tuning today fresh, I was one of those kids who constantly made mixtapes for myself and for my friends… even used them as a wildly ineffective way of trying to flirt. There is something about the art of placing songs in a specific order that I love, and I even go overboard enough to create some custom fake album art.
Immaculately Overwhelmed
Something that I realized in the time between my previous mixtape spree and now, is that I never really plumbed the depths of Emo Rock. I was way the fuck too old to adopt this as a style and way of life, but I spent plenty of time listening to this music. While as a Gen X I mostly viewed Emo as a resurgence of the Goth roots of The Cure and Bauhaus mixed through the party hard ethic of Blink-182. The end result was an extremely enjoyable rock phase from the mid to late 2000s. As frat rock began to fade it was replaced by this more deeply introspective version that honestly I related to quite a bit more. The scene kids that followed, even felt quite a bit like my little skater punk era. It is funny as you age, how you can clearly seen the connective fabric between different movements in music and culture. The only problem is you age out of being relevant to the oncoming generation, and as such those attempts at wisdom fade into the void. The cycle repeats for eternity.
Track List
Well folks that is it for another round of Mixtape Mondays. I hope this playlist hits the spot as much as it did for me. This would be number twenty two in total, and for those just now catching up you can check out the full list over at my archive page. I have a few mixes that are in a fluid state right now, and I will need to spend some time this week to dislodge them from the logjam they are in currently. I hope you all have a most excellent week, and we will continue this nonsense next week.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Thalen
Tonight we start off with an apology about missing last week due to severe weather. We did the thing where we accidentally talked about things we should have talked about on the show… and roll straight into a discussion about Drizzlewood and Living World Season 5. From there we talk a bit about the World of Warcraft Dragonflight announcement. This dives into a topic about how the failed state of Warcraft has helped so many games that are not Final Fantasy XIV and the odd thriving condition of legacy games. We talk a bit about Flowstone Saga and vampire Survivors. Then we dive into what ends up being a full spoiler discussion of Outriders that starts with some discussion about the expansion coming in June. We attempt to wrap things up with the Stanley Parable, but get into an offshoot at the end of the show about Marvel shows.
Topics Discussed
Guild Wars 2
Drizzlewood is Great
Chapter 5 of Living World 5 is NOT
World of Warcraft Dragonflight
WoW Failing Helped Everyone Out
Talk about various MMORPGs that are thriving right now
Last night was a very good night, and one that I have needed for awhile. It had absolutely nothing to do with what I happened to be playing, which was of course Guild Wars 2, but instead the company I kept. I’ve talked about my friend Grace so many times over the years on this blog and quite honestly they are one of my favorite people on the planet. It used to be that we were pretty regularly on the same bandwidth when it came to games and were partners in crime… whatever that crime happened to be. Lately however we have fallen out of step and the crossover opportunities have been limited. Our fallback was always Diablo 3 and the coming of a brand new season roughly every three months. However we’ve both sworn off Blizzard titles for the moment until the situation there improves… which has been more painful than I can put into words because it has also cost us our regular decompression sessions.
The pandemic has been hard in wildly different ways for different people. Grace and I have managed to stay in contact and pretty much still talk every single day, but our long gaming sessions over voice chat have dwindled to non-existent. Last night however we opted to remedy that and while they spent the evening on a combination of the Switch and Knitting and I had a casual night of World Bosses in Guild Wars 2, we spent almost three hours just talking about whatever the conversation happened to bring up. We talked about parents, jobs, and they graciously listened to me go on at length about Guild Wars 2. I am not necessarily trying to sell Grace on the game but I certainly would love to have them try it, but also know that at least until Living World Season 1 has rolled out completely that is going to be a non-starter. I just have a problem with gushing about something when I am super into it, and Grace has been there for me as I gushed at length about other games that they were not interested in at all.
The sad thing as we were talking is that we realized we had not done one of these big lengthy catch up sessions… since probably last year sometime. That is way the hell too long honestly. Granted we hang out for the length of the AggroChat podcast, but that is a more directed conversation and less free form random word association. The next step however is we have to figure out some game we are both interested in playing at the same time. While I have missed the conversation, I have very much extremely missed the random nonsense that we often got up to when playing games together. Aging and adulthood sucks sometimes, because it often pulls you away from the sorts of interactions you need most. Part of it for me is that I have also not been as available as I once was given that I can only really hang on voice chat when I am upstairs due to the quirks of Parsec blocking microphones. Since I have been working remotely for the last three years… the upstairs is “Work” and when I get off I go downstairs to “Home”. Though last night was fine and I really need to try and sort out how to make a microphone work in spite of Parsec.
