September 2016 – Page 9

Other Worlds

September 13, 2016 by Belghast

Last night marked my return to the Monday night raid thing in Final Fantasy XIV, that I had not been able to attend the last few weeks for one reason or another. I know most of my blog coverage lately has been about Legion, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for lots of other games. The intention was to pull together last night and do a lot of raidy bits, but I kinda ruined that. I’ve written about the struggles to get Luna integrated with our household and the other two cats. Things are still not going well, and I am not sure if they ever will at this point. She simply hates other cats, and I cannot seem to get her from charging the other cats when she sees them. This is a sort of behavior I have never seen in any of the other cats we have had throughout the years. It has gotten so bad that the only real way we can stop her is by dousing her with a spray bottle. Which seems to do NOTHING for the long term effect and only distracts her for the moment… because seconds later she is charging once again. So the only other option is to keep her shut up in my wife’s office… which is a somewhat shitty life. Now we are on that hard precipice of trying to decide what is best for her and what is best for our other two cats. We have some options, but one of them is of course to return her to the organization we adopted her from. I’ve never really felt as much as a failure as I do right now because we have tried so many things… including the extremely expensive pheromone night light things. In any case… Tam really likes to just queue the group instead of doing a ready check, and there was a period of time where I was away from the screen dealing with cats. The end result of too many of these premature queues unfortunately is that I locked the entire group out, at which point we dissolved instead of waiting thirty minutes for it to clear. We did however at least get a single kill in before that happened, and knocked out some needed content for one of the guildies.

The other game I have been occasionally poking my head into is Guild Wars 2. I have a really fraught relationship with this game, but it has been something that I have patched up multiple times and attempted to play. I say attempted, because no matter how many times I try there is just something that never quite clicks with me. I made it to about 65 on my own recognizance… and then got boosted due to the daily login system the rest of the way to 80. While I have tried a bunch of different classes… it feels like the one I still like the most is Warrior in spite of how lousy melee generally feels in this game. During a recent sale I managed to pick up Heart of Thorns for $18… and I figured it was well worth giving it a try for that price. With that came with a boost to 80, but I have not figured out what class I actually want to use it on. During Pax South 2015 when they announced the expansion… I thought Revenant was going to be the class for me. However the boost allows you a “try before you buy” sort of functionality… and in practice the class just doesn’t feel like anything I am interested in. It is this strange amalgam between WoW Shaman, Deathknight, and Rogue and in a way that just doesn’t exactly feel like something I want to play. During the boost it hands you a hammer and a pair of swords, but I am wondering if maybe one of the other weapon combos feels better since as warrior I only really like greatsword and hammer. In any case I popped in last night for a bit and started actually trying to move my original story forward… I stalled out around 60 and just never tried to pick it back up. Maybe the story will hook me into the game in a way that the gameplay never actually did.

Breaking Silence

September 12, 2016 by Belghast

After the challenges of last week, this past weekend was largely a time to chill out and relax. On the “paw” front I am pleased to announce that the round of IV antibiotics seemed to work pretty well given that the swelling is largely down as is the redness. There is one spot that is a bit troubling, but we are watching it. I am guessing that the location went a little deeper than the rest and as such might take a little longer to recover. There is always the fear that the bite penetrated a tendon or something else, but we will continue to watch it as it hopefully heals. On the gaming front… I had all of these grand ideas about running nonstop dungeons, but what happened in reality is that I wound up chilling with the wife downstairs and watching various stuff on the television. It felt like it would be an invasion of the peace and quiet to get on voice chat and start talking “strategery” and such. What happened instead is that I queued up a few times as a pug dps, and spent time working on older stuff in the meantime while waiting on that lengthy queue to pop. Of note on the Ruin server group, the queue time for a DPS is about 45 minutes, which means I had plenty of time to work on other objectives while waiting on the queue to pop. I spent some time in Warlords farming spawns attempting to get my Shatari Defense reputation up… because I am admittedly a bit jealous of Grace and her amazing fire mammoth mount that she keeps running around on. The only problem there is it seems with the opening of Tanaan Jungle at least one of the farm spots has been nerfed into the ground… and Shattrath city has spawns really far apart making it hard to gather things up and AOE them down with whirlwind spam.

