August 2018 – Page 12

Jason Jessee Board

August 8, 2018 by Belghast

This week was originally designated as “Get to Know Each Other Week” in my master scheme but I feel like that is well under way in part thanks to the existence of the Blaugust Discord. If you have not joined the discord I highly suggest doing so, also if you have not signed up for the event then there is still plenty of time to get involved. For as generally open as I am with my readers about a lot of things… I still find it fairly hard to actually talk about myself in any sort of directed way. Sure while I am in the middle of writing about a topic there are a bunch of real life details that end up getting thrown into the mix for flavor, but to sit down and write a specific topic about me as a person… that is a whole other challenge.

I was born in 1976 on the wane of the seventies and the cusp of the eighties… then spent my high school and college years in the nineties giving me a really odd blend of cultural experiences. Each of those decades left its own indelible mark on my psyche. Another piece of the puzzle is the fact that I was the only child of a machinist by day and occasionally professional photographer by night and weekend… and a home economics teacher. I grew up in Rural Americana in the middle of the part of Oklahoma aptly referred to as “Green Country” in a town with a population of around 2000 give or take a few. We lived just far enough outside of the city limits to prevent us from getting cable… or me having many kids to play with.

That means a good deal of my life was spent entertaining myself through copious amounts of imagination and a strong dash of public television. I’ve talked a bit about my attachment to Mister Roger’s Neighborhood but I was equally attracted to adult programs like Nova. For the first several years of my life I spent the majority of my time with my grandmother and grandfather who served as a babysitter while my folks worked. My grandmother also doubled as my companion on so many adventures from learning how to cook, to roaming around in the pasture… to playing rousing games of candyland. There were many times come Friday night when my folks came to pick me up, that I would announce that I was staying the weekend.

As time passed and I aged those weekends with my grandparents were replaced with staying over at friends houses. There was a circle of two other close friends that I had and it seemed like every single weekend we were gathered together at one of the houses. I always enjoyed the act of getting out of my own family and melding into another one for the weekend. In late middle school one of the trio moved away and we were left with a duo. By the time high school rolled around things started to get a little strained, since my partner in crime was largely forced into sports by his father who wanted him to follow in his own footsteps… and I didn’t really have the equivalent pressure pushing me in that direction.

We all saw each other pretty often because around about this time skateboarding was a massive thing. My first “real” deck that I planned for and bought on my own was the Jason Jessee Neptune deck, and I wish I still had it if for no reason other than to hang it on the wall. I’ve contemplated buying one of the modern reproductions to do that, but its an awful pricey expense for a piece of kitch. Skating lead its way to other drift compatible activities… like playing in a band that ultimately formed around the nexus of a few of us that hung out frequently. I played the drums, the friend from middle school played the bass and patterned himself after Flea of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and the other friend with seemingly unlimited means bought a sweet telecaster and played lead guitar. We never really coalesced on a proper band name… we were FSU for awhile which we thought was edgy because it stood for Fucking Shut Up. Later we performed under the name Jive Daddies… which I always thought was kinda dumb but was overridden by the other two.

During my junior year however I got really sick. I started having these black outs and managed to park my car perfectly in a ditch down from my house once. It was ultimately sorted out that I had a pinched blood vessel in my neck, that was the side effect of getting rear ended in a car wreck and developing a minor case of whiplash. However it took awhile to sort that out and during this time I sorta drifted away from that circle of friends and built a new one. One of the truths of small time life is the lack of things to do… leads kids towards copious amounts of alcohol and drug abuse. My original duo of friends found their way into more serious paths leading towards hard drugs, and that was not a journey I was willing to follow them on. So really my illness became a convenient excuse to simply stop participating and extract myself from that situation.

Another thing that happened around this time is that my family finally got a computer. It was a 386SX 16 MHz without a math co-processor with 2 meg of ram and a 90 MB hard drive that at the time seemed like all the space I would ever need. It had no sound card because those simply did not come with computers standard at that point and was largely designed for business products running Windows 3.0 originally…. and later upgraded to the revolutionary 3.1. I learned computers through necessity, because I kept doing something to jack the machine up and then needing to figure out how to fix it before my dad got home. Largely these interludes involved me trying to sort out how to get more than 16 colors in windows paint… it was simpler time.

The new circle of friends and I vacillated between two activities… pen and paper gaming and pouring over whatever bootleg games we managed to get from someone that had a relative in college and would ship us home boxes of pirated games. Getting anything new was pretty much out of the question because at this point we had no access to stores that sold anything even vaguely related to PC gaming. At some point I stumbled upon a bookstore that happened to have 5.25 inch floppies with shareware on them and got my first copy of Wolfenstein 3D and an editor that someone made for it. We obsessed over building levels to the game and the result was usually one person building a level and another person trying to run through it.

