What I’m Playing: August 7, 2016

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Hooray, I made it through the first week of Blaugust! WoW has definitely been my main focus, but some other games have still been on my radar too.

World of Warcraft: This is where I spent most of my time this week. I got my legendary mace on my forsaken priest, but otherwise have mostly been playing alliance side. It makes me frustrated and sad, because I just plain like the horde races and story better, but at this point absolutely all of my friends are playing alliance so there’s no escaping it. Once again I find myself really wishing WoW would just add cross faction play already, even if it were tied to battlenet friends or something. I already have prepared myself for the inevitable point in Legion where I get sick of being alliance and go back to level my horde mains all alone. I guess it is a good thing I like alting.

What I’m Playing: August 7, 2016

LFR gets a (mostly deserved) bad rap, but sometimes you luck out and it’s nothing but Gamon and rainbows as far as the eye can see.

Anyway, I’ve been doing a little LFR on my druid and wandering around on my baby spacegoat mage and enjoying it. I’ve been using the baby mage as a chance to really see the low-level alliance quests, and to knock out some of the individual zone loremaster achieves that I never did. I got the overall loremaster achievement and title back before Cataclysm, so there’s a lot of quests I’ve never seen before. See yesterday’s post from Felwood for just one example.

FFXIV: I want to be playing this more, but WoW is really taking up too much of my time and attention for me to bother. Over the past week I’ve logged in for raid and pretty much nothing else at all. Don’t get me wrong, raid time was amazing and probably more fun than all of the time I played WoW put together, but we only raid 2 hours a week. I had been hoping that raiding on a schedule again would reignite my drive to log in more and upgrade my gear and such but it didn’t work out that way.

WildStar: I’m going to come clean and admit I hadn’t logged in to WildStar in a couple months. That just felt wrong, so when WoW got hit by a DDoS attack a few evenings this week I logged back in to WildStar. I didn’t do anything new and exciting, just a couple of expeditions. It still felt amazing and comfortable, like nothing had changed. I will be trying to spend at least one night a week poking around in this game again, because it remains my favorite MMO of all time.

Diablo 3: Season 7 started on Friday! The response to this season seems to be very low compared to all of the previous ones, but I’ve still been playing and having a great time. On Friday I got to play with some friends that I haven’t hung out with in way too long, and had a blast leveling together. This season was the first time in a while that I didn’t get to 70 on the first night, but that was all on me because I decided to get some sleep instead. I hit 70 and completed the first 5 chapters of the season journey yesterday, which included the cosmetic rewards and the full free class set of gear (after chapter 4). Since that was my entire goal for this season, I don’t know if I will stay invested or not, especially with the pre-Legion WoW event coming on Tuesday. A lot of the goals for the stash tab this time around feel easier, but also grindier, and I’m guessing I’m not going to bother when there are new shiny things to distract me in other games.

 


AggroChat #118 – The Cities: Skylines Show

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Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam, Thalen and Inky talk about Cities: Skylines the July AggroChat Game Club Game

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After putting it off a week due to folks travelling, this week we record the July AggroChat Game Club show for our title of the month Cities: Skylines.  In this episode we talk about just how deep the rabbit hole of simulation goes with this would be king of city and mayor simulators.  In many ways this show is the tail of many failed cities and a handful of successful ones.  It is also when we learn just how bad of a mayor Belghast would be.  This title is the heir to the Sim City lineage, so we ask the question how it stacks up.  We also ask the question if city simulation is really that fun?  Additionally we get into a side tangent about wastewater management.

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Weekend Rusty

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Demon-Huntering

I promise that I had every intention of getting up this morning and writing a blog post immediately following breakfast.  However the world had other plans… or more truthfully my friends Grace and Sol had other plans.  Last night was the beginning of the Diablo 3 Season 7, but unlike so many other season starts I had other plans.  Firstly yesterday was the birthday of my amazing wife, and I ended up taking off a half day to go out to lunch and then to a movie.  We saw Ghostbusters, and I have things to say about that movie but it is probably going to be a discussion for another day.  After that we came home briefly where my folks came over and brought a cake, and then it was off to a semi-monthly dinner with some of my wife’s siblings.  By the time we got home it was after nine and after sitting down to start working on a character I found that I was fading extremely fast.  So I only managed to make it to around level 25 before crashing, and during all of this… I forgot to take any screenshots for the blog.  As a result I popped in early this morning with the purpose of taking a few screenshots and logging right back out.  However this is the one where Grace and Sol invited me to a group…  and when I joined and explained that I was only online to take a screenshot or two…  they both “noped” and proceeded to drag me up in levels a bit.

