Nothing Much to Say

Nothing Much to Say

This morning I feel like I don’t have an awful lot to talk about, but still feel obligated to say words and things.  The last few nights have mostly been what I would refer to as maintenance gaming, where I log into something…  do a few repeatable activities and then log right back out.  The majority of this time has been spent in World of Warcraft since I apparently have set forth a goal of unlocking the alliance races which will involve copious amounts of reputation grinding.  At this moment I am about 6500 out of 21000 towards exalted or some close equivalent in both of the necessary factions.  At the suggestion of my friend Grace I have started hoarding faction tokens for the Darkmoon Faire buff, which admittedly is not a thing I have really partaken of in its modern format.

I still find it super annoying that the Alliance route to new races is way harder than the Horde route.  As a “Mostly Alliance” player for most of my wow career I have always felt like Blizzard favored The Horde…  not in the least because of the constant insistence that we should care deeply about Green Jesus.  Weirdly enough however for the last while I have been almost exclusively playing The Horde and the character I am grinding up is my Orc Warrior not my Human one.  There are certain things that just work easier on that side of the pond than the other…  for example jumping the wall from the flightmaster to the Horde area in Dalaran is so much faster than having to fly all the way across the map to the Alliance area.  Having a reasonable foothold on both continents is another nice point…  with ways to get there quickly.  Sure you can still use the Theramore boat as Alliance… but it feels weird to do so.

Grace had this idea of doing a sort of “raiding light” group one night a week that worked on trying to get the Mythic+ number as high as we could.  So far however that is struggling to get off the ground given in our most immediate aggrochat crew we represent the only viable folks for this mission.  I am heavily favoring Horde side since my Warrior there is 927 but most of the connections I would have to pull in people for nonsense are Alliance side.  Over the coming days I might start reaching out to individuals that play horde side to see if they would be interested in shenanigans but for the moment the idea has taken root but not seen much progress.

As evidenced by the screenshot I used for this post I fired up Destiny last night and played around in it for a bit.  The changes have made a lot of the weapons feel odd so in theory I will need to test everything out again to see what I do and do not like now.  The fast rate of fire valkydyn that I am pictured holding above no longer feels that great.  The general movement speed however does and it feels like Titan Skating is back to being a fairly viable thing once more.  I am not sure if this is “just me” but I swear the grenade recharge rate was lowered once again, either that or I am still struggling to adjust to how generally slow that is.  Even with double charges it was rare that it would actually be up when I wanted to use it while roaming around Mercury and doing events.

I miss Destiny 2, and more importantly I miss wanting to play it.  I am not sure why I bounced so hard with the release of Curse of Osiris, and why I never actually managed to get any of the other classes in my stable through the story.  Ultimately I was expecting something along the scope of The Taken King, and then was disappointed that we got something the scope of Dark Below instead.  Additionally there just isn’t a grind I want to be doing there, because the weapons at least prior to yesterdays patch all sorta felt the same.  Maybe now with the sandbox update there will be some reason to grind content to attempt to get masterworks for the things I want to be playing with.

The other side note is that I have started attempting to play some Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate over lunch, but quickly realized that if I want to do this thing I will need to leave the floor.  We have a gaming area set up for folks to mostly play the WiiU that is hooked up there, but it does offer a bunch of really comfy chairs.  Over lunch yesterday I attempted to camp out in one and do a few hunts, and within minutes had someone do a drive by and start up a conversation about some project we were working on.  Basically now that I am 100% in the management world I cannot bump into someone without a conversation about something we need to deal with happening.  Ultimately I like the concept of playing a little 3DS or Switch over lunch, but I need to find a hidey hole to go do this thing in.

 

Bad Grind Good Grind

Bad Grind Good Grind

I am still reeling a bit from a dream I had over night.  I guess in theory you could call it a nightmare, where I ended up leaving my current job and ending back under the yoke of the one boss in my work history that I hated working for.  I’ve always been one of those people who tended to naturally get along with bosses.  Pending they are coming from a place of logic, I get why they want the things they want…  and especially now as a “boss” myself I get how orders that seem disconnected from reality end up having to be passed down.  This boss however was petty and vindictive and gave me nothing but a constant stream of conflicting information.  If I did what I thought was right…  he would rail on me for not doing it however the hell he wanted me to do it.  If I stopped and asked for directions in how he wanted me to do a thing…  he would rail on me for not taking initiative.  In the end it was two and a half years of the lowest point in my career that did some serious damage to my psyche that I am apparently still sorting out.