Another queue I wound up spending on the Isle of Giants in Pandaria where I learned a few key things. Firstly once again it is hard to gather everything up and AOE it down… because my aggro radius is minuscule now with the dinosaurs. Second I can apparently now easily solo Oondasta as Fury, so that is going to go on the mount farming list. The white raptor mount has been something I have worked on for awhile, and yesterday I ground out the last 2000 bones roughly. The queue popped before I could actually turn in, so I had to finish things up after the dungeon. The real takeaway from the weekend however is… my theory of treating World of Warcraft like Final Fantasy XIV seems to largely be working. Upon entering a dungeon, be it as tank or as dps… I do my customary “Hey Folks” which seems to unjam the conversation mechanism. Then throughout the dungeon folks tend to be willing to talk, but if I don’t say anything… it seems like folks are willing to just ride along in silence because there has always been the wowism that silence is preferable to dealing with assholes. The thing is… I think we can do better and a lot of the negative opinion folks have of this community is due to the fact that folks are willing to either put up with bullshit in dungeons because they want it to be over and don’t want to have to deal with another 45 minute queue. I am not sure if it is going to help, but I am absolutely making an effort to talk to people be it in my Class Hall fielding questions like I did yesterday… or running a dungeon, or even out in the world while doing an objective. I think most of us just simply assumed that no one was willing to have conversation, and I am trying to flip that assumption on its head.

The other big thing from the weekend is that I started work on my second character. Some time ago I started Exeter my Paladin off by getting Lightbringer. However after swapping Belghast to tanking, I am finding it way easier to quest like a madman in that mode. So as soon as I hit 102 I did the quest chain to pick up the second artifact, and had been holding artifact power items in reserve for awhile. Unlike Belghast I have a clear path that I am planning on working towards first, which I guess makes the experience feel more purposeful. On the Warrior protection tree there were so many cool things that I wanted, but none of them seemed to be clearly better than any of the others. Paladin it feels like there is one right choice for survival, and I am going in that direction first. Largely I devoted the time spent during the podcast to working on this guy, and by the end of the night I had hit 102 and was off into tanky land. I apparently also unlocked one of the appearances so I quickly swapped to the purple look and used it as an excuse to rock my purple judgement set. The one set that I wish existed in game is the yellow judgement set that you see one of the NPCs wearing. As it stands I have normal, Blue from the opening of Wrath event, and purple from the BC era heroics. This really is the best looking tier set in the game, and I wish more recolored sets would show up in dungeons, which reminds me… at some point I really need to work on farming up the turquoise wrath set. In any cases it was a good weekend and fairly relaxing, but it is my hope that with the week I will be back doing dungeons with friends again. I am now up to 823 item level on Belghast, which means I need to be hitting up those heroics.

AggroChat #123 – Purposeful Piddling

May 21, 2019September 11, 2016 by AggroChat

This week Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Tam talk Pax West 2016, Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns, and World of Warcraft Legion

This week we have a bizarre show that somehow covers a lot of content without us actually realizing it. Since Tam and Kodra attended Pax West last week we went into a discussion about all of the stuff they saw there. From there we branch out into a discussion about Guild Wars 2 and Tam recently picking the game up after talking to a friend about it. We largely discuss how the game has improved since launch and that Tam, Ash and Kodra are enjoying in it. Finally we wrap up the evening talking about World of Warcraft Legion and some of the experiences Grace and Belghast have after hitting the new level cap and experiencing World Quests.

Things We Discussed – Pax West 2016 – Dishonored 2 – Prey – 20XX – Open Sorcery – Thornwatch – Star Wars Destiny CCG – Hacknet – Elder Scrolls: Legends – Raging River Card – Elder Scrolls as MTG Colors – Duelyst – Speedrunners – Ultimate Chicken Horse – Pax Dev – Pax Panels – Guild Wars 2 – Heart of Thorns – World of Warcraft – Legion – World Quests

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Book Challenge #99: Piers Anthony’s Xanth Series

September 9, 2016 by Grace

The next item on my reading list is Piers Anthony’s Xanth series. It starts with A Spell for Chameleon, published in 1977. I knew this was a long series, but I had no idea that there are 39 of them, and several more still forthcoming. These books were always staples at my local used book store, but I never picked them up. Something about getting into a long series like that is incredibly daunting.

