On the Liebster Award

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Blaugust Post #8

liebster-award
Grace called it a blogging disease, I think of it as more of a chain letter. Either way, thanks for the Liebster award!

Here are my 11 random facts:

  1. I am the youngest person on the regular cast of Aggrochat.
  2. I’m a decent ice skater, and used to play hockey.
  3. However, if you put me on roller skates, I just fall down a lot.
  4. I will admit to liking a single song by N’SYNC. Said song is produced by one of my favorite EDM artists.
  5. I was given my first computer (a laptop the size of a briefcase) when I was 4. I could barely carry it.
  6. I have beaten Mega Man 8 more times than I can count. While in school, I beat it every time I came home, which meant about twice a year.
  7. WoW was technically my first MMO (and like Grace I didn’t play before Burning Crusade), but before WoW I was in the beta for Wish.
  8. I have an irrational love for shapeshifter characters. This has manifested in me playing a Druid whenever it comes up, but it isn’t limited to just that.
  9. I buy rulebooks for Pen and Paper RPGs I’ll likelyneverplay, just to see what’s interesting in them.
  10. As far as food goes, I believe that cinnamon makes almost everything better.
  11. Despite claims to the contrary, I’m not a robot.

And here are Grace’s Questions:

1.Why do you blog?

I blog to get my thoughts out to whoever might be interested in reading them. In some ways the podcast serves as this, but the blog helps for more long-form thoughts.

2. What was your favorite childhood cartoon show?

The answer to this question depends on how you’d like to define “childhood”. I remember really liking the Powerpuff Girls when I was younger (It premiered when I was 7). Later, I was part of the Toonami generation, and really liked Dragonball Z.

3. Fantasy or Sci-Fi?

Fantasy, full stop. Exceptions are made for Sci-fi that’s really just pretending to not be Fantasy, like Star Wars or Mass Effect.

4. What’s the most amazing place you’ve ever been? I was too young to gamble (or anything else, really) when I was there, but I really loved Las Vegas. It’s just an amazing spectacle, and I haven’t seen the like anywhere else.

5. Pizza: Chicago or New York?

In general, Chicago Pizza is better than New York Pizza. However, it’s nearly impossible to actually get good Chicago-style pizza outside of Chicago while a bunch of places do a decent imitation of New York-style pizza around the country, so in most locations the opposite is true.

6. If you could only pick one game genre to play for the rest of your life, what would it be?

I’m a big fan of Action-RPGs. If I can stretch that definition far enough to fit Diablo, Kingdom Hearts, and Elder Scrolls under the same umbrella, so much the better.

7. What inspired your character name?

This one’s easy. There’s some more story there, but that’s the name I took for my Druid in WoW when we started playing Horde-side, and it ended up sticking.

8. What is your greatest gaming moment or achievement?

I like soloing ridiculous content, and every so often I drag other people into it. I managed to solo the first boss of AQ40 at level 80 (it required a silly amount of Nature Resist gear), but I’m more proud of getting enough people in to clear the instance. I’d previously had groups that even at level 80, could not get past Twin Emperors, so doing it with a few guildies was a pretty awesome experience.

9. Do you share your love of games with your real-world friends and family, or keep it to the internet?

I keep a Pikachu Amiibo on my desk at work, so my love of games isn’t exactly a secret. I’ve gotten into discussions about games with family and co-workers, but a lot of my current co-workers play World of Tanks, which I don’t have a lot of interest in.

10. Have you ever had a really weird pet?

Nope. I had a dog once, and when I move somewhere that allows them, probably will again.

11. What is your favorite type of environment/biome in-game and IRL?

I’ve always been a big fan of forests. I grew up in a location where nature trails were readily available, so I spent a decent amount of time walking and riding through shaded areas in the summer. In games, forests (but not jungles) tend to be relatively quiet and mysterious, but they sometimes have the “twisty little maze of passages” thing going on. My tolerance for that trope depends on how much you’re expected to rely on trial-and-error.

