January 2016 – Page 15

Sleep and Nagrand

January 4, 2016 by Belghast

Struggle Is Real

It is Monday morning after my week and some change holiday break, and I have to tell you… the struggle to exist in the world is real. I am hoping through that yesterday I ultimately went through the worst. As I said yesterday morning, we set an alarm in an attempt to force ourselves to shift vaguely in the direction of a schedule. As a result I pretty much sleep walked through yesterday, and found myself generally staring in the direction of things rather than actually participating. This was doubly awkward since we were having our last “christmas” event of the year with my mom-in-law coming over. I tried desperately to keep up with the conversation, ultimately failing. The small wonder however was the fact that she brought her laptop for me to look at because it wasn’t working. Sure enough the first time it attempted to boot, it hung after login. However on the second shutdown and restart everything went normally, and as a result I busied myself staring at its screen for the remainder of her visit. I did the normal gamut of fiddling… checking her antivirus to make sure it was up to date, and patching as much as I could with windows update. A computer requires significantly less interaction than a human being, and that was ultimately what I was banking on.

The ultimate problem is… that she has no internet connection. What I mean by that is that she does not pay for internet at her house, but instead piggy backs off the wifi of her grand neice. This is perfectly find mind you, it is not like she was war driving one day and hijacked a wifi signal. The problem being that there is roughly a half football field of distance between her house and the nieces house, and our RV pad is smack dab in the middle. It was my hope that either we would put in wifi at our RV eventually, or set up a network of signal boosters to piggyback the signal across. The problem is since she doesn’t really know how technology works, it is hard to explain why her internet connection sometimes works fine and other times not at all. Basically it shouldn’t be working at all, and it is by sheer dumb luck that you can pick up a wifi signal from that sort of distance. The problem also being that she cannot differentiate between telling us something is wrong with her laptop and the software itself and her internet connection. This is the truth with most of our family, they know that facebook isn’t working but are of little to no help to actually diagnose over the phone as to why that is the case.

Paladins Everywhere

The problem with a big goal is once I accomplish it, I end up floundering for a bit trying to find something else to focus my attention on. In the past many of the times when I have left a game it was because I completed some big item that I was grinding my ass off to achieve…. and lost interest after finally getting it. I know it is in my nature to feel let down after finally getting something, and I am trying really hard to not let Draenor Pathfinder be that way as well. Since I finally can fly around, I have been focusing for a bit on trying to push up some of my post 90 characters on Argent Dawn and my highest of those is Exeter my original Alliance Paladin. Over the course of the weekend I took him from 94 to 98 and am now starting Nagrand, where I hope to finish up. I like finishing in Nagrand because gear wise I end up in a fair better position than if I grind the hell out of Spires of Arak. After the initial leveling in Draenor I have followed the pattern of swapping zones every time the game prompted me that the next one was available. So in my case that would be 94 for Talador, 96 for Spires of Arak and 98 for Nagrand. Doing this ends up with me in a mishmash of gear, and a bunch of abandoned quests, but seems to also be the fastest possible way to churn through the content.

Ultimately my goal is not to experience the quest content, because I have already done that several other times. The goal is to level as fast as possible, and I guess in theory I could simply just do the dungeon queue as a tank and be done with it. That is absolutely an option I will consider, but yesterday I absolutely was not competent enough to be responsible for the lives of anyone other than myself… and at times even that part was questionable. I died an awful lot yesterday, and spent probably as much time running back to my corpse as I did actively questing. The problem being that while every fiber in my being told me that I really just wanted to go to sleep, I knew that would only prolong the horribleness and make my first day back at work sheer hell. So I continued trying to busy my mind. While attempting to level the paladin we searched Netflix for something anywhere near as compelling as Making a Murderer, only to strike out multiple times. In the evening we ended up watching a documentary called Dear Zachary which was extremely good.. and moving… but I would not suggest watching unless you are really ready to cry. We ended up closing the evening out watching the Netflix comedy series Master of None because seriously… after that documentary we both needed a laugh. We ended up shutting down around 10 and making it to bed…. only to sit there and talk for awhile as neither of us seemed to be sleepy anymore.

