Belghast

Content by Belghast

Pre-Travel Post

by

The Night Before

I am going to warn you ahead of time…  I took some Benadryl earlier and am fading extremely quickly.  I take no credit for this post making a damned bit of sense tomorrow when you fine folks will actually read it.  Tonight did not go exactly as planned.  The goal was to get home, change the ferret cage and start packing technology.  At least on one level that worked, and I have at the very least everything laid out and ready to pack…. but will get into that more later.  The first obstacle was pulling my laptop case out of the closet….  which was inexplicably covered in a few tiny tiny spiders.  I am pretty sure a few of them bit me, either that or the paranoia just makes it seem like everything is crawling on me.  The original thought was to burn the laptop bag and call it good…  but then I remembered that I actually rather liked this laptop backpack… and also I needed it to travel.  So I did my best to de-spider the thing and get my laptop packed.  However in the process I kicked up an inordinate amount of dust…. which is where the Benadryl comes in as a desperate attempt to stave off triggering my asthma.

After that the plan was to start packing my messenger bag.  So I got together my power bank, and tested it.  It for some reason shipped 100% charged, which shocked the hell out of me.  It also seems to have a flashlight built into it…. that I managed to turn on and it took a good ten minutes of pressing buttons to get it to turn back off.  I also managed to test my digital recorder, and it seems like it is going to do a damned good job of recording any impromptu interviews that I get to do from the convention floor.  It is also going to hopefully be the basis of a “LunchCast” concept I am kicking around where I record little solo podcasts on my lunch break while sitting in the car.  So back to the bag… I was walking over to the bar where I had it laying… when Kenzie our kitten was pawing at it like she was trying to cover something up.  Turns out she had just pissed right in the middle of the bag, which leaves me pretty much zero options.  The bag itself was canvas with leather straps….  and at this point it is ruined unless I can somehow wash it.  With nothing much to lose, I threw it in the washing machine with a big fully blanket hoping to cushion the insanity that is the clasps clanging around in there.  For the most part it seems to have worked, and while it needs a little bit more time to dry…  it seems to be mostly in one piece.

The Backup Plan

In theory that should work, and if it doesn’t I guess we will find something else that will work on the drive down.  Right now the plan is to get up crazy early, pack our clothing, pick up our passenger and get on the road hopefully by 6 am.  From there we meander our way from Tulsa to Austin, where we are meeting some friends of my wife for dinner.  Right now I am just hoping that in my pre-coffee state I can remember to pack everything correctly.  Originally I had planned on bringing my chromebook, but since PAX does not actually have public internet…  it kinda makes a chromebook mostly useless.  Instead my idea is to talk to myself… and by talk to myself I mean record voice notes if there is anything I need to jot down quickly.  Last year I spent most of the first day of PAX alone, and it was not until Saturday that Rae and Ashgar actually arrived.  This year however I should have one or two people to hang out with on Friday, meaning I will have less time to sit in a quite place and bang out post ideas.

It feels like I am actually packing fairly light this year.  I did manage to get my 3DS all patched up and Final Fantasy Explorers downloaded and installed, so that at least is done.  That is pretty much going to be my go to for standing in line diversion.  Past that I will have my phone and will probably be tweeting throughout the day on twitter.  I think I am in a pretty good state as far as anxiety goes, because if tonight didn’t break my will…. I don’t figure anything can.  I am hearing reports that construction was pretty horrible between Dallas and Austin today as folks drove it, so I am definitely not looking forward to that.  The big positive however is I am driving down in a newer vehicle, that is way more comfortable to long trips.  Additionally in theory if I get tired of driving, I can probably convince either my wife or our passenger to trade off and take the wheel for awhile.   The greatest irony of going to a gaming convention is that it means until I finally get home Sunday night… I am going to be playing far fewer games than at any other point of the year.  If all goes as intended, I will get to meet a bunch of folks that I have gamed with for years and Pax South will be yet another amazing experience.

 

Of Brain Weasels

by

Anxiety Sucks

Yesterday was a bad day when it came to Anxiety.  There is always this little roller-coaster of emotions that I go through right before I am about to do anything.  It is like those butterflies in your stomach… eventually grew up into a Cthulhu-esc abomination that now tries to suck the life out of everything you do.  Right before a major event, be it a trip like in the case of Pax South or simply even just going out to dinner with friends…  my anxiety brain runs rampant telling me all of the myriad of things that are going to go horribly wrong.  The end result however is always the same, and the final chorus of the mental play always ends up singing…  “everyone will hate you” over and over again to the point of absurdity.  Part of my whole being honest with my readers means delving into these things when they are happening.  My general theory is that there are a lot of people suffering, thinking that no one else feels these things.  If by talking about it I help someone to realize that it is shockingly common, then I guess some good has come of the roller-coaster.  The internet can be a carnival of horribles, but at the same time it can be this strangely successful support group.  If others had not talked about their own anxieties… then chances are I wouldn’t be to the point where I can actually talk about and confront mine.

