Good Morning Friends. I am what I would prefer as a buzzer-beater. I get things done, but almost always end up doing them right before the deadline. I am the sort of employee that drives their managers insane when it comes to compliance items. If you tell me something is due on a specific date, I interpret it as being done at the close of business on that date and will hand it in without fail at the last minute. It is this way with seasonal events in video games, and last night I finally got around to checking out the Halloween event in New World. You technically can receive the quest at 35, but given how fast I got my ass handed to me by the roaming 60s I decided I would come back later. The problem is that “later” never really happened until last night.
When the fight begins properly you have a big boss called Baalphazu and a few types of smaller adds that spawn around it. The most common are these little pumpkins, which you can destroy and get a pumpkin bomb that you can throw at the boss. Essentially I think the plan is for those who are lower level to be picking up the pumpkin bombs and chucking them at the boss, which lowers its defenses and starts a burn phase. The larger challenge with that however is when it is doing a burn phase, it is also dealing massive AOE damage. The strategy seems to be to dogpile everyone on the boss and throw down enough healing circles to allow everyone to effectively shrug off the damage. When it worked it went well and 30-40 players showed up at the spawn point. When it did not go well, we struggled to burn down the boss until reinforcements arrived.
There were a number of rewards for the event that now makes me wish I had started this a bit earlier. There were three helmets, the one shown above, a pumpkin head, and a witches hat. There was also an armor set featuring a chest piece and helm that are designed to make you look like Baalphazu, as well as a “pumpkinling” that you could get for your home. The bigger reward is that after you had completed the event a few times you got enough faction with the vendor and could start buying item-level 600 weapon patterns. I ran enough of the event yesterday to pick up the cosmetics and greatsword, sword, and shield crafting patterns. Doing the event drops bags of loot that contained the lower-end versions of the weapon patterns, and I believe I managed to get one of those for all the other slots. All told it was a good event and I wish it was sticking around a bit longer, and that more level range variety could have easily participated.
Other than that I continue to quest my way through the game. Right now I have a few competing goals the first of which is to continue harvesting up all of my banks full of material so I can do another massive crafting session. The next is to gather up gold and territory standing so that I can purchase a Tier 4 house in either Brightwood or Mourningdale. Weirdly on my server… the guild that controls Brightwood seems to not care much about leveling up that territory so I am starting to lean heavily toward Mourningdale. Whatever the case I have to hit 30 faction in that territory in order to unlock that max-tier home. I think I am about to wrap up questing in Mourningdale, and not certain where the game will send me next. I would assume more than likely it would be Ebonscale Reach.
In other news… I lost yet another lottery in Final Fantasy XIV. I know a while back I said I was hopping off the lottery train, and I did for a few rounds… but alas I am back to doing the four-day wait. I do not understand why Square did not seize the opportunity with the Island Sanctuary to give us all an instanced housing plot. That seems like it would have been perfect to just have those hidden among the island somewhere and function essentially like a housing district for one. Right now on my server at least, it seems we are all vying for the same plot each week, so the likelihood of me ever winning one is pretty minimal.
If nothing else I guess it gets me logging into the game every week, though I almost always stay parked at the placard awaiting the sad trip back into the game when the results are posted.
The post Buzzer Beater appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This weekend I made some drastic choices and have started to begin evaluating what I actually want out of social media. Saturday afternoon while listening to an extremely great synth rendition of the Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers soundtrack, I started removing follows. I went through my list a single person at a time and asked myself… “is this someone I actually remember interacting with at some point”. That seems simple enough, but over the years I have been very liberal with who I followed in a search for more friends out there in the void. Roughly an hour later I had paired down my list and nuked about 500 follows. I am certain that I made some mistakes in this process and there are some folks I accidentally removed that I will regret. However, it was the first step in a process to try and return to the roots of why I originally started using the internet.
The internet for me at least started out fairly simple. There was a certain novelty in being able to communicate on my computer with people from all corners of the globe. It was this communication that was front and center and I hungrily gobbled up as much information about other peoples and other cultures as I could. I grew up in a fairly sheltered environment, in a very small town, in the middle of nowhere, and due to all of this, my world was pretty small. The internet cracked open a window that I never wanted to close. In those early days, we were just bits of text on a screen, and as a result, our value was in our ideas not necessarily the metrics associated with them.
Even the “realest” folks that I know adopt a carefully curated person when they present themselves online. That persona may be very close to reality, but it still exists both as a safety net to keep things from getting “too real” and to filter our thoughts through. In the early days of the internet, there was less need for this pretense. If you saw someone out on the broader internet, it was guaranteed that they too were a geek or a dork because the sheer act of getting there required a lot out of the user. AOL existed as a walled garden, a sort of uber BBS that gave folks some measure of taste of the “information super highway”. However, if you made your way to IRC, it meant you had shaken off the shackles of that garden, found your way to a full-service ISP, and begun your journey into a much larger world.
