Good Morning Friends. If we are following the theme of Blaugust this is “Introduce Yourself Week” and while I understand that I made this calendar… I never quite know what to do for this one. When you have been blogging in one form or another going on twenty years… I’ve already poured a lot of information about myself out into the ether. So instead of telling my life story once again… as I have done so many times, I thought I would share a few photos and write about them. This is a very young version of me… with Freddie Bear. I am not sure if it was originally called this on the packaging or if I gave him that name… but he was my constant companion followed by Raggedy Ann and Andy and a Sock Monkey I named Charlie. I’ve recently seen Freddie Bear and he is completely ragged from lots and lots of tiny hands hugging and loving him.
Another photo that I find funny is me and a childhood friend entering the yearly talent show, doing a dance number from Staying Alive. You would never know it from my 6’4″ blocky frame and complete lack of physical dexterity… but I was in Dance as a child. In theory, the story goes that I watched Olympic gymnasts and wanted to take gymnastics… and in our tiny town this was only taught by the local dance instructor. The “tax” that she placed upon male students, is that if they wanted to take gymnastics they also had to take tap and ballet. So I think I took around five years of tap, ballet, and gymnastics… and you could never tell it by the way I currently stumble about. It did however broaden my horizons quite a bit and I was in the regional production of the nutcracker several times as a tiny rat and as a tin soldier. I remember being so terrified of the seven-headed rat king on stage that I chewed on my plastic sword.
This is what remains of the very first automobile that I called “Bob” but being the weird artsy kid I said it was spelled without any Bs. I was a weird kid. I gave $200 for this vehicle and it carried me through college and survived a drunk lady backing into it at my wife’s apartment without so much as a scratch. It was not exactly a comfortable vehicle for someone over six feet tall to drive, but it was mine. The thing about an automobile more than anything is that it represents the freedom to go wherever you want whenever you want. I come from fairly humble means and there was not a chance in hell that my parents could afford to buy me something, so I think I spent money from working as a camp counselor at scout camp on it. I was an eagle scout and got brought onto staff one year when the camp decided that they wanted EVERY counselor to be an eagle for some reason. The biggest thing I remember about that summer was when we had to clear the copperhead snakes out from under the medical building. Probably not something you would ever have a bunch of teenagers do today… but I will never forget the distinct copperhead smell.
Now I live a relatively quiet life in suburbia. We bought our home in 1999 and have seen no reason to move. We love our neighborhood because it is this blend of older folks and young families, and over the years has become significantly more diverse. Most people bought here for the same reason we did… because it was cheap. Our house is roughly 1800 sq/ft and we paid somewhere in the vicinity of 83k in 1999… which had roughly tripled in value since we have been here. The thing I dig the most about our neighborhood though is how easy it would be for us to walk to the store or to a restaurant, even though we are often too busy to do this thing. Another thing I love is the fact that we have neighborhood ducks seen above. There are several ponds in the neighborhood and as a result, dusks roam around pretty regularly in small groups. Everyone stops for the ducks because they secretly rule the town. I am just thankful we got ducks because the neighborhood across the busy road… has geese and geese are assholes.
Being the soft-hearted person that I am… we are also the house in the neighborhood that puts out food for the community of feral cats. Seen lounging on our doormat is “Greybie” who is a grey tabby male that is extremely friendly… at least for a feral. He has this weird hang-up where he knows who we are if we are walking out of the house… but gets confused that we might be the same humans if we are walking into the house. Not pictured is “Tabby” who has only recently let me start petting her. They are all fairly skittish but along with a solid black cat they represent the cats that hang out in front of our house on the regular. We are not terribly original in our naming scheme in part because we don’t want to get too attached… because feral cats have a habit of eventually disappearing.