Yesterdays anxiety attack came from two distinct sources.  The first is the fact that I am meeting a bunch of people that I have “internet known” for years, for the first time in person at Pax South.  The logical brain tells me that these people love me, and will just be happy to see me.  The anxiety brain tells me, that I am a fraud and that everyone will hate you…. so you probably better just stay home where it is safe.  No amount of reassurance really stops the voices, because they are irrational fears… the primal stuff that never really goes away.  They are the evolved version of that nightmare where you end up at school naked, or in my case… I signed up for a class I never attended and it is past the drop date… and somehow have to cram and entire semester into a single week to pass the final or end up failing.  I know if I can get past this…. and get out the door on this journey, I will be perfectly fine.  Once I get in the moment I feel safe and happy and can really enjoy my friends, but  it sometimes takes all the power in my being to ignore the anxiety brain long enough to actually make that happen.  Adulting sometimes requires mental hacks.

Appraisal Anxiety

The other big source of anxiety that happened to be looming at the exact same time was our home appraisal.  Last week we went through the process and from that point onwards I have been stressed about whether or not we would get a decent enough price to be able to continue.  We are currently going through a home refinance, and there are few things that stress me out in quite the way that money does.  The thing is…  most of my concerns are entirely in my head.  Based on some quick comparisons we pulled together, it seemed like the number we were shooting for was very conservative.  However until we got the physical piece of paper back, we had no clue.  Also there was always the fear that the appraiser would find all of these faults that we had to cough up more money to fix…  just to be able to go through with the “refi”.  However about halfway through the afternoon we got back an email from the company with a lengthy form essentially saying that we were fine.  The number he came back with was way more than we needed, and in truth more than even my wildest dreams would have expected.  Essentially this good news was what I needed desperately to tell my anxiety brain to shut the hell up and let me go on with my life.

The interesting thing about this whole post is the fact that I was going to make it this morning regardless of anything else.  There is a whole lot of “stuff” that we just simply don’t talk about.  I was raised in a part of the country and a time period where this is not the sort of thing you discuss in polite society.  Additionally the bullshit logic of the eighties could be summed up in the commercial slogans like “never let them see you sweat”, where showing any sign of weakness would ultimately lead to your downfall.  However I tend to believe that if we were just more honest with each other about our own failings, that the world would be a much better place.  I know that there will be nothing that I can do to really shed my fears, irrational as they might be.  So instead I have learned to live with them, and learned ways to trick myself into doing the stuff that I need to do to be a “functioning member of society”.  It turns out that today without me realizing it is the day that the whole #BellLetsTalk hashtag happens online, where folks share their own stories about mental health.

Beauty of Honesty

The thing is…. I don’t have answers to my problems, but I have things that work for me.  The beauty of opening up about them… is the fact that chances are someone in your “monkeysphere” gets exactly how you are feelings.  Just knowing that often times helps more than anything, to know that you are not quite as alone in your mental prison as you happen to think you are.   I am lucky in that I have a lot of friends that just “grok” me in ways that I could never explain.  When I go through my “turtle” periods where I pull my head inside my shell and hide from the world… they are the ones poking their head in to check on me and make sure I am doing okay.  I am also lucky that I have a bunch of friends that understand that my withdrawing is not about them, but instead about me trying to give myself time to heal.  So just talking about the various things that are going on in my world, has helped me immeasurably.  If you find yourself in a situation where you just need another human being to listen to your problems and tell you that your brain is full of shit…  then I am here.  The truth is, for the most part our brains are constantly telling us lies, because they end up getting focused on incomplete data about every situation.  We can never fully know what someone other than ourselves thinks, so we fill in the missing bits of data with speculation…  which tends to be the worst possible view of a situation.  Over the next few days of packing and travel I am going to be stressed beyond belief, but I know deep down inside if I can just trick myself into going through with everything… I will have a really fun time.

 

 

X-Files and Grifts

by

Mulder and Scully

X-Files and Grifts

Last night really was a night all about one thing.  The previous night my wife had fallen asleep during the X-Files premiere, because she is sick as hell… so we had planned on watching the first episode again while eating dinner so that we would be primed and ready for part two when it aired at 7 pm my time.  I have to say I have been looking forward to this television return just about as much as anything you might imagine… other than maybe the start of a new Walking Dead season.  During the 90s I was a huge fan of the X-Files, and I am guessing I watched it more religiously than I ever realized.  When watching the show again recently with my wife on Hulu…  I remembered the major plot points of every single episode we saw.  For the most part… the original show holds up pretty well other than the technology aspects in a largely pre-internet world.  I tried to temper my hopes about how the continuation of the show might end up, but regardless I was pretty hyped.  Be warned that I am going to spoil various plot details so if you have not had a chance to watch the show, I suggest you skip down to the Diablo block below.

