AggroChat

Daily Creative Thing

July 26, 2017 by Belghast

No Blaugust

It’s been ages since I have done a heading in my blog, but I didn’t really have an image I wanted to put with this. Considering it is getting dangerously close to August and I have had a few people ask me… I will not be hosting some large Blaugust event this year. For three and a half years I did my blog every day thing, and it was interesting. In that process I learned a lot about myself and a lot about my readers. However I am no longer the bastion of regular blogging that I once was, and similarly I don’t really feel like I can carry the banner of “blog every day” quite so highly. Now the truth is Blaugust was never really “my” thing… firstly because there was another group that had independently been using that hashtag for ages apparently. Secondly the “festival” for lack of a better terms was more about the community than it ever was about me. So if you find yourself really wanting to do Blaugust, then go for it. This has been the year that the institutions have failed in the blogosphere. We had no Newbie Blogger Initiative and would not have had Developer Appreciate Week were it not for Rav picking up the torch and carrying it onwards. I hate that I am adding Blaugust to the pile but I am just not feeling it right now, and in truth wasn’t last year because I did a fairly halfassed job of trying to make it happen without requiring a lot of support.

If someone is interested in picking up the mantle and making it theirs… I welcome you with open arms. That said what is happening this year that is not exactly Blaugust but similarly themed is “Daily Creative Thing”. My good friend Grace felt like she was not taking the time to do creative stuff anymore, and had let some of her hobbies fall by the wayside. As such in the spirit of Blaugust she decided to start trying to force herself to do at least one creative thing every single day. What classifies as a “Creative Thing” is pretty open to interpretation, but as a side effect of this process she spawned a secondary blog where you can see a bit of her daily process. Some days it has been a drawing, others working on some crocheting, and one day some origami. The purpose being just to keep doing something interesting and fun and creative every single day… and then posting the product. I myself am contemplating doing this throughout the month of August, because there are a lot of creative things that I just stopped doing for some reason along the way. Namely I just don’t sketch like I used to, and I am not entirely sure why I stopped. I used to be one of those kids that was rabidly sketching in every single class… and then at some point I just stopped. Its like going to art school some how tarnished the fun… because instead of going and drawing goofy things… everything was deadly serious and representative. I would love to unblock myself and let the creativity flow once more, so maybe this is the time to do it.

Season 11 and Necro Wings

July 25, 2017 by Grace

Season 11 started with a very relaxed pace since opening night was a Thursday instead of the usual Friday. By the end of the weekend, though, I had completed through chapter iv and a bit more besides. First things first: the Necromancer is a joy to play. I’m still not sure whether it is because it is genuinely fun or simply because it is the first truly new thing we’ve had in D3 in a long time, but either way I’m loving it. I’ve been using the Rathma set that came as the season journey reward, so I get to have swarms of minions and that’s definitely a play style I enjoy.

I got quite lucky and picked up some important cube items while leveling, and the scythe+shield set combo very early once I hit 70. That meant that over the course of the weekend I went from being carried by a friend to running T10 and carrying others in return. If Tasker & Theo would drop already then I’d have everything complete for the build suggested on Icy Veins. Even without it I’m getting close to GR60. One thing I don’t like about that build is there’s no room for a movement ability. So far I’ve been modifying it a bit so I can put a move ability on my bars because I find myself dying way too much without it. I’m pretty sure that my ability to push into higher GRs is going to be limited with this set because of that, so I’ve been collecting the other ones too. I managed to get the Trag’oul and Inarius sets already, so I can try those out and see if I like them better.

I am extremely happy to report that in addition to my season progress, I also picked up the Necromancer wings on Sunday night. They’re a pretty sweet black/red recolor of the ones that come with the Necromancer pack, and you get them by completing all of the Necromancer class achievements. Luckily I had leveled my non-seasonal necro through the story to test it out when I bought it, so I already had the 2 story-related achieves out of the way going into the season. Most of the achievements were fairly easy to get through normal play, although things like letting your skeletons kill 500 elites took a bit of time. There were a few boss-specific ones that required some more forethought, but they weren’t too difficult. The trickiest one was having to kill your shadow clone using simulacrum during the Diablo encounter. I found some good advice that suggested lowering the difficulty way down, removing any gear that has thorns or any legendary gems that have damaging effects, and using simulacrum + blood nova. It took a couple tries to get the simulacrum to have the killing blow but compared to the silly things I’ve done for set dungeon masteries it was a cake walk.

Speaking of set mastery, I did master the Rathma’s set dungeon. I’ll probably do a write-up of all the Necro dungeons so I won’t go into tons of specifics here, but I will say that it wasn’t too bad. Getting one objective for completion for the season journey should be no problem for most folks. Now that I have my necro wings I’m eager to get back to my barbarian and finish mastering the last couple dungeons I need for the REALLY fancy wings. I got randomly grouped with someone who had them while running rifts the other night, and now I’m even more motivated to get them.