The whole feeding outdoor cats thing… more or less started because of “Tripod” pictured above. She is a three-legged calico and has been living in our backyard for going on four years. We even have a house that she can sleep in during the winter months with bedding to keep her warm. We’ve never gotten more than a few feet from her before she moves away and as such is still extremely feral… but also shows up at meal time every day. Occasionally she has a visiting tomcat that we call “splotchie” because he has an almost jaguar-like pattern on his grey and black coat. Almost all of the ferals that we see on the regular have been captured at one point and “fixed” then had their ears notched to indicate that they were released. I would adopt “Tripod” in a heartbeat, but given we have been doing this dance for years… I doubt she would ever trust me enough to come inside.
Speaking of Indoor Cats, this is my eldest Mollie. She is an asshole. Like she loves me but also is big into “love bites” thinking that is a proper way of showing affection. So loving on her is always a juggling act of trying to keep your hand out of her mouth. We rescued her from a large dog shelter, and she had been the only cat for two years there. As a result, I think she doesn’t quite know “how to cat”, and has trouble bonding… or at least her bonding is nowhere near what you would expect from a normal cat. She loves me and spends most of the day beside me on a box with a pink fleece blanket on it… pictured above. The problem with Mollie is… she does not understand how to play with our other girls and can get a little aggressive. Leading right now to the practice of us guarding our youngest while she goes to the litter box… which I hope does not last forever.
Then you have my baby girl Josie, who we have had for two years. Not pictured is her amazing ringtail… which basically turns up on itself in a loop… as its natural resting position. We are in a period of transition right now as the three girls figure out the new normal. That said if I am sitting downstairs on the couch, she is almost assuredly laying on my legs. Until Gracie came she also used to sleep on me every night… now she is sorta feeling out the new situation. She loves boxes and sitting on them… and it is weird how she has aged since we got the youngin. Not sure if this is a matter of perspective or if she really has decided that she needs to be a big sister. She is still deeply prone to bouts of kittenhood, especially when I get out the laser pointer. I work from home and she doesn’t spend much time upstairs, but when it is about time for me to “get off work” she comes up and reminds me.
If you have been reading my blog lately you will already be well versed in Gracie. She is a mess and one of the most active kittens I have ever experienced. She has learned how to climb things that no cat has ever figured out… which means we are constantly on the defensive. She would be in trouble were it not for the fact that she is so damned adorable. We would also probably call her “Little Shit” were it not for the fact we have already had a beloved cat from our past with that unfortunate moniker. Gracie basically wants whatever she can see… and then attacks it. She is super fierce… except when it comes to her interactions with Mollie who towers over her. As a result, we essentially have to take her to the litter box a few times a day, because she is too scared to come upstairs to them. She bonded heavily with my wife, but now that she is going back to school during the day… it will be interesting to see if “daddy” is suddenly cooler than I have been to this point.
Other than that… my primary hobby is gaming and I spend most evenings whiling away the hours playing some game while snuggling with cats. I’ve been working remotely for the last three years, and it does not appear that there is going to be any change to that. I’m a fairly simple person and honestly fairly boring. I’ve been a geek since before that term was really bandied about with any sense of street cred to it. I love comic books, all manner of science fiction and fantasy, and have been pouring my soul into either artwork or writing my entire life. I need to get back into drawing again because it was a huge part of my life for the first twenty years… and then I effectively just sort of severed that part of me. I keep thinking about doing Inktober, and maybe this year will be the year I actually do.
In 1998, our first year out of college I had a sort of tragic event happen to me that I never recovered from creatively. My wife was teaching in a very small “one-horse town”, and I was having to commute almost two hours a day to work as a result. At some point during that year, she was responsible for the senior class, and their class project was to fix up and paint the recreation center. I was asked if I would be willing to paint a mural with their mascot, and I spent the night laying out a sketch for it and had not actually started on it. We were up there until after midnight, so we locked the building and I left all of my supplies. When we came back about mid-day the next day… all of my stuff had been stolen. I am not really sure how to explain how big of a violation that felt.
