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Donuts and Calculations

April 13, 2017 by Belghast

I decided last night that the primary reason for me trying to complete all of the side quest content… is that it enables me to spend more time screwing around in the Nomad. At this point I am nearing 80 hours into the game, and thanks to Dusty Monk I know how to determine my completion score which is sitting at 63%. I’m level 52 as of last night and have completed the primary colonization arc of I believe all of the inhabitable worlds. There is a huge part of me that is somehow extremely bummed that we could not somehow turn habitat 7 around and at least put some form of a mining outpost. Similarly I am bummed that the game would not allow me to take over and inhabit the asteroid mining base out there with something other than some flavor text stating that the Nexus would begin mining there. However in all of this… doing stupid things in the Nomad has probably been the highlight. Why go around a mountain when you can use your rocket boost to climb it.

The biggest problem with Mass Effect Andromeda is the fact that it has latched on hard enough to make me go through the “just one more objective” problem. I am having hell each night pulling myself away to get some much needed sleep, and that means as a result most every night this week I have been finally hitting bed around 11:30 to midnight-ish which isn’t horrible until you account that I get up for work at 5:30. Thankfully today is my official unofficial Friday since we are off tomorrow, and that means I can in theory catch up on sleep over the three day weekend. I also hope that I can wrap this game up so I can move to one of the other games waiting on me to play it. More than likely I will be returning to Horizon Zero Dawn, because functionally I am on a timer with needing to play whatever it is that I want to play before the launch of Stormblood. So far on that list are Horizon Zero Dawn, Zelda Breath of the Wild, Wrapping up Final Fantasy XV, and Nier Automata. There are of course other games that should probably be on that list, but I am trying to stay at least a little focused right now.

Last night I experienced the best possible line in the game, hands down. Sure the game is full of some zingers, but one of the key problems I have had while playing it is reconciling Tann. I love Kumail Nanjiani as an actor…. but I have come to loath Director Tann with all of my being. I mean no one could have lived up to my love of Mordin Solus, and I am kinda happy that they did not even try. While Kallo Jath is cool enough, the character just doesn’t interact enough with him to make a really meaningful impression. As far as Salarian’s go the one that has left the biggest mark on me this game is Jarun Tann. He is exactly the wrong sort of person that I would want in charge of the Initiative, and I feel fairly frustrated that really there is nothing I can do about it. Granted I am still quite a ways from finishing the game, and largely paused any main quest development until I completed all of the side missions that I wanted. As a result I still have yet to find the Salarian Ark, and maybe that sequence allows me to do some wish fulfillment and expose Tann to be the pompous ass he is. However in the mean time… the game does at least allow me to say one liners like this one. Mass Effect Andromeda… is the Mass Effect the internet needed.

Mechanics Defeated

April 12, 2017 by Belghast

Last night did not ultimately end up like I thought it would, for many reasons. Firstly this weekend we had a death in the family… but man is it harder to explain than that. When you grow up in a small town, families that are connected to each other through a marriage end up mingling an awful lot. Because of kids birthday parties and school events, you are constantly encountering this whole other family that is not actually related to you. So when I say a death in the family, it was not actually my or my wife’s family, but instead the father of a brother in law in wife’s side. So when it happened we made a trip up to Friday night to attempt to offer support, and do our normal thing of bringing paper goods since during a death in the family a household goes through way more of everything. The funeral itself is today, and because of the weird familial restrictions of bereavement leave policy I don’t get a day off. Last night was the viewing, which is sort of like a wake but not actually a wake… and I did not think we were going to go. However when I got off from work my wife indicated that we probably should at least make a showing. I thought this largely meant that I would be gone from our normal Tuesday night FFXIV shenanigans. It was roughly an hour drive either direction, and then by the time we went to the event and ate dinner I fully expected to be about an hour late for fun time.

