I don’t have a whole hell of a lot this morning to talk about but I wanted to continue the pattern of the morning post. This weekend I have a family reunion and a funeral to deal with… all the while shortly after finishing this post I will be driving my wife to the airport to start her week and some change of AP Statistics test grading. The period of time when she is gone is always a hard one for me, but I am contemplating trying to stream a lot more in an effort to maybe not feel quite so alone. Effectively one of two things will happen… either I force myself to get engaged with other human beings or I will end up falling deep into a turtle mode period that will take a significant amount of time to surface from.
Work thankfully seems to be stabilizing a bit and I have been able to hire both of my supervisors which is a step in the right direction. I played a significant amount of Destiny 2 last night but unfortunately because of the nonsense that goes on with that game I couldn’t take any screenshots without disturbing the process of streaming it through Parsec. It seems as though Parsec really does not like the Nvidia overlay turned on with the target machine… and that is the only way I have been able to reliably take a screenshot from Destiny 2. Instead you are getting some images this morning from Hearthstone where I purchased the currently deal for several packs from all of the standard legal sets… and as you can see managed to somehow pull two legendaries in the same pack.
I also spent a good chunk of the evening a few nights ago playing my way through the Witchwood Monster Hunt solo adventure. I played as Shaw the Houndmaster and did fairly well right up until the fight encounter… when things went south really fast. All in all it was a really fun mode and I had personally not done much of the solo adventure content in Hearthstone. I think that is something I will ultimately need to remedy over the coming weeks. I like Hearthstone quite a bit but I never end up playing it for whatever reason. Similarly I am not playing that much MTG Arena, but with the addition of Kaladesh and Aether Revolt I might take part in the draft this weekend in an attempt to get some useful cards for fueling my Golgari obsession.
Ultimately it is going to be a rough weekend for me and probably a rough couple of weeks, so if I seem a little out of sorts that is why. I am going to try and force myself out of the rut that I can foresee is on the horizon, so if you see me streaming pop by and say hi.
Yesterday was extremely stressful at work and when I got home nothing seemed to go right either. I sat there battling a horrible headache trying to sort out why for some reason parsec was not streaming at all. I had to jump through a bunch of hoops involving restarting the clients on either end of the connection before finally returning full service. On the positive I now know the best way to restore functionality of Parsec has just gone south on a box… but on the negative it took practically all night to reach that point. To make matters worse… the evening culminated with a bit of a fight with my mother that I am at least in part going to talk about today.
On Monday night my last remaining Great Aunt passed away and I had been expecting to hear from my folks as to when the services were scheduled. While I have fond memories of Aunt Lucille, she isn’t exactly someone I had seen regularly over the last decade or so. When my Great Uncle who was the blood relative passed away, it halted a lot of their coming up to visit other family that I did see more often. That is just sorta the way of your related family, is as various linkages disappear so to do the get together that surrounded them. This is a reality that I guess the pragmatist in me has accepted this reality far better than I probably should have.
Where the source of the spat comes from… is not necessarily the Funeral but instead the family reunion that was scheduled for this same weekend on my father’s side of the family. She has been trying to tell me about all of these people that are coming… for example one individual she was trying to convince me that I had met… she eventually realized was last seen at my parents wedding. This is where the conflict kicks in because in my mom’s mind the fact that you are related to someone trumps everything… and makes it immediately important that you drop everything you are doing to placate them. For me the fact that I may see them once or even twice in my entire adult life… makes me question if they are even really family?
I mean yes I understand heredity and relationships so we don’t need to go into a discussion about that. What I mean instead is why should I invest any emotional resources in caring about a bunch of faces that ten minutes later I won’t remember any of the names that associate with them? For me family is more the people you interact with on a regular basis and can count on, not some third cousin twice removed that my mom once remembered seeing at a reunion when my parents were still dating. Again this is where I differ from my mother and became a great source of frustration, because I simply do not believe that blood is thicker than literally any other connection out there.