More than just losing the paint and brushes… it was like my language for HOW to function creatively was stolen from me. I had spent over a decade building a collection of brushes that all did different things.. found sometimes in thrift stores, some given to me by friends… I knew how each of them worked intimately. Then with all of that gone… I didn’t even understand how to begin to replace it. A new brush doesn’t perform the way one that has been used for a decade performs. So it is like a part of me just shut down and never came back… and now roughly twenty-five years later… I’ve yet to really regain the confidence to begin creating art again. I shifted to pouring all of my hopes and dreams and thoughts into words.
Sometimes a blog post develops a life of its own… and this one today certainly has. I didn’t set out to talk about this. That is the hardest lesson that I have learned over all these years of blogging, which is that you have to go with the flow of the post. Sometimes your emotions are going to spill out in the process and it is okay to show your weaknesses. It means I have to put a lot of trust in the hands of my readers, but for the most part, if you stick around here… you are not here for the topics.
The post Who The Heck Am I appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I’ve been in a bit of a funk of late and been largely unable to stick to a single game for very long. In truth as I have talked about before, I am in a bit of a holding pattern until the start of the new league in Path of Exile. In this interim time, however, I have failed to gain purchase when it comes to actually dive seriously into any game. Over the weekend I started a new venture and so far I am deeply engaged. I’ve talked about imperfect gems before namely in the collected works of the French studio Spiders. I love the Bioware style RPG, but so few studios can really carry it off well and before now I would have ranked Spiders as one of the ONLY ones. Kingdom Come Deliverance is from Czech video game developer Warhorse Studios, and manages to vie for the crown of “Next Best Thing To Bioware”.
Kingdom Come Deliverance is a purely non-fantastical representation of the region of Bohemia in 1403. This region is located in the modern-day Czech Republic and focuses on real-world events surrounding then King Sigismund of Hungary deposing King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia. This is a time period and destination that I personally am wholly uninformed about, but I figure to the Czech home audience this would be the stuff of legend. The game focuses on Henry the son of the Master Swordsmith currently serving as the town Blacksmith in Skalitz. The tutorial of the game focuses on getting you acquainted with moving around this area before the events kick in that brings this section to a close and ignites the key conflict of the game. From there you have a few main story quests to follow and bring you purpose and a huge number of incidental side quests, very few of which are actually marked on your in-game map.
The game map is fairly huge and magnified by the fact that for a good while you are without a horse, forced to walk/run your way between destinations. There is a fast travel system but the destinations are few and far between and largely just focus on allowing you to hop between major towns. Traversal can be a bit fiddly at times because it can be a bit of a challenge to determine which bushes you can pass through and which will ultimately bar your way. Of note, there is a game mod that removes clipping from all bushes that I might install at some point because it can be infuriating trying to navigate a course at times.
The game is fully voice acted and the acting itself varies from “competent” to “pretty great”. The writing as well is pretty solid and seems to be period appropriate. It is deeply weird to see so much early Christianity in video game form, as I am far more used to made-up religions and deities. Of note and this comes up a few times… this is taking place during the schism in the Catholic church with one Pope in Avignon and another in Rome. There are times when it feels like you are given significant dialog options and other times when there is essentially a predetermined battery of options. There are various skill checks associated with different lines, but unfortunately, these have a hidden value behind them and there is seemingly no way of knowing if you are going to pass the check or not before attempting it. Skill in this game is raised through doing the thing repeatedly, and the same is true for speaking… so it honestly is beneficial to run around talking to everyone as there are also hidden quests that can be uncovered in this way.
Where things start to fall apart for me is when we get to combat in this game. There have been a number of times when a well-intentioned game studio has attempted to improve the basic click-to-attack gameplay present in so many Action focused RPGs. A prime example of this is the horribly fiddly combat of the first Witcher game, which for me at least makes it a completely unplayable experience. Kingdom Come Deliverance comes close to this level of annoyance with its direction “star” based combat system. Essentially when an opponent is attacking you, they will be holding their sword in one of six regions: Head, Upper Left, Upper Right, Lower Left, Lower Right, and then a central neutral position. In order to land attacks you effectively have to be attacking in a quadrant that they are not defending against.