Minuet 42

July 25, 2017 by Belghast

A few days ago I said I had more or less “beat” the Destiny 2 beta in part because there is so little to actually do in it. That said for whatever reason I keep returning and playing. Since writing my initial post I have done the strike several times and spend a bit more time in the Crucible. Some of my initial comments about not really liking the 4 vs 4 format and the small map sizes, is in part me likely just getting adjusted to changes and not really having a weapon load-out that I would have preferred. Traditionally my crucible build has been an Auto Rifle in the primary slot… usually my extreme stability Haakon’s Hatchet or if I am feeling squirrely… my Genesis Chain. From there I generally have either a Shotgun in the secondary slot Invective or Party Crasher +1 or I go for one of my Fusion Rifles… traditionally Saladin’s Vigil. The heavy slot varies greatly because in truth… I am not really expecting to get heavy ammo in Crucible matches so I am not super concerned. If I have an exotic slot available I go with Gjallarhorn and if not probably my Silvered Dread machine gun. The problem with the Destiny 2 weapon loadouts is that on my preferred class… the Titan there was nothing that I could really replicate this feel with so I in part had to feel out what worked for me in the new scheme.

What finally ended up feeling good and seeming usable is to run a Submachine Gun in my primary slot, namely The Showrunner seen above. However in truth I was using this weapon much in the same way as I would have used a secondary in Destiny 1 only swapping to it at certain times. For my main weapon I relied heavily on the Minuet Hand Cannon sitting in my energy weapon slot, because it had some significant stopping power and actually allowed me to win non-teamshot firefight engagements. Where the sub machinegun was handy is any time that someone ran up on me, I could hang out just outside of melee range and grind them down with a rapid fire hail of bullets. In theory I think this is more or less what folks who loved the sidearm used to do… but I never could make sidearms work for me in this fashion. As far as the heavy/power weapon slot… once again I didn’t care too terribly much about this given that I was similarly not expecting to ever get ammunition for it… so instead just relied on the grenade launcher in case I ever did. I am by no means “good” at the new Crucible, but I managed to find a setup and style that worked for me and I managed to keep climbing higher in my efficiency number as the night went on.

The thing that I find the most impressive about the Destiny 2 demo experience… is the fact that it is so damned short yet I kept returning day after day to keep experiencing it in any way that I could. In part it has made me want to actually dig in and try and finish some of the book achievements that are sitting there unfinished, and bask in the glory of the Destiny 1 experience before it is gone. All in all I am anxiously awaiting the release of this game and even more so the upcoming PC beta that we are getting at some point in August. I have a lot of concerns relating to the PC version, namely how it is going to feel and how well it plays in my various systems. I am really hoping that I can figure out a set of tweaks to get it to play with passable performance on my i7 Geforce 960m laptop. I am not expecting the world and would be completely fine with running 720p on it… pending that the performance is at a minimum 30 fps. One moment of sadness last night however is that the left thumb stick on beloved Hori FPS Plus controller started tearing. I am seemingly particularly hard on left thumb sticks, and as Squirrel pointed out last night… since it is not our aiming stick we are way less gentle with it. I ordered a set of cheapo aftermarket thumb stick caps, hoping that maybe just maybe it will fit. I tried one of the Kontrol Freaks PS4 caps that I had laying around and it kept popping off because the slightly smaller than normal size. All in all though I am going to be really sad to see Destiny 2 beta ending tonight, but will be looking forward to actually getting to play the game at launch.

Daily Creative Thing

July 24, 2017 by Grace

As usual I had a silly idea one day and decided to put it into action and see what happened. I wanted to do something in the spirit of Blaugust this year, but without the stress of having to come up with a complete, coherent post every day. I also wanted to get back into some of my creative hobbies that I’ve dabbled in over the years. Thus Daily Creative Thing was born.

The idea is very simple. Do something creative every day, and stay positive. The part that makes it work is that the bar for “do something creative” is set intentionally low. Did you doodle something cute on a post-it at work today? That counts. Did you sing in the shower for 15 minutes straight and annoy your roommate? That counts. Did you add a row or two of stitches to a bigger project? That counts. This endeavor is about recognizing all the little creative things we do, in addition to encouraging spending a bit more dedicated time on whole projects. The creative thing doesn’t have to be completed, finishing a whole project every day would be exhausting, and wouldn’t leave room for things like writing a story or knitting a blanket. It also doesn’t matter what kind of creative thing you do, as long as you consider it creative. Drawing some fan art, writing a blog post, baking a cake… you get the idea. It all counts!

The other key here is the “and stay positive” bit. It’s okay to be critical of your own work sometimes. That’s how we improve. But when sharing things for this project, I’m taking the stance of “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”. Especially when posting half-finished things, the temptation is to apologize for it. Instead I want to celebrate that I made an effort and made something new in the world, and look for the things I like about it so I can keep doing those next time around. The internet is full of places where people tear themselves and each other down. I want this project to be focused on building things up. Stay positive.

That’s all there is to it. Keeping it simple means there’s at least a chance that I’ll follow through on it but making it daily means it is still a challenge and a change for the better in my habits.

If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll join me on this journey. I would love to have a network of people sharing their progress and cheering each other on. I also selfishly just want to see all the amazing things that you all will create when you get in the habit. Try it for the month of Blaugust and see if it sticks. Let’s create some things!