You can’t choose who you are related to, but you do get to choose the people that you make your family. So the people that I record AggroChat with every single week… those are family. The neighbor down the street that we’ve been close with for two decades and literally cleaned up my blood after the human sprinkler incident… that is real fucking family. Rae who moved to Tulsa from Ft Smith Arkansas to take a job in my department… and has since moved on to bigger and better opportunities… is real family. The little man around the corner from us who walks with my wife every night for a single blocks length… and occasionally cooks meals for us is absolutely actual and legitimate family. All of which I have a real tangible connection to that isn’t blood related but is far more real and important to me than some random stranger that I am told should mean something more to me than they ever will.
So ultimately I am wondering… am I just odd in the way that I make my familiar connections? Is this a generational thing and there are others out there that are more like me than are my mom? My wife and I had a discussion about this and she theorized that once upon a time folks simply didn’t move far away from each other so it was very easily to get back together regularly… and in an era without free long distance and facebook people made more of an effort to do it on a regular basis. I mean on some level the blood family that I think about of being family… are all within a few hours of where I live right now. However I have to admit I don’t really put in the effort to see them on a regular basis.
We used to do this thing among the members of my generation, where we had dinner out on a regular basis and in truth we probably need to start this up again. I do really like my cousins that also live in the Tulsa area and we tend to get along swimmingly… but at the same time we are all also very busy with our own lives and careers. With the existence of social media… it gives the illusion that you are spending time together that sorta salves over that feeling that you should really see each other more often. Maybe it is simply because my wife and I met through IRC… that I consider internet communication methods to be just as real as face to face ones. Whatever the case there is a significant difference between how I view family and how my mom does.
So I am curious… how do you my readers out there define family? Are you more like my mom or are you more like me… in finding family in your closest relationships regardless of heredity. The truth is I will be taking my mom to the funeral and then driving her to the reunion afterwards… since they are on the same day. Regardless of my personal feelings… it is important to her and I want to make sure she gets there safely given she has fallen quite a few times lately.
In Today’s adventures of Bel is completely all over the place in his gaming free time… we see see a return to Destiny 2. This should shock no one given that Bungie did a big announcement trailer yesterday for the Year 2 content and the upcoming Forsaken “comet” expansion to the game. I feel like I need to spend some time explaining that term as it gets throw around a lot in Destiny discussions. When the original roadmap for Destiny was laid out they set up two expansions worth of content and then something they referred to as the Comet… or a sort of mega expansion that changes the world in a significant way. The comet for the original game ended up being The Taken King expansion which was an additional purchase and signaled the shift from Year 1 to Year 2 of Destiny.
Similarly in September we have Forsaken acting as the shift between Year 1 and Year 2 of Destiny 2. It seems as though they are solidifying the pace of content releases for Destiny 2 in forming a setup where each calendar year will have a major release in the form of the Comet, and then two follow up expansions the size of Curse of Osiris/Warmind making up the remainder of a “Season” in FPS gaming terms. To coincide with this they are selling annual passes allowing you to pick up the two expansions at a minor discount or you can bundle it in with the deluxe version of the game for a little bit more of a discount depending on how much you value you the extra in game bits.
If this is what it takes to fund constant development of Destiny 2… I am largely okay with it especially considering that maybe just maybe it sounds like they have learned some of the lessons that they should have learned in The Taken King. Namely that players need a wide diversity of activities to do and that Destiny 2 felt like a thinning down of those possibilities rather than an increase in them. I am super amped for the Gambit play mode which is a sort of competitive PVE thing, but I am concerned about the return of random rolls. There is supposedly a new mod system that may fix bad rolls, but we have yet to see much information about that. If I can in fact take a crummy drop and fix its problems with mods… then I would be largely okay with randomized rolls.
