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Seasonal Swan Song

November 28, 2017 by Belghast

I talked a bit about progress in Destiny 2 in yesterdays post but I didn’t really want to get too deep into it figuring I would talk more at length today. Last week I managed to knock out a bunch of accomplishments, not the least of which was hitting 305 light finally on the Titan. Granted I realize this is all going to be in vain starting next week as the level cap itself is raising and I assume as well that means the light level with it. Last week was Iron Banner, the second for console players but the very first for those of us choosing to primary the PC version. Now on the PS4 I managed to complete a full set of Iron Banner armor on my Titan and my goal was of course to do the same for the PC. I consider myself extremely lucky because I managed to get the full set after turning in thirteen packages. There are folks I know who have been grinding away at this all week long and are still missing pieces of armor. In addition to this I managed to pick up all of the weapons but three… sidearm, fusion rifle and submachinegun. Of those the only one that I would have actually used is the Fusion Rifle, but even there I have several options that I like already including Merciless if I am willing to give up my exotic slot and Main Ingredient if I am not. The most important weapons for me were getting the Pulse Rifle, Auto Rifle and Hand Cannon all of which will see use. The scout rifle might, but I need to spend some more time playing with it.

The other thing going on is the fact that this week is effectively the last chance to do anything in Season 1. Now I am not entirely certain what this means from a player perspective other than the fact that we know a bunch of new stuff is going to happen. All of the Eververse items are changing out apparently, so that only makes the fact that they have apparently been throttling our xp gain towards bright engrams all the more shitty. In truth I have gotten the few items that I care about… namely the Ramen bowl emote and Bandwagon ship. On top of that I managed to pull three of the exotic ships total and two of the exotic sparrows. All in all I feel like I made out pretty well for season 1, but what I am really curious about is whether or not all of package loot is changing as well. There are a number of weapons that I have not managed to get that I really walk… namely the Curtain Call rocket launcher, Jiangshi AR4 auto rifle and Halfdan-D auto rifle. I would not mind getting a Morrigan-D rocket launcher either considering I believe it is the only one with tracking still intact. Finally I really want to complete the hunter set from Io on the off chance that maybe those are changing out as well. Granted I don’t know any of this, but I know in Destiny 1 they started re-rolling the weapons so that is a possibility here as well I would guess.

Lastly the other big change for us personally… is that our clan will be resetting from rank 6 to rank 1 next week and we will need to begin the leveling process anew. Supposedly we will be adding a brand new clan banner standard to the mix because we maxed things out in Season 1. Additionally the perks for each of the clan ranks will be changing out to a new set more relevant to the content we will be doing, that is at least in theory Vex based. The only thing that concerns me is that we do not have nearly as many people actively playing right now as we did at the launch of the clan, and as a result the grind is going to go more slowly. The calculations I had done before said that we needed about 20-25 characters reaching maximum contribution each week to keep us hitting the progression cap each week, and I think in theory we will still have at least that. I know I will continue to keep contributing my 5000 clan XP on three different characters per week and if things get dire I have a set of characters on the PS4 on a secondary account that could add experience as well. This whole season thing is new concept to me and I am somewhat excited to see just how different the game is from a loot perspective. That also means that this week I need to do some significant vault purging to get ready for the introduction of new items. I am hoping that we get some more space… because we need it across the board from vault to shader storage. If they really want money from me… I would throw money at the screen for more storage space.

Reading Challenge #85: Anathem by Neal Stephenson

November 27, 2017 by Grace

It feels like forever since I’ve updated my reading challenge series. The truth of the matter is that this book was really long, and I needed a break along the way to read some things for fun. I think I might start posting about some of the other books I’ve been reading just so I can keep tabs on them and also share them with you. Anyhow, this entry is Anathem by Neal Stephenson, published in 2008.

Part of the reason I’ve been reading other books is because I have read Anathem before, and I was dreading this re-read. Not because it is bad, but because it is long and pretty dense. You know you’re going to be in for a treat of a read when a novel opens with definitions from a fictional dictionary. In fact the whole book is like this, peppered with strange words and dictionary definitions and just-different-enough-to-be-annoying turns of phrase. Yes, there is a reason for it, but it made my head hurt. There are some interesting philosophical ideas and social commentary in this book, but you have to excavate them from the constructed language and tumble them around in your brain for a while for them to clean up enough to be understood. I’m going to try to spare you from this as much as I can in my descriptions.

The story is told by Erasmus (Raz), who is a sort of monk who lives in a monastery for people who want to be cut off from the rest of the world and just think about things. They’re not religious per se, rather they focus on understanding things through study and debate. Different subsets avoid contact with the outside world for anywhere from 1 year to 1000 years at a time. Erasmus’ particular home is only open to the rest of the world for 10 days once every 10 years.

Around the time of one of these opening events, one of Raz’s teachers notes something unusual in the sky. The monastic authorities block off all use of the telescope facilities for a few weeks. It’s obvious something strange is happening but the powers that be want to keep them from investigating it. The teacher conspires to use forbidden outside technology to keep up his study, and soon he is expelled from the order for it.

This book is so long it is hard to sum up the whole plot succinctly, but after the teacher is expelled suddenly lots of the monks start getting called to leave the monastery to solve the mystery of the unusual thing in the sky, which is an alien spacecraft. Raz undertakes a long journey with many high and low points including nearly dying a few times. He finds his old teacher out in the world, only to lose him again. He gets up close and personal with an alien ship and some aliens. Only they’re not aliens, they’re from alternate universes.

In a normal book this process might be exciting and action-packed. Here there are action sequences, but the bulk of the words are dedicated to long thought exercises and philosophy lessons. The concept of the multiverse is an interesting one and the ideas the author puts forward are fun to think about. My main issue is that for large chunks of the book he is lecturing, through philosophical dialog between these monks, rather than showing through any kind of action.