Weekend Rusty

As a result I am getting a late start to this whole weekend posting thing, which is not terribly surprising given that I have always had trouble staying on focus during the weekends.  Something about getting up and milling around the house causes the morning to lack a clear sense of purpose.  I think the key to the week days functioning at all is the fact that I get up and take a shower the moment I crawl out of bed, which serves to wake me up completely.  This whole leisurely getting up, having breakfast, and nestling into the couch with my laptop business is a recipe for slacking off.  Regardless I am blogging now because Grace decided to go out for coffee giving me a nice break in the leveling process to knock out this post.  Firstly I am not nearly as pumped about D3 this season as I was in previous seasons.  Right now there is just too much stuff going on that I want to be participating in.  Namely at the moment my seeming fresh re-addiction to World of Warcraft.  Tuesday we can start rolling Demon Hunters, and I figure that will pretty much be the end of my Diablo 3 season experience.  Additionally I still have my Warlock that I am enjoying leveling, and I want to continue pushing it to 100 as soon as possible.  At the moment I am knee deep in Talador around level 94, but once again I am doing the method of leveling where I jump zones as soon as possible so as soon as I hit 96 I will be shifting to Spires of Arak.

This feels very much like a scattered post and I guess in a way it is.  I am so very not used to doing this weekend blogging thing.  This is the first weekend post I have made since breaking my streak of blogging every single day in May.  These couple of months have been more than enough to push me out of the habit.  In truth I think I enjoy not blogging on the weekend because there is nothing really hanging over me.  That isn’t strictly true I guess because I still end up having to edit and get posted the AggroChat episode each Sunday morning, but that at least gives me Saturday to be relatively carefree.  From a standpoint of our lifestyle it has been pretty huge as well because it means that my wife and I can get up and around and go out and do things, without having to wait for the inspiration to hit me… and a blog post to mysteriously appear on the page and get posted.  So while I am doing this for Blaugust I absolutely expect to return to posting week days once the month of August is over.  I am a prime example of trying to find a livable schedule to blog on, and this is a huge part of why I decided to do the more chill version of the initiative.  Sure we can push ourselves to come up with thirty one blog posts, and it is an interesting exercise…  but if the end result is resentment towards your blog or blaugust in general then I think the overall mission of promoting blogging on a schedule has failed.  For the time being however I am returning to my games and calling this post to a close.

Thalen Reads Lord Valentine’s Castle #Blaugust2016

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You are very peculiar. You speak no lies, yet nothing you say sounds right.I think you yourself have little knowledge of your own soul. - Carabella
This week, it's a return to older science fiction with the first book of Robert Silverberg's Majipoor series, Lord Valentine's Castle.


 I've read quite a few short story collections edited by Robert Silverberg over the years, but this is the first book actually written by him that I've read. Obviously I knew going on that he's a Grand Master of Science Fiction, so I expected great things. Happily I wasn't disappointed.

Lord Valentine's Castle is set on the world of Majipoor and is one of those novels that could easily be classified as science fiction or as fantasy depending on what your definitions are and how hard-nosed you want to be about it. It certainly feels like fantasy in a lot of ways; magic exists and wizards are common enough to be hired by caravans, dreams are sources of knowledge or dread punishments, and there are many non-human races. But on the other hand, space travel exists and spaceships come to Majipoor (though very rarely), vehicles float via technological means and are pulled by genetically modified herd beasts, and both the human and non-human races are immigrants from other planets, apart from a native race that is not very well treated.

We learn about this setting through the eyes of Valentine, a man who finds himself on a hill outside a city with no real memory of his past (take a drink). The new Coronal of Majipoor (one of the rulers of the planet) is visiting this very city, and just happens also be named Valentine. It's not hard to see that the Valentine we're following is somehow the real Lord Valentine and has been replaced by an impostor. Happily, Silverberg didn't try to stage this as some big reveal; both the replacement and who is behind it are verified about a quarter of the way into the book.

The main conflict of the book then centers around Valentine's quest to regain his title, although he does question whether really wants to do so. Even once he knows what has been done to him he doesn't really remember the person he was. He's fallen in with a troupe of traveling jugglers and has discovered he has a talent for the art. Does he really want to give up this new life for a title he doesn't truly miss?

The majority of the book is taken up by travels across Majipoor, first as a juggler with his new troupe and then as the deposed Coronal attempting to first prove his story and then amass a force with which to assault the castle of the Coronal and reclaim his title. Silverberg uses this to give us a sort of travelogue. Valentine and his companions pass through a reservation where some of Majipoor's distrusted and downtrodden natives live, take ship with a crew of sea-dragon hunters, fall afoul of some of Majipoor's carnivorous plant life, and so forth.

I enjoyed Lord Valentine's Castle quite a bit, certainly enough to seek out and read more of the books in the series. Apparently there are a number of them and quite a few short stories and novelettes, most of which take place prior to this book. I'm not sure if any of them go more into how Majipoor was colonized and how it's system of government came to be, but I'd certainly be interested to learn more about that.