And 11 more questions:

  1. Why do you blog? Yes, I know it’s a repeat. Deal with it.
  2. What’s the first game you remember playing?
  3. Dogs or Cats?
  4. Do you have a favorite villain?
  5. What are your thoughts on escort missions?
  6. Borrowing from the “stereotypical interview questions” list, What would you say is your biggest weakness? (I did actually get this question a lot last year.)
  7. What character archetype do you find yourself playing most often?
  8. Other than games and the means to play them, do you own any gaming-related items?
  9. Because I know who these questions are going to, I can ask this one: What’s your favorite system for Tabletop RPGs?
  10. What upcoming games (if any) are you looking forward to?

Because Thalen hasn’t beaten me to it, Tamrielo and Kodra, have fun with this one.

Breaking the Format

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A Time for A Change

A few days ago I made the above statement on twitter, because I had reached a point where I was finally frustrated with my original blog theme.  For the last several years I have structured my posts in a way as such to hide the faults of my theme.  For example the whole “heading” construct that I use is largely to keep any images I post from overflowing and acting wonky.  I’ve used the same theme since 2008 and over those years I grafted new appendages onto it like an undead juggernaut until it reached the point where it was simply having trouble staying upright.  My theme believe it or not was originally a super limited World of Warcraft theme, that I have revitalized time and time again trying to keep it current.  When I first started my blog for example, there was no menu editor in WordPress, and the theme was originally designed to have someone actually go into the php pages and edit navigation items.  I hacked in basic nav support, but I have finally decided to get off my ass and apply some structure to the way things are laid out.  After spending an hour and a half the other night reclassifying posts… I came to the sad realization that my theme didn’t actually have suckerfish style menu support and every bit of effort I had just done was essentially in vain.

So quite literally I did nuke my old theme from orbit and replaced it with a brand new one.  For awhile I had considered building my own and I have downloaded Underscores more than a few times to get started on that.  However the end product never really makes me happy, and it always ends up feeling extremely spartan.  So while I COULD build my own theme… I decided not to.  Instead I decided to go with the extremely flexible GeneratePress.  The freebie version has a lot of features, but I ultimately wanted some of the things that their paid addon gives you, and after doing some of this myself for years… that $30 seems like a steal.  Ultimately to have a theme that I can simply patch each time a new version of WordPress comes out and adds more toys to my disposal is worth twice that amount of money to me personally.  Last night I rebuilt the logo from scratch and pestered the hell out of one or two friends as I tweaked this font size or that amount of spacing.  I think I am mostly done for the time being, but I am sure I will be tweaking things over the coming weeks.  I am curious to know what people think, so drop me a line and let me know.

Breaking the Format

Another thing about my blog that frustrates me, is that I have a clearly defined format that I always seem to follow.  In large part every post has three headings, three images, and six paragraphs.  In that format I usually introduce three completely different subjects as I hop around through what I have been doing.  For awhile I have referred to this at least privately as my “swiss army post”, that is everything to everyone and reliable.  I absolutely do not mind reliable, because in truth every single day I have a conversation with my readers… albeit a generally one sided one.  I share lots of details of my life, and my gaming… and that part is awesome.  The problem is that every single day feels formulaic, and I am hoping to begin to change that a bit.  As I was sorting my posts I noticed that I have this way of starting down a path only to quit after a few weeks.  There were so many “series” that I started down and never got very far…  remember Easing Into Eorzea? or Forum Fodder Friday? or even the more recent Storytime Saturday?  All of these are prime examples of why the daily posting routine has become so important to me.  I know that once I get disconnected from my routine… I never really return to it.