For the most part… I think the show ended up really damned good.  I was kinda shocked to see them using the same television intro sequence that they did in the original, but I guess they wanted to paint a clear picture of the fact that this directly connects to the original.  We find out that Mulder and Scully did in fact get together… and had a child together… but ended up having to put him up for adoption to project him from the powers that were after both of them.  Mulder has essentially lived a life in relative seclusion, whereas Scully has returned to medicine and is doing surgery to correct defects that may or may not be caused by Alien DNA.  Where the show starts to go a little off the rails is the introduction of a new character played by Joel  McHale.  “Tad O’Malley” is a caricature of the right wing conspiracy theory types, and he vehemently believes that the government has been in a massive cover-up of alien activity since Roswell.  All of this fits the original vibe of the show… but then something happens that I just cannot reconcile.  Mulder is introduced to a woman that he apparently interviewed when she was a child, during her first abduction… that tells him that she was abducted by men not by aliens.  Without much additional information…  Mulder goes through this “change of religion” and is instantly equally convinced that the government has been fiddling with its own people, and that the Aliens are no longer even a thing anymore.

I guess my problem here is… how does someone who has devoted his life to the thought that Aliens were fiddling with the human populace, quite literally turn on a dime and adopt a completely different conspiracy mythology. Thankfully Scully plays the skeptic here, and calls him on his shit.  By the end of the show however his change of religion is essentially confirmed, but the way this all plays out just feels pretty abrupt.  We are treated to a very sweet shot of the “Smoking Man” who is now having to smoke out of a tracheal plug.  Then we shoot forward to last nights episode, as both Mulder and Scully are apparently back in the saddle working for the FBI under Walter Skinner again.  This episode felt perfect.  Everything about this felt like we are just picking up the legacy of the original show and moving forward, this time acting upon the theory that mankind has been fiddling with Alien dna and fusing it with people.  We are eventually presented this super creepy ward filled with kids with rare deformities, that we suspect are the cause of Alien intermingling . Basically if they can keep cranking out episodes as good as the second part of this “six part event”, I am down to gobbling up whatever the X-Files puts out there.  The best part about all of this… is Duchovny and Anderson still work amazingly well together.

Grifts with Friends

X-Files and Grifts

While watching our little mini X-Files marathon last night, I was also fiddling around in Diablo 3.  I initially started simply piddling around and doing bounties, however once Damai logged in he rallied the troops and before long we had a full team alternating between regular and greater rifts.  There are still several pieces of gear that I am hunting for, so I was totally down with the cavalcade of legendaries and set pieces.  The big takeaway from last night was just how well I seemed to be able to hold my own.  For the most part we were doing the same Torment X stuff that was wrecking my face the last time we were together as a group, but I have reached a point where honestly it doesn’t really phase me.  Sure I still need to get out of exploding bits..  but most of the mob and environment damage is at a point where it is reasonable.  The only gotcha is the fact that I still do way less damage than would be needed to quickly clear this content.  Fortunately however we had plenty of dps to chew through the mobs, and Carth who is now well over 600 paragon levels is a brutal machine.

By the end of the night I managed to climb to 297 Paragon which places me within the realm of the big kids finally.  I am still pretty sold on my thunderfury, and I managed to pick up a temporary chest piece that serves nicely until I can find the one I am actually hunting for.  Other than that the big acquisition was the thorns epic gem, but I am running very low on sockets for my jewelry.  This is a point of contention for me with this game actually.  At 70, no piece of jewelry should come without a socket.  There is never a point where you would not want an epic gem in every piece of jewelry, yet the random item generator is constantly spitting out socketless rings and necklaces to serve as  disenchant fodder.  Instead I went through 35 diamonds trying to socket a ring before finally getting the lucky roll, which ends up super frustrating.  Mostly this just feels like a design flaw, since the key to doing awesome things at high level seems to be based around rocking as many maxed out legendary gems as you can throw in there.  I still don’t have all of the gems that I need, so I am guessing that my new idle activity is going to be clearing greater rifts just to level the ones I have up.