There is a time I remember fondly when every piece of content you consumed from gopher to wais, to even the fledgling world wide web was “user created”. The creation was a labor of love and there were countless web farms devoted to all manner of nonsense. It was a time when there was very little corporate presence online, and the majority of infrastructure was run out of academia. The bright hubs of commerce were places like WUSTL.edu or WISC.edu where their public FTP sites served as a clearing house for all of the content that mattered from the latest doom wad file to the latest release of mIRC. All of this infrastructure and content was run and created by the denizens of this fledgling internet.
As time passed the internet was tamed by corporations and bent to their whims, all for the purpose of converting our free time and hobbies into currency. Social networks consolidated what was once a series of disconnected GeoCities and self-hosted websites, into an easy-to-use structure that allowed you to communicate with your friends. I remember clearly a time when I was using Blogger and others were using Xanga or Live Journal… but we had connected up a ragtag cluster of websites via links or connections to web rings. Each person in that “community” had complete freedom over the content that they were presenting to the world even though they were functionally operating on someone else’s network.
I think MySpace was the beginning of the modern era of social media, and with it introduced metrics like “friend” counts and the introduction of the aspirational “top 8” list. Attributing numerical success to your internet efforts only got worse with the introduction of Facebook, and subsequently Twitter. Entire infrastructure like Social Blade shown above was erected to prove numerically who was “winning” the internet. I remember when we were dabbling in Google Plus, playing with a tool called Klout and being fascinated by how it boiled a user down to a value. I hate that I cared even for a moment about the supposedly “value” something like that was providing. If I had known how much of the internet has become about chasing clout and popularity, I would have hissed and slowly backed away from it.
I hate everything about the influencer culture that has spawned around internet content creation. My friends jokingly refer to me as an influencer, partially because I have always been way more socially engaged than they are, and partially because they know it pisses me off. In the art world, there is a concept called “Outsider Art” and I like to think I am that, but for internet media. I’ve been plugging away at this blog for almost fourteen years, and the podcast for almost nine years… and while I try and share both freely the popularity or lack thereof doesn’t make me any less interested in the act of creation. I will likely be over here in my corner continuing to do whatever I want to do and continue to be absolutely allergic to trying to monetize it.
As far as modern social media goes though, Twitter was my home. I originally launched my Twitter account as a way of interacting with other bloggers in the Blog Azeroth community, and as a way of promoting my posts. Over the years I have met some of my best friends through this medium, but year after year it seemed to get harder and harder to make any real and lasting connections. Gamergate was a wake-up call and threw a cold glass of water in the face of online social interactions. Getting DDOS’d as a result of my random comments on Twitter, made me way more guarded about what I said there and fear of malicious attacks did the same to others. The Muskrat coming in and threatening to dismantle what little safety net there was there… has made me deeply contemplate what presence I still want to have on that network.
I’ve dabbled with Mastodon/Fediverse since 2018, but I can’t say I have really ever set up permanent residence there. This weekend I attempted to change that, and the pairing down of Twitter was the first step in that evolution. I have to say the interactions that I am having on this alternate social media platform continue to be refreshing. Using the Fediverse feels like stepping back in time to my IRC days when people seemed to just genuinely want to make friends on the internet and share their ideas and dreams. Having conversations on my local feed feels like popping into random IRC channels and getting to know the regulars. Ultimately making friends is the only thing I ever really wanted from the internet, and over time it became one of the hardest tasks to accomplish.
I’ve also been dabbling a bit with a platform called MeWe, where a handful of friends have erected a bastion in honor of the glory days of Google Plus. It has been delightful so far, but the platform as a whole seems to have way fewer guardrails than I might like. The madness of the alt-right seems to have infected some corners of the platform, and there are some questions about just how open everything is. For me though my interaction circles around a handful of individuals and as a result, it is working as intended.
I’ve also spent at least a summary amount of time exploring something called Cohost, which appears to be a Live Journal clone. I am not certain if I will keep using it, because it doesn’t seem to be a great discovery engine. That is the challenge with branching out into new networks is that you ultimately have to carve a place out for yourself and figure out if and how it is going to add value to your life. Having a good discovery engine helps to make finding new people out in the void a bit easier, which is admittedly one of the key complaints that I see leveraged against the Fediverse, and being so fragmented. That said I also feel like no one seems to have a memory of how obtuse Twitter was in 2009 when I started trying to figure out how to find friends to follow.