I hate my brain so much at times, because through out the day all it did was complain about how tired it was… and begged me to go to sleep… and now that I am finally read for it to shut down it is acting like a spoiled toddler crossing its arms and holding its breath. I wish so much that I had a normal relationship with sleep… that it was just one of those things that happened naturally for me. My entire life it has been a struggle to actually have a normal sleep schedule. Every fiber of my being is wired to be awaken during the night… because I feel far more alive after the sun goes down than at any other part in my existence. The sun and I really do not get along, and I think in theory I could be happy working night shift. The problem being I work the sort of job that happens during the day time, and I have tried for years to become the kind of person that functions during the day. There are all manner of tricks that I play upon myself and an absolutely silly amount of caffeine and energy drinks that I use to force myself to remain viable and cognizant during the hours I am supposed to be. But my brain is a brat and refuses to function like a normal human being, and I get so tired of playing the game where I am laying comfortably in bed… and every neuron is firing wildly trying to keep me from achieving a restful nights sleep. Fuck you brain… you are an asshole. But hopefully I got enough sleep to be mostly functional on this first day back from break.

Frustration and Fallout 4

January 3, 2016 by Belghast

Morning Will Suck

This morning I attempted to get myself back in line for the impending work week, and I have to say the experiment has been a dismal failure. I normally get up for work at 5:30 in the morning, and then get up… do my routine and finally knock out a blog post. Sundays have always been difficult because generally speaking I am up until at least after Midnight and often times 1 am working on the AggroChat podcast that I end up having to finish editing and posting in the morning. Last night I was up until around 1:30 but thought it was probably a good idea to set an alarm. So at 7:30 I at least put toes on the ground…. and sat there teetering on the edge of the bed for a few minutes trying to decide what step came next. I finally realized that hoping in the shower was a good idea, and did that hoping that the water would somehow jog my brain into functioning enough to go through the rest of the morning boot up routine. I had decided yesterday that instead of having a yummy bowl of cereal in my warm home…. I would get out and find something in the cruel cold world to call breakfast. This ultimately meant that I would go outside and scrape the vehicle since apparently over night the temperatures had dropped a bit.

So I consumed my breakfast and a big tall monster zero…. and played the fun game of trying to throw my muffin wrapper away. I say its a game… because my kitten for some reason LOVES muffin wrappers. She will literally go dumpster diving through my trash can trying to get it, only to drag it out from the bottom of the bin…. carefully unwrap the plastic bag I threw it away in and unfold the muffin wrapper so she can lick it. She is a damned determined cat and the second I leave the room and let my guard down…. she strikes and before I know it she has the damned wrapper out again. This will be something that continues over the next several days. The long and short of all of this…. is that tomorrow is going to be pure hell. I am dreading going back, not because there is something there that I dread necessarily… but that twelve days off from work is more than enough time to completely destroy any routines you have had. Many nights it might be two in the morning before I finally get to sleep… which is not exactly conducive to a 5:30 alarm clock. The goal is to have forced myself to get up earlier than normal this morning, and to stay up all day long regardless of how tired I might be…. in the hopes that I will get a nice full night of sleep tonight. I feel like it is not going to go anywhere near as well as I might have hoped.

Making a Murderer

This break has been the one of binge watching content, and while most of it was Star Wars… we did manage to watch a new Netflix series called Making a Murderer over the last few days. Apparently my wife’s friends had been talking about it, and when she said they explained it as “like Serial” I knew I was in for the ride. Serial was one of those things that I got in on late, but I still dutifully listened to the show over the course of a few days while doing other things. The only problem with content like this, is that it does not wrap up neatly in a box at the end of the experience. In a “crime drama” at the end of the show you have some grand exposition that explains how it “really happened”, but real life is never that neat. Serial more or less was a show that made me wonder if this kid did what the police said he did, but it never made me physically angry at the police. I could see their side of the tale and I could see the kids side of the tail… and the end result was you mostly trying to sort out what you personally believed in the mix. “Making a Murderer” on the other hand presents a tale so frustrating that it ended up with me yelling at the screen several times, and my wife having to talk me down.