The plot pace picks up considerably in the last quarter or so of the book. It was right about the time when I was thinking “I must have stopped reading partway through when I originally bought this novel a few years ago.” I couldn’t remember any of it past the point where the monks left their monastery. Then suddenly when they were drifting through space trying to board a spacecraft from an alternate universe I started remembering things again. I guess my brain just blanked out all the philosophical dialog in-between.

This novel gets chalked up in the column reserved for “I understand why people voted for it, but it is definitely not for me.” It raises some interesting philosophical questions. It has an interesting story idea. It was just too much to dig through all of the slow, boring, lecturing, jargony bits to get to the good stuff. I suspect I would really enjoy this novel if it was about 400 pages shorter and written in plain english.

TL;DR: Alternate-reality monks talk about philosophy a lot and eventually save the world. Cool idea but boring execution.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Rating: 3/5 stars

Verdict: Neat idea, interesting story beats, but waaaay too much lecturing. Would only recommend if you’re already a Stephenson fan.

Next up: The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

Shovels and Shoveltusks

November 27, 2017 by Belghast

I declared Thursday and Friday to be part of the weekend last week and decided to take myself four days off from the blog and one week off from the podcast. I feel super chill going into what is likely going to be an exceedingly stressful week so I think it was probably a good call. Apart of having to help my folks move some furniture yesterday, I mostly had a pretty chill thanksgiving. Both Friday and Saturday my wife and I attempted to avoid the world, and the only shopping we really did was online apart from a mad dash out to Target around 9 pm on Friday. At that point the store was largely sane and wasn’t that much different than a normal trip on any other night. Throughout all of this I have found myself forsaking my normal checking of Pokemon Go in favor of the relatively newly released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. First off I have to admit I have never played an animal crossing game before so I didn’t have much of a cultural frame of reference going into this. The experience instead reminds me a lot of a mix between the former web based casual MMO Glitch and some flavors of Stardew Valley. Whatever you end up calling it the game is extremely charming and at this point I am level 16 and have a bunch of the animals at my campsite… enough that the last three or four gave me a messaging saying there was no room. Unfortunately I have no clue how you actually determine which ones are at your camp and which ones are not… but for the moment I am rolling with it.

I’ve also seemingly hit whatever the friend cap is because when I try and add anyone it says that combined between my friends list and the few outstanding requests I have run out of room. I have no clue what this cap actually is… I estimated 200 the other day but I am guessing in truth it is closer to 100. The game is maybe bad at messaging some things but I am largely limping along without doing much in the way of research. There is a quarry mini-game that requires you to get help from five of your friends, and I wish they messaged when my friends were needing help a little better. For example if you look at the middle section of the above screenshot you will see a shovel icon out to the side of Kelsey’s name. I wish there was a way to sort these to the top of the list because they are really the ones I am most interested in given I like helping other players, because you appear to get some sort of cut of their profits. After that you attempt to guess which rocks have the most profitable stones… gold nuggets seem to be the best. I still very much feel like I don’t fully grasp a lot of things… like how the hell to make large quantities of Bells that Animal Crossing currency. Right now I have a 30,000 bells loan with the auto place and have never really gotten close to paying it off. Thankfully they don’t seem to be sending anyone to break my kneecaps because of it though, and they still allowed me to customize my RV regardless of having the loan out. I feel like maybe they don’t have the best business model. Regardless if you have not been playing this you should probably check it out because it definitely seems to be addictive as hell given the wide variety of friends that seem to be playing it on a regular basis.

I made a bunch of progress in Destiny 2 but I am likely going to wait until tomorrow to talk about that. Instead I wanted to talk a bit about the other game I played over the break… World of Warcraft. I am still working on my tiny Orc Warrior that is getting less and less tiny as each week goes by. At this point I have completed the Cataclysm content and am on the airship just about to start the invasion of Pandaria. This is something I have never actually done on the horde side given my last several characters I leveled were abusing the shit out of the pre-legion launch invasions. I’ve also not spent much time playing through Warlords of Draenor as a Horde character, so that should be interesting as well. Similarly I have never seen Legion as the Horde… all things I am interested in experiencing first hand. The biggest shock for me is just how fast Cataclysm managed to go given that I started in on Vashj’ir Saturday night and dinged level 85 well before finishing the final section of it Sunday evening. I realize that zone is in theory about the same size as two other zones combined… but I did not expect to be getting quite that much experience from it. Granted I am fully geared out in level 100 heirlooms (minus the rings because I don’t have the patience for that nonsense), but did not partake of any of the experience boosting options. The mission of the day however is to try and figure out how to get a Pandaria flying book… because I do not want to return to land based leveling if I can help it.

Warrior Mount Quest

November 26, 2017 by Grace

I finally finished up the last class mount quest. The warrior class hall and story is very much not for me, much like the warrior class in general. I like the aesthetic of the halls of valor just fine, but I hate Odyn, he’s a jerk. That made all the class quests running around doing his errands for him so painful. The mount quest was more of the same, proving myself for the 10,000th time to Odyn by beating 4 other champions in combat. Then for some reason when he gave me my mount, I punched it in the face? Must be a warrior thing…

Anyway now I’ve got all of the possible class mounts, so that’s one huge goal checked off of my gaming goal list. It’s been fun seeing all the different class stories and the various mount questlines. I think the rogue mounts are my favorites, I just love the look of those ravens. The paladin quest was probably the best quest though, just for the sheer nostalgia factor. Now that I’m done with these I need to figure out some other silly goal to keep me busy for a while!