 

 

Kitten Assist

by

Helping Hand

Kitten Assist

This is becoming a pretty regular occurrence in my office, where Kenzie decides to “lay” behind one of my two monitors and then spend time poking her head out under the bottom and bopping things with her paw.  This morning she has been desperately trying to drag my phone that is attached to a usb cable towards her…  which is making me rethink the placement of that charger cable.  For the most part this weekend we hibernated to avoid the cold, and while we had nothing to deal with like the blizzard folks on the east coast…  I am not equipped to handle 20* temperatures that well.  The biggest news of the weekend is that we got our new dishwasher set up on Saturday.  Its stupid but right now it feels like we are purposefully dirtying dishes just so we can “play with it”.  I know it sounds like we truly are deprived of fun when you put it into those terms.  The truth is… we’ve gone without a dishwasher for a very long time.  The order of business was to rinse things out, and set them in the sink… until we had enough there to warrant washing dishes.  Now we simply dump the dirties in the dishwasher as we dirty them….  which is making me have to rewire a bunch of my internal processes.

We also used this as an excuse to buy new silverware… and by silverware I really mean stainless-steel-ware because it is not like we are the “good silver” type.  I am getting used to not eating on a mishmash of seven different patterns that we have had since college, but it is taking some doing.  A few years back we standardized on one set of dishes and gave away the equally mishmash set of plates and cups and bowls that we got in college, and I guess it was time for us to do the same with utensils.  So we are now eating with the best forks target can buy!  Well not exactly… there were apparently ritzier sets available.  The whole experience is just strange… its like I have to reroute how I exist in the kitchen now and it is taking some getting used to.  One of the themes that you can catch running through the blog is that “bel doesn’t handle change well” so… it will take a few weeks before I really can tell you if I like it or not.

Crusader Weekend

Kitten Assist

I spoke a little bit about this one but on Friday night I got carried hard in Diablo III.  On the night season 5 opened, several of us ran around together as a group… but one of that group has eclipsed the rest of us by a huge margin.  On Friday night my friend Carth was nearing 500 paragon levels, and I am almost certain that by the time I am writing this today he is probably around 600 given his meteoric rise.  Me however… I was sitting at only around 10 paragon when I joined the madness that was our leveling binge.  Over the course of roughly three hours I got drug up in level to a point where I was actually somewhat functional.  During that time I pieced together what was a pretty damned good set of gear, and Saturday morning I managed to wrap up the last few requirements for the season 5 chapter 4 rewards.  At this point you can check out the particulars on my Diablo 3 profile, but there are still a handful of things that I am working on upgrading.  Damai linked me this build and I am following it to some extent, but there are some places where I plan on diverging… namely on the choice of weapons.

There is no world where I would ever use the pig sticker with its constant squealing.  The entire point of using it, is to have a fast attack speed… and technically my current sword already has a faster attack speed than the pig sticker.  Most of the weekend past Friday night was about me figuring out just what I could do on my own.  I can solo Torment VIII pretty easy, but it is slow enough going that for bounties I have decided to just stick to Torment VII as they go so much faster.  While recording the double AggroChat this weekend, I managed to do one full circuit of Torment VII bounties and while I added a few paragon levels I didn’t really get much loot to write home about.  At some point I plan on trying to solo more greater rifts to increase my blood shard count, but right now I have done through level 30 without much issue.  I really hate doing timed events… they just bring out all of the horrible anxieties in me, so in truth greaters are not exactly my favorite thing to do in the world.

Rhino Prime

Kitten Assist

The other big happening of the weekend is the fact that I managed to finish up both my Rhino Prime and my ArchWing.  The only problem is that I have a silly amount of things that now need leveling.  I still have not capped the Lex sidearm, or my Drakgoon, Boltor, Latro…  or even my Dual Skana.  The frustrating thing about all of that is that I really don’t know how best to level them.  This is one of those games where I really like running around with other people and playing it…  but have not really enjoyed soloing much at all.  So whenever I had a “solo” moment this weekend, I fired up WoW and did Garrison stuff or popped into Diablo 3.  I need to sort out a solid and reliable way for leveling, and I thought just maybe it would have been a low level survival mission.  While I got lots of loot from it… I didn’t exactly get lots of levels and only managed to put four levels on the Rhino frame.

I am in this strange state of limbo where I think I might want to like Warframe more than I actually like it.  I absolutely enjoy playing with my friends, but unfortunately without also playing it solo… I am falling massively behind.  The friends who are really super serious about playing this game… are playing it all of the time as their primary game right now.  Which means I will always be behind in my ability to actually help them out in missions.  It gets frustrating sometimes when you realize you are being carried hard… and there isn’t much you can do about it.  I was slow abandoning the bow, and as a result I am struggling to play catch up with my other weapons.  The bow is this awesome solo weapon…. but pretty useless for group activity.  The problem there is that I feel like the non-bow weapons are less useful for soloing… so when I am stuck going through missions by myself to level them it feels like a sub optimal experience.  So as a result… I really didn’t play much warframe this weekend because I am still sorting out my feelings about the game.