I wrote this over the weekend and I still believe it. Something feels different this time. In the past folks would start using the Fediverse and then within hours/days/weeks run straight back to the platforms they originally came from. Sure a handful of people would stick around, but the end result created this cycle of “vacationers” and “townies”. I think social media has reached this breaking point where the cycle of chasing clout is unsustainable. The Muskrat making some broad sweeping changes to the platform he now “owns” is merely the trigger of something larger that has been sitting below the surface. I think there is a broad sense of dissatisfaction with the way things have been and the way online human interactions have functioned for the last decade. That said it could just be me projecting my own general sense of dissatisfaction on the whole ordeal.
I have no control over the broader internet, but I do have control over my small corner of it. Going forward I am shifting how I consume social media. It is about human interactions and less as a broadcast medium. I will still shout into the void about the things that are making me happy or excited, but I am going to care far less about whether or not the void answers back. I have this feeling that the Twitter pair-down was only the beginning, and there will likely be more waves of that in the future. For now, I am enjoying yet another honeymoon period with the Fediverse or more particularly Mstdn.social that I migrated to last April. If you too have a general sense of dissatisfaction with the way things have been and the direction they have been going, then you are more than welcome to join me in any of my nonsense.
I’ve written about the Fediverse a number of times, but the two most cogent tomes are my general primer and how to migrate instances. As always I will still be here, on the only platform I have any real control over… my blog, and my podcast.
The post Celebrity Ruined the Internet appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we have a bit of a weird show, where we start off talking about the nonsense happening over on Twitter with the Muskrat purchase of the company going through. Bel talks a bit about social media alternatives and how the administrators on the Fediverse/Mastodon instances are straining a bit under the load. From there we talk a bit about the community being angry at Magic, and Bel’s adventures in buying the cheapest Wish dot com proxies he could find. We continue to talk about New World and how Themiscyra is now open for business again. There are a number of interesting changes on the PTR and we talk through those. Finally, we land on Fallout 76, the game the other half of the show has been enjoying. The crew playing makes their way into The Pitt expedition and talks a bit about that experience.
Good Morning Friends! It is time once again for my semi-annual explainer post about the Fediverse or as some call it Mastodon. In truth, I am not going to do a full explainer because I did one back in April and I am not sure I can do a better job than I did then. If you are like most of us and have littered the fediverse with many past versions of yourself as you tried out many instances, then this post might be of interest about migrating between sites. As I said in the post from April, I originally joined the fediverse during the Wheedon Exodus of 2018, but it seems like every six months or so there is another mass influx of folks discovering/re-discovering the platform. Of note… while I jokingly refer to it as the Wheedon Exodus, I mostly got hip to the notion of “mastodon” due to all of the Loading Ready Run cast moving to various sundry instances. It does make me wonder if anyone is out there tracking the migratory patterns of Twitter users.
So You Decided to Leave Twitter
Yeah, I guess I am going to write about this today, but given that I already linked you better articles that I have already written I am not sure where to go with this one. I think first it is important that you understand that the Fediverse as I refer to it, or Mastodon as the media seems to refer to it… is not a single website controlled by a single entity. There is no one corporation responsible for running everything, but instead a network for smaller “instances” that are “federated” so that they can share messages with each other and facilitate cross-instance communication. What this means in practice is that the Fediverse is not a monolith with a single culture, but instead a bunch of different smaller communities that each have their own cultures. Probably a better analogy would be for you to imagine that users on the World of Warcraft Forum, Something Awful Forum, GameFaqs, and Reddit could somehow seamlessly communicate with each other.
Firstly I feel like I want to get this out of the way. This is not a post attempting to recruit you to the Fediverse. I am happy to welcome you with open arms to this alternate dimension, but it isn’t the sort of thing where you unplug from Twitter and plug into the Fediverse and life continues on like normal. Using these instances is its own thing with its own series of differences that go far deeper than the tweet vs toot thing. Image a server instance as a small computer club that meets in the back room of your library, that deals with all sorts of logistical problems inherent with growing membership and outgrowing its meeting room space. Instances in general are run by a very small group of administrators that are struggling to pay the bills and are happy to have you… but also know that each influx is going to wreak havoc on their data usage.
Finding a Home
I’ve bounced around quite a bit during my time in the fediverse, but this is sort of a thing that happens to most people. They join an instance and it doesn’t end up feeling right for one reason or another. My own journey looks a little bit like this:
Mastodon.cloud – My very first instance and I had no clue what any of it meant at that point, or that I wasn’t signing up for one single monolithic site. It was perfectly cromulent.
Elekk.xyz – Once I learned different instances and did different things, I obviously tried to gravitate toward the gaming-related one. It was a pretty nice place with a bunch of interesting users that I still follow to this day.
