August 2018 – AggroChat

2018 Blaugust wrap-up

August 31, 2018 by Grace

Today is the last day of Blaugust, and everyone is starting to reflect on the month and what we’ve accomplished. Before I get to that, though, I want to thank Belghast for setting everything up this year. There’s a bunch of time and stress associated with getting a community project like this off the ground. I’m so very grateful that he made the effort to revive Blaugust, give us some guidance and our Discord, and be our biggest cheerleader during this month of nonsense.

I managed to get 29 posts written here this year (counting this one). I would have had a perfect 31 but I decided to take last weekend off to avoid burn-out. Luckily I also have my other blog, where I have faithfully posted every single day. So in fact I will have a total of 60 posts up for the month. That’s so much blogging!

One thing that really set this year apart for me was the amount of interaction I’ve had with my fellow bloggers. I had more than double the views and almost ten times the comments compared to this time last year! I definitely attribute that to being more active in the comments here and on the blogs I’m reading. There are always so many awesome things to read over Blaugust, but I really made an effort to try to comment more this year too, which led to some really fantastic conversations. Most years I feel so exhausted and burnt-out after posting every day for a month that I end up taking a big break in September. This year I’m really motivated to stay active because I don’t want to miss out on chatting with the new friends I’ve made.

Thank you, fellow bloggers, for making this the best Blaugust ever!

Foil by Cats

August 31, 2018 by Belghast

This morning I had the boldest of plans for what I was going to do with my day off… but so far none of it has come to fruition as I keep being besieged by adorable cats wanting to snuggle. Today begins my four day weekend, and while I will have to do some work at some point… namely reconcile timesheets… I have most of the day to myself. I originally planned to tear apart my system upstairs and move it to its new case… that is large enough to finally fit the 1080 ti that I picked up on the cheap during prime day. So far this has not happened and I am not honestly certain it will.

This is the problem with making plans sometimes is that other plans sorta insert themselves in the middle of them. Right now I am chilling on the sofa with cats as I type my morning post, and considering I don’t think I slept terribly well… I am largely okay with this situation. An alternate strategy is to play World of Warcraft and work on leveling the Demon Hunter while trying to finish Jessica Jones season 2 and start Luke Cage season 2. Whatever the case… I needed a break because the rigors of work have been nonsense. I only wish that my wife could have also had a similar break.

Right now I am a little over halfway to 116 and finally reaching the point I have already quested through in Nazmir. I look forward to seeing how the rest of the zone goes since I largely stalled out on it as soon as I dinged 120 and became obsessed with gear acquisition on the Warrior. I am enjoying Fury quite a bit, but I have never really had the soul of a dps player… but I do like that it gives me an option to run when someone else is able to tank. I still however feel the need to push up a viable tank since that is largely the role I always inhabit in group play. My hope is by the end of this break I will be back at 120 and potentially have eclipsed where my Warrior is gear wise.

However… for the very moment I am going to get back to snuggling with cats.

FROGS!

August 30, 2018 by Grace

Shoutout to my friend Mor, who suggested the topic of today’s post. FROGS!

Frogs are some of my favorite creatures. I’m not really sure why I like them so much. Maybe it is their cute little froggy faces, or their weird amphibian life cycle, or all the crazy colors they can be. All I know is I love frogs! That’s why I’m so happy that there are new froggy friends to enjoy in BfA.

I’ve already talked a bit about my love of Krag’wa, the enormous frog Loa in Nazmir. Krag’wa’s burrow is surrounded by naga and blood trolls, but he’s knows he can take them. He is worried about his children though. I’m not sure if they are literal or metaphorical children, but either way the the naga are stealing frogs and doing mean things to them. I happily murdered a bunch of naga to save the adorable froggies. Interestingly, there seems to be a connection between the crawgs and Krag’wa. Are crawgs what happens to Krag’wa’s spawn when they get corrupted? Or does Krag’wa just watch over all the weird swamp creatures? When you rescue a tiny crawg during a quest, Krag’wa tells you he can’t help it, and asks you to watch over it.