I feel like at this point I have already typed too much information about myself, so I am going to cut things off at this point. We are now circa 1992 and on the cusp of Magic the Gathering being a thing. I’ve recently gotten back in touch with one of the members of the little crew that I played table top games with, so I fully expect him to respond here at some point. I do miss those days when things were so much simpler and it seemed like we had all of the time in the world to hang out and do stuff together. Time moves so much faster as you get older, and busier, and have your attention fragmented by dozens of things at the same time. I might pick up tomorrow with some more details that I maybe glazed over, but like I said… getting any sort of coherent narrative out of me about myself is a challenge.

On EDH

August 7, 2018 by Ashgar

In most senses, I’ve known how to play Magic the Gathering since I was in middle school. I never had any cards of my own (I had Pokemon cards when those were new) but I knew the rules somewhat and I could play at a very basic level. Most of my Magic experience remained theoretical until I got Duels of the Planeswalkers (the first one, in 2009) on a whim and really enjoyed it. At the same time, I never really got into “competitive” Magic. I was (and still am) uninterested in putting in the time and money it would take to get “good” at any of the constructed formats. Draft is also a skill I just never picked up.

Fast forward several years, and I find out about the Commander format. For those unfamiliar, this is a format usually played with more than two people, using decks containing 100 cards where you can have no more than one of anything other than basic lands, and using a legendary creature as your “Commander”. This is a card you have access to at all times that also determines what colors of cards you can include in your deck. (The original Commanders were the Elder Dragons from way back in Legends, so that’s where the original name “Elder Dragon Highlander” comes from.) Commander games tend to be quite a bit longer and crazy things can happen that are unlikely to ever see any use in a normal game. The multiplayer aspect is also relevant, because it encourages playing politics if someone is getting ahead.

I started with the pre-constructed deck featuring Atraxa, the rather ridiculous card pictured above. I’ve since tried building my own decks, some of which have been more successful than others. It’s definitely re-kindled my interest in the game, and this more casual approach has helped other podcast members get into it as well.

Tales from too many pugs

August 7, 2018 by Grace

I wanted to try to keep from completely bouncing off of WoW after all my feelings about the War of the Thorns content. I decided that leveling something new from scratch would be fun and would keep me far away from the pre-expansion stuff for a while. Because I’m full of terrible ideas, I’m trying to level a priest via pugging dungeons.

This is DiscGrace, my new blood elf disc priest. It’s been a few years since I really played a priest, but in my heart my undead priest will always be my main. Now I’m trying to re-learn how to disc while subjecting myself to the best and worst of pugs in WoW. Either I’m going to get super good at priesting, or I’m going to ragequit MMOs for a while. At least I’ll get some good blogging out of it.

I leveled to 15 questing in the blood elf starting area. I like how quiet it is there, and how much has stayed the same since I first started playing the game. Once I could queue for dungeons I started running them and only questing a little to fill in the down time. I’m going to try to run them all in order if I can.

Deadmines: This was a reasonable group. I had a very nice bear tank. I was frustrated for a while because you don’t get atonement until around level 20, so I had to heal “properly” for this one. I hadn’t run many dungeons since the leveling changes last patch, so the time to kill the bosses was surprising to me. Other than that this was a smooth run.

Ragefire Chasm: Another reasonable group. I could get used to this. I had a monk tank this time. They were a little bit slow to pick up aggro but other than that there were no problems. People even said thank you when we were done!

Shadowfang Keep: My first wtf moment of this experiment. I’m amazed it took this long. Had a pally tank and a monk that kept rushing ahead and pulling. I finally had atonement at least and kept everybody alive fine even through some big pulls and various kinds of stupid. The wtf moment came about halfway through when the pally asked me “don’t you know how to atonement heal?”. That’s…what I was doing the whole time? Apparently they were mad that my largest heal on the meters was my shield, and nothing I could say seemed to placate them so I just gave up. Even the annoying monk that kept pulling stood up for me which was a shock. I ended up keeping my mouth shut for the rest of the run and just kept healing the same way I had been the whole time. Very odd.

So far I’ve made it to level 22 with only one relatively small incident. I’ll call that a win. I’m sure things will keep getting more interesting as I move into more complicated dungeons. Anybody want to take bets on how far I get before I get sick of pugs and give up?

Mining The Past

August 7, 2018 by Belghast

This week was at least in part supposed to primarily be about generating topics for your blog that you can sustain yourself on for the rest of the sprint. Unfortunately only one of my posts has actually accomplished this. I brain stormed together a list of topics on August first and never really revisited it because I was ultimately dealing with some of my own things. However one of the general pieces of advice I can offer you is to be willing to mine your own experience for topics. Each of us tends to think our own experiences are banal and not actually worth writing about. The thing is… those experiences are unique to you and tell the reader an awful lot about your own feelings on a subject.