Nineties.Cafe – My friend Liore wanted to start up an instance so I signed on this nonsense to help administrate it. This meant leaving Elekk behind, but since you can so easily migrate between instances it was no big deal.
MMORPG.Social – As Ninteties.Cafe had run through its cycle of excitement, and a friend of mine Gazimoff decided he wanted to try and tackle creating MMORPG-centric social media. I moved houses once again and helped administrate, but the costs eventually became egregious and it was shuttered.
Elekk.xyz – So I migrated back to Elekk and mostly went to sleep for a while, going dormant for a year or so. When I woke up and started caring about the fediverse again, the instance was a very changed place. It seems that there was a bit of a “netsplit” to borrow an old term, and Elekk was pretty proactively blocking a bunch of instances making it very hard to communicate with friends spread throughout the fediverse.
Mstdn.social – This led me to try and find a more neutral ground instance. One that was not quite so block-happy but also was not doing anything egregious that would lead to it being actively blocked. So I migrated over to this lovely instance run by a nice person who goes by Stux.
I fully expect that most of you are going to go through a sequence of events similar to the ones that I did. At this point, I would maybe shoo people away from rolling on Mastodon.social, because while it is the largest instance and considered the “flagship” it is also largely lawless. Nothing has been done about abusive members for long enough that the community took it upon itself and caused the problems that ultimately led me to leave Elekk. Basically, if you choose to use that one, just know that there is going to be a wide swath of people who won’t be able to see you.
Maybe Support If You Stick Around
Like I said before each instance is usually run by a very small team that is racking up expenses in order to keep the lights on. Knowing this I have always tried to chip something into wherever I am calling home. When I was on Elekk I contributed to their Patreon, and when I moved to Mstdn.social I started contributing to the one Stux has set up. Like it isn’t a large amount of money but I end up chipping in $5 a month as a way of attempting to help the operation. It doesn’t give me any benefits other than knowing that I am at least helping to keep the lights on a little bit. Most of these instances are not profitable and are deeply cutting into the personal finances of those who are running them.
Each time there is a mass migration wave, more folks end up sticking around. Something you should go into this knowing is that the vast majority of “I’m leaving Twitter” folks will be back within the week. However, what has evolved over time is an alternate reality that skews way more liberal and queer and as a result super open and accepting about some things and hypercritical of other things. I feel like if you want to come to the Fediverse, you are going to need to accept it for what it is and not try and turn it into Twitter 2.0. The folks are really lovely but also a heck of a lot quieter. There is less general noise on the network, but also much less interaction.
Riding the Bomb Down
I’ve personally found a place in my life for both Twitter and the Fediverse/Mastodon. I have no plans to do anything drastic like delete my Twitter account. If folks legitimately migrate this time then I will likely spend less and less time there. I feel it is also very important for folks to realize the level of stress these mass migration waves place upon the existing denizens of these instances. Like they are all open and welcoming but have been through this shit so many times before. I know alone this is my fourth or fifth mass migration, and I know they existed prior to the Wheedon Exodus that brought me to these shores. On some level, the “townies” often duck out for a few weeks until the onslaught has died down a bit and then poke their heads out again to see who actually stuck around.
Please note while this post is not an attempt to recruit you, it is also not an attempt to dissuade you. Whether or not you take this adventure is entirely up to you. I am more than happy to field direct questions from anyone considering it. Like I said before I’ve written about this several times in the past and some of my words might fill in gaps in your knowledge. So I will leave you with a list of links.
Moving Your Home Fediverse Instance – a follow-up post where I talk about the process of migrating your follows and redirecting people to your new home instance. This is helpful if you have a string of other attempts to move off Twitter.
Adventures in the Fediverse – might be fun to read to see how my tone has shifted over the years since this original post back in August of 2018. I was way more excited about this being the future of all social media, whereas now I am pretty resigned to knowing it will only take hold with a handful of people.
Keep Up Alternate Contacts
I will close this out with the last piece of general advice, one that I have learned the hard way over the years. If you care about someone enough to not want to lose contact with them… trade multiple forms of contact. There are numerous folks that I have lost over the years through various gaming venues, and I occasionally wonder how they are doing. I know email is old school, but it and phone numbers tend to be the lowest common denominator for staying in contact. I’ve had the same email address for almost twenty years, and at this point moving to another would be painful. Discord is another more modern messaging platform that is worth trading information on, but remember it is also a closed platform owned by a single company and could at someday be the thing you are fleeing.
For me, you will always have this blog. I am going on my fourteenth year and I figure much like Slim Pickens I am going to be riding this bomb to the ground. This will always have some cogent way of contacting me available to you.
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