Ultimately what I want to do is allow myself to post more spontaneously.  When I make more than one post in a day… it feels like I am stealing material from what could be the next mornings post.  So I hold off on doing it… and then a backlog of ideas happens… and I feel are no longer relevant because I did not post them “in the moment”.  While I started Blaugust as this festival of routine and regularity… I think personally I am going to use it to mix things up a bit.  I already nuked my theme from orbit… maybe it is time for me to nuke my format as well.  Once again I would love to hear some feedback from my readers since I am basically going to be doing some renovations to what you have come to know about this blog.  I am sure I will still create swiss army posts in the future, because at this point I can knock them out while I am sleeping…  literally most mornings I don’t remember writing a post.  However I also want to play with the format a bit and try and find room for smaller and more focused posts.  One of my key problems with advertising my posts on Anook for example, has been that rarely are they actually devoted to a single game.  This also was a huge problem when it came to trying to categorize my posts.. because you might click through to my World of Warcraft posts to find half of them only mention the game in passing.  Essentially I want my Tales of the Aggronaut to be better than it actually is, and I am hoping you are all willing to struggle with me on this new journey.

 

On Revenge

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Blaugust Post #7

I still don’t take enough screenshots.

FF14 recently added an option where you can go into dungeons as an “undersized party” which is the only way to enter with fewer than the required number of people, and also skips the level sync portion. In all honesty I’m not sure what the intent is, but we’ve used it for two things: Entering level 50 raids at 60 and soloing old content.

Into Darkness

Before I even properly leveled anything, one of the first things I did was go into Dzemael Darkhold on my warrior (at 50) and see if I could solo the thing. DD is a level 44 dungeon, and at the time I needed a relic drop from there and was quite tired of running it at the proper level.Turns out that except for the final boss, not only is it possible, it’s easy. The final boss is also possible, but considerably less easy. I always liked doing similar things in WoW, so I think this got me hooked on trying to solo things here.

On Revenge

Further Endeavors

Fast Forward about a month, and I have a level 60 Paladin, ready to try my hand at some tougher content. Still needing Relic drops, I decided to start with Amdapor Keep, one of the “starting” level 50 dungeons. This took a bit more doing than Dzemael Darkhold, especially because the final boss has a healing debuff. I’ve been working my way down the list since then. I haven’t had any success with Copperbell (Can’t keep up DPS on the boss and do mechanics), or Lost City (The first boss just eats you, which is fatal with no party members). I did manage to solo Wanderer’s Palace and Halatali. I still have quite a few to go, so we’ll see where the brick wall is. I suspect that if I run into issues as a tank, I could always come back as one of the Arcanist classes once I get to 60.

Fridays Are For… Yelp?

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Friday has become a weird blogging day for me lately. My habit is generally to write out a post the night before, as the last thing I do before going to bed. Having tried writing posts at different times of day, however, I’ve noticed that the thoughts I have and the kinds of things I write about are very different depending on when I write the post.

As part of this, I started working on trying to seed in posts at different times, so that I’m putting a post up every day, but not always at the exact same time every day (and, more importantly, not writing them at the same time every day). Given that I’ve missed a few Fridays because Friday apparently is a busy-ish day for me most weeks, this hasn’t worked out so well.

On the other hand, writing at 2:30pm rather than 1am means that my mind is on different things. Right now I’m thinking about how difficult it is to find trustworthy reviews of places. I need to get my oil changed, and according to yelp there are about 40 places within a reasonable distance I could go to do this. Yelp reviews have fallen into the problem of public reviews in general– pretty much no one ever gives something an accurate number of stars– it either gets 5 stars (if it was a good experience) or 0/1 (if it wasn’t), and figuring out what kind of place I’m going to based on a bunch of random people’s one-sided reports isn’t terribly useful now that everyone uses Yelp.

Fridays Are For… Yelp?

The same is true of apartment hunting, restaurants, glassdoor company reviews… everything. Everything is three to three-and-a-half stars, and often reading into a particularly bad review suggests that the fault miiiiiight not lie with the company in question, although sometimes it does.

What I’ve been mulling over is the idea of a yelp-style concept that plugs into existing social media (yelp may already do this, but it’s poorly advertised), so that what you get is your friends’ and acquaintances’ reviews of things. I feel like, properly done, it would drive more casual and more helpful reviews while also encouraging people to both review more often and at a higher quality. Instead of a star system, it could just say “friends have posted from this location X times in the last Y days” and show you what they’ve had to say over time (and you’re more likely to actually care, because it’s your friends).

Food for thought. Time to make some key lime pie.