This might work better on a controller, but effectively in order to do this with a Mouse and Keyboard, you have to be moving your mouse in a specific trajectory to get that quadrant of the star to light up. This feels awful and even more frustrating is the fact that the AI is really damned good at blocking, dodging, and abusing any openings in your defenses. Getting ANY damage can quickly become critical and there is no fantastical equivalent of the health potion. Even worse is the non-consensual target locking system that glues your viewpoint to a specific target and forces you to use the mouse scroll wheel to change targets when fighting multiple encounters at the same time. I am sure over time someone could probably get good at this mess, but if I had my druthers I would replace it entirely with a standard hack and slash combat system and be done with it. I mean I don’t really play this sort of game for the combat in the first place, I play it for the story.
Thankfully it is at this point that our old friend Nexus Mods comes through because apparently, Kingdom Come Deliverance has a vibrant modding community. While you can’t completely gut the combat system and replace it with something more standard, you can curb the frustrations a bit by making your enemies less likely to block or parry you. You can remove a lot of the annoyances like the fact that saving in this game requires that you have a stock of a specific kind of schnapps. Instead, I added a mod that removed this entirely and allows me to save as often as I like. You might be saying… “but Bel, that is cheating” and I will say yes it absolutely is. Life is too damned short to deal with the parts of games that annoy you, and if I can mod my way out of them… like completely removing inventory management… I am going to do it every single time. Game developers try really hard but sometimes get hung up on some really stupid ideas at times, and through modding, I can fix these “problems”.
Thanks to mods I have more or less pushed aside any lingering frustrations that I had with the game and have been able to just sit back and enjoy the world and the story surrounding it. At this point, I am around eleven hours into the experience and enjoying myself greatly. That said I also feel like I have barely scratched the surface. There are a number of characters that have some nuance in the way they interact with you when their public face is on the line, and how they behave in private out of the eyes of the court. Dealing with nobility is frustrating, especially given that I am very much a low-born trying to run around in circles that are constantly reminding me of my station in life. That said I have already elevated my status to that of a soldier and in theory, I think by the time this game is done I will have improved that further.
I’ve also started down the formal romance/courtship line towards Theresa a childhood friend who also managed to survive the situation at Skalitz. It is interesting because this more or less is following what I would assume formal courtship would have been like back during this period. Essentially every few days I can ask her out on some sort of a formal date, and if I don’t screw that up… I gain a reputation. I assume at some point this will lead to marriage, and maybe even buying some sort of a home. In a lot of ways, this game reminds me of what it would feel like to play in a first-person adventure through a Crusader Kings game. There are some definitely flaws in the game, but for the moment I appear to be hooked.
The post Bohemian Rascalry appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we are down a Kodra because he is off enjoying GenCon. If you see a spot on Fred from Scooby Doo in GenCon photos, that would probably be him. We start with a topic that was purposefully bumped from last week because the ramifications were not specific yet. Essentially Star Citizen did a progress wipe and maybe got it wrong with a rounding error causing players to end up with way more money than they had before. From there we talk about the Festival of the Four Winds in Guild Wars 2 and some purposefully non-spoiler Sandman discussion. Bel talks a bit about trying out Kingdom Come Deliverance and how their attempt at a clever combat system blows but can largely be fixed with mods. From there we dive into a weird topic against gatekeeping and the joy of seeing people discovering Kate Bush. Then we dive into a Blizzard section as we talk about the cancellation of WoW Mobile, grouping issues in Diablo Immortal, and just general issues with Blizzard. Finally, we wrap things up with a little discussion about Xenoblade 3.