However we opted to pick up some food and eat it while travelling… I would explain what we got but it probably would not make sense to anyone who did not grow up in a tiny town. I also apparently drove like a bat out of hell, because I made it home and was only about fifteen minutes late… with folks still trying to pull the group together. With me it meant we had seven people available to do stuff… and in some quirk of bravado we decided to pug that 8th layer and keep working on “Mechanics: The Fight” or Thordan Ex. We got a Dragoon that said they had run the fight on a healer before… and we proceeded to start attempting to make progress. A few seconds into the fight and the Dragoon was already dead. During that first attempt I think they were rezzed four different times… and more than likely through the entire sequence of the attempts averaged around three deaths per outing. As if summoned by our tears… Kodra showed up and we rejoiced and disbanded our party finder group to bring him in. The hilarious part about this is that we all started talking about how much we had gotten used to having a good Dragoon. Then a few seconds into the first attempt… Kodra died in EXACTLY the same manner as our pug dragoon.

We rebounding from this and started making proper attempts. The night was mildly stressful because we once again had a slightly different line up than normal. Muspel was filling one of the slots, and his only level 60 and geared character is his warrior. That mean’t Ashgar was not tanking along side me and instead running DPS on his monk. This is not normally a big deal other than the fact that every attempt I have been in the offtank role, and last night was my first night actually tanking the main boss. It took some adjustment, namely during the dragons eye phase to know that I had to actually step through the boss to make sure I was clear of the effect. Similarly there was a dance of times I needed to stack up… and then hurriedly run the hell out before he cast a frontal cleave. I am pretty sure I killed someone at least once during one of these interchanges, or when having to run across the Arena to place to boss so that the dragon eye and boss were in the same orientation. However on what would have been our last attempt due to the timer, we brought all of these elements together and managed to get our very first Thordan Ex kill. Now to move on to the Warring Triad Extremes, but hopefully we can keep popping Thordan each week so we don’t actually forget the dance.

Book Challenge #93: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

April 11, 2017 by Grace

I finished another book on my list, and that means it is reading challenge time yet again! This book is #93, A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, first published in 1992. This is notable because it tied with the Doomsday Book by Connie Willis for the 1993 Hugo. Definitely a good year for genre fiction. On with the show!

This book is an interesting amalgam. It is partly a sci-fi novel about artificial intelligence and interstellar conquest, and partly a fantasy novel about warring tribes of creatures with no advanced technology. Bridging the divide are a handful of humans who happened to be in the wrong places at the wrong times. The book opens with some human explorers/scavengers who uncover and activate a malevolent Power, or artificial intelligence, which gets released out into the galaxy. Only one ship escapes, carrying a family, a cargo of all the settlement’s children in cryosleep, and some fragment which may either be a piece of code the Power, eventually known as the Blight, requires or some means of stopping it. Either way the Blight desperately wants it.

The ship is able to escape mainly because of the “Zones of Thought” that this series is named after. This is the interesting conceit that there are different bands of the galaxy that permit more and more complex technology and things like advanced AIs and faster than light travel. Most Powers or AIs have to be in the Transcend or the High Beyond. The escaped ship ended up in the bottom of the Beyond, near the “Slowness” where high technology essentially breaks down and becomes useless. I think these zones make for a really interesting narrative device, but I was a little frustrated because they aren’t really clearly explained until fairly deep into the book, and because they feel like a plot device and not something that is scientifically plausible.

The story follows the two children who were awake on the escaped ship after they have an emergency landing on a low-technology planet populated by the Tines. These are creatures somewhat like dogs, where each pack of 4-8 individual animals is one whole person. I really enjoyed the thought experiment of what these creatures would be like and how their societies develop. Their politics and interpersonal relationships drive much of the narrative. There are major differences in how they respond to the fact that aliens have dropped down from the sky and bring technology and potential access to the stars. The ship’s distress beacon is picked up by the crew of the Out of Band II, which escapes a Blight attack in the High Beyond and is racing against the Blight and warmongering aliens to get to the Tines world and hopefully find the countermeasure. By the time they get near their goal they have been tailed by three different fleets of aliens, and will have to deal with a war between different factions of the Tines, and hopefully be able to save the human children in addition to saving the galaxy.

There’s a lot of high concept ideas going on in this novel, and to its credit it still manages to be engaging and have interesting characters. It is also quite entertaining watching the rest of the galaxy respond to the ongoing crisis of the Blight via what is essentially a galactic message board system, complete with probable sources and bad translations. My only real complaint is that the mechanics of the way the different zones work are weird and slightly immersion breaking for me.