In other random news I am really enjoying the Halo series. I’ve said it before but I know next to nothing about Halo and I think it has helped my enjoyment. It does however make me want to go back and try and play the games again. I find it to be a really compelling setting and maybe it will act as a catalyst for me to actually get into the series in general. I know I had not played any of the Witcher games to the end until I watched the Netflix series, and that lead me to go on a deep dive and play everything Witcher related I could get my hands on. I technically own all of the Halo games, and even if I did not they are all available through Gamepass. At some point when I decide to get on a single player kick again, I should try and play through them all.
The post Partner in Crime appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Over the last several days I have fielded a large number of questions about Mastodon and the Fediverse at large. There is one aspect that I hinted about in my guide post, but did not really cover in detail and that is how to move instances. I bring this up in part because yesterday I moved instances. It is something that I have done a number of times over the years for various reasons. For fun here is a quick rundown:
Mastodon.cloud – I started here because I had no clue how anything worked and was joining during another wave of mass exodus from Twitter in 2018.
Elekk.xyz – I was not there long and then moved to Elekk because in the directory it reported to be a gaming focused instance. While gaming discussion does happen I was kinda surprised by how not true that statement was.
Nineties.Cafe – My friend Liore decided to start up an instance and happily moved over, and ended up helping with the administration and moderation a bit. We had some fun times here.
MMORPG.Social – After awhile Nineties.Cafe died down and my friend Gazimoff wanted to try and create an MMORPG focused social network, and as such I moved houses once again and helped a bit with administration and moderation.
Elekk.xyz – When things got too hard for Gaz to keep it running, I migrated back to Elekk and mostly went into read only mode for awhile, occasionally favoriting and posting daily blog posts but not a ton of direct interaction.
Mstdn.social – Then yesterday I moved once again to a larger instance run by a lovely Dutch fellow that goes by Stux, and is more general purpose.
To most people this is going to seem like madness, but in truth instance migration is built into the fabric of the Fediverse and a rather normal custom. Why did I decide to pick up my box and move it to another home? Well the reality is in the time I had been semi-afk on Elekk, it became a much more locked down environment than I realized and as a result I had been severed from a number of people on Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online, who through no fault of their own decided to pick the big flagship instances that some instance operators are blocking. Elekk is still a lovely place and if you are there currently there is zero reason to ever leave, that is unless you ALSO have friends in places that you could not communicate with.
Most instances that you would be migrating to or from are going to be running Mastodon as the backend software. Pleuroma is also extremely popular, but I have no experience with those instances and as a result I am uncertain how this process works there. However if you see an interface that looks something like this when you go into user preferences, you are on a Mastodon based instance. Under Account > Account Settings there is a functionality that allows you to move from one instance to another. There are two ways to do this, but the first is automated where you plug in the information for the instance you are moving to, and go through a series of dialogs to indicate which bits of data you want transferred. The instance you are leaving will then go dormant and show that you have moved to a new instance (will show this shortly).
If for whatever reason there is a difference in software versions, a misconfiguration… or something purposefully blocking this functionality there is another method. Essentially you can go into the Data Export section of the Mastodon user preferences screen and dump individual CSV files for each of the pieces of data you might want to migrate. Then on your new instance you can go into the Import screen of the same area and pull in the individual CSV files. Something you need to know about this process is you can migrate the people you follow, but you cannot migrate your followers. This moving process happens often enough that when someone gets a notification that you have followed them on a new account, most of the time they click follow out of habit. The Fediverse in general is way less focused on clout and making follower numbers go up. I personally like this manual process because it allows me to edit the CSV which is just a text file, and remove any accounts that I might not want to carry over to the next instance for any reason.
When someone goes to your old profile, they are going to see something like this indicating that the account has gone dormant and moved. Notice how my header image and avatar are greyed out, and in the side there is a note indicating that I have moved to @Belghast@Mstdn.Social. What is nice about this process is that if anyone happens to stumble upon any of your older “toots” out in the ether, there will be a breadcrumb trail that can lead them back to your active account. Among all of those accounts I talked about earlier, the only instances that are still alive are Mastodon.cloud and Elekk.xyz, and as a result I logged into both of them yesterday and set up my redirections.
Hopefully through this little sequence you can see that the process of moving instances is nowhere near as tedious as it might sound at first. As always if you have any questions about the process please feel free to drop me a line below, or if you are yourself dabbling in the Fediverse feel free to reach out to me @Belghast@Mstdn.Social. There are certain customs and traditions in the Fediverse that might see a bit odd at first, but over the last four years I have gotten accustomed to them. I am always willing to help new folks as they start down this journey.
The post Moving Your Home Fediverse Instance appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