I am not sure how much I can say that won’t give the entire tale away, because I feel like it is probably best to just watch the 10 episode series for yourself. There are however lots of moments that swayed me to the side of the supposed killer. I feel like he was most definitely not given a completely fair chance in this case, and there is a significant amount of bias in the area against him. There were several incidents that occurred that were never explained… like one of the police officers running the tags for the Jeep two days before the victim was reported missing, but after she WOULD HAVE BEEN missing. The recorded dispatch call sounded as though he was staring at the vehicle reading the plates off, and verifying that it was a jeep. Don’t get me wrong… I know a lot of really awesome police officers, but I also know some that probably would not bat an eye at planting evidence to support their case. The thing is… I believe at no point did anyone think they were framing an innocent man… but instead that from the moment his name was mentioned he was already assumed guilty and they began trying to make a case against him work. I think that is probably the worst thing that the show highlights is how non-existence the burden of proof really is. Maybe I am just more questioning of information… but I had more than enough “reasonable doubt”.

The Fallout 4 Show

Last night we recorded our AggroChat podcast devoted to Fallout 4. More or less this was the reason why I pushed through the storyline recently, and I have to say forcing myself to complete this game was one of the more miserable experiences. I wanted to be able to talk about story plots, but part of me thinks i would have been happier if I had just not done that. Bethesda games in general for me are about the little moments, and not the big picture. This is a game that delivers in spades when it comes to little vignettes, but fails to deliver when it comes to giving me a larger story arc that I really cared about. The biggest problem for me at least was the fact that in no way could you complete the game in a fashion that did not end up with completely closing off all of the other options. I hate red versus blue situations… and even though fallout 4 was red vs blue vs orange vs green…. it still set up an artificial conflict that I had no way of mediating. There were no “grand bargain” options but instead a lot of “nope they will hate you now” paths you were forced down.

All of that said… the game itself was really awesome and I highly suggest it. When we finally do the game of the year show, this is more or less going to be my pick. I love the game, but then again I have loved every Fallout game to date…. well except Tactics… we don’t talk about Tactics. It was awesome and interesting hearing everyone elses options on the game as well. When we got to recording the show neither Ashgar or Kodra had managed to beat the storyline… and I think I probably would have been far happier if I had joined them in that club. Dallian on the other end of the spectrum had gotten 100% of the PS4 trophies, meaning that he had quite literally gotten every ending possible I believe. The takeaway is… this is a Bethesda game. If you like those games, then you are absolutely going to love Fallout 4… and more than likely you already own it and are happily playing it. If you don’t like Bethesda games, then this isn’t the departure you are looking for. If you are on the fence… then wait for a sale and try it then. If you’ve never played a Fallout game… I highly suggest you pick up Fallout New Vegas because it pretty much represents some of the best storytelling in the series. The show itself is full spoilers so if you plan on playing Fallout 4 at some point, and if you are one of those people for whom spoilers mean something…. then you probably should skip the show until a later date.

AggroChat 89 – The Fallout 4 Show

AggroChat #89 – The Fallout 4 Show

May 21, 2019January 3, 2016 by AggroChat

In November AggroChat decided to try a new experiment. There was a game coming out that month that all of us wanted to play, so when Tam went to make his choice he opted to go with Fallout 4. That said we all agreed that we would need more than a month to play the game, and ultimately we spend a little over two months with the game. Any Bethesda game is massive, and simply takes a sheer volume of hours to sift through the content… and even then there is pretty much no chance you will ever experience all of it.

For this show we once again pulled in Inkybrushes who we had on the recent Villians show, and called back a regular host from our early days Dallian. The majority of the cast had beaten the game with at least one ending, and a few managed to get multiple endings. The funny thing is… for a game that we all universally liked, we all had a bunch of negative comments as well. I guess that is the nature of our podcast, that we end up focused on the things that frustrated us and often miss some of the things we really enjoyed. This is a full spoiler deep dive into the storyline and various game elements, so if you have not played the game and intend to, I highly suggest you skip this show until a later date.