There are “spawn of Krag’wa” all around Nazmir. There’s even an achievement for finding all of them and sending them back home to the burrow. Although little compared to Krag’wa, these babies are the size of a large dog. I would love to have one as a pet, but I wonder what they would eat? Something that big would have to eat birds instead of bugs!

If you really can’t get enough of the Krag’wa-model frogs, there’s good news. For only 75 polished pet charms you can get Tragg the Curious to come and join you on your adventures! This was one of the first pets I bought this expansion. Speaking of battle pets, there are even more frog pets to collect. There’s both wild and vendor pets with a new model that looks like a poison dart frog. They are extra cute, and they can have some pretty useful moves for pet battles too!

Lastly there’s the amazing frog mount. It has been datamined, but there seems to be no way to get it in-game at the moment. I really hope that they make it available soon. I need to be able to hop around the swamps of Nazmir and strike fear into the hearts of my enemies from atop my very own riding frog!

That’s enough of my love of frogs for a bit! Do you love frogs too? Or is there another new model in the game that you’ve fallen in love with?

Tarnished Hope

August 30, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday was a bit of a trying day for me personally. I’ve personally been bought into this notion that Mastodon provided a kinder gentler alternative to Twitter, but yesterday largely proved that notion completely wrong. The Fediverse has been the welcome home of the disenfranchised and marginalized, which is awesome since Twitter has not done a great job of protecting that group in any way. However some events happened recently and because of them I am glad that I joined up several weeks ago rather than right now at this time. I was able to see what I thought was the ActivityPub community in its native state, talking about interesting things openly and publicly and willing to friend each other just as easily. I was able to get settled in quickly with the help of a whole slew of people who offered useful advice as I docked myself into a corner of this big maelstrom of interesting things.

I started out on Mastodon.cloud which was a large overflow instance to the original flagship of Mastodon.social. However I quickly realized that maybe being on a big disconnected instance was not the best idea in the world. As such I made the migration to Elekk.xyz which is awesome and started funding the patreon a bit to help out in its maintenance. However when my good friend Liore decided to fire up her own private instance… I found myself making the jump yet again to Nineties.Cafe and I am extremely happy I did. It is sort of this protective bubble where the people I already knew and the friends of those people are hanging out and talking freely about our interests. It has made it very easy to drown out the events that are happening over in “fedi” aka the federated timeline.

Effectively some weeks back Wil Wheaton joined Mastodon and like any denizen of twitter had some difficulty adjusting to the weird mix of things going on here and all of the little social norms that I talked a bit about the other day. However with increasing fervor there was a move to push him off of the platform, and while there are folks who have very valid concerns… most of what I saw regularly in the form of shitposts from Fedi was effectively the consensus of “fuck him for being famous”. As such it felt like a defense coalesced with the goal of pushing the infection out of the system, and in that I saw a lot of behavior that I had seen on Twitter and other social media platforms that is normally targeted at those same disenfranchised and marginalized people that I talked about at the beginning of the post.

Essentially I was watching the bullied become the bullies, and it saddened me greatly. I thought I had found a quiet corner of the internet that functioned the way I remember the internet first feeling during those heady early days of the nineties. I’ve compared Mastodon to early IRC or to the BBS era… but the last couple of days have felt like anything but that. I am not saying that the folks who pushed back are evil or wrong, just that the tactics that they were employing were the exact same thing that I have seen employed against them in the past. The only real comment I have made on the issue was last night.

I guess today yet again proved that we can build a better technology, that has the potential for better community engagement. But we can’t necessarily guarantee that everyone is going to be willing to be better human beings. Human beings still suck, and I welcome the robot overlords that will come after us.

I still have a lot of hope in Mastodon and Pleroma and the rest of the little islands that live in the ActivityPub Fediverse, and I am super glad that I have found my little island full of refugees from the nineties. I just saw a lot of the same behavior that I have on other social media platforms and it made me a little bummed about the whole experiment. However I will keep moving on and keep looking for the good things out there happening. There are needlessly folks who feel safer after yesterdays events, and that is good I guess. I just wish it wasn’t at the cost of reverting to the same flavors of toxic gate keeping that had been used as a weapon against “the other” before. Yesterday just made me think a little too much about this quote from Animal Farm: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.