The return to Destiny last night however was marked by the beginning of a new Faction Rally event. I almost want to think of this as Faction Rally 2.0 because enough significant changes happened to warrant that sort of nomenclature. First off… you can only pledge one faction per account instead of being able to split the difference like I always have done and choose one of each. As a result I had to struggle a bit here… and chose New Monarchy because I like their old school shaders the best and still have yet to get the Ship or Sparrow. Additionally of all of the armor sets I like the design of the Titan one the best pending I apply a completely different shader to it in order to remove that whole mustard and ketchup appearance.
Additionally I just love the look of the weapon that is up for grabs as part of the rally. It reminds me of a Christian Hosoi Skateboard which I always thought was a great design… in spite of its problematic connotations with the Japanese Imperial Rising Sun flag. The truth is it will be hard pressed to make me change things up and stop using Merciless for my main Heavy weapon… but it would be nice to have a rocket launcher I at least like the look of. Additionally there is a version of the Antiope-D up for grabs as well that seems to have most of the same stats… making it something I am definitely going to grind for.
I have to admit I have not really followed the changes to the Faction Rally that closely, so I was completely confused when I was presented with two tasks… one to do a Lost Sector with 3 Renown and the other to do a Lost Sector with 5 Renown. Essentially now when you complete an event… you gain renown which is a gauge that shows up above your main hotbar of sorts showing you what your current ranking is. This caps out at 5 and doing stuff… makes it go up like Events, High Value Targets and Patrol Missions. When you enter a Lost Sector it scales in difficulty based on the number of pips of renown you currently have and triggers a bunch of negative effects… like the fact your health and shielding regenerates at a snails pace.
Reddit being the place that it will always be of course has a guide that explains all of the various things that allow you to get Renown and the stacking effects that trigger. Firstly you cannot fast travel at all while you have a stack of renown without resetting this back to zero… which gets annoying as the fastest way to stack renown seems to be doing events. When you die it removes a single pip of renown, which means if you are trying to stack up to do the 5 pip challenge you need to play more carefully.
I am not sure how many penalties you wind up with… but the shields very obviously stop recharging around the 3 mark and you also seem to move slower meaning you probably take an agility hit. Lastly each pip seems to make mobs deal more damage to you, but thankfully they don’t seem to take more damage to kill. I was still able to oneshot basically everything with a good hand cannon headshot. I hung out in game for long enough to get enough tokens to open four New Monarchy packages before finally calling it a night. I did however stumble across Scarybooster out in the wilds while doing some events on the EDZ which I guess makes sense because geographically we are fairly close to each other with me being in Oklahoma and him being I believe in Nebraska. It is always really cool when you see someone in game that you know… and unfortunately I didn’t have a simple wave emote on my bar at the time so I think I made a bowl of Ramen, did the salt emote, and danced for him.
I have what one might call unusual needs when it comes to gaming. My primary gaming systems are all up in my office hooked up to the same 43 inch 4k television that I have written about in the past. That said I maintain a laptop downstairs that I can game on while hanging out on the sofa with my wife and either watching television or just functionally being in the same room. This has been one of the secrets of our marital bliss is the fact that several nights a week I hang out downstairs within easy talking distance rather than being completely sequestered up in my office all of the time. This means that I ultimately need to maintain two different gaming setups and end up splitting resources between the two of them.
The biggest issue with this equation is that gaming laptops are horrible. What I mean by that is that while yes they are more powerful than a normal laptop… they also have a greatly stripped down feature set of a gaming desktop. They usually run some sort of mobile specific version of a graphics card… which tends to perform roughly the same as one product generation lower. What I mean by that is my current gaming laptop has a 960M in it… which instead of performing like a GTX 960 it performs far closer to a GTX 760 (given that they jumped the 8 series of cards). Similarly the processors also suffer from this same issue with a mobile i7 greatly under performing a desktop i7. Then of course there is the fact that you are ultimately going to pay a significant premium for a machine that is pretending to be extremely high powered but that is a whole other discussion.