The internet can be a really weird place sometimes. This morning’s post is more or less me explaining a rabbit hole I have been going down over the last few days. So some background information… I often times listen to YouTube as though it were a podcast while I do work on the other monitor… and admittedly also spend a fair amount of time reading Twitter. On the second something about MGK aka Machinegun Kelly aka Colson Baker aka Megan Fox’s boyfriend… scrolled across my Twitter feed. Now I have listened to quite a bit of music from him because at face value his newer stuff sounds like a lot of the pop-punk music that I actually dig. However the longer I have listened to it the more it has bothered me… how it is essentially this inch-deep surface-level interpretation of the 90s pop punk and emo genres.
This led to me tweeting that it sounds like the music had been generated by an AI that was trained by feeding it essentially everything from the 90s and early Oughts and having it regurgitate a song. The lyrics are bad, the emotional content is shallow, and ultimately sounds like the most generic version of the music you have already heard before. It is a recreation of a genre without understanding any of the elements that led that genre to come into being in the first place. This is where things take an interesting turn. For years I’ve known that behind the scenes everything we are saying and doing is being linked to some algorithm designed to feed us more relevant content. I cannot count the number of times my wife and I have had a conversation inside our home… and then moments later we are getting fed advertisements related to that conversation. Granted we don’t have any voice assistants but I am pretty sure that both of our phones are reporting back what we are saying.
It was shortly after writing this tweet that I turned around and hit refresh on the YouTube home feed to find the next thing to listen to… that I was served up this video. So some background that I did not know going into this adventure. Pat Finnerty is a musician from Scranton, PA, and a member of a band called Okay Paddy and has toured with other bands and projects. Based on my further journey down this rabbit hole, it seems like his moment of internet fame came during the quarantine era of this pandemic doing Instagram live concerts from his home and eventual rooftop. During one of these he staged a “Grohl-a-thon” where after 9 hours of being on air, Dave Grohl hopped on the feed and joined him for some discussion of Dire Straights of all things.
The other thing that he is known for, and the reason I now know he exists… and have subsequently torn through all of these videos… is a series called “What Makes This Song Stink”. He explains in the first video that he is a fan of a series by Rick Beato called “What Makes This Song Great?”, and wanted to essentially create the counterpoint. At face value that is a reasonable concept, but what carries it forward and makes these videos so damned entertaining is that they go some places. It is not just Pat technically breaking down what is wrong with a given song, they are this entire story journey weaving in bits of his past and a whole cast of characters that grows over the course of the series including “Blinds-to-Go Guy” and a fictitious radio station called “The Moose”.
What is even wilder is during the course of these videos… sometimes he decides he can do it better. So in the MGK video, he creates his own emo/punk pop band called “August is Falling”. During this, he goes to the Mall of America and gets fashion advice from a pair of extremely good nature people at Hot Topic. It doesn’t stop there… because apparently he actually played on stage AS the band.. after finding an Emo rock bassist on Instagram to sit in on the set. Taking the joke even further… you can now listen to Mad This Summer by August is Falling over on Bandcamp. Another video has this entire running gag about Here Comes the Hotstepper rocking… and he convinces the band he rents a studio from to release a cover… which now exists.
Then there is the whole Kravitz Bowl… which is a video parody of the classic era of the Super Bowl pitting American Woman against Fly Away in an attempt to determine which song stinks the worst. Like I said before these videos are a lot and in around 45 minutes each… they go on this wild journey while actually explaining the technical faults with each song covered. The could be a slog to get through at that length were it not for the fact that Pat is legitimately hilarious. I guess one of the traits that musicians and comedians both share are understanding how important timing is… and he nails the delivery of what would otherwise feel like purely video parody.
I think it would be unfair if I did not close by sharing one of his performances. On top of being funny as hell… he is legitimately a deeply talented musician. I’ve always loved Sultans of Swing and this rendition is most excellent. One of the things that have come up multiple times during this most recent Blaugust is whether or not you should stick to a theme with your blog. While Tales of the Aggronaut is for the most part a Video Game blog… I have to leave myself room to talk about other things that interest me. This morning is a prime example because I could not experience this ride… without sharing it with you all.
The post Pat Finnerty Rocks appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
