Good Morning Friends! I had every intent of blogging yesterday but life got in the way. We had an extended internet outage and my normal backup of tethering to my phone was less than reliable. It took me until almost work time to sort out a reasonable connection, and then I got busy and never made it back to actually writing a blog post. Today would normally be a day I would consider part of the weekend, given that we are off for Good Friday… but given that I never blogged yesterday I feel like I should probably write something. It has been a good few days and am falling into some rhythms in Guild Wars 2.
One of the things that my friends will tell you is that I seem to have phenomenal luck when it comes to video games, or MMORPGs specifically. I think it is largely that I just farm content and as a result am getting more iterations of kills than the average person. They will deny this and tell you that I just have some magical power to doctor the dice rolls. Proof of this is that in less than a weeks time I have gotten two Ascended weapon drops from Tequatl, or as we call him Taco. I got the Pistol first and then later got another weapon choice chest, this time with Assassin stats instead of Settlers. I also finished up my Caladbolg questline and turned it into a Dagger giving me a full set of ascended weapons on both my Reaper and Harbinger builds. Not shown is a Greatsword that I crafted, but I am also slowly working on finishing out the Dark Harvest achievement for the Reaper Greatsword. Assassins is “close enough” and I have been too lazy to convert it to Marauder.
Since we last talked I have also finished up Living World Season 4, and I have to say the story just keeps getting better. I actually care about the characters of Dragon’s Watch, which is not a thing that I ever felt about Destiny’s Edge. I had a moment near the end of this season where I legitimately started to tear up a bit in reaction to the events that were happening. Well done Arena Net. I am looking forward to starting on Living World Season 5 today, but first I need to go up to my home town and help my parents with a few things. I am finally understanding why people were telling me this story was almost as good as Final Fantasy XIV… it just takes longer to get there. I am fully on board for wherever we are headed now.
I hope you all have a wonderful holiday weekend. I am wrapping this up so that my wife and I can go out real quick and try and restock on Reeses Peanut Butter eggs before they disappear forever… or at least until the Halloween equivalent comes out. One last thing… before I go… a parting gift. I wanted to add the profession and elite spec icons to the AggroChat chat server and struggled to find them in an easy to download form. After much sifting about I scraped a full set from the wiki, and have uploaded them to a file sharing service. These are the 200 pixel set which seemed the most useful place to start. They are archived with 7zip, which hopefully you have and if you do not… you should absolutely get. This should make it easy to add the specs to discord, slack, or any other chat software that supports custom emojis.
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Good Morning Friends! Today is the eighth anniversary of the first time we released an episode of AggroChat. While technically we are in our ninth calendar year and as a result “season 9” in my confusing and contorted numbering, Sunday April 13th of 2014 is when the show first saw the light of day. This weekend we released our three hundred and eighty fifth episode of the podcast, and honestly… all these years later I am not entirely certain how we have managed to keep it going. I think part of it comes from the significant shift our lives have undergone in these nine years. As a result AggroChat became this weekly touch point where it guaranteed that we would all be online and talking to each other… the fact that other people listen to it is sort of incidental.
When we started this show we were all in the habit of hanging out on voice chat while gaming, regardless of what that game happened to be. We had these broad reaching discussions every single night, which is ultimately the spark of inspiration that we should record that. As time and our lives shifted, those moments where we were all in the same place at the same time became more fleeting. I think the Saturday evening ritual of recording the podcast became something that we could count on and as a result kept it going. I think another secret to our success, if you can call it that… is the fact that none of us have really taken it too seriously. It is a thing that we do every week but it also doesn’t have a real reason to exist other than for our own entertainment.
Most of us hail from an earlier era of the internet, when things were done for passion or fun… and not necessarily as a vehicle for monetization. As a result we have never planned or even attempted to make any money from the things that we produce. That means we don’t really have a “boss” and are not beholden to the expectations of our listeners other than out of common courtesy. We do this thing every single week and if you are into it cool… and if you are not then maybe don’t listen. The weird thing is we have maintained a fairly consistent listenership over these eight years. We have some episodes that spike the numbers, like any time we do one of our spoiler shows for Final Fantasy XIV. Then we have super esoteric episodes that no one listens to like when we go heavy into something extremely niche like competitive sudoku. Enough people listen on the regular however to keep the numbers spinning, and through a pretty wide variety of platforms.
If we were doing it for the numbers though we would have considered this podcast a failure years ago however. I don’t get that many readers and we collectively get even fewer listeners. However like all passion projects it is effectively keeping itself going because it is a thing that we do together collectively. I will admit there are times when depression hits me and I consider shutting it all down, but then I remember that I am not doing this to make metrics go up. In the art world there is this concept of “outsider art”, where folks make art because they want to, not because they are beholden to some traditions of what makes art good. I’ve always sort of thought my blogging and podcasting are my version of that. Sure I have the knowledge to do something differently and could chase statistics or optimize the fuck out of everything… but why would I be doing it? I feel like I would be generating a lot of stress for little benefit to anyone involved.