On the gaming front however I have been playing quite a bit of World of Warcraft, mostly because I want to unlock the two Allied races that I have yet to.  Let me take a moment to talk about how much bullshit the way these races are unlocked is.  Primarily that it is grossly unfair that two races for a single faction are unlocked by doing content that has been in game more or less since the launch of Legion, and the other two gated behind the newest content and honestly the most frustrating to do.  So I have the two horde races of the High Mountain Tauren and the Nightfallen unlocked and a monk and rogue create respectively.  Now I am working on the frustrating rep grind that is roaming around Argus and doing daily quests barely watching the needle climb at all.

Argus just feels bad and was only slightly improved when I got the reputation to unlock the improved flight whistle.  Why in the hell this was not a default thing makes zero sense to me.  I get that they rushed this content out the door and did a lot of visual tricks that are easily dispelled the second you lift off the ground.  However the constant tug of war of achieving flying only to have it arbitrarily taken away from you is maddening.  We experienced this with Pandaria and then suddenly losing the ability to fly on the Timeless Isle and Isle of Giants and in both cases it felt horrible.  Having a speed bump in the form of Argus still feels horrible…  but I am gritting my teeth and dealing with it for the sake of racial unlocks.  As to why this suddenly matters to me now?  I have no clue… it could have been simply spurred on by having access to the races in Alpha.

Bad Grind Good Grind

The other game I have been playing a significant amount of lately is Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate on my new pokeball edition 2DS XL.  Unfortunately the shut down of MiiVerse and the lack of having any sort of a native screenshot functionality will keep me from actually capturing any shots of my gameplay.  However this has sorta become my evening retreat as I chill out doing some monster hunter from bed before finally heading to sleep.  I find having some sort of a wind down activity helps a lot and at least thus far this fits the bill nicely.  I do however have a USB to 3DS charging cable at work so I might start taking this with me and playing a little over lunch now that I am getting into some of the more exciting activities.

I’ve not made it terribly far but at this point I have taken down two monsters:  Velicidrome and Seltas…  both of which I need several more parts from.  I have the mission to hunt the Great Jaggi so I am likely to attempt that next because I need a single hide to upgrade my current sword and shield.  Not sure why I have not broken out my beloved Longsword yet, but for the moment I opted to stick to the starter weapon.  In truth in Monster Hunter World, the Sword and Shield is probably my second favorite of the weapons so I am in part using MH4U as a way to get more familiar with its quirks.

How quickly I have taken to this game in the relatively short amount of time I have been playing it…  tells me that Monster Hunter World is not necessarily a fluke for me.  Sure it was this amazing gateway into a very complex game…  but the core mechanics are ultimately the thing that is keeping me there.  I’ve had similar experiences with Generations, but I feel like 4U does a much better job of easing you into the game and giving you some semblance of a story to care about.  At some point I fully expect to return to Generations and push a little further given that I have yet to actually get to a single real monster there.

 

Opening the Patio

Opening the Patio

While I got in a fair bit of gaming this weekend… it was far from the major mission at hand.  We had decided some weeks back that over spring break we would rehabilitate our lawn.  We had been putting this off for some time as evidenced by the mountain of yard waste that is now sitting waiting for the city to pick it up.  Our city has two options for lawn waste the first being get a red bin and then in essence pay rent on it all year round.  The other option is to go to a local QuikTrip store and buy some very pricey special bags emblazoned with the city name on them that denote that the it is going to some sort of a yard waste recycling plant.

Unfortunately I just looked up on the city website….  and it appears that yard waste collection will not resume until April 9th meaning these bags will be hanging out on the side of my house a little longer than I expected.  It was a pretty weekend however and allowed us to get things under control before the real growth seasons starts.  The funny thing about this is you can see all of the leaves that make up this mess…  were gathered in a lawn with no trees.  Our back yard seems to be the catch all for all of the houses that do have trees.

Opening the Patio

The real mission of the weekend however was to reconstitute our back patio that opens out from our bedroom.  This is my wife’s happy place and I wanted her to at least be able to spend some of her spring break out there reading.  This was in fact something she managed to do a good chunk of Saturday given that I took Friday off in which we did most of the work.  I will admit I like hanging out here too but mostly in the evenings when we have a very long shadow hanging out and covering the patio area.  I am rather fond of hanging out and listening to the wind chimes while watching the birbs.

This year I do plan on spending a good deal of time out here either playing the Switch or 2DS XL, both of which are really solid outdoor gaming options for me.  I had originally hoped that the WiiU would have been functional for outdoor gaming but unfortunately the receiver was not strong enough to penetrate the door to the bedroom where I had it hooked up for awhile.  I am still grumpy about how lousy the range on the handheld unit is, but with the advent of the Switch it was essentially what I was hoping the WiiU was going to be.

Opening the Patio

While it is still a little early to set out the “flower babies” we did set up a feeder for the birbs and within a day our backyard was humming with activity.    We’ve seen a nesting pair of mourning doves pictured in my hastily zoomed in phone camera shot, a pair of cardinals, a male blue jay and a myriad of smaller birds that I don’t know the names of.   We had a fungus infect our two red tipped photinias last year and while we attempted to fight it with some spray…. we lost the battle and ultimately had to take out the two dead bushes that had grown into the size of small trees.

