Good Morning Friends. I have not been sleeping terribly well the last few nights which has lead me to be sorta walking through the world in a fog. I am not sure what is up but whatever the case I hope it passes soon. As a result I am not terribly certain I am up to some epic post, so instead you are going to get some blurbs about various things I am doing. Firstly I am still playing quite a bit of Outriders and am pretty much doing farming runs. Essentially in Trench Town there are two repeatable quests that reward quite a bit of gear in the process. The first of these is the Wanted posters that I have talked about before, but each individual quest rewards you a random epic or better weapon and doing the full sequence of ten quests rewards you a random legendary weapon. The other series is the Monster Hunts, which each reward a random piece of epic or better armor… with the full sequence rewarding you a piece of legendary armor.
I also find myself recording some more videos and I am not entirely certain why. There are just times that it is easier to talk about something while doing it and recording it in video form. One that I am releasing today shows off my favorite “loot cave”, which is actually just the outhouse mission over and over. I’ve also released a video of me doing a single Wanted quest on World Tier 11, and then another where I did two on World Tier 12 and got a random useless legendary weapon from turning in. If watching me do nonsense is your jam then by all means have at it. Like I know I will never have many viewers but I also find recording videos to be this weirdly relaxing extension of blogging? I push myself into the same sort of mindset as when I am writing and pretending that I am largely just talking to myself.
On a whim last night I started playing State of Decay 2 again and I mean I know precisely WHY I did it… but actually going through with reinstalling it and playing it was not terribly expected. One of the folks at Undead Labs, Geoffrey Card aka @Rangutang does these really enjoyable streams where he either plays State of Decay or explores some random game that he finds interesting. More recently he has been on a kick of playing State of Decay 2 again, because Undead Labs is leading up to some open beta on Steam and the combination of hanging out in chat while he played made me want to play. This is the problem I have with streaming… it doesn’t trigger a feeling of wanting to watch more of the stream but instead triggers a desire to just play the damned game myself.
So last night I started a brand new group of survivors. Things were going awesome until they suddenly were not and I wound up losing two people when tangling with some bandits that stole an allied groups meds. I did manage to relocate us to a new base of operations centered around a truck stop. Now I need to find a programmer so I can loot a drop pod that is taking up one of my spaces, so that I can build something useful there for my community instead of it just taking up space.
Lastly I am still playing Elder Scrolls Online, and by playing I mean logging in every night to loot my daily reward cache and train mounts on my four 50s. I allowed myself to get into the bad pattern of just logging in every character and doing crafting writs during the recent holiday event, and I need to actually get back into questing and doing something more enjoyable. The combination of the Jesters Festival and the Anniversary event meant that I devoted a bunch of time to grinding up three characters from low levels to the level cap. This however sorta knocked the wind out of my sails because it got me out of the pattern of logging in and questing each night. I need to get back into that because it is that sort of thing that keeps me engaged in the game. Unfortunately I have been in the pattern of “maintenance gaming” where I just log in to do dailies and then immediately log right back out.
I am not entirely certain what is going to win when it comes to my play time. I had a lot of fun last night playing State of Decay 2 and I expect that I will probably play some more of that in the coming evenings. Then given how exhausted I am right now… it is highly likely that I might just crash at some point rather than spend much time gaming in the first place. I wish I knew why I was not sleeping well, because I sure would love a good nights sleep.
The post Accidents with Zombie Survivors appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I have been planning some nonsense for awhile now and today represents the first day of a new series on this blog. As a GenXer I come from the golden age of the Mixtape, and was one of those people who would create lots of them and often times hand out to friends. The thing that has been lost in the age of the single and iTunes is that there used to be an intelligence to the placement of songs on an album. There were various bands that had what I used to call a “listen through” experience, where the flow of the music would happen in just the right way to have high points and low points and provide an experience that was greater than the sum of its parts.
When I used to build mixtapes for my friends, or as an often times failed vehicle for flirtation… I attempted to apply this same sort of care to the placement of songs. The majority of my life I always had some sort of soundtrack to my activities that would be playing in the background. I would associate songs with places and people and now listening back to any of those invokes this tapestry of feelings and memories along with a very concrete sense of time and place. However for the majority of the past decade this has been absent in my life and replaced with a combination of NPR and podcasts. Very recently I have been immersing myself in music and it is like a sense that I had once lost came rushing back to me.
Along with this has come the desire to start building mixtapes once again. I’ve cobbled together a number of these and I decided that the best way to share them with you my friends… is to do a weekly column of sorts. I am notoriously bad at keeping this sort of thing going for very long, but for until I get distracted by some other shiny object… I will be posting a new mixtape every Monday morning.