One of the core problems that I am dealing with right now is I am starting to reach the end of the viability of this laptop for any sort of modern gaming. Sure it can run older games just fine and does an admirable job at a lot of the MMORPGs that I enjoy playing, but I have a long string of games that just will not function on the device. The first game I encountered like this was Dishonored 2… which I still have not finished playing through because it simply will not run in anything other than the most potato of resolutions on the laptop. Traditionally the downstairs experience is where I play a lot of my single player titles… and with the inability to actually do this thing games like Dishonored and Assassin’s Creed Origins that will not run on the laptop at all just sit there un-played.
Steam In-Home streaming I thought originally was going to be a unique tool that I could employ to stream games from my Desktop to my Laptop and be able to skirt all of these problems. However after years of piddling with it… I still have issues. There are times where a game window may get stranded or launch in a weird resolution and with that not being an actual remote desktop tool there is little way to right the ship once it capsizes. I’ve read of individuals having good luck with Splashtop desktop/streamer but the latency there was so high that I simply could not handle it and now only use it as a way of remoting in to the gaming machine if I am absolutely in a desperate state. Even if I could get Steam In-Home streaming working… there was always the problem of not being able to easily run all of those games that I have that for one reason or another do not go through the client (I am looking at you Dragon Age Inquisition).
This is where in my travels yesterday I happened across a mention of a product called Parsec. The company effectively does a couple of different things, the first being rent virtual boxes that you can use to install all of your games on out in the cloud and then remotely connect to. The second is that they have very highly tuned and low latency streaming software that allows you to connect to a machine, be it one of their virtual machines or your home machine and play games off it. Lastly they add additional functionality of being able to play the couch co-op experience remotely through a social and online play system. While I was supremely jaded by my other experiences I gave it a shot last night.
The setup is pretty straight forward in that it requires you to install the parsec client on the host machine and the client machine. They have clients for Windows, MacOS, Android, Linux and Raspberry Pi 3… which gives you a few options for even creating your own homebrew Steamlink sort of device for streaming to a television. For me I wanted a pretty straight forward set up of installing the software on my gaming desktop upstairs and adding it as a host… that you can see in the client above. Yes I named my gaming desktop Serenity… I love me some Firefly. Then downstairs on my laptop I installed the client again but this time just connected to the Serenity computer profile by hitting play. Immediately I was presented with a remote desktop like experience that allowed me to pretty much launch whatever the hell I wanted to on my machine.
It was at this point that I just started testing all sorts of games… I played some Crucible in Destiny 2 with no noticeable input delay in a fashion that was comfortable enough to actually do competitive tasks. I played some Dauntless where I took down the stupid thunder lizard Drask that had been giving me fits before. Essentially any game that I launched was able to run just fine and in a completely playable and honestly beautiful state. I had some issues with Steam games at first, but after troubleshooting that came down to something I had done yesterday in trying to set up my iPad as a third monitor. Apparently the software that is involved with that does not play nicely with the Steam DRM. However after uninstalling and rebooting all of those steam games that I struggled with before like Dishonored 2 and Assassin’s Creed Origins worked lovely as well.
I am known for doing some silly things… but there is a level of madness with Parsec that I am not entirely sure if I am willing to go through. They have a blog post up outlining how they have managed to get a console working through the Parsec software and I would absolutely try this… if it did not involve two hardware purchases that I do not currently have. I have been wanting to get an Elgato Pro… so this might be something I do at some point. This would honestly be the perfect set up if I could somehow get all of my consoles playing through Parsec as well. I have wanted a sort of virtual KVM for consoles for years… and in theory I might be able to actually make this thing to work using Parsec. If nothing else however I thought I would talk about my experiences this morning in case someone else out there is looking to do something similar. I am greatly pleased with this process and I play on fiddling around with it some more tonight… maybe actually working on some of those single player games that I have failed to make much progress in. At face value though… I am supremely impressed with Parsec and will definitely be following their updates.