I was afraid this lose of cover would decrease the amount of activity we saw in our back yard, but weirdly enough it seems to have actually increased the amount of time the birds are out and roaming around visibly.  The focus seems to have shifted away from hanging out in the bushes to hanging out on our back deck, which would probably a problem…  if we actually used that back deck.  It is way too far removed from the house to really be convenient and you have to cross over to the other side of the pool to even get up on it.  So as a result we tend to mostly forget it exists other than our old set of lawn furniture being up on it.

A good chunk of the weekend was spent happily watching the birbs hanging out in our yard and also watching them completely drain one of the two feeders we have this year.  I can already tell that we need to find two things this year…  firstly a proper bird bath so they have a place to get a drink or wash off.  Secondly we need some sort of a ground level vessel for water because we traditionally have bunnies in our yard quite a bit given that we are not likely to chase them off.  Nothing depresses me more than having to fish a dead animal out of the pool because they were trying to get a drink.  So my hope is to place something else to get a drink from more prominently… and I will just fill it when I am watering the flowers in the evening.  All in all though, happy to have the patio back open for business.

Opening the Patio

Opening the Patio

While I got in a fair bit of gaming this weekend… it was far from the major mission at hand.  We had decided some weeks back that over spring break we would rehabilitate our lawn.  We had been putting this off for some time as evidenced by the mountain of yard waste that is now sitting waiting for the city to pick it up.  Our city has two options for lawn waste the first being get a red bin and then in essence pay rent on it all year round.  The other option is to go to a local QuikTrip store and buy some very pricey special bags emblazoned with the city name on them that denote that the it is going to some sort of a yard waste recycling plant.

Unfortunately I just looked up on the city website….  and it appears that yard waste collection will not resume until April 9th meaning these bags will be hanging out on the side of my house a little longer than I expected.  It was a pretty weekend however and allowed us to get things under control before the real growth seasons starts.  The funny thing about this is you can see all of the leaves that make up this mess…  were gathered in a lawn with no trees.  Our back yard seems to be the catch all for all of the houses that do have trees.

Opening the Patio

The real mission of the weekend however was to reconstitute our back patio that opens out from our bedroom.  This is my wife’s happy place and I wanted her to at least be able to spend some of her spring break out there reading.  This was in fact something she managed to do a good chunk of Saturday given that I took Friday off in which we did most of the work.  I will admit I like hanging out here too but mostly in the evenings when we have a very long shadow hanging out and covering the patio area.  I am rather fond of hanging out and listening to the wind chimes while watching the birbs.

This year I do plan on spending a good deal of time out here either playing the Switch or 2DS XL, both of which are really solid outdoor gaming options for me.  I had originally hoped that the WiiU would have been functional for outdoor gaming but unfortunately the receiver was not strong enough to penetrate the door to the bedroom where I had it hooked up for awhile.  I am still grumpy about how lousy the range on the handheld unit is, but with the advent of the Switch it was essentially what I was hoping the WiiU was going to be.

Opening the Patio

While it is still a little early to set out the “flower babies” we did set up a feeder for the birbs and within a day our backyard was humming with activity.    We’ve seen a nesting pair of mourning doves pictured in my hastily zoomed in phone camera shot, a pair of cardinals, a male blue jay and a myriad of smaller birds that I don’t know the names of.   We had a fungus infect our two red tipped photinias last year and while we attempted to fight it with some spray…. we lost the battle and ultimately had to take out the two dead bushes that had grown into the size of small trees.

I was afraid this lose of cover would decrease the amount of activity we saw in our back yard, but weirdly enough it seems to have actually increased the amount of time the birds are out and roaming around visibly.  The focus seems to have shifted away from hanging out in the bushes to hanging out on our back deck, which would probably a problem…  if we actually used that back deck.  It is way too far removed from the house to really be convenient and you have to cross over to the other side of the pool to even get up on it.  So as a result we tend to mostly forget it exists other than our old set of lawn furniture being up on it.

A good chunk of the weekend was spent happily watching the birbs hanging out in our yard and also watching them completely drain one of the two feeders we have this year.  I can already tell that we need to find two things this year…  firstly a proper bird bath so they have a place to get a drink or wash off.  Secondly we need some sort of a ground level vessel for water because we traditionally have bunnies in our yard quite a bit given that we are not likely to chase them off.  Nothing depresses me more than having to fish a dead animal out of the pool because they were trying to get a drink.  So my hope is to place something else to get a drink from more prominently… and I will just fill it when I am watering the flowers in the evening.  All in all though, happy to have the patio back open for business.