So I guess the question is… how long will we keep this going? To that I give you a hearty shoulder shrug, because I have no clue. I am not even sure how we have managed to keep it going this long. Pending we don’t miss many shows we will be releasing our four hundredth episode in July, which seems like a significant milestone. When we started this there were a large number of peer podcasts that we were active with, and we have outlasted most of them. I am not sure what that says about us. We are either really stubborn or really oblivious, because we sorta just keep doing the same thing over and over. If that is your jam then we welcome you along for the ride, and if it is not… that is cool too. In the meantime however we will probably still be over here in the corner doing our own thing.
I never really know what to do for the anniversary of a thing that I created. Coming up soon is the thirteenth anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut in general and again no clue what to do for it. The only regret that I have all these years later is that we would have chosen a better name for the podcast. Tales of the Aggronaut made sense in the original context… which was a Warrior Tanking blog. AggroChat was more or less the fake name that we gave the podcast because it was spun out of the Aggonaut blog…. but then it just sort of stuck for lack of better options. I wish we would have come up with something that sounded a bit more inviting because our discussion is almost never anything close to “Aggro”. However once you have lived with something for as long as we have this name… it becomes hard to change mentally. So here we are… the AggroChat crew and will probably stay that until the end.
Thanks for being along on this ride with us.
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I have a bunch of things that I have repeated on this blog but never actually coalesced into a “feature”. I watch way more YouTube than I should, and I often times have a video running on my second monitor that I am halfway paying attention to. I could be watching something more meaningful… but I am trash. I have a number of guilty pleasure channels that I indulge in from time to time, and have shared a number of these in the past. Today I am going to share some more and you can judge me for my bad taste (at least on some of these).
Mythical Kitchen
I’ve been a fan of Rhett and Link for years, and through the transitive property of enjoyment… I got hooked on Mythical Kitchen when they spun that off as a secondary channel. Chef Josh is just the right level of endearing and annoying mixed into a compelling package. I also really like the larger cast of talent specifically Nicole, Trevor, and Vi. There are so many reoccurring bits and the one I linked today is where Josh cooks a three course meal for a famous food critic… and then decides to use some item commonly found in a Seven Eleven. It is this nexus of comedy show and cooking show that I particularly enjoy.
Overnight Channel/TFIL
So there is an awful lot about this channel that would normally annoy me. However something is going on with it that I find interesting. Firstly it very much seems to have started as the same bullshit prank channel that the internet is flooded with, but at some point they decided to lean super freaking hard into paranormal investigations. I am a sucker for these sorts of shows and if I happen to see a marathon of Ghost Adventures on… I am going to watch it. I have watched a number of these videos over the last few weeks and they have greatly improved their technique and are seemingly taking this shit way more seriously than you would expect from a channel of “himbos”. The disturbing thing is that they have managed to capture some pretty shocking evidence in spite of themselves. I think my interest comes from the fact that I too dabbled in EVP back in the late 90s and was in the orbit of a legitimate group of investigators here.
Adam Savage’s Tested
I love Adam Savage. I have loved this man since Myth Busters and I have continued to follow his career after that show stopped. The format of his Tested videos really changed with the pandemic and they became deeply personal, and honestly… something I enjoy so much better. I specifically linked a video of him showing off his Science Fiction Blaster collection, but probably my favorite videos are the “One Day Builds” series. My dad was a maker before that title existed, and honestly watching an Adam Savage video reminds me a lot of my father and visiting his own very similar workshop. My Mom is the sort of person that despises silence… and my Dad has always used his workshop as a way to get some peace and quiet. It is also great when Adam goes into stories about his movie prop making days.
New Rockstars
The next two picks should be taken as a pair and not individually. One of the interesting things that has shifted interesting over the last few years is the way that Disney shows have become the new “must see tv”. As a result I consume a certain amount of media surrounding these, namely I have gotten in this pattern of watching a show and then turning around and watching some of the easter egg videos or reaction breakdowns surrounding it. There are two channels that really stand out for me in the way they digest this media and then spin off content related to that. The first is New Rockstars and they probably have the higher production value.
Screencrush
The second of these is Screencrush and honestly… I think I like its overall aesthetic better. The entire show takes place within a set patterned off of a Blockbuster Video, which absolutely hits me straight in the nostalgia feels. Additionally Screencrush has Doug the Dog, and having a cute animal immediately improves everything. Like I said above I don’t really consider these two different picks on this list, but instead sort of bookends that provide similar but different experiences. For example I have been thinking about both the Dark Avengers and the Midnight Sons of late, trying to figure out how Moon Knight and Blade are going to work into these… and low and behold here is a video with some theories surrounding that.