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The Pathfinder

January 2, 2016 by Belghast

Flying Again

Not being able to fly in Draenor has been an interesting experience, and mostly one that I did not fully realize what I was missing until recently. I had got so used to NOT flying… that it always felt strange when I entered the old would and could suddenly take to the skies again. I would lift off the ground in Stormwind or Ironforge and have this momentary pause where I couldn’t quite remember what I was supposed to do now that I was up above the world. I can’t say I gnashed me teeth wanting flight, in fact I think it was probably a much more enjoyable experience for me because I was forced to be on the ground. I made me actually learn the lay of the land in these zones, and it also got me using the flight point system again. However over the last few weeks I have been working on the final requirements for Draenor Pathfinder, and being shuttled around by one of my friends on her rocket makes me realize just how much easier everything is with flight. Why clear your way through a camp when you can just drop down on top of your objective? But it also has made me realize exactly why they disabled in the first place. Flight is overpowered when it comes to questing, and there is nothing more frustrating than working your way to a treasure chest in Tanaan only to have someone swoop in from above to snatch it from you before you can get to it. When I was wrapping up the last bits of faction yesterday I had this happen three times in the course of a ten minute period.

I honestly don’t so much care about flight for my max level characters, but instead for my characters that I have yet to level further. This means that I can pretty much chain quest my way to 100 by doing ONLY the objectives, and while this means I will be skipping a bunch of content… it is also content I have seen several times. The biggest boon to me is that it will make collecting treasures so much easier, especially the ones that involve a jumping puzzle. The negative is… that I will no longer be cycling through my collection of ground mounts, but in the grand scheme I think I will live. I realize this is months late, but it is still exciting to me to be able to return to the skies. While Draenor Pathfinder was kind of a pain in the ass…. I got lucky and managed to get several medallions from the current Christmas event that helped me leapfrog 1000 faction at a time. The problem is…. now that I am done with this achievement I am not really sure what to do with myself. I could either start pushing the rest of my alliance characters from 90ish to 100…. or I could return to working on my Orc Warlock to hopefully have a second 100 to play with Horde side. In any case… I topped a big goal off of my list and am pretty happy.

Last Gen Destiny

Over the week I have had a friend of mine talking about picking up Destiny now that he realized you could get it for the Xbox 360. I myself have considered picking it up on that console for awhile, especially since I feel bad that my 360 doesn’t see much love. I had been trying to use PSTV to play PS4 downstairs where we have the exercise bike set up, and the lag is just enough that it makes Destiny largely unplayable for me. The answer on all of the forums seems to be to hard wire your PSTV into your network…. but I don’t have the ability to have Ethernet downstairs, and I question how well powerline adapters would work in my house. Which moves me to potentially relocating my Xbox 360 to downstairs and playing some Destiny on it. I ended up picking it up and I have to say… I am pretty impressed. The game for the most part “feels” the same… just at a much lower resolution. To some extent playing on the 360 feels like you are squinting while playing it on the PS4. Everything is just slightly lower resolution, which would make sense considering that Destiny runs at 1080p 30fps on the PlayStation 4 and it runs 720p 30fps on the Xbox 360. The difference is noticeable when you are standing still but for the most part in the heat of the battle I don’t really notice it that much.

The only negative of playing on the Xbox 360 however is that I am starting completely over. I’ve read that apparently you can log your characters in on either Xbox 360 or Xbox One… and the same goes for PS4 and PS3. So if I ever get a Xbox One at some point all of the effort I have done on the 360 will port over. Interestingly enough though that means that I guess I could have picked up a copy for the PS3 and played my existing PS4 characters on it. That said… I have heard some really bad issues with Destiny on the PS3. Everything I had read about the 360 made it sound like it was just a downgraded resolution… but I’ve heard the PS3 version is only running at a strange 624p and also has some framerate dip issues. Mostly I am still amazed at just how well it runs on last generation hardware, and while I won’t have that constant desire to take screenshots because the game is so damned pretty…. it will give me something interesting to do while riding the exercise bike. I have a woefully small number of people on my XBox Live account so feel free to add BelghastStern, and especially if you play Destiny on the 360 please let me know!