Contours of Indecision
This first mix tape has more of an industrial bent. I often times gave my mixtapes pretentious names, so I figured I would start off this process with a doozy. I spent hours adding and removing songs from the list until I ended up with a balanced product that sorta fades in on a strong note and releases you on a very melancholy and reflective note. There are a lot of what I would consider rarities on this specific mix tape, or places where an artist is acting in a manner other than what we expect from them. I hope you enjoy, here is the manifest:
Burn – The Cure
Everything’s Ruined – Faith No More
All Wrong – God Lives Underwater
Eye – Smashing Pumpkins
I’m Afraid of Americans – David Bowie and Trent Reznor
The Witch – The Cult
Ruiner – Nine Inch Nails
Animal – Prick
Down – Gravity Kills
Army of Me – Bjork
Trip Like I Do – Filter with Crystal Method
Girl – Beck
Tech Noir – Gunship
For those without Access to Spotify, I also have provided this in a YouTube Playlist, with the key difference being you won’t get my custom album artwork.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we have a show that is pretty much dominated by a discussion about Outriders. Tam and Bel both attempt to avoid any outright spoilers but I feel like I still need to issue a warning. This game has some deeply disturbing themes and we talk about these. While we attempt to do so as gingerly as possible, I feel like I still need to provide a content warning to our listeners. From there we talk about Stellaris and the third release of the game and how apparently it changes everything. We also talk about Paradox and the history of long tailed support for games.
Morning Friends! It has been awhile since I wrote a complete nonsense post and as such now that I have some nonsense to talk about I thought it was high time. I am a horrible human being. Like I realize that is a big blanket statement but I will attempt to explain WHY I am a horrible human being. First there are some key elements that you need to understand for this story to work. This is Josie rolled into a ball sleeping on the box beside me during the work day. She is a mess, but a delightful one. As a ringtail breed as I understand them… she will pretty much be permanently in a state of extended kittenhood. She plays with everything and has a grand ole time doing it. She is also EXTREMELY precocious and figures out ways to get into pretty much everything. She wakes us up on the weekends by trying to running across us, attacking the rug at the foot of the bed or attempting to climb the curtains. Let me reiterate… she is a mess but we love her greatly.
Another key bit of information that is important for this story to make any sense is the fact that my wife has no depth perception. I don’t mean this is a funny “ha ha” sort of way stating that she is bad at catch, but instead in a very literal sense. She was born without her eyes fused together and while she spent much of her childhood going through an arduous path of attempts to make them fuse… it never quite happened. There are some truly adorable photos of her as a child sporting an eyepatch, mischievous grin and adorable curls… and I can’t revel in just how stinking cute she was because it is a traumatic experience. It took me until recently to understand some of her behavior like her reluctance to use drive throughs or to gas up her own car. These are both things I do for her generally, but never understood why until she finally explained some twenty years after marriage that she cannot figure out where she is in relation to the drive through or the gas pump.
The next bit of information that you need to understand is what a “Roly Polly” is, which admitted gets called by a bunch of names depending on the region you grew up in. I think more collectively they are known as pill bugs. One of the first things we learn as a child is that they roll up into a ball as a defensive mechanism (or to preserve moisture in periods of dryness). It is fun of course to flick a rolypolies and watch it go rolling across the ground. We have a partially collapsed ductwork through our concrete foundation and as a result the odd random smol bug finds its way into our house. Generally speaking I leave Rolypolies alone because they are obviously lost if they made it inside but occasionally I will just open the bedroom door and set them outside so they can find a better climate.
Now that you have all of the key bits of information we will move on with this story. I had gotten up and showered and was getting dressed when my wife was in the bathroom. Josie has this habit of obsessively staying in the bedroom with us as we get ready, and she was apparently stalking something in the adjacent bathroom. My wife proclaimed that she thought there was a bug on the floor and I of course asked what kind. She wasn’t sure and that lead me to come into the room and upon seeing it I immediately said it was just a rolypolie and not a big deal. She doubted me because she said it didn’t look like a rolypolie… because again no depth perception she just saw a flattened black thing on the ground. So without thinking I reached down and gave the bug a little flick… it rolled up into a ball and skidded across the room.
Remember that Josie is extremely precocious. She immediately grasped what had happened and proceeded to start batting the rolypolie around the bathroom floor. I am a horrible human being because I taught a cat how to torture a poor little bug. At some point she lost track of it and we proceeded to quietly open the back door and rescue the poor thing. However I am absolutely certain that Josie is not going to bop every single bug to see if it rolls into a ball and can be made into a “more funner” toy. I’ve given her a bit of information she did not need to know because up until now she had mostly just quietly followed bugs around the house out of curiosity. I just taught her that they can also be really fun toys.
The post I am a Horrible Human Being appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