Loading Ready Run
We close out this section with the granddaddy of guilty pleasure channels for me… Loading Ready Run. If for some reason you are not already in the orbit of this channel, I highly suggest at least tuning in each week for CheckPoint. This is effectively a condensed news comedy show and the takes they come up with are golden. The absolute best thing they have ever done however is Qwerpline, an imaginary radio talk show set in the occasionally eldritch city of Nsberg. I am also partial to Crapshots which is a very short form sketchy comedy show. Again if you are not already watching their content then I would suggest adding it to your rotation.
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Sometimes you don’t have to look terribly far to find nonsense in games… sometimes it finds you. Mistlock Sanctuary is an extremely handy place to have access to, and honestly half of the time it becomes the unofficial Guild Hall of Greysky Armada given that it tends to be where we all meet up on the regular. It is essentially a tightly condensed area that has all of the vendors and services that you might need from a town, and allows you to teleport right back to where you were before entering. It becomes a hangout spot for lots of folks within the Guild Wars 2 community, including apparently a group of Thundershrimps. I briefly joined this hivemind when I noticed there were two players glamoured to this appearance following me around the Mists… and then shortly I received an mail message with a tonic attached.
It was fun… nonsensical… and we slowly gained numbers until I believe right before I left we had six players running around as shrimp. I think this might be the highlight of my weekend and I am leading off this mornings post using it as a reminder. There are moments in MMORPGs that are completely meaningless in the scope of the game itself or your own progression… but are absolutely moments worth indulging in. The above image is from our old FC house on Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV, and that night a bunch of us just happened to be wearing the newly added Dragon Quest Slime Hat… and proceeded to dance around for thirty minutes. Moments like this is well worth indulging when they happen, and I think are good for the soul.
The other highlight of the weekend is getting a new ascended weapon for free. Since coming back I have been trying to run Tequatl as many times as possible. There are days where the stars have not aligned, but more times than not… I am running this each time the server resets. I have known for awhile that there is a very rare chance of getting ascended weapons to drop, and I believe Friday night I managed to get a Settlers chest to drop. Seeing as I had crafted a Greatsword already, I opted instead to go pistol given that I am spending so much time as Harbinger of late. I immediately took it to the mystic toilet and changed its stat package to something more reasonable for the sort of nonsense I have been doing of late. I may never actually see another of these, but it isn’t going to stop me from trying each day. I could now really use a dagger and a staff.
Another great moment from the weekend is that Sunday afternoon the stars aligned and a bunch of us ran some fractals. I needed three for the first part of the Twilight precursor quest, and Thalen needed three different ones for some other quest. I’ve decided that Fractals are more or less what Mythic+ feels like in World of Warcraft. While the Fractals themselves are shorter, the pace feels similar and the fact that they scale over time also feels similar. I really think that this was the dungeon content I had been looking for, and while Tam kept telling me that… I was bad at listening because my preconceived notions of what that meant kept getting in the way. This whole experience of coming back to Guild Wars 2 and it lighting a fire in me… has also made me realize how generally closed minded I have been when it comes to MMORPGs. If the game did not fit a specific mold that I had determined was optimized for my enjoyment… I wanted no part of it.
Lastly for the weekend I spent a good deal of time chipping away at Living World Season 4. If my theory is correct, I am nearing the end of Chapter 5 and will be starting the final chapter soon. Not every new map is a winner, but I have to say LW4 so far has had far more winners than losers. I love the intricacy of each new map, and this is honestly slowing me down in my progress because I keep getting distracted by events and metas. Admittedly this is artificially causing me to engage with the content as though it were releasing more slowly, rather than just powering through it. We talked a bit about this over the weekend, but when you are powering through things you have trouble realizing that significant chunks of time have passed in game between content drops. Essentially the expansions and Living World progress in real time, meaning that a number of years sit between the end of one expansion and the beginning of the next.
It was a pretty great weekend, albeit a pretty short one. I do need to get finishing up Horizon Forbidden West but lord it has been awhile since I have been this engaged with a game. During my months of playing Final Fantasy XIV every single day… I was deeply beholden to the mission. Were it not for my quest to get everything to level 80… I am pretty sure I would have bounced much earlier. This… I just have so many different dials and levers that I can interact with and it all feels fresh. I am sure doing Tequatl for the 200th time will start to tarnish it a bit, but I really do love the encounter. I mean I managed to do Praetorium every single day and find enjoyment it in while I was grinding out those 80s.
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