Luckily after the last book I read for this challenge, this one doesn’t take itself seriously at all and is a light, vaguely pleasant read. Well, most of the time. Spoilers ahead!

Also TW for discussion of a rape trial.

The story follows the (mis)adventures of Bink as he tries to establish a place for himself in the magical realm of Xanth. As an aside, the map of Xanth in the front of the book looks suspiciously like the state of Florida, and is the first clue that this book is going to poke some fun at fantasy tropes. In Xanth, if you can’t demonstrate some form of magical ability by the time you come of age you get exiled out into the mundane world where the rest of us humans supposedly live. Bink is trying to avoid this fate, so he sets out on a quest to discover if he has a power and what that power is.

The story takes a few interesting turns, but unfortunately it lost me fairly early. If you enjoy humor and fantasy you have probably read at least one book by Terry Pratchett. If you haven’t, stop what you’re doing and go grab one. Small Gods is a good one, and in fact is farther up on this reading challenge list. In any case, Terry Pratchett has spoiled me a bit on other fantasy humor, because not only are his novels funny, but they are often packed full of biting British satire so potent that you often laugh to release the explosive pressure of all the snark. That’s the bar that has been set for fantasy humor. Piers Anthony’s humor is funny (sometimes) for its own sake, and lacks the sharp edge that I enjoy from laughing at something that is funny because it is shedding uncomfortable truths.

The main uncomfortable truth laid out in A Spell for Chameleon is that Piers Anthony’s depictions of women are abyssmal. His humorous touches were entertaining most of the time, but when it comes to any interaction between Bink and a female character, human or otherwise, the jokes could have been written by a horny 14 year old boy. I suppose that’s who this series is really aimed towards, since I have several friends who read them when they were young and seemed to have fond memories. Heck, I probably wouldn’t have had much problem with it when I was younger, and that thought makes me deeply uncomfortable. The women in this novel are horrible caricatures of the worst stereotypes of women. The one who seems most like a person, the initial love interest of Bink, Sabrina, gets written off as heartless and traitorous early on because she doesn’t sacrifice her entire life to try to save or to be exiled with Bink. The centaur woman Bink meets is smart and capable in some ways, but her whole reason for existing in the plot is to “temper” the hot headed male centaur and to get “accidentally” groped by the protagonist. That was where the book lost me, 10% in according to my Kindle. After that we get treated to a disgusting sham of a rape trial, a power mad older woman who uses illusions to appear younger, and the pinnacle of the book, Chameleon.

Chameleon is a woman who changes over the cycle of (surprise!) a month. At one peak of her cycle, she is beautiful but completely devoid of intelligence, while at the other end she is very smart but also very ugly. I am not even going to start unpacking that here. But Bink decides that this is exactly the perfect kind of woman for him. Basically this book gave me insight I didn’t want into the mind of Piers Anthony, and probably millions of men like him. Insight like how they think a rape case is as bad for the victim as for the defendant, and that if you know each other ahead of time it couldn’t really have been rape anyway. Insight like thinking women who won’t reshape their lives to suit yours are cold and unworthy, but ones who try to reshape your life to theirs are grasping and evil. And insight like the the assumption that no man could settle for a smart “ugly” woman or even a moderately smart, moderately attractive woman when they could also have a beautiful idiot. Let’s not even mention the fact that beauty plus brains seems to be an impossible combination.

This book did have some genuinely funny moments too. Outside of its treatment of women it was mostly fine. Some other stuff happens in the plot but honestly by the time that happened I was so checked out I couldn’t really tell you. If you like sophomoric humor and gross stereotypes about women, there’s 38 more where this one came from including one charmingly titled “The Color of Her Panties”. For anyone else, you’re better off skipping this series.

TL;DR:

A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony

Rating: 2/5 stars

Verdict: I would have enjoyed this more and probably given 3 or so stars when I was a kid. Now I’m old and cranky and think the way it treats women is supremely gross.