TL;DR: Some high-concept ideas executed in an approachable and engaging way.

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

Rating: 4/5 stars

Verdict: Read it if you like thinking about how alien races and AIs might think

Next up: Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Doom Therapy

April 11, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was a bit of a frustrating day. For some reason lately there has been this common theme for me at work. That is getting pulled into projects that I have never touched before, and don’t even know the history of… as a sort of troubleshooter in chief. I apparently have this ability to break through the layers of urban legends and get at the heart of problems. Largely this all centers on my ability to ask “why are you doing it that way?”… regardless of who happens to be in the room. I am not mean spirited about it, but in truth what I am trying to do is separate out what is needed and adds value to the process and what is just extra steps that were put in for no apparent reason. I mean I have worked in environments where I did not have access to the appropriate permissions, and in those environments you sort of make things work however you can. A prime example is a process that I a digging into right now that involves going for seven hops between what is essentially an FTP drop directory and the actual directory the software loads data from. I’m trying to peel back the layers of tradition and determine does each of these steps actually do something other than just adding more steps where a file can possibly get corrupted. Also in this case the file crosses the operating system boundary at least four times which in itself is sort of problematic.

There are days when I have had my fill of madness and simply need to watch the world burn. Instead of ACTUALLY watching the world burn… I have a more healthy outlet in the form of video games. The genre of choice during these days is some form of a shooter, and last night on a whim I decided to boot up the modern incarnation of Doom. Now I have not spent nearly as much time in this game as it deserves, largely because it ran less than amazing on my previous system. I mean it was workable but for a game that demands such fast paced action… my old AMD FX-6300 process wasn’t really doing the job. Now that I have this spiffy x99 i7 system it runs extremely smooth in both normal and vulcan modes. In theory I should probably put this game on the SSD because it has quite possibly one of the slowest boot sequences that I have seen from any game. Whatever the case it absolutely filled my need especially when it comes to “glory kills”, which allows you to rip the heads/arms/various other body parts off of demons when they are low health. When you are deeply frustrated… it helps a little bit to inflict massive amounts of digital carnage.

After about an hour of “Doom Therapy” I was more than ready to strap back into the environmental suit and go exploring in Mass Effect Andromeda. Last night I arrived at “Not-Tatooine” the obligatory desert world in the Andromeda galaxy. I think there is some unwritten rule that if you have an ice wasteland planet… you must then have a desert wasteland planet to balance things out. The positive is that “Not-Tatooine” is way easier to traverse than “Not-Hoth” due to the lack of giant ice crevices that go on forever. There are however giant sinkholes that seem to go on forever, but these seem easier to see than the crevices were. One of the things that you have to know about me is… that essentially roads and paths in videos games don’t exist and I will try my damnedest to figure out how to wall hack my way into a place rather than trying to sort out which direction the game is intending me to approach. This absolutely wrecks a lot of scripting that intends on players to arrive from a specific vector… and sometimes causes some hilarious moments of me unintentionally “sneaking” up behind guards. As a result when you apply this instinct to Andromeda it means that I spend a not insignificant amount of time forcing my nomad to climb sheer rock faces by abusing boosts.

The sad moment of last night unfortunately was when I decided that I should probably abandon my N7 tier 5 gear for something tier 6… and as a result I wound up putting on a full set of initiative spearhead armor. It has some perfectly reasonable if generic stats… but the key problem is that it just doesn’t look as cool. I have yet to find a set of “new” gear that really looks cool… and have been relying on the Quarian themed armor that I got with the collectors edition and the various N7 armor sets that I have been able to scrounge up. Apparently the Initiative only got to take the ugly armors with them to Andromeda… because all of the cool armor was needed to fight the Collectors and or the Reapers. I have a massive influx of research points because quite honestly… none of the Helius cluster gear looks very cool. I’ve never touched any of the Kett weaponry largely because they are ugly as sin, and while the Angaran weapons look a little better…. they are nowhere near as cool as the good old standbys from the Milky Way. The look and feel of a weapon to me are as important as the function. In theory what I should do is hang out next to one of the forward supply points and keep swapping weapons until I have tried out everything in my inventory before returning to my practice of mass deconstructing everything. The inventory upgrades have given me some breathing room to be able to hold onto some extra items.