This is where I break into a story to illustrate this point. I started leading guilds with the launch of World of Warcraft in 2004 and since then have been the helm of many offshoots be they connected to House Stalwart or later Greysky Armada. In addition to that there has been an awful lot of experience leading various communities from the Argent Dawn Exiles that I started when the Blizzard mods made the official server forums completely unpalatable to the things like BelEffect that I largely started as a joke but developed a life of its own. Every single bit of that experience, while I didn’t necessarily know it at the time was relevant to what I would ultimately do for a living later.

While I have never listed it on my resume, that solid decade and some change has been a hardcore training ground for management in the real world. I first had my taste for managing others at my first job back in 1999-2000 and I did not like it at all. The whole setting the vision for the group was fun, but what ultimately broke me was a situation that happened with one of my employees. I had been placed in a position of power because I was the one with the answers… not with none of the training to actual manage others. I had a boss at that time for whom the most important thing you could do was be sitting at your desk at 8 am. I didn’t believe this and still don’t for that matter… and was put in the awkward position of having to discipline an employee for an infraction that I didn’t myself believe in.

This bad taste made me actively avoid taking on the mantle of supervisor or manager for a significant time. However in the gaming space I found myself pushed into that role because no one was willing to take it upon themselves to create the sort of gaming environment I wanted to play in. So out of necessity I became the Guild Leader and set forth the build the best possible guild I could… and immediately stumbled about six months into the game. However I learned how to deal with different personalities and outlooks on the game play experience and about a year and a half into World of Warcraft we picked ourselves back up and rebuilt House Stalwart.

Throughout Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King we forged the guild and the raid associated with it into a strong community. So strong that when my account got hacked while raiding Ulduar and said hackers disbanded the guild and moved my main off server… we immediately picked back up the pieces that night. The community had the guild up and running before I managed to get my account restored, and then handed back over the crown willingly. The hack itself is a story that is buried somewhere in the annals of this blog, but I had somehow managed to forge something strong enough and loyal enough to keep on going without me even being in the picture.

So much so that all these years later without me really at the helm since Cataclysm… the guild continues on through a succession of leaders from Elnore, Rylacus and now Kylana keeping things alive and actually in a constant state of growth. I admit it was a bit of a hit to my ego at first to see that the guild was doing well without me. However over time I came to appreciate the fact that I built that organization and it managed to survive succession which is a truly rare occurrence in either the gaming world or the business world. While I spend significantly less time playing Alliance right now, I am still happy each time I hear about them downing some new boss or getting some new achievement. I am proud of what that guild and community became.

When my boss moved up from Manager to Director, I was presented with another challenge. Did I stay in the comfortable development lead role I had carved out for myself, or did I step up to management not quite knowing if I would be able to make it work. The truth is it was the years of experience I had leading other people in situations where I often times had no actual power of authority to use as a crutch… that gave me the confidence that maybe i could do this thing. If you can convince forty strangers to work towards a singular goal, then you have a significant bit of work experience there leading people and understanding how to adapt your message so that others will be able to consume it.

So this morning I had sat down and mined a bit of my own experience to convert it into a blog post. Each of us has deep reserves of information just sitting there waiting to be harvested, talking about past experiences in games or how they have effected you in the real world. The challenge however is being willing to open up and talk about your past and present it with a new perspective. I would say most of what I write about draws deeply upon all of the decisions that I made to get me to where I am today. Often times when I write about things I omit details here and there to clarify the narrative that would otherwise muddy the presentation, but the core of the experience is still effectively what happened.

With time you develop your own personal methodology for which things to talk about and which things to skip over because it won’t translate into words that well. However the only way to really sort this out is to start trying to adapt your own life story. Our experiences also change over time… because how you view something at age 20 is going to be different than how you view an experience at age 40. In all of my time working there has only been one boss that did not like me. While I was going through those experiences it was a very dark time for me… but after exiting that shroud I have come to realize that even that horrible experience was a blessing in disguise. Effectively it gave me the piece of experience that I was missing… how not to lead others. I had a use case of the exact wrong way to do leadership and I have been able to mine it as well to make sure I was not following in his footsteps.

Basically mining your past experiences allows you to dust them off and view them from a different perspective, which is helpful for you to grow personally… but also can be exploited to make something relate-able for your readers. Like I have said before… there comes a point where the readers stop caring about the subject matter you are writing about and start caring about you as a human being. These are the posts that effectively set that process in motion. When you share of yourself… it makes others more willing to share of themselves. I realize this has probably turned into a really contorted esoteric topic, but I still feel like it is useful information. So often we look outside for assistance when occasionally the answers we need are buried deep down inside of our own experiences.